Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for veteran communist, Antoinette Konikow.
Markin comment:
I am fond of using the comment of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, noting, sadly and with some trepidation, that the Western labor movement (us) had not, for the most part, created the kind of hard revolutionary cadre formed by the fires of the Russian revolutionary movement. That remains true, too true today. However in the case of the revolutionary being honored here, Antoinette Konikow, Trotsky’s remark really hits home. Christ, this is a woman who was there at the dawn of Russian Marxism under Plekanov, the teacher of Lenin and Martov, in his good days. Think of the links from there through the Russian revolution, the founding of American communism, and its extension in American Trotskyism. This is the ‘soul” of the communist revolution. They cannot be made without the Antoinette Konikows of this wicked old world. Step up to the plate.
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Workers Vanguard No. 956
9 April 2010
Pioneer Trotskyist and Fighter for Women’s Rights
Honor Antoinette Konikow
(From the Archives of Marxism)
We reprint below a 1938 speech given by Antoinette Konikow, originally published in Socialist Appeal (5 November 1938), at a meeting celebrating her 50 years as a revolutionary Marxist. Konikow was born in 1869 in tsarist Russia and at the age of 19 joined Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labor Group. As a result of tsarist repression, she emigrated to the United States in 1893. In her 50 years as a communist fighter, Antoinette Konikow not only stayed the course but also, with Marxist compass in hand, fought for the correct program in the major fights of the socialist movement.
Konikow joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1893; she was expelled in 1897 for her opposition to its bureaucratic practices. Already speaking five languages, she learned Yiddish in the mid 1890s in order to become a more effective organizer among immigrant Jewish workers. In 1901, Konikow was a founding member of the Socialist Party of America. In opposition to World War I, she toured the U.S., inspired by German Marxist leader Karl Liebknecht’s courageous opposition to social patriotism. She threw her support to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and became a founder of the Communist movement in the U.S. in 1919 (she was associated with Ludwig Lore, a founding member of the Communist Labor Party). Against the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union, which began in 1923-24, she took up the fight alongside Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky and the founders of American Trotskyism in the Communist League of America, which was later to become the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). At the time of her death in 1946, she was an honorary member of the SWP National Committee.
Konikow was not a supporter of James P. Cannon’s faction within the Communist Party (CP). But she was one of the first within the American party to support the views of Trotsky’s Left Opposition, and she won a group of five Boston-area party members to her views. After the 1928 expulsion of Cannon, Martin Abern and Max Shachtman for their support to the Left Opposition, Konikow was summoned to appear before the CP’s Political Committee. She wrote a defiant protest letter to CP Secretary Jay Lovestone. As the Prometheus Research Library, the central reference archive of the Spartacist League/U.S., noted in the introduction to James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism (1992):
“After reading Konikow’s letter to the November 2 meeting of the Committee, Lovestone commented that ‘it is obvious from her letter that she is the worst kind of a Trotskyite, biologically as well as politically. The sooner that we throw her out the better for the party.’ Konikow, a medical doctor and a pioneer of birth control, was unanimously expelled by the Political Committee. She founded the Independent Communist League, which published her letter in its first Bulletin, dated December 1928. Konikow’s League merged forces with the expelled Cannon faction to found the Communist League of America in May 1929.”
In The History of American Trotskyism, Cannon recalls a Boston meeting threatened by a gang of Stalinist hoodlums. The meeting was a success. As Cannon recalled, “Needless to say, my chairman on this historic occasion was Antoinette Konikow.”
Konikow was always a stalwart fighter for women’s rights. In 1923, she published her handbook, Voluntary Motherhood, the first birth control manual by an American physician, written to educate her primarily female immigrant patients. It sold more than 10,000 copies in its first three editions. She was repeatedly hounded by Boston authorities for her work on birth control, and in 1928 she was arrested for exhibiting contraceptives in public (the case was dismissed). On her own initiative, Konikow traveled to the Soviet Union in 1926 to introduce an inexpensive contraceptive jelly she developed with John G. Wright, a chemist who was also her son-in-law and comrade and later one of Trotsky’s translators. In 1931, she published Physicians’ Manual of Birth Control to address the widespread ignorance in the medical profession itself.
One of Konikow’s prized possessions was a photograph of Trotsky dedicated to her in Trotsky’s own hand: “We are proud, my dear Antoinette, to have you in our ranks. You are a beautiful example of energy and devotion for our youth. I embrace you with the wish: Long Live Antoinette Konikow. Yours fraternally, Leon Trotsky, Oct. 28, 1938, Coyoacán.”
* * *
The comrades have received me with warmth and friendship. It gives me tremendous happiness. The kind words written by Comrade Trotsky on his picture presented to me remind me of the greatest honor—the honor that was—given to comrades in Russia, the Order of Lenin pinned upon their breasts. I feel as if Comrade Trotsky has pinned the Order of Trotsky on my breast! Not that I am a hero-worshipper—for I have helped to pull down too many heroes from their pedestals. But in the last ten years of darkness of despair, the words of Leon Trotsky have been like a bell for a ship in distress, leading it to safe harbor.
Joined in 1888
In 1888, fifty years ago, I joined the Social Democratic Party of Russia. Life was as dark and hopeless as it may seem to many today. I was delighted to hear the words of Plekhanov at the first congress of the Second International: “Only the working class will lead the Russian revolution!” But the working class of Russia was spiritually even further away from us than the workers of the United States today. If anyone had told us at that time that 15 years later a strike of one and a half million workers would almost overthrow Czarism, and that 15 years after that the Russian soldier would turn his gun not only against Czarism but against the Russian bourgeoisie, we would not have believed it. We would have laughed. But it happened—and it will happen again. Only this time it will not take 30 years.
At Many Cradlesides
I have had to sponsor so many new organizations that I have often jokingly told my comrades that I feel like a mother always rocking a new cradle—and that is all wrong for me, for I am known as an advocate of birth control.
But I did rock the cradle of the Russian Social Democracy and out of it came a great giant, the Russian Bolshevik Party. After being expelled in the United States from the Socialist Labor Party, I soon began to rock the cradle of the Debs party, later the Socialist Party. It seemed to contain a healthy baby, but the war and the Russian revolution proved that there was a weak spot in its spine.
I then helped to rock another cradle, the cradle of the young vigorous Communist Party. The glory of those days of the great Russian Revolution shall never be forgotten—the tremendous enthusiasm for Lenin and Trotsky—the ten days that shook the world! But again things went wrong. “Socialism in one country” became the slogan. This meant not only socialism in no other country, but no socialism in any country.
I began to rock another cradle and today the baby is ten years old. Who can deny that it is a sturdy, strong young fellow? The Socialist Workers Party is the only bright ray that today penetrates the horror of present-day nightmares.
I saw the beginning of the Second International and its fall. I saw the beginning of the Third International and its fall. Now together we launch the Fourth International which will accomplish the tasks betrayed by the Second and the Third.
A Magic Word
We live now in the atmosphere of impending war. My war memories remind me of many encounters. I was sent on tour by the German-language federation of the S.P. to speak in German at anti-war meetings. That was no easy task at the height of the war frenzy. Many times comrades would approach me, pale and trembling, begging that I speak on another subject. They pointed to German detectives and the sheriff sitting in the crowd. Often I felt like weakening—but there was one magic word that gave me strength to do my duty. I tell it to you comrades—it may again help you. The magic word was Liebknecht.
Before I conclude, let me say a few words to the youth. No sermons or admonitions, for you do not need them! I am proud of you. I want to tell you that I envy you, your youth and vigor. I would like to be 50 years younger to work with you, for your task in the coming years will be the most important in human history. You have great monsters to fight, Fascism, Stalinism. It was easier to work under the Russian Czar than under Stalin, easier under the German Kaiser than under Hitler.
An Unsoiled Banner
But you have better weapons than we had, more knowledge, the experience of 50 years of the leadership of the greatest living genius of the revolution, Leon Trotsky.
We place in your hands a banner unsoiled. Many times it was dragged into the mud. We lifted it up and lovingly cleansed it to give it to you. Under the red banner of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, you will conquer.
And when that great moment arrives, pause for a moment and think of us, who will not be with you at that glorious time, and say: “Comrades, sleep in peace. The work has been done.”
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-19th Century Women's Rights And Black Liberation Fighter Fanny Wright
Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for women's rights fighter, Fanny Wright.
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- The Grimke Sisters- Fighters For Slavery Abolition And Women's Rights
*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- The Grimke Sisters- Fighters For Slavery Abolition And Women's Rights
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimk%C3%A9_sisters
Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the 19th century American radicals, Sarah And Angelina Grimke.
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women's History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
**********
Women And Revolution, Volume 29, Spring 1985
The Grimke Sisters:
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
By Amy Rath
"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours." —Angelina Grimke', address to Women's Loyal League, May 1863
Angelina and Sarah Grimke' were two of the earliest fighters for black and women's rights in America. Although far from being socialists or revolutionaries, the Grimke' sisters of South Carolina were among the foremost fighters for human equality of their time, the 1830s and the tumultuous era which saw the birth of the abolitionist movement, foreshadowing the great Civil War which freed the slaves. They were also among the the first women to speak publicly on political issues. "Genteel society" objected to the fact of their public appearances—and even more to the content of their speeches. Thus the first serious, widespread discussion of women's rights in the United States was directly linked to the black question and the liberation of the slaves, questions which 25 years later would tear the nation apart in civil war.
Further, the Grimke' sisters' almost visionary commitment to the fight for the liberation of all, exemplified in Angelina's famous statement to the Women's Loyal League, stands in stark contrast not only to early abolitionist anti-women prejudices, but also to the later, shameful betrayal of black rights by feminists during the Reconstruction era. "The discussion of the rights of the slave has opened the way for the discussion of other rights," wrote Angelina to Catherine E.Beecher in 1837, "and the ultimate result will most certainly be the breaking of every yoke, the letting the oppressed of every grade and description go free,—an emancipation far more glorious than any the world has ever yet seen."
The sisters and Theodore Weld published American Slavery As It Is (1840), the most influential anti-slavery document until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Though they had essentially retired from active politics by the time of John Brown's courageous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, the actual opening shot of the Civil War, they deeply believed in his cause. Angelina's stirring "Address to the Soldiers of our Second Revolution" (given at the May 1863 Women's Loyal League convention) advocated massive arming of the former slaves as part of the Union Army, and remains today a remarkably radical and prescient analysis of the implications of the Civil War:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government... are driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war— The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
On February 21,1838, hundreds of people swarmed to the great hall of the Massachusetts State Legislature. Angelina Grimke", the first woman ever to address an American legislative body, would argue for the most controversial subject of the day: the immediate abolition of slavery.
This speech—which continued over three days, despite efforts by pro-slavery forces to stop it—was the culmination of a nine months' tour by Sarah and Angelina Grimke', the first women agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), founded in 1833. While their speeches began as "parlor meetings" in private homes or church halls for women only, such was the power and growing fame of Angelina's oratory that men began to slip into the back to listen, and the Grimke' sisters became the first American women to address what were then called "promiscuous" audiences.
Uproar swept genteel society across the nation. The Grimke' sisters were breaking the rules of ladylike decorum by their "unwomanly" displays. Angelina was popularly called "Devilina"; "Fanny Wrightists!" screamed the pro-slavery press. (Fanny Wright was a Scots Utopian socialist who toured the U.S. in 1828 for abolition, public education, women's rights, the ten-hour day and "free love"; she set up an anti-slavery commune and edited a newspaper. When these projects failed, she left the country, having made little impact.) "Why are all the old hens abolitionists?" sneered the New Hampshire Patriot: "Because not being able to obtain husbands they think they may stand some chance for a negro, if they can only make amalgamation [interracial sex] fashionable."
The Congregationalist church, the descendant of the New England Puritans, issued a "Pastoral Letter" condemning the Grimke's for leaving "woman's sphere" and going against the biblical injunction, of Paul: "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." Sarah answered this, and other attacks, in the brilliant Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, the first American book on the rights of women, predating Margaret Fuller's more famous work by six years.
In her arguments Sarah relied extensively on biblical sources, for to her it was important to prove that the equality of the sexes should be a Christian belief, and she wanted to show that women had the right and duty to work for the emancipation of the slave. Her concrete solutions to women's oppression were naive: for example, she suggested that husbands should content themselves with baked potatoes and milk for dinner, to give their wives time to educate themselves. She never understood that the institution of the family itself necessarily stands in the way of women's freedom. Indeed, she could not reconcile herself to the idea that divorce should be legalized. But for all these limita¬tions, Sarah's book is the pioneer American work on the subject. She was deeply interested in women workers, and polemicized against unequal wages; she attacked with great bitterness the lack of educational opportunities for women and their total lack of legal rights. "I ask no favors for my sex," she wrote, "All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."
Many fellow abolitionists demanded that the sisters give up their arguments on women's rights, fearing that it would detract from the more important question of the hour: freedom for the slave. But Angelina pointed out that the outcry against women's public lecturing was a tool of the slaveholders: "We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of the road.... Can you not see the deep laid scheme of the clergy against us as lecturers?... If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?" (emphasis in original; letter to Theodore Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, 20 August 1837).
The Making of a Southern Abolitionist
The sisters' effectiveness as abolitionist agents had to do not only with the power and sweep of their arguments, but with the fact that they were native-born eyewitnesses to Southern slavery. Yet precisely because they were gently bred daughters of one of South Carolina's most prominent slaveholding families, they had not seen the worst of it, as they themselves were quick to point out. They did not see the slave gangs on the plantations, the brutal whippings, but the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves.
Sarah was born in 1792. The invention of the cotton gin in her infancy led her father, like many others, to expand his plantation holdings and build up his slave force. He was one of the wealthiest men in Charleston, the political capital of the South, and a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a former Speaker in the state House, a judge and author. Sarah grew up with every advantage that wealth and position could offer a woman of her time. But instead of satisfying herself with embroidery, piano and a little French, she studied her brother's lessons in mathematics, history and botany, and declared her wish to become a lawyer. Her family mocked her; her father forbade her to study Latin. Perhaps influenced by her own educational frustrations as well as her childhood revulsion for the slave system, she started to teach her personal maid to read. "I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting-maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my long locks. The light was put out, the keyhold screened, and flat on our-stomachs, before the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the laws of South Carolina."
As an adult Sarah's aspirations to make something of her life turned in the one direction open to "respectable" women of her day and class: religion. She became a Quaker. Later she converted Angelina, 12 years her junior. Before joining her sister in Philadel¬phia, the Quakers' center, Angelina undertook a personal conversion crusade against slavery among her family and friends. In her gray Quaker dress, she started arguments at tea against the sin of holding slaves, becoming quite unpopular with Charleston's ruling elite. Inquiries were made about her sanity.
Convinced at last that there was no future in this, Angelina went north. But she could not be satisfied with the orthodox Quaker doctrine, which at that time included colonization as a "solution" to slavery. Black "Friends" were made to sit on a separate bench. In the early 1830s Angelina became interested in the growing abolitionist movement, and was horrified at the violence the free North turned against anti-slavery spokesmen. William Lloyd Garrison was barely saved from lynching at the hands of a Boston mob in 1835. Theodore Weld was repeatedly mobbed as he toured the Midwest, as were many others. Early in the decade Prudence Crandall was forced to close her school for black girls in Connecticut when the well was poisoned, doctors refused to treat the students, and finally a mob torched the school building. In 1838 a pro-slavery mob, egged on by the mayor himself, burned down Philadelphia Hall, which had been built by the abolitionists as a partial answer to their difficulty in finding places to meet. An interracial- meeting of abolitionists was in progress there at the time; two days earlier, Angelina and Weld had married, and the attendance of both blacks and whites at their wedding fueled the fury of the race-terrorists.
The abolitionists were part of a broader bourgeois radical movement, the 19th century herrs of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals, and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. Although opposition to slavery was by no means as widespread in the 1830s as it was to become immediately before the Civil War, nonetheless many prominent men, such as the wealthy Tappan brothers of New York and Gerrit Smith, the biggest landowner in the North, had joined the movement by the middle of the decade. Many of the abolitionists had been part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists were formulating their philos¬ophy. Religious revivalists such as Charles G. Finney, who converted Weld, preached temperance and that slavery was a sin against god.
Angelina became convinced that god had called her to work actively for the emancipation of the slaves. Defying the Quakers (who later expelled the sisters when Angelina and Weld married in a non-Quaker ceremony), the sisters went to New York where they participated in a conference for the training of abolitionist agents. Thus began the famous speaking tour of 1837-38.
The politics of the Grimke sisters was radical bourgeois egalitarianism profoundly rooted in religion. They believed that slavery was a sin, that as "immortal, moral beings" women and blacks were the equals of white men. They argued that slavery was contrary to the laws of god (the Bible) and of man, as put forth in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; they disagreed with Garrison's view of the Constitution as a "pro-slavery" document. Again unlike Garrison, they wrote and spoke for rights of education and property for free blacks as well, and bitterly denounced racism within the abolitionist movement. They were the integrationists of their time.
For many years, however, the sisters agreed with Garrison that slavery could be done away with peacefully by moral persuasion. They preached a boycott of slave-made goods (Angelina's wedding cake was made of "free" sugar by a free black baker). One of Angelina's first writings was "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States," widely circulated by the AASS, in which she urged Southern women to begin a petition campaign for immediate emancipation, to free their own slaves and to educate them. When copies of this pamphlet reached Charleston, the postmaster publicly burned them and the police informed the Grimke' family that if their daughter ever attempted to set foot in the city, she would be jailed and then sent back on the next ship.
The sisters were also for many years staunch pacifists, as would be expected from their Quaker background. Sarah took this to such an extreme that she denied that abolitionists had the right to arm themselves in defense against pro-slavery mobs. This became a subject of controversy in the abolitionist movement in 1837 when publisher Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois by a mob. True to her pacifist idealism, Sarah ques¬tioned his right to bear the gun with which he tried to save his life.
Splits and the Coming Storm
By the 1840s the Grimke'sisters had largely withdrawn from public activity. In part this was due to ill health Angelina suffered as a result of her pregnancies, as well as family financial problems. But much of it was probably political demoralization. In 1840the abolitionist movement split over the issues of women's rights and political action. The Garrisonian wing wanted to include women in the organization, but was opposed to abolitionists voting or running for political office, since Garrison believed the "pro-slavery" U.S. Con¬stitution should be abolished and that the North should expel the South. The other wing, represented by eminent men like the Tappan brothers, excluded women from office within the organization, was against women's rights, and wanted to orient to political work in Congress. Since they agreed with neither side in this split, the Grimke's and Weld retired to private life. In later years Angelina spoke bitterly against "organizations."
Meanwhile, however, on the left wing of the abolitionist movement there were gathering forces which saw the irrepressible and inevitable necessity for a violent assault on the slave system, to end it forever by force of arms. The brilliant black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and John Brown spearheaded this growing conviction. As we noted in our SL pamphlet, "Black History and the Class Struggle," "Douglass' political evolution was not merely from 'non-resistance' to self-defense. Contained in the 'moral suasion' line was a refusal to fight slavery politically and to the wall, by all methods. That is the importance of the Douglass-Brown relationship: together they were planning the Civil War." And it was John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 which galvanized the nation; abolitionists who the day before were pacifists took the pulpit to proclaim the necessity of a violent end to the slave system.
The Grimke' sisters and especially Theodore Weld had earlier become convinced that only war could end slavery. Sarah believed she had communed with John Brown's spirit the night before his martyrdom at the hands of Colonel Robert E. Lee, acting under command of President Buchanan. "The John Huss of the United States now stands ready... to seal his testimony with his life's blood," she wrote in her diary. Two of the executed men from the Harpers Ferry raid were buried in the commune at Raritan Bay, New Jersey, where the sisters and Weld were living at the time. The graves had to be guarded against a pro-slavery mob.
When the Civil War officially began the Grimke's did emerge briefly from private life. They were staunch Unionists, supported the draft and were critical of Lincoln for not freeing the slaves sooner. They were founding members of the Women's Loyal League. It was at a meeting of this group that Angelina made her famous statement: "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
Reconstruction Betrayed: Finish the Civil War!
Following the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction, the most democratic period for blacks in U.S. history, the former abolitionist movement split again. During that period, women suffrage leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—formerly avowed abolitionists—turned their movement for women's rights into a tool of racist reaction. They organized against passage of the Fifteenth Amendment because it gave votes to blacks and not to women (the Grin-ike sisters were silent on this question, even though this disgusting racism was foreign to everything they had fought for). Stanton and Anthony worked closely with such racist Southern Democrats as James Brooks, because he purported to support women's suffrage. In a letter to the editor of the New York Standard (1865), Stanton wrote,
"...now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk
into the kingdom first In fact, it is better to be the slave
of an educated white man, then of a degraded, ignorant black one."
It was Frederick Douglass who fought this racist assault. Douglass had been a fervent supporter of the infant women's rights movement, which began largely as a result of the chauvinism which women anti-slavery activists encountered from many abolitionists. At the 1869 convention of the Equal Rights Association, Douglass made a final attempt to win the suffragists from their reactionary policy:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have [the same] urgency to obtain the ballot."
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands," while imploring a redou¬bling "of our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." And for the rest of his life Douglass remained a staunch champion of women's rights.
Though the Civil War freed the slaves, it was not the fulfillment of Angelina's vision of a great, all-encompassing human emancipation. The betrayal of Reconstruction by the counterrevolutionary and triumphant capitalist reaction of the 1870s, in which the bourgeois feminists played their small and dirty part, left unfulfilled those liberating goals to which the Grimke sisters were committed. Yet Angelina's statement—"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours"—was and is true in a way the Grimke's could not understand. Their social perspective was limited to the bourgeois order: they never identified property as the source of the oppression of both women and blacks. Indeed, as bourgeois egalitarians, the basis of their arguments was that women and blacks should have the same right to acquire property as the white man and that this would liberate them completely. As Marx noted:
"The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other."
—"The Civil War in the United States," Collected Works, Volume 19, 1861-64
The system of "free labor," capitalism, won out. Radical Reconstruction, enforced by military occupation, sought to impose equality of bourgeois democratic rights in the South. It was defeated by.compromise between the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern land-owning aristocracy, thus revealing the ultimate incapacity of bourgeois radicalism to finally liberate any sector of the oppressed. This failure and betrayal of Reconstruction perpetuated the oppression of blacks as a color caste at the bottom of American capitalist society. This racial division, with whites on top of blacks, has been and continues to be the main historical obstacle to the development of political class consciousness among the American proletariat. It will take a third American Revolution, led by a multiracial workers party against capitalism itself, to break the fetters of blacks, women and all the oppressed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimk%C3%A9_sisters
Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the 19th century American radicals, Sarah And Angelina Grimke.
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women's History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
**********
Women And Revolution, Volume 29, Spring 1985
The Grimke Sisters:
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
By Amy Rath
"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours." —Angelina Grimke', address to Women's Loyal League, May 1863
Angelina and Sarah Grimke' were two of the earliest fighters for black and women's rights in America. Although far from being socialists or revolutionaries, the Grimke' sisters of South Carolina were among the foremost fighters for human equality of their time, the 1830s and the tumultuous era which saw the birth of the abolitionist movement, foreshadowing the great Civil War which freed the slaves. They were also among the the first women to speak publicly on political issues. "Genteel society" objected to the fact of their public appearances—and even more to the content of their speeches. Thus the first serious, widespread discussion of women's rights in the United States was directly linked to the black question and the liberation of the slaves, questions which 25 years later would tear the nation apart in civil war.
Further, the Grimke' sisters' almost visionary commitment to the fight for the liberation of all, exemplified in Angelina's famous statement to the Women's Loyal League, stands in stark contrast not only to early abolitionist anti-women prejudices, but also to the later, shameful betrayal of black rights by feminists during the Reconstruction era. "The discussion of the rights of the slave has opened the way for the discussion of other rights," wrote Angelina to Catherine E.Beecher in 1837, "and the ultimate result will most certainly be the breaking of every yoke, the letting the oppressed of every grade and description go free,—an emancipation far more glorious than any the world has ever yet seen."
The sisters and Theodore Weld published American Slavery As It Is (1840), the most influential anti-slavery document until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Though they had essentially retired from active politics by the time of John Brown's courageous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, the actual opening shot of the Civil War, they deeply believed in his cause. Angelina's stirring "Address to the Soldiers of our Second Revolution" (given at the May 1863 Women's Loyal League convention) advocated massive arming of the former slaves as part of the Union Army, and remains today a remarkably radical and prescient analysis of the implications of the Civil War:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government... are driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war— The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
On February 21,1838, hundreds of people swarmed to the great hall of the Massachusetts State Legislature. Angelina Grimke", the first woman ever to address an American legislative body, would argue for the most controversial subject of the day: the immediate abolition of slavery.
This speech—which continued over three days, despite efforts by pro-slavery forces to stop it—was the culmination of a nine months' tour by Sarah and Angelina Grimke', the first women agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), founded in 1833. While their speeches began as "parlor meetings" in private homes or church halls for women only, such was the power and growing fame of Angelina's oratory that men began to slip into the back to listen, and the Grimke' sisters became the first American women to address what were then called "promiscuous" audiences.
Uproar swept genteel society across the nation. The Grimke' sisters were breaking the rules of ladylike decorum by their "unwomanly" displays. Angelina was popularly called "Devilina"; "Fanny Wrightists!" screamed the pro-slavery press. (Fanny Wright was a Scots Utopian socialist who toured the U.S. in 1828 for abolition, public education, women's rights, the ten-hour day and "free love"; she set up an anti-slavery commune and edited a newspaper. When these projects failed, she left the country, having made little impact.) "Why are all the old hens abolitionists?" sneered the New Hampshire Patriot: "Because not being able to obtain husbands they think they may stand some chance for a negro, if they can only make amalgamation [interracial sex] fashionable."
The Congregationalist church, the descendant of the New England Puritans, issued a "Pastoral Letter" condemning the Grimke's for leaving "woman's sphere" and going against the biblical injunction, of Paul: "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." Sarah answered this, and other attacks, in the brilliant Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, the first American book on the rights of women, predating Margaret Fuller's more famous work by six years.
In her arguments Sarah relied extensively on biblical sources, for to her it was important to prove that the equality of the sexes should be a Christian belief, and she wanted to show that women had the right and duty to work for the emancipation of the slave. Her concrete solutions to women's oppression were naive: for example, she suggested that husbands should content themselves with baked potatoes and milk for dinner, to give their wives time to educate themselves. She never understood that the institution of the family itself necessarily stands in the way of women's freedom. Indeed, she could not reconcile herself to the idea that divorce should be legalized. But for all these limita¬tions, Sarah's book is the pioneer American work on the subject. She was deeply interested in women workers, and polemicized against unequal wages; she attacked with great bitterness the lack of educational opportunities for women and their total lack of legal rights. "I ask no favors for my sex," she wrote, "All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."
Many fellow abolitionists demanded that the sisters give up their arguments on women's rights, fearing that it would detract from the more important question of the hour: freedom for the slave. But Angelina pointed out that the outcry against women's public lecturing was a tool of the slaveholders: "We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of the road.... Can you not see the deep laid scheme of the clergy against us as lecturers?... If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?" (emphasis in original; letter to Theodore Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, 20 August 1837).
The Making of a Southern Abolitionist
The sisters' effectiveness as abolitionist agents had to do not only with the power and sweep of their arguments, but with the fact that they were native-born eyewitnesses to Southern slavery. Yet precisely because they were gently bred daughters of one of South Carolina's most prominent slaveholding families, they had not seen the worst of it, as they themselves were quick to point out. They did not see the slave gangs on the plantations, the brutal whippings, but the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves.
Sarah was born in 1792. The invention of the cotton gin in her infancy led her father, like many others, to expand his plantation holdings and build up his slave force. He was one of the wealthiest men in Charleston, the political capital of the South, and a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a former Speaker in the state House, a judge and author. Sarah grew up with every advantage that wealth and position could offer a woman of her time. But instead of satisfying herself with embroidery, piano and a little French, she studied her brother's lessons in mathematics, history and botany, and declared her wish to become a lawyer. Her family mocked her; her father forbade her to study Latin. Perhaps influenced by her own educational frustrations as well as her childhood revulsion for the slave system, she started to teach her personal maid to read. "I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting-maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my long locks. The light was put out, the keyhold screened, and flat on our-stomachs, before the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the laws of South Carolina."
As an adult Sarah's aspirations to make something of her life turned in the one direction open to "respectable" women of her day and class: religion. She became a Quaker. Later she converted Angelina, 12 years her junior. Before joining her sister in Philadel¬phia, the Quakers' center, Angelina undertook a personal conversion crusade against slavery among her family and friends. In her gray Quaker dress, she started arguments at tea against the sin of holding slaves, becoming quite unpopular with Charleston's ruling elite. Inquiries were made about her sanity.
Convinced at last that there was no future in this, Angelina went north. But she could not be satisfied with the orthodox Quaker doctrine, which at that time included colonization as a "solution" to slavery. Black "Friends" were made to sit on a separate bench. In the early 1830s Angelina became interested in the growing abolitionist movement, and was horrified at the violence the free North turned against anti-slavery spokesmen. William Lloyd Garrison was barely saved from lynching at the hands of a Boston mob in 1835. Theodore Weld was repeatedly mobbed as he toured the Midwest, as were many others. Early in the decade Prudence Crandall was forced to close her school for black girls in Connecticut when the well was poisoned, doctors refused to treat the students, and finally a mob torched the school building. In 1838 a pro-slavery mob, egged on by the mayor himself, burned down Philadelphia Hall, which had been built by the abolitionists as a partial answer to their difficulty in finding places to meet. An interracial- meeting of abolitionists was in progress there at the time; two days earlier, Angelina and Weld had married, and the attendance of both blacks and whites at their wedding fueled the fury of the race-terrorists.
The abolitionists were part of a broader bourgeois radical movement, the 19th century herrs of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals, and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. Although opposition to slavery was by no means as widespread in the 1830s as it was to become immediately before the Civil War, nonetheless many prominent men, such as the wealthy Tappan brothers of New York and Gerrit Smith, the biggest landowner in the North, had joined the movement by the middle of the decade. Many of the abolitionists had been part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists were formulating their philos¬ophy. Religious revivalists such as Charles G. Finney, who converted Weld, preached temperance and that slavery was a sin against god.
Angelina became convinced that god had called her to work actively for the emancipation of the slaves. Defying the Quakers (who later expelled the sisters when Angelina and Weld married in a non-Quaker ceremony), the sisters went to New York where they participated in a conference for the training of abolitionist agents. Thus began the famous speaking tour of 1837-38.
The politics of the Grimke sisters was radical bourgeois egalitarianism profoundly rooted in religion. They believed that slavery was a sin, that as "immortal, moral beings" women and blacks were the equals of white men. They argued that slavery was contrary to the laws of god (the Bible) and of man, as put forth in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; they disagreed with Garrison's view of the Constitution as a "pro-slavery" document. Again unlike Garrison, they wrote and spoke for rights of education and property for free blacks as well, and bitterly denounced racism within the abolitionist movement. They were the integrationists of their time.
For many years, however, the sisters agreed with Garrison that slavery could be done away with peacefully by moral persuasion. They preached a boycott of slave-made goods (Angelina's wedding cake was made of "free" sugar by a free black baker). One of Angelina's first writings was "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States," widely circulated by the AASS, in which she urged Southern women to begin a petition campaign for immediate emancipation, to free their own slaves and to educate them. When copies of this pamphlet reached Charleston, the postmaster publicly burned them and the police informed the Grimke' family that if their daughter ever attempted to set foot in the city, she would be jailed and then sent back on the next ship.
The sisters were also for many years staunch pacifists, as would be expected from their Quaker background. Sarah took this to such an extreme that she denied that abolitionists had the right to arm themselves in defense against pro-slavery mobs. This became a subject of controversy in the abolitionist movement in 1837 when publisher Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois by a mob. True to her pacifist idealism, Sarah ques¬tioned his right to bear the gun with which he tried to save his life.
Splits and the Coming Storm
By the 1840s the Grimke'sisters had largely withdrawn from public activity. In part this was due to ill health Angelina suffered as a result of her pregnancies, as well as family financial problems. But much of it was probably political demoralization. In 1840the abolitionist movement split over the issues of women's rights and political action. The Garrisonian wing wanted to include women in the organization, but was opposed to abolitionists voting or running for political office, since Garrison believed the "pro-slavery" U.S. Con¬stitution should be abolished and that the North should expel the South. The other wing, represented by eminent men like the Tappan brothers, excluded women from office within the organization, was against women's rights, and wanted to orient to political work in Congress. Since they agreed with neither side in this split, the Grimke's and Weld retired to private life. In later years Angelina spoke bitterly against "organizations."
Meanwhile, however, on the left wing of the abolitionist movement there were gathering forces which saw the irrepressible and inevitable necessity for a violent assault on the slave system, to end it forever by force of arms. The brilliant black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and John Brown spearheaded this growing conviction. As we noted in our SL pamphlet, "Black History and the Class Struggle," "Douglass' political evolution was not merely from 'non-resistance' to self-defense. Contained in the 'moral suasion' line was a refusal to fight slavery politically and to the wall, by all methods. That is the importance of the Douglass-Brown relationship: together they were planning the Civil War." And it was John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 which galvanized the nation; abolitionists who the day before were pacifists took the pulpit to proclaim the necessity of a violent end to the slave system.
The Grimke' sisters and especially Theodore Weld had earlier become convinced that only war could end slavery. Sarah believed she had communed with John Brown's spirit the night before his martyrdom at the hands of Colonel Robert E. Lee, acting under command of President Buchanan. "The John Huss of the United States now stands ready... to seal his testimony with his life's blood," she wrote in her diary. Two of the executed men from the Harpers Ferry raid were buried in the commune at Raritan Bay, New Jersey, where the sisters and Weld were living at the time. The graves had to be guarded against a pro-slavery mob.
When the Civil War officially began the Grimke's did emerge briefly from private life. They were staunch Unionists, supported the draft and were critical of Lincoln for not freeing the slaves sooner. They were founding members of the Women's Loyal League. It was at a meeting of this group that Angelina made her famous statement: "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
Reconstruction Betrayed: Finish the Civil War!
Following the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction, the most democratic period for blacks in U.S. history, the former abolitionist movement split again. During that period, women suffrage leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—formerly avowed abolitionists—turned their movement for women's rights into a tool of racist reaction. They organized against passage of the Fifteenth Amendment because it gave votes to blacks and not to women (the Grin-ike sisters were silent on this question, even though this disgusting racism was foreign to everything they had fought for). Stanton and Anthony worked closely with such racist Southern Democrats as James Brooks, because he purported to support women's suffrage. In a letter to the editor of the New York Standard (1865), Stanton wrote,
"...now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk
into the kingdom first In fact, it is better to be the slave
of an educated white man, then of a degraded, ignorant black one."
It was Frederick Douglass who fought this racist assault. Douglass had been a fervent supporter of the infant women's rights movement, which began largely as a result of the chauvinism which women anti-slavery activists encountered from many abolitionists. At the 1869 convention of the Equal Rights Association, Douglass made a final attempt to win the suffragists from their reactionary policy:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have [the same] urgency to obtain the ballot."
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands," while imploring a redou¬bling "of our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." And for the rest of his life Douglass remained a staunch champion of women's rights.
Though the Civil War freed the slaves, it was not the fulfillment of Angelina's vision of a great, all-encompassing human emancipation. The betrayal of Reconstruction by the counterrevolutionary and triumphant capitalist reaction of the 1870s, in which the bourgeois feminists played their small and dirty part, left unfulfilled those liberating goals to which the Grimke sisters were committed. Yet Angelina's statement—"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours"—was and is true in a way the Grimke's could not understand. Their social perspective was limited to the bourgeois order: they never identified property as the source of the oppression of both women and blacks. Indeed, as bourgeois egalitarians, the basis of their arguments was that women and blacks should have the same right to acquire property as the white man and that this would liberate them completely. As Marx noted:
"The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other."
—"The Civil War in the United States," Collected Works, Volume 19, 1861-64
The system of "free labor," capitalism, won out. Radical Reconstruction, enforced by military occupation, sought to impose equality of bourgeois democratic rights in the South. It was defeated by.compromise between the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern land-owning aristocracy, thus revealing the ultimate incapacity of bourgeois radicalism to finally liberate any sector of the oppressed. This failure and betrayal of Reconstruction perpetuated the oppression of blacks as a color caste at the bottom of American capitalist society. This racial division, with whites on top of blacks, has been and continues to be the main historical obstacle to the development of political class consciousness among the American proletariat. It will take a third American Revolution, led by a multiracial workers party against capitalism itself, to break the fetters of blacks, women and all the oppressed.
Monday, April 19, 2010
*Ya, Let’s Hang Around Mama And Put A Good Buzz On- The Music Of Jonathan Edwards-An Encore
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Jonathan Edwards performing his classic, "Sunshine".
CD Review
Lucky Day, Jonathan Edwards, Atlantic Records, 1974
Over the past several years I have spent some time working around the idea of why certain folk revival performers of the early 1960s, or later folk rock artists either never made it big and stayed big (relatively) as with the obvious case of the staying power of Bob Dylan, or were more one-hit wonders who faded from the scene quickly, if not quietly. I have mentioned names like Tom Paxton, Dave Van Ronk, Tom Rush and Jesse Winchester who made their names in that era. Singer/songwriters of immense talent yet except among the ever dwindling core of aficionados have faded from any spotlight. With the artist under review, Jonathan Edwards, who came a little later and can be more rightly classified under the folk rock genre, I find myself asking the same question.
Now in this case I am not asking merely an academic question. I recently attended a performance of the very much alive Mr. Edwards at a local folk club in Cambridge, Ma. and came away from the very up tempo performance of his, mainly, older work scratching my head. The man and his band (including a couple of his old band members on this CD, Bill Elliot and Start Schulman) have, if anything, more energy that in the old days and certainly more stage presence. The versions of the tunes played were perhaps more clearly done in bluegrass/country tempo which always helps. But that does not solve the question. Of course sometimes one personal life, for good or evil, sets you on a different path. Or one gets tired of the road. Or one runs out of musical energy and thoughts but I am still, nevertheless, scratching my head on this one.
That said, in his prime Jonathan Edwards had a number of minor classics of the folk rock genre, all of which he played at that local club. The highlight, as to be expected, is the song, some of whose lyrics form part of the headline of this entry, “Shanty”. Others include “Give Us A Song”, “Sunshine” (a variation), “Have You Seen Her” and the title track, “Lucky Day”. Not performed at the club is a nice cover of the country classic “Today I Started Loving You Again” that shows a certain country influence in his work, especially his later work.
Jonathan Edwards
Shanty lyrics
Gonna sit down in the kitchen
And fix me something good to eat
And make my head a little high
And make this whole day complete
Cuz we gonna lay around the shanty, mama
And put a good buzz on
Well pass it to me baby
Pass it to me slow
We'll take time out to smile a little
Before we let it go
Cuz we gonna lay around the shanty, mama
And put a good buzz on
Well there ain't nothin' to do
And there's always room for more
Fill it, light it, shut up
And close the door
Cuz we gonna lay around the shanty, mama
And put a good buzz on
We gonna sit around the kitchen
Fix us somethin' good to eat
And make ourselves a little high
And make the whole day complete
Cuz we gonna lay around the shanty, mama
And put a good buzz on
Cuz we gonna lay around the shanty, mama
And put a good buzz on
CD Review
Lucky Day, Jonathan Edwards, Atlantic Records, 1974
Over the past several years I have spent some time working around the idea of why certain folk revival performers of the early 1960s, or later folk rock artists either never made it big and stayed big (relatively) as with the obvious case of the staying power of Bob Dylan, or were more one-hit wonders who faded from the scene quickly, if not quietly. I have mentioned names like Tom Paxton, Dave Van Ronk, Tom Rush and Jesse Winchester who made their names in that era. Singer/songwriters of immense talent yet except among the ever dwindling core of aficionados have faded from any spotlight. With the artist under review, Jonathan Edwards, who came a little later and can be more rightly classified under the folk rock genre, I find myself asking the same question.
Now in this case I am not asking merely an academic question. I recently attended a performance of the very much alive Mr. Edwards at a local folk club in Cambridge, Ma. and came away from the very up tempo performance of his, mainly, older work scratching my head. The man and his band (including a couple of his old band members on this CD, Bill Elliot and Start Schulman) have, if anything, more energy that in the old days and certainly more stage presence. The versions of the tunes played were perhaps more clearly done in bluegrass/country tempo which always helps. But that does not solve the question. Of course sometimes one personal life, for good or evil, sets you on a different path. Or one gets tired of the road. Or one runs out of musical energy and thoughts but I am still, nevertheless, scratching my head on this one.
That said, in his prime Jonathan Edwards had a number of minor classics of the folk rock genre, all of which he played at that local club. The highlight, as to be expected, is the song, some of whose lyrics form part of the headline of this entry, “Shanty”. Others include “Give Us A Song”, “Sunshine” (a variation), “Have You Seen Her” and the title track, “Lucky Day”. Not performed at the club is a nice cover of the country classic “Today I Started Loving You Again” that shows a certain country influence in his work, especially his later work.
Jonathan Edwards
Shanty lyrics
Gonna sit down in the kitchen
And fix me something good to eat
And make my head a little high
And make this whole day complete
Cuz we gonna lay around the shanty, mama
And put a good buzz on
Well pass it to me baby
Pass it to me slow
We'll take time out to smile a little
Before we let it go
Cuz we gonna lay around the shanty, mama
And put a good buzz on
Well there ain't nothin' to do
And there's always room for more
Fill it, light it, shut up
And close the door
Cuz we gonna lay around the shanty, mama
And put a good buzz on
We gonna sit around the kitchen
Fix us somethin' good to eat
And make ourselves a little high
And make the whole day complete
Cuz we gonna lay around the shanty, mama
And put a good buzz on
Cuz we gonna lay around the shanty, mama
And put a good buzz on
*From The Annals Of American History- The Boston Massacre- "The Charge Is Murder"- A Guest Commentary
Click on the headline to link to a "Sunday Boston Globe" article, dated April 18, 2010, concerning a different look at the famous Boston Massacre, one of the key precursor events to the American revolution.
Markin comment:
This is an interesting article with a little different take on the possible motives of individuals on both sides of this event. However, the operative point in drawn nicely in the concluding paragraphs linking, in this case, the British imperial occupation of the America colonies with later, more current occupations like the American presence in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere now. Such occupations weren't pretty then and they ain’t pretty now. And certainly are not conducive to good fellowship between the occupiers and the occupied. I note further that in the case of British imperialism when it "ruled the waves", and much else, that in places like India, Ireland, and in their settlements in China, all events in the 20th century, they had no qualms about letting their soldiery fire at will, provocation or not, and notwithstanding individual soldier motivation. So this Boston Massacre is hardly a unique event in the annals of that branch of world imperialism. Imperialists Hands Off The World!
Markin comment:
This is an interesting article with a little different take on the possible motives of individuals on both sides of this event. However, the operative point in drawn nicely in the concluding paragraphs linking, in this case, the British imperial occupation of the America colonies with later, more current occupations like the American presence in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere now. Such occupations weren't pretty then and they ain’t pretty now. And certainly are not conducive to good fellowship between the occupiers and the occupied. I note further that in the case of British imperialism when it "ruled the waves", and much else, that in places like India, Ireland, and in their settlements in China, all events in the 20th century, they had no qualms about letting their soldiery fire at will, provocation or not, and notwithstanding individual soldier motivation. So this Boston Massacre is hardly a unique event in the annals of that branch of world imperialism. Imperialists Hands Off The World!
Sunday, April 18, 2010
*When Doo Wop Bopped-The Music Of The 1950s
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the Fiestas performing their Doo Wop classic, "So Fine".
CD Review
Old Town Doo Wop, Volume Two, Ace Records, 1992
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but now when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, moves away from ballady show tunes, rhymey Tin Pan Alley tunes and, most importantly, any and all music that your parents might have approved of, even liked, or at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room hit post World War II America like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Now strictly speaking “Doo Wop” is not really rock and roll, but rather a second cousin to it coming out of the black-dominated rhythm and blues tradition. The fantastic harmonics, precise rhythmic patterns, and smooth lyrics reflect that tradition more than the over-heated, guitar-driven, solo-singer rock performances that drove most of us to the dance floor back in the day. The kind of rock and roll that most of us children of the genre listened to, went wild over and spent that precious disposable income on was the rockabilly, hillbilly, black country blues variation that Sam Phillips and Sun Records first produced in the early 1950s and that Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis came to be exemplars of. But some of us, when we had a little extra cash, definitely bopped “doo wop” as part of our coming of age, especially if some dreamy girl (or guy for shes) was falling all over herself to listen to. Remember to be young was to be ready.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer and some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such 1950s compilations “speak” to. No one came out of the 1950s without having at least listened to “So Fine” by the Fiestas, or maybe less possible their “Our Anniversary. And with Ruth McFadden on “School Boy” Or the very edgy fine “Life Is But A Dream” by the Harptones. Or The Chimes classic, “My Broken Heart”. Now this sub-genre is a very acquired taste, to be sure, but if you need a "doo wop” primer here is a place to start.
SO FINE
THE FIESTAS
So fine, so fine.
So fine, yeah.
My baby's so dog gone fine,
She loves me, come rain, come shine
Oh oh yeah so fine.
she thrills me, she thrills me
She thrills me, yeah.
My baby thrills me all the time.
she sends those chills up and down my spine,
Oh oh yeah so fine.
Well I know
she loves me so.
Well I know,
because my baby tells me so-oh oh so fine.
So fine
So fine, yeah, My baby's so dog gone fine
She sends those chills up and down my spine,
Oh oh yeah, so fine
CD Review
Old Town Doo Wop, Volume Two, Ace Records, 1992
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but now when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, moves away from ballady show tunes, rhymey Tin Pan Alley tunes and, most importantly, any and all music that your parents might have approved of, even liked, or at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room hit post World War II America like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Now strictly speaking “Doo Wop” is not really rock and roll, but rather a second cousin to it coming out of the black-dominated rhythm and blues tradition. The fantastic harmonics, precise rhythmic patterns, and smooth lyrics reflect that tradition more than the over-heated, guitar-driven, solo-singer rock performances that drove most of us to the dance floor back in the day. The kind of rock and roll that most of us children of the genre listened to, went wild over and spent that precious disposable income on was the rockabilly, hillbilly, black country blues variation that Sam Phillips and Sun Records first produced in the early 1950s and that Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis came to be exemplars of. But some of us, when we had a little extra cash, definitely bopped “doo wop” as part of our coming of age, especially if some dreamy girl (or guy for shes) was falling all over herself to listen to. Remember to be young was to be ready.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer and some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such 1950s compilations “speak” to. No one came out of the 1950s without having at least listened to “So Fine” by the Fiestas, or maybe less possible their “Our Anniversary. And with Ruth McFadden on “School Boy” Or the very edgy fine “Life Is But A Dream” by the Harptones. Or The Chimes classic, “My Broken Heart”. Now this sub-genre is a very acquired taste, to be sure, but if you need a "doo wop” primer here is a place to start.
SO FINE
THE FIESTAS
So fine, so fine.
So fine, yeah.
My baby's so dog gone fine,
She loves me, come rain, come shine
Oh oh yeah so fine.
she thrills me, she thrills me
She thrills me, yeah.
My baby thrills me all the time.
she sends those chills up and down my spine,
Oh oh yeah so fine.
Well I know
she loves me so.
Well I know,
because my baby tells me so-oh oh so fine.
So fine
So fine, yeah, My baby's so dog gone fine
She sends those chills up and down my spine,
Oh oh yeah, so fine
Friday, April 16, 2010
*From The Anti-War Soldiers Front- The "Courage To Resist" Website
Click on the headline to link to the "Courage To Resist" anti-war soldiers Website.
Markin comment:
Individual draft resistance in the old days of Vietnam when it was a "hot bottom" issue was not a part of the communist program. Nor are individual acts of resistance in the military. We say get to the soldiers en masse and move from there. Those individual soldiers who have come to understand the imperial nature of their tasks are precious cadre to lead their fellows out of war. that said, we, of course, defend those who are committed to individual acts of resistance. Forward!
Markin comment:
Individual draft resistance in the old days of Vietnam when it was a "hot bottom" issue was not a part of the communist program. Nor are individual acts of resistance in the military. We say get to the soldiers en masse and move from there. Those individual soldiers who have come to understand the imperial nature of their tasks are precious cadre to lead their fellows out of war. that said, we, of course, defend those who are committed to individual acts of resistance. Forward!
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- Victory To The Rio Tinto Borax Strike!
Click on the headline to link to a "Workers Vanguard" article, dated April 9, 2010 concerning the lessons to be drawn from the struggle of the Rio Tinto miners out in California.
Markin comment:
Hot-cargoing scab Borax products is simply the beginning of wisdom on this one. Sometimes there is only one way to get successful results and it starts by putting a crimp in the profits of these monster mining conglomerates.
Markin comment:
Hot-cargoing scab Borax products is simply the beginning of wisdom on this one. Sometimes there is only one way to get successful results and it starts by putting a crimp in the profits of these monster mining conglomerates.
* From The Anti- War Parliamentary Left - The James McGovern-Russ Feingold Sponsored Exit Strategy Legislation-From "Win Wthout War"
Click on the headline to link to a "Win Without War" Website posting of the Congressional legislation sponsored by Congressman James McGovern and Senator Russ Feingold that would create a date certain exit strategy for Afghanistan.
Markin comment:
This legislation provides an interesting contrast to the consummately legalistic (and really diplomatic language0 that even the most left parliamentary politicians are addicted to and the real thrust of what needs to be addressed. Instead of calling on the imperial president (aka the imperial Commander-in-Chief) to do, or not do, anything we communists would use any Congressional position we held to call on the citizenry and the soldiers to put an end to this Afghan occupation. Now that is an exit strategy I could support. This thing is not worth the paper it is written on, or the cyberspace it takes up.
Markin comment:
This legislation provides an interesting contrast to the consummately legalistic (and really diplomatic language0 that even the most left parliamentary politicians are addicted to and the real thrust of what needs to be addressed. Instead of calling on the imperial president (aka the imperial Commander-in-Chief) to do, or not do, anything we communists would use any Congressional position we held to call on the citizenry and the soldiers to put an end to this Afghan occupation. Now that is an exit strategy I could support. This thing is not worth the paper it is written on, or the cyberspace it takes up.
Tina Fey (Oops!) Sarah Palin And The Tea Baggers Come To Boston- A Guest Commentary
Click on the headline to link to a United For Justice With Peace (UJP) post on their activities inportest of Sarah Palin and the tea baggers on Boston Common on April 14, 2010.
Markin comment:
Look, I like to protest out in the streets, for or against, lots of things. Against war, militarism, the death penalty, and so on. For immigrant rights, abortion rights, May Day and so on. What I don’t like to do, although other leftists are more than free to do so, is take precious time out to picket right wing bourgeois politicians like Sarah Palin. Or in the old days, George Wallace and Ronald Reagan, for example. Yes, these guys and gals are awful politically but as I have been trying to put stress on lately to protest them tends to make it look like you are giving political cover to the Democrats. And, frankly, today for those of us who are realistic about our short term political prospects and necessities of accruing young cadre by taking them away from our main enemy who is none other than a hard Democrat, Barack Obama. Sure, aim your fire at the right- but make that the Obama/Palin right and the capitalist system they jointly, and fervently, defend and will defend to their last breaths.
Markin comment:
Look, I like to protest out in the streets, for or against, lots of things. Against war, militarism, the death penalty, and so on. For immigrant rights, abortion rights, May Day and so on. What I don’t like to do, although other leftists are more than free to do so, is take precious time out to picket right wing bourgeois politicians like Sarah Palin. Or in the old days, George Wallace and Ronald Reagan, for example. Yes, these guys and gals are awful politically but as I have been trying to put stress on lately to protest them tends to make it look like you are giving political cover to the Democrats. And, frankly, today for those of us who are realistic about our short term political prospects and necessities of accruing young cadre by taking them away from our main enemy who is none other than a hard Democrat, Barack Obama. Sure, aim your fire at the right- but make that the Obama/Palin right and the capitalist system they jointly, and fervently, defend and will defend to their last breaths.
*When The Western Catholic Church Was The Only Game In Town In Europe-Almost- A Book Review
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Waldo Of Lyon mentioned below in this book review.
Book Review
Popular Religion In The Middle Ages, Rosalind And Christopher Brooke, Thames and Hudson, London, 1984
Back a goodly number of years ago now I began purchasing a number of books, including the one under review, “Popular Religion In The Middle Ages”, on the early history, ethos, and development of Western religions, essentially the Roman Catholic Church and its various off-shoots. My purpose for the purchases at that time was to begin to stockpile material so that when I reached an old enough age I would able to withdraw from the political struggles that animated my youth: the struggle against war, against racial and economic injustice, and various other worldly oppressions and study the social roots of religious expression, especially the primitive communal ones. I have, unfortunately, had to spend that old age continuing those same struggles from my youth but I have come to realize that if I want to get to those questions I had better dust off the old books and sneak some time to read about the old time religion.
I have, frankly, always been intrigued by those various primitive religion expressions that we can directly, in some way, link to the more secular, socialist consciousness of our day. The short-lived, besieged Anabaptist Commune at Muenster in the 1500s, written about long ago by the German Social Democratic leader and academic, Karl Kautsky, comes to mind, as does the medieval theological expression of that same phenomena, Waldo of Lyon and the Waldenese communities that suffered extreme persecution as heretics. Furthermore, I was interested in learning more about a half-forgotten old sect; the Cathars, also known as the Albigensian heretics.
Along the way the authors here investigate all that and also the relationship between the ignorant, illiterate lay masses and the sometimes equally ignorant clergy; the role of the bible, church buildings, church art and the like in bringing the message to the masses; the recurrence waves of piety that would spread over various social layers of society and produced a slew of isolated, otherworldly monasteries and convents; the rise of what we would call primitive capitalism in changing, for some, the way religion got expressed. Now this may seem like very specialized reading, and it is, although the authors here have dealt with that problem with a fairly light touch in this short medieval religion primer. And have provided many interesting pictorial illustrations as well.
Book Review
Popular Religion In The Middle Ages, Rosalind And Christopher Brooke, Thames and Hudson, London, 1984
Back a goodly number of years ago now I began purchasing a number of books, including the one under review, “Popular Religion In The Middle Ages”, on the early history, ethos, and development of Western religions, essentially the Roman Catholic Church and its various off-shoots. My purpose for the purchases at that time was to begin to stockpile material so that when I reached an old enough age I would able to withdraw from the political struggles that animated my youth: the struggle against war, against racial and economic injustice, and various other worldly oppressions and study the social roots of religious expression, especially the primitive communal ones. I have, unfortunately, had to spend that old age continuing those same struggles from my youth but I have come to realize that if I want to get to those questions I had better dust off the old books and sneak some time to read about the old time religion.
I have, frankly, always been intrigued by those various primitive religion expressions that we can directly, in some way, link to the more secular, socialist consciousness of our day. The short-lived, besieged Anabaptist Commune at Muenster in the 1500s, written about long ago by the German Social Democratic leader and academic, Karl Kautsky, comes to mind, as does the medieval theological expression of that same phenomena, Waldo of Lyon and the Waldenese communities that suffered extreme persecution as heretics. Furthermore, I was interested in learning more about a half-forgotten old sect; the Cathars, also known as the Albigensian heretics.
Along the way the authors here investigate all that and also the relationship between the ignorant, illiterate lay masses and the sometimes equally ignorant clergy; the role of the bible, church buildings, church art and the like in bringing the message to the masses; the recurrence waves of piety that would spread over various social layers of society and produced a slew of isolated, otherworldly monasteries and convents; the rise of what we would call primitive capitalism in changing, for some, the way religion got expressed. Now this may seem like very specialized reading, and it is, although the authors here have dealt with that problem with a fairly light touch in this short medieval religion primer. And have provided many interesting pictorial illustrations as well.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
*The Modern Southern Literary View Of The American Civil War Period- William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!"
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the American novelist, William Faulkner.
Book Review
Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner, The Modern Library, New York, 1936
I am here to tell you that not every great book that describes the human struggle as we emerged from the mud has to be written from a leftist progressive political perspective, although usually it helps. The novelist, self-proclaimed white racial purist, and Mississippi partisan, William Faulkner, with this very complicated and somewhat rambling novel placed himself front and center in the pantheon of American literary figures who have tried to confront the daunting task of making great literature out of the slavery-driven plantation society of the ante bellum South and of that same locale in the period of defeat after the Civil War. One does not have to sign up for membership in the William Faulkner political fan club to realize that he has created something that speaks to that very contradictory, and at times incomprehensible, human drive to succeed as it has evolved thus far. He does not pull his punches or hold back on the grizzly picture that he paints.
Let me explain that last sentence. I was put on the trail of Faulkner this time, having previously reviewed his “Sanctuary” in this space, by reading and reviewing a book titled “The Unwritten War” by Daniel Aaron. Aaron’s major thesis is that the social, political and military dimensions of the American Civil experience, for both sides, were so traumatic and overwhelming that it took a figure removed in time, like Faulkner, to have a realistic shot at writing the “great American Civil War novel”. Aaron runs through the litany of great American literary figures that did, or did not, try to create such a work in the immediate post-war period and came up dry until the emergence of Faulkner (and, possibly, the “Agrarians” like Robert Penn Warren). One can agree or disagree with Professor Aaron's thesis but it hard to argue, at an artistic level, that Faulkner’s work here, especially the portrait of the central character, Thomas Sutpen, as he emerges from the descriptions of several fellow townspeople, including characters from other Faulkner novels, of the mythical Jefferson, Mississippi is not a serious candidate for that honor.
And what do we have here in the four hundred or so pages of this novel. A description of the intricate web of the roots of one branch of the slavery economy in the French West Indies as it connects to the then (1830’s) virgin Mississippi lands suitable for plantation creation. The trials and tribulations of two varieties of “poor white trash” (Sutpen, and later his overseer). The Civil War as refracted though small town Southern life. Miscegenation. Lust. Incest. Murder, Almost murder. Wannabe murder. Abortion. Southern gentility. Not so gentile Southern life. Ghosts, real and imagined. Fear of going forward. Fear of going back. Hatred of the North. Hatred of the South. Carpetbaggers. Scalawags. Almost every social and human experience, except any serious description of the hated n----r in post-Civil War society, and except as monsters. And that is only a start. So here is the “real deal”. Goddam, William Faulkner can write a hell of a novel. Nevertheless, after reading this novel, I will stick with the lyrics in Nina Simone’s old 1960’s Civil Rights-inspired song- “Mississippi, Goddam"
"Mississippi Goddam"- Nina Simone- 1963
The name of this tune is Mississippi goddam
And I mean every word of it
Alabamas gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about mississippi goddam
Alabamas gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about mississippi goddam
Cant you see it
Cant you feel it
Its all in the air
I cant stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer
Alabamas gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about mississippi goddam
This is a show tune
But the show hasnt been written for it, yet
Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every days gonna be my last
Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I dont belong here
I dont belong there
Ive even stopped believing in prayer
Dont tell me
I tell you
Me and my people just about due
Ive been there so I know
They keep on saying go slow!
But thats just the trouble
Do it slow
Washing the windows
Do it slow
Picking the cotton
Do it slow
Youre just plain rotten
Do it slow
Youre too damn lazy
Do it slow
The thinkings crazy
Do it slow
Where am I going
What am I doing
I dont know
I dont know
Just try to do your very best
Stand up be counted with all the rest
For everybody knows about mississippi goddam
I made you thought I was kiddin didnt we
Picket lines
School boy cots
They try to say its a communist plot
All I want is equality
For my sister my brother my people and me
Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And youd stop calling me sister sadie
Oh but this whole country is full of lies
Youre all gonna die and die like flies
I dont trust you any more
You keep on saying go slow!
Go slow!
But thats just the trouble
Do it slow
Desegregation
Do it slow
Mass participation
Do it slow
Reunification
Do it slow
Do things gradually
Do it slow
But bring more tragedy
Do it slow
Why dont you see it
Why dont you feel it
I dont know
I dont know
You dont have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about mississippi
Everybody knows about alabama
Everybody knows about mississippi goddam
Thats it!
Book Review
Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner, The Modern Library, New York, 1936
I am here to tell you that not every great book that describes the human struggle as we emerged from the mud has to be written from a leftist progressive political perspective, although usually it helps. The novelist, self-proclaimed white racial purist, and Mississippi partisan, William Faulkner, with this very complicated and somewhat rambling novel placed himself front and center in the pantheon of American literary figures who have tried to confront the daunting task of making great literature out of the slavery-driven plantation society of the ante bellum South and of that same locale in the period of defeat after the Civil War. One does not have to sign up for membership in the William Faulkner political fan club to realize that he has created something that speaks to that very contradictory, and at times incomprehensible, human drive to succeed as it has evolved thus far. He does not pull his punches or hold back on the grizzly picture that he paints.
Let me explain that last sentence. I was put on the trail of Faulkner this time, having previously reviewed his “Sanctuary” in this space, by reading and reviewing a book titled “The Unwritten War” by Daniel Aaron. Aaron’s major thesis is that the social, political and military dimensions of the American Civil experience, for both sides, were so traumatic and overwhelming that it took a figure removed in time, like Faulkner, to have a realistic shot at writing the “great American Civil War novel”. Aaron runs through the litany of great American literary figures that did, or did not, try to create such a work in the immediate post-war period and came up dry until the emergence of Faulkner (and, possibly, the “Agrarians” like Robert Penn Warren). One can agree or disagree with Professor Aaron's thesis but it hard to argue, at an artistic level, that Faulkner’s work here, especially the portrait of the central character, Thomas Sutpen, as he emerges from the descriptions of several fellow townspeople, including characters from other Faulkner novels, of the mythical Jefferson, Mississippi is not a serious candidate for that honor.
And what do we have here in the four hundred or so pages of this novel. A description of the intricate web of the roots of one branch of the slavery economy in the French West Indies as it connects to the then (1830’s) virgin Mississippi lands suitable for plantation creation. The trials and tribulations of two varieties of “poor white trash” (Sutpen, and later his overseer). The Civil War as refracted though small town Southern life. Miscegenation. Lust. Incest. Murder, Almost murder. Wannabe murder. Abortion. Southern gentility. Not so gentile Southern life. Ghosts, real and imagined. Fear of going forward. Fear of going back. Hatred of the North. Hatred of the South. Carpetbaggers. Scalawags. Almost every social and human experience, except any serious description of the hated n----r in post-Civil War society, and except as monsters. And that is only a start. So here is the “real deal”. Goddam, William Faulkner can write a hell of a novel. Nevertheless, after reading this novel, I will stick with the lyrics in Nina Simone’s old 1960’s Civil Rights-inspired song- “Mississippi, Goddam"
"Mississippi Goddam"- Nina Simone- 1963
The name of this tune is Mississippi goddam
And I mean every word of it
Alabamas gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about mississippi goddam
Alabamas gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about mississippi goddam
Cant you see it
Cant you feel it
Its all in the air
I cant stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer
Alabamas gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about mississippi goddam
This is a show tune
But the show hasnt been written for it, yet
Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every days gonna be my last
Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I dont belong here
I dont belong there
Ive even stopped believing in prayer
Dont tell me
I tell you
Me and my people just about due
Ive been there so I know
They keep on saying go slow!
But thats just the trouble
Do it slow
Washing the windows
Do it slow
Picking the cotton
Do it slow
Youre just plain rotten
Do it slow
Youre too damn lazy
Do it slow
The thinkings crazy
Do it slow
Where am I going
What am I doing
I dont know
I dont know
Just try to do your very best
Stand up be counted with all the rest
For everybody knows about mississippi goddam
I made you thought I was kiddin didnt we
Picket lines
School boy cots
They try to say its a communist plot
All I want is equality
For my sister my brother my people and me
Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And youd stop calling me sister sadie
Oh but this whole country is full of lies
Youre all gonna die and die like flies
I dont trust you any more
You keep on saying go slow!
Go slow!
But thats just the trouble
Do it slow
Desegregation
Do it slow
Mass participation
Do it slow
Reunification
Do it slow
Do things gradually
Do it slow
But bring more tragedy
Do it slow
Why dont you see it
Why dont you feel it
I dont know
I dont know
You dont have to live next to me
Just give me my equality
Everybody knows about mississippi
Everybody knows about alabama
Everybody knows about mississippi goddam
Thats it!
*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor The Memory Of Soviet Red Army Marshal Tuchachevsky
Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Soviet Red Army leader and victim of Stalin's Red Army purges in the 1930s, Marshal Mikhail Tuchachevsky.
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
************
The mere mention of the name of the great Soviet General, Marshal Mikhail Tuchachevsky, evokes the heroic age of the seizure of power in the Russian October Revolution of 1917, and its aftermath in the destructive civil wars to defend the new proletarian state against the against the White Guards. Nothing will ever chance that view, except maybe new Octobers that will produce new military heroes to defend those states. That said, beyond those early exploits I always associate Tuchachevsky’s name with two things. The first, his adherence during the early Trotsky-led Soviet War Commissariat, to the military doctrine of the proletarian offensive, and secondly, his heroic, although wasted, military leadership of the struggle against Polish counter-revolution in 1920.
The doctrine of the proletarian offensive need not detain us for any length of time, as life itself determined the incorrect one-sidedness of such a doctrine in pursuit of working class military victories. Such doctrines, in many spheres of early Soviet life, were in any case pervasive and spoke to the pride that those who fought for the creation of the Soviet state had in its creation. If in the relatively benign fields of literature and culture one could reasonably, if again incorrectly, argue for merits of a distinct proletarian culture during the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat that argument falls flat in military affairs.
As we have learned from bitter experience, especially in the last few decades, the vicissitudes of the class struggle produce many ebbs and flows politically and militarily requiring many different responses. As a history of the Soviet state, especially in the early days indicates that same condition held on the military front. Thus, an inflexible doctrine based on some supposed preferred proletarian military doctrine was doomed from the start. Street fighting, offensive positional action, defensive positional action, insurrection, export of revolution, guerrilla fighting and the whole range of previously known military strategies and tactics that humankind has accumulated in these arts are necessary in the doctrinal military arsenal of the proletarian state. .
The Russian-Polish War of 1920, and its negative outcome for the Soviet side, is a more serious matter, although Marshal Tuchachevsky can hardly be held responsible for the Soviet defeat before Warsaw. A stronger argument can and has been made, that Stalin’s actions, as chief political commissar of one of the fronts, precluded victory in that struggle. I tend to agree with that argument but whatever its merits Tuchachevsky was thwarted in his ability to win a frontal assault against the French-advised and supplied Polish forces.
There can be no question by serious revolutionaries that this example of “export of revolution” by force of arms by the Soviet state, not only to break the back of the Polish nationalists and defend Soviet borders but to try to link up through the Polish “corridor” with the then restless and ready for action German proletariat, or at least its vanguard, was entirely consistent with Marxist doctrine. That is the real import of the defeat. Imagine, if you will, the possible difference outcome to the flow of the 20th century a Red Army victory would have posited. The “what if’s” of history are always problematic but here it was a near thing. The defeat, or rather non-start of the German revolution of 1923, is often, mainly correctly, cited as a defining moment in the ebb of 20th century working class revolutionary prospects. I, along with others, would suggest that the 1920 defeat also was a decisive act in creating that ebb. All Honor To The Memory Of Marshal Tuchachevsky!
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
************
The mere mention of the name of the great Soviet General, Marshal Mikhail Tuchachevsky, evokes the heroic age of the seizure of power in the Russian October Revolution of 1917, and its aftermath in the destructive civil wars to defend the new proletarian state against the against the White Guards. Nothing will ever chance that view, except maybe new Octobers that will produce new military heroes to defend those states. That said, beyond those early exploits I always associate Tuchachevsky’s name with two things. The first, his adherence during the early Trotsky-led Soviet War Commissariat, to the military doctrine of the proletarian offensive, and secondly, his heroic, although wasted, military leadership of the struggle against Polish counter-revolution in 1920.
The doctrine of the proletarian offensive need not detain us for any length of time, as life itself determined the incorrect one-sidedness of such a doctrine in pursuit of working class military victories. Such doctrines, in many spheres of early Soviet life, were in any case pervasive and spoke to the pride that those who fought for the creation of the Soviet state had in its creation. If in the relatively benign fields of literature and culture one could reasonably, if again incorrectly, argue for merits of a distinct proletarian culture during the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat that argument falls flat in military affairs.
As we have learned from bitter experience, especially in the last few decades, the vicissitudes of the class struggle produce many ebbs and flows politically and militarily requiring many different responses. As a history of the Soviet state, especially in the early days indicates that same condition held on the military front. Thus, an inflexible doctrine based on some supposed preferred proletarian military doctrine was doomed from the start. Street fighting, offensive positional action, defensive positional action, insurrection, export of revolution, guerrilla fighting and the whole range of previously known military strategies and tactics that humankind has accumulated in these arts are necessary in the doctrinal military arsenal of the proletarian state. .
The Russian-Polish War of 1920, and its negative outcome for the Soviet side, is a more serious matter, although Marshal Tuchachevsky can hardly be held responsible for the Soviet defeat before Warsaw. A stronger argument can and has been made, that Stalin’s actions, as chief political commissar of one of the fronts, precluded victory in that struggle. I tend to agree with that argument but whatever its merits Tuchachevsky was thwarted in his ability to win a frontal assault against the French-advised and supplied Polish forces.
There can be no question by serious revolutionaries that this example of “export of revolution” by force of arms by the Soviet state, not only to break the back of the Polish nationalists and defend Soviet borders but to try to link up through the Polish “corridor” with the then restless and ready for action German proletariat, or at least its vanguard, was entirely consistent with Marxist doctrine. That is the real import of the defeat. Imagine, if you will, the possible difference outcome to the flow of the 20th century a Red Army victory would have posited. The “what if’s” of history are always problematic but here it was a near thing. The defeat, or rather non-start of the German revolution of 1923, is often, mainly correctly, cited as a defining moment in the ebb of 20th century working class revolutionary prospects. I, along with others, would suggest that the 1920 defeat also was a decisive act in creating that ebb. All Honor To The Memory Of Marshal Tuchachevsky!
*From The "Renegade Eye" Blog- "Know Thy Enemy"- Sizing Up The "Tea-Baggers"- A Poll
Click on the headline to link to the "Renegade Eye" blog concerning the demographics and other data of this "hot" political phenomena, "The Tea-Bagger"
Markin comment:
Such right-wing groupings as the "Tea-baggers", are a recurring phenomena in American politics going back to establishment of the American Republic. Someone mentioned the "Know-Nothings" of the 1850s as an example of that tradition. I think that is not a bad approximation, especially on the anti-immigrant, close the borders, sent the blacks back to Africa, and hide your head in the sand while Wall Street takes us on a another roller-coaster ride front. However, another look at those demographics tells me a different story. These people are not going to lead a counter-revolution. Retired, rich, white people who have not even gotten back from Florida, or other of the world sun-tanning spots yet, are not, in the end, up to that task. It is the forces that they might support, or do now support, like the expanding militia movements, where the danger lies. And why we have to "know thy enemy". No question.
Markin comment:
Such right-wing groupings as the "Tea-baggers", are a recurring phenomena in American politics going back to establishment of the American Republic. Someone mentioned the "Know-Nothings" of the 1850s as an example of that tradition. I think that is not a bad approximation, especially on the anti-immigrant, close the borders, sent the blacks back to Africa, and hide your head in the sand while Wall Street takes us on a another roller-coaster ride front. However, another look at those demographics tells me a different story. These people are not going to lead a counter-revolution. Retired, rich, white people who have not even gotten back from Florida, or other of the world sun-tanning spots yet, are not, in the end, up to that task. It is the forces that they might support, or do now support, like the expanding militia movements, where the danger lies. And why we have to "know thy enemy". No question.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- A Case Study In Why Revolutionaries Do Not Run For The Executive Offices Of The Bourgeois State
Click on the headline to link to an "American Left History" blog entry concerning the subject discussed below, the attitude of revolutionaries toward running for the executive offices of the bourgeois state.
Markin comment:
Every once in a while in a now rather long political life I get my comeuppance handed to me on a silver platter. That fact has taken on added meaning after reading one of the two parts of the subject matter of this guest commentary below- the parliamentary maneuvering of the bourgeois parties in a recent flare-up in the Canadian Parliament, which, in the final analysis, is still tied to Mother England by a million strands. As the facts of the matter state in the article the British Commonwealth governor –general was asked by the leader of the ruling Tory Party to suspend parliament for his own political reasons. The governor-general complied. That, in the normal course events, is worthy of vociferous protest by your average democratic elements, the parliamentary left, the non-parliamentary left, and even a thoughtful Tory or two . That is not the issue. The issue, driven home in the article, is the rather touching faith of the non-parliamentary left in the preservation of the parliamentary system when that system, their system, in not under attack by some para-military right wing forces. That part they will have to answer politically for in due course.
The real question brought home to this writer is, however, his own previous nonchalant attitude toward the executive offices of the bourgeois state and whether revolutionaries should run for those offices. My struggle over the question, including a confession of seeing it previously as a non-question or not an important question at this time, is linked above. The article below just brings the issue home as to the currency of the question. The question becomes crystal clear here in the case of a rather obscure parliamentary move. Why on this good green earth would we want to administer the bourgeois state, any bourgeois state, and as in the case of Canada have to face and take responsibility for it before Mother England and her monarchist agents? Answer: we don’t. And by the way-whether we defend a parliamentary system at any given point that defense does not hinge on keeping the archaic British monarchy, the House of Lords, or the Church of England. Abolish those institutions. That said, I am still red-faced over my previous stand on executive offices.
A second issue brought up by the article is the question, the burning question, of the national right to self-determination of Quebec. It’s right to separate from English-speaking Canada. There should be no question on the left that Quebec has that right. There is also no question that revolutionaries reserve the right to raise the demand at any particular time, or not raise it. Why? The whole point for revolutionaries, in the long history of struggle over the question of the right to national self-determination within the international working class movement, in raising the demand is to cut across some historic national antagonisms in order to further the class struggle. There is nothing inherently virtuous in the national state and the right of nations to self-determination for revolutionaries, except when it interferes with that goal. Anyone at all familiar with Quebec and its people, especially its at times very militant labor movement, knows that the antagonism with the English-speaking part of Canada today interfere with that goal. Those who want to preserve a unitary Canadian state only add to the problem. Those who know the political thrust of this blog know that I very, very highly regard the martyred revolutionary German Communist leader, Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose Of The Revolution. However, she was wrong on her position on opposition to the right to national self-determination for Poland as against the Tsarist Russian unitary state. Those who oppose Quebec independence today make that same mistake. I need not stand red-faced on this one. Independence For Quebec!
**************
Workers Vanguard No. 955
26 March 2010
Parliamentary Cretinism and Class Collaboration
Canada: A Prorogue’s Gallery
A part of the British Commonwealth, Canada is subordinate to the British monarchy, whose representative, the governor-general, has the power to suspend the Canadian parliament, as happened in December at Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper’s request. The following article about this question originally appeared in Spartacist Canada No. 164 (Spring 2010), newspaper of the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste, Canadian section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).
On January 23, more than 20,000 people in many Canadian cities protested against the suspension (prorogation) of parliament by governor-general Michaëlle Jean at the behest of Tory prime minister Stephen Harper. These protests, called in the name of “Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament” (CAPP), were backed by the capitalist Liberal Party of Canada, the NDP [New Democratic Party] social democrats and a variety of reformist left groups. Prominent among the latter were the International Socialists (I.S.). They helped organize and build the Toronto demo and one of their leading members made CAPP’s money pitch from the platform. While Liberal heavies like Bob Rae worked the Liberal/NDP crowd in Toronto, the Ottawa rally was addressed by both Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and NDP leader Jack Layton.
A central demand of these protests was that parliament “get back to work.” But the “work” of parliament is to ensure the continued exploitation of the working class and the supremacy of private property. Job one when parliament does “get back to work” will be to continue making the working class pay for the capitalist economic crisis; the Tories are planning massive spending cuts, including an expected assault on the pensions of government workers.
Unlike our reformist opponents, we Marxists do not uphold the “sanctity” of parliament, though we certainly oppose its arbitrary curtailment by the executive power of the capitalist state. We also call for the immediate abolition of the monarchy, the governor-general and the unelected Senate—no mere relics but rallying points for social reaction.
The fake left’s embrace of this “movement” to recall parliament reflects their deeply reformist view that the capitalist state can be administered in the interests of the workers and oppressed, especially if the NDP is helping to run it. In contrast, we recognize that the capitalist state must be smashed through proletarian revolution and replaced with workers councils (soviets), organs of working-class power.
Our defense of bourgeois-democratic rights is closely linked to combatting illusions in the “democratic” trappings of this unjust social system. V.I. Lenin, leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, captured the essence of capitalist democracy in a scathing attack on the reformist enemies of Soviet Russia, the world’s first workers state: “The working people are barred from participation in bourgeois parliaments (they never decide important questions under bourgeois democracy, which are decided by the stock exchange and the banks) by thousands of obstacles” (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky [1918]).
We thus do not, on principle, run for or accept executive offices, from mayor to president. In parliaments and other legislative bodies, communist deputies can, as oppositionists, serve as revolutionary tribunes of the working class. But assuming executive office or gaining control of a bourgeois legislative or municipal council, either independently or in coalition, requires taking responsibility for the administration of the machinery of the capitalist state, including its corrupt, violent, racist police forces (see “Down With Executive Offices of the Capitalist State! Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009).
The Harper government’s latest suspension of parliament is a very real violation of bourgeois-democratic norms. But consider the history of the parliamentary parties that paraded in the streets. It was the Liberal government of Mackenzie King that interned Japanese Canadians during World War II, a racist atrocity backed by the NDP’s predecessors, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals imposed martial law in Quebec in 1970 and Jean Chrétien’s Liberals, backed by the NDP, imposed the Clarity Act, which effectively bans Quebec from exercising its democratic right to self-determination. Federally or provincially; Tory, Liberal or NDP: the bosses’ parliamentary governments wage incessant attacks on workers and the oppressed on behalf of the exploiters.
When Chrétien prorogued parliament (four times), the fake left raised no hue and cry. Now, mired in their typical “fight the right” opportunism, the reformist Communist Party (CP) declared that “this movement to ‘get Parliament back to work’ can help spark a powerful campaign to block and defeat the Harper Tories” (January 7 statement). The CP’s “anybody but Harper” sentiment—shared, if expressed less crudely, by the entire reformist left—can only be read as an endorsement of the bourgeois Liberals or at best the NDP.
In that same “fight the right” spirit, the I.S. begged the NDP to “step it up” so as “to make a difference to the outcome of this fight.” Blaring “Make Harper Pay,” the I.S. pleaded that “the union movement, social justice organizations, anti-war activists, environmentalists and socialists must go all-out to make this movement as big and as militant as possible” (Socialist Worker, January 2010). This is a blatant call on workers to join hands with their capitalist exploiters for the purpose of running the capitalist state. In this the I.S. repeats their bowing to the Liberal-NDP coalition a year earlier. We said that this class-collaborationist alliance was an enemy of the interests of the working class.
Also agonizing over the role of their cherished NDP was Fightback, the Canadian group of Alan Woods’ International Marxist Tendency. Noting the presence of the bourgeois Liberals at the anti-prorogation rallies, Fightback worried that “if the movement continues in its present class collaborationist formation, with demands acceptable to the Liberals, then it will go nowhere.” They recommended fighting “against the dictatorship of the bosses and for a genuine socialist workers’ democracy” (marxist.ca, 26 January). Yet what they mean by this is to call on the NDP, in which they are buried, to take power “on a socialist program.” But the Canadian state is a bourgeois state. Putting the NDP at the helm of this state is the antithesis of a genuine socialist program, i.e., workers revolution to smash the capitalist state and replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat, the necessary foundation for any regime based on workers democracy.
According to Fightback, “the NDP and the unions need to put themselves at the head of this movement and extend it beyond the issue of prorogation.” The NDP is a bourgeois workers party, based in part on affiliation with workers unions but committed to a thoroughly pro-capitalist program. Contrary to Fightback, the only reason the NDP social democrats “put themselves at the head” of any social struggle is to derail and confine it to what is acceptable to the capitalist rulers.
The “Marxist” pretensions of the I.S., Fightback et al. are an utter fraud. This is best illustrated by their cheering on (and in some cases participating in) the capitalist-restorationist movements which destroyed the bureaucratically deformed/degenerated workers states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Under cover of defending the same classless (i.e., bourgeois) “democracy” they tout today, they joined in the imperialists’ “human rights” crusade, the sole aim of which was capitalist counterrevolution. They have the same attitude towards China, by far the strongest of the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states, where the return of capitalism would be a gigantic defeat for China’s worker and peasant masses for whom the 1949 Chinese Revolution has brought tremendous social gains. In contrast, we Trotskyists stand for the unconditional military defense of China, as well as the other deformed workers states—Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam—against imperialism and internal counterrevolution, while calling for the overthrow of the bureaucratic Stalinist misrulers through workers political revolution.
Down With Anglo Chauvinism! Independence for Quebec!
The recent suspension of parliament has its immediate origins in the Tories’ attempts to deflect anger over the well-established fact that the Canadian military in Afghanistan has been routinely handing over prisoners to their Afghan puppet allies for torture. At a more fundamental level, however, the inability of the ruling class to “solve” the Quebec national question has produced a structurally dysfunctional parliamentary system. Variously using military repression and threats, economic blackmail, compromises, cajoling, insults and more threats, the Anglo-chauvinist rulers are dead set on maintaining the French-speaking Québécois as an oppressed nation within a unitary Canadian state. This is the fundamental fault line of the reactionary “Canadian confederation.”
Following the collapse of the 1987 Meech Lake accord and the 1995 referendum which came close to victory for the side of Quebec sovereignty, the Québécois have repeatedly voted for a majority of bourgeois-nationalist Bloc Québécois MPs [Members of Parliament]. Since 2004, this has produced a series of weak minority governments in Ottawa, which worries the anglophone ruling class. Outside Canada, even that haughty mouthpiece of British capital, the Economist, has brooded about Canada’s “deadlocked politics.”
What is decisive for Marxists, though, is the fact that Canada’s protracted split along national lines has created a deep divide within the working class, pitting working people of English Canada and Quebec against one another instead of the capitalist rulers. As we recognized prior to the 1995 referendum, the only foreseeable way forward is for revolutionaries to advocate Quebec independence. By getting the national question off the agenda, workers of both nations will see more clearly that their true enemies are their “own” capitalist bosses, and not one another.
The English Canadian union tops and NDP have long been virulently hostile to Quebec’s national rights. They have lined up behind the Canadian ruling class whenever the Québécois seriously tried to assert their right to self-determination, including in the 1995 referendum. Such Anglo chauvinism has served to drive the once-militant Québécois working class into the arms of their “own” national exploiters, represented by the Bloc and Parti Québécois.
The reformist left capitulates to the Anglo chauvinists of the NDP in English Canada and, in some cases, to the bourgeois nationalists in Quebec, depending on where their immediate opportunist appetites lie. The Communist Party and Fightback oppose independence outright and cover their straight capitulation to Anglo chauvinism with empty “unite-and-fight” rhetoric (see “‘Fightback’ and the Quebec National Question,” SC No. 162, Fall 2009 [reprinted in WV No. 943, 25 September 2009]). Others, such as Socialist Action, favour Quebec independence, but only as a means to ingratiate themselves with “left” Québécois bourgeois nationalists. Today their chosen vehicle for this is the left-nationalist Québec Solidaire, a petty-bourgeois formation that does not even pay lip service to socialism.
Along with Fightback and the CP, the grotesquely misnamed Bolshevik Tendency is another staunch “left” defender of “Canadian unity.” In line with their sneering contempt for all forms of special oppression, the BT openly opposes independence for Quebec. Notoriously, the BT has the dubious distinction of being the “socialists” officially invited to a Montreal “Canadian unity” rally organized by business groups on the eve of the 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty! More recently, a BT contingent blended right into the flag-waving January prorogation protest in Toronto—none of their placards breathed a word of criticism against the ruling-class Liberal Party, let alone the social-democratic NDP. The BT is an integral part of the syphilitic chain of pro-capitalist reformism.
While workers and the oppressed must oppose ruling-class attacks on bourgeois-democratic rights, they must do so by their own methods and under their own independent banner. As we said in our 22 December 2008 supplement, “Liberal-NDP Coalition: Tool of the Bosses” (SC No. 160, Spring 2009):
“The Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste is fighting to build the nucleus of a revolutionary Marxist party that can root itself in the working class. Taking up the cause of all the oppressed, such a party would give conscious leadership to the struggles of the workers not only to improve their present conditions but to do away with the entire system of capitalist wage slavery. ‘Unity’ with the oppressors, or with their social-democratic political agents, is the road to defeat. The only way to smash the all-sided assault on social programs, to assure free quality medical care, childcare and jobs and decent living standards for all, to end the neocolonial pillage of the Third World, is by ripping the productive forces from the hands of the capitalist class through socialist revolution and putting them in the hands of those whose labour makes society run.”
Markin comment:
Every once in a while in a now rather long political life I get my comeuppance handed to me on a silver platter. That fact has taken on added meaning after reading one of the two parts of the subject matter of this guest commentary below- the parliamentary maneuvering of the bourgeois parties in a recent flare-up in the Canadian Parliament, which, in the final analysis, is still tied to Mother England by a million strands. As the facts of the matter state in the article the British Commonwealth governor –general was asked by the leader of the ruling Tory Party to suspend parliament for his own political reasons. The governor-general complied. That, in the normal course events, is worthy of vociferous protest by your average democratic elements, the parliamentary left, the non-parliamentary left, and even a thoughtful Tory or two . That is not the issue. The issue, driven home in the article, is the rather touching faith of the non-parliamentary left in the preservation of the parliamentary system when that system, their system, in not under attack by some para-military right wing forces. That part they will have to answer politically for in due course.
The real question brought home to this writer is, however, his own previous nonchalant attitude toward the executive offices of the bourgeois state and whether revolutionaries should run for those offices. My struggle over the question, including a confession of seeing it previously as a non-question or not an important question at this time, is linked above. The article below just brings the issue home as to the currency of the question. The question becomes crystal clear here in the case of a rather obscure parliamentary move. Why on this good green earth would we want to administer the bourgeois state, any bourgeois state, and as in the case of Canada have to face and take responsibility for it before Mother England and her monarchist agents? Answer: we don’t. And by the way-whether we defend a parliamentary system at any given point that defense does not hinge on keeping the archaic British monarchy, the House of Lords, or the Church of England. Abolish those institutions. That said, I am still red-faced over my previous stand on executive offices.
A second issue brought up by the article is the question, the burning question, of the national right to self-determination of Quebec. It’s right to separate from English-speaking Canada. There should be no question on the left that Quebec has that right. There is also no question that revolutionaries reserve the right to raise the demand at any particular time, or not raise it. Why? The whole point for revolutionaries, in the long history of struggle over the question of the right to national self-determination within the international working class movement, in raising the demand is to cut across some historic national antagonisms in order to further the class struggle. There is nothing inherently virtuous in the national state and the right of nations to self-determination for revolutionaries, except when it interferes with that goal. Anyone at all familiar with Quebec and its people, especially its at times very militant labor movement, knows that the antagonism with the English-speaking part of Canada today interfere with that goal. Those who want to preserve a unitary Canadian state only add to the problem. Those who know the political thrust of this blog know that I very, very highly regard the martyred revolutionary German Communist leader, Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose Of The Revolution. However, she was wrong on her position on opposition to the right to national self-determination for Poland as against the Tsarist Russian unitary state. Those who oppose Quebec independence today make that same mistake. I need not stand red-faced on this one. Independence For Quebec!
**************
Workers Vanguard No. 955
26 March 2010
Parliamentary Cretinism and Class Collaboration
Canada: A Prorogue’s Gallery
A part of the British Commonwealth, Canada is subordinate to the British monarchy, whose representative, the governor-general, has the power to suspend the Canadian parliament, as happened in December at Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper’s request. The following article about this question originally appeared in Spartacist Canada No. 164 (Spring 2010), newspaper of the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste, Canadian section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).
On January 23, more than 20,000 people in many Canadian cities protested against the suspension (prorogation) of parliament by governor-general Michaëlle Jean at the behest of Tory prime minister Stephen Harper. These protests, called in the name of “Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament” (CAPP), were backed by the capitalist Liberal Party of Canada, the NDP [New Democratic Party] social democrats and a variety of reformist left groups. Prominent among the latter were the International Socialists (I.S.). They helped organize and build the Toronto demo and one of their leading members made CAPP’s money pitch from the platform. While Liberal heavies like Bob Rae worked the Liberal/NDP crowd in Toronto, the Ottawa rally was addressed by both Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and NDP leader Jack Layton.
A central demand of these protests was that parliament “get back to work.” But the “work” of parliament is to ensure the continued exploitation of the working class and the supremacy of private property. Job one when parliament does “get back to work” will be to continue making the working class pay for the capitalist economic crisis; the Tories are planning massive spending cuts, including an expected assault on the pensions of government workers.
Unlike our reformist opponents, we Marxists do not uphold the “sanctity” of parliament, though we certainly oppose its arbitrary curtailment by the executive power of the capitalist state. We also call for the immediate abolition of the monarchy, the governor-general and the unelected Senate—no mere relics but rallying points for social reaction.
The fake left’s embrace of this “movement” to recall parliament reflects their deeply reformist view that the capitalist state can be administered in the interests of the workers and oppressed, especially if the NDP is helping to run it. In contrast, we recognize that the capitalist state must be smashed through proletarian revolution and replaced with workers councils (soviets), organs of working-class power.
Our defense of bourgeois-democratic rights is closely linked to combatting illusions in the “democratic” trappings of this unjust social system. V.I. Lenin, leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, captured the essence of capitalist democracy in a scathing attack on the reformist enemies of Soviet Russia, the world’s first workers state: “The working people are barred from participation in bourgeois parliaments (they never decide important questions under bourgeois democracy, which are decided by the stock exchange and the banks) by thousands of obstacles” (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky [1918]).
We thus do not, on principle, run for or accept executive offices, from mayor to president. In parliaments and other legislative bodies, communist deputies can, as oppositionists, serve as revolutionary tribunes of the working class. But assuming executive office or gaining control of a bourgeois legislative or municipal council, either independently or in coalition, requires taking responsibility for the administration of the machinery of the capitalist state, including its corrupt, violent, racist police forces (see “Down With Executive Offices of the Capitalist State! Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 61, Spring 2009).
The Harper government’s latest suspension of parliament is a very real violation of bourgeois-democratic norms. But consider the history of the parliamentary parties that paraded in the streets. It was the Liberal government of Mackenzie King that interned Japanese Canadians during World War II, a racist atrocity backed by the NDP’s predecessors, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals imposed martial law in Quebec in 1970 and Jean Chrétien’s Liberals, backed by the NDP, imposed the Clarity Act, which effectively bans Quebec from exercising its democratic right to self-determination. Federally or provincially; Tory, Liberal or NDP: the bosses’ parliamentary governments wage incessant attacks on workers and the oppressed on behalf of the exploiters.
When Chrétien prorogued parliament (four times), the fake left raised no hue and cry. Now, mired in their typical “fight the right” opportunism, the reformist Communist Party (CP) declared that “this movement to ‘get Parliament back to work’ can help spark a powerful campaign to block and defeat the Harper Tories” (January 7 statement). The CP’s “anybody but Harper” sentiment—shared, if expressed less crudely, by the entire reformist left—can only be read as an endorsement of the bourgeois Liberals or at best the NDP.
In that same “fight the right” spirit, the I.S. begged the NDP to “step it up” so as “to make a difference to the outcome of this fight.” Blaring “Make Harper Pay,” the I.S. pleaded that “the union movement, social justice organizations, anti-war activists, environmentalists and socialists must go all-out to make this movement as big and as militant as possible” (Socialist Worker, January 2010). This is a blatant call on workers to join hands with their capitalist exploiters for the purpose of running the capitalist state. In this the I.S. repeats their bowing to the Liberal-NDP coalition a year earlier. We said that this class-collaborationist alliance was an enemy of the interests of the working class.
Also agonizing over the role of their cherished NDP was Fightback, the Canadian group of Alan Woods’ International Marxist Tendency. Noting the presence of the bourgeois Liberals at the anti-prorogation rallies, Fightback worried that “if the movement continues in its present class collaborationist formation, with demands acceptable to the Liberals, then it will go nowhere.” They recommended fighting “against the dictatorship of the bosses and for a genuine socialist workers’ democracy” (marxist.ca, 26 January). Yet what they mean by this is to call on the NDP, in which they are buried, to take power “on a socialist program.” But the Canadian state is a bourgeois state. Putting the NDP at the helm of this state is the antithesis of a genuine socialist program, i.e., workers revolution to smash the capitalist state and replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat, the necessary foundation for any regime based on workers democracy.
According to Fightback, “the NDP and the unions need to put themselves at the head of this movement and extend it beyond the issue of prorogation.” The NDP is a bourgeois workers party, based in part on affiliation with workers unions but committed to a thoroughly pro-capitalist program. Contrary to Fightback, the only reason the NDP social democrats “put themselves at the head” of any social struggle is to derail and confine it to what is acceptable to the capitalist rulers.
The “Marxist” pretensions of the I.S., Fightback et al. are an utter fraud. This is best illustrated by their cheering on (and in some cases participating in) the capitalist-restorationist movements which destroyed the bureaucratically deformed/degenerated workers states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Under cover of defending the same classless (i.e., bourgeois) “democracy” they tout today, they joined in the imperialists’ “human rights” crusade, the sole aim of which was capitalist counterrevolution. They have the same attitude towards China, by far the strongest of the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states, where the return of capitalism would be a gigantic defeat for China’s worker and peasant masses for whom the 1949 Chinese Revolution has brought tremendous social gains. In contrast, we Trotskyists stand for the unconditional military defense of China, as well as the other deformed workers states—Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam—against imperialism and internal counterrevolution, while calling for the overthrow of the bureaucratic Stalinist misrulers through workers political revolution.
Down With Anglo Chauvinism! Independence for Quebec!
The recent suspension of parliament has its immediate origins in the Tories’ attempts to deflect anger over the well-established fact that the Canadian military in Afghanistan has been routinely handing over prisoners to their Afghan puppet allies for torture. At a more fundamental level, however, the inability of the ruling class to “solve” the Quebec national question has produced a structurally dysfunctional parliamentary system. Variously using military repression and threats, economic blackmail, compromises, cajoling, insults and more threats, the Anglo-chauvinist rulers are dead set on maintaining the French-speaking Québécois as an oppressed nation within a unitary Canadian state. This is the fundamental fault line of the reactionary “Canadian confederation.”
Following the collapse of the 1987 Meech Lake accord and the 1995 referendum which came close to victory for the side of Quebec sovereignty, the Québécois have repeatedly voted for a majority of bourgeois-nationalist Bloc Québécois MPs [Members of Parliament]. Since 2004, this has produced a series of weak minority governments in Ottawa, which worries the anglophone ruling class. Outside Canada, even that haughty mouthpiece of British capital, the Economist, has brooded about Canada’s “deadlocked politics.”
What is decisive for Marxists, though, is the fact that Canada’s protracted split along national lines has created a deep divide within the working class, pitting working people of English Canada and Quebec against one another instead of the capitalist rulers. As we recognized prior to the 1995 referendum, the only foreseeable way forward is for revolutionaries to advocate Quebec independence. By getting the national question off the agenda, workers of both nations will see more clearly that their true enemies are their “own” capitalist bosses, and not one another.
The English Canadian union tops and NDP have long been virulently hostile to Quebec’s national rights. They have lined up behind the Canadian ruling class whenever the Québécois seriously tried to assert their right to self-determination, including in the 1995 referendum. Such Anglo chauvinism has served to drive the once-militant Québécois working class into the arms of their “own” national exploiters, represented by the Bloc and Parti Québécois.
The reformist left capitulates to the Anglo chauvinists of the NDP in English Canada and, in some cases, to the bourgeois nationalists in Quebec, depending on where their immediate opportunist appetites lie. The Communist Party and Fightback oppose independence outright and cover their straight capitulation to Anglo chauvinism with empty “unite-and-fight” rhetoric (see “‘Fightback’ and the Quebec National Question,” SC No. 162, Fall 2009 [reprinted in WV No. 943, 25 September 2009]). Others, such as Socialist Action, favour Quebec independence, but only as a means to ingratiate themselves with “left” Québécois bourgeois nationalists. Today their chosen vehicle for this is the left-nationalist Québec Solidaire, a petty-bourgeois formation that does not even pay lip service to socialism.
Along with Fightback and the CP, the grotesquely misnamed Bolshevik Tendency is another staunch “left” defender of “Canadian unity.” In line with their sneering contempt for all forms of special oppression, the BT openly opposes independence for Quebec. Notoriously, the BT has the dubious distinction of being the “socialists” officially invited to a Montreal “Canadian unity” rally organized by business groups on the eve of the 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty! More recently, a BT contingent blended right into the flag-waving January prorogation protest in Toronto—none of their placards breathed a word of criticism against the ruling-class Liberal Party, let alone the social-democratic NDP. The BT is an integral part of the syphilitic chain of pro-capitalist reformism.
While workers and the oppressed must oppose ruling-class attacks on bourgeois-democratic rights, they must do so by their own methods and under their own independent banner. As we said in our 22 December 2008 supplement, “Liberal-NDP Coalition: Tool of the Bosses” (SC No. 160, Spring 2009):
“The Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste is fighting to build the nucleus of a revolutionary Marxist party that can root itself in the working class. Taking up the cause of all the oppressed, such a party would give conscious leadership to the struggles of the workers not only to improve their present conditions but to do away with the entire system of capitalist wage slavery. ‘Unity’ with the oppressors, or with their social-democratic political agents, is the road to defeat. The only way to smash the all-sided assault on social programs, to assure free quality medical care, childcare and jobs and decent living standards for all, to end the neocolonial pillage of the Third World, is by ripping the productive forces from the hands of the capitalist class through socialist revolution and putting them in the hands of those whose labour makes society run.”
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
*The Problems Of The American Organized Labor Movement - Victory To The Shaw's Supermarket Strikers!
Click on the headline to link to a "Boston Sunday Globe" article, dated April 11, 2010, concerning the decline of strike action by organized labor and the use of consumer boycotts as an alternative to such actions.
As the above linked “Boston Globe’ article indicates the current condition of the organized labor movement is in perilous straits. And, by extension, the unorganized working class is in even more desperate straits. Not only was the year 2009 the nadir of strike action nationally, the lowest since 1984 and by some other indicators ever, but there was a continuing long term decline in the number of organized union members, especially in the core industrial sector. Now no one expects that in hard economic times there would be a rush of strike activity. This is a defensive time when holding onto work and not losing benefits is the short term goal. However, as history has shown, the fate of the organized sector of the labor movement reflects on the rest of the class. That fate is particularly important to note today as the atomization of the class economically portends problems with organizing the unorganized later. We militants are duty-bound to fight against the atomization of the American working class, as well as internationally.
The central focus of the above article is on the current strike by some 300 warehouse workers, organized in the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), at the Shaw’s Supermarket warehouse. The upshot of this action was a lockout by Shaw’s and the hiring of replacement workers (aka, scabs). The union workers are currently conducting a consumer boycott campaign to get shoppers to shop elsewhere and put “pressure” on Shaw’s to come to terms. Labor militants, of course, support such actions. However one should also note that such ephemeral actions aimed at the general public are seldom successful. And that strategy pursued by the UFCW (and many other unions) is exactly one of the reasons that the atomization of the working class proceeds apace.
Part of the problem with the current labor movement is that there has been a serious breaking of continuity with the labor struggles of the past, especially those labor actions in the 1930s that helped to organize the basic industries like steel, auto, and the truck drivers. By every known indicator the working class, and its sons and daughters, are worst off today than they were a generation ago. That situation cannot be blamed solely on the trials and tribulations of “globalization”, privatization or other factors. Some of it is directly attributable to the actions, or rather inactions, of the national labor organizations and federations. Thus, the call for new labor leadership and a new labor strategy of organizing the unorganized starting with Wal-Mart and the South is merely the beginning of wisdom.
That, obviously, is no mean task with the enormous resources that the international corporations and their agents can bring to bear. However, it is a “no-brainer” that not to fight will only further erode the slight consciousness of the working class as a class and will not even solve the most minimal solutions such as health care, working conditions, and runaway shops. Seemingly the day of the great social-democratic labor unions, like the United Auto Workers, or even the traditional merely trade union-oriented business-like unions, like the Teamsters, are past but that is merely an illusion. At least it is an illusion if one does believes that the working class can be organized to fight for its immediate concerns, and eventually for its own workers government. I do, don't you?
As the above linked “Boston Globe’ article indicates the current condition of the organized labor movement is in perilous straits. And, by extension, the unorganized working class is in even more desperate straits. Not only was the year 2009 the nadir of strike action nationally, the lowest since 1984 and by some other indicators ever, but there was a continuing long term decline in the number of organized union members, especially in the core industrial sector. Now no one expects that in hard economic times there would be a rush of strike activity. This is a defensive time when holding onto work and not losing benefits is the short term goal. However, as history has shown, the fate of the organized sector of the labor movement reflects on the rest of the class. That fate is particularly important to note today as the atomization of the class economically portends problems with organizing the unorganized later. We militants are duty-bound to fight against the atomization of the American working class, as well as internationally.
The central focus of the above article is on the current strike by some 300 warehouse workers, organized in the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), at the Shaw’s Supermarket warehouse. The upshot of this action was a lockout by Shaw’s and the hiring of replacement workers (aka, scabs). The union workers are currently conducting a consumer boycott campaign to get shoppers to shop elsewhere and put “pressure” on Shaw’s to come to terms. Labor militants, of course, support such actions. However one should also note that such ephemeral actions aimed at the general public are seldom successful. And that strategy pursued by the UFCW (and many other unions) is exactly one of the reasons that the atomization of the working class proceeds apace.
Part of the problem with the current labor movement is that there has been a serious breaking of continuity with the labor struggles of the past, especially those labor actions in the 1930s that helped to organize the basic industries like steel, auto, and the truck drivers. By every known indicator the working class, and its sons and daughters, are worst off today than they were a generation ago. That situation cannot be blamed solely on the trials and tribulations of “globalization”, privatization or other factors. Some of it is directly attributable to the actions, or rather inactions, of the national labor organizations and federations. Thus, the call for new labor leadership and a new labor strategy of organizing the unorganized starting with Wal-Mart and the South is merely the beginning of wisdom.
That, obviously, is no mean task with the enormous resources that the international corporations and their agents can bring to bear. However, it is a “no-brainer” that not to fight will only further erode the slight consciousness of the working class as a class and will not even solve the most minimal solutions such as health care, working conditions, and runaway shops. Seemingly the day of the great social-democratic labor unions, like the United Auto Workers, or even the traditional merely trade union-oriented business-like unions, like the Teamsters, are past but that is merely an illusion. At least it is an illusion if one does believes that the working class can be organized to fight for its immediate concerns, and eventually for its own workers government. I do, don't you?
*From "The Rag Blog"- The Culture Wars Redux- Tea Bag Nation
Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry concerning the latest round in the forty plus years of cultural wars we have been fighting- just to keep OUR leftist, militant, communist and socialist heads above water.
Monday, April 12, 2010
*Poet's Corner-Robert Lowell's "For The Union Dead"
Link to essay by poet and literary critic Helen Vendler about Robert Lowell's "For The Union Dead".
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lowell/uniondead.htm
Guest Commentary
On the 152th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War in honor of the Northern armies that fought and died defending the union and/or the abolition of slavery a poem written by Robert Lowell during the Centenary in 1964. Markin
Robert Lowell - For the Union Dead- 1964
"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gently tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.
On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .
Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."
The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lowell/uniondead.htm
Guest Commentary
On the 152th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War in honor of the Northern armies that fought and died defending the union and/or the abolition of slavery a poem written by Robert Lowell during the Centenary in 1964. Markin
Robert Lowell - For the Union Dead- 1964
"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gently tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.
On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .
Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."
The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-A Call For U.S. /U.N. Troops Out Of Haiti
Click on the headline to link to an "American Left History" blog entry, "A Polemic On Haiti And What Revolutionaries Can Do About It- The Internationalist Group vs. The Spartacist League-Part 2", which gives some context to the material below.
Markin comment:
The question of the call for the withdrawal of American and United Nations troops from Haiti in the aftermath of the recent horrific earthquake there has been the subject of an on-going polemic between the International Communist League/ Spartacist League/U.S. and one of its off-shoots, the International Group (with another off-shoot, the International Bolshevik Tendency, chiming in for good measure). I have provided a link above to the various polemics between the organizations that I had posted previously in this space on this subject. I just want to make a couple of quick comments here now that the ICL/Spartacist League/U.S. has, as their article below states, shifted their position on the question in light of changed circumstances on the ground in Haiti.
To boil down the argument to its core the dispute has centered on the question of the timeliness of a slogan, in this case the withdrawal of imperial troops in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, and under what circumstances to raise the slogan.
There is no question that revolutionaries would not, and do not, call for bourgeois governments, large or small, to sent their troops anywhere, under virtually any foreseeable circumstances. That is the ABCs of Marxism, pure and simple.
Our international workers movement has broken its teeth too many times on that issue, fundamentally the issue of the state and who controls it, to require much further comment on that point. However, I have raised, on several previous occasions in this space, the timeliness of slogans in politics in general and of our revolutionary politics in particular. And that is where I believe that the ICL/SL had the better of the argument here. As cited in the article below that organization, taking a leaf from the thinking of the American Socialist Workers Party in its revolutionary days back in the 1940s (“Shall We Campaign For U.S. Government Aid To The USSR?”, “Militant”, 19 July 1941, although I was not able to get a Google for the article to place it here), argued that while revolutionaries, of course, do not call for sending troops into a situation may, under certain circumstances, not raise an objection. That fits the situation in Haiti in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake to a tee. I would add, as well, particularly when there was precious little, as in Haiti, which revolutionaries today could do about it in that immediate aftermath.
We, unfortunately, can no longer do something like call on the ex-Soviet Union to provide massive relief in the alternative, although I did not see any group calling on the Chinese workers state to do so. Cuba, despite its heroic efforts, is, frankly, just too limited in resources to have effectively provided such an alternative. To pose the question that way gives a little more realistic approach to what was possible, and why raising no immediate objections made sense in conditions of a human/natural catastrophe on the ground. Where I would fault the ICL position, while we are on the subject of timeliness of slogans, is the fact of their timeliness in calling for troop withdrawals. I believe that the withdrawal call could have and should have been made within a month after the earthquake as it became clear that this “aid” situation with the American/ United Nations troops had gone beyond the usual, to use their word, “piggish” nature of such beasts. In any case, we are all on the same page now, and for anyone who isn’t- U.S. /.U.N Troops Out Of Haiti, And Stay Out!
***********
Workers Vanguard No. 955
26 March 2010
All U.S./UN Troops Out of Haiti Now!
It is now more than two months since Haiti was struck by the earthquake that left over 200,000 of its nine million people dead. The quake has multiplied the desperate conditions of what was already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Even before the devastation wreaked by it, nearly one out of every two Haitians had no regular access to drinking water and more than half the population survived on less than one dollar a day. Two centuries of looting by the U.S. and France and repeated American invasions to install and prop up brutal tinpot dictatorships had left the populace utterly exposed to the ravages of this natural disaster and totally reliant on outside aid. The quisling state administration of President René Préval—a fig leaf for a United Nations occupation regime—installed in 2006 at U.S. imperialism’s behest, collapsed as rapidly as did the tin shacks housing much of the population.
As part of a “relief effort,” the Obama administration dispatched some 20,000 troops and a flotilla of naval vessels to Haiti, not least in order to prevent Haitians from fleeing to the U.S. and to shore up the UN occupation force, which itself was damaged by the quake. Some 2,000 additional UN troops have been sent to the country, as well as an additional 1,500 UN police.
In response to the quake, a range of pseudo-socialist groups in the U.S. rushed to beg the American imperialists to do right by the Haitian people and send “aid not troops.” In this, groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Workers World Party (WWP) served only to aid Democrat Obama, whose election they had hailed, in providing a “humanitarian” facelift for blood-drenched U.S. imperialism. The notion that the imperialist powers that have laid waste to this small black country will serve the interests of the Haitian masses is a sick joke.
As we made clear in our article, “Haiti Earthquake Horror: Imperialism, Racism and Starvation” (WV No. 951, 29 January), while we were not for the U.S. military going into Haiti, neither were we going to demand, in the immediate aftermath of that horrific natural disaster, the immediate withdrawal of any forces that were supplying such aid as was reaching the Haitian masses. But the continued presence of any U.S. or UN military forces can only be a dagger aimed at the social and national aspirations of the Haitian toiling people. All U.S./UN troops and police out now!
In a 1941 article titled “Shall We Campaign for U.S. Government Aid to the USSR?” (Militant, 19 July 1941), the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) underlined: “There is a difference between not raising any objection, when a capitalist government sends aid, and agitating for such aid. The key to the whole question consists in the understanding that we cannot rely on bourgeois governments to aid our cause.” The SWP was addressing the demand of the Stalinist Communist Party that the U.S. provide aid to the Soviet Union following the June 1941 Nazi invasion amid the Second World War. The Trotskyists opposed all the belligerent imperialist powers in that interimperialist slaughter, while standing for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state.
But while the circumstances were different than those in Haiti today, the Marxist method outlined by our Trotskyist forebears remains fully valid. To call on the imperialists to provide aid means taking “responsibility for bourgeois governmental policy.” Drawing out the logic of the Stalinists’ position, the SWP article added: “Were we to agitate for aid to the Soviet Union by the Roosevelt government, would we then not be compelled to favor convoys to guarantee the arrival of the material shipped to the Soviet Union? Should we then not demand that the waters to Vladivostok be kept open by the U.S. government against Japan?” Indeed, the Stalinists’ call for imperialist aid was part and parcel of their support to the “democratic” imperialists in World War II.
In Haiti today, the U.S. imperialists have basically achieved their purpose, including a blunt reassertion to the rest of the world, most notably French imperialism, that the Caribbean remains an “American lake.” They are patting themselves on the back for a job well done as they wind down their military deployment in Haiti to 8,000 soldiers in order to direct troops back to where the Pentagon needs them—as part of the armies of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, some 9,000 UN troops and 3,600 UN cops are to occupy Haiti. The U.S. and other imperialist military forces in the Caribbean are a particular threat to the Cuban bureaucratically deformed workers state. Defend Cuba! U.S. out of Guantánamo! All U.S. troops and bases out of Puerto Rico!
Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s vaunted offer of temporary legal status for undocumented Haitian immigrants in the U.S. has been shown to be the sham that it is, as only a small percentage of these immigrants has been able to afford the $500 application fees for the legal permits. Anybody who has made it to the U.S. should have the right to stay and work here. Down with the racist ban on Haitian refugees! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!
The notion purveyed by reformists like the ISO and WWP that U.S. imperialism can be cajoled or pressured into serving the needs of the oppressed, rather than its own class interests, shows boundless illusions in the good offices of the rapacious American ruling class. Such illusion-mongering goes hand in hand with fawning over Third World populist nationalists like Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Préval’s mentor, who was restored to the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince in 1994 by a U.S. invasion force after being ousted by a (U.S.-backed) military coup. Aristide was then subsequently whisked away by the U.S. in 2004.
Taking up the left flank of the reformists is the centrist Internationalist Group (IG). In a 20 January article, the IG grotesquely and cynically claimed that the earthquake provided an opening for socialist revolution in Haiti, “particularly at present where the machinery of the capitalist state is largely reduced to rubble and a few marauding bands of police.” As we wrote in response in WV No. 951, “not only is the state ‘largely reduced to rubble,’ but so is the society as a whole,” underlining that “there is a military power in Haiti that is far from ‘reduced to rubble,’ and it’s U.S. imperialism.” Indeed, the only force that seemed to share the IG’s delusions of an uprising in Haiti after the quake was the Pentagon.
Yet the IG denounced us as “supporting imperialism” because we didn’t call for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops. As we stated, in a situation where there were no good alternatives, we were “not going to call for an end to such aid as the desperate Haitian masses can get their hands on.” That the IG conjured up fantasies of a workers uprising was little more than an effort to give a phony “revolutionary” veneer to Haitian populists and others who used the earthquake to reinforce the illusions of the Haitian masses in Aristide (see “Haiti: IG Conjures Up Revolution Amid the Rubble,” WV No. 952, 12 February).
The desperate conditions of Haiti cannot be resolved within Haiti. To end the grinding poverty and degradation of the Haitian people, the imperialist system must be swept away through international socialist revolution. What there is of a working class in Haiti has neither the social weight nor industrial concentration to effect a revolutionary transformation of that society. But in the Dominican Republic, Canada and the U.S. there are hundreds of thousands of Haitian workers who can play a vital role in the struggle for socialist revolution. As we stressed in WV No. 951: “The key to the liberation of Haiti lies in proletarian revolution throughout the hemisphere, in which the mobilization of the sizable Haitian proletariat in the diaspora can play a key role.... It is only this revolutionary internationalist program that holds out any genuine perspective for the liberation of the Haitian masses.”
Markin comment:
The question of the call for the withdrawal of American and United Nations troops from Haiti in the aftermath of the recent horrific earthquake there has been the subject of an on-going polemic between the International Communist League/ Spartacist League/U.S. and one of its off-shoots, the International Group (with another off-shoot, the International Bolshevik Tendency, chiming in for good measure). I have provided a link above to the various polemics between the organizations that I had posted previously in this space on this subject. I just want to make a couple of quick comments here now that the ICL/Spartacist League/U.S. has, as their article below states, shifted their position on the question in light of changed circumstances on the ground in Haiti.
To boil down the argument to its core the dispute has centered on the question of the timeliness of a slogan, in this case the withdrawal of imperial troops in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, and under what circumstances to raise the slogan.
There is no question that revolutionaries would not, and do not, call for bourgeois governments, large or small, to sent their troops anywhere, under virtually any foreseeable circumstances. That is the ABCs of Marxism, pure and simple.
Our international workers movement has broken its teeth too many times on that issue, fundamentally the issue of the state and who controls it, to require much further comment on that point. However, I have raised, on several previous occasions in this space, the timeliness of slogans in politics in general and of our revolutionary politics in particular. And that is where I believe that the ICL/SL had the better of the argument here. As cited in the article below that organization, taking a leaf from the thinking of the American Socialist Workers Party in its revolutionary days back in the 1940s (“Shall We Campaign For U.S. Government Aid To The USSR?”, “Militant”, 19 July 1941, although I was not able to get a Google for the article to place it here), argued that while revolutionaries, of course, do not call for sending troops into a situation may, under certain circumstances, not raise an objection. That fits the situation in Haiti in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake to a tee. I would add, as well, particularly when there was precious little, as in Haiti, which revolutionaries today could do about it in that immediate aftermath.
We, unfortunately, can no longer do something like call on the ex-Soviet Union to provide massive relief in the alternative, although I did not see any group calling on the Chinese workers state to do so. Cuba, despite its heroic efforts, is, frankly, just too limited in resources to have effectively provided such an alternative. To pose the question that way gives a little more realistic approach to what was possible, and why raising no immediate objections made sense in conditions of a human/natural catastrophe on the ground. Where I would fault the ICL position, while we are on the subject of timeliness of slogans, is the fact of their timeliness in calling for troop withdrawals. I believe that the withdrawal call could have and should have been made within a month after the earthquake as it became clear that this “aid” situation with the American/ United Nations troops had gone beyond the usual, to use their word, “piggish” nature of such beasts. In any case, we are all on the same page now, and for anyone who isn’t- U.S. /.U.N Troops Out Of Haiti, And Stay Out!
***********
Workers Vanguard No. 955
26 March 2010
All U.S./UN Troops Out of Haiti Now!
It is now more than two months since Haiti was struck by the earthquake that left over 200,000 of its nine million people dead. The quake has multiplied the desperate conditions of what was already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Even before the devastation wreaked by it, nearly one out of every two Haitians had no regular access to drinking water and more than half the population survived on less than one dollar a day. Two centuries of looting by the U.S. and France and repeated American invasions to install and prop up brutal tinpot dictatorships had left the populace utterly exposed to the ravages of this natural disaster and totally reliant on outside aid. The quisling state administration of President René Préval—a fig leaf for a United Nations occupation regime—installed in 2006 at U.S. imperialism’s behest, collapsed as rapidly as did the tin shacks housing much of the population.
As part of a “relief effort,” the Obama administration dispatched some 20,000 troops and a flotilla of naval vessels to Haiti, not least in order to prevent Haitians from fleeing to the U.S. and to shore up the UN occupation force, which itself was damaged by the quake. Some 2,000 additional UN troops have been sent to the country, as well as an additional 1,500 UN police.
In response to the quake, a range of pseudo-socialist groups in the U.S. rushed to beg the American imperialists to do right by the Haitian people and send “aid not troops.” In this, groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Workers World Party (WWP) served only to aid Democrat Obama, whose election they had hailed, in providing a “humanitarian” facelift for blood-drenched U.S. imperialism. The notion that the imperialist powers that have laid waste to this small black country will serve the interests of the Haitian masses is a sick joke.
As we made clear in our article, “Haiti Earthquake Horror: Imperialism, Racism and Starvation” (WV No. 951, 29 January), while we were not for the U.S. military going into Haiti, neither were we going to demand, in the immediate aftermath of that horrific natural disaster, the immediate withdrawal of any forces that were supplying such aid as was reaching the Haitian masses. But the continued presence of any U.S. or UN military forces can only be a dagger aimed at the social and national aspirations of the Haitian toiling people. All U.S./UN troops and police out now!
In a 1941 article titled “Shall We Campaign for U.S. Government Aid to the USSR?” (Militant, 19 July 1941), the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) underlined: “There is a difference between not raising any objection, when a capitalist government sends aid, and agitating for such aid. The key to the whole question consists in the understanding that we cannot rely on bourgeois governments to aid our cause.” The SWP was addressing the demand of the Stalinist Communist Party that the U.S. provide aid to the Soviet Union following the June 1941 Nazi invasion amid the Second World War. The Trotskyists opposed all the belligerent imperialist powers in that interimperialist slaughter, while standing for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state.
But while the circumstances were different than those in Haiti today, the Marxist method outlined by our Trotskyist forebears remains fully valid. To call on the imperialists to provide aid means taking “responsibility for bourgeois governmental policy.” Drawing out the logic of the Stalinists’ position, the SWP article added: “Were we to agitate for aid to the Soviet Union by the Roosevelt government, would we then not be compelled to favor convoys to guarantee the arrival of the material shipped to the Soviet Union? Should we then not demand that the waters to Vladivostok be kept open by the U.S. government against Japan?” Indeed, the Stalinists’ call for imperialist aid was part and parcel of their support to the “democratic” imperialists in World War II.
In Haiti today, the U.S. imperialists have basically achieved their purpose, including a blunt reassertion to the rest of the world, most notably French imperialism, that the Caribbean remains an “American lake.” They are patting themselves on the back for a job well done as they wind down their military deployment in Haiti to 8,000 soldiers in order to direct troops back to where the Pentagon needs them—as part of the armies of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, some 9,000 UN troops and 3,600 UN cops are to occupy Haiti. The U.S. and other imperialist military forces in the Caribbean are a particular threat to the Cuban bureaucratically deformed workers state. Defend Cuba! U.S. out of Guantánamo! All U.S. troops and bases out of Puerto Rico!
Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s vaunted offer of temporary legal status for undocumented Haitian immigrants in the U.S. has been shown to be the sham that it is, as only a small percentage of these immigrants has been able to afford the $500 application fees for the legal permits. Anybody who has made it to the U.S. should have the right to stay and work here. Down with the racist ban on Haitian refugees! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!
The notion purveyed by reformists like the ISO and WWP that U.S. imperialism can be cajoled or pressured into serving the needs of the oppressed, rather than its own class interests, shows boundless illusions in the good offices of the rapacious American ruling class. Such illusion-mongering goes hand in hand with fawning over Third World populist nationalists like Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Préval’s mentor, who was restored to the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince in 1994 by a U.S. invasion force after being ousted by a (U.S.-backed) military coup. Aristide was then subsequently whisked away by the U.S. in 2004.
Taking up the left flank of the reformists is the centrist Internationalist Group (IG). In a 20 January article, the IG grotesquely and cynically claimed that the earthquake provided an opening for socialist revolution in Haiti, “particularly at present where the machinery of the capitalist state is largely reduced to rubble and a few marauding bands of police.” As we wrote in response in WV No. 951, “not only is the state ‘largely reduced to rubble,’ but so is the society as a whole,” underlining that “there is a military power in Haiti that is far from ‘reduced to rubble,’ and it’s U.S. imperialism.” Indeed, the only force that seemed to share the IG’s delusions of an uprising in Haiti after the quake was the Pentagon.
Yet the IG denounced us as “supporting imperialism” because we didn’t call for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops. As we stated, in a situation where there were no good alternatives, we were “not going to call for an end to such aid as the desperate Haitian masses can get their hands on.” That the IG conjured up fantasies of a workers uprising was little more than an effort to give a phony “revolutionary” veneer to Haitian populists and others who used the earthquake to reinforce the illusions of the Haitian masses in Aristide (see “Haiti: IG Conjures Up Revolution Amid the Rubble,” WV No. 952, 12 February).
The desperate conditions of Haiti cannot be resolved within Haiti. To end the grinding poverty and degradation of the Haitian people, the imperialist system must be swept away through international socialist revolution. What there is of a working class in Haiti has neither the social weight nor industrial concentration to effect a revolutionary transformation of that society. But in the Dominican Republic, Canada and the U.S. there are hundreds of thousands of Haitian workers who can play a vital role in the struggle for socialist revolution. As we stressed in WV No. 951: “The key to the liberation of Haiti lies in proletarian revolution throughout the hemisphere, in which the mobilization of the sizable Haitian proletariat in the diaspora can play a key role.... It is only this revolutionary internationalist program that holds out any genuine perspective for the liberation of the Haitian masses.”
*From The "SteveLendmanBlog"- On The American Afghan Atrocities
Click on the headline to link to a "SteveLendmanBlog" entry concerning the inevitable question of American military atrocities in Afghanistan.
Markin comment:
The American imperial military machine has never left a small footprint whenever it has gone into action- from the Spanish-American War forward. The best way to curb that, in the short term, is Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied troops From Iraq and Afghanistan! And build those anti-war soldiers and sailors solidarity committees that I have spoken of previously. Then watch out!
Markin comment:
The American imperial military machine has never left a small footprint whenever it has gone into action- from the Spanish-American War forward. The best way to curb that, in the short term, is Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied troops From Iraq and Afghanistan! And build those anti-war soldiers and sailors solidarity committees that I have spoken of previously. Then watch out!
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