Click on the headline to link to a Leon Trotsky Internet Archives online copy of his 1940 work, Trade Unions In The Epoch Of Imperialist Decay.
Markin comment:Recently, as noted in some Jobs For Justice website postings, a number of states including Florida, and more infamously as part of the broader anti-union legislation, Wisconsin, have been eliminating the automatic union dues check-off and collection process as part of the efforts to destroy collective bargaining rights for public workers. I have noted previously that while, as a matter of trade union independence from the state, the bourgeois state, trade union militants favor union dues being collected by our own agents, shop stewards, or other union personnel we oppose actions, such as the one in Florida mentioned above, by state legislatures and state executives to eliminate that “right” in order to further gut public workers union collective bargaining gains.
That is the easy part to understand under today’s all too familiar class-war circumstances. The harder part is for trade union militants to understand that the seemingly mere bookkeeping function by the state (or private employer, for that matter) in the dues collecting process is just one more way that our trade unions are entangled with the state (or with capitalism, directly or indirectly). As recently as the April 4th Job for Justice national actions to defend the unions I have had to deal with this question put to me by some thoughtful trade unionists. As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky (and others since) noted in his last unfinished work before he was murdered by a Stalinist agent in 1940, Trade Unions In The Epoch Of Imperialist Decay, the modern trend is for the trade unions to become emerged with the state at many levels, consciously or unconsciously. Trade unions are working class organizations and in America, absent a workers party, the main way that workers are organized against the class enemy.
Trade union independence from the state in such matters as employer dues collection, settling internal union squabbles in the capitalist courts, bringing law suits against the union in those same courts only weaken an already weak working class vehicle. Moreover, in the interest of simple union solidarity and accountability wouldn’t you rather see your union shop steward coming around with his little union dues book to ask you personally for your dues (and let you have an opportunity to scream in his or her ear about something on your mind). Believe it or not, that was the way it was done in the old days, the 1930s and later, when the industrial unions were getting a toehold (and were just as hated by the bosses and their state as the public workers unions are today).
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
In The Time Of The Be-Bop Baby Boom Jail Break-Out- “The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era- 1959-Still Rocking”- A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Falcons performing You're So Fine.
CD Review
The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era: 1959-Still Rocking, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1989
I have recently been on a tear in reviewing individual CDs in this extensive Time-Life Rock ‘n’ Roll series. A lot of these reviews have been driven by the artwork which graces the covers of each item, both to stir ancient memories and reflect that precise moment in time, the youth time of the now very, very mature (nice sliding over the age issue, right?) baby-boomer generation who lived and died by the music. And who fit in, or did not fit in as the case may, to the themes of those artwork scenes. This 1959 is a case of the latter, of the not fitting in for this reviewer. On this cover, a summer scene (always a nice touch since that was the time when we had least at the feel of our generational breakout), two blondish surfer guys, surf boards in tow, are checking out the scene.
That scene although not pictured (except a little background fluff to inform you that you are at the beach, the summer youth beach and no other, certainly not the tortuous family beach scene with its lotions, luggage, lawn chairs, and longings, longings to be elsewhere in early teen brains), can only mean checking out the babes, girls, chicks, or whatever you called them in that primitive time before we called them sister, and woman. No question that this whole scene is nothing but a California come hinter scene. No way that it has the look of Eastern pale-face beaches, family or youth. These is nothing but early days California dreamin’ cool hot days and cooler hot nights with those dreamed bikini girls. These are, no question “beach bums”, no way that they are serious surfer guys, certainly not Tom Wolfe’s Pump House LaJolla gang where those surfers lived for the perfect wave, and nothing else better get in the way. For such activity one needed rubberized surf suits complete with all necessary gear. In short these guys are “faux” surfers. Whether that was enough to draw the attention of those shes they are checking out I will leave to the reader’s imagination.
As for the music, the 1959 music, that backs up this scene we are clearly in a trough, the golden age of rock with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, and Chuck Berry is fading, fading fast into what I can only describe as “bubble gum” music. Sure I listened to it, listened to it hard on my old transistor radio, mainly because that was all that was presented to us. It will be a while until the folk, folk rock, British invasion, and free expression rock engulfs us. As the bulk of this CD’s contents will attest to we are marking time. There are, however, some stick-outs here that have withstood the test of time. They include: La Bamba, Ritchie Valens; Dance With Me, The Drifters; You’re So Fine (great harmony),The Falcons; Tallahassee Lassie (a favorite then at the local school dances by a local boy who made good), Freddy Cannon; Mr. Blue (another great harmony song and the one, or one of the ones, anyway that you hoped, hoped to distraction that they would play for the last dance), The Fleetwoods; and, Lonely Teardrops, Jackie Wilson (a much underrated singer, then and now, including by this writer after not hearing that voice for a while).
Note: After a recent trip to the Southern California coast I can inform you that those two surfer guys are still out there and still checking out the scene. Although that scene for them now is solely the eternal search for the perfect wave complete with full rubberized suit and gear. No artist would now, or at least I hope no artist would, care to rush up and draw them. For now these brothers have lost a step, or seven, lost a fair amount of that beautiful bongo hair, and have added, added believe me, very definite paunches to bulge out those surfer suits all out of shape. Ah, such are the travails of the baby-boomer generation. Good luck though, brothers.
CD Review
The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era: 1959-Still Rocking, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1989
I have recently been on a tear in reviewing individual CDs in this extensive Time-Life Rock ‘n’ Roll series. A lot of these reviews have been driven by the artwork which graces the covers of each item, both to stir ancient memories and reflect that precise moment in time, the youth time of the now very, very mature (nice sliding over the age issue, right?) baby-boomer generation who lived and died by the music. And who fit in, or did not fit in as the case may, to the themes of those artwork scenes. This 1959 is a case of the latter, of the not fitting in for this reviewer. On this cover, a summer scene (always a nice touch since that was the time when we had least at the feel of our generational breakout), two blondish surfer guys, surf boards in tow, are checking out the scene.
That scene although not pictured (except a little background fluff to inform you that you are at the beach, the summer youth beach and no other, certainly not the tortuous family beach scene with its lotions, luggage, lawn chairs, and longings, longings to be elsewhere in early teen brains), can only mean checking out the babes, girls, chicks, or whatever you called them in that primitive time before we called them sister, and woman. No question that this whole scene is nothing but a California come hinter scene. No way that it has the look of Eastern pale-face beaches, family or youth. These is nothing but early days California dreamin’ cool hot days and cooler hot nights with those dreamed bikini girls. These are, no question “beach bums”, no way that they are serious surfer guys, certainly not Tom Wolfe’s Pump House LaJolla gang where those surfers lived for the perfect wave, and nothing else better get in the way. For such activity one needed rubberized surf suits complete with all necessary gear. In short these guys are “faux” surfers. Whether that was enough to draw the attention of those shes they are checking out I will leave to the reader’s imagination.
As for the music, the 1959 music, that backs up this scene we are clearly in a trough, the golden age of rock with the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, and Chuck Berry is fading, fading fast into what I can only describe as “bubble gum” music. Sure I listened to it, listened to it hard on my old transistor radio, mainly because that was all that was presented to us. It will be a while until the folk, folk rock, British invasion, and free expression rock engulfs us. As the bulk of this CD’s contents will attest to we are marking time. There are, however, some stick-outs here that have withstood the test of time. They include: La Bamba, Ritchie Valens; Dance With Me, The Drifters; You’re So Fine (great harmony),The Falcons; Tallahassee Lassie (a favorite then at the local school dances by a local boy who made good), Freddy Cannon; Mr. Blue (another great harmony song and the one, or one of the ones, anyway that you hoped, hoped to distraction that they would play for the last dance), The Fleetwoods; and, Lonely Teardrops, Jackie Wilson (a much underrated singer, then and now, including by this writer after not hearing that voice for a while).
Note: After a recent trip to the Southern California coast I can inform you that those two surfer guys are still out there and still checking out the scene. Although that scene for them now is solely the eternal search for the perfect wave complete with full rubberized suit and gear. No artist would now, or at least I hope no artist would, care to rush up and draw them. For now these brothers have lost a step, or seven, lost a fair amount of that beautiful bongo hair, and have added, added believe me, very definite paunches to bulge out those surfer suits all out of shape. Ah, such are the travails of the baby-boomer generation. Good luck though, brothers.
From The SteveLendmanBlog- On Lynne Stewart's Appeal Brief
Lynne Stewart's Appeal Brief
by Stephen Lendman
Email: lendmanstephen (nospam) sbcglobal.net (verified) 04 Apr 2011
political persecution
Lynne Stewart's Appeal Brief - by Stephen Lendman
Numerous previous articles discussed her case, character, honor, and dedication to justice as the law demands, what it didn't afford her. Two of them covered her imprisonment and re-sentencing, accessed through the following links:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2009/11/lynne-stewart-heroic-human-rights.
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/07/darkness-in-america-lynne-stewarts
A brief timeline of her case was as follows:
-- indicted on April 9, 2002;
-- on February 10, 2005, convicted on all counts;
-- on October, 17, 2006, sentenced to 28 months;
-- on November 17, 2009, a US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit three-judge panel upheld the conviction, shamelessly accusing Lynne of "knowingly and willfully making false statements," re-directing her case to District Court Judge John Koeltl for re-sentencing, instructing him to consider enhancements for terrorism, perjury, and abuse of her position as a lawyer - an outrageous mandate intimidating Koeltl to comply.
-- on November 19, 2009, Stewart jailed at MCC-NY, 150 Park Row, New York, NY; and
-- on July 15, 2010, Stewart re-sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for doing her job honorably, ethically, and admirably with distinction for 30 years.
Disgracefully, Judge Koeltl explained it, saying:
"(C)omments by Stewart in 2006, including a statement in a television interview that she would do 'it' again and would not 'do anything differently' influenced (the) decision....indicat(ing) the original sentence 'was not sufficient' to reflect the goals of sentencing guidelines."
Forgotten were his October 2006 comments, calling Lynne's character "extraordinary," saying she was "a credit to her profession," and that a long imprisonment would be "an unreasonable result," citing "the somewhat atypical nature of her case (and) lack of evidence that any victim was harmed...."
He also considered her age (70), health (at times poor), distinguished career representing society's disadvantaged and unwanted, and the unlikelihood she'd commit another "crime." However, the Second Circuit Appeals Court intimidated him to comply, his own career perhaps on the line otherwise.
Initially jailed in New York, supporters can now reach her at:
Lynne Stewart
53504-054
FMC Carswell
Federal Medical Center
PO Box 27137
Fort Worth, TX 76127
Her full appeal brief can be accessed through the following link:
http://lynnestewart.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/LS-Appellants-brief-F
Her web site - www.lynnestewart.org - summarizes it as follows:
It was filed with the Second Circuit Appeals Court. "The same panel (Judges Walker, Calabrese and Simon) will" re-hear her case this fall. If unsuccessful, a Supreme Court appeal may follow.
Brief highlights include:
-- enhancing her original 28 month sentence based on public statements she made violated her First Amendment rights, the most important ones without which all others are jeopardized;
-- increasing her sentence fourfold constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, violating Eight Amendment protection against it; moreover, it "failed to balance her lifetime" commitment to community, the nation, and society's poor, underprivileged, and unwanted, never afforded justice without an advocate like her; and
-- erroneously charging perjury and misuse of her position to enhance her sentence.
Lynne asked for a reversal and remand. She's represented by New York-based lawyers:
-- Jill Shellow;
-- Robert Boyle; and
-- Herald Price Fahringer.
In addition, many other lawyers and supporters helped prepare her appeal, including husband and spokesperson, Ralph Poynter, available at 917-853-9759.
Lynne calls her case "bigger than just me personally," saying she'll keep fighting for justice. Her inspiring comment to others is:
"Organize - Agitate, Agitate, Agitate!" And write her at the above address, as well as others wrongfully imprisoned in America's gulag.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
This work is in the public domain
by Stephen Lendman
Email: lendmanstephen (nospam) sbcglobal.net (verified) 04 Apr 2011
political persecution
Lynne Stewart's Appeal Brief - by Stephen Lendman
Numerous previous articles discussed her case, character, honor, and dedication to justice as the law demands, what it didn't afford her. Two of them covered her imprisonment and re-sentencing, accessed through the following links:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2009/11/lynne-stewart-heroic-human-rights.
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/07/darkness-in-america-lynne-stewarts
A brief timeline of her case was as follows:
-- indicted on April 9, 2002;
-- on February 10, 2005, convicted on all counts;
-- on October, 17, 2006, sentenced to 28 months;
-- on November 17, 2009, a US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit three-judge panel upheld the conviction, shamelessly accusing Lynne of "knowingly and willfully making false statements," re-directing her case to District Court Judge John Koeltl for re-sentencing, instructing him to consider enhancements for terrorism, perjury, and abuse of her position as a lawyer - an outrageous mandate intimidating Koeltl to comply.
-- on November 19, 2009, Stewart jailed at MCC-NY, 150 Park Row, New York, NY; and
-- on July 15, 2010, Stewart re-sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for doing her job honorably, ethically, and admirably with distinction for 30 years.
Disgracefully, Judge Koeltl explained it, saying:
"(C)omments by Stewart in 2006, including a statement in a television interview that she would do 'it' again and would not 'do anything differently' influenced (the) decision....indicat(ing) the original sentence 'was not sufficient' to reflect the goals of sentencing guidelines."
Forgotten were his October 2006 comments, calling Lynne's character "extraordinary," saying she was "a credit to her profession," and that a long imprisonment would be "an unreasonable result," citing "the somewhat atypical nature of her case (and) lack of evidence that any victim was harmed...."
He also considered her age (70), health (at times poor), distinguished career representing society's disadvantaged and unwanted, and the unlikelihood she'd commit another "crime." However, the Second Circuit Appeals Court intimidated him to comply, his own career perhaps on the line otherwise.
Initially jailed in New York, supporters can now reach her at:
Lynne Stewart
53504-054
FMC Carswell
Federal Medical Center
PO Box 27137
Fort Worth, TX 76127
Her full appeal brief can be accessed through the following link:
http://lynnestewart.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/LS-Appellants-brief-F
Her web site - www.lynnestewart.org - summarizes it as follows:
It was filed with the Second Circuit Appeals Court. "The same panel (Judges Walker, Calabrese and Simon) will" re-hear her case this fall. If unsuccessful, a Supreme Court appeal may follow.
Brief highlights include:
-- enhancing her original 28 month sentence based on public statements she made violated her First Amendment rights, the most important ones without which all others are jeopardized;
-- increasing her sentence fourfold constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, violating Eight Amendment protection against it; moreover, it "failed to balance her lifetime" commitment to community, the nation, and society's poor, underprivileged, and unwanted, never afforded justice without an advocate like her; and
-- erroneously charging perjury and misuse of her position to enhance her sentence.
Lynne asked for a reversal and remand. She's represented by New York-based lawyers:
-- Jill Shellow;
-- Robert Boyle; and
-- Herald Price Fahringer.
In addition, many other lawyers and supporters helped prepare her appeal, including husband and spokesperson, Ralph Poynter, available at 917-853-9759.
Lynne calls her case "bigger than just me personally," saying she'll keep fighting for justice. Her inspiring comment to others is:
"Organize - Agitate, Agitate, Agitate!" And write her at the above address, as well as others wrongfully imprisoned in America's gulag.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com
This work is in the public domain
The Latest From The Private Bradley Manning Website- A List Of Solidartiy Actions For April 9th and 10th 2011- Free Bradley Manning Now!
Click on the headline to link to a Private Bradley Manning website entry for the solidarity activities scheduled for the weekend of April 9-10, 2011.
Markin comment:
Free Bradley Manning Now!
Markin comment:
Free Bradley Manning Now!
From The Jobs For Justice Website- The April 4th Actions- A Report With Video From Boston
Click on the headline to link to a Jobs For Justice website post of the national actions on April 4, 2011 in defend of union rights.
Monday, April 04, 2011
From The Jobs For Justice Blog-April 4 Call to Action: We are One
April 4 Call to Action: We are One
By jwjnational, on March 25th, 2011
On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, where he had gone to stand with sanitation workers demanding their dream: the right to bargain collectively for a voice at work and a better life. The workers were trying to form a union with AFSCME.
On April 4, 2011, join union members, community activists, people of faith, students, youth, LGBTQ, civil rights, and immigrant rights allies to stand in solidarity with working people in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and dozens of other states where well-funded, right-wing corporate politicians are trying to take away the rights Dr. King gave his life for: the freedom to bargain, to vote, to afford a college education and justice for all workers, immigrant and native-born. It’s a day to show movement with actions, teach-ins, worksite discussions, vigils, faith events – a day to be creative, but clear: We are one.
Visit www.we-r-1.org to find a local event, or add your own event to the growing list of activities. Some ideas for action:
•Worksite actions. Recruit co-workers to carry out a worksite activity – wearing red shirts, ribbons, or stickers – and having a discussion about the attacks on working people at lunch break.
•Organize a teach-in or screening of “At the River I Stand”, which tells the story of the Memphis sanitation workers and Dr. King’s support of their struggle.
•Organize a mobilization or action that links current organizing or bargaining fights with the moment we are in.
•Organize a prayer vigil in front of a symbol that represents Dr. King’s vision of a better world.
•Organize discussions at churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples the weekend before April 4.
•Organize an action with students who are fighting budget battles around education and make link to attack on workers in the public sector.
•Change your Facebook & twitter profile image to the JwJ “We Are One” image
The www.we-r-1.org website has some resources to help you plan your events and check out Jobs with Justice resources including a guerilla theater script, talking points, a video discussion guide, and chants.
It’s time to come together to curb unchecked corporate power. Who will control our communities: working people or corporations?
In Dr. King’s words:
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
By jwjnational, on March 25th, 2011
On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, where he had gone to stand with sanitation workers demanding their dream: the right to bargain collectively for a voice at work and a better life. The workers were trying to form a union with AFSCME.
On April 4, 2011, join union members, community activists, people of faith, students, youth, LGBTQ, civil rights, and immigrant rights allies to stand in solidarity with working people in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and dozens of other states where well-funded, right-wing corporate politicians are trying to take away the rights Dr. King gave his life for: the freedom to bargain, to vote, to afford a college education and justice for all workers, immigrant and native-born. It’s a day to show movement with actions, teach-ins, worksite discussions, vigils, faith events – a day to be creative, but clear: We are one.
Visit www.we-r-1.org to find a local event, or add your own event to the growing list of activities. Some ideas for action:
•Worksite actions. Recruit co-workers to carry out a worksite activity – wearing red shirts, ribbons, or stickers – and having a discussion about the attacks on working people at lunch break.
•Organize a teach-in or screening of “At the River I Stand”, which tells the story of the Memphis sanitation workers and Dr. King’s support of their struggle.
•Organize a mobilization or action that links current organizing or bargaining fights with the moment we are in.
•Organize a prayer vigil in front of a symbol that represents Dr. King’s vision of a better world.
•Organize discussions at churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples the weekend before April 4.
•Organize an action with students who are fighting budget battles around education and make link to attack on workers in the public sector.
•Change your Facebook & twitter profile image to the JwJ “We Are One” image
The www.we-r-1.org website has some resources to help you plan your events and check out Jobs with Justice resources including a guerilla theater script, talking points, a video discussion guide, and chants.
It’s time to come together to curb unchecked corporate power. Who will control our communities: working people or corporations?
In Dr. King’s words:
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
Once Again On The Question Of Abolishing The British Monarchy- “The Madness Of King George”- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for The Madness Of King George.
DVD Review
The Madness Of King George, Nigel Hawthorne, Helen Mirren, 1994
Frankly, I like my kings (or queens, for that matter), especially 18th and 19th century kings, to be villainous and inept. And, of course, we descendant American rebel supporters of the revolutionary war against King George III of England have more than a few unkind things to say about his use of Red Coats and Hessians to deny our forebears their right to an independent state. However, apparently good King George had an afterlife, well except a little fetish about still calling us his colonies (which Prime Minister Pitt insistently, if futilely, reminded him was not the case any longer), guiding Britannia and the empire to rule the waves, being a good and gentle husband, a fine father (cough) and all-around jack-of-all trades in his tidy island kingdom. Except that little question of his madness (temporary though it was). And the maneuvers, by family and political foes, to get him out of the way, are what drive the core of this film. Oh, and a very disturbing inside view of the norms of medical practice in those days, as well.
Since nobody, or at least nobody shown in the film, had a serious clue as to the king’s malady (except those telltale urine samples).least of the “doctors” the old tried and true try anything and everything, quack or sound, to see if the king can recover was the order of the day. However not everyone was committed to that recovery, or a safe and speedy recovery, and that is where the family and political plots thicken. Son George (the heir apparent) was linked with the so-pictured nefarious Whigs (led by Mr. Fox) to declare a regency on his behalf. The Tory Mr. Pitt was linked with keeping his job and that depended on the king’s speedy recover. Pitt moved might and main to insure that recover, and to insure a delay in a parliamentary vote on the regency question. All of this is done with a certain wit, including by the king in his lucid moments. But all’s well that ends well, the king recovered, his family is reconciled with his longevity, and he continued to rule those Britannia waves.
A word on the acting here. Nigel Hawthorne shines as the lucid, reflective, just momentarily mad, witty farmer King George. Except, again, on that little buggy issue of the colonies. His performance here is the best public relations the old king has had in a couple of centuries. And, of course, Helen Mirren (who else?) as his steadfast queen and main champion (beyond Mr. Pitt) is well, queenly. Apparently she has the lock on playing British queens, and playing them with a certain style. Finally, since everybody and their brother weighed in on the nature of the king’s malady, I will give it a parting shot. I am convinced, and I believe all reputable sources will confirm this diagnosis, that old King George suffered from advanced imperialitis and those “colonists” who formed these United States caused him his reflex attack. By the way is it not about time for starters, among other things, to abolish that deadweight monarchy over there in Great Britian. This film is prima facie evidence for that proposition,
DVD Review
The Madness Of King George, Nigel Hawthorne, Helen Mirren, 1994
Frankly, I like my kings (or queens, for that matter), especially 18th and 19th century kings, to be villainous and inept. And, of course, we descendant American rebel supporters of the revolutionary war against King George III of England have more than a few unkind things to say about his use of Red Coats and Hessians to deny our forebears their right to an independent state. However, apparently good King George had an afterlife, well except a little fetish about still calling us his colonies (which Prime Minister Pitt insistently, if futilely, reminded him was not the case any longer), guiding Britannia and the empire to rule the waves, being a good and gentle husband, a fine father (cough) and all-around jack-of-all trades in his tidy island kingdom. Except that little question of his madness (temporary though it was). And the maneuvers, by family and political foes, to get him out of the way, are what drive the core of this film. Oh, and a very disturbing inside view of the norms of medical practice in those days, as well.
Since nobody, or at least nobody shown in the film, had a serious clue as to the king’s malady (except those telltale urine samples).least of the “doctors” the old tried and true try anything and everything, quack or sound, to see if the king can recover was the order of the day. However not everyone was committed to that recovery, or a safe and speedy recovery, and that is where the family and political plots thicken. Son George (the heir apparent) was linked with the so-pictured nefarious Whigs (led by Mr. Fox) to declare a regency on his behalf. The Tory Mr. Pitt was linked with keeping his job and that depended on the king’s speedy recover. Pitt moved might and main to insure that recover, and to insure a delay in a parliamentary vote on the regency question. All of this is done with a certain wit, including by the king in his lucid moments. But all’s well that ends well, the king recovered, his family is reconciled with his longevity, and he continued to rule those Britannia waves.
A word on the acting here. Nigel Hawthorne shines as the lucid, reflective, just momentarily mad, witty farmer King George. Except, again, on that little buggy issue of the colonies. His performance here is the best public relations the old king has had in a couple of centuries. And, of course, Helen Mirren (who else?) as his steadfast queen and main champion (beyond Mr. Pitt) is well, queenly. Apparently she has the lock on playing British queens, and playing them with a certain style. Finally, since everybody and their brother weighed in on the nature of the king’s malady, I will give it a parting shot. I am convinced, and I believe all reputable sources will confirm this diagnosis, that old King George suffered from advanced imperialitis and those “colonists” who formed these United States caused him his reflex attack. By the way is it not about time for starters, among other things, to abolish that deadweight monarchy over there in Great Britian. This film is prima facie evidence for that proposition,
From The Jobs For Justice Website-Florida House Votes to End Pay Deductions for Public Workers’ Union Dues
Markin comment:
Although, as a matter of trade union independence from the state, the bourgeois state, trade union militants favor union dues being collected by our own agents, shop stewards, or other union personnel we oppose actions, as the one in Florida mentioned in this post (and elsewhere in Ohio and Wisconsin), by state legislatures and state executives to eliminate that “right” in order to further gut public workers union collective bargaining gains.
********
Florida House Votes to End Pay Deductions for Public Workers’ Union Dues
By jwjnational, on March 31st, 2011
On Friday, March 25th, the Florida Governor signed legislation into law that ties teacher’s salaries to test scores and removes tenure. On the same day, the Florida House passed legislation to make union dues deduction of public workers illegal.
Workers and students united in Orlando to say “Enough is Enough” to these attacks on working people. Protesters demanded the Speaker of the House Dean Cannon stop the scapegoating of workers and students. Rep. Cannon is following the Governor’s agenda of prioritizing corporate interests at the expense of middle class families dealing with the effects of economic crisis. Its time to find real solutions and sensible policies and not keep it as politics as usual.
The delegation loudly marched into Rep. Cannon’s office. A person dressed as the Notorious Governor Rick Scott left a huge box of money behind congratulating the Representative on blaming working people on behalf of their corporate cronies. People carried framed testimonials from a student, an unemployed worker, a professor, a parent and an immigrant advocate: we will not be framed for the state’s revenue shortfall!
Protests will continue to escalate throughout the legislative session. Coordinating groups include Central Florida Jobs with Justice, Central Florida AFL-CIO, and the Student Labor Action Project @UCF.
Although, as a matter of trade union independence from the state, the bourgeois state, trade union militants favor union dues being collected by our own agents, shop stewards, or other union personnel we oppose actions, as the one in Florida mentioned in this post (and elsewhere in Ohio and Wisconsin), by state legislatures and state executives to eliminate that “right” in order to further gut public workers union collective bargaining gains.
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Florida House Votes to End Pay Deductions for Public Workers’ Union Dues
By jwjnational, on March 31st, 2011
On Friday, March 25th, the Florida Governor signed legislation into law that ties teacher’s salaries to test scores and removes tenure. On the same day, the Florida House passed legislation to make union dues deduction of public workers illegal.
Workers and students united in Orlando to say “Enough is Enough” to these attacks on working people. Protesters demanded the Speaker of the House Dean Cannon stop the scapegoating of workers and students. Rep. Cannon is following the Governor’s agenda of prioritizing corporate interests at the expense of middle class families dealing with the effects of economic crisis. Its time to find real solutions and sensible policies and not keep it as politics as usual.
The delegation loudly marched into Rep. Cannon’s office. A person dressed as the Notorious Governor Rick Scott left a huge box of money behind congratulating the Representative on blaming working people on behalf of their corporate cronies. People carried framed testimonials from a student, an unemployed worker, a professor, a parent and an immigrant advocate: we will not be framed for the state’s revenue shortfall!
Protests will continue to escalate throughout the legislative session. Coordinating groups include Central Florida Jobs with Justice, Central Florida AFL-CIO, and the Student Labor Action Project @UCF.
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Leon Trotsky On The Duty Of Socialists To Defend Smaller States Against Imperialist Attack- "Declaration To The Antiwar Congress At Amsterdam (July 1932)"- Today- Defend Libya Against The American-Led Coalition Attacks
Leon Trotsky On The Duty Of Socialists To Defend Smaller States Against Imperialist Attack- "Declaration To The Antiwar Congress At Amsterdam (July 1932)"
On Defense of Dependent Countries Against Imperialism
Introduction from Workers Vanguard, Number 977
As the U.S., France and Britain lead the murderous bombing campaign against semi-colonial Libya in the name of "protecting civilians," social-democratic groups beat the drums for the Libyan "opposition," the imperialists'front men on the ground. Writing on the need for proletarian revolution to rid the world of imperialist war, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky insisted that the working class must militarily defend oppressed nations under imperialist attack and excoriated the League of Nations, predecessor to the United Nations under whose imprimatur the war against Libya was begun.
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Capitalist brigands always conduct a "defensive" war, even when Japan is marching against Shanghai and France against Syria or Morocco. The revolutionary proletariat distinguishes only between wars of oppression and wars of liberation. The character of a war is defined, not by diplomatic falsifications, but by the class which conducts the war and the objective aims it pursues in that war. The wars of the imperialist states, apart from the pretexts and political rhetoric, are of an oppressive character, reactionary and inimical to the people. Only the wars of the proletariat and of the oppressed nations can be characterized as wars of liberation....
The League of Nations is the citadel of imperialist pacifism. It represents a transitory historical combination of capitalist states in which the stronger command and buy out the weaker, then crawl on their bellies before America or try to resist; in which all equally are enemies of the Soviet Union, but are prepared to cover up each and every crime of the most powerful and rapacious among them. Only the politically blind, only those who are altogether helpless or who deliberately corrupt the conscience of the people, can consider the League of Nations, directly or indirectly, today or tomorrow, an instrument of peace....
Whoever directly or indirectly supports the system of colonization and protectorates, the domination of British capital in India, the domination of Japan in Korea or in Manchuria, of France in Indochina or in Africa, whoever does not fight against colonial enslavement, whoever does not support the uprisings of the oppressed nations and their independence, whoever defends or idealizes Gandhism, that is, the policy of passive resistance on questions which can be solved only by force of arms, is, despite good intentions or bad, a lackey, an apologist, an agent of the imperialists, of the slaveholders, of the militarists, and helps them to prepare new wars in pursuit of their old aims or new.
—Leon Trotsky, "Declaration to the Antiwar Congress at Amsterdam" (July 1932)
On Defense of Dependent Countries Against Imperialism
Introduction from Workers Vanguard, Number 977
As the U.S., France and Britain lead the murderous bombing campaign against semi-colonial Libya in the name of "protecting civilians," social-democratic groups beat the drums for the Libyan "opposition," the imperialists'front men on the ground. Writing on the need for proletarian revolution to rid the world of imperialist war, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky insisted that the working class must militarily defend oppressed nations under imperialist attack and excoriated the League of Nations, predecessor to the United Nations under whose imprimatur the war against Libya was begun.
********
Capitalist brigands always conduct a "defensive" war, even when Japan is marching against Shanghai and France against Syria or Morocco. The revolutionary proletariat distinguishes only between wars of oppression and wars of liberation. The character of a war is defined, not by diplomatic falsifications, but by the class which conducts the war and the objective aims it pursues in that war. The wars of the imperialist states, apart from the pretexts and political rhetoric, are of an oppressive character, reactionary and inimical to the people. Only the wars of the proletariat and of the oppressed nations can be characterized as wars of liberation....
The League of Nations is the citadel of imperialist pacifism. It represents a transitory historical combination of capitalist states in which the stronger command and buy out the weaker, then crawl on their bellies before America or try to resist; in which all equally are enemies of the Soviet Union, but are prepared to cover up each and every crime of the most powerful and rapacious among them. Only the politically blind, only those who are altogether helpless or who deliberately corrupt the conscience of the people, can consider the League of Nations, directly or indirectly, today or tomorrow, an instrument of peace....
Whoever directly or indirectly supports the system of colonization and protectorates, the domination of British capital in India, the domination of Japan in Korea or in Manchuria, of France in Indochina or in Africa, whoever does not fight against colonial enslavement, whoever does not support the uprisings of the oppressed nations and their independence, whoever defends or idealizes Gandhism, that is, the policy of passive resistance on questions which can be solved only by force of arms, is, despite good intentions or bad, a lackey, an apologist, an agent of the imperialists, of the slaveholders, of the militarists, and helps them to prepare new wars in pursuit of their old aims or new.
—Leon Trotsky, "Declaration to the Antiwar Congress at Amsterdam" (July 1932)
Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Ain’t Got No Time For Corner Boys-Harry's Variety
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing his song Jersey Girl that formed part of the inspiration for this post.
Markin comment:
Riding down the old neighborhood streets a while back, the old North Adamsville working class streets, streets dotted with triple-deckers housing multiple families along with close-quarter, small cottage-sized single family houses like the one of my own growing to manhood time. Houses, moreover, that reflected, no exclaimed right to their tiny rooftops, that seemingly eternal overweening desire to have, small or not, worth the trouble or not, something of one’s own against the otherwise endless servitude of days. Suddenly, coming to an intersection, I was startled, no, more than that I was forced into a double-take, by the sight of some guys, some teenage guys hanging, hanging hard, one foot on the ground the other bent holding up the infernal brick wall that spoke of practice and marking one’s territory, against the oncoming night in front of an old time variety store, a mom and pop variety from some extinct times before the 7/11 chain store, fast shop, no room for corner boys, police take notice, dark night. Memory called it Kelly’s, today Kim’s. From the look of them, baggy-panted, latest fashion footwear name sneakered, baseball cap-headed, all items marked, marked with the insignia (secretly, and with no hope of outside decoding) signifying their "homeboy" associations (I would say gang, but that word is charged these days and this is not exactly what it looked like, at least to the public eye, my public eye) they could be the grandsons, probably not biological because these kids were almost all Asians speckled with a couple of Irish-lookers, shanty Irish-lookers, of the ghost be-bop night guys that held me in thrall in those misty early 1960s times.
Ya, that tableau, that time-etched scene, got me to thinking of some long lost comrades of the schoolboy night like the hang-around guys in front of Harry’s Variety, although comrades might not be the right word because I was just some punk young kid trying to be a wannabe, or half-wannabe, corner boy and they had no time for punk kids and later when I came of age I had no time for corner boys. Ya, that scene got me to thinking of the old time corner boys who ruled the whole wide North Adamsville night (and day for those who didn’t work or go to school, which was quite a few on certain days, becasue most of theses guys were between sixteen and their early twenties with very jittery school and work histroies better left unspoken, or else). Ya, got me thinking about where the white tee-shirted, blue-jeaned, engineer-booted, cigarette-smoking, unfiltered of course, sneering, soda-swilling, Coke, naturally, pinball wizards held forth daily and nightly, and let me cadge a few odd games when they had more important business, more important girl business, to attend to.
Ya, I got to thinking too about Harry’s, old Harry’s Variety over there near my grandmother’s house, over there in that block on Sagamore Street where the Irish workingman’s whiskey-drinking (with a beer chaser), fist-fighting, sports-betting after a hard day’s work Dublin Grille was. Harry’s was on the corner of that block. Now if you have some image, some quirky, sentimental image, of Harry’s as being run by an up-and-coming just arrived immigrant guy, maybe with a big family, trying to make this neighborhood store thing work so he can take in, take in vicariously anyway, the American dream like you see running such places now forget it. Harry’s was nothing but a “front.” Old Harry, Harry O’Toole, now long gone, was nothing but the neighborhood “bookie” known far and wide to one and all as such. Even the cops would pull up in their squad cars to place their bets, laughingly, with Harry in the days before state became the bookie-of-choice for most bettors. And he had his “book”, his precious penciled-notation book right out on the counter. But see punk kid me, even then just a little too book-unworldly didn’t pick up on that fact until, old grandmother, jesus, grandmother “hipped” me to it.
Until then I didn’t think anything of the fact that Harry had about three dust-laden cans of soup, two dust-laden cans of beans, a couple of loaves of bread (Wonder Bread, if you want to know) on his dust-laden shelves, a few old quarts of milk and an ice chest full of tonic (now called soda, even by New Englanders) and a few other odds and ends that did not, under any theory of economics, capitalist or Marxist, add up to a thriving business ethos. Unless, of course, something else was going on. But what drew me to Harry’s was not that stuff anyway. What drew me to Harry’s was, one, his pin ball machine complete with corner boy players and their corner boy ways, and, two, his huge Coca Cola ice chest (now sold as antique curiosities for much money at big-time flea markets and other venues) filled with ice cold, cold tonics (see above), especially the local Robb’s Root Beer that I was practically addicted to in those days (and that Harry, kind-hearted Harry, stocked for me).
Many an afternoon, a summer’s afternoon for sure, or an occasional early night, I would sip, sip hard on my Robb’s and watch the corner boys play, no sway, sway just right, with that sweet pinball machine, that pin ball machine with the bosomy, lusty-looking, cleavage-showing women pictured on the top glass frame of the machine practically inviting you, and only you the player, on to some secret place if you just put in enough coins. Of course, like many dream-things what those lusty dames really gave you, only you the player, was maybe a few free games. Teasers, right. But I had to just watch at first because I was too young (you had to be sixteen to play) , however, every once in a while, one of the corner boys who didn’t want to just gouge out my eyes for not being a corner boy, would let me cadge a game while Harry was not looking. When you think about it though, now anyway, Harry was so “connected” (and you know what I mean by that) what the hell did he care if some underage kid, punk kid, cadged a few games and looked at those bosomy babes in the frame.
Ya, and thinking about Harry’s automatically got me thinking about Daniel (nobody ever called him that, ever) “Red” Hickey, the boss king of my schoolboy night at Harry’s. Red, the guy who set the rules, set the style, hell, set the breathing, allowed or not and when, of the place. I don’t know if he went to some corner boy school to learn his trade but he was the be-bop daddy (at least all the girls, all the hanging all over him girls, called him that) because he, except for one incident that I will relate below, ruled unchallenged with an iron fist. At least I never saw his regular corner boys Spike, Lenny, Shawn, Ward, Goof (yes, that was his name the only name I knew him by, and he liked it), Bop (real name William) or the Clipper (real name Kenny, the arch-petty Woolworth’s thief of the group hence the name) challenge him, or want to.
Ya, Red, old red-headed Red was tough alright, and has a pretty good-sized built but that was not what kept the others in line. It was a certain look he had, a certain look that if I went into describing it now I would get way overboard into describing it as some stone-cold killer look, some psycho-killer look but that would be wrong because it didn’t show that way. But that was what it was. Maybe I had better put it this way. Tommy Thunder, older brother of my middle school and high school best friend and a corner boy king in his own right, Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, a big bruiser of a legendary North Adamsville football player and human wrecking machine who lived a few doors up from Harry’s went out of his way not to go near the place. Ya, Red was that tough.
See, he was like some general, or colonel or something, an officer at least, and besides being tough, he would “inspect” his troops to see that all and sundry had their “uniform” right. White tee-shirt, full-necked, no vee-neck sissy stuff, no muscle shirt half-naked stuff, straight 100% cotton, American-cottoned, American-textiled, American-produced, ironed, mother-ironed I am sure, crisp. One time Goof (sorry that’s all I knew him by, really) had a wrinkled shirt on and Red marched him up the street to his triple-decker cold-water walk-up flat and berated, berated out loud for all to hear, Goof’s mother for letting him out of the house like that. And Red, old Red like all Irish guys sanctified mothers, at least in public, so you can see he meant business on the keeping the uniform right question.
And like some James Dean or Marlon Brando tough guy photo, some motorcycle disdainful, sneering guy photo, each white tee-shirt, or the right sleeve of each white tee-shirt anyway, was rolled up to provide a place, a safe haven, for the ubiquitous package of cigarettes, matches inserted inside its cellophane outer wrapping, Luckies, Chesterfields, Camels, Pall Malls, all unfiltered in defiance of the then beginning incessant cancer drumbeat warnings, for the day’s show of manliness smoking pleasures.
And blue jeans, tight fit, no this scrub-washed, fake-worn stuff, but worn and then discarded worn. No chinos, no punk kid, maybe faux "beatnik," black chinos, un-cuffed, or cuffed like I wore, and Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, king of the faux beatnik middle school night, including among his devotees this little too bookish writer, who was as tough a general, colonel, or some officer anyway, as corner boy Red was with his guys. Frankie example: no cuffs on those black chinos, stay home, or go elsewhere, if you are cuffed. Same kingly manner, right? Corner boys blue-jeaned and wide black-belted, black always, black-belt used as a handy weapon for that off-hand street fight that might erupt out of nowhere, for no reason, or many. Maybe a heavy-duty watch chain, also war-worthy, dangly down from those jeans. Boots, engineer boots, black and buckled, worn summer or winter, heavy, heavy-heeled, spit-shined, another piece of the modern armor for street fight nights. Inspection completed the night’s work lies ahead.
And most nights work, seemingly glamorous to little too bookish eyes at the time, was holding up some corner of the brick wall in front or on the side of Harry’s Variety with those engineer boots, one firmly on the ground the other bent against the wall, small talk, small low-tone talk between comrades waiting, waiting for… Or just waiting for their turn at that Harry luscious ladies pictured pinball machine. Protocol, strictly observed, required “General Red” to have first coin in the machine. But see old Red was the master swayer with that damn machine and would rack up free games galore so, usually, he was on that thing for a while.
Hey, Red was so good, although this is not strictly part of the story, that he could have one of his several honeys right in front of him on the machine pressing some buttons and he behind pressing some other buttons Red swaying and his Capri-panted honey, usually some blond, real or imagined, swaying, and eyes glazing, but I better let off with that description right now, because like I said it was strictly speaking not part of the story. What is part of the story is that Red, when he was in the mood or just bored, or had some business, some girl business, maybe that blond, real or imagined, just mentioned business would after I had been hanging around a while, and he thought I was okay, give me his leftover free games.
Now that was the “innocent” part of Red, the swaying pinball wizard, girl-swaying, inspector general part. But see if you want to be king of the corner boy night you have to show your metal once in a while, if for no other reason than the corner boys, the old time North Adamsville corner boys might be just a little forgetful of who the king hell corner boy was, or as I will describe, some other corner boy king of some other variety store night might show up to see what was what. Now I must have watched the Harry’s corner boy scene for a couple of years, maybe three, the last part just off and on, but I only remember once when I saw Red show “his colors.” Some guy from Adamsville, some tough-looking guy who, no question, was a corner boy just stopped at Harry’s after tipping a couple, or twenty, at the Dublin Grille. He must have said something to Red, or maybe Red just knew instinctively that he had to show his colors, but all of a sudden these two are chain-whipping each other. No, that’s not quite right, Red is wailing, flailing, nailing, chain-whipping this other guy mercilessly, worst, if that is possible. The guy, after a few minutes, was left in a pool of blood on the street, ambulance ready. And Red just walked way, just kind of sauntering away.
Of course that is not the end of the Red story. Needless to say, no work, no wanna work Red had to have coin, dough, not just for the pinball machine, cigarettes, and soda, hell, that was nothing. But for the up-keep on his Chevy (Chevvies then being the “boss” car, and not just among corner boys either), and that stream of ever-loving blond honeys, real or imagined, he escorted into the seashore night. So said corner boys did their midnight creep around the area grabbing this and that to bring in a little dough. Eventually Red “graduated” to armed robberies when the overhead grew too much for little midnight creeps, and graduated to one of the branches of the state pen, more than once. Strangely, his end came, although I only heard about this second hand, after a shoot-out with the cops down South after he tried to rob some White Hen convenience store. There is some kind of moral there, although I will be damned if I can figure it out. Red, thanks for those free games though.
Markin comment:
Riding down the old neighborhood streets a while back, the old North Adamsville working class streets, streets dotted with triple-deckers housing multiple families along with close-quarter, small cottage-sized single family houses like the one of my own growing to manhood time. Houses, moreover, that reflected, no exclaimed right to their tiny rooftops, that seemingly eternal overweening desire to have, small or not, worth the trouble or not, something of one’s own against the otherwise endless servitude of days. Suddenly, coming to an intersection, I was startled, no, more than that I was forced into a double-take, by the sight of some guys, some teenage guys hanging, hanging hard, one foot on the ground the other bent holding up the infernal brick wall that spoke of practice and marking one’s territory, against the oncoming night in front of an old time variety store, a mom and pop variety from some extinct times before the 7/11 chain store, fast shop, no room for corner boys, police take notice, dark night. Memory called it Kelly’s, today Kim’s. From the look of them, baggy-panted, latest fashion footwear name sneakered, baseball cap-headed, all items marked, marked with the insignia (secretly, and with no hope of outside decoding) signifying their "homeboy" associations (I would say gang, but that word is charged these days and this is not exactly what it looked like, at least to the public eye, my public eye) they could be the grandsons, probably not biological because these kids were almost all Asians speckled with a couple of Irish-lookers, shanty Irish-lookers, of the ghost be-bop night guys that held me in thrall in those misty early 1960s times.
Ya, that tableau, that time-etched scene, got me to thinking of some long lost comrades of the schoolboy night like the hang-around guys in front of Harry’s Variety, although comrades might not be the right word because I was just some punk young kid trying to be a wannabe, or half-wannabe, corner boy and they had no time for punk kids and later when I came of age I had no time for corner boys. Ya, that scene got me to thinking of the old time corner boys who ruled the whole wide North Adamsville night (and day for those who didn’t work or go to school, which was quite a few on certain days, becasue most of theses guys were between sixteen and their early twenties with very jittery school and work histroies better left unspoken, or else). Ya, got me thinking about where the white tee-shirted, blue-jeaned, engineer-booted, cigarette-smoking, unfiltered of course, sneering, soda-swilling, Coke, naturally, pinball wizards held forth daily and nightly, and let me cadge a few odd games when they had more important business, more important girl business, to attend to.
Ya, I got to thinking too about Harry’s, old Harry’s Variety over there near my grandmother’s house, over there in that block on Sagamore Street where the Irish workingman’s whiskey-drinking (with a beer chaser), fist-fighting, sports-betting after a hard day’s work Dublin Grille was. Harry’s was on the corner of that block. Now if you have some image, some quirky, sentimental image, of Harry’s as being run by an up-and-coming just arrived immigrant guy, maybe with a big family, trying to make this neighborhood store thing work so he can take in, take in vicariously anyway, the American dream like you see running such places now forget it. Harry’s was nothing but a “front.” Old Harry, Harry O’Toole, now long gone, was nothing but the neighborhood “bookie” known far and wide to one and all as such. Even the cops would pull up in their squad cars to place their bets, laughingly, with Harry in the days before state became the bookie-of-choice for most bettors. And he had his “book”, his precious penciled-notation book right out on the counter. But see punk kid me, even then just a little too book-unworldly didn’t pick up on that fact until, old grandmother, jesus, grandmother “hipped” me to it.
Until then I didn’t think anything of the fact that Harry had about three dust-laden cans of soup, two dust-laden cans of beans, a couple of loaves of bread (Wonder Bread, if you want to know) on his dust-laden shelves, a few old quarts of milk and an ice chest full of tonic (now called soda, even by New Englanders) and a few other odds and ends that did not, under any theory of economics, capitalist or Marxist, add up to a thriving business ethos. Unless, of course, something else was going on. But what drew me to Harry’s was not that stuff anyway. What drew me to Harry’s was, one, his pin ball machine complete with corner boy players and their corner boy ways, and, two, his huge Coca Cola ice chest (now sold as antique curiosities for much money at big-time flea markets and other venues) filled with ice cold, cold tonics (see above), especially the local Robb’s Root Beer that I was practically addicted to in those days (and that Harry, kind-hearted Harry, stocked for me).
Many an afternoon, a summer’s afternoon for sure, or an occasional early night, I would sip, sip hard on my Robb’s and watch the corner boys play, no sway, sway just right, with that sweet pinball machine, that pin ball machine with the bosomy, lusty-looking, cleavage-showing women pictured on the top glass frame of the machine practically inviting you, and only you the player, on to some secret place if you just put in enough coins. Of course, like many dream-things what those lusty dames really gave you, only you the player, was maybe a few free games. Teasers, right. But I had to just watch at first because I was too young (you had to be sixteen to play) , however, every once in a while, one of the corner boys who didn’t want to just gouge out my eyes for not being a corner boy, would let me cadge a game while Harry was not looking. When you think about it though, now anyway, Harry was so “connected” (and you know what I mean by that) what the hell did he care if some underage kid, punk kid, cadged a few games and looked at those bosomy babes in the frame.
Ya, and thinking about Harry’s automatically got me thinking about Daniel (nobody ever called him that, ever) “Red” Hickey, the boss king of my schoolboy night at Harry’s. Red, the guy who set the rules, set the style, hell, set the breathing, allowed or not and when, of the place. I don’t know if he went to some corner boy school to learn his trade but he was the be-bop daddy (at least all the girls, all the hanging all over him girls, called him that) because he, except for one incident that I will relate below, ruled unchallenged with an iron fist. At least I never saw his regular corner boys Spike, Lenny, Shawn, Ward, Goof (yes, that was his name the only name I knew him by, and he liked it), Bop (real name William) or the Clipper (real name Kenny, the arch-petty Woolworth’s thief of the group hence the name) challenge him, or want to.
Ya, Red, old red-headed Red was tough alright, and has a pretty good-sized built but that was not what kept the others in line. It was a certain look he had, a certain look that if I went into describing it now I would get way overboard into describing it as some stone-cold killer look, some psycho-killer look but that would be wrong because it didn’t show that way. But that was what it was. Maybe I had better put it this way. Tommy Thunder, older brother of my middle school and high school best friend and a corner boy king in his own right, Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, a big bruiser of a legendary North Adamsville football player and human wrecking machine who lived a few doors up from Harry’s went out of his way not to go near the place. Ya, Red was that tough.
See, he was like some general, or colonel or something, an officer at least, and besides being tough, he would “inspect” his troops to see that all and sundry had their “uniform” right. White tee-shirt, full-necked, no vee-neck sissy stuff, no muscle shirt half-naked stuff, straight 100% cotton, American-cottoned, American-textiled, American-produced, ironed, mother-ironed I am sure, crisp. One time Goof (sorry that’s all I knew him by, really) had a wrinkled shirt on and Red marched him up the street to his triple-decker cold-water walk-up flat and berated, berated out loud for all to hear, Goof’s mother for letting him out of the house like that. And Red, old Red like all Irish guys sanctified mothers, at least in public, so you can see he meant business on the keeping the uniform right question.
And like some James Dean or Marlon Brando tough guy photo, some motorcycle disdainful, sneering guy photo, each white tee-shirt, or the right sleeve of each white tee-shirt anyway, was rolled up to provide a place, a safe haven, for the ubiquitous package of cigarettes, matches inserted inside its cellophane outer wrapping, Luckies, Chesterfields, Camels, Pall Malls, all unfiltered in defiance of the then beginning incessant cancer drumbeat warnings, for the day’s show of manliness smoking pleasures.
And blue jeans, tight fit, no this scrub-washed, fake-worn stuff, but worn and then discarded worn. No chinos, no punk kid, maybe faux "beatnik," black chinos, un-cuffed, or cuffed like I wore, and Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, king of the faux beatnik middle school night, including among his devotees this little too bookish writer, who was as tough a general, colonel, or some officer anyway, as corner boy Red was with his guys. Frankie example: no cuffs on those black chinos, stay home, or go elsewhere, if you are cuffed. Same kingly manner, right? Corner boys blue-jeaned and wide black-belted, black always, black-belt used as a handy weapon for that off-hand street fight that might erupt out of nowhere, for no reason, or many. Maybe a heavy-duty watch chain, also war-worthy, dangly down from those jeans. Boots, engineer boots, black and buckled, worn summer or winter, heavy, heavy-heeled, spit-shined, another piece of the modern armor for street fight nights. Inspection completed the night’s work lies ahead.
And most nights work, seemingly glamorous to little too bookish eyes at the time, was holding up some corner of the brick wall in front or on the side of Harry’s Variety with those engineer boots, one firmly on the ground the other bent against the wall, small talk, small low-tone talk between comrades waiting, waiting for… Or just waiting for their turn at that Harry luscious ladies pictured pinball machine. Protocol, strictly observed, required “General Red” to have first coin in the machine. But see old Red was the master swayer with that damn machine and would rack up free games galore so, usually, he was on that thing for a while.
Hey, Red was so good, although this is not strictly part of the story, that he could have one of his several honeys right in front of him on the machine pressing some buttons and he behind pressing some other buttons Red swaying and his Capri-panted honey, usually some blond, real or imagined, swaying, and eyes glazing, but I better let off with that description right now, because like I said it was strictly speaking not part of the story. What is part of the story is that Red, when he was in the mood or just bored, or had some business, some girl business, maybe that blond, real or imagined, just mentioned business would after I had been hanging around a while, and he thought I was okay, give me his leftover free games.
Now that was the “innocent” part of Red, the swaying pinball wizard, girl-swaying, inspector general part. But see if you want to be king of the corner boy night you have to show your metal once in a while, if for no other reason than the corner boys, the old time North Adamsville corner boys might be just a little forgetful of who the king hell corner boy was, or as I will describe, some other corner boy king of some other variety store night might show up to see what was what. Now I must have watched the Harry’s corner boy scene for a couple of years, maybe three, the last part just off and on, but I only remember once when I saw Red show “his colors.” Some guy from Adamsville, some tough-looking guy who, no question, was a corner boy just stopped at Harry’s after tipping a couple, or twenty, at the Dublin Grille. He must have said something to Red, or maybe Red just knew instinctively that he had to show his colors, but all of a sudden these two are chain-whipping each other. No, that’s not quite right, Red is wailing, flailing, nailing, chain-whipping this other guy mercilessly, worst, if that is possible. The guy, after a few minutes, was left in a pool of blood on the street, ambulance ready. And Red just walked way, just kind of sauntering away.
Of course that is not the end of the Red story. Needless to say, no work, no wanna work Red had to have coin, dough, not just for the pinball machine, cigarettes, and soda, hell, that was nothing. But for the up-keep on his Chevy (Chevvies then being the “boss” car, and not just among corner boys either), and that stream of ever-loving blond honeys, real or imagined, he escorted into the seashore night. So said corner boys did their midnight creep around the area grabbing this and that to bring in a little dough. Eventually Red “graduated” to armed robberies when the overhead grew too much for little midnight creeps, and graduated to one of the branches of the state pen, more than once. Strangely, his end came, although I only heard about this second hand, after a shoot-out with the cops down South after he tried to rob some White Hen convenience store. There is some kind of moral there, although I will be damned if I can figure it out. Red, thanks for those free games though.
Saturday, April 02, 2011
From Spartacist Canada-Students Must Ally With the Working Class
Markin comment:
I have been placing posts that link the current world-wide student struggles over budgets issues, war, democracy, etc. up with the working class struggle. One of the great lessons learned from the 1960s anti-war struggles was just this point. Learn it students, youths, and, yes, old-timey radicals too!
*****
Spartacist Canada No. 168
Spring 2011
Students Must Ally With the Working Class
SYC Speaker at Toronto Holiday Appeal
(Young Spartacus pages)
The following speech was given by comrade Orlando Martin of the Toronto Spartacus Youth Club at the January 28 Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in Toronto. It has been slightly edited for publication.
There is a video circulating online of one of many instances of state repression during the G20 summit in Toronto. In it, after forcefully grabbing a young protester, a cop demands to search his backpack. The protester, innocently expecting better treatment, says that as a Canadian, he has the right to refuse the search. So the cop simply says, “This ain’t Canada right now.”
What is Canada but a capitalist state and, as such, a dictatorship of the capitalist class against the working class, against the oppressed, and against anybody who dares to oppose capitalism? The G20 events were just one more example of what the Canadian capitalist state really is. The arrest of 1,100 people, the cop violence, the racist abuse of minorities, the singling out of Québécois protesters, the humiliation of women, gays and lesbians as well as the threats of rape perfectly mirror the racism, chauvinist oppression and violence that are integral to capitalist society, here in Canada and in every capitalist country.
Comrade V.I. Lenin, the great leader of the Russian Revolution, explained in The State and Revolution that “the state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.” Its aim is the creation of “order,” which legalizes and perpetuates the oppression of one class by another. Against every other so-called Marxist or leftist group that explicitly or implicitly calls to reform the capitalist state, we emphasize that the working class needs to smash it.
A year has gone by since our last Holiday Appeal—another year of police brutality and repression against leftists. Two years ago the cops killed Fredy Villanueva in Montreal. Last year in Toronto, Junior Manon, an 18-year-old Latino youth, was brutally killed after being stopped by cops for a minor traffic offence. As expected, the Ontario Special Investigations Unit has cleared all officers of any wrongdoing. While minority youth are outraged and demand justice, they need to understand that capitalism cannot deliver justice to the working class and oppressed. Calls to jail killer cops, for the community to control the police, or for independent public inquiries, fool the working class into thinking that the capitalist state can be reformed. Even if these calls were realized they would do nothing to end the police violence that is endemic to capitalism. Junior Manon and other victims of racist cop terror will only get justice when the working class overthrows capitalism.
And then there is the brutal police violence against anti-G20 protesters in Toronto last year. What did the left do in response? Jack Layton, speaking of the smashed windows, railed that “the vandalism is criminal and totally unacceptable.” The radical liberal Naomi Klein called on the cops to “do your goddamn job,” which of course means more police brutality. And how about the fake-Marxists? Here is one example: the group Fightback, which claims to be the Marxist voice of labour and youth and also claims that cops are “workers in uniform,” ran an event on June 30 that featured speakers who actually praised the cops!
Let me tell you what we did. A day after the mass arrests, on June 28, we wrote and widely circulated a protest statement that denounced in the strongest terms the brutal police violence unleashed on protesters and defended all victims of state repression, including the anarchists in the Black Bloc, despite political differences (see “Protest Mass Arrests of G20 Protesters!” SC No. 166, Fall 2010). We wrote: “An injury to one is an injury to all! Free all the protesters—Drop the charges!” This is what Marxists do, and what non-sectarian defense work means.
While smashing bank windows and burning police cars are not crimes from the standpoint of the working class, such isolated acts are counterposed to the Marxist fight to mobilize the social power of a class-conscious proletariat to sweep away capitalism. At bottom, anarchism is a form of radical democratic idealism and has proven to be a class-collaborationist obstacle to the liberation of the oppressed.
State repression against G20 leftists was vivid at the University of Toronto campus. During a major raid on the U of T Graduate Student Union building, at least 50 G20 protesters from Quebec were arrested. Last September, political science student and activist Jaroslava Avila was arrested by ten plainclothes cops on campus. These arrests underline the Spartacus Youth Club’s call to get cops off campus and the necessity for young radicals to take up this demand.
What did the left on campus do after the G20 mass arrests? At the annual Clubs Fair, the U of T student bureaucrats allowed cops to have a table as if nothing had happened a few weeks before. What did we do? As soon as we saw this, we made a placard on the spot that read: “The SYC Says: Cops Off Campus!” We went right in front of the tables of the NDP and the reformists, denounced them for their faith in the capitalist state and sloganeered against state repression. The student bureaucrats and Ontario Public Interest Research Group organized a little rally the month after to appeal to the university administration to renounce the cop presence. The reality is that universities under capitalism are class-biased institutions that play a role that serves the interests of capital, not the interests of workers and the oppressed. No appeal to the administration is going to stop the repression of activists on campus. We call to abolish the administration! For student/teacher/worker control of the universities! Free, quality education for all requires the overthrow of capitalism through a workers revolution.
The Spartacus Youth Club also protests the witchhunting, censorship and repeated intimidation of pro-Palestinian students on campuses. Recently, our comrades in Vancouver issued a protest statement against a vicious campaign by Zionists and student bureaucrats to vilify defenders of Palestinians as “terrorists” and “anti-Semites” (see “Down With Anti-Palestinian Witchhunt at UBC!” page 6). Each spring, organizers of Israeli Apartheid Week also face smears of “anti-Semitism.” We say, Defend the Palestinians! Hands off their supporters!
Our message to the youth is to use their fighting spirit to ally with the working class, the only class able to emancipate itself and all the oppressed. Students by themselves cannot change the material conditions that create their oppression but the working class has the objective interest and power to overthrow capitalism.
In order to build the next Bolshevik party that will smash the capitalist state, end racist cop terror and open the road to an egalitarian communist future, we in the Spartacus Youth Club seek to win a new generation of youth to the fight for world socialist revolution. We are the training ground for future revolutionaries. Join us and be part of the struggle!
I have been placing posts that link the current world-wide student struggles over budgets issues, war, democracy, etc. up with the working class struggle. One of the great lessons learned from the 1960s anti-war struggles was just this point. Learn it students, youths, and, yes, old-timey radicals too!
*****
Spartacist Canada No. 168
Spring 2011
Students Must Ally With the Working Class
SYC Speaker at Toronto Holiday Appeal
(Young Spartacus pages)
The following speech was given by comrade Orlando Martin of the Toronto Spartacus Youth Club at the January 28 Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in Toronto. It has been slightly edited for publication.
There is a video circulating online of one of many instances of state repression during the G20 summit in Toronto. In it, after forcefully grabbing a young protester, a cop demands to search his backpack. The protester, innocently expecting better treatment, says that as a Canadian, he has the right to refuse the search. So the cop simply says, “This ain’t Canada right now.”
What is Canada but a capitalist state and, as such, a dictatorship of the capitalist class against the working class, against the oppressed, and against anybody who dares to oppose capitalism? The G20 events were just one more example of what the Canadian capitalist state really is. The arrest of 1,100 people, the cop violence, the racist abuse of minorities, the singling out of Québécois protesters, the humiliation of women, gays and lesbians as well as the threats of rape perfectly mirror the racism, chauvinist oppression and violence that are integral to capitalist society, here in Canada and in every capitalist country.
Comrade V.I. Lenin, the great leader of the Russian Revolution, explained in The State and Revolution that “the state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.” Its aim is the creation of “order,” which legalizes and perpetuates the oppression of one class by another. Against every other so-called Marxist or leftist group that explicitly or implicitly calls to reform the capitalist state, we emphasize that the working class needs to smash it.
A year has gone by since our last Holiday Appeal—another year of police brutality and repression against leftists. Two years ago the cops killed Fredy Villanueva in Montreal. Last year in Toronto, Junior Manon, an 18-year-old Latino youth, was brutally killed after being stopped by cops for a minor traffic offence. As expected, the Ontario Special Investigations Unit has cleared all officers of any wrongdoing. While minority youth are outraged and demand justice, they need to understand that capitalism cannot deliver justice to the working class and oppressed. Calls to jail killer cops, for the community to control the police, or for independent public inquiries, fool the working class into thinking that the capitalist state can be reformed. Even if these calls were realized they would do nothing to end the police violence that is endemic to capitalism. Junior Manon and other victims of racist cop terror will only get justice when the working class overthrows capitalism.
And then there is the brutal police violence against anti-G20 protesters in Toronto last year. What did the left do in response? Jack Layton, speaking of the smashed windows, railed that “the vandalism is criminal and totally unacceptable.” The radical liberal Naomi Klein called on the cops to “do your goddamn job,” which of course means more police brutality. And how about the fake-Marxists? Here is one example: the group Fightback, which claims to be the Marxist voice of labour and youth and also claims that cops are “workers in uniform,” ran an event on June 30 that featured speakers who actually praised the cops!
Let me tell you what we did. A day after the mass arrests, on June 28, we wrote and widely circulated a protest statement that denounced in the strongest terms the brutal police violence unleashed on protesters and defended all victims of state repression, including the anarchists in the Black Bloc, despite political differences (see “Protest Mass Arrests of G20 Protesters!” SC No. 166, Fall 2010). We wrote: “An injury to one is an injury to all! Free all the protesters—Drop the charges!” This is what Marxists do, and what non-sectarian defense work means.
While smashing bank windows and burning police cars are not crimes from the standpoint of the working class, such isolated acts are counterposed to the Marxist fight to mobilize the social power of a class-conscious proletariat to sweep away capitalism. At bottom, anarchism is a form of radical democratic idealism and has proven to be a class-collaborationist obstacle to the liberation of the oppressed.
State repression against G20 leftists was vivid at the University of Toronto campus. During a major raid on the U of T Graduate Student Union building, at least 50 G20 protesters from Quebec were arrested. Last September, political science student and activist Jaroslava Avila was arrested by ten plainclothes cops on campus. These arrests underline the Spartacus Youth Club’s call to get cops off campus and the necessity for young radicals to take up this demand.
What did the left on campus do after the G20 mass arrests? At the annual Clubs Fair, the U of T student bureaucrats allowed cops to have a table as if nothing had happened a few weeks before. What did we do? As soon as we saw this, we made a placard on the spot that read: “The SYC Says: Cops Off Campus!” We went right in front of the tables of the NDP and the reformists, denounced them for their faith in the capitalist state and sloganeered against state repression. The student bureaucrats and Ontario Public Interest Research Group organized a little rally the month after to appeal to the university administration to renounce the cop presence. The reality is that universities under capitalism are class-biased institutions that play a role that serves the interests of capital, not the interests of workers and the oppressed. No appeal to the administration is going to stop the repression of activists on campus. We call to abolish the administration! For student/teacher/worker control of the universities! Free, quality education for all requires the overthrow of capitalism through a workers revolution.
The Spartacus Youth Club also protests the witchhunting, censorship and repeated intimidation of pro-Palestinian students on campuses. Recently, our comrades in Vancouver issued a protest statement against a vicious campaign by Zionists and student bureaucrats to vilify defenders of Palestinians as “terrorists” and “anti-Semites” (see “Down With Anti-Palestinian Witchhunt at UBC!” page 6). Each spring, organizers of Israeli Apartheid Week also face smears of “anti-Semitism.” We say, Defend the Palestinians! Hands off their supporters!
Our message to the youth is to use their fighting spirit to ally with the working class, the only class able to emancipate itself and all the oppressed. Students by themselves cannot change the material conditions that create their oppression but the working class has the objective interest and power to overthrow capitalism.
In order to build the next Bolshevik party that will smash the capitalist state, end racist cop terror and open the road to an egalitarian communist future, we in the Spartacus Youth Club seek to win a new generation of youth to the fight for world socialist revolution. We are the training ground for future revolutionaries. Join us and be part of the struggle!
Even New York Times Columnists Get It- Bob Herbert's Column On Libya- Our Call- Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attacks!
Click on the headline to link to a The New York Times Bob Herbert column on the madness of the American imperialist-led Libya attacks.
Markin comment:
I don't usually post things from the key mouthpiece of the American imperium, The New York Times, at least not for anything other than information but this one sets just the right tone.
Markin comment:
I don't usually post things from the key mouthpiece of the American imperium, The New York Times, at least not for anything other than information but this one sets just the right tone.
Once Again, When Be-Bop Bopped In The Doo Wop Night- “Street Corner Serenade II”- A CD Review
***Once Again, When Be-Bop Bopped In The Doo Wop Night- “Street Corner Serenade II”- A CD Review
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rHqV3YMTP8&feature=related
Click on the headline to link ot a YouTube film clip of the Harptones performing Life Is But A Dream.
CD Review
The Rock ‘n’ Roll, Era: Street Corner Serenade, Volume II, Time-Life Music, 1992
Sure I have plenty to say, as I mentioned in a review of Volume One of this two volume Street Corner Serenade set, about early rock ‘n’ roll, now called the classic rock period in the musicology hall of fame. And within that say I have spent a little time, not enough, considering its effect on us on the doo-wop branch of the genre. Part of the reason, obviously, is that back in those mid-1950s jail-breakout days I did not (and I do not believe that any other eleven and twelve year olds did either), distinguish between let’s say rockabilly-back-beat drive rock, black-based rock centered on a heavy rhythm and blues backdrop, and the almost instrument-less (or maybe a soft piano or guitar backdrop) group harmonics that drove doo-wop. All I knew was that it was not my parents’ music, not close, and that they got nervous, very nervous, anytime it was played out loud in their presence. Fortunately, some sainted, sanctified, techno-guru developed the iPod of that primitive era, the battery-driven transistor radio. No big deal, technology-wise by today’s standards, but get this, you could place it near your ear and have your own private out loud without parental scuffling in the background. Yes, sainted, sanctified techno-guru. No question.
What doo-wop did though down in our old-time working class neighborhood, and again it was not so much by revelation as by trial and error is allow us to be in tune with the music of our generation without having to spend a lot of money on instruments or a studio or any such. Where the hell would we have gotten the dough for such things when papas were out of work, or were one step away from that dreaded unemployment line, and there was trouble just keeping the wolves from the door? Sure, some kids, some kids like my “home boy” (no, not a term we used at the time) elementary school boyhood friend Billie, William James Bradley, were crazy to put together cover bands with electric guitars (rented occasionally), and dreams. Or maybe go wild with a school piano a la Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, or Fats Domino but those were maniac aficionados. Even Billie though, when the deal went down, especially after hearing Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers on Why Do Fools Fall In Love was mad to do the doo-wop and make his fame and fortune.
The cover art on this compilation shows a group of young black kids, black guys, who look like they are doing their doo wop on some big city street corner. And that makes sense reflecting the New York City-derived birth of doo-wop and that the majority of doo-wop groups that we heard on AM radio were black. But the city, the poor sections of the city, white or black, was not the only place where moneyless guys and gals were harmonizing, hoping, hoping maybe beyond hope to be discovered and make more than just a 1950s musical jail-breakout. Moreover, this cover art also shows, and shows vividly, what a lot of us guys were trying to do-impress girls (and maybe visa-versa for girl doo-woppers but they can tell their own stories).
Yes, truth to tell, it was about impressing girls that drove many of us, Billie included, christ maybe Billie most of all, to mix and match harmonies. And you know you did too (except girls just switch around what I just said). Ya, four or five guys just hanging around the back door of the elementary school on hot summer nights, nothing better to do, no dough to do it, maybe a little feisty because of that, and start up a few tunes. Billie, who actually did have some vocal musical talent, usually sang lead, and the rest of us, well, doo-wopped. What do you think we would do? We knew nothing of keys and pauses, of time, pitch, or reading music we just improvised. (And I kept my changing to teen-ager, slightly off-key, voice on the low.) Whether we did it well or poorly, guess what, as the hot day turned into humid night, and the old sun went down just over the hills, first a couple of girls, then a couple more, and then a whole bevy (nice word, right?) of them came and got kind of swoony and moony. And swoony and moony was just fine. And we all innocent, innocent dream, innocent when we dreamed, make our virginal moves. But, mainly, we doo-wopped in the be-bop mid-1950s night. And a few of the songs in this doo-wop compilation could be heard in that airless night.
The stick outs here on Volume Two which is not quite as good as the first volume overall reflecting, I think, that like in other genres, there were really only so many doo-wop songs that have withstood the test of time: Life Is But A Dream (which with my voice really changing I kept very, very low on), The Harptones; Gloria ( a little louder from me on this one), The Cadillacs; Six Nights A Week (not their best 16 Candles is), The Crests: and, A Kiss From Your Lips, The Flamingos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rHqV3YMTP8&feature=related
Click on the headline to link ot a YouTube film clip of the Harptones performing Life Is But A Dream.
CD Review
The Rock ‘n’ Roll, Era: Street Corner Serenade, Volume II, Time-Life Music, 1992
Sure I have plenty to say, as I mentioned in a review of Volume One of this two volume Street Corner Serenade set, about early rock ‘n’ roll, now called the classic rock period in the musicology hall of fame. And within that say I have spent a little time, not enough, considering its effect on us on the doo-wop branch of the genre. Part of the reason, obviously, is that back in those mid-1950s jail-breakout days I did not (and I do not believe that any other eleven and twelve year olds did either), distinguish between let’s say rockabilly-back-beat drive rock, black-based rock centered on a heavy rhythm and blues backdrop, and the almost instrument-less (or maybe a soft piano or guitar backdrop) group harmonics that drove doo-wop. All I knew was that it was not my parents’ music, not close, and that they got nervous, very nervous, anytime it was played out loud in their presence. Fortunately, some sainted, sanctified, techno-guru developed the iPod of that primitive era, the battery-driven transistor radio. No big deal, technology-wise by today’s standards, but get this, you could place it near your ear and have your own private out loud without parental scuffling in the background. Yes, sainted, sanctified techno-guru. No question.
What doo-wop did though down in our old-time working class neighborhood, and again it was not so much by revelation as by trial and error is allow us to be in tune with the music of our generation without having to spend a lot of money on instruments or a studio or any such. Where the hell would we have gotten the dough for such things when papas were out of work, or were one step away from that dreaded unemployment line, and there was trouble just keeping the wolves from the door? Sure, some kids, some kids like my “home boy” (no, not a term we used at the time) elementary school boyhood friend Billie, William James Bradley, were crazy to put together cover bands with electric guitars (rented occasionally), and dreams. Or maybe go wild with a school piano a la Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, or Fats Domino but those were maniac aficionados. Even Billie though, when the deal went down, especially after hearing Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers on Why Do Fools Fall In Love was mad to do the doo-wop and make his fame and fortune.
The cover art on this compilation shows a group of young black kids, black guys, who look like they are doing their doo wop on some big city street corner. And that makes sense reflecting the New York City-derived birth of doo-wop and that the majority of doo-wop groups that we heard on AM radio were black. But the city, the poor sections of the city, white or black, was not the only place where moneyless guys and gals were harmonizing, hoping, hoping maybe beyond hope to be discovered and make more than just a 1950s musical jail-breakout. Moreover, this cover art also shows, and shows vividly, what a lot of us guys were trying to do-impress girls (and maybe visa-versa for girl doo-woppers but they can tell their own stories).
Yes, truth to tell, it was about impressing girls that drove many of us, Billie included, christ maybe Billie most of all, to mix and match harmonies. And you know you did too (except girls just switch around what I just said). Ya, four or five guys just hanging around the back door of the elementary school on hot summer nights, nothing better to do, no dough to do it, maybe a little feisty because of that, and start up a few tunes. Billie, who actually did have some vocal musical talent, usually sang lead, and the rest of us, well, doo-wopped. What do you think we would do? We knew nothing of keys and pauses, of time, pitch, or reading music we just improvised. (And I kept my changing to teen-ager, slightly off-key, voice on the low.) Whether we did it well or poorly, guess what, as the hot day turned into humid night, and the old sun went down just over the hills, first a couple of girls, then a couple more, and then a whole bevy (nice word, right?) of them came and got kind of swoony and moony. And swoony and moony was just fine. And we all innocent, innocent dream, innocent when we dreamed, make our virginal moves. But, mainly, we doo-wopped in the be-bop mid-1950s night. And a few of the songs in this doo-wop compilation could be heard in that airless night.
The stick outs here on Volume Two which is not quite as good as the first volume overall reflecting, I think, that like in other genres, there were really only so many doo-wop songs that have withstood the test of time: Life Is But A Dream (which with my voice really changing I kept very, very low on), The Harptones; Gloria ( a little louder from me on this one), The Cadillacs; Six Nights A Week (not their best 16 Candles is), The Crests: and, A Kiss From Your Lips, The Flamingos.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
March Is Women’s History Month-Honor Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg- The Rose Of The Revolution
Click on the headline to link to the Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archives.
March Is Women’s History Month
Markin comment:
Usually I place the name of the martyred Polish communist revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, in her correct place of honor along with Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht when we of the leftist international working class movement honor our historic leaders each January. This year I have decided to, additionally, honor the Rose of the Revolution during Women’s History Month because, although in life she never fought on any woman-limited basis in the class struggle, right this minute we are in need, desperate need of models for today’s women and men to look to. Can there be any better choice? To ask the question is to give the answer. All honor to the memory of the Rose of the Revolution- Rosa Luxemburg.
*******
Rosa Luxemburg
Peace Utopias
[Abstract]
(1911)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First Published: Leipziger Volkzeitung, May 6 and 8, 1911.
Source: This work was reprinted in a shorter form in Die Internationale, January 1926. A translation of the latter piece was made in The Labour Monthly, July 1926, pp.421-428, from which this version is taken. We earnestly would like to print the full copy, instead of this abstract version, which is the best we’ve been able to find hitherto.
Translated: (from the German) ?
Transcription/Markup: Ted Crawford/Brian Baggins.
Copyleft: Luxemburg Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2004.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WHAT is our task in the question of peace? It does not consist merely in vigorously demonstrating at all times the love of peace of the Social Democrats; but first and foremost our task is to make clear to the masses of people the nature of militarism and sharply and clearly to bring out the differences in principle between the standpoint of the Social Democrats and that of the bourgeois peace enthusiasts.
Wherein does this difference lie? Certainly not merely in the fact that the bourgeois apostles of peace are relying on the influence of fine words, while we do not depend on words alone. Our very points of departure are diametrically opposed: the friends of peace in bourgeois circles believe that world peace and disarmament can be realised within the frame-work of the present social order, whereas we, who base ourselves on the materialistic conception of history and on scientific socialism, are convinced that militarism can only be abolished from the world with the destruction of the capitalist class state. From this follows the mutual opposition of our tactics in propagating the idea of peace. The bourgeois friends of peace are endeavouring – and from their point of view this is perfectly logical and explicable – to invent all sorts of “practical” projects for gradually restraining militarism, and are naturally inclined to consider every outward apparent sign of a tendency toward peace as the genuine article, to take every expression of the ruling diplomacy in this vein at its word, to exaggerate it into a basis for earnest activity. The Social Democrats, on the other hand, must consider it their duty in this matter, just as in all matters of social criticism, to expose the bourgeois attempts to restrain militarism as pitiful half-measures, and the expressions of such sentiments on the part of the governing circles as diplomatic make-believe, and to oppose the bourgeois claims and pretences with the ruthless analysis of capitalist reality.
From this same standpoint the tasks of the Social Democrats with regard to the declarations of the kind made by the British Government can only be to show up the idea of a partial limitation of armaments, in all its impracticability, as a half-measure, and to endeavour to make it clear to the people that militarism is closely linked up with colonial politics, with tariff politics, and with international politics, and that therefore the present Nations, if they really seriously and honestly wish to call a halt on competitive armaments, would have to begin by disarming in the commercial political field, give up colonial predatory campaigns and the international politics of spheres of influence in all parts of the world – in a word, in their foreign as well as in their domestic politics would have to do the exact contrary of everything which the nature of the present politics of a capitalist class state demands. And thus would be clearly explained what constitutes the kernel of the Social Democratic conception, that militarism in both its forms – as war and as armed peace – is a legitimate child, a logical result of capitalism, which can only be overcome with the destruction of capitalism, and that hence whoever honestly desires world peace and liberation from the tremendous burden of armaments must also desire Socialism. Only in this way can real Social Democratic enlightenment and recruiting be carried on in connection with the armaments debate.
This work, however, will be rendered somewhat difficult and the attitude of the Social Democrats will become obscure and vacillating if, by some strange exchange of roles, our Party tries on the contrary to convince the bourgeois State that it can quite well limit armaments and bring about peace and that it can do this from its own standpoint, from that of a capitalist class State.
It has until now been the pride and the firm scientific basis of our Party, that not only the general lines of our programme but also the slogans of our practical everyday policy were not invented out of odds and ends as something desirable, but that in all things we relied on our knowledge of the tendencies of social development and made the objective lines of this development the basis of our attitude. For us the determining factor until now has not been the possibility from the standpoint of the relation of forces within the State, but the possibility from the standpoint of the tendencies of development of society. The limitation of armaments, the retrenchment of militarism, does not coincide with the further development of international capitalism. Only those who believe in the mitigation and blunting of class antagonisms, and in the checking of the economic anarchy of capitalism, can believe in the possibility of these international conflicts allowing themselves to be slackened, to be mitigated and wiped out. For the international antagonisms of the capitalist states are but the complement of class antagonisms, and the world political anarchy but the reverse side of the anarchic system of production of capitalism. Both can grow only together and be overcome only together. “A little order and peace” is, therefore, just as impossible, just as much a petty-bourgeois Utopia, with regard to the capitalist world market as to world politics, and with regard to the limitation of crises as to the limitation of armaments.
Let us cast a glance at the events of the last fifteen years of international development. Where do they show any tendency toward peace, toward disarmament, toward settlement of conflicts by arbitration?
During these fifteen years we had this: in 1895 the war between Japan and China, which is the prelude to the East Asiatic period of imperialism; in 1898 the war between Spain and the United States; in 1899-1902 the British Boer War in South Africa; in 1900 the campaign of the European powers in China; in 1904 the Russo-Japanese War; in 1904-07 the German Herero War in Africa; and then there was also the military intervention of Russia in 1908 in Persia, at the present moment the military intervention of France in Morocco, without mentioning the incessant colonial skirmishes in Asia and in Africa. Hence the bare facts alone show that for fifteen years hardly a year has gone by without some war activity.
But more important still is the after effect of these wars. The war with China was followed in Japan by a military reorganisation which made it possible ten years later to undertake the war against Russia and which made Japan the predominant military power in the Pacific. The Boer War resulted in a military reorganisation of England, the strengthening of her armed forces on land. The war with Spain inspired the United States to reorganise its navy and moved it to enter colonial politics with imperialist interests in Asia, and thus was created the germ of the antagonism of interests between the United States and Japan in the Pacific. The Chinese campaign was accompanied in Germany by a thorough military reorganisation, the great Navy Law of 1900, which marks the beginning of the competition of Germany with England on the sea and the sharpening of the antagonisms between these two nations.
But there is another and extremely important factor besides the social and political awakening of the hinterlands, of the colonies and the “spheres of interest,” to independent life. The revolution in Turkey, in Persia, the revolutionary ferment in China, in India, in Egypt, in Arabia, in Morocco, in Mexico, all these are also starting points of world political antagonisms, tensions, military activities and armaments. It was just during the course of this fifteen years that the points of friction in international politics have increased to an unparalleled degree, a number of new States stepped into active struggle on the international stage, all the Great Powers underwent a thorough military reorganisation. The antagonisms, in consequence of all these events, have reached an acuteness never known before, and the process is going further and further, since on the one hand the ferment in the Orient is increasing from day to day, and on the other every settlement between the military powers unavoidably becomes the starting point for fresh conflicts. The Reval Entente between Russia, Great Britain and France, which Jaurs hailed as a guarantee for world peace, led to the sharpening of the crisis in the Balkans, accelerated the outbreak of the Turkish Revolution, encouraged Russia to military action in Persia and led to a rapprochement between Turkey and Germany which, in its turn, rendered the Anglo-German antagonisms more acute. The Potsdam agreement resulted in the sharpening of the crisis in China and the Russo-Japanese agreement had the same effect.
Therefore, on a mere reckoning with facts, to refuse to realise that these facts give rise to anything rather than a mitigation of the international conflicts, of any sort of disposition toward world peace, is wilfully to close one’s eyes.
In view of all this, how is it possible to speak of tendencies toward peace in bourgeois development which are supposed to neutralise and overcome its tendencies toward war? Wherein are they expressed?
In Sir Edward Grey’s declaration and that of the French Parliament? In the “armament weariness” of the bourgeoisie? But the middle and petty bourgeois sections of the bourgeoisie have always been groaning at the burden of militarism, just as they groan at the devastation of free competition, at the economic crises, at the lack of conscience shown in stock exchange speculations, at the terrorism of the cartels and trusts. The tyranny of the trust magnates in America has even called forth a rebellion of broad masses of the people and a wearisome legal procedure against the trusts on the part of the State authorities. Do the Social Democrats interpret this as a symptom of the beginning of the limitation of trust development, or have they not rather a sympathetic shrug of the shoulders for that petty-bourgeois rebellion and a scornful smile for that State campaign? The “dialectic” of the peace tendency of capitalist development, which was supposed to have cut across its war tendency and to have overcome it, simply confirms the old truth that the roses of capitalist profit-making and class domination also have thorns for the bourgeoisie, which it prefers to wear as long as possible round its suffering head, in spite of all pain and woe, rather than get rid of it along with the head on the advice of the Social Democrats.
To explain this to the masses, ruthlessly to scatter all illusions with regard to attempts made at peace on the part of the bourgeoisie and to declare the proletarian revolution as the first and only step toward world peace – that is the task of the Social Democrats with regard to all disarmament trickeries, whether they are invented in Petersburg, London or Berlin.
II
The Utopianism of the standpoint which expects an era of peace and retrenchment of militarism in the present social order is plainly revealed in the fact that it is having recourse to project making. For it is typical of Utopian strivings that, in order to demonstrate their practicability, they hatch “practical” recipes with the greatest possible details. To this also belongs the project of the “United States of Europe” as a basis for the limitation of international militarism.
“We support all efforts,” said Comrade Ledebour in his speech in the Reichstag on April 3, “which aim at getting rid of the threadbare pretexts for the incessant war armaments. We demand the economic and political union of the European states. I am firmly convinced that, while it is certain to come during the period of Socialism, it can also come to pass before that time, that we will live to see the UNITED STATES OF EUROPE, as confronted at present by the business competition of the United States of America. At least we demand that capitalist society, that capitalist statesmen, in the interests of capitalist development in Europe itself, in order that Europe will later not be completely submerged in world competition, prepare for this union of Europe into the United States of Europe.”
And in the Neue Zeit of April 28, Comrade Kautsky writes:
... For a lasting duration of peace, which banishes the ghost of war forever, there is only one way to-day: the union of the states of European civilisation into a league with a common commercial policy, a league parliament, a league government and a league army – the formation of the United States of Europe. Were this to succeed, then a tremendous step would be achieved. Such a United States would possess such a superiority of forces that without any war they could compel all the other nations which do not voluntarily join them to liquidate their armies and give up their fleets. But in that case all necessity for armaments for the new United States themselves would disappear. They would be in a position not only to relinquish all further armaments, give up the standing army and all aggressive weapons on the sea, which we are demanding to-day, but even give up all means of defence, the militia system itself. Thus the era of permanent peace would surely begin.
Plausible as the idea of the United States of Europe as a peace arrangement may seem to some at first glance, it has on closer examination not the least thing in common with the method of thought and the standpoint of social democracy.
As adherents of the materialist conception of history, we have always adopted the standpoint that the modern States as political structures are not artificial products of a creative phantasy, like, for instance, the Duchy of Warsaw of Napoleonic memory, but historical products of economic development. But what economic foundation lies at the bottom of the idea of a European State Federation? Europe, it is true, is a geographical and, within certain limits, an historical cultural conception. But the idea of Europe as an economic unit contradicts capitalist development in two ways. First of all there exist within Europe among the capitalist States – and will so long as these exist – the most violent struggles of competition and antagonisms, and secondly the European States can no longer get along economically without the non-European countries. As suppliers of foodstuffs, raw materials and wares, also as consumers of the same, the other parts of the world are linked in a thousand ways with Europe. At the present stage of development of the world market and of world economy, the conception of Europe as an isolated economic unit is a sterile concoction of the brain. Europe no more forms a special unit within world economy than does Asia or America.
And if the idea of a European union in the economic sense has long been outstripped, this is no less the case in the political sense.
The times when the centre of gravity of political development and the crystallising agent of capitalist contradictions lay on the European continent, are long gone by. To-day Europe is only a link in the tangled chain of international connections and contradictions. And what is of decisive significance – European antagonisms themselves no longer play their role on the European continent but in all parts of the world and on all the seas.
Only were one suddenly to lose sight of all these happenings and manoeuvres, and to transfer oneself back to the blissful times of the European concert of powers, could one say, for instance, that for forty years we have had uninterrupted peace. This conception, which considers only events on the European continent, does not notice that the very reason why we have had no war in Europe for decades is the fact that international antagonisms have grown infinitely beyond the narrow confines of the European continent, and that European problems and interests are now fought out on the world seas and in the by-corners of Europe.
Hence the “United States of Europe” is an idea which runs directly counter both economically and politically to the course of development, and which takes absolutely no account of the events of the last quarter of a century.
That an idea so little in accord with the tendency of development can fundamentally offer no progressive solution in spite of all radical disguises is confirmed also by the fate of the slogan of the “United States of Europe.” Every time that bourgeois politicians have championed the idea of Europeanism, of the union of European States, it has been with an open or concealed point directed against the “yellow peril,” the “dark continent,” against the “inferior races,” in short, it has always been an imperialist abortion.
And now if we, as Social Democrats, were to try to fill this old skin with fresh and apparently revolutionary wine, then it must be said that the advantages would not be on our side but on that of the bourgeoisie. Things have their own objective logic. And the solution of the European union within the capitalist social order can objectively, in the economic sense, mean only a tariff war with America, and in the political sense only a colonial race war. The Chinese campaign of the united European regiments, with the World Field Marshal Waldersee at the head, and the gospel of the Hun as our standard – that is the actual and not the fantastic, the only possible expression of the “European State Federation” in the present social order.
March Is Women’s History Month
Markin comment:
Usually I place the name of the martyred Polish communist revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, in her correct place of honor along with Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht when we of the leftist international working class movement honor our historic leaders each January. This year I have decided to, additionally, honor the Rose of the Revolution during Women’s History Month because, although in life she never fought on any woman-limited basis in the class struggle, right this minute we are in need, desperate need of models for today’s women and men to look to. Can there be any better choice? To ask the question is to give the answer. All honor to the memory of the Rose of the Revolution- Rosa Luxemburg.
*******
Rosa Luxemburg
Peace Utopias
[Abstract]
(1911)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First Published: Leipziger Volkzeitung, May 6 and 8, 1911.
Source: This work was reprinted in a shorter form in Die Internationale, January 1926. A translation of the latter piece was made in The Labour Monthly, July 1926, pp.421-428, from which this version is taken. We earnestly would like to print the full copy, instead of this abstract version, which is the best we’ve been able to find hitherto.
Translated: (from the German) ?
Transcription/Markup: Ted Crawford/Brian Baggins.
Copyleft: Luxemburg Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2004.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WHAT is our task in the question of peace? It does not consist merely in vigorously demonstrating at all times the love of peace of the Social Democrats; but first and foremost our task is to make clear to the masses of people the nature of militarism and sharply and clearly to bring out the differences in principle between the standpoint of the Social Democrats and that of the bourgeois peace enthusiasts.
Wherein does this difference lie? Certainly not merely in the fact that the bourgeois apostles of peace are relying on the influence of fine words, while we do not depend on words alone. Our very points of departure are diametrically opposed: the friends of peace in bourgeois circles believe that world peace and disarmament can be realised within the frame-work of the present social order, whereas we, who base ourselves on the materialistic conception of history and on scientific socialism, are convinced that militarism can only be abolished from the world with the destruction of the capitalist class state. From this follows the mutual opposition of our tactics in propagating the idea of peace. The bourgeois friends of peace are endeavouring – and from their point of view this is perfectly logical and explicable – to invent all sorts of “practical” projects for gradually restraining militarism, and are naturally inclined to consider every outward apparent sign of a tendency toward peace as the genuine article, to take every expression of the ruling diplomacy in this vein at its word, to exaggerate it into a basis for earnest activity. The Social Democrats, on the other hand, must consider it their duty in this matter, just as in all matters of social criticism, to expose the bourgeois attempts to restrain militarism as pitiful half-measures, and the expressions of such sentiments on the part of the governing circles as diplomatic make-believe, and to oppose the bourgeois claims and pretences with the ruthless analysis of capitalist reality.
From this same standpoint the tasks of the Social Democrats with regard to the declarations of the kind made by the British Government can only be to show up the idea of a partial limitation of armaments, in all its impracticability, as a half-measure, and to endeavour to make it clear to the people that militarism is closely linked up with colonial politics, with tariff politics, and with international politics, and that therefore the present Nations, if they really seriously and honestly wish to call a halt on competitive armaments, would have to begin by disarming in the commercial political field, give up colonial predatory campaigns and the international politics of spheres of influence in all parts of the world – in a word, in their foreign as well as in their domestic politics would have to do the exact contrary of everything which the nature of the present politics of a capitalist class state demands. And thus would be clearly explained what constitutes the kernel of the Social Democratic conception, that militarism in both its forms – as war and as armed peace – is a legitimate child, a logical result of capitalism, which can only be overcome with the destruction of capitalism, and that hence whoever honestly desires world peace and liberation from the tremendous burden of armaments must also desire Socialism. Only in this way can real Social Democratic enlightenment and recruiting be carried on in connection with the armaments debate.
This work, however, will be rendered somewhat difficult and the attitude of the Social Democrats will become obscure and vacillating if, by some strange exchange of roles, our Party tries on the contrary to convince the bourgeois State that it can quite well limit armaments and bring about peace and that it can do this from its own standpoint, from that of a capitalist class State.
It has until now been the pride and the firm scientific basis of our Party, that not only the general lines of our programme but also the slogans of our practical everyday policy were not invented out of odds and ends as something desirable, but that in all things we relied on our knowledge of the tendencies of social development and made the objective lines of this development the basis of our attitude. For us the determining factor until now has not been the possibility from the standpoint of the relation of forces within the State, but the possibility from the standpoint of the tendencies of development of society. The limitation of armaments, the retrenchment of militarism, does not coincide with the further development of international capitalism. Only those who believe in the mitigation and blunting of class antagonisms, and in the checking of the economic anarchy of capitalism, can believe in the possibility of these international conflicts allowing themselves to be slackened, to be mitigated and wiped out. For the international antagonisms of the capitalist states are but the complement of class antagonisms, and the world political anarchy but the reverse side of the anarchic system of production of capitalism. Both can grow only together and be overcome only together. “A little order and peace” is, therefore, just as impossible, just as much a petty-bourgeois Utopia, with regard to the capitalist world market as to world politics, and with regard to the limitation of crises as to the limitation of armaments.
Let us cast a glance at the events of the last fifteen years of international development. Where do they show any tendency toward peace, toward disarmament, toward settlement of conflicts by arbitration?
During these fifteen years we had this: in 1895 the war between Japan and China, which is the prelude to the East Asiatic period of imperialism; in 1898 the war between Spain and the United States; in 1899-1902 the British Boer War in South Africa; in 1900 the campaign of the European powers in China; in 1904 the Russo-Japanese War; in 1904-07 the German Herero War in Africa; and then there was also the military intervention of Russia in 1908 in Persia, at the present moment the military intervention of France in Morocco, without mentioning the incessant colonial skirmishes in Asia and in Africa. Hence the bare facts alone show that for fifteen years hardly a year has gone by without some war activity.
But more important still is the after effect of these wars. The war with China was followed in Japan by a military reorganisation which made it possible ten years later to undertake the war against Russia and which made Japan the predominant military power in the Pacific. The Boer War resulted in a military reorganisation of England, the strengthening of her armed forces on land. The war with Spain inspired the United States to reorganise its navy and moved it to enter colonial politics with imperialist interests in Asia, and thus was created the germ of the antagonism of interests between the United States and Japan in the Pacific. The Chinese campaign was accompanied in Germany by a thorough military reorganisation, the great Navy Law of 1900, which marks the beginning of the competition of Germany with England on the sea and the sharpening of the antagonisms between these two nations.
But there is another and extremely important factor besides the social and political awakening of the hinterlands, of the colonies and the “spheres of interest,” to independent life. The revolution in Turkey, in Persia, the revolutionary ferment in China, in India, in Egypt, in Arabia, in Morocco, in Mexico, all these are also starting points of world political antagonisms, tensions, military activities and armaments. It was just during the course of this fifteen years that the points of friction in international politics have increased to an unparalleled degree, a number of new States stepped into active struggle on the international stage, all the Great Powers underwent a thorough military reorganisation. The antagonisms, in consequence of all these events, have reached an acuteness never known before, and the process is going further and further, since on the one hand the ferment in the Orient is increasing from day to day, and on the other every settlement between the military powers unavoidably becomes the starting point for fresh conflicts. The Reval Entente between Russia, Great Britain and France, which Jaurs hailed as a guarantee for world peace, led to the sharpening of the crisis in the Balkans, accelerated the outbreak of the Turkish Revolution, encouraged Russia to military action in Persia and led to a rapprochement between Turkey and Germany which, in its turn, rendered the Anglo-German antagonisms more acute. The Potsdam agreement resulted in the sharpening of the crisis in China and the Russo-Japanese agreement had the same effect.
Therefore, on a mere reckoning with facts, to refuse to realise that these facts give rise to anything rather than a mitigation of the international conflicts, of any sort of disposition toward world peace, is wilfully to close one’s eyes.
In view of all this, how is it possible to speak of tendencies toward peace in bourgeois development which are supposed to neutralise and overcome its tendencies toward war? Wherein are they expressed?
In Sir Edward Grey’s declaration and that of the French Parliament? In the “armament weariness” of the bourgeoisie? But the middle and petty bourgeois sections of the bourgeoisie have always been groaning at the burden of militarism, just as they groan at the devastation of free competition, at the economic crises, at the lack of conscience shown in stock exchange speculations, at the terrorism of the cartels and trusts. The tyranny of the trust magnates in America has even called forth a rebellion of broad masses of the people and a wearisome legal procedure against the trusts on the part of the State authorities. Do the Social Democrats interpret this as a symptom of the beginning of the limitation of trust development, or have they not rather a sympathetic shrug of the shoulders for that petty-bourgeois rebellion and a scornful smile for that State campaign? The “dialectic” of the peace tendency of capitalist development, which was supposed to have cut across its war tendency and to have overcome it, simply confirms the old truth that the roses of capitalist profit-making and class domination also have thorns for the bourgeoisie, which it prefers to wear as long as possible round its suffering head, in spite of all pain and woe, rather than get rid of it along with the head on the advice of the Social Democrats.
To explain this to the masses, ruthlessly to scatter all illusions with regard to attempts made at peace on the part of the bourgeoisie and to declare the proletarian revolution as the first and only step toward world peace – that is the task of the Social Democrats with regard to all disarmament trickeries, whether they are invented in Petersburg, London or Berlin.
II
The Utopianism of the standpoint which expects an era of peace and retrenchment of militarism in the present social order is plainly revealed in the fact that it is having recourse to project making. For it is typical of Utopian strivings that, in order to demonstrate their practicability, they hatch “practical” recipes with the greatest possible details. To this also belongs the project of the “United States of Europe” as a basis for the limitation of international militarism.
“We support all efforts,” said Comrade Ledebour in his speech in the Reichstag on April 3, “which aim at getting rid of the threadbare pretexts for the incessant war armaments. We demand the economic and political union of the European states. I am firmly convinced that, while it is certain to come during the period of Socialism, it can also come to pass before that time, that we will live to see the UNITED STATES OF EUROPE, as confronted at present by the business competition of the United States of America. At least we demand that capitalist society, that capitalist statesmen, in the interests of capitalist development in Europe itself, in order that Europe will later not be completely submerged in world competition, prepare for this union of Europe into the United States of Europe.”
And in the Neue Zeit of April 28, Comrade Kautsky writes:
... For a lasting duration of peace, which banishes the ghost of war forever, there is only one way to-day: the union of the states of European civilisation into a league with a common commercial policy, a league parliament, a league government and a league army – the formation of the United States of Europe. Were this to succeed, then a tremendous step would be achieved. Such a United States would possess such a superiority of forces that without any war they could compel all the other nations which do not voluntarily join them to liquidate their armies and give up their fleets. But in that case all necessity for armaments for the new United States themselves would disappear. They would be in a position not only to relinquish all further armaments, give up the standing army and all aggressive weapons on the sea, which we are demanding to-day, but even give up all means of defence, the militia system itself. Thus the era of permanent peace would surely begin.
Plausible as the idea of the United States of Europe as a peace arrangement may seem to some at first glance, it has on closer examination not the least thing in common with the method of thought and the standpoint of social democracy.
As adherents of the materialist conception of history, we have always adopted the standpoint that the modern States as political structures are not artificial products of a creative phantasy, like, for instance, the Duchy of Warsaw of Napoleonic memory, but historical products of economic development. But what economic foundation lies at the bottom of the idea of a European State Federation? Europe, it is true, is a geographical and, within certain limits, an historical cultural conception. But the idea of Europe as an economic unit contradicts capitalist development in two ways. First of all there exist within Europe among the capitalist States – and will so long as these exist – the most violent struggles of competition and antagonisms, and secondly the European States can no longer get along economically without the non-European countries. As suppliers of foodstuffs, raw materials and wares, also as consumers of the same, the other parts of the world are linked in a thousand ways with Europe. At the present stage of development of the world market and of world economy, the conception of Europe as an isolated economic unit is a sterile concoction of the brain. Europe no more forms a special unit within world economy than does Asia or America.
And if the idea of a European union in the economic sense has long been outstripped, this is no less the case in the political sense.
The times when the centre of gravity of political development and the crystallising agent of capitalist contradictions lay on the European continent, are long gone by. To-day Europe is only a link in the tangled chain of international connections and contradictions. And what is of decisive significance – European antagonisms themselves no longer play their role on the European continent but in all parts of the world and on all the seas.
Only were one suddenly to lose sight of all these happenings and manoeuvres, and to transfer oneself back to the blissful times of the European concert of powers, could one say, for instance, that for forty years we have had uninterrupted peace. This conception, which considers only events on the European continent, does not notice that the very reason why we have had no war in Europe for decades is the fact that international antagonisms have grown infinitely beyond the narrow confines of the European continent, and that European problems and interests are now fought out on the world seas and in the by-corners of Europe.
Hence the “United States of Europe” is an idea which runs directly counter both economically and politically to the course of development, and which takes absolutely no account of the events of the last quarter of a century.
That an idea so little in accord with the tendency of development can fundamentally offer no progressive solution in spite of all radical disguises is confirmed also by the fate of the slogan of the “United States of Europe.” Every time that bourgeois politicians have championed the idea of Europeanism, of the union of European States, it has been with an open or concealed point directed against the “yellow peril,” the “dark continent,” against the “inferior races,” in short, it has always been an imperialist abortion.
And now if we, as Social Democrats, were to try to fill this old skin with fresh and apparently revolutionary wine, then it must be said that the advantages would not be on our side but on that of the bourgeoisie. Things have their own objective logic. And the solution of the European union within the capitalist social order can objectively, in the economic sense, mean only a tariff war with America, and in the political sense only a colonial race war. The Chinese campaign of the united European regiments, with the World Field Marshal Waldersee at the head, and the gospel of the Hun as our standard – that is the actual and not the fantastic, the only possible expression of the “European State Federation” in the present social order.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Leninism vs. Stalinism On The United Front: What Strategy To Fight Fascism? (1980)
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
********
Markin comment on this article:
This article is a rather succinct description of the differences between the early Communist International Lenin-Trotsky-derived united front tactic and the later Stalin—derived popular front strategy. In practice, the difference between pushing the international proletarian struggle forward and acting primarily as agents for Stalinized Soviet foreign policy- against revolution, in short. I have, periodically addressed the question of the united front tactic and have placed a number of previous articles from historic sources, and commentaries on those historic sources so I will only address the united front question as it applies to the struggle against fascism. Not because the tactic works differently on that question but rather that it takes added urgency to try to create a united front against our mortal enemies on the streets when they raise their heads.
In the best of situations, of course, a mass communist party with authority in the working class and few social-democratic opponents would not need to use the united front, or its use would not be as pressing. Call the demonstration or other action, bring out your membership, and see who else shows up. And a lot of others will, as the experience of the Bolshevik revolution demonstrated when the deal when down for real. For the rest of us, as a sign of our individual organizational weaknesses (or in a case when there is more than one authoritative working class organization with a mass following) the united front is the supreme tactic to get a mass to come out in defense of their organizations. We now know, if previous generations didn’t know or chose not to know, that is what it comes to.
I, and not I alone, have always argued that we need to “nip the fascists in the bud” whenever they ill-advisedly try to show themselves on the streets for some “celebration.” We have no other recourse than to try to create the united front under the traditional practice of marching separately (under your own banners and with your own propaganda) and striking together (united on this particular issue). As this article argues that is easier said that done with the political consciousness at the level it is (or was, since this is a 1980s article but, if anything, it is even lower these days-particularly on the issues of reliance on the state to "ban the fascists" and on “education” (the debate issue) rather than confrontation. On this question, however, there is nothing to debate, there is no will on the part of the state to break these para-military thugs up and we are left to cobble on own resources for a united front. By any means necessary.
*********
From Young Spartacus, October 1980-Leninism vs. Stalinism On The United Front: What Strategy To Fight Fascism?
We publish below a letter Young Spartacus received in June in response to our polemic against the Communist Workers Party (CWP) last May on the strategy to fight fascism and YSp's reply.
June 17, 1980 Los Angeles
Young Spartacus:
I enjoyed your discussion of Dimitrov ["CWP Zigzags Between Third Period' and Popular Front," Young Spartacus No. 82, May 1980] and its particular relevance to the fight against fascist groups in this country. But, if you want to discuss Dimitrov, I think you should complete the discussion.
It is true that his views were presented at the CPSU's 7th Party Congress in 1935. But he only represented one half of a debate! True, it was the winning side, but the alternative position of a "united working class front" of different elements calling for dictatorship of the proletariat (The only real alternative to Dimitrov!) was written by R. Palme Dutt in his Fascism and Socialist Revolution [1934-35]. In this volume he clearly and brilliantly outlines the linkages of the failures of capitalism to inter-imperialist contradictions on one side and the failures of the social democrats on the other. The line which you are taking is diluted Dutt, so why not go read him and draw him into the discussion. Another Marxist discussion from the period which is also very good is Daniel Guerin's Fascism and Big Business. He is stronger than Dutt in explaining how fascist ideology and organization work, but weaker in explaining the causes of fascism within the contradictions of capitalism and imperialism.
Several other points remain, however:
1 By your definitions Dutt was aStalinist. He was the head of the-British CP. How can this be?
2. If you want to clearly present apolitical alternative to the latter day
Dimitrovs, you must work out a few bugs in your line. To begin, you are
correct in criticizing the CWP's [Communist Workers Party] reliance on the
state, but what about your reliance onbourgeois unions and petty-bourgeois
nationalist organizations? The alternative to Dimitrov is not going to liberal organizations, whether labor unions or minority organizations, as an alternative to the large bourgeoisie. This is really an extension of Dimitrov, because you are saying there are some good factions of the bourgeoisie—in the person of union leaders and minority leaders. If you are to make a clean break with Dimitrov, as you suggest, you must make a clean break with the bourgeoisie and their immediate (and politically dependent) representatives.
3. The alternative is to turn directly to people, but not to liberal organizations in which they may have been drawn in.Furthermore, if the basis of this united front from below (qualitatively different
than alliances with petty bourgeois organizations) is simply opposition to
fascism (under some old CP slogan, such as the preservation of democratic
rights) you have also replicated Dimitrov, not repudiated him. The clear
repudiation, again as outlined by Dutt,is to call for a united front from below which is committed to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In other words, if the basis for the united front is the watering down of a communist line to draw in the good (petty) bourgeoisie—as your organization seems to be doing—you have unwittingly committed the errors which you criticize the CWP of, that is exhuming Dimitrov. It is true they do it deliberately, and you appear to do it unwittingly, but the result is the same.
4. A final point needs to be clarified, and this is the debate between Dimitrov and Dutt which you partially analyzed has already been brought up to the attention of the left. In 1971 PL Magazine carefully followed through
the discussion, and pointed out the long list of theoretical and practical errors generated by the International Communist Movement turning to the Dimitrov formulation and abandoning the concept of the united front from below. How is it that one of the groups you decry as Stalinist figured out what your [organization] recently became aware of nine years earlier and with greater theoretical and practical precision? Is this organization really not Stalinist (and Dutt too for that matter), or does
Stalinism not automatically lead to Dimitrovism?
I realize this is a long letter but I would like your reactions to some of the points I have raised, especially about how your line does not represent a clear break with Dimitrov.
Rick Platkin
Young Spartacus replies: Platkin raises once again (ostensibly from the "left")the question of Stalinism versus Trotskyism on the united front. While his slightly crackpot letter contains a number of historical inaccuracies and political absurdities and could be easily dismissed, it provides an opportunity for Young Spartacus to review the elementary Leninist tactic of the united front. Particularly in the aftermath of our successful anti-fascist mobilizations in Detroit and San Francisco, we are pleased to discuss the history of the united front and its particular application to the American labor movement in the fight against the increasingly visible fascist movement.
Without specifically referring to the April 19 Committee Against Nazis (ANCAN) demonstration in San Francisco, called to combat a threatened "celebration" of Hitler's birthday by the Bay Area fascists, Platkin argues that this mobilization—heavily built and organized by the SL/SYL—was inherently opportunist. He accuses us of "exhuming Dimitrov." The reason? Because in addition to the communist SL/SYL, 35 elected trade-union officials as well as nine local unions endorsed and actively built the ANCAN rally along with a number of community, minority, gay and civil rights organizations. For the first time in decades, a genuine united-front action of socialists and organized labor defended the rights of the working class and oppressed, independent of and against the efforts of the bourgeois state and politicians.
No gang of Nazis went goosestepping into San Francisco's Civic Center to celebrate Hitler's birthday and not because the police canceled their permit or the Board of Supervisors passed resolutions against the little storm-troopers. As the endorsement list for the ANCAN rally steadily grew, the cops announced that they could not guarantee the safety of the Nazi scum. The Nazis failed to show because thousands of unionists, minorities and socialists intended to sweep them off the streets. Ever since the April 19 rally, the fake-lefts have been falling all over themselves to explain away the undeniable success of the ANCAN mobilization.
Based on the simple proposition that a massive mobilization of the labor movement and its allies could stop the Nazis, the ANCAN rally was a victory and a vindication of the Leninist tactic of the united front. In contrast the Maoist-dominated Anti-Klan/Nazi Coalition held a little sectarian rally, which attracted 350, a quarter mile away from the site of the proposed Nazi Hitlerfest. Fundamentally pessimistic about the ability of the working class to turn out in force to stop the brownshirts, the Maoist-dominated coalition turned instead to the strikebreaking Democrats in City Hall. Their "strategy" hinged on pressuring Mayor Feinstein and the Board of Supervisors to revoke the Nazis' permit and pass a resolution condemning the Hitler-lovers. But the Maoists found that there were very few bourgeois politicians interested in building a mass demonstration against fascism. Even after they pledged not to lay a finger on the Nazis, the Anti-Klan/ Nazi Coalition could only dig up one black councilman from Oakland. The opportunists, albeit empty-handed, were a quarter mile away from the action.
Platkin accuses the SL/SYL of "watering down... a communist line to draw in the good (petty) bourgeoisie" ind counterposes turning directly to the 'people." In doing so, he echoes Progressive Labor's (PL) rejection of the united front in Road to Revolution III:
"We reject the concept of a united front with the bosses. We reject the concept of a united front with Trotskyists and the herd of various fakes in the left "We believe in a united front from below that takes the form of a left-center coalition."
—PL, November 1971
Platkin speaks approvingly of the "theoretical and practical precision" of the sometime left-sounding Stalinists of Progressive Labor and is in fact a longtime supporter of their sub-reformist front group, the Committee Against Racism (CAR). It is worth noting that PL also came unglued by the success of the ANCAN demo. Before the April 19 rally PL—true to form—denounced both ANCAN and the Maoist-led splinter coalition as "calls for a pacifist counter-demonstration [which] amount to calling for 'peace to the Nazis'." After the fact, in an article entitled "1500 Protest Against Nazis" (Challenge, 30 April) PL waxed eloquent about the Civic Center rally participants who were "just itching for the Nazis to show their faces," proving that when it's opportune PL will even tail the Trotskyist SL/ S YL. (Naturally, they omit any mention of the SL/SYL's central role in building the ANCAN rally.)
The United Front— A Leninist Tactic
The united front is a tactic employed by the vanguard party to unite the working class for practical action and to win the allegiance of non-communist workers from the reformists, centrists, labor bureaucrats and at times the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalists. We wrote in "On the United Front":
"The UF can only be a reality during periods of social struggle, when the need for sharp class battles makes class unity a burning objective necessity that shakes the ranks of the non-communist workers organizations from their le¬thargy and day-to-day humdrum or¬ganizational parochialism, and places strongly before them the need for class unity that transcends their particular organizations..."
— Young Communist Bulletin No. 3, p. 8
There is a reason that the united front became a central question at the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1922. At the time of the First World Congress in 1919 it was expected that the working-class offensive in the wake of the First World War would lead to the direct overthrow of the bourgeoisie under Communist leadership. The need for the united front tactic flowed from the fact that the majority of workers in most countries had gone through the postwar revolutionary upsurge retaining their allegiance to the reformist leaderships of the trade unions and the social-democratic parties. At the same time, in the wake of the receding revolutionary tide, the bourgeoisie went on the offensive. The capitalist offensive was forcing even the reformist-led organizations into partial and defensive struggles for their lives, simply to maintain the organizational gains and standard of living they had won in the past. This situation placed on the agenda the need for a united workers front.
The Third World Congress had two tasks before it: 1) to cleanse the working class, including the ranks of the Communist parties, of all reformist and centrist elements who did not want to struggle; and 2) to learn the art of struggle, and master revolutionary tactics and strategy. Much of the ideological struggle at the Third Congress was directed against the "Lefts"—those whose revolutionary impatience caused them to lose sight of the most important preparatory and preliminary tasks of the party. The Bolsheviks counseled the young communist "Lefts" at the Congress: "Comrades, we desire not only heroic struggle, we desire first of all victory." Trotsky explained:
"Does the united front extend only to the working masses or does it also include the opportunist leaders? "The very posing of this question is a product of misunderstanding. "If we were able to unite the working masses around our own banner or around our practical immediate slogans, and skip over reformist organizations, whether party or trade union, that would of course be the best thing in the world. But then the very question of the united front would not exist in its present form
"It is possible to see in this a rapprochement with the reformists only
from the standpoint of a journalist who believes that he rids himself of refor¬mism by ritualistically criticizing it without ever leaving his editorial office but who is fearful of clashing with the reformists before the eyes of the working masses and giving the latter an opportunity to appraise the Communist and the reformist on the equal plane of the mass struggle.
"Behind this seemingly revolutionary fear of 'rapprochement' there really lurks a political passivity which seeks to perpetuate an order of things wherein the Communists and the reformists each retain their own rigidly demarcated spheres of influence, their own audiences at meetings, their own press, and all this together creates an illusion of serious political struggle."
—"On the United Front," The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. 2
Platkin argues, "If you are to make a clean break with Dimitrov, as you suggest, you must make a clean break with the bourgeoisie and their immediate (and politically dependent) representatives." Why should Trotskyists make a "break" with Dimitrov? Unlike the Stalinists, we never supported his class-collaborationist line in the first place. And what does Dimitrov have to do with the Leninist united front tactic? Nothing! Dimitrov supplied the theoretical justification not for the united front but for class-collaborationist political blocs with the bourgeoisie which came to be known as popular fronts. At the Seventh Congress of the Stalinized Comintern in 1935, (not the CPSU's Seventh Party Congress as Platkin says) Dimitrov was quite explicit:
"Now the toiling masses in a number of capitalist countries are faced with the necessity of making a definite choice, and of making it today, not between proletarian dictatorship and bourgeois democracy, but between bourgeois democracy and fascism."
For Platkin, included in the category of "immediate representatives" of the bourgeoisie are the trade unions. Caught in the stranglehold of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, the trade unions are nonetheless workers organizations. And in the United States, they are the only mass organizations of the proletariat. To insist that revolutionaries never conclude united front blocs for action with the trade unions is simply a recipe for sealing off commu¬nists from the organized working class. We refer our readers to Trotsky's polemic against the sectarian policies of Stalin's "Third Period" in What Next? Trotsky noted that "just as the trade union is the rudimentary form of the united front in the economic struggle, so the soviet is the highest form of the united front under the conditions in which the proletariat enters the epoch of fighting for power." He goes on to argue that "the refusal by the Communist Party to make arrangements and take joint action with other parties within the working class means nothing else but the refusal to create Soviets" (emphasis in original in both quotes).
Moreover, Platkin's attitude toward the unions is totally at variance with the practice of Progressive Labor which he upholds as the real "left" alternative to Dimitrov. In the history of the commu¬nist movement, there are and have been ultra-left and anarchist organizations which refused on principle to work in the unions, but PL is not one of them. Far from a "leftist" policy, PL's left-center coalitionism in the unions has led to the worst kind of sub-reformist economism and support to "lesser evil" bureaucrats in the United Auto Workers, Communications Workers, AFSCME and other unions.
Cloaked in the phraseology of revolutionary intransigence, blanket opposi¬tion to the united front actually represents political passivity, conservatism and a lack of revolutionary will. "No united front with the reformists" is simply an inverted non-aggression pact with the reformists, an implicit agree¬ment not to fight them on their own turf. Far from such a pact, the united front implies a sharpening of the political struggle with the reformist misleaders. For instance, the unions, black organizations, Chicano, Jewish and gay groups all had a vital interest in stopping the fascist filth. The proposal of a concrete joint action to these organizations gave their respective leaderships the choice of either openly opposing the action or appearing on the same platform with the communists. The vanguard party must retain full freedom to criticize its temporary allies in the united front, something that the Spartacist League took full advantage of on April 19. The dual nature of the united front is captured in the slogan, "March separately, strike together," and the party must be ready to break with the reformists and centrists when they become a brake on the struggle.
Such was the case in Detroit on November 10. The SL and militant auto workers attempted to mobilize the powerful UAW to stop a planned Klan march in Detroit, a march called to "celebrate" the Greensboro massacre. Criminally, the UAW tops refused tc put the weight of the Detroit labor movement behind the anti-Klan rally The "liberal" black mayor, Coleman Young, threatened to arrest any demonstrators—Klan or anti-Klan. We were de facto forced into a united front "from below" under these circumstance and took the call for the demonstration directly to the factory gates an working-class neighborhoods. The result was a rally composed of the "hard core" of largely black, advanced workers willing to defy the criminal inaction of the UAW tops and stand up to a hostile city government and the possibil¬ity of arrest. It was critical that the Klan be stopped in the labor/black town of Detroit. And they were stopped despite the sabotage of the union bureaucrats— a victory for the entire working class and oppressed. However, we did not choose to limit the strength of the anti-Klan mobilization, the only such action to occur in the wake of Greensboro, to a hard core of 500. Much more powerful would have been thousands-strong contingents from the unions putting the Klan and City Hall on notice that "The Klan Won't Ride in the Motor City!"
"The United Front from Below"— History of Betrayal
Platkin fails to address the fact that the revolutionary-sounding "united front from below" has a history: it was the policy of the Stalinized Comintern from 1928 to 1935, the "Third Period." Is Platkin really unaware of the results? The triumph of Hitler and the decimation of the German proletariat were a world historic defeat for the working class.
The policies of the "Third Period" followed the cumulative failures of Stalin's 1924-27 policies of conciliating the colonial bourgeoisie and the trade-union reformists abroad as well as the kulaks at home. During this period, Lenin's united front tactic was degraded to an instrument for class collaboration and counterrevolution. In China, Stalin's "united front" with the bourgeois-nationalist Kuomintang (KMT), resulting in the complete liquidation of the Chinese Communist Party, led to the massacre of tens of thousands of Communist and working-class militants in the Shanghai insurrection of 1927 and killed for two decades the possibility of anti-capitalist revolution in China. In Britain, Stalin allied with the British trade-union bureaucrats in the "Anglo-Russian Trade Union Unity Committee." The Comintern did not see this as a temporary alliance with British trade-union leaders but as a long-lasting co¬partnership. This alliance was preserved through the betrayals of the 1926 General Strike and the miners strike, lending the prestige of the Bolshevik Revolution arid Communism to the strikebreaking Trades Union Congress tops.
From these disasters of Stalin's rightist course were born the ultra-left policies of the 'Third Period." In Germany, Stalin proclaimed....(missing part) .. the reformist Social Democratic Party (SPD) to be "social fascist" and thus eliminated any possibility of an SPD-KPD (German Communist Party) united front against Hitler's increasingly strong forces. Of course, it's quite true that SPD was complicit in the murders of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg. In 1929 the Social Democrat Zoergeibel drowned the KPD May Day march in blood. At every step on Hitler's road to power the reformists capitulated rather than fight.
Trotsky called the Social Democratic bureaucracy the "rottenest portion of putrefying capitalist Europe." But despite the counterrevolutionary be¬trayals of the leadership of the SPD, the Social Democrats still led millions of workers and within certain limits were constrained to reckon with their deluded proletarian constituency as well as with their bourgeois masters. The victory of fascism would mean the annihilation of the organizations of Social Democracy. While the SPD leaders did not want to fight, for the Social Democratic ranks it was a matter of life and death. The KPD's refusal to utilize this contradiction was an act of gross stupidity and treachery. The united front would set class against class, defending the workers' organizations against the stormtroopers and at the same time expose in action the hesitations, vacillations and abhorrence of socialist revolution that lie at the heart of Social Democracy. Trotsky insisted that in the war against fascism the Communists must be ready to conclude practical military alliances with the devil and his grandmother, even with 'Noske and Zoergeibel.
But the Stalinists continued to follow their sectarian-defeatist logic, captured in the slogan "After Hitler—Us." Millions of workers organized in the SPD and KPD were ready and eager to crush the Nazis, but Hitler came to power without a shot being fired because of the policies of the Stalinist "Third Period."
The Popular Front
At the end of 1933, with the triumph of Hitler and the renewed threat of imperialist attack, the panic-stricken Stalinist bureaucracy zigzagged once again. In a desperate search for allies, the Comintern sought to ingratiate itself with the "democratic" imperialist bourgeoisies through calculated contain¬ment of revolutionary proletarian movements in Europe. Where a year before the Stalinists had refused blocs with bourgeois workers parties, they were now prepared to make alliances with the bourgeoisie itself, including participation in capitalist governments. Enter Dimitrov, who provided the justification for these treacherous class-collaborationist political blocs at the expense of proletarian revolution under the catch phrase "the united front against fascism."
Platkin claims that the positions of R. Palme Dutt were the only real alternative to the Dimitrov/Stalin line. From the 1920s through the mid-1960s denounced those who declared the "existing bourgeois dictatorship" to be a "'lesser evil' than the victory of Fascism," but to see this as a polemic against Dimitrov is absurd. The change in the Comintern's line was so abrupt and unevenly implemented that initially even some of the most loyal Stalinist hacks were caught marching out of step. Dutt spoke in favor of Dimitrov's resolution at the Seventh World Congress and was for the first time elected as a candidate member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. How can Dutt be called a Stalinist? In addition to his grandiloquent praise for Stalin himself ("the genius and will of Stalin, the architect of the rising world of free humanity," etc., etc.) suffice it to say that for 40 years he popularized and promoted every twist and turn of Moscow's line in the pages of Labour Monthly.
There is an organic unity between the methodology of the "Third Period" and the popular front. At bottom both represent a lack of confidence in the proletariat's ability to conquer state power. During the "Third Period" the Stalinists abstained from fighting class collaborationism; with the popular front policy they simply embraced it. The net result was the same.
Who opposed the Dimitrov/Stalin line which led to bloody defeat for the working class in Spain and headed off a pre-revolutionary situation in France during the 1930s? Only the Trotskyists. To the popular front, the Trotskyists counterposed a working-class united front to smash the fascists. Instead of depending on the republican generals and the police, the Trotskyists called for workers militias based on the trade unions.
This Trotskyist tradition is today embodied in the program of the Spartacist League/SYL. Against the "ban the Klan" reformism of the Stalinists, the revolting defense of "free speech for fascists" of the social democratic SWP, and the episodically substitutionist antics of PL/CAR and the CWP we have successfully fought for labor/black mobilizations to smash the fascist scum. No other left organization in the U.S. can claim to have responded to the Greensboro massacre by mobilizing black and white trade unionists against the KKK as we did in Detroit; nor has anyone but the SL/SYL put forward and implemented the mass mobilization of the organized labor movement against the fascist threat as occurred in the ANCAN demonstration. The basis for Leninist principles and tactics, as proven by the history of the world working class, is what works.
***********
A cattle dealer once drove some bulls to the slaughterhouse. And the butcher came nigh with his sharp knife.
"Let us close ranks and jack up this executioner on our horns," suggested one of the bulls.
"If you please, in what way is the butcher any worse than the dealer who drove us hither with his cudgel?" replied the bulls, who had received their political education in Manuilsky's institute.
"But we shall be able to attend to the dealer as well afterwards!"
"Nothing doing," replied the bulls, firm in their principles, to the counselor. "You are trying to shield our enemies from the left; you are a social-butcher yourself."
And they refused to close ranks.
—from Aesop's Fables
—Leon Trotsky, "What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat," The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, 1932
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
********
Markin comment on this article:
This article is a rather succinct description of the differences between the early Communist International Lenin-Trotsky-derived united front tactic and the later Stalin—derived popular front strategy. In practice, the difference between pushing the international proletarian struggle forward and acting primarily as agents for Stalinized Soviet foreign policy- against revolution, in short. I have, periodically addressed the question of the united front tactic and have placed a number of previous articles from historic sources, and commentaries on those historic sources so I will only address the united front question as it applies to the struggle against fascism. Not because the tactic works differently on that question but rather that it takes added urgency to try to create a united front against our mortal enemies on the streets when they raise their heads.
In the best of situations, of course, a mass communist party with authority in the working class and few social-democratic opponents would not need to use the united front, or its use would not be as pressing. Call the demonstration or other action, bring out your membership, and see who else shows up. And a lot of others will, as the experience of the Bolshevik revolution demonstrated when the deal when down for real. For the rest of us, as a sign of our individual organizational weaknesses (or in a case when there is more than one authoritative working class organization with a mass following) the united front is the supreme tactic to get a mass to come out in defense of their organizations. We now know, if previous generations didn’t know or chose not to know, that is what it comes to.
I, and not I alone, have always argued that we need to “nip the fascists in the bud” whenever they ill-advisedly try to show themselves on the streets for some “celebration.” We have no other recourse than to try to create the united front under the traditional practice of marching separately (under your own banners and with your own propaganda) and striking together (united on this particular issue). As this article argues that is easier said that done with the political consciousness at the level it is (or was, since this is a 1980s article but, if anything, it is even lower these days-particularly on the issues of reliance on the state to "ban the fascists" and on “education” (the debate issue) rather than confrontation. On this question, however, there is nothing to debate, there is no will on the part of the state to break these para-military thugs up and we are left to cobble on own resources for a united front. By any means necessary.
*********
From Young Spartacus, October 1980-Leninism vs. Stalinism On The United Front: What Strategy To Fight Fascism?
We publish below a letter Young Spartacus received in June in response to our polemic against the Communist Workers Party (CWP) last May on the strategy to fight fascism and YSp's reply.
June 17, 1980 Los Angeles
Young Spartacus:
I enjoyed your discussion of Dimitrov ["CWP Zigzags Between Third Period' and Popular Front," Young Spartacus No. 82, May 1980] and its particular relevance to the fight against fascist groups in this country. But, if you want to discuss Dimitrov, I think you should complete the discussion.
It is true that his views were presented at the CPSU's 7th Party Congress in 1935. But he only represented one half of a debate! True, it was the winning side, but the alternative position of a "united working class front" of different elements calling for dictatorship of the proletariat (The only real alternative to Dimitrov!) was written by R. Palme Dutt in his Fascism and Socialist Revolution [1934-35]. In this volume he clearly and brilliantly outlines the linkages of the failures of capitalism to inter-imperialist contradictions on one side and the failures of the social democrats on the other. The line which you are taking is diluted Dutt, so why not go read him and draw him into the discussion. Another Marxist discussion from the period which is also very good is Daniel Guerin's Fascism and Big Business. He is stronger than Dutt in explaining how fascist ideology and organization work, but weaker in explaining the causes of fascism within the contradictions of capitalism and imperialism.
Several other points remain, however:
1 By your definitions Dutt was aStalinist. He was the head of the-British CP. How can this be?
2. If you want to clearly present apolitical alternative to the latter day
Dimitrovs, you must work out a few bugs in your line. To begin, you are
correct in criticizing the CWP's [Communist Workers Party] reliance on the
state, but what about your reliance onbourgeois unions and petty-bourgeois
nationalist organizations? The alternative to Dimitrov is not going to liberal organizations, whether labor unions or minority organizations, as an alternative to the large bourgeoisie. This is really an extension of Dimitrov, because you are saying there are some good factions of the bourgeoisie—in the person of union leaders and minority leaders. If you are to make a clean break with Dimitrov, as you suggest, you must make a clean break with the bourgeoisie and their immediate (and politically dependent) representatives.
3. The alternative is to turn directly to people, but not to liberal organizations in which they may have been drawn in.Furthermore, if the basis of this united front from below (qualitatively different
than alliances with petty bourgeois organizations) is simply opposition to
fascism (under some old CP slogan, such as the preservation of democratic
rights) you have also replicated Dimitrov, not repudiated him. The clear
repudiation, again as outlined by Dutt,is to call for a united front from below which is committed to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In other words, if the basis for the united front is the watering down of a communist line to draw in the good (petty) bourgeoisie—as your organization seems to be doing—you have unwittingly committed the errors which you criticize the CWP of, that is exhuming Dimitrov. It is true they do it deliberately, and you appear to do it unwittingly, but the result is the same.
4. A final point needs to be clarified, and this is the debate between Dimitrov and Dutt which you partially analyzed has already been brought up to the attention of the left. In 1971 PL Magazine carefully followed through
the discussion, and pointed out the long list of theoretical and practical errors generated by the International Communist Movement turning to the Dimitrov formulation and abandoning the concept of the united front from below. How is it that one of the groups you decry as Stalinist figured out what your [organization] recently became aware of nine years earlier and with greater theoretical and practical precision? Is this organization really not Stalinist (and Dutt too for that matter), or does
Stalinism not automatically lead to Dimitrovism?
I realize this is a long letter but I would like your reactions to some of the points I have raised, especially about how your line does not represent a clear break with Dimitrov.
Rick Platkin
Young Spartacus replies: Platkin raises once again (ostensibly from the "left")the question of Stalinism versus Trotskyism on the united front. While his slightly crackpot letter contains a number of historical inaccuracies and political absurdities and could be easily dismissed, it provides an opportunity for Young Spartacus to review the elementary Leninist tactic of the united front. Particularly in the aftermath of our successful anti-fascist mobilizations in Detroit and San Francisco, we are pleased to discuss the history of the united front and its particular application to the American labor movement in the fight against the increasingly visible fascist movement.
Without specifically referring to the April 19 Committee Against Nazis (ANCAN) demonstration in San Francisco, called to combat a threatened "celebration" of Hitler's birthday by the Bay Area fascists, Platkin argues that this mobilization—heavily built and organized by the SL/SYL—was inherently opportunist. He accuses us of "exhuming Dimitrov." The reason? Because in addition to the communist SL/SYL, 35 elected trade-union officials as well as nine local unions endorsed and actively built the ANCAN rally along with a number of community, minority, gay and civil rights organizations. For the first time in decades, a genuine united-front action of socialists and organized labor defended the rights of the working class and oppressed, independent of and against the efforts of the bourgeois state and politicians.
No gang of Nazis went goosestepping into San Francisco's Civic Center to celebrate Hitler's birthday and not because the police canceled their permit or the Board of Supervisors passed resolutions against the little storm-troopers. As the endorsement list for the ANCAN rally steadily grew, the cops announced that they could not guarantee the safety of the Nazi scum. The Nazis failed to show because thousands of unionists, minorities and socialists intended to sweep them off the streets. Ever since the April 19 rally, the fake-lefts have been falling all over themselves to explain away the undeniable success of the ANCAN mobilization.
Based on the simple proposition that a massive mobilization of the labor movement and its allies could stop the Nazis, the ANCAN rally was a victory and a vindication of the Leninist tactic of the united front. In contrast the Maoist-dominated Anti-Klan/Nazi Coalition held a little sectarian rally, which attracted 350, a quarter mile away from the site of the proposed Nazi Hitlerfest. Fundamentally pessimistic about the ability of the working class to turn out in force to stop the brownshirts, the Maoist-dominated coalition turned instead to the strikebreaking Democrats in City Hall. Their "strategy" hinged on pressuring Mayor Feinstein and the Board of Supervisors to revoke the Nazis' permit and pass a resolution condemning the Hitler-lovers. But the Maoists found that there were very few bourgeois politicians interested in building a mass demonstration against fascism. Even after they pledged not to lay a finger on the Nazis, the Anti-Klan/ Nazi Coalition could only dig up one black councilman from Oakland. The opportunists, albeit empty-handed, were a quarter mile away from the action.
Platkin accuses the SL/SYL of "watering down... a communist line to draw in the good (petty) bourgeoisie" ind counterposes turning directly to the 'people." In doing so, he echoes Progressive Labor's (PL) rejection of the united front in Road to Revolution III:
"We reject the concept of a united front with the bosses. We reject the concept of a united front with Trotskyists and the herd of various fakes in the left "We believe in a united front from below that takes the form of a left-center coalition."
—PL, November 1971
Platkin speaks approvingly of the "theoretical and practical precision" of the sometime left-sounding Stalinists of Progressive Labor and is in fact a longtime supporter of their sub-reformist front group, the Committee Against Racism (CAR). It is worth noting that PL also came unglued by the success of the ANCAN demo. Before the April 19 rally PL—true to form—denounced both ANCAN and the Maoist-led splinter coalition as "calls for a pacifist counter-demonstration [which] amount to calling for 'peace to the Nazis'." After the fact, in an article entitled "1500 Protest Against Nazis" (Challenge, 30 April) PL waxed eloquent about the Civic Center rally participants who were "just itching for the Nazis to show their faces," proving that when it's opportune PL will even tail the Trotskyist SL/ S YL. (Naturally, they omit any mention of the SL/SYL's central role in building the ANCAN rally.)
The United Front— A Leninist Tactic
The united front is a tactic employed by the vanguard party to unite the working class for practical action and to win the allegiance of non-communist workers from the reformists, centrists, labor bureaucrats and at times the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalists. We wrote in "On the United Front":
"The UF can only be a reality during periods of social struggle, when the need for sharp class battles makes class unity a burning objective necessity that shakes the ranks of the non-communist workers organizations from their le¬thargy and day-to-day humdrum or¬ganizational parochialism, and places strongly before them the need for class unity that transcends their particular organizations..."
— Young Communist Bulletin No. 3, p. 8
There is a reason that the united front became a central question at the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1922. At the time of the First World Congress in 1919 it was expected that the working-class offensive in the wake of the First World War would lead to the direct overthrow of the bourgeoisie under Communist leadership. The need for the united front tactic flowed from the fact that the majority of workers in most countries had gone through the postwar revolutionary upsurge retaining their allegiance to the reformist leaderships of the trade unions and the social-democratic parties. At the same time, in the wake of the receding revolutionary tide, the bourgeoisie went on the offensive. The capitalist offensive was forcing even the reformist-led organizations into partial and defensive struggles for their lives, simply to maintain the organizational gains and standard of living they had won in the past. This situation placed on the agenda the need for a united workers front.
The Third World Congress had two tasks before it: 1) to cleanse the working class, including the ranks of the Communist parties, of all reformist and centrist elements who did not want to struggle; and 2) to learn the art of struggle, and master revolutionary tactics and strategy. Much of the ideological struggle at the Third Congress was directed against the "Lefts"—those whose revolutionary impatience caused them to lose sight of the most important preparatory and preliminary tasks of the party. The Bolsheviks counseled the young communist "Lefts" at the Congress: "Comrades, we desire not only heroic struggle, we desire first of all victory." Trotsky explained:
"Does the united front extend only to the working masses or does it also include the opportunist leaders? "The very posing of this question is a product of misunderstanding. "If we were able to unite the working masses around our own banner or around our practical immediate slogans, and skip over reformist organizations, whether party or trade union, that would of course be the best thing in the world. But then the very question of the united front would not exist in its present form
"It is possible to see in this a rapprochement with the reformists only
from the standpoint of a journalist who believes that he rids himself of refor¬mism by ritualistically criticizing it without ever leaving his editorial office but who is fearful of clashing with the reformists before the eyes of the working masses and giving the latter an opportunity to appraise the Communist and the reformist on the equal plane of the mass struggle.
"Behind this seemingly revolutionary fear of 'rapprochement' there really lurks a political passivity which seeks to perpetuate an order of things wherein the Communists and the reformists each retain their own rigidly demarcated spheres of influence, their own audiences at meetings, their own press, and all this together creates an illusion of serious political struggle."
—"On the United Front," The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. 2
Platkin argues, "If you are to make a clean break with Dimitrov, as you suggest, you must make a clean break with the bourgeoisie and their immediate (and politically dependent) representatives." Why should Trotskyists make a "break" with Dimitrov? Unlike the Stalinists, we never supported his class-collaborationist line in the first place. And what does Dimitrov have to do with the Leninist united front tactic? Nothing! Dimitrov supplied the theoretical justification not for the united front but for class-collaborationist political blocs with the bourgeoisie which came to be known as popular fronts. At the Seventh Congress of the Stalinized Comintern in 1935, (not the CPSU's Seventh Party Congress as Platkin says) Dimitrov was quite explicit:
"Now the toiling masses in a number of capitalist countries are faced with the necessity of making a definite choice, and of making it today, not between proletarian dictatorship and bourgeois democracy, but between bourgeois democracy and fascism."
For Platkin, included in the category of "immediate representatives" of the bourgeoisie are the trade unions. Caught in the stranglehold of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, the trade unions are nonetheless workers organizations. And in the United States, they are the only mass organizations of the proletariat. To insist that revolutionaries never conclude united front blocs for action with the trade unions is simply a recipe for sealing off commu¬nists from the organized working class. We refer our readers to Trotsky's polemic against the sectarian policies of Stalin's "Third Period" in What Next? Trotsky noted that "just as the trade union is the rudimentary form of the united front in the economic struggle, so the soviet is the highest form of the united front under the conditions in which the proletariat enters the epoch of fighting for power." He goes on to argue that "the refusal by the Communist Party to make arrangements and take joint action with other parties within the working class means nothing else but the refusal to create Soviets" (emphasis in original in both quotes).
Moreover, Platkin's attitude toward the unions is totally at variance with the practice of Progressive Labor which he upholds as the real "left" alternative to Dimitrov. In the history of the commu¬nist movement, there are and have been ultra-left and anarchist organizations which refused on principle to work in the unions, but PL is not one of them. Far from a "leftist" policy, PL's left-center coalitionism in the unions has led to the worst kind of sub-reformist economism and support to "lesser evil" bureaucrats in the United Auto Workers, Communications Workers, AFSCME and other unions.
Cloaked in the phraseology of revolutionary intransigence, blanket opposi¬tion to the united front actually represents political passivity, conservatism and a lack of revolutionary will. "No united front with the reformists" is simply an inverted non-aggression pact with the reformists, an implicit agree¬ment not to fight them on their own turf. Far from such a pact, the united front implies a sharpening of the political struggle with the reformist misleaders. For instance, the unions, black organizations, Chicano, Jewish and gay groups all had a vital interest in stopping the fascist filth. The proposal of a concrete joint action to these organizations gave their respective leaderships the choice of either openly opposing the action or appearing on the same platform with the communists. The vanguard party must retain full freedom to criticize its temporary allies in the united front, something that the Spartacist League took full advantage of on April 19. The dual nature of the united front is captured in the slogan, "March separately, strike together," and the party must be ready to break with the reformists and centrists when they become a brake on the struggle.
Such was the case in Detroit on November 10. The SL and militant auto workers attempted to mobilize the powerful UAW to stop a planned Klan march in Detroit, a march called to "celebrate" the Greensboro massacre. Criminally, the UAW tops refused tc put the weight of the Detroit labor movement behind the anti-Klan rally The "liberal" black mayor, Coleman Young, threatened to arrest any demonstrators—Klan or anti-Klan. We were de facto forced into a united front "from below" under these circumstance and took the call for the demonstration directly to the factory gates an working-class neighborhoods. The result was a rally composed of the "hard core" of largely black, advanced workers willing to defy the criminal inaction of the UAW tops and stand up to a hostile city government and the possibil¬ity of arrest. It was critical that the Klan be stopped in the labor/black town of Detroit. And they were stopped despite the sabotage of the union bureaucrats— a victory for the entire working class and oppressed. However, we did not choose to limit the strength of the anti-Klan mobilization, the only such action to occur in the wake of Greensboro, to a hard core of 500. Much more powerful would have been thousands-strong contingents from the unions putting the Klan and City Hall on notice that "The Klan Won't Ride in the Motor City!"
"The United Front from Below"— History of Betrayal
Platkin fails to address the fact that the revolutionary-sounding "united front from below" has a history: it was the policy of the Stalinized Comintern from 1928 to 1935, the "Third Period." Is Platkin really unaware of the results? The triumph of Hitler and the decimation of the German proletariat were a world historic defeat for the working class.
The policies of the "Third Period" followed the cumulative failures of Stalin's 1924-27 policies of conciliating the colonial bourgeoisie and the trade-union reformists abroad as well as the kulaks at home. During this period, Lenin's united front tactic was degraded to an instrument for class collaboration and counterrevolution. In China, Stalin's "united front" with the bourgeois-nationalist Kuomintang (KMT), resulting in the complete liquidation of the Chinese Communist Party, led to the massacre of tens of thousands of Communist and working-class militants in the Shanghai insurrection of 1927 and killed for two decades the possibility of anti-capitalist revolution in China. In Britain, Stalin allied with the British trade-union bureaucrats in the "Anglo-Russian Trade Union Unity Committee." The Comintern did not see this as a temporary alliance with British trade-union leaders but as a long-lasting co¬partnership. This alliance was preserved through the betrayals of the 1926 General Strike and the miners strike, lending the prestige of the Bolshevik Revolution arid Communism to the strikebreaking Trades Union Congress tops.
From these disasters of Stalin's rightist course were born the ultra-left policies of the 'Third Period." In Germany, Stalin proclaimed....(missing part) .. the reformist Social Democratic Party (SPD) to be "social fascist" and thus eliminated any possibility of an SPD-KPD (German Communist Party) united front against Hitler's increasingly strong forces. Of course, it's quite true that SPD was complicit in the murders of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg. In 1929 the Social Democrat Zoergeibel drowned the KPD May Day march in blood. At every step on Hitler's road to power the reformists capitulated rather than fight.
Trotsky called the Social Democratic bureaucracy the "rottenest portion of putrefying capitalist Europe." But despite the counterrevolutionary be¬trayals of the leadership of the SPD, the Social Democrats still led millions of workers and within certain limits were constrained to reckon with their deluded proletarian constituency as well as with their bourgeois masters. The victory of fascism would mean the annihilation of the organizations of Social Democracy. While the SPD leaders did not want to fight, for the Social Democratic ranks it was a matter of life and death. The KPD's refusal to utilize this contradiction was an act of gross stupidity and treachery. The united front would set class against class, defending the workers' organizations against the stormtroopers and at the same time expose in action the hesitations, vacillations and abhorrence of socialist revolution that lie at the heart of Social Democracy. Trotsky insisted that in the war against fascism the Communists must be ready to conclude practical military alliances with the devil and his grandmother, even with 'Noske and Zoergeibel.
But the Stalinists continued to follow their sectarian-defeatist logic, captured in the slogan "After Hitler—Us." Millions of workers organized in the SPD and KPD were ready and eager to crush the Nazis, but Hitler came to power without a shot being fired because of the policies of the Stalinist "Third Period."
The Popular Front
At the end of 1933, with the triumph of Hitler and the renewed threat of imperialist attack, the panic-stricken Stalinist bureaucracy zigzagged once again. In a desperate search for allies, the Comintern sought to ingratiate itself with the "democratic" imperialist bourgeoisies through calculated contain¬ment of revolutionary proletarian movements in Europe. Where a year before the Stalinists had refused blocs with bourgeois workers parties, they were now prepared to make alliances with the bourgeoisie itself, including participation in capitalist governments. Enter Dimitrov, who provided the justification for these treacherous class-collaborationist political blocs at the expense of proletarian revolution under the catch phrase "the united front against fascism."
Platkin claims that the positions of R. Palme Dutt were the only real alternative to the Dimitrov/Stalin line. From the 1920s through the mid-1960s denounced those who declared the "existing bourgeois dictatorship" to be a "'lesser evil' than the victory of Fascism," but to see this as a polemic against Dimitrov is absurd. The change in the Comintern's line was so abrupt and unevenly implemented that initially even some of the most loyal Stalinist hacks were caught marching out of step. Dutt spoke in favor of Dimitrov's resolution at the Seventh World Congress and was for the first time elected as a candidate member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. How can Dutt be called a Stalinist? In addition to his grandiloquent praise for Stalin himself ("the genius and will of Stalin, the architect of the rising world of free humanity," etc., etc.) suffice it to say that for 40 years he popularized and promoted every twist and turn of Moscow's line in the pages of Labour Monthly.
There is an organic unity between the methodology of the "Third Period" and the popular front. At bottom both represent a lack of confidence in the proletariat's ability to conquer state power. During the "Third Period" the Stalinists abstained from fighting class collaborationism; with the popular front policy they simply embraced it. The net result was the same.
Who opposed the Dimitrov/Stalin line which led to bloody defeat for the working class in Spain and headed off a pre-revolutionary situation in France during the 1930s? Only the Trotskyists. To the popular front, the Trotskyists counterposed a working-class united front to smash the fascists. Instead of depending on the republican generals and the police, the Trotskyists called for workers militias based on the trade unions.
This Trotskyist tradition is today embodied in the program of the Spartacist League/SYL. Against the "ban the Klan" reformism of the Stalinists, the revolting defense of "free speech for fascists" of the social democratic SWP, and the episodically substitutionist antics of PL/CAR and the CWP we have successfully fought for labor/black mobilizations to smash the fascist scum. No other left organization in the U.S. can claim to have responded to the Greensboro massacre by mobilizing black and white trade unionists against the KKK as we did in Detroit; nor has anyone but the SL/SYL put forward and implemented the mass mobilization of the organized labor movement against the fascist threat as occurred in the ANCAN demonstration. The basis for Leninist principles and tactics, as proven by the history of the world working class, is what works.
***********
A cattle dealer once drove some bulls to the slaughterhouse. And the butcher came nigh with his sharp knife.
"Let us close ranks and jack up this executioner on our horns," suggested one of the bulls.
"If you please, in what way is the butcher any worse than the dealer who drove us hither with his cudgel?" replied the bulls, who had received their political education in Manuilsky's institute.
"But we shall be able to attend to the dealer as well afterwards!"
"Nothing doing," replied the bulls, firm in their principles, to the counselor. "You are trying to shield our enemies from the left; you are a social-butcher yourself."
And they refused to close ranks.
—from Aesop's Fables
—Leon Trotsky, "What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat," The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, 1932
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