Wednesday, August 24, 2011

***The Road To…., The Corner Boys Of The 1930s-Tom Hanks’ “Road to Perdition”- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film The Road To Perdition.

DVD Review

The Road To Perdition, starring Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Jude Law, based on the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins, Dreamworks, 2002


I have spent a lot of time in this space writing about my corner boy experiences growing up in my old Irish and Italian working class neighborhood in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I have also spent some time talking about the corner boys who just immediately preceded us in the early 1950s. Pretty tame really although if you were on the receiving end of a vicious beating, got your money stolen in some back alley, or had your personal household possessions ransacked or stolen by some midnight shifter your perspective might not be so romantic. The “corner boys,” Irish and Italian mainly, of 1930s Great Depression Chicago though, as portrayed in the film under review, The Road to Perdition, make all that other stuff seem “punk” by comparison.

Of course the motives to join a gang of lumpenproletarians in all cases were the same then, and today. That is “where the money was” to paraphrase the old-time famous bank robber, Willy Sutton. No question all those guys in the 1930s and later were (and are) from hunger. But also looking for the quick dollar and the “no heavy lifting” life not associated with steady working class factory every day values. Equally true is the fact that there are always more “hungry” guys than the market can bear which leads to two things-external “turf wars” between gangs and internal turf wars over who controls what within gangs. And that is the heart of this story.

The problem for Tom Hanks, a trusted, very trusted, enforcer (read: “hit man”) for Irish mob boss Paul Newman (he of many such corner boy roles going back to Cool Hand Luke and before) is that Newman's psychotic son wants his share of the goodies as befits a son and heir apparent. Needless to say that things get dicey, very dicey as they maneuver to the top, including the gangland-style execution of Hanks’ family that was suppose to include a son, the narrator of the film, who is forced to help Hanks’ seek the inevitable revenge required by the situation. In the end though Tom Waits is right in the opening line from Jersey Girl- “Ain’t got no time for the corner boys, down in the streets making all that noise.” A nice cinematically-pleasing 1930s period piece and what turned out to be a great farewell performance by the late Paul Newman.

The Latest From The “Veterans For Peace” Website-Gear Up For The 2011-12 Anti-War Season-Troops Out Now!

Click on the headline to link to the Veterans For Peace website for the latest news.

Re-posted From American Left History- Thursday, November 11, 2010

*A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!

Markin comment:

Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.


Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (“the battle of the barstool”) and donning the old overstuffed uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened this time as well. What also happened in Boston this year (and other years but I have not been involved in previous marches) was that the Veterans For Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their “Veterans Day” program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one.

Previously there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events.) You know the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long as there have been ex-soldiers (and others) who have differed from the bourgeois party pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. Nice, right? Something of the old I’ll take my ball and bat and go home by the "officials" was in the air on that one.

But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in the world. In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited as the official paraders marched by and waved and clapped at our procession. Be still my heart. But that response just provides another example of the ‘street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these vets would go beyond the “bring the troops home” and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today I was very glad to be fighting for our communist future among those who know first-hand about the dark side of the American experience. No question.

The Latest From The "Jobs With Justice Blog"-The Seemingly One-Sided Struggle Continues-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 Is The Slogan Of The Day.

Click on the headline to link to the Jobs With Justice Blog for the latest national and international labor news, and of the efforts to counteract the massively one-sided class struggle against the international working class movement.

From the American Left History blog-Wednesday, June 17, 2009

With Unemployment Rising- The Call "30 For 40"- Now More Than Ever- The Transitional Socialist Program


Google To Link To The Full Transitional Program Of The Fourth International Adopted In 1938 As A Fighting Program In The Struggle For Socialism In That Era. Many Of The Points, Including The Headline Point Of 30 Hours Work For 40 Hours Pay To Spread The Work Around Among All Workers, Is As Valid Today As Then.

Guest Commentary

From The Transitional Program Of The Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages
and Sliding Scale of Hours


Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.

The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.

Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.

Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.

Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

In Honor Of The “Old Man”- On The 71st Anniversary Of The Death Of Leon Trotsky-Leon Trotsky:Revolutionary Teacher Of the Colonial Peoples-By Li Fu-jen

Click on the headline to link to a review of the early life of Leon Trotsky in his political memoir, My Life.

Markin comment:

Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!

Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that
material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though.
******
Li Fu-jen
Leon Trotsky:Revolutionary Teacher Of the Colonial Peoples

(August 1944)

Li Fu-jen, Revolutionary Teacher Of the Colonial Peoples, Fourth International, August 1944.
Copied form the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

The development of a Marxist program and strategy for the colonial revolution belongs exclusively to our epoch – the epoch of wars and revolutions leading to the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist society. It was Lenin who first outlined this program and strategy. But its detailed unfoldment and its first concrete applications were the work of Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s great co-worker. Trotsky’s writing on the problems of the colonial revolution, many of which still await publication, would fill numerous volumes. They form an integral and indispensable part of the program and strategy of the world socialist revolution and rank with the greatest of Trotsky’s immense contributions to the development of Marxist theory and revolutionary socialist practice.

In a preface to the Afrikaans edition of the Communist Manifesto, first published by Marx and Engels in 1848, Trotsky observed that this founding document of the international socialist movement contained no reference to the struggle of colonial and semi-colonial countries for national independence. This was due, he pointed out, to the fact that the founders of scientific socialism considered the socialist revolution in Europe to be, at most, a few years distant. The destruction of capitalism in Europe would “automatically” bring liberation to the oppressed peoples. However, history did not adhere to this optimistic time table. Not only did the European proletariat fail to destroy capitalism in its classic stronghold, but capitalism penetrated ever more deeply into the backward colonial countries, leading in time to the creation of powerful national liberation movements. Here was a new and mighty revolutionary factor. Its emergence set up an objective need for a colonial revolutionary program and strategy.

If in the period of the progressive upswing of capitalism the seizure of colonies was essential to enable the discharge by the bourgeoisie of what Marx described as their special historic mission, namely, “the establishment of the world market, at any rate in its main outlines and of a production upon this basis” (Karl Marx, letter to Engels, Oct. 8, 1858) – then today, in the era of the decline and decay of capitalist economy, retention of colonies, with the opportunity to plunder their natural riches and exploit their inhabitants, has become a vital condition of the very survival of capitalism on a world scale.

Revolutionary Internationalism

It is this profound and demonstrable truth which furnishes the basis of the reciprocal inter-relationship of the socialist movement of the proletariat in the advanced capitalist countries and the national liberation movement in the colonies and semicolonies. These latter countries embrace more than half of the world’s population. The liberation of their inhabitants is as important for the working-class as their continued enslavement is for the imperialist bourgeoisie. For Trotsky, this was the point of departure in the work of creating a colonial revolutionary strategy. It was the internationalist axis around which he always and unfailingly built. “The Communists,” declared the Manifesto of 1848, “everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” To which Trotsky added:

“The movement of the colored races against their imperialist oppressors is one of the most important and powerful movements against the existing order and therefore calls for complete, unconditional and unlimited support on the part of the proletariat of the white race.” (Leon Trotsky, 90 Years of the Communist Manifesto, New International, Feb. 1938.)

National liberation movements in the colonies and semicolonies unfolded after the first imperialist world war and were the immediate product of conditions created by the war.

Growth of the Working Class

Until the end of the nineteenth century, imperialist exploitation bore almost exclusively the character of outright robbery and spoliation. Economic development of colonial areas was confined to such measures as were necessary to aid in the extraction of raw materials and the marketing of finished commodities produced in the capitalist countries of the West. It was British commercial capital, for example, which first penetrated India. Such industrial development as took place was incidental to the central aim of commercial exploitation. Britain’s capitalists built cotton mills in Bombay only when it was discovered to be cheaper to process Indian-grown cotton on the spot, with cheap Indian labor, than to ship it to Lancashire for spinning and weaving, especially since a large part of the finished products was destined for sale in India and nearby countries. In line with the same policy, British capitalists erected cotton mills in Shanghai to handle the Chinese cotton crop as well as part of the Indian crop.

The most important political consequence of this incidental industrial development was the appearance in these vast backward lands of an industrial proletariat, pitted against the imperialist exploiters. Whereas foreign commercial capital had merely raised up an embryonic native or national bourgeoisie as agents of imperialism (the compradores), the foreign industrial capital which followed produced an industrial working-class which had a single, undisguised interest in relation to the imperialists – uncompromising struggle against them!

During the first world war, when the economic pressure of the imperialists was relaxed because of preoccupation with the military struggle in Europe, the industrial development of the big colonial lands took on an accelerated pace. The native compradores and some of the big native landowners entered the industrial field, creating enterprises in competition with those of the imperialists. Thus the “national” bourgeoisie came to flower. The industrial proletariat grew correspondingly. It was these developments which set the class pattern for the great revolutionary upheavals in the colonial countries in the decade after the war, above all the abortive

Chinese revolution of 1925-27.

Class relations are decisive for revolutionary Marxists in determining the character and perspectives of revolutionary movements and the political strategy necessary to bring them to fruition. The class criterion is as mandatory for the colonial countries as it is for the capitalist metropoli, Trotsky, following Marx and Lenin, insisted upon this criterion in opposition to Stalin and all the other revisionist opponents and betrayers of socialism It runs like a red thread through his voluminous speeches and writings on the problems of the colonial revolution. Most of these speeches and writings were concerned with China and the Chinese revolution. In the class relations of China are refracted the class relations of the colonies in general. The essence of Trotsky’s thought on China will therefore furnish the key to revolutionary Marxist policy in the entire colonial question.

Character of the Revolution

“In its immediate aims,” Trotsky wrote in 1938, “the incompleted Chinese Revolution is ‘bourgeois.’ This term, however, which is used as a mere echo of the bourgeois revolutions of the past actually helps us very little. Lest the historical analogy turn into a trap for the mind, it is necessary to check it in the light of a concrete sociological analysis. What are the classes which are struggling in China? What are the interrelationships of these classes? How, and in what direction, me these relations being transformed? What are the objective tasks of the Chinese Revolution, i.e.. those tasks dictated by the course of development? On the shoulders of which classes rests the solution of these tasks?

“Colonial and semi-colonial – and therefore backward – countries, which embrace by far the greater part of mankind, differ extraordinarily from one another in their degree of backwardness, representing an historical ladder reaching from nomadry, and even cannibalism, up to the most modern industrial culture. The combination of extremes in one degree or another characterizes all of the backward countries. However, the hierarchy of backwardness, if one may employ such an expression, is determined by the specific weight of the elements of barbarism and culture in the life of each colonial country. Equatorial Africa lags far behind Algeria, Paraguay behind Mexico, Abyssinia, behind India or China. With their common economic dependence upon the imperialist metropoli, their political dependence bears in some instances the character of open colonial slavery (India, Equatorial Africa), while in others it is concealed by the fiction of state independence (China, Latin America).

“In agrarian relations backwardness finds its most organic and cruel expression. Not one of these countries has carried it democratic revolution through to any real extent. Half-way agrarian reforms are absorbed by semi-serf relations, and these me inescapably reproduced in the soil of poverty and oppression. Agrarian barbarism goes hand in hand with the absence of roads, with the isolation of provinces, with ‘medieval’ particularism, and absence of national consciousness. The purging of social relations of the remnants of ancient and the encrustations of modern feudalism is the most important task in all these countries.

The National Bourgeoisie

“The achievement of the agrarian revolution is unthinkable, however, with the preservation of dependence upon foreign imperialism, which with one hand implants capitalist relations while supporting and recreating with the other all the forms of slavery and serfdom. The struggle for the democratisation of social relations and the creation of a national state thus uninterruptedly passes into an open uprising against foreign domination.

“Historical backwardness does not imply a simple reproduction or the development of advanced countries, England or France, with a delay of one, two or three centuries. It engenders an entirely new ‘combined’ social formation in which the latest conquests of capitalist technique and structure root themselves into relations of feudal or pre-feudal barbarism, transforming and subjecting them and creating a peculiar relation of classes.

“Not a single one of the tasks of the ‘bourgeois’ revolution can be solved in these backward countries under the leadership of the ‘national’ bourgeoisie, because the latter emerges at once with foreign support as a class alien or hostile to the people. Every stage in its development binds it only the more closely to foreign finance capital of which it is essentially the agency. The petty bourgeoisie of the colonies, that of handicraft and trade, is the first to fall victim in the unequal struggle with foreign capital, declining into economic insignificance, becoming declassed and pauperized. It cannot even conceive of playing an independent political role. The peasantry, the largest numerically and the most atomized, backward, and oppressed class, is capable of local uprisings and partisan warfare, but requires the leadership of a more advanced and centralized class in order for this struggle to be elevated to an all-national level. The task of such leadership falls in the nature of things upon the colonial proletariat, which, from its very first steps stands opposed not only to the foreign but also to it own national bourgeoisie” (From the Introduction by Leon Trotsky to Harold R. Isaacs’ The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, London, 1938.)

These views concerning the peculiarity of class relations and, consequently, the special character of “bourgeois-democratic” revolutions in historically belated countries do not rest as Trotsky proceeded to point out, on theoretical analysis alone. They had been submitted to a “grandiose historical test” in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and February and October, 1917. These three revolutions proved beyond all question the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie in a backward country to solve the tasks of the democratic revolution. Hence the need to orient the proletariat toward the seizure of power. Lenin put the matter thus:

“Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution, the workers must support the bourgeoisie – say the worthless politicians from the camp of the liquidators. Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution, say we who are Marxists. The workers must open the eyes of the people to the fraud of the bourgeois politicians, teach them not to place trust in promises and to rely on their OWN forces, on their OWN organization, on their OWN unity and on their OWN weapons alone.” (Lenin, Works, Vol.XIV, Part 1, p.11.)

The Chinese Catastrophe

In the case of Czarist Russia the Bolshevik theory of the hegemony of the proletariat in the revolution received positive vindication in the victorious October overturn. The Russian workers, allied with the lower layers of the peasantry, and led by the Bolshevik Party, overthrew both Czarism and capitalism. The tasks of the democratic revolution were solved through the dictatorship of the proletariat, which then proceeded to socialist tasks.

In China, on the contrary, the theory of proletarian hegemony, the very core of Bolshevik policy, received negative confirmation in a monstrous revolutionary catastrophe. Stalin and Bukharin, the then theoreticians of the Communist International, chopped the historic process into separate, independent stages in accordance with a lifeless scheme which decreed that only the “democratic” revolution was on the order of the day and that consequently the leadership of the revolution belonged and could only belong to the bourgeoisie. The formula of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry,” which Lenin had discarded in 1917 in favor of the proletarian dictatorship, was revived and expanded into the infamous “bloc of four classes,” prototype of the so-called Popular Fronts of later years. In this bloc – in reality a bloc of party tops and nothing else – the right to represent the peasantry was given to the party of the national bourgeoisie, the Kuomintang. The Communist Party, the party of the proletariat, gave up its political independence and entered the Kuomintang. The workers were thereby subordinated to the political control of the national bourgeoisie. And this criminal break with proletarian class policy, this disregard of the plain lessons of Russian revolutionary history, this rejection of the still fresh teachings of Lenin, was palmed off on the young and inexperienced Chinese Communist Party as – Bolshevism!

In order to justify this treacherous policy of class collaboration, Stalin-Bukharin adduced the fact of imperialist oppression which supposedly impelled “all the progressive forces in the country” toward an alliance against imperialism. Thus the national bourgeoisie was invested with a progressive role, that of a fighter against imperialism for national liberation. But this, as Trotsky pointed out, “was precisely in its day the argument of the Russian Mensheviks, with the difference that in their case the place of imperialism was occupied by Czarism.”

Bourgeois Counter-Revolution

As we have already seen, the national bourgeoisie is incapable of conducting a progressive fight, a fight to the end, to realize the aims of the democratic revolution, foremost of which, in the colonial countries, is the destruction of imperialist domination. This incapacity has a dual basis: 1. The close ties of the bourgeoisie with the imperialists and the elements of rural reaction; 2. Fear of mobilizing the masses, who, in the high tide of the struggle must inevitably pass over to the fight for the destruction of bourgeois property. But when the masses rise against imperialism as they did in China in 1925-27, the bourgeoisie endeavors to take charge of the movement and to use it to extract concessions from the imperialists. It then stamps upon the revolutionary masses and drives them back to their old slavery. Such, in reality, is the character of the “democratic” revolution under bourgeois leadership.

Nevertheless, insisted Stalin-Bukharin, Chiang Kai-shek (the leader of the Chinese national bourgeoisie) were conducting a struggle against imperialism. And so it really appeared to the superficial minds in the Kremlin. Actually Chiang was engaged in a limited struggle against certain militarists who were the agents of a single imperialist power – Britain – in the hope merely of forcing concessions from the imperialist overlords of the country. This is not the same thing as a principled all-out struggle to the finish against the entire system of imperialist domination. Today Chiang Kai-shek conducts a fight against Japanese imperialism, and in the process passes into the service of Anglo-American imperialism, thus preparing a new slavery for the Chinese nation. The alleged anti-imperialist role of the national bourgeoisie was sharply characterized by Trotsky in words which he sought to burn into the consciousness of the revolutionary vanguard:

“The so-called ‘national’ bourgeoisie tolerates all forms of national degradation so long as it can hope to maintain its own privileged existence. But at the moment when foreign capital sets out to assume undivided domination of the entire wealth of the country, the colonial bourgeoisie is forced to remind itself of its ‘national’ obligations. Under pressure of the masses it may even find itself plunged into a war. But this will be a war waged against one of the imperialist powers, the one least amenable to negotiations, with the hope of passing into the service of some other, more magnanimous power. Chiang Kai-shek struggles against the Japanese violators only within the limits indicated to him by his British or American patrons. Only that class which has nothing to lose but its chains can conduct to the very end the war against imperialism for national emancipation.” (From the Introduction by Leon Trotsky to Harold R. Isaacs’ The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution.)

The Lesson of China

According to Stalin-Bukharin, the policy of the bloc of four classes was to lead to completion of the democratic revolution in China and thus open the road to the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat. What happened is a matter of history. Chiang Kai-shek, instead of leading a “democratic” revolution, emerged as the leader of a triumphant counter-revolution, The shaken imperialists recovered all their positions. The agrarian problem remained unsolved. What does all this mean for future revolutionary policy?

It means – and this is the most vital part of the lesson which Trotsky taught to the new revolutionary cadres – that between the bourgeois-military dictatorship of (Chiang Kai-shek and the dictatorship of the proletariat there can be no intermediate “democratic” regime. It means that if, in the high tide of the coming colonial revolutions, the proletarian vanguard party should seek to bring about the establishment of such a regime, instead of orienting the workers toward the seizure of power and the creation of a proletarian dictatorship, only fresh revolutionary catastrophes can result.

Almost as if answering in advance the false and treacherous policies of the Stalinist betrayers of the Chinese revolution-particularly the stupid Menshevik theory of stages – Lenin in his famous April Theses, written in April 1917 to rearm the Bolshevik Party and prepare its revolutionary triumph, had proclaimed the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat to be the sole means of carrying through the agrarian revolution to the end and of winning freedom for oppressed peoples. But the regime of proletarian dictatorship could not, because of its very nature, limit itself to bourgeois-democratic tasks within the framework of bourgeois property relations. The rule of the proletariat automatically places the socialist revolution – destruction of bourgeois property relations and the liquidation of class rule – on the order of the day. The socialist revolution is thus uninterruptedly linked to the democratic revolution and is an organic outgrowth of it.

Theory of Permanent Revolution

“Such was (Trotsky observes), in broad outline, the essence of the conception of the permanent (uninterrupted) revolution. It was precisely this conception that guaranteed the victory of the proletariat in October.” (Idem.) In China, it was the violation of this Bolshevik conception, or, more accurately, its outright rejection, that guaranteed the victory of Chiang Kai-shek and the bourgeois counter-revolution.

The theory of permanent revolution was originated by Marx. Lenin made of it a powerful lever of revolutionary victory. Trotsky, the authentic continuator of the work of Marx and Lenin, defended and developed the theory in its manifold aspects in the course of nearly two decades of struggle against the Stalinist falsifiers and betrayers, thereby rearming the revolutionary vanguard in preparation for future great struggles. Trotsky’s writings on the permanent revolution are the theoretical mainspring of proletarian revolutionary strategy and are an obligatory study for all who aspire to lead the working-class in the struggle for socialism, whether in the capitalist countries of the West or in the backward colonial countries. The theory of the permanent revolution is the Marxist antithesis of the reactionary theory of socialism in one country which, under Stalin, became the official state doctrine of the Soviet Union. It also stands in diametrical opposition to Stalin’s Menshevik policies which brought the Chinese revolution to disaster.

“The permanent revolution, in the sense which Marx attached to the conception.” wrote Trotsky. “means a revolution which maker no compromise with any form of class rule, which does not stop at the democratic stage, which goes over to socialist measures and to war against the reaction from without, that is, a revolution whose every next stage is anchored in the preceding one and which can only end in the complete liquidation of all class society.” (Leon Trotsky, Introduction to The Permanent Revolution, New York, 1931, p.xxxii.)

Trotsky Explains Theory

What does this mean for the so-called backward countries the colonies and semi-colonies? Trotsky proceeds to explain:

“With regard to the countries with a belated development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks, democratic and national emancipation, is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.

“Not only the agrarian, but also the national question, assigns to the peasantry, the overwhelming majority of the population of backward countries, an important place in the democratic revolution. Without an alliance of the proletariat with the peasantry, the tasks of the democratic revolution cannot be solved, nor even seriously posed. But the alliance of these two classes can be realized in no other way than through an intransigent struggle against the influence or the national liberal bourgeoisie.

“The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and very quickly placed before tasks that are bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over immediately into the socialist and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.

“The conquest of power by the proletariat does not terminate the revolution, but only opens it Socialist construction is conceivable only on the foundation of the class struggle, on a national and international scale. The struggle, under the conditions of an overwhelming predominance of capitalist relationships on the world arena, will inevitably lead to explosions, that is, internally to civil wars, and externally to revolutionary wars. Therein lies the permanent character of the socialist revolution as such, regardless of whether it is a backward country that is involved, which only yesterday accomplished its democratic revolution, or an old capitalist country, which already has behind it a long epoch of democracy and parliamentarism.

“The completion of the socialist revolution within national limits is unthinkable. One of the basic reasons for the crisis in bourgeois society is the fact that the productive forces created by it conflict with the framework of the national state. From this follow, on the one hand, imperialist wars, and on the other, the utopia of the bourgeois United States of Europe. The socialist revolution commences on the national arena, is developed further on the inter-state and finally on the world arena. Thus, the socialist revolution becomes a permanent revolution in a newer and broader sense of the word; it attains completlon only in the final victory of the new society on our entire planet.” (Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, pp.151-155.)

In the domain of practical politics, these views of the character and class dynamics of the revolution obligate the party of the revolutionary vanguard in the colonial countries to a policy of irreconcilable struggle against imperialism and its native ally, the national bourgeoisie. It must not permit itself to be led into a policy of class conciliation and class collaboration when the national bourgeoisie, for its own class reasons, displays a “left” face to the masses, as did Chiang Kai-shek. It must remain completely independent of all other parties and enter into no blocs or alliances with them. It must not mix its own class banner with the banners of other classes and parties much less kneel before another’s banner. It must keep unswervingly to the single aim of leading the proletariat toward the conquest of power in alliance with the masses of peasants.

During the revolutionary crisis in China, Trotsky strove to imbue the Communist International with these fundamental revolutionary ideas, and through the C.I. to deflect the Chinese Communist Party from the fatal opportunistic course to which it was being held by Moscow. To no avail. Reaction against the Leninist ideas of the October Revolution was mounting. The Chinese revolution went down in disastrous defeat. Trotsky and the Bolshevik-Leninists of the Left Opposition were expelled from the ranks of the Russian party. Trotsky himself was exiled.

This was not, as bourgeois commentators believed, a mere personal defeat for Trotsky. It was a defeat for Bolshevism, a defeat for Marxism and Leninism. This defeat reflected the growth of reaction both within and without the Soviet Union. Thus Trotsky appraised what had occurred. But Trotsky was not only a revolutionary Marxist theoretician. He was also an active revolutionist. For him the defeat of the Chinese revolution, and the triumph of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and the Communist International, called for a Marxist analysis in order to avoid future catastrophes and clear the road for future revolutionary victories. The first need was to understand what had happened, and why, in order to furnish a basis for m grouping and rearming the revolutionary vanguard.

Rearming the Vanguard

Trotsky’s efforts to steer the Chinese Communist Party on to a correct revolutionary path in the great and tragic events of 1925-27 had a great preparatory value for this later work. Several thousand young Chinese Communists had gone to Moscow for training in the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. A large number of them, influenced by Trotsky’s tireless fight to guide the Chinese revolution toward victory, joined the ranks of the Left Opposition. Most of the remainder were silent adherents of Trotsky’s Bolshevik program. On November 7, 1927, the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, when Stalin was preparing to exile Trotsky from the Soviet Union, the young Chinese revolutionists paraded through Moscow’s Red Square with other foreign Communist delegations. On the banners which they carried were inscribed the slogans deemed appropriate by the Stalinist controlling clique. But as they passed in front of Stalin they flipped the banners over and disclosed a slogan reading: “Long Live Trotsky!” This was not just a personal tribute to Lenin’s greatest comrade-in-arms, but a declaration of solidarity with his ideas. The banner-bearers were arrested and later murdered by Stalin’s counter-revolutionary regime. A few – very few – of the Chinese revolutionists in Moscow at that time escaped the blood-purge and managed to return to China to form the nucleus of the Left Opposition which later became the Chinese section of the Fourth International.

In his first place of exile, in Alms Ata, Trotsky set himself the task of analyzing the revolutionary disaster in China. The Stalinist clique in Moscow sought to make the Chinese Communists the scapegoats and to prevent any real discussion of what had occurred. Trotsky, however, insisted on dragging the whole lamentable story into broad daylight, drawing from it all the necessary lessons, in order to lay bare the mainsprings of the defeat and prepare for future victory. For, as he said, “one unexposed and uncondemned error always leads to another, or prepares the ground for it.” In this essential work he had in mind not only the arrival – even if with some delay – of a new revolutionary situation in China, but the future of the entire colonial revolutionary movement. in Alms Ata he wrote:

“The lessons of the second Chinese revolution are lessons for the entire Comintern, but primarily for all the countries of the Orient. All the arguments presented In defense of the Menshevik line in the Chinese revolution must, if we take them seriously, hold trebly good for India. The imperialist yoke assumes in India, the classic colony, infinitely mere direct and palpable forms than in China. The survivals of feudal and serf relations in India are immeasurably deeper and greater. Nevertheless, or rather precisely for this reason, the methods which applied In China, undermined the revolution, must result in India in even more fatal consequences. The overthrow of Hindu feudalism and of the Anglo-Hindu bureaucracy and British militarism can be accomplished only by a gigantic and an indomitable movement of the popular masses which precisely because of its powerful sweep and irresistibility, its international aims and ties, cannot tolerate any half-way and compromising opportunist measures on the part of the leadership.” (Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin, New York, 1936, p.212.)

From his various places of exile, first in Alms Ata, later in Turkey, France, Norway and Mexico, Trotsky followed with passionate interest the regroupment of the revolutionary vanguard in the colonial countries, first as cadres of the Left Opposition, later as sections of the Fourth International, on the basis of the Bolshevik-Leninist program. It was largely due to his efforts, brought to bear through participation from afar in their discussions, that three separate groups of Chinese Left Oppositionists were united in the year 1931 to form the Communist League of China, now the Chinese section of the Fourth International. And it was on the basis of Trotsky’s teachings on the colonial revolution – above all the lessons which he drew from the abortive Chinese revolution – that sections of the Fourth International later grew up in India, Ceylon and Indo-China and in the semi-colonial countries of Latin America.

Growing Up Absurd In The 1950s- Penny’s Brand New Phonograph

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Penguins performing their 50s classic, Earth Angel.

CD Review

The Golden Age Of American Rock ‘n’ Roll; Volume One, various artists, Ace Records,
1994

Scene: Prompted by the cover photograph, the memory cover photograph, which grace each CD in this The Golden Age Of American Rock ‘n’ Roll series. The photo on this CD, as might be expected, shows the ubiquitous, highly coveted, then and today, old time LP (and 45’s convertible) record player and the family radio, probably RCA, both weapons in the 1950’s teenage wars to have our own music, and to be able to listen to said music 24/7 without parental interference, or knowledge. Of course, not everybody, teenage everybody, and that’s what counted, including rock dizzy Penny had one or the other and that is the struggle we are to presently witness.

“Good night, Mr. and Mrs. Dodd, the kids were no problem and thanks again for the money.” “Whee,” Penny Parker whispered under her breathe, as she went out the door. Those kids were nothing but monsters, refusing to go to bed unless, and until, they watched Maverick on television, Penny played checkers with Bobby and Billy Dodd (sister Laura was satisfied to be a spectator), and they each (all three on this one) got not one, but two scoops of ice cream before surrendering to Penny’s demands. And all for a lousy seventy-five cents an hour. Those were slave wages, slave wages even for a thirteen year old girl and Penny, Parker proud if not Parker bright, bright yet anyway thought for just a minute to give up this monster-sitting, well, baby-sitting really, up. “No,” she yelled into the Clintondale night, “No way after all I have put up with from those beasts am I giving up my dream record player now, no way.” And that was that.

Penny, Parker bright or proud notwithstanding, was a creature of her times, as we all are more or less. And the times called for every self-respecting teenager, and teenagers were all that counted in Penny’s universe, had his or her own private, up in his or her room, phonograph to play his or her favorite music, rock ‘n’ roll music, naturally. Not some lame Benny Goodman or Doris Day mumble that her parents listened to on the radio downstairs and drove Penny up a wall, maybe up more than one wall. And drove her right out of the Parker door down to Bop Benny’s Record Shop to play the jukebox there when the newest of the new records came out. See, Penny did not have her own record player like every other girl, every other teen-age girl that counted in her class at Clintondale Junior High School. Even Pammy Fuller had one, and Pam’s parents had them practically living on the county farm. But Peter Parker, father Parker, was adamant that he would not pay for anything that was connected with rock ‘n’ roll. Not out of religious principles, or anything like that, but he just hated the sound. Yes, I know, Peter Parker, square, square cubed.

So that left Penny down at Benny’s throwing nickels, dimes, and quarters in that old juke box. Many nickels when Kathy Young’s A Thousand Stars was hot, or when she had a crush, a big crush, on Zack Smith and she “broke the bank,” playing Earth Angel by the Penguins and When We Get Married by The Dreamlovers whenever Zack was in Benny’s and she wanted to draw his attention to her. Or the time when “Foul-Mouth” Phil Jackson dared her to play Eddie My Love by the Teen Queens when he was trying to date her up, or what passed for a date at twelve.

One day her brother, Paul, a year older than Penny but seemingly about a million years wiser saw that she had put at least fifty cents in the box when she was feeling all sentimental about Jimmy Kelly, her ex-beau, or as ex-beau as any thirteen year old girl is allowed to have, and was playing I Love How You Love Me by the Paris Sisters like crazy. He just flat-out told her after dinner that night that it would be a whole lot easier and less expensive to just get her own record player and play up in her room to her heart’s contend. Penny stood there in disbelief, not in disbelief about the idea but that dear old dad would go for it. Well, the long and short of it, was that dear old dad did go for it, with the usual provisos that there would be no loud or late playing. Sure daddy.

And that prospect, that record player of her very own, with her own platters to spin (records, grooved vinyl records to the squares), and no bother, except maybe to invite Jimmy or Zack over bother, is why this night as she walks home she is muttering about wage slavery, the injustices of the world, the teenage world, the only one that counted in case someone might have forgotten, and other communistic sentiments, if anybody had hear her. Penny figured after that night that another twelve hours of drudgery, another nine dollars and she could get that cool one that she saw in the Sears&Roebuck catalogue.

But then Penny, Parker bright just then, looked pensively down at the sidewalk when she realizes that she would have to buy records to feed that record player and that she would have to continue baby-sitting for slave wages forever with Dodd monsters to get all the 45s that she absolutely needed. And then, horror of horrors, what if Jimmy liked Sixteen Candles by the Crests and Zack didn’t but liked Rockin’ Robin by Bobby Day (and he probably would) and she had to buy both records. Well, what’s a girl to do but, Penny, Parker proud just then, thought she would be able to figure it out.

On The 40th Anniversary Of The Death Of Black Panther George Jackson-From San Quentin To Attica To Pelican Bay- Never Forget!

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the black liberation fighter and Black Panther Party leader, George Jackson.

Bob Dylan- George Jackson Lyrics

I woke up this morning
There were tears in my bed
They killed a man I really loved
Shot him through the head

Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground

Sent him off to prison
For a seventy dollar robbery
Closed the door behind him
And they threw away the key

Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground
He wouldn't take shit from no one
He wouldn't bow down or kneel
Authorities, they hated him
Because he was just too real

Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground

Prison guards, they cursed him
As they watched him from above
But they were frightened of his power
They were scared of his love

Lord, Lord, so they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground

Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards

Lord, Lord, they cut George Jackson down
Lord, Lord, they laid him in the ground

The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States- American Socialist Workers Party Leader James P.Cannon-Early Years of the American Communist Movement-Origin of the Policy on the Labor Party

Click on the headline to link to a James P. Cannon Internet Archives online copy of Early Years of the American Communist Movement-Origin of the Policy on the Labor Party

Markin comment on this series:

Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.

Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.

As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts run a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.

Verizon Workers Head Back To Work- No Contract Victory In Sight

Click on the headline to link to a Boston Globearticle detailing the return ot work of the Verizon strikers.

Markin comment:

The Verizon strikers are heading back to work without a new contract. From the outside it is sometimes hard to see what negotiations will produce without a picket line to back them up, if anything. A workers’ strike, short of the struggle for state power, is a moment in the class struggle and a union contract is an “armed truce” in that struggle. Not all strikes, obviously, are successful, or produce the hope for results but returning back to work without a better contract on this one does not make sense. First, the picket lines were holding, and being held militantly in many cases. Secondly Verizon acknowledged that the strike was hurting their customer base. In short the strike was hurting the company’s basic concern-profits. This did not seem like a time to walk off the lines. Period.

Monday, August 22, 2011

From The Partisan Defense Committee-New Move to Reinstate Death Sentence for Mumia-Free Mumia Now! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

Workers Vanguard No. 984
5 August 2011

Free Mumia Now! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

New Move to Reinstate Death Sentence for Mumia

The Philadelphia district attorney’s office recently petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate the death sentence for black political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The D.A. is seeking to reverse an April 26 ruling by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which for the second time upheld a 2001 decision by District Court judge William Yohn overturning the sentence on the grounds of faulty jury instructions (see “Federal Appeals Court Orders New Sentencing Hearing,” WV No. 980, 13 May). Yohn simultaneously upheld every aspect of the frame-up conviction that sent Mumia—a former Black Panther Party spokesman and later a MOVE supporter and award-winning journalist—to death row on false charges of killing Philly police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. From top to bottom, the courts have repeatedly refused to hear the overwhelming evidence of Mumia’s innocence, including Arnold Beverly’s confession that he was Faulkner’s killer.

The D.A.’s petition reviles the Third Circuit for obstructing the legal lynching not just of Mumia but also of many others, largely black and poor, railroaded to death row “up South” in Philadelphia. The brief rants that the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, signed by Bill Clinton to speed up the pace of executions, “will remain ineffective in the Third Circuit until the circuit court enforces it.” The prosecution calls on the Supreme Court to order the Third Circuit to apply the 1996 law to foreclose virtually any federal habeas corpus challenge to Pennsylvania death sentences. Where the Supreme Court stands on ruthless application of the death penalty was seen on March 28, when it turned down the appeal of Troy Davis, a black inmate in Georgia, despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence.

In its own way, the D.A.’s brief highlights that Mumia’s case is crucial in the struggle to abolish the death penalty. The ultimate sanction wielded by the capitalist rulers in their repression of workers and minorities, the death penalty is a barbaric legacy of medieval torture. In the U.S., capital punishment can be traced directly back to chattel slavery, when black people could be put to death for any act deemed “insolent” or a challenge to slaveholders. Since then, the death penalty has gone hand in hand with KKK lynchings and summary executions carried out by cops on the street. Over 3,200 sit on death rows across the U.S., 54 percent of them black or Latino.

The cops, prosecutors, lawmakers and their mouthpieces in the bourgeois press will not rest until Mumia is strapped onto an execution gurney. Mumia’s fight for life and freedom is not for him alone. By executing this eloquent spokesman for the oppressed, the forces of the state want to send a message to all who would fight against the exploitation, oppression and imperialist war inherent in the decaying capitalist system that they, too, are in the state’s gun sights. The only “alternative” to execution held out by the courts is that Mumia rot in prison for the rest of his life, without the possibility of parole. As the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have always insisted, fighters for Mumia’s freedom must place no reliance on the racist capitalist courts but must look instead to link Mumia’s cause to the class struggles of the multiracial proletariat. To put a final halt to the grisly workings of the capitalist rulers’ machinery of death will take nothing less than proletarian socialist revolution.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- ILWU Battles Union Busters -Working Class Solidarity, Not Scabbing!-Build One Nationwide Waterfront Union!

Workers Vanguard No. 984
5 August 2011

Stop Operating Engineers Local 701 Scabbing!

ILWU Battles Union Busters

Longview, WA

JULY 29—The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in Longview, Washington, is locked in battle with a union-busting international consortium intent on breaching the ILWU’s hold on loading and unloading ships on the West Coast. EGT Development—a joint venture between St. Louis-based Bunge North America, the Itochu Corporation (an import-export conglomerate based in Japan) and the South Korean shipping company Pan Ocean STX—is in the process of opening a new, $200 million export grain terminal in Longview, the first such facility built in the U.S. in over two decades. It wants to keep out the ILWU, which works grain terminals in the Pacific Northwest.

The 200-man ILWU Longview Local 21 has stepped up to the fight. On July 11, about 100 longshoremen and their supporters tore down a chain-link fence and occupied EGT grounds, demanding that the company honor its lease with the Port of Longview, which stipulates that it must hire Local 21 members. Some 90 protesters were arrested and later charged with trespassing. But that didn’t keep 600 more from around the region from blocking the railroad tracks in the dead of night on July 13-14 to stop a 107-car Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) train carrying grain to the plant, now in its testing phase. The train was diverted to Vancouver, Washington, and BNSF suspended train service to the Longview terminal.

On July 22, a militant ILWU picket forced EGT itself to temporarily suspend operations. A major show of force by cops, sheriff’s deputies and state troopers three days later allowed the company to reopen the facility, with police escorting in 15-20 scabs. Seven unionists were arrested on the picket line, including one on felony charges. The cops have since forced the ILWU to limit the number of pickets at the EGT gate to 16, moving all other protesters to a site over a half mile away from the terminal. With some 100 ILWU members and supporters facing charges, Cowlitz County authorities are continuing their investigation and may charge others. Labor must demand: Drop the charges against the Longview unionists! Victory to the ILWU!

The Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, wrote to the Cowlitz County prosecutor protesting the arrests. The PDC noted in a letter of solidarity to Local 21: “Your fight has rightly won the support of trade unions throughout the region and of ILWU locals up and down the West Coast. The police attacks on your protests are a threat to unionized workers on the docks and throughout the U.S.” In addition to longshoremen from across the region, members of the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Pulp and Paper Workers, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and other construction unions have participated in ILWU actions in Longview, which is located on the Columbia River. In early June, over 1,200 rallied in front of EGT Development’s headquarters in Portland, some 50 miles upriver from Longview.

The overwhelming support indicates the high stakes at play. Grain export is big business in the Pacific Northwest. More than 47 percent of U.S. wheat exports use the Columbia-Snake River gateway. With demand for grain expected to skyrocket in Asia, grain export terminals in most ports in the region are expanding. All these facilities operate with ILWU labor under the Northwest Grainhandler’s Agreement. If the ILWU loses in Longview, the defeat would establish a non-union beachhead for the profit-hungry international conglomerates.

“This is much bigger than Longview,” said Tacoma-based ILWU Local 23 president Scott Mason (Labor Notes, July 21). “It’s about organized labor and not having a Wisconsin.” In Wisconsin, tens of thousands of unionists and their supporters flooded the streets of the state capital earlier this year to fight a massive anti-labor assault on public workers by the Republican-led state government. But the union misleaders diverted this militancy into boosting the fortunes of the Democratic Party through a campaign to recall Republican officeholders.

It’s about time that the ILWU exercises its power, which lies in its ability to shut down the ports and interrupt the flow of cargo up and down the coast. But so far, the ILWU International has shown no sign of mobilizing coastwide in defense of its embattled Longview local, even as the union’s future is posed. To win this showdown, Local 21 must continue to look to their allies in the labor movement and not bank on the “good graces” of the port bosses, the Democratic Party politicians, who represent the class enemy, or the courts, which routinely issue anti-strike injunctions. Solidarity from the rail workers in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLE) could be crucial to stopping the shipment of scab grain.

Backstabbing Treachery of IUOE Local 701

Despicably, International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 701 is openly crossing the ILWU’s picket lines. This scabbing began after EGT Development announced on July 17 that it had signed a five-year deal with General Construction Company from Federal Way, Washington, to operate its Longview facility. IUOE Local 701, whose members work for General Construction, agreed to take 25 to 35 of the plant’s projected 50 jobs. The local had already been excluded from the Longview/Kelso Building & Construction Trades Council for refusing to sign a “letter of solidarity” committing them to abide by union jurisdictional lines and honor picket lines. Its scabbing at the grain terminal has been condemned by the Executive Board of the Oregon state AFL-CIO.

EGT Development is retailing the lie that Local 701’s scabbing is a union jurisdictional dispute. But the conglomerate has run a union-busting operation in Longview since they broke ground on the facility in 2009. The company hired a Minnesota-based general contractor that in turn hired subcontractors employing largely non-union labor. In January, gearing up to open the new terminal in time for the fall harvest, EGT Development sued the Port of Longview, arguing that they were not bound by the Port’s agreement with the ILWU. EGT lawyers boast that they will save $1 million in operating costs by refusing to hire ILWU members.

EGT was in negotiations with the ILWU until talks broke down earlier this year over the issue of overtime pay for 12-hour shifts. The ILWU’s longshore contract with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) limits work to ten hours, with overtime paid after eight. The union’s dispatch system, intended to share available work equitably, allows workers to vary their jobs day-to-day. This is a real safety issue, as monotonous and dangerous work on bulk and break-bulk cargo is the bread and butter of the small ILWU locals in the region. The ILWU must stand firm: No substandard contracts! The work at Longview must be covered by the standard Grainhandler’s Agreement!

In using another union as a tool for its union-busting, EGT is following a playbook already tested by East Coast shipping bosses. In 1993, the labor-hating Holt family hired Teamsters to replace the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) at the Holts’ Gloucester City terminal on the Delaware River near Philadelphia. After the AFL-CIO ruled that the Teamsters had no jurisdiction, the Gloucester local morphed into an out-and-out company union. Last year, Del Monte Co., notorious for union-busting worldwide, tore up its contract with the ILA (despite the union’s offer of massive concessions) and moved its operation to the Gloucester terminal under the jurisdiction of the company’s “Independent Dock Workers Local 1.”

In response, last September ILA members shut down docks in Philly and the New York/New Jersey area in a two-day protest. The New York Shipping Association then slapped the ILA with a lawsuit demanding over $5 million in “damages” for the port shutdown (see “ILA Under Attack Over Strike to Save Jobs,” WV No. 971, 7 January). Likewise in Charleston, South Carolina, Ports America and the SSA stevedoring firm are suing ILA Local 1422 after longshoremen walked off the job in May to protest the use of non-union labor on the docks. The ILWU’s Local 10 in the Bay Area and its president Richard Mead are facing a similar lawsuit from the PMA, which is demanding compensation for losses incurred when Local 10 members overwhelmingly stayed away from work on April 4 to support Wisconsin workers. This was the only labor action on that supposed “national day of action” (see “All Labor Must Defend ILWU Local 10!” WV No. 979, 29 April). The ILWU’s Dispatcher has yet to even mention the suit against Local 10.

EGT Development’s federal court suit against the Port of Longview won’t be heard until next year. But in the meantime, the Port has asked a judge to order EGT to honor its lease and hire Local 21 labor. The ILWU has made itself a party to the suit on the side of the Port. Workers should be under no illusion that the courts are on labor’s side. The judicial system is an integral part of the repressive apparatus of a state that exists only to defend the interests of the ruling class—the tiny minority that owns industry and lives off the toil of working people. Just as the cops have arrested Longview ILWUers seeking to defend their livelihoods, so too will the courts enforce capitalist “law and order” against labor. It is through victory on the picket line that the ILWU will prevail.

The Poison of Protectionism

Obscuring the irreconcilable class divide between labor and its exploiters and their state is at the heart of the trade-union bureaucrats’ class-collaborationist policies. To this end, they portray Longview as one united “community,” up against gigantic multinational corporations that give away “local” jobs to people from elsewhere while the small port town struggles with an unemployment rate of 12-14 percent.

Protesters at ILWU actions have carried signs reading, “Employ Local Workers for Local Jobs.” But the operating engineers who are scabbing on Local 21 are local workers, and unionized ones at that! In announcing its scab deal, EGT boasted: “We’re willing to hire union labor, and we got what we think is a good agreement with General Construction. Local, family-wage jobs is a really good news story.”

The port bosses already try to play one longshore local against another in the competition for work. This is the road to ruin for the multiracial ILWU, whose solidarity hinges on its coastwide membership. “Local workers for local jobs” is but an echo of the protectionist poison of “American jobs for American workers” with which the labor misleaders undermine class struggle, preaching the lie that workers in the U.S. have common interests with American-based corporations and the U.S. imperialist state that defends capitalist interests.

But anyone who follows the red-white-and-blue jingoists at the top of the AFL-CIO into thinking they will get a better deal from an “American” or “local” company should take a hard look at Wal-Mart, General Motors or…General Construction. Corporations, be they U.S.-based entities or international conglomerates, are in business only to make a profit for their shareholders from the sweat and blood of those they employ. The true allies of workers here are not the “local” bosses, but fellow workers across the continent and around the world.

The poison of protectionism pits U.S. workers against their class brothers and sisters around the world, thereby helping to fuel the anti-immigrant bigotry that has been a key factor in undermining union power. The longshore unions on both coasts have become isolated bastions of organized labor amid a sea of unorganized and largely immigrant port truckers as well as non-union intermodal yard workers and inland warehouse workers. The situation cries out for a massive campaign to organize these unorganized workers into solid industrial unions, including a national union of all port workers. To wage such a struggle, the unions must champion the rights of all foreign-born workers employed in the ports. Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

A new leadership of the labor movement, imbued with the program of working-class independence from the bourgeois state, can only be forged in the crucible of such class struggle. That leadership will be the militant advocate of a workers party that fights for a workers government, built in intransigent opposition to all the parties of the capitalist class. It will arm workers with the understanding that their historic interests lie in freeing humanity from the anarchy and misery of an economic system based on production for profit instead of human need.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Hunger Strike In California Prison Hell (Pelican Bay)- From Attica To Pelican Bay Never Forget!

Workers Vanguard No. 984
5 August 2011

Hunger Strike in California Prison Hell

JULY 29—For three weeks, inmates locked in the solitary concrete isolation chambers of the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at California’s notorious Pelican Bay “supermax” prison starved themselves simply in order to be accorded some vestige of humanity from their jailers. At its height, the hunger strike, which began on July 1, was joined by 6,600 inmates at 13 other prisons in the state. The prisoners’ demands—for an end to group punishment and enforced “snitching”; for access to educational and other programs; to be allowed human contact, weekly phone calls, access to sunlight and nutritional food—were strikingly minimal. This fact is itself testament to the dehumanizing torture of solitary confinement.

As Pennsylvania death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal put it in a solidarity statement, “These men are killing themselves potentially for fresh air and sunlight.” SHU prisoners are locked in windowless concrete cells for 22 and a half hours a day under the incessant glare of fluorescent lights and behind solid metal doors that do not even allow eye contact with fellow inmates. The only “reprieve” is a possible 90 minutes a day in a 26-by-10-foot recreation yard surrounded by 20-foot-high walls. As an op-ed piece in the New York Times (17 July) titled “Barbarous Confinement” noted: “Many of these prisoners have been sent to virtually total isolation and enforced idleness for no crime, not even for alleged infractions of prison regulations…. Since it is not defined as punishment for a crime, it does not fall under ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ the reasoning goes.”

To be branded a “gang member”—a tag that can be applied at whim—is a one-way ticket to the SHU, where many prisoners have languished for years and some for decades. One way out, besides death, is “debriefing”—snitching out other prisoners as gang members, itself a possible death sentence for not only the prisoner but his family as well. As the hunger strike spread, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) railed that the willingness of thousands of prisoners to starve themselves was further evidence of “the power, influence and reach of prison gangs”!

The strike at Pelican Bay ended on July 21 with the CDCR agreeing to allow SHU prisoners to have wall calendars and woolen caps to wear in freezing cells during the winter, as well as promising some educational programs and a review of the “debriefing” procedures.

The super maximum jails like Pelican Bay, begun in the 1980s, were designed, in the words of one journalist, for “psychological emasculation, to crush the spirit, strip a man of the last vestige of defiance and force him to conform to the most punitive system the courts will allow” (London Sunday Times, 23 May 1993). High-tech sensory deprivation chambers like the SHU throw into stark relief the nature of the bourgeois state as an apparatus of organized violence to preserve the rule and profits of racist American capitalism.

The prisons are the concentrated expression of the depravity of this society, a key instrument in coercing, torturing and brutalizing those who have been cast off as the useless residue of a system rooted in exploitation and racial oppression. Elementary humanity demands that the SHU and all other solitary confinement chambers be abolished. But it will take nothing short of proletarian socialist revolution to destroy the capitalists’ prison system and sweep away all the barbaric institutions of the bourgeois state.

From Attica to Pelican Bay

The Pelican Bay hunger strike took place on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the murder of San Quentin prisoner and Black Panther Party spokesman George Jackson, who was gunned down by prison guards who alleged that he was “trying to escape.” The murder of Jackson was the spark that ignited the multiracial rebellion of inmates at Attica prison in upstate New York in September 1971. Declaring: “We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such,” the Attica prisoners demanded decent medical care, a minimum wage for prison work, rehabilitation and education programs and an end to censorship of reading material.

In their struggle against the conditions in America’s prisons, Jackson and the Attica inmates reflected the mass social struggles that were taking place outside the prison walls, from the “black power” movement to the protests against the Vietnam War. One of Jackson’s comrades was Hugo Pinell, who became a leader of the prisoners’ rights struggle in the late 1960s while incarcerated in California. The Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee have long fought for freedom for Pinell, a Pelican Bay SHU prisoner who took part in the hunger strike. Pinell has been locked in solitary for some 40 years but remains unbroken and unbowed.

George Jackson was killed and the Attica revolt crushed with particular vengeance because the capitalist rulers feared that the prisoners had come to understand their repression in political terms. When New York governor Nelson Rockefeller moved in for the kill at Attica, he declared that the “revolutionary tactics of militants” were a “serious threat to the ability of free government to preserve order.” Four days after the revolt began, the state unleashed a 1,000-strong assault team. Twenty-nine inmates were killed. After the slaughter, hundreds of naked, overwhelmingly black prisoners were lined up in the yard like slaves at an auction in the Confederate South. Here was a searing image of the reality of black oppression in the U.S. Built on the foundation of black chattel slavery, the forcible segregation of the majority of the black population at the bottom of this society endures as a fundamental prop for preserving capitalist rule in the United States.

Forty years after Attica, America’s prisons are overflowing with black and Latino youth, the majority of them rounded up under the “anti-crime” crusade and especially the “war on drugs.” Republican president Richard Nixon launched a “war on crime” that was centrally aimed at the repression of black militants and the inner-city poor following the ghetto upheavals of the 1960s. This campaign was augmented as deindustrialization began to hit a wide swath of the country in the late 1970s. Largely due to the “war on drugs,” by the mid 1990s the prison population had grown by a million—one place behind bars for every job lost on the assembly lines.

The lives of inner-city blacks, who once supplied a “reserve army of labor” to fill jobs during times of economic expansion, were written off as expendable, no longer worth providing even the minimal subsistence needed to raise the next generation of wage slaves. Virtually every social program benefiting the ghetto and barrio poor was slashed. Having created the conditions in which black and Latino youth had little or no way out of desperate poverty, the rulers branded them as criminal “outlaws.”

The “war on drugs” went into high gear under Republican president Ronald Reagan, with the avid support of black Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who joined in the ideological crusade against ghetto youth as drug-pushing predators. By 2010, the prison population had reached 2.3 million people, the majority of whom were convicted on non-violent drug charges. The Spartacist League calls to decriminalize drugs. We oppose all laws against “crimes without victims”—from drug use and gambling to prostitution and pornography—which at bottom are designed to regiment the population in this viciously racist, bigoted, class-divided society.

As we wrote 16 years ago in “Lockdown U.S.A.” (WV No. 618, 10 March 1995): “The bourgeoisie’s vicious drive to imprison and execute ever-increasing numbers of ghetto youth reflects a sinister impulse to genocide against a layer of the black population.” The election of America’s first black president has not changed this cruel calculus of torture and death. While one in four black children have lost their fathers to prison by age 14, Barack Obama lectures young black men for having insufficient “family values.”

This is a common refrain of the black petty bourgeoisie. A thin layer of blacks benefited from the affirmative action and “war on poverty” programs instituted in response to the civil rights struggles and to quell the ghetto revolts. Today, much of the black middle class reviles the inner-city poor as “bringing down the race.” As Commander-in-Chief, Obama is the overseer of the plantation of racist American capitalism, which subjects tens of thousands of black, Latino and other U.S. citizens locked up in solitary to the kind of horrors perpetrated in the name of the “war on terror” against prisoners in Guantánamo.

Cruel but Not Unusual

With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has 25 percent of the prison population of the entire planet. Over 7.3 million men, women and children are now in jail or prison or on parole or probation. And California leads the nation in the number of people behind bars. The state’s prison population exploded from 25,000 in 1980 to 168,000 in 2009. In the same period, 23 new prisons were built. But this has not been enough to warehouse those put on the state’s conveyor belt to mass incarceration.

California prisons are packed to almost 200 percent capacity in conditions so depraved that a narrow majority of the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that they violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.” It is notable that the ruling came from a Court that has itself worked assiduously to shred prisoners’ rights, as well as those of the population as a whole. But at bottom the ruling represents little more than an application of some cosmetics to the barbarism of the U.S. “justice” system.

Going back nearly three decades, a series of lower court orders have directed California prison authorities to relieve overcrowding, provide medical care and stop abuse by prison guards. In 2005, a California federal court found it to be an “uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six to seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.” Such “deficiencies” include denial of medical care as well as the risk to life and limb that comes with being confined with hundreds of others, triple-bunked in gyms and cafeterias, for 24 hours a day in conditions described as a “giant game of survivor.” Mentally ill prisoners are locked up in “telephone-booth sized cages without toilets.” One prisoner a week kills himself, a suicide rate 80 percent higher than the national average. Even the former head of the prisons in Texas, the execution capital of the U.S., described California’s prisons as “appalling” and “inhumane,” adding that “in more than 35 years of prison work experience I have never seen anything like it.”

Such conditions are the product of literally thousands of laws enacted by Democratic and Republican governors alike, over the past 30 years. In his first round in the governor’s office, when he was known as Governor Moonbeam by those who saw him as the voice of “la-la land” liberalism, Jerry Brown, a Democrat, knocked down any possibility for early release. Most rehabilitation programs were eliminated, and the length of mandatory prison terms was increased. The supercharged “tough on crime” climate laid the basis for the passage of Proposition 184 in 1994. The harshest “three strikes” law in the country, it mandates 25 years to life for any third offense by those with two prior serious convictions. Among those behind bars for life under this law are people convicted on their “third strike” of stealing $2 socks or $20 work gloves.

Anti-gang injunctions make it a crime if the cops find you anywhere in public in the company of an alleged gang member. Once you’re railroaded to prison, the brand of “gang affiliation” can land you in the torture chambers of solitary confinement. Even after serving their time, prisoners remain ensnared by laws that bar ex-felons from public housing, food stamps and many other benefits. California has 210 laws and regulations preventing felons from getting jobs or licenses—even to be a barber, an interior designer or a guide-dog trainer. Criminal background checks are mandatory on most employment applications. Seventy-seven percent of those released from prison in California end up back behind bars—the highest recidivism rate in the nation.

In 2009, Lovelle Mixon, a young black man raised on the destitute streets of the East Oakland ghetto who was out on parole, blew away four cops with an assault rifle in two separate confrontations after he was pulled over by the police. An article in the San Francisco Bay View (24 March 2009) remarked at the time: “Lovelle Mixon was America’s worst nightmare: the Black man with nothing to lose.” As an ex-felon on the streets, he had no prospects. When confronted by the cops, his only future was to be sent back to jail, so he went to his death in a hail of police gunfire instead. More than 500 people came out for Mixon’s funeral, their rage and defiance of the occupying army of police on their streets captured in a text message reading: “Us: 4—Them: 1.”

To preserve their power and profits against those they exploit and oppress, the capitalist rulers erect ever more monstrous institutions of coercion, suppression and death, vastly expanding police powers on the streets of the U.S. while their military marauds over the planet. The medieval tortures of the rack and the screw have been replaced by the high-tech barbarism of solitary confinement, the death row gurneys of state-sanctioned murder or the more “normal” conditions of being packed in overcrowded prisons like animals in abattoirs. Unspeakably cruel, these conditions are not, however, unusual in racist America. On the contrary, such barbarism is the product of a system that has long outlived any measure of progress.

The “Worst of the Worst”: California Prison Guards

Among the biggest beneficiaries of the “war on crime” have been the sadistic jailers themselves. In the past 30 years, the size of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) has grown from 5,600 to 33,000, their pay more than tripling during the same period from $21,000 to $73,000 a year. One of the most powerful political forces in the state, the CCPOA has poured millions of dollars into speeding up the assembly line to prison. Promoting a series of reactionary initiatives—from the 1972 reinstatement of California’s death penalty to the 1994 “three strikes” law—this “union” has been a moving force behind the defeat of any attempt to alleviate prison conditions. The hellish prison conditions are their bread and butter. One guard enthused: “With ‘Three Strikes’ and the overcrowding we’re going to experience with that, we’re going to need to build at least three prisons a year for the next five years. Each one of those institutions will take approximately 1,000 employees.”

If there is any criminal gang in California’s prisons, the guards are it, genuinely the “worst of the worst” violent predators. According to testimony in a class-action suit brought by 3,600 Pelican Bay prisoners in the mid 1990s, California prison guards shot and killed more than 30 inmates between 1989 and 1994. Eight Corcoran State Prison guards were indicted for staging “blood sport” fights between inmates in the Secure Housing Unit. In 2010, an investigation by a Sacramento Bee journalist exposed the vicious racism and brutality of guards in the “Behavior Modification Unit” in the High Desert Prison, describing how one black prisoner was shackled, pepper-sprayed and then “paraded naked through the cell block in a way that that prisoner and others who witnessed the event regarded as a kind of image of modern slavery.”

A throwback to the plantation overseers in the Confederate slavocracy, the guards are well-compensated for “doing their job.” While savaging social programs for the poor, sick and aged in the name of balancing the state’s budget, Jerry Brown increased the CCPOA’s vacation and other benefits earlier this year. This was more than a simple payoff for the $2 million the prison guards provided for Brown’s election campaign. The misleaders of the public workers unions shelled out millions for the Democrats, but that didn’t spare their members’ jobs, pensions and other benefits from the budget-cutting ax. The political power of the bonapartist thugs who run and police the prisons is fed by the racist rulers’ endless “anti-crime” campaigns. Having secured ever more fabulous wealth through grinding the working class and poor, the capitalist class is well aware that it is creating a massive sea of discontent at the bottom of this society, and it spares no expense in increasing the powers of state repression—from the cops to the prisons.

Yet the armed thugs of the capitalist rulers are welcomed into the labor movement by the sellout misleaders of the trade unions. It would be hard to find a more savage indictment of the service the union bureaucrats provide as the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class. In defense of the profits and competitiveness of U.S. imperialism, they allowed the industrial unions to be ravaged. Now they are lying down in the face of an all-out war against public workers unions, offering to share in the “sacrifice” while channeling the anger of their ranks into renewed support for the Democratic Party. To maintain their dues base, they organize the strikebreaking cops and the sadistic jailers whose purpose is the violent suppression of the working class, the ghetto and barrio poor and all those perceived as potential “enemies of the state.” Cops and prison guards out of the unions!

Fight for a Socialist America!

While they have written off a whole generation of black youth as criminal outlaws, the rulers remain fearful that prisoners might develop some social and political consciousness. Being caught with a book by George Jackson is enough to be branded a gang member and sent to solitary. In 2005, black death row prisoner Tookie Williams was denied clemency by then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In sending Williams to his death, Schwarzenegger particularly singled out Williams’ dedication of his 1998 book Life in Prison to, among others, George Jackson as “a significant indicator that Williams is not reformed and that he still sees violence and lawlessness as a legitimate means to address societal problems.”

It was the violence and brutality of the prisons, combined with the social upheavals of the time, that propelled George Jackson and others to see their oppression as a product of the capitalist system. Even so, as prisoners, divorced from any role in capitalist production, they had no social power. The struggles of that time were subject to both bloody repression and co-optation by the ruling class. Today, the Pelican Bay hunger strike is a desperate product of that legacy and of the subsequent dearth of class and other social struggle against the capitalist rulers, who are loyally served by the trade-union bureaucracy. The destitution and mass joblessness in the inner cities have likewise increasingly robbed a whole layer of the black population of any social power, reducing many ghetto youth to a reactive glorification of lumpenism as a reflection of their own desperate struggle to survive by whatever means necessary.

The multiracial working class is the only force in capitalist society with both the social power and historic interest to eradicate a system rooted in its exploitation. The black workers who remain a militant backbone of the unions provide a critical human bridge for linking the power of the working class to the anger of the inner cities. To unleash this power, it is necessary to wage a political struggle to break the chains forged by the trade-union bureaucracy which have shackled labor to its exploiters.

As we wrote in “Massacre at Attica,” the front-page article of the first issue of Workers Vanguard (October 1971):

“We support the most militant struggle against the state. We only seek to give that struggle the strategic perspectives that will lead to the workers conquering political power….

“The heroic Attica martyrs and George Jackson will long be remembered for their courageous stand against overwhelming odds. It is not the crimes (real or alleged) for which the prisoners were jailed, but the stand they took—rising far above capitalist-imposed ignorance, poverty, brutality and frame-up—for justice and against oppression, that the world’s working people will remember.”

The purpose of the Spartacist League is to build the multiracial revolutionary party that will lead the workers in the fight to shatter the capitalist state and all its instruments of incarceration, torture and death. When the workers internationally take political power and put the wealth now appropriated by the tiny class of exploiters to serving the needs of humanity, they will lay the material basis for achieving an egalitarian communist society, doing away with any need for a state apparatus of repression.

An Old Geezer Jogging, Kind Of, At The North Adamsville"Dust Bowl" (A.K.A. The Cavanaugh Track)-For Bill Bailey, North Adamsville Class Of 1964

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Hicham el Guerouj, the Moroccan Knight, setting the one mile run world record in 2008.

Peter Paul Markin comment:


I have written a number of entries in this space about the old days at North, North Adamsville High School in the early 1960s, for those unfamiliar with that hallowed ground, and the like. This little beauty follows in that same tradition, although with this twist- the "old geezer" described in the headline to this entry has requested anonymity for reasons that will become obvious once the tale he has asked me to tell unfolds. I think, however, that the average, above-average, classmates that old North produced can all figure this one out. Right?

For those of us who went to North Adamsville Junior High School and can remember that far back this year (2010) marks the 50th anniversary of our graduation from that unhallowed school. For the old geezer, a man know personally to me from the old days and man given to the faux-heroic feat, the odd-ball, off-hand symbolic gesture, and a disturbingly steadfast adherence to the drumbeat of history this called for some action. Now the old geezer and I go back to the times when we were corner boys together along with Frankie Riley, yes, Frankie Riley the now successful lawyer that you keep reading about in the newspapers of late (that is if anybody still reads such things in the “new age”) along with several other guys at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs.” (For those unfamiliar with that term don’t worry about such a localism it does not affect the story here). So when I speak of odd-ball behavior I know of where I speak.

As if merely a nodding commemoration of the 50th anniversary graduation “event” were not enough since this year also marked the 50th anniversary of the old geezer’s first seriously taking up running (indoor and outdoor track, cross country) as a sport, under the guidance of old time North Adamsville Junior High, Coach Bob Lewis, a gesture was required. As a historic “gesture” he decided to an attempt to run one mile around the old "Dust Bowl" track that served (and still serves) as an “athletic field” for the North high school and middle school (a.k.a. junior high school) community since Hector was a pup. And if not that long, then since beyond local memory.

Now this Herculean effort was to be done in spite of the fact that the old geezer had done no more, at most, than run for the bus for the past quarter of a century, or more. And just missed that bus on more occasions that warrants attention here. Note also that the distance selected for this “heroic” effort was the well-known classic one mile that he sought to run. Not for him that old "lame" 600 yards around the front driveway circle at North that everyone had to do as part of the old-time yearly President's Physical Fitness Test. Kids’ stuff. No, he went back to the mist of time and to feats like those of the first sub-four minute miler, Roger Bannister. (For those unfamiliar with that name it too is not germane to this story, although you can Google the name or look it up in Wikipedia if you have a little time on your hands.

For those not familiar with the location the old "Dust Bowl" is the field the next street over from the North Adamsville Middle School. It served as our junior high school field for some other sports as well. It also was the place where the legendary 1964 football team, led by "Bullwinkle", "Woj", Jim Fallon, Charlie McDonald, Tom Kiley, Walt Simmons, Don McNally, Lee Munson and a host of others practiced being mean under Coach Lion in order to beat beleaguered cross town arch-rival Adamsville High School that year. Now I know that some readers here "know" that location.

Furthermore, it was also the training ground and meet location for the high school spring track team where the silky-strided Bill Bailey held forth in distance running, Ritchie McDonald and others in the middle distances, Brooks Atkins in the sprints, Carl Lindberg and Ralph Moore in the hurdles, Al Bartley in the pole vault and a host of others who ran around in their skimpy black shorts, including the old geezer. The old geezer, moreover, was then distinguished by being a consummate well-below average runner. He had the “slows” as every other teammate told him at every possible opportunity. He was not sure on this one, nor am I, but, perhaps, the football cheerleaders led by the spunky Josie Weinfeld, the sprightly Roxanne Gower, and the plucky Linda Plane also practiced there. In short, if you were not familiar with the locale and grew up in the old town there then you now stand accused of being willfully out of touch with old North Adamsville reality.

I should also mention that this name "Dust Bowl" is not mere hyperbole on my part. In summer and fall, at least, there was more dust that the EPA would find tolerable these days. Moreover, as the old geezer told me the field 'owed' him. So revenge was also a motive here, as well. Apparently he still has cinders in his left knee from when he fell while running on the track 50 years ago. Ouch! He asked me to ask around to see if others had similar "war stories", although none came worthy of notice-mere band-aid wounds. Moreover, and this is symbolic in its own way, the track is not the normal quarter-mile one that you only had to go around four times to the mile(for the non-Math whizzes out there) but five laps to the mile. That may explain many things about our subsequent lives, right?

Okay, now to the big event. In the interest of accuracy this "event", according to the old geezer's information, occurred at about 9:00 AM on February 6, 2010. Now why he was not in Florida or at least in some warm house instead of being out on the "track" will go a long way to explaining the "inner demons" that plague then this sixty-three year-old man's psyche. Moreover, he continued on with his quest despite having to wait upon dogs, and their owners, who seemingly felt such an hour was ripe for a canine national convention at the old bowl. But, we digress.

The old geezer started off okay with the usual burst of adrenaline one gets when the big day finally comes carrying him along for a while, he then settled into a 'pace' and all went well until he started breathing heavily, got light-headed and began feeling cramps in his thigh, and that was only on the first lap. It went down hill from there. He insisted I give the gory details of each lap but thank god for the Delete button. Intrepid soul that he is he” dogged" it out. He informed me that his time for the mile has been declared a matter of national security and therefore not available to the public, although he did allude to an unfavorable comparison with the time it takes to get to the moon and back. Nevertheless the gesture is in the books, a member of the class of 1964 has been vindicated, and life can return to normal. Oh, the old geezer did mention this. For those of you with grandchildren under the age of five he is ready to take on all comers. Okay.

Postscript- If you can believe this the old geezer refuses to permit me to post the “news” of his “heroic” one mile effort if I do not include a blow-by-blow description of his five lap (remember the “Dust Bowl” is five laps to the mile in case you might have forgotten). I thought that giving a short summary of his first lap was more than adequate but no we need to know every hurried breathe, every turned toe, every near collapse. The reader should feel no compulsion to wade through this but don’t forget the Delete button is readily at hand. In any case the following is strictly the old geezer’s take on the matter.

Old Geezer comment:

That February day was cold but not much colder than in the old days when we went down to Clintondale and their winter outdoor track in January that really froze you. The trick was to take off your sweat suit, jump on the oval banked-wooden track as quickly as possible and hit the starting line just as the starter yelled to run. And then do the same thing in reverse after the race. Funny the old Dust Bowl with the exception of them taking out the wooden bleachers where the seven (hey, maybe it was six if you didn’t count the girl scorer, the cute girl scorer, Roseanne something, I think) track and field fans gathered in the old days the place looked like it hadn’t been upgraded since about 1964. Same old rutted, brambly, asphalty, hard-scrabble surface that you dare not trip and fall on. I know because I still carry some “cinder” from the old days in my left knee. But enough. To the run itself.

Of course I started out slow, slow as hell, slower than a couple of the dogs that were rummaging around along with their “guardians.” As I picked up steam I was going pretty good until I started breathing real heavy, started to get the inevitable sweating, and my legs started getting light and wobbly. That was almost at the end of the first lap with four more to go. I almost stopped but I am not built that way, slow or fast, mainly slow I almost always finished a race except when I came up injured a couple of times. The second lap was tough as I started to put my head down to push myself along just like in the old days. Painful step after step.

The third lap got a little better as I got in stride and was pretty uneventful except for a random dog who decide he (or she) wanted to be my “rabbit” ( a rabbit in track is someone who sets the pace, a fast pace, for others and then either falls back or drops out). The fourth lap though almost did me in. I stumbled and almost fell on a clod of dirt that must have been dug up before the winter set in. I managed to right myself but I felt kind of dizzy after that for a while. Hey, four laps are done now and I am at the “gun” lap (fifth for those legions who don’t know track “lingo”). No way am I not going to finish now. And while it seemed like an eternity I did finish with a “sprint” the last ten yards or so. After about twenty minutes recuperation while my pulse slowed down, my blood pressure stabilized and about thirteen other medical conditions passed the crisis point I left the dust bowl feeling I had even up the score on that damn place.

Markin comment:

That "fifteen minutes of fame" thing is pretty attenuated here but for those who actually read this last section there you have it. Enough.