Click on the headline to link to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive blog page for all kinds of interesting information about that important historic grouping.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
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The truth about Guernica: Picasso and the lying press
March 9, 2012
By Martin Minchom-->
Picasso, Figure of a Woman Inspired by the Spanish Civil War, 19 January, 1937.
“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth” —Pablo Picasso
What inspired Picasso to paint his Guernica? It was not just the bombing of the Basque town on April 26, 1937. In fact, to properly understand the circumstances that gave rise to the creation of Picasso’s contribution to the 1937 World Fair, it is necessary to consider the full historical background, beginning with a series of events that influenced Picasso’s earliest artistic reactions to the Spanish Civil War in late 1936 and early 1937. (1) The great cultural tradition that links Picasso with artists like Goya has always been, and rightly so, the High Road towards the masterpiece. But, as we will see, exploring the Low Road of newspapers, pamphlets and street posters, government reports and conspiracy theories–teasing out information from exactly contemporaneous sources–can also provide surprisingly rich pickings. In what follows I will attempt to reconstruct a street view of Picasso the newspaper reader—the worried and indignant Spaniard in France—over an extended period between December 1936 and April 1937.
I will base my discussion on a close reading of French newspapers and weeklies, looking at the ways in which press influence can be traced in Picasso’s print Dream and Lie of Franco (an eighteen-scene narrative in etching and aquatint, sold as prints to raise funds for the Republic) and the Guernica itself. But let me begin with a strange drama, finely poised between tragedy and farce, that strongly affected French reactions to the Spanish Civil War. On December 8, 1936 the French embassy plane in Spain, a converted Potez 54 bomber plane, was intercepted and brought down by unknown attackers about 60 miles northeast of Madrid. Just one person died in that attack: the French journalist Louis Delaprée, who was returning to France to have it out with his newspaper editors, after they had censored and suppressed his reports denouncing the pro-Francoist aerial bombardments of Madrid. In previous pieces for the Volunteer (see here and here) I studied this case essentially from the left-wing perspective of Picasso’s circle of friends and the campaign spearheaded by the French Communist newspaper L’Humanité, arguing that this intriguing “Spanish” news of aerial bombardments, censorship and lies caught the attention of Pablo Picasso, who had not previously manifested any interest in the war as an artistic subject. (2)
But any confrontation has two sides. In this companion piece, I will retrace my steps through late 1936 and early 1937 to view the picture from a different angle, taking into account the conservative and right-wing reactions of those who were unsympathetic to the Spanish Republic. They were concerned with a quite different issue, namely the murky circumstances surrounding the downing of the embassy plane. There were persistent rumors that this was really a Soviet-style operation to cover up the previous month’s Republican killings near Madrid. (3) Despite the many uncertainties surrounding this case, there have been few “ifs” and “buts” in the literature on it, created mainly beyond the confines of historical scholarship. In cyberspace, in fact, the conjectures of the 1930s have by now hardened into dark certainties. If one looks up Paracuellos massacre (now the generic term for the Republican killings) in Wikipedia, for instance, an account of the attack on the embassy plane emerges as a key episode. Appearing under the heading “Henny’s attempted murder”, it is presented as though the whole affair were a closed case. (Dr. Henny was one of the plane’s passengers, as I discuss below.) (4) In this version of events, the clinching argument would be that the French government investigated the affair and blamed the Republicans, yet somehow failed to publish their findings. (5)
Le Charivari, 8-9 January 1937. (Martin Minchom)
As always, however, reality is more complicated. Last year, I located the official French files on this attack. Contrary to the more sinister hypotheses, these files had actually been sitting quietly undisturbed in the diplomatic archives in Nantes, simply waiting to be consulted. (6) To be sure, some of this material had initially been classified secret, exactly as we would expect; but after several decades it was declassified under equally standard procedures. In other words, there was no official French cover-up. What to the files show? While they suggest that French diplomacy harbored genuine suspicions about Republican involvement in the attack, they signally–and from the French point of view, frustratingly–failed to uncover much hard evidence. As a diplomatic incident, the case lays bare the fault lines in the fractious relationship between France and the Spanish Republic, while it is also instructive about internal tensions within France over the Spanish Civil War. French diplomacy and left-wing forces were uneasy bedfellows, although both were nominally loyal to the Popular Front-led government. Indeed, far from withholding papers to protect the Spanish government, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs may even have gone public to counteract French Communist agitation.
Along with its Spanish background, the Delaprée case had other features to intrigue Picasso. Quite recently, I located a full-page cartoon about the attack that was used as the cover illustration for Le Charivari, an extreme right-wing satirical weekly, for its issue of January 8, 1937. (7) A few days later Picasso produced a painting, linked to his own Dream and Lie of Franco, that bears several unmistakable similarities to this particular right-wing caricature. Artistically, the Charivari sketch was no doubt crude and unworthy of Picasso’s attention–but it did represent the same forces with which the artist engaged so memorably in the Guernica.
A series of artistic reactions by Picasso show that he was repeatedly affected by aerial bombardments of civilian targets, and appalled at the silence of the mainly conservative French press on this issue. (8) Picasso was a regular reader of L’Humanité, which launched a vigorous campaign against “the lying press, the murderous press” in 1936 and 1937. (9) While L’Humanité certainly practised its own manipulations, I believe that this campaign shaped the context in which Picasso interpreted the distorted, incomplete and often distressing news from Spain. Picasso explicitly named the ‘lie’ in his title for Dream and Lie of Franco, and drew a clenched fist on a copy of Paris-Soir that ignored the bombing of Madrid. I will argue here that there are similar echoes in the Guernica itself.
One anecdote, possibly apocryphal, has it that when news of the bombing of Gernika reached Paris in April 1937 the subject was proposed to Picasso, who replied that he didn’t even know what a bombed town looked like. (10) If this response was true, it was certainly disingenuous. Nevertheless, Picasso does seem to have felt that an artist had the special power to counter deceit, by using the inversions and apparent deceptions of artistic creation to cut through all the lies propagated in the public sphere. In 1935, Picasso spoke of a dictatorship of painters, or of a painter, “to suppress all those who tricked us, to suppress the cheaters, to suppress the objects of trickery, to suppress customs, to suppress charms, to suppress history, to suppress a heap of still more things.” (11). Artistic truth, he seems to suggest, will be terrible rather than reassuring, opening our eyes but stripping away our illusions.
The wreckage of the French Embassy plane. (L. Delaprée, Morir en Madrid, 2009 / Lincoln-Delaprée collection.)
The Downing of the Potez 54 and its Strange Aftermath
I am especially interested in clarifying French reactions to the Potez 54 / Delaprée affair between 29 December 1936 and mid-January 1937, when Picasso was involved. But first I’ll look at the attack itself. Thirty years ago, the leading hispanist Ian Gibson suggested that if the official French files on this case were ever found, they might shed some interesting light. (12) Now that I have located them, however, I can only say that they raise as many questions as they answer.
During the Spanish Civil War, the French embassy in Madrid used a converted Potez 54 bomber plane to carry official correspondence, and sometimes passengers, between Spain and France. That plane was due to leave Barajas airport in Madrid on December 6, 1936. But it was delayed twice due to technical problems, and finally left for Toulouse, France, at 12.20 on December 8th. In addition to its captain and radio operator, it carried two French journalists, Louis Delaprée of the daily newspaper Paris-Soir and André Château of the Havas news agency. The French embassy gave three non-French passengers permission to travel, namely two Spanish girls and Dr. Henny, the Swiss envoy of the International Red Cross. The plane had not been in the air for long when, near Alcalá de Henares, it was approached by a monoplane. According to the captain of the embassy plane, Charles Boyer, the co-pilot had plenty of time to look it over. Some time later, when the Potez 54 had reached the Guadalajara region, it was attacked by a second aircraft, a biplane, at an altitude of about 10,000 feet. (13) Thanks to its pilot’s cool head it managed to make a bumpy crash landing in a field near the village of Pastrana. Dr. Henny was taken quickly to the Palace Hotel in Madrid, and after a delay, the other passengers were also taken to Madrid. One of them, the journalist Louis Delaprée died at 2:00 in the morning on December 11th.
Press reporting on the incident was initially confused. Contradictory information was spread, for example, with regard to the number of attacking planes. It was also often asserted incorrectly that an Air France plane had been brought down. Early on, it was generally assumed that pro-Francoist planes were responsible for the attack, and right-wing sources asked why the French embassy had been using a converted bomber plane that could so easily be confused with a military aircraft.
Louis Delaprée: the photo that was used on street posters on 31 December 1936. (Bibliothèque nationale de France.)
Suspicions quickly surfaced, however, that the attack had been specifically aimed at Dr. Henny because he had knowledge, and possibly documents, about the Paracuellos killings–the mass execution by Republicans of pro-Franco prisoners, which had taken place in November and early December–that he was taking to France and then on to Geneva. The arrival of this news in Geneva would have immediately preceded the Spanish State minister’s address to the League of Nations. (14) As early as December 9th, the day after the attack, Emmanuel Neuville, the French consul in Madrid, voiced his suspicions that the aim of the plane attack had been to stop Henny reporting the atrocities. (15) Dr. Henny reported back to the Red Cross in Geneva that he also thought he might have been the target. (16) An otherwise skeptical passenger, the injured journalist André Château, acknowledged that if the attack had been aimed at anyone, this would have been Henny. Neither Delaprée nor himself had any information that would have marked them out, he said, whereas Henny was potentially an “awkward witness”. (17)
All the same, Dr. Henny was not the only possible object of the attack, and Delaprée’s name also came up later, in other speculations, although less frequently. For example, it was claimed in 1938 that Louis Delaprée was carrying some information so vital that the “reds” wanted to intercept it at any cost. (18) Delaprée himself seems to have believed his life was threatened, and his papers may have been tampered with after the attack. (19)
There are many colorful details to this case, far more than I can do justice to here. At the height of the Cold War, in 1961 the Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer wrote a widely cited account, strewn with inaccuracies, that blamed Orlov’s Soviet agents. (20) In 1987, half a century after the event, a local resident Dr. Cortijo spoke of handing over two bags found near the wreckage to trustworthy French embassy officials. (21) In fact the diplomatic bag (which was indeed made up of two separate bags) does show up in the official inventory. (22) But according to legend, these bags were packed with compromising photos and documents on Paracuellos, while there is no such indication in the consular documentation. Finally, long after the event two Soviet pilots were described as have admitted to shooting down the aircraft, but without realizing that it was an embassy plane. (23)
Emmanuel Neuville, the French consul in Madrid, was in charge of investigations in situ and from the outset suspicions focused on a Frenchman, Robert Marcelin. Not much seems to have been known about Marcelin’s background, and he was not specifically identified as a Soviet agent, unless the description of him as a “member of the Cheka” was hinting at this. (The chekas were non-official people’s tribunals and make-shift prisons that administered very rough justice.) Marcelin certainly talked up his role because he was claimed to have boasted to foreign journalists that he was head of espionnage under the Madrid junta. (24) Marcelin’s connections make him a plausible suspect for the plane attack as the junta was set up after the Republican government had left Madrid for Valencia, and the Paracuellos killings were on its watch.
French diplomacy suspected Marcelin of practically every single unsolved crime involving foreigners in the Republican zone. However, by spreading the net so very wide, they also revealed how little hard evidence they really had. The French were particularly interested in tracking down one person at Barajas airport to whom Marcelin was alleged to have said, on the eve of the attack, that one of those leaving would never arrive. (25) This reported statement circulated widely, and was interpreted as a threat to attack the plane. But surely–if true–this was said earlier than reported, and meant that a passenger (Henny? Delaprée?) would meet a sticky end in a dark Madrid side-street. Marcelin was referring to one person, not seven; and how do you pick out a single victim at 10,000 feet?
The French embassy was given a report from the Madrid Junta on December 9, 1936 showing that Robert Marcelin and Florentino Ruiz had been the agents in charge of the initial investigation. (26) Embassy officials found this highly suspicious, and Marcelin’s name was underlined in red pencil on the document and highlighted by a red exclamation mark. Marcelin’s name subsequently disappeared from junta documentation, which only reinforced French suspicions.
Picasso's sketch of a hand holding a hammer/sickle, on a copy of Paris-Soir.
The Marcelin connection was the closest the French investigation ever got to a genuine lead, but plenty of details reveal an atmosphere of tension and distrust. On the day of the attack itself, Emmanuel Neuville’s suspicions were raised by the pilot’s reluctance to say over the phone who he thought was responsible. (27) On December 11, concern was expressed for the safety of the pilot and radio operator, who were discreetly taken out of Spain. (28) The French apparently even managed the logistical feat of having the plane itself moved to safe hiding. Otherwise, the French had little to go on, and their work focused almost entirely on the identification of the attacking planes. (29)
When the French government sent a letter of protest to the Republican government on December 28, it basically had to rely on this type of evidence. However, a photo of the wreckage of the plane (preserved by Mme. Catherine Lincoln-Delaprée) shows that the issue of identification was not clear-cut. The plane’s numbering F-A000 is clearly visible on the photo. However, the tail displays a single letter (F), which was characteristic of Malraux’s air squadron, and displays neither the tricolor nor the official letters RF. (30) As the embassy plane had previously been a military aircraft, in process of transformation for civilian use, the possibility of an erroneous identification was greater than usually imagined. The plane, in other words, looked like a Republican military aircraft. This reopens the possibility of an attack in error by pro-Francoist aviation.
The French went on investigating after they had sent their letter of protest on December 28, but if anything they found themselves going backwards. On January 5 1937, the injured journalist André Château was repatriated to France and hospitalized in Bordeaux, where his testimony failed to back up the Republican government’s conclusions. He had the “impression” that the Potez 54 has been attacked by a government plane, but he was not sure. He was not convinced about the identification because Franco’s planes had red and yellow markings, and the yellow was less visible. He did have doubts about whether Franco’s plane would have gone so near to Alcalá de Henares, where there was a military airport. He reckoned the attack might have been perpetrated by mistake by a government plane. The attacking plane did have time to look, but maybe the markings were not clear enough to allow for identification. (31) (The archives of the Havas news agency show that the unfortunate Château’s return to France was not to be a happy one, and he stoically had his right leg amputated in April 1937. (32))
By mid-January, the French consul Neuville reported that his investigation was stalling: he had not got new proofs which could be considered conclusive. “At best,” he said, he could point to the type and coloring of the wings of the attacking plane, as indicated by the pilot and radio operator. (33) However, he also expressed renewed suspicions of Marcelin. On January 29, 1937, a request was made for a bullet found after the attack to be examined more closely. On March 19, 1937, the consul in Madrid Emmanuel Neuville warned the consulate in Alicante that the Frenchman Robert Marcelin, described as the head of espionnage for the Madrid junta, was going there. (34) But basically, the official investigation was fizzling out.
And the mystery? My two cents goes on the mundane possibility that the embassy airplane was attacked in error, perhaps by pro-Francoist planes, perhaps by Republican planes. As for a planned Soviet attack, at this time Soviet foreign policy was still based on making a common front with France and Britain against Nazism; and Stalin would not have felt that shooting down French planes was the best way to go about it. Much the same argument would apply to the Republican government. But that does not rule out a more improvised local action. Local agents could–say–have messed up a dirty tricks operation in Madrid, and then panicked, providing (dis)information to pro-Republican aviation. But this conjecture is highly speculative. My guess is that only Soviet documentation, if it exists, could prove conclusively that there was a planned attack; and if Soviet agents had indeed done their worst, they might well not have written to Stalin to boast about it.
A sketch of 19 April 1937, showing the raised arm, clenched fist and hammer and sickle.
However, we can certainly dismiss the hypothesis of a French cover-up. The notion of official connivance between two brotherly Popular Front governments was never plausible given what we know about the troubled course of French-Spanish relations and the ambivalent attitude of the French State Office, the Quai d’Orsay. (35) In many ways, French diplomacy in Spain operated in a similar way to Britain’s. Both countries had absentee ambassadors on the frontier, who were bitterly hostile to the Republic, while their consular officials, like Emmanuel Neuville (and in the British case Ogilvie-Forbes), discharged their duties honorably in Madrid. (36) Embassy officials who were too sympathetic to the Republicans, like the French military attaché Henri Morel, found themselves in trouble. (37) On my reading, the French government had reasonable suspicions, but very little hard evidence, when it issued its findings attributing the attack to pro-Republication aviation.
The findings of the State Office were made public on December 31, 1936. At this point the two strands in the affair–the attack on the plane and the censorship of Louis Delaprée’s writings–converge. As a commentator observed at the time: “… the curiously ironical outcome of the incident [i.e. the attack on the plane, MM] was this: on the very day on which the walls of Paris were adorned with manifestos of protest by Left journalists, the Quai d’Orsay itself made an official statement to the effect that the ambassadorial plane had been shot down by the government forces. Apparently M. Blum’s liaison arrangements with the Left journalists were somewhat defective.” (38)
It must have been very soon after the attack that the Republicans and their supporters realized that Delaprée’s writing might have great propaganda value. While Delaprée was still being dismissed as a sensationalist jet-setter for the far-right press in a Spanish newspaper on December 9th, for example, a mere two days later the same newspaper suddenly started calling him a “genuine liberal”. (39) Something was clearly going on behind the scenes. In December, circles close to the Communist newspaper L’Humanité managed to get hold of the full copies of Louis Delaprée dispatches denouncing the pro-Francoist aerial bombardments of Madrid in November 1936. These had originally being filed with the Republican Censorship Office in Madrid, and were probably taken to Paris by L’Humanité’s correspondent, Georges Soria. Delaprée’s reports had mainly been rejected by his own newspaper, but soon they would be brought out in pamphlet form in no less than five languages, as part of a major propaganda initiative. (40)
The victims from a bombed church in Durango. (L’Humanité, 6 April 1937, and Durango, Ville Martyre, 30 April 1937.)
At the end of December, however, things were being warmed up with the launching of street posters (visible in a scene shown here in L’Humanité of 1 January 1937), in which Delaprée’s wan and melancholy face looks out at us alongside the words: “The voice of a dead man denounces the lies of the press.” Picasso’s biographer Sir John Richardson has drawn attention to the painter’s very first reference to the Spanish Civil War in Still Life with a Lamp on December 29, 1936, which included a severed arm (as in the Guernica), and a poster on the wall with the date. This was when the Delaprée poster was being printed, allowing us to infer that Picasso must have seen it before it came out. Perhaps the whole purpose of the campaign had been to get the world’s most famous artist to be more fully engaged with Republican Spain. If so, it was brilliantly successful.
In perfect synchronicity, the Right highlighted the attack on the plane at the same time as L’Humanité focused on Delaprée’s death and censored writings. L’Action Française of January 1, 1937 reported the French Government’s findings that Louis Delaprée had in fact been “murdered” by the Spanish Popular Front. There were also the first right-wing hints that the French writer André Malraux might somehow be mixed up in all this (which later turned into an aggressive, denunciatory campaign by the fascist writer Robert Brasillach (41)). L’Humanité did not buy into the idea that the timing of the announcement was a mere coincidence, alleging on January 2, 1937 that there was complicity between Paris-Soir and officials at the Quai D’Orsay. (42) On January 3, 1937 the French Communist newspaper L’Humanité made its own counter-accusation blaming Italian aviation.
The duelling resumed one week later, on Friday, January 8, 1937. That day, Louis Delaprée’s writings on the bombardments of Madrid were published as a pamphlet called The Martyrdom of Madrid. (On Saturday–see here–L’Humanité showcased it under the heading Shame on the Lying Press!) Friday was also the day of the week that many weeklies were brought out, albeit with Saturday’s dateline, so that they could reach people before the weekend. One right-wing weekly that came out that day was particularly significant because, as I will show in a moment, Picasso saw it and reacted to it.
It is worth noting the extraordinary violence of the language that marked this controversy. L’Humanité placed a caption beneath the photo of the street scene on January 1, 1937, making an allusion to the “press which kills and lies.” Strong stuff. These words were linked to L’Humanité’s ongoing campaign against the far Right press which it blamed, probably correctly, for having hounding a government minister called Roger Salengro to his suicide. On November 18, 1936, L’Humanité had brought out a special edition on Salengro’s death, specifically denouncing calumnies spread by the “murderous press.” As part of this campaign, L’Humanité’s director Paul Vaillant-Couturier wrote a pamphlet with a title that used similar language: “The lying press, the murderous press.” (43)
A 1930s press campaign was the very opposite of an ordered process of political debate; and in this one, both sides were accusing each other of nothing less than murder. But if we prioritize Picasso’s reactions, the idea of lying, also so decisive here, was not merely rhetorical–especially given the fact that insults to honor were a defining feature of Spanish culture.
The royal shivaree and Picasso’s Dream and Lie of Franco
As mentioned above, on Friday January 8, 1937, Picasso saw and reacted to a crude caricature on the cover of Le Charivari, a right-wing satirical weekly. Le Charivari was on the outer reaches of the French Right, at the point where it shaded into outright fascism. Previously, on 23 February 1935 Le Charivari’s cover had portrayed Léon Blum as a vulture. The caricaturist had curved Blum’s nose into the beak so beloved of anti-semitic caricaturists, showing him picking away at a Christ-like victim. Presumably, this was the fate in store for suffering taxpayers if the Popular Front ever came to power. (44) Ralph Soupault, the cartoonist who drew the cover which interests us, would subsequently make himself notorious in March 1937 for a violently anti-semitic depiction of Léon Blum. On that occasion, Soupault portrayed Blum, by then Prime Minister, as being covered in blood, saying: “Who said I had no French blood?” in reference to a violently suppressed demonstration. (45)
Picasso, Dream and Lie of Franco, Part I, 8 January 1937.
The cover for this particular issue of Le Charivari showed a vulture perched on the edge of a coffin. Although Saturday January 9 was its cover date, we can confirm that it came out a day earlier by consulting L’Action Française, which announced its appearance on January 8th. (See here, at the bottom.) Given the weekly’s previous and future record, the vulture on Le Charivari’s cover of January 8, 1937 must be a direct reference to the notion of the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy, so beloved of the Nazi and Fascist right in the 1930s. The vulture has a red hammer and sickle on its chest, and two drops of blood are falling from its blood-covered beak. We know where the blood comes from because the open coffin on which it is perched carries a name: Louis Delaprée. (46)
The reason I am so sure that Pablo Picasso saw this caricature is that, a few days later, he replied to Le Charivari’s cover with a painting that is, detail by detail, its exact antithesis. On January 19, 1937, Picasso portrayed a woman-vulture from exactly the same angle, and with an identical slant of the neck, also looking sideways at us. In one claw, she grasps the Nationalist flag, red, yellow and red, except that against a yellow background we can only clearly make out the two little red stripes which match the vulture’s two drops of blood. Whereas the vulture’s body has the emblem of the hammer and sickle, hers is covered in crosses, their symbolic antithesis. She is standing on a raised balcony, which is of a funereal black but is covered by a white lapidary inscription: “Portrait of the Marchioness Of The Christian Ass, tossing a coin to the Moorish soldiers, defenders of the Virgin”. (47)
To Le Charivari’s dark evocation of Bolshevik machinations, Picasso is offering the riposte, much used on the Republican side, that the Nationalist generals have built their “Christian” crusade on the military might of the Moorish soldiers of the Army of Africa. Picasso adds a little touch of blasphematory burlesque by giving his woman-vulture the noble title of Marchioness Of The Christian Ass. In spirit, this painting has an obvious afinity with Dream and Lie of Franco. The text was unusually explicit by Picasso’s standards, although it had its own logic in this context.
The Charivari/Portrait of the Marchioness parallels prove that Picasso did indeed react to the Potez 54 / Delaprée affair. Picasso began his series of etchings Dream and Lie of Franco on January 8, 1937, on exactly the same day that the infinitely less gifted Ralph Soupault published his blood-spattered vulture; and Louis Delaprée’s writings on the bombing of Madrid also appeared that day. Picasso’s painting of a few days later not only shows that that Picasso reacted to that caricature, then, but also that something in it turned his stomach enough to make him want to “copy,” invert, and refute it. Dream and Lie, too, is a classic piece of inversion, beginning with its title, and I think I now have enough elements to study it more closely.
Dream and Lie of Franco is a two-part series of etchings, accompanied by a prose poem, that represents Franco as a grotesque king in a Spanish Golden Age setting. (48) In form, it is inspired by traditional narrative prints called aleluyas. (49) In successive scenes, Franco is shown riding a variety of steeds, walking a tightrope or chipping away at a classical statue. This monstrous polyp comes off much the worse in his jousting with a bull who radiates an incomparably greater power and dignity. There are four scenes, added later on, which are close to the Guernica; but a prostrate woman, also seemingly a war victim, belongs with the earliest etchings. The Franco figure is close to the burlesque scatological Ubu, a character created by the French author Alfred Jarry, while scholars have detected a number of quite specific references to the Spanish Civil War in this series, and especially to Madrid. (50)
The voice of a dead man accuses the lying press
As always, the spirit of Goya is omnipresent. Many people felt that Goya was somehow their contemporary in his portrayal of the horrors of war–”no better better reporter on the Spanish Civil War than Goya”, as the moderate weekly Marianne put it, juxtaposing Goya’s images with recent photos. (51) In this instance, an acknowledged influence is Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Creates Monsters, perhaps seen as a strange premonition of nocturnal aerial bombardments on the day that Delaprée’s reports on the bombing of Madrid were published.
Given that Picasso saw, and reacted to Le Charivari that day, I think we can ask whether the term ‘charivari’ (or ‘shivaree’ in the United States), had any significance for Dream and Lie. The shivaree was a a centuries-old custom with carnivalesque elements in which villagers made ‘rough music’, such as cacophonous noises with pots and kettles, beneath the windows of a newly married couple. The objects of this persecution were somehow considered to have transgressed habitual norms and expectations.
In European terms, the quintessential subject of a shivaree was talked about on the day that Picasso began Dream and Lie: the British monarch King Edward VIII and his lover Wally Simpson, a twice-divorced American woman, whose planned marriage had precipitated his abdication. The poster that L’Humanité had used to campaign against the ‘lying press’ at the end of December had reproduced Louis Delaprée’s acid comment: “The killing of a hundred Spanish kids is less interesting than a sigh from Mrs Simpson, the royal whore.” That message had also been reproduced in L’Humanité in an uncensored facsimile on December 31, 1936. When readers first saw Delaprée’s pamphlet on January 8, 1937, they will have noticed that the phrase ‘royal whore’ had gone, but of course they will have remembered it. Also on that day, L’Humanité contemptuously reported a complaint about some press reports on Mrs Simpson, managed to work Delaprée’s name into the discussion, and suggested that “Her Highnesses and Her Vile Lownesses should get their act together”. (52)
With regard to Delaprée’s most famous sentence–itself a kind of verbal shivaree–I believe that there is both a “royal whore” and a dethroned king in Dream and Lie. The joke is that Franco is both king and whore. In this carnival of reversals and inversions, Franco has a giant phallus in one scene, but is a female whore in another, swinging his/her hips suggestively, and carrying a fan bearing an emblem of the Virgin, for good measure. There is a destroyed town is in the background, so perhaps the dead kids are also present. In the following scene, the bull charges the monstruous king and he loses his crown. Dream and Lie has its own soundtrack in the form of a poem that is a cacophony of clanking sounds: “cries of children cries of women cries of birds cries of flowers cries of timbers and of stones cries of bricks cries of furniture of beds of chairs of curtains of pots of cats and of papers…” (53) I think that this part of the poem may have echoes of a shivaree, as well as the sounds of a bombed city.
I am not suggesting that Dream and Lie is literally a shivaree, but rather that this is one of a number of carnivalesque elements feeding into it. A peculiarity of Dream and Lie is that can be “read” both sequentially and at random. If we follow its apparent order, it works well as a kind of “story,” beginning one sunny day when the grotesque king sets off on his adventures. Yet the scenes are also independent, and at one point were going to be sold as postcards at the World’s Fair. If we make nine separate cards from the scenes in Part I, we can view them cinematographically in any order, and yet the effect is always the same. We cut continually from a procession to an event and then back again. In the procession sequences, Franco is always seen moving in the same direction against a low background. Our view is from one side, as when we watch a Spanish religious procession pass through a street. In fact, I think the monster is riding on a series of floats: an elongated horse (or perhaps the festive Catalan mulassa or mule); a wounded, winged pegasus; a tarasca (not simply a pig, I think–a tarasca was a dragon-like monster in the feast of Corpus Christi, with a curved back “like a giant armadillo” and a curled tail). (54) He may also be “riding” the giant phallus, in canivalesque register.
Dream and lie is, I believe, a perfect representation of the inversions of Spanish religious festivals, and by extension the broader world of carnivalesque popular culture. Later in 1937 Franco would order the abandonment of carnival precisely because, like Picasso, he saw this fierce explosion of popular energy as the antithesis, and at least potentially the enemy, of ordered, hierarchical Christian society. (55) Dream and lie is suffused with religious symbolism, such as the banners, or religious pendants, which can also be seen in Goya’s painting of the mock ceremony of the Burial of the Sardine at the end of Carnival. (56) But on my reading, this is not because the Church lent its support to Franco (or not mainly for that reason). (57) Rather, Picasso’s distancing in time and space made a religious framework so wholly appropriate: a Spanish religious festival drew on the energy of a whole people in its enactment of the triumph over evil, visualized as a grotesque hybrid monster. (58) In Dream and Lie that monster is Franco.
Picasso first reacted artistically to the Spanish Civil War in the period from 29 December 1936 to January 8-9, 1937. This time frame closely matches the chronology of the Embassy plane / Delaprée controversy. However, this was also a festive time of year. L’Humanité had launched its poster campaign on New Year’s Eve. More to the point, 28 December was the Spanish feast of the Holy Innocents, the equivalent of April Fools’ Day, while January 6th was the traditional Spanish Epiphany. The Holy Innocents commemorated the biblical Massacre of the Innocents, implicit in Delaprée’s phrase about Mrs. Simpson, and was specifically referred to in Delaprée’s Bombs Over Madrid: “Christ said: ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do.’ I feel that after the slaughter of the innocents in Madrid, we should say: ‘Do not forgive them for they know right well what they are doing.’ “ (59) As for Epiphany, this celebrated the Three Kings, when the simplest and most universal inversion was the king’s cardboard crown that made its way into so many households. I can find no specific satirical intent in the photo that L’Humanité published on January 7th, which showed a chimpanzee wearing a cardboard crown and munching away at a slice of king cake; but it does remind us that this was a significant date, whether parodied or inverted.
Perhaps it was the strangeness of this controversy which drew Picasso towards it. (60) Although Picasso was clearly responding to the Spanish Civil War, this was not, in my view, politically commited art as it is usually understood. (61) These events also cohere if we strip them of their ideological trappings, and abstract them from time and place: The voice of a dead man denounces the lying press from beyond the grave; a king loses his crown on account of a whore; bombs are falling on my homeland; perhaps this is a dream, happening far away or long ago; but dreams (songes) are lies (mensonges)… (62) At this point, the drive in Picasso’s undoing of the monster Franco in Dream and Lie came from fierce, blasphematory mockery, and the tragic, universal vision was in the future.
The ruins of Gernika. (Le Petit Journal, 30 April 1937.)
“The lying press, the murderous press” in Picasso’s Guernica
On April 26, 1937, the planes of the German Condor Legion destroyed the Basque town of Gernika causing numerous civilian casualties in the attack that almost immediately preceded the creation of Picasso’s masterpiece. A new and unfamiliar name–Ce Soir initially called it Quirnica (63)–would enter the world’s consciousness. Five days later, Picasso finally moved beyond dilatory sketching for his commission for the Paris World’s Fair to throw all his extraordinary energy into the Guernica. Newspaper reporting played an acknowledged role in the genesis of that masterpiece, and indeed newsprint imagery has been detected within the painting itself. But I feel that there is much more to be said about it in the light of what we have seen of Picasso’s reactions over the previous months.
News of the attack on Gernika first reached Paris in the afternoon of April 27th, and on April 28th it was major headline news in L’Humanité and elsewhere. But it was not big news in all the French press, and in some French newspapers it was not even news at all. There is no doubt that the presence of foreign journalists in the Basque country, rapidly making their way to bombed Gernika, was decisive in bringing these events to the world’s attention. George Steer’s report had an especially notable impact because it was published in both the New York Times and London’s most influential newspaper, the Times. (In British establishment circles in the 1930s, only events mentioned in the Times were considered truly newsworthy.) (64) However, Herbert Southworth’s exhaustive work has shown that Gernika was primarily a media event in the English-speaking world, in contrast to what he calls a “wall of silence” in France. Southworth has also studied another twist, namely the story rapidly cooked up by Nationalist propagandists that the Basques had destroyed and burned the town themselves before retreating. (65)
Gernika/Guernica owes its symbolic primacy to Picasso’s masterpiece. Time and again we read that “nothing like this calculated and meticulously planned massacre… had occurred in modern times.” (66) But this is not true. Madrid remained a far more universal reference during the Spanish Civil War itself. (67) Prior to Gernika there had been – notably, but not exclusively – the day and night aerial bombardments of Madrid, the attacks on the Málaga-Almería road and the Basque town of Durango, and then the renewed artillery shelling of Madrid, each time with numerous casualties. (68) And before Picasso single-handedly refocused our vision, these attacks were threading together to form a single narrative. (69) When Delaprée’s accounts of the aerial bombardments of Madrid in November 1936 were published on January 8, 1937, this was under the title The Martyrdom of Madrid. But a French pamphlet on the aerial bombardments of Durango on March 31 and April 2, 1937 was given a near-identical title: Durango, Martyred Town. (70) I think Picasso’s painting draws directly on both these sources, as well as being an infinite enlargement of them, a kind of Martyrdom of Guernica.
A dead priest lies in the bombed church of Durango. (Durango, Ville Martyre, c 30 April 1937).
The religious connotations that suffuse the Guernica have been widely acknowledged, but to the best of my knowledge the pro-Francoist aerial bombardments of Durango have been wholly ignored as a possible source. Yet these dreadful massacres in the predominantly Catholic Basque country took the lives of priests and nuns, along with many others, and religious buildings were destroyed. No single event so perfectly undermined the case that Fascist and Nazi aviation somehow represented Christian values. The French pamphlet Durango, Martyred Town is likely to have been a far more important visual source for Picasso than the familiar newspaper photos of bombed Gernika. The pamphlet was profusely illustrated with terrible images but, more significantly, it was advertised for purchase in L’Humanité on Monday May 3, 1937. (71) That means that, like the other pamphlets and weeklies we have discussed, it will have been published on the previous Friday, i.e. April 30th, the day before Picasso began the Guernica. In an earlier piece I discussed how pamphlets like Delaprée’s Martyrdom were forwarded to international figures like Virginia Woolf, and this pamphlet will most certainly have reached Picasso. It was on much better quality paper than the daily newspapers, and the images were far sharper. This means that when Picasso was first hearing and reading about Gernika, he was really seeing Durango.
One image is especially strange. A dead priest lies shockingly inert, like a huge flattened puppet, in the foreground (p. 14). One of his arms stretches out horizontally in the posture of the Crucifixion, but the other arm seems to be completely missing. In the background we can make out images of the Mother and Child, while there is a vertical pulpit to the right. Three contemporary figures, Basque motorized policemen, stand incongruously in this mad, deformed Baroque scene. It is not for me to analyze Picasso’s imagery – and the cut arm appeared previously in Picasso’s painting of December 29, 1936 – but I do think this photo needs to be studied for possible links to the Guernica, and especially the image of the fallen warrior. (72) (I mention another photo of the victims in Durango below.)
The extent to which a particular bombardment became a full-scale media event depended, to put it crudely, on how much serviceable newspaper copy it generated and how quickly this reached the international press. Durango had been attacked on March 31 and April 2, 1937, but for all its passionate pro-Republican advocacy, L’Humanité was only able to publish this news prominently on its front page on April 6th. On the same day, the mass-circulation evening newspaper Paris-Soir also reported the dead and wounded in a church in Durango, while failing to make clear who was responsible. (73) On the other hand, the intensive shelling of Madrid in April 1937, a city which international figures as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a British Duchess, and Hollywood film star Errol Flynn all passed through, was always bound to make the headlines. (74) The result was that the shelling became a major Francoist propaganda setback, from which few obvious military advantages accrued.
We get a small reality check by looking at the French newspaper Le Matin for April 28, 1937, when the latest bombardment of Madrid was given a prominent place among the main headlines, while the news of Gernika was only secondary.
In a previous piece, I studied the raised arm holding a hammer and sickle that Picasso sketched on a copy of the mass circulation evening newspaper Paris-Soir on April 19, 1937. In impishly placing the hammer and sickle at the top of Paris-Soir’s name, Picasso was mimicking L’Humanité, where it formed part of the logo. That raised arm and clenched fist of defiance made their way directly into pre-Guernica sketches so we are talking about Picasso’s reactions on the eve of its creation. I believe that they reflected Picasso’s anger at what was missing from the front page of Paris-Soir that day, and had been discretely ‘hidden’ away on page 3, namely, the news of the bombardment of Madrid. The defaced front page had reported Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos’s bland wish to stay friends with all parties, i.e. including Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. So Picasso was also reproaching another type of deceit, the official Franco-British policy of Non-Intervention in the Spanish Civil War. The bombs falling in Spain gave the lie to Non-Intervention.
Given these precedents, I’d like to take a close look at the reactions of the Paris press, over the three days before Picasso started his painting. Many of the newspapers can now be consulted online, so the reader can follow the links provided at each date. (75) Of course Picasso will not have read all these newspapers, but I am convinced that they provide us with a good overall picture of the atmosphere in Paris – how the news story was panning out, what was being said and left unsaid. (76)
I’ll begin with two respected daily newspapers, the moderate Le Temps, and the more conservative Le Figaro. Neither newspaper had reports on Gernika on April 28–Le Temps had a general account of the Basque campaign that day–although the news had begun to reach Paris the evening before. In itself, there was nothing terribly sinister about this silence. In general, the more serious newspapers did not publish news items without copy from their own correspondents, or reports from agencies like Havas, neither of which they had received. And after all, Gernika was not Guernica yet. On April 29 and April 30 Le Temps attached comparable importance to the bombardment, the Nationalist denial and the reaction in London. On April 19 Le Figaro had coverage along similar lines, a ‘balanced’ three-way treatment, almost symmetrically divided into three parts: the Basque government’s accusations, the Nationalist counter-accusations and the émotion in London. On April 30 Le Figaro did include a photo of the ruins of Gernika, and specifically attributed the damage to an aerial bombardment.
How would the likes of Picasso have reacted to this seemingly anodyne type of coverage? Rather than its lack of depth (not in itself so unusual), I think two other aspects were outrageous. Firstly, thanks to the Times’ decisive impact, the reaction in Britain had become the story. On 29-30 April the French press, across the political spectrum, focused on the turmoil in Britain. Potentially at stake, of course, was the joint policy of Non-Intervention, the rock on which French-British cooperation was built. The bombs falling on the Basque country were somehow minor collateral damage in a bigger game. But we can be absolutely sure that Picasso did not see things in these terms. If the big news in the mainstream French press was that the British were getting worked up, then surely this represented a huge challenge for a Spanish artist living on French soil. If the artist had the power to cut through all the falsehoods and make us look straight at the world, what better opportunity would he get?
Secondly, news which for once was based on an irreproachable source like the Times was being placed on exactly the same footing as the Nationalist counter-accusations. Nearly all historians have stressed how heavy-handed and counterproductive these Nationalist claims were, and over time this was no doubt true. The Nationalist propagandists were to prove remarkably unwilling to let things go, and their claims had a sinuous and persistent after-life. (77) Nevertheless, for a very short time they did muddy the waters. For example, on 29 April the Catholic newspaper La Croix called the bombing ‘frightful and useless’, but on 30 April it practically retracted: “Who is responsible for the bombing of Guernica?” (78) The point about this backtracking is that it took place just before Picasso launched himself into the Guernica. At this point the lie seemed to be gaining ground.
While there was a conservative bias in the French press, mass circulation newspapers never liked to miss out on big news stories, and mainly thanks to the Times this had certainly become one. Le Petit Parisien made it a huge front page story on 28 April, presumably in its later editions as it used material from that day’s Times. On 29 April it covered the debate on Gernika in the British Parliament. On 30 April a girl’s eyewitness account made the front page. It was also important news in Le Petit Journal on 28 April, as well as on the 29 April (see also here); but once again with a considerable emphasis on the indignation in London. The photo that Le Petit Journal published on its front page on 30 April has an interesting spatial disposition. As in the Guernica, the sky is seen through a window on the top right, there is intense light in the center of the photo, while the buildings on the left are receding. (There were more images of desolation on page 3.) Paris-Soir benefited from its agreement with the Daily Express to republish Noel Monks’ eyewitness report. Typically, Paris-Soir tried to have it both ways, with a main headline saying that Gernika had been destroyed by planes, and a secondary one reporting the Nationalist allegations. (79)
Among reactionary newspapers, L’Écho de Paris retracted a detail in its previous day’s report and blamed the Basques for the destruction on 29 April. It provided the full Nationalist version on 30 April, complete with a photo of the damage caused by the ‘red militia’. On the far right, L’Action Française didn’t bother to cover the attack at all. It included a small announcement on 30 April that Gernika had been taken.
L’Humanité, Picasso’s regular newspaper, attached great importance to the bombing from 28 April onwards. Its assertion that this was “the most horrible bombardment” since the beginning of the Spanish Civil War was typical of its combative style. That day L’Humanité also printed a photo to accompany its first report of the news from Gernika. This photo could not possibly have reached the newspaper so quickly from Gernika. Indeed L’Humanité specifically acknowledged this fact in its caption, which referred to “some women – no doubt mothers – killed during a bombardment”. In other words, its point was a universal one: fascism kills.
This photo is no minor detail in our narrative of the Guernica because it has been argued that this photo of the dead woman facing upwards was ‘the decisive shock’ for Picasso, and that she was the model for a prostrate woman in an early version of the Guernica. (80) Similar photos had been published periodically since the bombardments of Madrid in November 1936, but not even L’Humanité served them up on a daily or weekly basis. On 10 February 1937, L’Humanité published an image of bomb victims, who had been escaping from Málaga, Picasso’s birthplace. On 30 April 1937 the pamphlet Durango, Ville Martyre published a photo of the dead victims of the bombing of a church in the Basque town of Durango (p.18), which had previously been published in L’Humanité on 6 April. If we compare that image with the one that the same newspaper reproduced on 28 April, we can see that the woman in the foreground is not only very similar, but is shown in the same posture, and from an identical angle. The woman in the earlier photo looks younger, but then so does the woman in Picasso’s preliminary sketch.
The prostrate woman in Picasso’s sketch may have been one or the other of these victims, or perhaps both. I don’t think it matters that neither actually came from Gernika itself because we are still talking about the maelstrom of emotion in the wake of its destruction. There is a cumulative effect in this recurring pattern of aerial bombardments: ever more dead, ever more lies. Anger and mockery had previously surfaced in Picasso’s work, but nothing compared to the Guernica’s extraordinary release of energy, in which so many disparate elements were fused together. Surely, now, the future bombardment of Barcelona, where Picasso’s mother and sister lived, was also in the air. (It was to happen in March 1938.)
The widespread assumption that George Steer’s report, which was republished in L’Humanité on 29 April, had a decisive impact on Picasso is altogether plausible. (81) Apart from Steer and Delaprée, few other ‘bourgeois’ journalists can have had their reports published in the Communist newspaper L’Humanité at this period. Both journalists described the effects of the aerial bombardments of civilians, albeit in contrasting styles as Steer was more measured and less emotional than Delaprée. I think their writings had such an impact precisely because of their provenance. L’Humanité’s combative and iconoclastic style may have been good fun for readers like Picasso, but the critical writing of independent journalists from newspapers like the Times or Paris-Soir must have carried more authority.
I believe the spirit of Picasso’s masterpiece is close to Louis Delaprée’s descriptions of the nightmarish nocturnal bombardments of Madrid in November 1936. The theme of the Mother and Child Pietà is so universal that it would be reckless to ascribe it to a single influence. Nevertheless, I do think Picasso scholars should study the passage in Louis Delaprée’s night scene in Bombs Over Madrid where a flashlight illuminates a dead child in the arms of an injured woman who has had her breast gashed. (That last detail is also present in Guernica-related sketches.) The text of Bombs Over Madrid was published in The Martyrdom of Madrid on 8 January, the same day that Picasso began Dream and Lie, and it was also republished in L’Humanité on the following day. Its religious/blasphematory conclusion (also very much in the spirit of the Guernica) was placed at the top left of the page as an epigraph: “Christ said: ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do’. I feel that after the slaughter of the innocents in Madrid, we should say: ‘Do not forgive them for they know right well what they are doing.’”
The aerial bombardments of Madrid, Durango and Gernika had all been enveloped in lies and silences. But the most brazen and insistent deception was the Nationalist claim from late April 1937 onwards that the Basques had destroyed Gernika themselves. That lie was beginning to gain in force precisely when Picasso began the Guernica and, according to at least one interpretation, provided its central focus. Thus, the head in the window has been interpreted as an allegory of truth, in accordance with a Bronzino painting from which the accompanying arm holding a light was also taken. The counter-argument runs that if Truth were the subject, following the Bronzino allegory, then surely Calumny and Deceit should also be present. (82) But perhaps they are: the lamp held by the arm is shining onto scratchy newsprint. And if truth is represented by a classical image, the newsprint it shines onto is strictly contemporary. There is a similar opposition in Dream and Lie of Franco, when the revolting little monster Franco chips away at a majestic, noble, classical bust. The French title Songe et Mensonge de Franco also reflects this contrast. Songe was the classical word (in everyday useage ‘dream’ would be rêve), while mensonge was the altogether contemporary word that Picasso read on a daily basis in L’Humanité’s ongoing campaign against the “lying press”.
My work has been based on the premise – scarcely sacrilegious – that the Guernica was an artifact of its times, rooted in the social history of the 1930s. Picasso’s art “created reality on its own terms”(83): instead of representing one event literally, the Guernica plays on the nightmare of recurring aerial bombardments, in which Gernika is the culmination of a process that has already affected Madrid and Durango. When Picasso created both Dream and Lie of Franco and the Guernica, it was each time slightly after the event, and each time in a context in which the main story was being obscured or overwhelmed by deception. On 8 January 1937, Picasso responded to the bombardments of Madrid, but only on the delayed publication of Delaprée’s writing, and amidst press controversy. Picasso began his Guernica on 1 May, fairly soon after the destruction of Gernika, but when Nationalist claims were gaining ground. Picasso had an astonishing artistic armory to combat lies and distortions. It was on this slippery terrain that he ridiculed the monster Franco in January 1937; while in the Guernica he shone a fierce light onto the tattered newsprint of the “lying press, the murderous press”.
Martin Minchom’s publications include Spanish editions of Geoffrey Cox, La defensa de Madrid (2005), and Louis Delaprée, Morir en Madrid (2009).
1 I am especially grateful to Mme Catherine Lincoln-Delaprée for all her help, and I would also like to thank Prof. Sebastiaan Faber. Part of this material was presented at the “Jornadas sobre las Brigadas Internacionales: de lo local a lo global”, International Institute, Madrid, 20-21 October 2011 (with thanks to Justin Byrne and Seve Montero).
2 Prior to my Volunteer pieces (see here and here), I suggested a link between Picasso and Delaprée in my edition of Louis Delaprée, Morir en Madrid, Madrid, Editorial Raíces, 2009, pp. 88-96. John Richardson, “How Political was Picasso?“, New York Review of Books, 25 November 2010, pp. 27-30, uncovered a painting of 29 December 1936 that relates to the Delaprée affair. The art historian Gijs van Hensbergen, Sir John Richardson’s collaborator, kindly sent me a pre-publication copy of this painting.
3 For these killings see Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, W.W. Norton, 2012, read by me in the Spanish edition (2011).
4 Paracuellos massacre“, Wikipedia[last accessed 15 Feb. 2012].
5 César Vidal, Paracuellos-Katyn: un ensayo sobre el genocidio de la izquierda, Barcelona, Planeta, 2007, pp. 207-213. It’s depressing that Vidal can be so categorical (p. 213) about documentation that he has neither seen nor apparently attempted to locate.
6 I looked in the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères et Européennes, Paris (MAEE/P), before finding the key file in the Archives diplomatiques de Nantes: Madrid – Ambassade – Guerre Civile (AD/N – MAGC) 570.
7 Le Charivari was dated 9 January 1937, but like most weeklies it came out a day earlier.
8 The classic account is Herbert R. Southworth, La destruction de Guernica: Journalisme, diplomatie, propagande et histoire, Paris, Ruedo Ibérico, 1975. See David Wingeate Pike, France Divided: The French and the Civil War in Spain, Eastbourne, Sussex Academic Press, 2011, pp. 280-305, for a useful summary of the French press and its political sympathies.
9 Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Presse qui ment, presse qui tue!… Paris, Éd populaire de propagande, n.d. (1936).
10 Gijs van Hensbergen, Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon, London, Bloomsbury, 2004 (2005 edn.), p. 33.
11 Eric Michaud, “Matisse and Picasso: The Redemption and The Fall”, nonsite.org, January 25, 2011 [last accessed 15 February, 2012]. See here here for the epigraph at the head of this piece: “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”
12 Ian Gibson, Paracuellos: cómo fue [1983], Madrid, Temas de hoy, 2005, p. 150-151. (These files were only declassified well after Gibson had published his book.)
13 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 278, 11 December 1936: testimony of Charles Boyer.
14 Ian Gibson, op. cit., p. 150.
15 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 271, 9 December 1936.
16 Pierre Marqués, La Croix-Rouge pendant la Guerre d’Espagne, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2000, p. 119, Henny, Report to the Red Cross, Geneva, 2 January 1937.
17 AD/N – MAGC, 570, nº 25, 10 January 1937, Déclarations de M. Château: “Henny passait sans doute pour être un témoin gênant.”
18 Miguel Pérez Ferrero, Drapeau de France: La vie des refugiés dans les legations de Madrid, Paris, Sorlot, 1938, pp. 93-94.
19 Mme Catherine Lincoln-Delaprée is the author of a very lively and readable reconstruction of her late father’s final days (forthcoming). Despite Château’s comments, Delaprée does seem to have felt himself threatened.
20 Sefton Delmer, Trail Sinister, Londres, Secker & Warburg, 1961, pp. 322-326.
21 Felipe Ezquerro Ezquerro, “El derribo del Potez de la Embajada Francesa sobre Pastrana. ¿Error o intención?”, Revista Española de Historia Militar, nº 9, marzo 2001, pp. 120-121.
22 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 269-272, 9 December 1936.
23 Andrés García Lacalle, Mitos y verdades: la aviación de caza en la Guerra Española, Mexico, Oasis, 1973, pp. 218-220.
24 This point emerges in the AD/N documentation, while c.f. the generally unreliable Keith Scott Watson, Single to Spain, London, Arthur Barker, 1937, p. 234.
25 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 290-291, 12 December 1936: “Il y aura tout au moins un de ceux qui partent qui n’arrivera pas.”
26 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Folder 19 January 1937.
27 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 265, 8 December 1936, time: 21.00.
28 AD/N – MAGC, 570, 283, 11 December 1936; and 308, 16 December 1936.
29 AD/N – MAGC, 570, 19 January 1937: Telegram on identifying planes. According to nº 291, 13 December 1936, the pilot and radio operator saw similar planes on the ground near Guadalajara.
30 Juan Manuel Riesgo had not seen my 2010 Alba piece (at note 13), when he confirmed this point in a talk in Madrid in early 2011.
31 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Telegram 25, 10 January 1937: Déclarations de M. Château.
32 Archives nationales, Paris 5AR, 271: Madrid – Havas – Guerre Civile. Dossiers de Reporters. Mr Château. Letter from Château to Havas, 18 April 1937. Telegram, Bordeaux, Havas, 19 avril 1937.
33 AD/N – MAGC, 570, Diplomatie 50-51, 16 January 1937: he found no new “argument péremptoire contre les Autorités gouvernementales. / Tout au plus pourrait-on insister sur le fait (signalé par mon télégramme nº 290-291) que d’après le pilote Boyer et le radiotélégraphiste, le type et les bandes rouges de l’appareil agresseur étaient semblables à ceux des avions gouvernementaux”.
34 AD/N – MAGC, 570, 19 March 1937.
35 See for example, the article of Ricardo Miralles in Ángel Viñas (dir.), Al Servicio de la República, Diplomáticos y guerra civil, Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2010, at pp. 130-133.
36 For similar contrasts in British diplomacy, Ángel Viñas, La conspiración del general Franco, Barcelona, Crítica, 2011, pp. 129-246. There are many examples of an anti-Republican bias: AD/N – MAGC, 570, 1232, 14 December 1936, for reflections on the need to rethink the whole perspective on Republican Spain in the light of this case. Telegram of 15 December 1936 sent by a general in Valladolid to the consul in San Sebastián saying “The person you’re looking for is called Red”, (“Autor que le interesa se llama Rojo”), and taken completely seriously despite its Francoist provenance.
37 Anne-Aurore Inquimbert, Un officier français dans la guerre d’Espagne. Carrière et écrits d’Henri Morel (1919-1944), Presses Universitaires de Rennes / Service Historique de la Défense, Rennes, 2009, for example, pp. 162, 175.
38 A. R. Chisholm, “Europe and Ourselves—And a Saxophone”, The Australian Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2 (June 1937), p. 70.
39 For this contrast, “Metralla en las alas de Francia, La Voz, 9 December 1936 compared to “Ha muerto Louis Delaprée”, La Voz, 11 December 1936.
40 Carlos Serrano, L’enjeu espagnol: PCF et guerre d’Espagne, París, Messidor / Éditions sociales, 1987, pp. 91-92 for an undefined propaganda initiative. I have consulted the corresponding papers in the Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Fondo Araquistáin, Leg 23 A 108, but they provide few details. This was a time of intense propaganda activity, c.f. MAEE/P, Direction des Affaires Politiques et commerciales, Espagne 142 (p. 200), Direction Génerale de la Sûreté Nationale to MAE, Paris, 9 January 1937, mentioning the imminent publication of L’Espagne Libre, a weekly published by the Generalitat’s press office in Paris, and with some Komintern money from Willi Münzenberg. For the activites of Agence Espagne, see Hugo García, Mentiras necesarias, La batalla por la opinión británica durante la Guerra Civil, Madrid, Biblioteca Nueva, 2008, pp. 89-92.
41 Robert Brasillach, “Allo Malraux”, Je suis partout, 2 January 1937; and then much more explicitly, “Quand demandera-t-on l’extradition d’André Malraux?”, Je suis partout, 16 January 1937 (now online: here). For Brasillach, Niall Binns, La Llamada de España: Escritores Extranjeros en la Guerra Civil, Madrid, Montesinos, 2004, pp. 145-148, and Martin Hurcombe, France and the Spanish Civil War: Cultural Representations of the War next Door, Farnham, Ashgate, 2011, pp. 81-109.
42 Arturo Barea, La forja de un rebelde, Barcelona, Debate, 2003 edn., p. 735, claimed that Delaprée was going to have it out with the people at the Quai d’Orsay when he returned to France; but I think he was misremembering this posthumous controversy. On the evidence of the files, Delaprée had no problems with the diplomatic service.
43 Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Presse qui ment, presse qui tue!… op. cit.
44 Online here (halfway down the page).
45 Eugen Weber, L’Action Française, Stanford University Press, 1962, p. 391. See here for another anti-semitic caricature of Blum. (When accessed on 20 February 2012, this website gave inflated circulation figures for the right-wing press.)
46 Le Charivari, 8-9 January 1937: my own copy.
47 Figure of a Woman Inspired by the Spanish Civil War, Paris, 19 January, 1937.
48 From Picasso’s notes it appears that the title Songe et Mensonge de Franco was not meant to be Sueño y Mentira de Franco in Spanish. At one point, he jotted down wordplay, once again contrasting opposites: ‘dicha desdicha/de Franco’ (well-being and misfortune): Vinyetes al front, Barcelona, Museu Picasso, 2011, p. 161 (pp. 157-166, online here). According to Gertje R. Utley, Picasso: The Communist Years, Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 17-18, 20-21, a drawing of 9 January 1937, “Bather under a black sun” was also linked to Spain. The common thread may be Gérard de Nerval’s poem El Desdichado (“The Ill-starred One”), which referred to “the black sun of melancholy”. In Dream and Lie, the bright sun darkens.
49 See the essays and illustrations in Vinyetes, op cit.
50 For scene by scene references, Patricia Failing, “Picasso’s ‘Cries of Children…Cries of Stones.’” Art News 126, 7 (Sept 1977): 55-64; and Vinyetes, pp. 167-177 (text in English).
51 “Pas de meilleur reporter sur la guerre civile en Espagne que Francesco (sic) Goya”, Marianne, 19 august 1936.
52 “Aux trusts de presse en attendant mieux”, L’Humanité, 8 January 1937, discussing Mrs Simpson’s complaints about some press reports: “Que ces Altesses et ces Bassesses se débrouillent entre elles!”
53 Translation from Vinyetes, op. cit., p. 166.
54 David D. Gilmore, “Tarasca: Ritual Monster of Spain“, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 152 (3), September 2008, p. 367. For images from an earlier period, Javier Portús Pérez, La Antigua Procesión de Corpus Christi en Madrid, Madrid, Consejería de Educación y Cultura, 1993. The pig was not a common animal in Picasso’s bestiary, and this hybrid could have been both pig and tarasca.
55 David D. Gilmore, Carnival and Culture, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998, p. 12.
56 Picasso studied at the San Fernando academy in Madrid, which owned this painting, and knew the area because he had attended the verbena at San Antonio de la Florida in 1898: John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume I, 1881-1906, London, Pimilico, [1991], 209, p. 97. As well as its pendant, the sinister, smiling Sun is similar to the – Falangist? – one which shines at Franco in the opening scene of Dream and Lie.
57 The source for Franco walking the tightrope is Goya’s May the Rope break, which is remarkable for its portrayal of the latent power of the watching crowd.
58 The bull has been associated with the Spanish people in Dream and Lie, and it is shown twice, gaining in vitality after it has defeated the monster. In the second depiction, the bull is a noble animal radiating power. c.f. David D. Gilmore, “Tarasca“ op. cit. p. 366, for “rituals in which people are attacked by an external force representing evil, usually embodied in the form of a menacing animal or a monster. The people then defeat the monster through common action, killing the beast and returning to normalcy, not in the same form as before, but with a renewed “vitality” that they derive from appropriating and “consuming” the power of the thing they have killed.” Festive rivalry was the ultimate expression of group honor: Timothy J. Mitchell, Violence and Piety in Spanish Folklore, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, pp. 38-56.
59 L’Humanité used it as an epigraph at the top of the page on 9 January 1937.
60 For Picasso’s politics, John Richardson, “How political” op. cit. An example of Picasso’s hitherto apolitical character was the way, 30 years earlier, he sat out Catalonia’s agitated Tragic Week, John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume II, 1907-1917, London, Pimilico, [1996], 2009, p. 136.
61 The commission for the World’s Fair is not proof that Picasso wanted to do something ‘political’, given how dilatory he was prior to the Guernica. The political references in Failing, op. cit. 55-64, and Vinyetes, pp. 167-177 are unmistakeable and extremely well documented (and, interestingly, many of them refer to Madrid). But I feel that Picasso’s fiercely ironic and transforming mockery belongs to a very different tradition from most ‘political’ art.
62 The Golden Age dramatist Calderón de la Barca’s Life’s a Dream has been considered a possible influence. The advert for Dream and Lie included a fascinating quotation from Francisco de Quevedo, which is a strange reminder of how the “voice of a dead man” was made to speak in L’Humanité’s press campaign: “I govern men going rotten, neither living nor dead, who bring a finely adorned ghost..” (“Yo administro unos hombres a medio podrir, entre vivos y muertos, que traen bien aliñada fantasma…”, Vinyetes, p. 161.
63 “800 victimes a Quirnica, Ancienne capitale basque”, Ce Soir, 28 de abril 1937.
64 In 1936, the dying King George V was injected with morphine so that the news would be announced in the Times and not in the “less appropriate” evening newspapers.
65 Herbert R. Southworth, op. cit., studies how the French Havas agency failed to supply good copy rapidly, despite having a reporter in the Basque country. His book is dedicated, in part, to those who broke this “wall of silence”.
66 Russell Martin, Picasso’s War, Dutton, 2002, p. 51.
67 Simone Téry recalled the “famous” bombings of Madrid when she was looking for a point of reference for bombardments of Barcelona by Italian aviation in March 1938. Simone Téry, Front de la liberté: Espagne 1937-1938, Paris, Éditions sociales internationales, 1938, p. 315.
68 For figures, Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté and Joan Villarroya, España en llamas, La guerra civil desde el aire, Madrid, Temas de Hoy, 2003. Compare: Robert Stradling, Your Children will be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2008.
69 A pamphlet was published, or at least edited, just two days after the bombing of Gernika: Pierre Gérôme, La Presse et Franco, Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes, Paris, 28 avril, 1937. As Gernika was such recent news, it is interesting that they managed to work in a footnote at all (at p. 34n). The main narrative of ‘events’ consisted of sections on Badajoz, Madrid, Málaga and Durango (pp. 28-34), and only the first of these had no place in the emerging series of aerial bombardments. L’Humanité connected Gernika and Durango on innumerable occasions: for example, 7, 9, 10, 15 and 31 May and 11 June 1937. Paradoxically, it was Picasso’s masterpiece, drawing on both, that eventually broke this link.
70 Durango, Ville Martyre: Ce que furent les bombardements de la ville de Durango par les avions allemands, Comité Franco-Espagnol, Paris, n.d. (before 3 May 1937). Despite its title, Italian aviation was involved. ‘Le Martyre de Guernica’ was subsequently evoked, c.f. Southworth, op. cit. pp 21, 40.
71 Durango only made page 1 of L’Humanité on 6 April 1937 so preparation certainly began later than that. It needed some time to be written and printed (although this was usually done quickly), which takes us into late April. The advertisement in L’Humanité on 3 May gives us a likely cut-off date of 30 April 1937. (1 May was a celebration and 2 May was a Sunday.)
72 This strange and disturbing image was also later reproduced in G.L. Steer, The Tree of Gernika: A Field Study of Modern War, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1938, pp. 96-97.
73 “Des bombes d’avion tombent sur l’église de Durango (Biscaye)”, Paris-Soir, 7 April 1937 (a day earlier).
74 “Madrid’s 18 Days Under Shell Fire / Still a Million People in the Capital / Senseless Bombardment of Frequented Streets”, The Manchester Guardian, 30 April 1937; “Comment j’ai failli être tué dans Madrid bombardée”, par le célèbre acteur de cinema Erroll Flynn”, Paris-Soir, 8 April 1937.
75 Non-digitized newspapers (as of 15 February 2012) include Paris-Soir and Ce soir, consulted on microfilm at the National Library in Paris.
76 Picasso read several newspapers at this period, c.f. Patricia Failing, op. cit. pp.55-64.
77 This point is developed in great depth in Southworth, op. cit.
78 In this case, La Croix reported the surreal accusation that red planes might be attacking their own town.
79 “La ville sainte des basques: Guernica détruite de fond en comble par les avions.” Lesser heading: “Cependant les nationalists affirment que la ville a été incendiée par les Basques avant d’être evacuée”, Paris-Soir, 29 April 1937 (in fact a day earlier).
80 Herschel B. Chipp, El Guernica de Picasso, Historia, transformaciones, significado, Barcelona, Polígrafa, 1991, p. 83, for both photo and image; Rachel Wischnitzer, “Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. A Matter of Metaphor”, Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 6 (12) 1985, p. 165.
81 Carlos García Santa Cecilia, ed., Corresponsales en la Guerra de España, Madrid, Instituto Cervantes / Fundación Pablo Iglesias, 2006, facsimile online here, at pp. 127-128; Paul Preston, We Saw Spain Die, London, Constable, 2008, pp. 263-290.
82 Rachel Wischnitzer, op. cit., pp. 163-165, citing R. Hohl, Die Wahrheit über Guernica, Pantheon, 36 (January 1978), pp. 41-58.
83 Gertje R. Utley, op. cit., p. 172.
Saturday, August 04, 2012
A MODEST LABOR PROPOSAL-RECRUIT, RUN INDEPENDENT LABOR MILITANTS IN THE 2012 ELECTIONS.
A MODEST LABOR PROPOSAL-RECRUIT, RUN INDEPENDENT LABOR MILITANTS IN THE 2012 ELECTIONS.
IN THIS TIME OF THE ‘GREAT FEAR’ WE NEED CANDIDATES TO FIGHT FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT.
FORGET DONKEYS AND ELEPHANTS - BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
In the summer of 2006 I originally wrote the following commentary (used in subsequent election cycles and updated a little for today’s purpose) urging the recruitment of independent labor militants as write-in candidates for the mid-term 2006 congressional elections based on a workers party program. With the hoopla already in full gear for the 2012 election cycle I repost that commentary below with that same intention of getting thoughtful leftists to use the 2012 campaign to further our propagandistic fight for a workers’ party that fights for a workers government.
A Modest Proposal-Recruit, Run Independent Labor Militants In The 2012 Elections
All “anti-parliamentarian”, “anti-state”, “non-political” anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist brothers and sisters need read no further. This writer does not want to sully the purity of your politics with the taint of parliamentary electoral politics. Although I might remind you, as we remember the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Barcelona Uprising, that your political ancestors in Spain were more than willing to support the state and enter the government when they got the chance- the bourgeois government of a bourgeois state. But, we can fight that issue out later. We will, hopefully, see you on the barricades with us when the time comes.
As for other militants- here is my modest proposal. Either recruit fellow labor militants or present yourselves as candidates to run for public office, especially for Congress, during the 2012 election cycle. Why? Even a quick glance at the news of the day is calculated to send the most hardened politico screaming into the night. The quagmire in Afghanistan (and unfinished business in Iraq and threats to Iran), immigration walls, flag-burning amendments, anti -same-sex marriage amendments, the threat to separation of church state raised by those who would impose a fundamentalist Christian theocracy on the rest of us, and the attacks on the hard fought gains of the Enlightenment posed by bogus theories such as ‘intelligent design.’ And that is just an average day. Therefore, this election cycle provides militants, at a time when the dwindling electorate is focused on politics, a forum to raise our program and our ideas. We use this as a tool, like leaflets, petitions, meetings, demonstrations, etc. to get our message across. Why should the Donkeys, Elephants, and the other smaller bourgeois parties have a monopoly on the public square?
I mentioned in the last paragraph the idea of program. Let us face it if we do not have a program to run on then it makes no sense for militants to run for public office. Given the political climate our task at this time is to fight an exemplary propaganda campaign. Our program is our banner in that fight. The Democrats and Republicans DO NOT RUN on a program. The sum of their campaigns is to promise not to steal from the public treasury (or at least not too much), beat their husbands or wives, or grossly compromise themselves in any manner. On second thought, given today’s political climate, they may not promise not to beat their husbands or wives or not compromise themselves in any untoward manner. You, in any case, get the point. Damn, even the weakest neophyte labor militant can make a better presentation before working people that this crowd. This writer presents a five point program (you knew that was coming, right?) that labor militants can run on. As point five makes clear this is not a ‘minimum’ program but a program based on our need to fight for power.
1. FIGHT FOR THE IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. TROOPS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST NOW (OR BETTER YET, YESTERDAY)! U.S. HANDS OFF THE WORLD! VOTE NO ON THE WAR BUDGET!
The quagmire in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Libya, Palestine, Iran) is the fault line of American politics today. Every bourgeois politician has to have his or her feet put to the fire on this one. Not on some flimsy ‘sense of the Congress’ softball motion for withdrawal next, year, in two years, or (my favorite) when the situation is stable. Moreover, on the parliamentary level the only real vote that matters is the vote on the war budget. All the rest is fluff. Militants should make a point of trying to enter Congressional contests where there are so-called anti-war Democrats or Republicans (an oxymoron, I believe) running to make that programmatic contrast vivid.
But, one might argue, that would split the ‘progressive’ forces. Grow up, please! That argument has grown stale since it was first put forth in the “popular front” days of the 1930’s. If you want to end the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere fight for this position on the war budget. Otherwise the same people (yes, those 'progressive Democrats') who almost unanimously voted for the last war budget get a free ride on the cheap. War President Barack Obama desperately needs to be opposed by labor militants. By rights this is our issue. Let us take it back.
2. FIGHT FOR A LIVING WAGE AND WORKING CONDITIONS-UNIVERSAL FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL.
It is a ‘no-brainer’ that no individual, much less a family can live on the minimum wage (now $7/hr. or so). What planet do these politicians live on? We need an immediate fight for a living wage, full employment and decent working conditions. We need universal free health care for all. End of story. The organized labor movement must get off its knees and fight to organize Wal-Mart and the South. A boycott of Wal-Mart is not enough. A successful organizing drive will, like in the 1930’s; go a long way to turning the conditions of labor around.
3. FIGHT THE ATTACKS ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT.
Down with the Death Penalty! Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants who make it here! Stop the Deportations! For the Separation of Church and State! Defend abortion rights! Down with anti-same sex marriage legislation! Full public funding of education! Stop the ‘war on drugs’, basically a war on blacks and minority youth-decriminalize drugs! Defend political prisoners! This list of demands hardly exhausts the “culture war” issues we defend. It is hard to believe that in the year 2012 over 200 years after the American Revolution and the French Revolution we are fighting desperately to preserve many of the same principles that militants fought for in those revolutions. But so be it.
4. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS PARTY.
The Donkeys, Elephants and other smaller bourgeois parties have had their chance. Now is the time to fight for our own party and for the interests of our own class, the working class. Any campaigns by independent labor militants must highlight this point. And any campaigns can also become the nucleus of a workers’ party network until we get strong enough to form at least a small party. None of these other parties, and I mean none, are working in the interests of working people and their allies. The following great lesson of politic today must be hammered home. Break with the Democrats, Republicans!
5. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS AND XYZ GOVERNMENT. THIS IS THE DEMAND THAT SEPARATES THE MILITANTS FROM THE FAINT-HEARTED REFORMISTS.
We need our own form of government. In the old days the bourgeois republic was a progressive form of government. Not so any more. That form of government ran out of steam about one hundred years ago. We need a Workers Republic. We need a government based on workers councils with a ministry (I do not dare say commissariat in case any stray anarchists are still reading this) responsible to it. Let us face it if we really want to get any of the good and necessary things listed above accomplished we are not going to get it with the current form of government.
Why the XYZ part? What does that mean? No, it is not part of an algebra lesson. What it reflects is that while society is made up mainly of workers (of one sort or another) there are other classes (and parts of classes) in society that we seek as allies and could benefit from a workers government. Examples- small independent contractors, intellectuals, the dwindling number of small farmers, and some professionals like dentists. Yes, with my tongue in my cheek after all my dental bills, I like the idea of a workers and dentists government. The point is however you formulate it you have got to fight for it.
Obviously any campaign based on this program will be an exemplary propaganda campaign for the foreseeable future. But we have to start now. Continuing to support or not challenging the bourgeois parties does us no good. That is for sure. While bourgeois electoral laws do not favor independent candidacies write-in campaigns are possible. ROLL UP YOUR SHEEVES! GET THOSE PETITIONS SIGNED! PRINT OUT THE LEAFLETS! PAINT THOSE BANNERS! GET READY TO SHAKE HANDS AND KISS BABIES.
IN THIS TIME OF THE ‘GREAT FEAR’ WE NEED CANDIDATES TO FIGHT FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT.
FORGET DONKEYS AND ELEPHANTS - BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
In the summer of 2006 I originally wrote the following commentary (used in subsequent election cycles and updated a little for today’s purpose) urging the recruitment of independent labor militants as write-in candidates for the mid-term 2006 congressional elections based on a workers party program. With the hoopla already in full gear for the 2012 election cycle I repost that commentary below with that same intention of getting thoughtful leftists to use the 2012 campaign to further our propagandistic fight for a workers’ party that fights for a workers government.
A Modest Proposal-Recruit, Run Independent Labor Militants In The 2012 Elections
All “anti-parliamentarian”, “anti-state”, “non-political” anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist brothers and sisters need read no further. This writer does not want to sully the purity of your politics with the taint of parliamentary electoral politics. Although I might remind you, as we remember the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Barcelona Uprising, that your political ancestors in Spain were more than willing to support the state and enter the government when they got the chance- the bourgeois government of a bourgeois state. But, we can fight that issue out later. We will, hopefully, see you on the barricades with us when the time comes.
As for other militants- here is my modest proposal. Either recruit fellow labor militants or present yourselves as candidates to run for public office, especially for Congress, during the 2012 election cycle. Why? Even a quick glance at the news of the day is calculated to send the most hardened politico screaming into the night. The quagmire in Afghanistan (and unfinished business in Iraq and threats to Iran), immigration walls, flag-burning amendments, anti -same-sex marriage amendments, the threat to separation of church state raised by those who would impose a fundamentalist Christian theocracy on the rest of us, and the attacks on the hard fought gains of the Enlightenment posed by bogus theories such as ‘intelligent design.’ And that is just an average day. Therefore, this election cycle provides militants, at a time when the dwindling electorate is focused on politics, a forum to raise our program and our ideas. We use this as a tool, like leaflets, petitions, meetings, demonstrations, etc. to get our message across. Why should the Donkeys, Elephants, and the other smaller bourgeois parties have a monopoly on the public square?
I mentioned in the last paragraph the idea of program. Let us face it if we do not have a program to run on then it makes no sense for militants to run for public office. Given the political climate our task at this time is to fight an exemplary propaganda campaign. Our program is our banner in that fight. The Democrats and Republicans DO NOT RUN on a program. The sum of their campaigns is to promise not to steal from the public treasury (or at least not too much), beat their husbands or wives, or grossly compromise themselves in any manner. On second thought, given today’s political climate, they may not promise not to beat their husbands or wives or not compromise themselves in any untoward manner. You, in any case, get the point. Damn, even the weakest neophyte labor militant can make a better presentation before working people that this crowd. This writer presents a five point program (you knew that was coming, right?) that labor militants can run on. As point five makes clear this is not a ‘minimum’ program but a program based on our need to fight for power.
1. FIGHT FOR THE IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. TROOPS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST NOW (OR BETTER YET, YESTERDAY)! U.S. HANDS OFF THE WORLD! VOTE NO ON THE WAR BUDGET!
The quagmire in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Libya, Palestine, Iran) is the fault line of American politics today. Every bourgeois politician has to have his or her feet put to the fire on this one. Not on some flimsy ‘sense of the Congress’ softball motion for withdrawal next, year, in two years, or (my favorite) when the situation is stable. Moreover, on the parliamentary level the only real vote that matters is the vote on the war budget. All the rest is fluff. Militants should make a point of trying to enter Congressional contests where there are so-called anti-war Democrats or Republicans (an oxymoron, I believe) running to make that programmatic contrast vivid.
But, one might argue, that would split the ‘progressive’ forces. Grow up, please! That argument has grown stale since it was first put forth in the “popular front” days of the 1930’s. If you want to end the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere fight for this position on the war budget. Otherwise the same people (yes, those 'progressive Democrats') who almost unanimously voted for the last war budget get a free ride on the cheap. War President Barack Obama desperately needs to be opposed by labor militants. By rights this is our issue. Let us take it back.
2. FIGHT FOR A LIVING WAGE AND WORKING CONDITIONS-UNIVERSAL FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL.
It is a ‘no-brainer’ that no individual, much less a family can live on the minimum wage (now $7/hr. or so). What planet do these politicians live on? We need an immediate fight for a living wage, full employment and decent working conditions. We need universal free health care for all. End of story. The organized labor movement must get off its knees and fight to organize Wal-Mart and the South. A boycott of Wal-Mart is not enough. A successful organizing drive will, like in the 1930’s; go a long way to turning the conditions of labor around.
3. FIGHT THE ATTACKS ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT.
Down with the Death Penalty! Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants who make it here! Stop the Deportations! For the Separation of Church and State! Defend abortion rights! Down with anti-same sex marriage legislation! Full public funding of education! Stop the ‘war on drugs’, basically a war on blacks and minority youth-decriminalize drugs! Defend political prisoners! This list of demands hardly exhausts the “culture war” issues we defend. It is hard to believe that in the year 2012 over 200 years after the American Revolution and the French Revolution we are fighting desperately to preserve many of the same principles that militants fought for in those revolutions. But so be it.
4. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS PARTY.
The Donkeys, Elephants and other smaller bourgeois parties have had their chance. Now is the time to fight for our own party and for the interests of our own class, the working class. Any campaigns by independent labor militants must highlight this point. And any campaigns can also become the nucleus of a workers’ party network until we get strong enough to form at least a small party. None of these other parties, and I mean none, are working in the interests of working people and their allies. The following great lesson of politic today must be hammered home. Break with the Democrats, Republicans!
5. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS AND XYZ GOVERNMENT. THIS IS THE DEMAND THAT SEPARATES THE MILITANTS FROM THE FAINT-HEARTED REFORMISTS.
We need our own form of government. In the old days the bourgeois republic was a progressive form of government. Not so any more. That form of government ran out of steam about one hundred years ago. We need a Workers Republic. We need a government based on workers councils with a ministry (I do not dare say commissariat in case any stray anarchists are still reading this) responsible to it. Let us face it if we really want to get any of the good and necessary things listed above accomplished we are not going to get it with the current form of government.
Why the XYZ part? What does that mean? No, it is not part of an algebra lesson. What it reflects is that while society is made up mainly of workers (of one sort or another) there are other classes (and parts of classes) in society that we seek as allies and could benefit from a workers government. Examples- small independent contractors, intellectuals, the dwindling number of small farmers, and some professionals like dentists. Yes, with my tongue in my cheek after all my dental bills, I like the idea of a workers and dentists government. The point is however you formulate it you have got to fight for it.
Obviously any campaign based on this program will be an exemplary propaganda campaign for the foreseeable future. But we have to start now. Continuing to support or not challenging the bourgeois parties does us no good. That is for sure. While bourgeois electoral laws do not favor independent candidacies write-in campaigns are possible. ROLL UP YOUR SHEEVES! GET THOSE PETITIONS SIGNED! PRINT OUT THE LEAFLETS! PAINT THOSE BANNERS! GET READY TO SHAKE HANDS AND KISS BABIES.
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Markin’s Big Date
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Eddie Cochran performing Sittin’ in the Balcony to add a zest to this sketch.
Sittin' In The Balcony
Recorded by Eddie Cochran
Written by John D. Loudermilk
G D7 G
I'm just a sittin' in the balcony just a watching the movie
D7 G
Or maybe it's a symphony I wouldn't know
D7 G
I don't care about the symphonies just a cymbal and a timpani
D7 G
I'm just a sitting in the balcony on the very last row
C G
I'll hold your hand and I'll kiss you too
A7 D7
The feature's over but we're not through
G D7 G
Just a sittin' in the balcony holding hands in the balcony
D7 G
Just a sittin' in the balcony on the very last row
C G
We may stop loving to watch bugs bunny
A7 D7
But he can't take the place of my honey
G D7 G
Just a sittin' in the balcony just a smooching in the balcony
D7 G
Just a sittin' in the balcony on the very last row
C G D7 G
Just a hugging and a kissing with my baby in the very last row
You never knew what kind of story Peter Paul Markin my old yellow brick road compadre going back to the1960s was going to come up with back in those California “on the bus” searching for the great American West night days as we roamed up and down that state on Captain Crunch’s merry prankster bus. One day (night, more likely) he might be all high politics and want to talk about what was wrong with various slogans put forth on the workers’ government question at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922. The next day (or maybe that same night if we had hit the right kind of “high” for the occasion) he might just draw back to recall some childhood or teenage angst story. When he went into that mode it usually meant he wanted to discuss some forlorn “chick” that got away in those woe begotten days, or ones that didn’t and he wished they had. This one though is about one that didn’t get away but didn’t work out either. Amazingly, thinking about it later after he told me this story, I noticed how many such no win tales he kept locked in that mind of his.
For this one Peter Paul (I am under the equivalent of a court order not to use his nickname, his childhood stuck to adulthood nickname Pee-Pee when writing about him) reached way back to his elementary school days down at the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments (the “projects” in his terms) where he came of age. And where he “discovered” girls, although not without the usual ten tons of trauma, angst and alienation. Of course the ins and outs of the boy-girl thing have eluded every guy from ten to ten times ten since girls were invented so his story is not one that I found so bizarre. Just the particulars of his dilemma.
See, for a guy who thought nothing of spouting off those facts about the trials and tribulations of the Fourth Congress of Communist International Peter Paul was (and is) an extremely shy guy. And was back in the back the day time he was talking about, maybe more so. His thing was always to kind of overwhelm the girls with about ten thousand arcane facts on about eleven thousand different things that he had read about. Well, we all have our ways of relating to the world, and the opposite sex (or the same sex these days as far as preferences go). Personally I always thought he was crazy to do that routine when I saw him in action later when we were on the road. But some girls (and women more than I would have figured) were easily impressed by such odd-ball foolishness. My thing, personally, was just to say pretty things about them and take my chances like most normal guys.
Enter Belinda, Belinda Boylston, a blonde-haired stick (local Adamsville corner boy short-hand for girls who had not gotten a figure yet but who, well, who had some other charms only immature teen boys would notice) who had just that year (1958) moved into the new middle class single family colonial-style houses up the street build for those, unlike Peter Paul’s family, moving up in the golden age of American post- World War II prosperity. She had entered the school in October and so was not aware like all the other girls in his class of his special “skills.” And not knowing that she one day, maybe the second or third day of class, gave him a smile, a thin Mona Lisa smile. He blushed, blushed seven shades of red the lightest being blood red. Done. Gone. Finished.
After that in class Peter Paul poured it on especially when he noticed that she was paying attention when he answered a question, or just started to ramble on. (Jesus, I know that one.) But how was he going to get to talk to her. That is where Billie Bradley, the king hell king of the young teen Adamsville corner boy night came to the rescue. Or rather his sister, Celina, who was a year ahead of the boys, did. She corralled Belinda one day at lunch and just came right out with it. Did she like Peter Paul, or not? Of course came the since time immemorial- let him ask me himself. And with that our tale ends. Not end ends but ends for the few weeks that it took Peter Paul to get up the courage to talk to Belinda. And only under threat that Billie Bradley was going to take a run after her himself.
Well the long and short of it was that Belinda had not been coquettish (although she could be that) when she gave her answer to Celina but was pretty shy herself. She had planned to have her new friend, Maude, Maude Riley, ask Peter Paul if he liked her but Celina got there first. And so, finally, like some false-fated lovers out of some Greek tragedy (or Hollywood B script) they talked and she agreed to go on a “date.” with
one Peter Paul Markin that next Saturday.
Now this twelve year old “date” business is not (or was not) like a real date that older teens and we adults have but is strictly around the block stuff. First off it was strictly day time, strictly going to the movies or the beach (in summer) and strictly a few hours, no more. And with no car to drive them to the movies (nobody then, even shy nobodies, and I hope not now either, wanted to be chauffeured by some old foggy parents when they only had that precious few hours to make an impression) they took the bus to the Stand Theater in Adamsville Square for the Saturday matinee double-feature.
Peter Paul dressed in his best shirt and pants and his hair combed picked up Belinda at her house. Belinda looked nice too in her just slightly filling out cashmere sweater all the rage in those days. After the obligatory hi and goodbye (and parental list of dos and don’ts) they headed to the bus stop. Here is a funny part, or I thought it was funny. After leaving the Boylston house they were like two magpies talking about a storm like they had known each other forever. And every once in a while as he was talking she gave Peter Paul that fatal (to him) Mona Lisa smile. Finally they got to the square and headed for the theater.
Peter Paul said the rest of the afternoon was a little hazy. They entered the theater although he confessed that on a stack of seven bibles he could not remember the movies being played that day. Maybe Peggy Sue Meets Godzilla he though, something like that. And here is why things were a little hazy. Now parents and old foggies when they go to the movie theater are looking for the best seats to view the film. Twelve year olds then (and maybe now too for all I know) on their first “date” had a different decision to make. Orchestra seats or balcony? The answer meant an ordinary old foggy-type date or holding hands, and lips, upstairs. Peter Paul shyly asked Belinda where she wanted to sit. She gave him that thin Mona Lisa smile and pointed upstairs.
I wish I could give a postscript that Peter Paul and Belinda lived happily ever after, or until something else came along. However in this wicked old world some things just can’t work out, work out for twelve and thirteen year olds. Peter Paul and Belinda were an “item” for the rest of the school year, or most of it. Then Belinda’s father got a promotion that required a transfer to another part of the state. Such is life. But he still remembers that Mona Lisa smile as she, unable to talk she was so shy at that moment, pointed to those stairs.
Sittin' In The Balcony
Recorded by Eddie Cochran
Written by John D. Loudermilk
G D7 G
I'm just a sittin' in the balcony just a watching the movie
D7 G
Or maybe it's a symphony I wouldn't know
D7 G
I don't care about the symphonies just a cymbal and a timpani
D7 G
I'm just a sitting in the balcony on the very last row
C G
I'll hold your hand and I'll kiss you too
A7 D7
The feature's over but we're not through
G D7 G
Just a sittin' in the balcony holding hands in the balcony
D7 G
Just a sittin' in the balcony on the very last row
C G
We may stop loving to watch bugs bunny
A7 D7
But he can't take the place of my honey
G D7 G
Just a sittin' in the balcony just a smooching in the balcony
D7 G
Just a sittin' in the balcony on the very last row
C G D7 G
Just a hugging and a kissing with my baby in the very last row
You never knew what kind of story Peter Paul Markin my old yellow brick road compadre going back to the1960s was going to come up with back in those California “on the bus” searching for the great American West night days as we roamed up and down that state on Captain Crunch’s merry prankster bus. One day (night, more likely) he might be all high politics and want to talk about what was wrong with various slogans put forth on the workers’ government question at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922. The next day (or maybe that same night if we had hit the right kind of “high” for the occasion) he might just draw back to recall some childhood or teenage angst story. When he went into that mode it usually meant he wanted to discuss some forlorn “chick” that got away in those woe begotten days, or ones that didn’t and he wished they had. This one though is about one that didn’t get away but didn’t work out either. Amazingly, thinking about it later after he told me this story, I noticed how many such no win tales he kept locked in that mind of his.
For this one Peter Paul (I am under the equivalent of a court order not to use his nickname, his childhood stuck to adulthood nickname Pee-Pee when writing about him) reached way back to his elementary school days down at the Adamsville Housing Authority apartments (the “projects” in his terms) where he came of age. And where he “discovered” girls, although not without the usual ten tons of trauma, angst and alienation. Of course the ins and outs of the boy-girl thing have eluded every guy from ten to ten times ten since girls were invented so his story is not one that I found so bizarre. Just the particulars of his dilemma.
See, for a guy who thought nothing of spouting off those facts about the trials and tribulations of the Fourth Congress of Communist International Peter Paul was (and is) an extremely shy guy. And was back in the back the day time he was talking about, maybe more so. His thing was always to kind of overwhelm the girls with about ten thousand arcane facts on about eleven thousand different things that he had read about. Well, we all have our ways of relating to the world, and the opposite sex (or the same sex these days as far as preferences go). Personally I always thought he was crazy to do that routine when I saw him in action later when we were on the road. But some girls (and women more than I would have figured) were easily impressed by such odd-ball foolishness. My thing, personally, was just to say pretty things about them and take my chances like most normal guys.
Enter Belinda, Belinda Boylston, a blonde-haired stick (local Adamsville corner boy short-hand for girls who had not gotten a figure yet but who, well, who had some other charms only immature teen boys would notice) who had just that year (1958) moved into the new middle class single family colonial-style houses up the street build for those, unlike Peter Paul’s family, moving up in the golden age of American post- World War II prosperity. She had entered the school in October and so was not aware like all the other girls in his class of his special “skills.” And not knowing that she one day, maybe the second or third day of class, gave him a smile, a thin Mona Lisa smile. He blushed, blushed seven shades of red the lightest being blood red. Done. Gone. Finished.
After that in class Peter Paul poured it on especially when he noticed that she was paying attention when he answered a question, or just started to ramble on. (Jesus, I know that one.) But how was he going to get to talk to her. That is where Billie Bradley, the king hell king of the young teen Adamsville corner boy night came to the rescue. Or rather his sister, Celina, who was a year ahead of the boys, did. She corralled Belinda one day at lunch and just came right out with it. Did she like Peter Paul, or not? Of course came the since time immemorial- let him ask me himself. And with that our tale ends. Not end ends but ends for the few weeks that it took Peter Paul to get up the courage to talk to Belinda. And only under threat that Billie Bradley was going to take a run after her himself.
Well the long and short of it was that Belinda had not been coquettish (although she could be that) when she gave her answer to Celina but was pretty shy herself. She had planned to have her new friend, Maude, Maude Riley, ask Peter Paul if he liked her but Celina got there first. And so, finally, like some false-fated lovers out of some Greek tragedy (or Hollywood B script) they talked and she agreed to go on a “date.” with
one Peter Paul Markin that next Saturday.
Now this twelve year old “date” business is not (or was not) like a real date that older teens and we adults have but is strictly around the block stuff. First off it was strictly day time, strictly going to the movies or the beach (in summer) and strictly a few hours, no more. And with no car to drive them to the movies (nobody then, even shy nobodies, and I hope not now either, wanted to be chauffeured by some old foggy parents when they only had that precious few hours to make an impression) they took the bus to the Stand Theater in Adamsville Square for the Saturday matinee double-feature.
Peter Paul dressed in his best shirt and pants and his hair combed picked up Belinda at her house. Belinda looked nice too in her just slightly filling out cashmere sweater all the rage in those days. After the obligatory hi and goodbye (and parental list of dos and don’ts) they headed to the bus stop. Here is a funny part, or I thought it was funny. After leaving the Boylston house they were like two magpies talking about a storm like they had known each other forever. And every once in a while as he was talking she gave Peter Paul that fatal (to him) Mona Lisa smile. Finally they got to the square and headed for the theater.
Peter Paul said the rest of the afternoon was a little hazy. They entered the theater although he confessed that on a stack of seven bibles he could not remember the movies being played that day. Maybe Peggy Sue Meets Godzilla he though, something like that. And here is why things were a little hazy. Now parents and old foggies when they go to the movie theater are looking for the best seats to view the film. Twelve year olds then (and maybe now too for all I know) on their first “date” had a different decision to make. Orchestra seats or balcony? The answer meant an ordinary old foggy-type date or holding hands, and lips, upstairs. Peter Paul shyly asked Belinda where she wanted to sit. She gave him that thin Mona Lisa smile and pointed upstairs.
I wish I could give a postscript that Peter Paul and Belinda lived happily ever after, or until something else came along. However in this wicked old world some things just can’t work out, work out for twelve and thirteen year olds. Peter Paul and Belinda were an “item” for the rest of the school year, or most of it. Then Belinda’s father got a promotion that required a transfer to another part of the state. Such is life. But he still remembers that Mona Lisa smile as she, unable to talk she was so shy at that moment, pointed to those stairs.
Friday, August 03, 2012
The Latest From “The Rag Blog”
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
The Latest From The “Veterans For Peace” Facebook Page-Gear Up For The Fall 2012 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.
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 British Leftist Blog-"Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism"
http://histomatist.blogspot.com/
Markin comment:
While from the tenor of the articles, leftist authors featured, and other items it is not clear to me that this blog is faithful to any sense of historical materialism that Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky would recognize I am always more than willing to "steal" material from the site. Or investigate leads provided there for material of interest to the radical public-whatever that seemingly dwindling public may be these days.
Markin comment:
While from the tenor of the articles, leftist authors featured, and other items it is not clear to me that this blog is faithful to any sense of historical materialism that Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky would recognize I am always more than willing to "steal" material from the site. Or investigate leads provided there for material of interest to the radical public-whatever that seemingly dwindling public may be these days.
From The "Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives" Website- The Alba Blog-Alexander Cockburn (1941-2012)
Click on the headline to link to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive blog page for all kinds of interesting information about that important historic grouping.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
***********
Alexander Cockburn (1941-2012)
July 28, 2012
By Sebastiaan Faber-->
Earlier this month, journalism mourned the death of the radical British journalist Alexander Cockburn, son of the journalist and Spanish Civil War veteran Claud Cockburn, aka Frank Pitcairn (1904-1981). Among the many obituaries, The Nation’s Victor Navasky writes:
His style was witty, coruscating, deadly, in the highest polemical traditions of Ambrose Bierce and H.L. Mencken. Yet his most slashing sallies were always fact-based, right up to his final Nation column, last issue, on the Libor scandal.
“Alex knew how good he was,” John Nichols writes,
He knew that he could take readers where other writers could not — to the fields of India where Coca-Cola was stealing water from peasants; to the barricades of neglected labor battles in Austin, Minn., and Kenosha, Wis.; to “The City” of London, where the Libor scandal now unfolds. There were times when the going got rough; Alex’s radicalism was genuine, and he could offend not just foes on the right but friends on the left. He parted company with mainstream liberals on issues ranging from gun control to global warming.
Markin comment:
This blog had gotten my attention for two reasons: those rank and filers who fought to defend democracy, fight the fascists and fight for socialism in Spain for the most part, political opponents or not, were kindred spirits; and, those with first-hand knowledge of those times over seventy years ago are dwindling down to a precious few and so we had better listen to their stories while they are around to tell it. More, later.
***********
Alexander Cockburn (1941-2012)
July 28, 2012
By Sebastiaan Faber-->
Earlier this month, journalism mourned the death of the radical British journalist Alexander Cockburn, son of the journalist and Spanish Civil War veteran Claud Cockburn, aka Frank Pitcairn (1904-1981). Among the many obituaries, The Nation’s Victor Navasky writes:
His style was witty, coruscating, deadly, in the highest polemical traditions of Ambrose Bierce and H.L. Mencken. Yet his most slashing sallies were always fact-based, right up to his final Nation column, last issue, on the Libor scandal.
“Alex knew how good he was,” John Nichols writes,
He knew that he could take readers where other writers could not — to the fields of India where Coca-Cola was stealing water from peasants; to the barricades of neglected labor battles in Austin, Minn., and Kenosha, Wis.; to “The City” of London, where the Libor scandal now unfolds. There were times when the going got rough; Alex’s radicalism was genuine, and he could offend not just foes on the right but friends on the left. He parted company with mainstream liberals on issues ranging from gun control to global warming.
The Latest From The SteveLendmanBlog
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/
Markin comment:
I am always happy to post material from the SteveLendmanBlog, although I am not always in agreement with his analysis. I am always interested in getting a left-liberal/radical perspective on some issues that I don’t generally have time to cover in full like the question of Palestine, the Middle East in general, and civil rights and economic issues here in America and elsewhere. Moreover the blog provides plenty of useful links to other sources of information about the subject under discussion.
Markin comment:
I am always happy to post material from the SteveLendmanBlog, although I am not always in agreement with his analysis. I am always interested in getting a left-liberal/radical perspective on some issues that I don’t generally have time to cover in full like the question of Palestine, the Middle East in general, and civil rights and economic issues here in America and elsewhere. Moreover the blog provides plenty of useful links to other sources of information about the subject under discussion.
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Free The Class-War Prisoners-Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Leonard Peltier, Free Lynne Stewart And Her Co-Workers-Free The Remaining Ohio 7 Prisoners!
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeoisie decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeoisie decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
The Latest From "The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five" Website -Free The Five Ahora! -The Defense Of The Cuban Revolution Begins With The Defense Of The Cuban Five
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from this site.
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011):
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck (now deceased), whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I have been a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases internationally that are brought to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
Markin comment (re-post from July 26, 2011):
On a day, July 26th, important in the history of the Cuban revolutionary movement it is also important, as always, to remember that the defense of the Cuban revolution here in the United States, the "heart of the beast", starts with the defense of the Cuban Five.
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck (now deceased), whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I have been a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases internationally that are brought to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
From Archives Of Boston Occupier” –Newspaper Of “Occupy Boston” (OB)-Number Nine-July 2012
Click on the headline to link to the Boston Occupier Archives.
Markin comment:
Defend the Occupy movement! Hands Off All Occupy Protestors!
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
Markin comment:
Defend the Occupy movement! Hands Off All Occupy Protestors!
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Out In The Hills And Hollows Of Appalachia- Man Of Constant Sorrow- A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry of the Soggy Mountain Boys performing the Appalachian classic Man Of Constant Sorrow.
CD Review
Man of Constant Sorrow (And other Timeless Mountain Ballads), various artists, Yazoo Records, 2002
Recently I did a CD review in this space of now old- time urban blues folk revival 1960s minute songs, The New City Blues, that featured songs from earlier times down in places like the country blues-rich Mississippi Delta as covered by the aspiring folk artists of that latter period. As part of that review I mentioned that my old-time yellow brick road merry prankster summer of love, 1967 version, San Francisco Great American West night friend , Peter Paul Markin, a few years older than I am, had been instrumental in “tuning” me into those classic songs and folk music in general. Having grown up in backwoods (okay, back ocean) Olde Saco up in Maine and not near any folk centers like Cambridge I was clueless back then about anything except the burgeoning psychedelic rock scene and childhood Bobby Darin/Connie Francis vanilla rock music.
That said, Peter Paul tried, tried like hell, to interest me in even earlier roots music, the music of Appalachia, the hills and hollows country, hard coal- mining and hard-scrabble farming country living off the leavings of the great trek west many years before. No sale, No sale for a long time. Then watching the George Clooney film Brother, Where Art Thou? and listening to the soundtrack from the film about a decade ago I got a little hooked. The finishing touches came when I heard some woman (later identified to me as Emmy Lou Harris) singing Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies on some off-hand CD someone was playing. Strangely this was a song I knew from the yellow brick road days because Peter Paul played it to me several times as sung by the late gravelly-voiced folk singer/historian Dave Von Ronk. Like I said no sale, no way, turn the damn thing off, please.
So tastes change, or develop, but that is not the important story here. The real story here is why Peter Paul was so insistent on my understanding this mountain music, of seeing why he had come to see it as important. He had resisted the draw of the hills and hollows too. He had started out musically tuned into the great rock and roll jail break-out of the mid-1950s with Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and all the other classic (now classic) rock artists, male and female. He had no kid time for old foggy parent music like this. But that word parent is the key to why he tried to drag me in his wake. His father was from down there, down in the hills and hollows, down in coal-mining country. Down in Hazard, Kentucky a place known far and wide in song and hard fighting labor history and a place highlighted in Michael Harrington’s famous book on serious poverty places, The Other America.
This is the music that Peter Paul’s father grew up on in those lonely 1930s Saturday night whiskey-drinking (moonshine whiskey of course) back road barn dances. Or just hanging around some porch guitar, fiddle, mandolin, whatever, whiling away the hours until Sunday church and Monday back-breaking work again. So it was in his DNA, hard-wired into his DNA. That is why, I think anyway, he tried to force feed that old Dave Von Ronk cover
to me back in the day. And maybe by osmosis, or something, it finally rubbed off on me.
You should know this CD, this Man Of Constant Sorrow CD, if you are clueless about mountain music like I was, has a veritable American songbook-mountain music segment(and Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music songbook too) “greatest hits” contained in it. As with many oral traditions, mountain music, as it passed from generation to generation, locale to locale, got twisted around, got words added, ideas added and so on so that some of the versions here are, according to Peter Paul, different from those that he first heard. What is the same though is that the subjects, murder, mayhem, adultery, false love, lost love, very false love, abandonment, very, very false love, too much whiskey Saturday night and too little repentance Sunday morning, and, sometimes, true love get plenty of mention. Just the kind of subjects that the folk in hills and hollows (Markin said I should put in at least one hollas to show respect but what can I do) of Appalachia wanted to hear sung about. And maybe still do.
CD Review
Man of Constant Sorrow (And other Timeless Mountain Ballads), various artists, Yazoo Records, 2002
Recently I did a CD review in this space of now old- time urban blues folk revival 1960s minute songs, The New City Blues, that featured songs from earlier times down in places like the country blues-rich Mississippi Delta as covered by the aspiring folk artists of that latter period. As part of that review I mentioned that my old-time yellow brick road merry prankster summer of love, 1967 version, San Francisco Great American West night friend , Peter Paul Markin, a few years older than I am, had been instrumental in “tuning” me into those classic songs and folk music in general. Having grown up in backwoods (okay, back ocean) Olde Saco up in Maine and not near any folk centers like Cambridge I was clueless back then about anything except the burgeoning psychedelic rock scene and childhood Bobby Darin/Connie Francis vanilla rock music.
That said, Peter Paul tried, tried like hell, to interest me in even earlier roots music, the music of Appalachia, the hills and hollows country, hard coal- mining and hard-scrabble farming country living off the leavings of the great trek west many years before. No sale, No sale for a long time. Then watching the George Clooney film Brother, Where Art Thou? and listening to the soundtrack from the film about a decade ago I got a little hooked. The finishing touches came when I heard some woman (later identified to me as Emmy Lou Harris) singing Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies on some off-hand CD someone was playing. Strangely this was a song I knew from the yellow brick road days because Peter Paul played it to me several times as sung by the late gravelly-voiced folk singer/historian Dave Von Ronk. Like I said no sale, no way, turn the damn thing off, please.
So tastes change, or develop, but that is not the important story here. The real story here is why Peter Paul was so insistent on my understanding this mountain music, of seeing why he had come to see it as important. He had resisted the draw of the hills and hollows too. He had started out musically tuned into the great rock and roll jail break-out of the mid-1950s with Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and all the other classic (now classic) rock artists, male and female. He had no kid time for old foggy parent music like this. But that word parent is the key to why he tried to drag me in his wake. His father was from down there, down in the hills and hollows, down in coal-mining country. Down in Hazard, Kentucky a place known far and wide in song and hard fighting labor history and a place highlighted in Michael Harrington’s famous book on serious poverty places, The Other America.
This is the music that Peter Paul’s father grew up on in those lonely 1930s Saturday night whiskey-drinking (moonshine whiskey of course) back road barn dances. Or just hanging around some porch guitar, fiddle, mandolin, whatever, whiling away the hours until Sunday church and Monday back-breaking work again. So it was in his DNA, hard-wired into his DNA. That is why, I think anyway, he tried to force feed that old Dave Von Ronk cover
to me back in the day. And maybe by osmosis, or something, it finally rubbed off on me.
You should know this CD, this Man Of Constant Sorrow CD, if you are clueless about mountain music like I was, has a veritable American songbook-mountain music segment(and Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music songbook too) “greatest hits” contained in it. As with many oral traditions, mountain music, as it passed from generation to generation, locale to locale, got twisted around, got words added, ideas added and so on so that some of the versions here are, according to Peter Paul, different from those that he first heard. What is the same though is that the subjects, murder, mayhem, adultery, false love, lost love, very false love, abandonment, very, very false love, too much whiskey Saturday night and too little repentance Sunday morning, and, sometimes, true love get plenty of mention. Just the kind of subjects that the folk in hills and hollows (Markin said I should put in at least one hollas to show respect but what can I do) of Appalachia wanted to hear sung about. And maybe still do.
A Eugene V. Debs Moment -Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her vice presidential running mate Cheri Honkala were arrested during a protest at the offices of mortgage company Fannie Mae on Banker's Row in Philadelphia- A Challenge To The Republicrats.
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for early Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs.
Markin comment:
Every presidential candidate worth his or her salt (and vice-presidential candidates as well) should consider it an honor and a requirement to run for high office by being arrested as described below following in the tradition of Socialist party candidate Eugene V. Debs in 1920 when he ran his campaign from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. And why was Brother Debs in prison? For opposition to his generation’s imperial war, World War I. The one, to remind everyone, that was “to make the world safe for democracy.”
And here is a challenge to the candidates of the major bourgeois parties,
Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney (or is it the other way around?). Why were you not at that demonstration and subject to arrest for a righteous cause? They are more likely to be subject to arrest for other more heinous crimes. Barack Obama for his war crimes against the peoples of the world and Mitt Romney for simple tax evasion and being stupid and greedy in a public place. And tell everybody that is what Debs would say too.
************
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her vice presidential running mate Cheri Honkala were arrested today during a protest at the offices of mortgage company Fannie Mae on Banker's Row in Philadelphia.
Among those arrested along with Dr. Stein and Ms. Honkala were labor lawyer James Moran and Sister Margaret McKenna of the Medical Mission Sisters. An attorney who supports civil disobedience cases is providing legal assistance. All of those arrested are expected to come before a judge early on Thursday morning. At that time bail will either be set or they will be released on their own recognizance.
The protest was originally called for by the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign to demand that the giant mortgage company halt foreclosure proceedings against two Philadelphia residents in danger of losing their homes. Stein joined the protest after Cheri Honkala joined her as Stein's vice presidential running mate. Honkala, a former homeless single mother, has been confronting banks and mortgage companies for decades demanding that they adopt policies that will, "keep families in their homes."
At 1pm today about 50 protestors gathered outside of Fannie Mae's Philadelphia headquarters. They heard from Miss Fran and Rhonda Lancaster, the heads of two families evicted by Fannie Mae in its refusal to negotiate an alternative to foreclosure. Fannie Mae executive Zach Oppenheimer had previously promised in writing to meet with the two women in order to discuss other options. Yet no followup meeting ever took place, and so protestors today entered the Fannie Mae building and vowed to stay until Mr. Oppenheimer's word was honored.
At about 2:30pm, an hour after entering the building and beginning a sitdown protest, lower level Fannie Mae officials agreed to meet with Miss Fran and Ms. Lancaster. These meetings proved inconclusive, ending only with promises of more meetings. With Philadelphia police on hand with six paddy wagons and plainclothesman, a smaller subset of protestors stayed inside the building and risked arrest. Five were arrested, including Dr. Stein and Ms. Honkala.
In explaining why she joined the protest, Stein said that almost half of Americans now live in poverty or near poverty, eight million families face eviction from their homes due to foreclosures, and over a third of mortgage holders are "underwater" - meaning that they owe more to the lenders than their properties are worth on the market.
Said Stein, "The developers and financiers made trillions of dollars through the housing bubble and the imposition of crushing debt on homeowners. And when homeowners could no longer pay them what they demanded, they went to government and got trillions of dollars of bailouts. Every effort of the Obama Administration has been to prop this system up and keep it going at taxpayer expense. It's time for this game to end. It's time for the laws be written to protect the victims and not the perpetrators. It's time for a new deal for America, and a Green New Deal is what we will deliver on taking office. "
"The laws and the budgets and the procedures are designed to protect the lenders and to extract as much money as possible from the victims," Honkala explained. "This isn't the way it would be if we really had a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The first goal of government should be to keep families in their homes, and to provide restitution for the deception and fraud that has robbed millions of Americans of financial security."
Stein laid out a number of steps that will be part of a new deal for homeowners when and where the Green Party wins power. First, as President, Dr. Stein would issue an executive order establishing a moratorium on foreclosures of occupied dwellings. Second, municipalities governed by Greens will get homeowners out of underwater mortgages by seizing mortgages through eminent domain and letting non-profit community development organizations - not Wall Street banks - reissue the mortgages.
Noting that the Obama administration has only released 10% of the aid that Congress had promised to homeowners, Stein asserted that "There is much more interest in Washington in protecting the profits of banks than in getting this aid out to the families whose lives are falling apart. President Obama held a big press conference to announce a program that would supposedly help 1.5 million homeowners and so far it has actually helped only 1 per cent of that number. Real help goes to the CEOs who play golf with the President and the people get lip service. This will change only if the people stand up and say we're not going to put up with it anymore."
Statement from RHONDA LANCASTER (Excerpted from People’s Tribune):
My family has lived in this home in Germantown for over 35 years. When my mother got ill and could not afford her health care, a reverse mortgage idea was presented to me. They made it look like it was a great thing. It was going to take care of my mother, and when my mother passed away it would be just fine.
The nightmare started after my mom died. I notified the bank she had passed away, and two days later I was getting ready for her funeral. Relatives and friends were coming in from all over the country. The bank told me to stop everything and let them come in and do an appraisal.
The bank refused to accept me as the executor of her estate, although the proper papers had been filed at City Hall. From that point on it was a complete nightmare. I could get through to no one and no one could help me. They denied me my legal US rights as heir to my mother’s property.
Statement from MISS FRAN (Excerpted from People’s Tribune):
I have lived in Philadelphia all my life, and in this house since 1988. Once when I was forced to file for bankruptcy, my mortgage holder, Chase Bank, suddenly came to court and objected to my bankruptcy plan. Although the law requires them to notify me in advance, I had no warning of their action, so I had no lawyer and no time to prepare my evidence. The judge dismissed my file for bankruptcy and Chase began foreclosure proceedings.
I participated in Philadelphia’s Mortgage Foreclosure Diversion Program, so I was able to keep my home off the sheriff sale list. Then they claimed I missed a Conciliation Conference even though they had never notified me about it. When I complained, the court rescheduled the sheriff sale of my home from July 1, 2008, to September. I attended that sale on July 1 and was shocked to hear them put my house up for sale anyway. I was in the back of the auditorium and ran to the front making so much noise the sheriff’s lawyer had to stop the sale. Finally they brought in a letter from the sheriff saying they had obtained a court order that same day to sell the house. They had gone to court without even notifying me. The same judge who postponed the sale in the first place had turned around and vacated his own order, all without telling me.
The sale of my home went through on July 1, but my battle was just beginning. Although Chase Bank foreclosed on my home, I found out the sheriff changed the name on the documents to Fannie Mae. There is no bill of sale from Chase to Fannie Mae and no record of any transfer. Fannie Mae has no legal standing to evict me. But that didn’t stop them from trying. They sued to evict me in April 2011. I filed an objection, it was overruled, I answered them, and we were supposed to go to trial in February 2012. Then they filed for a summary judgment against me, which is only supposed to be granted when there is no dispute in the matter. I told them we most definitely do have a dispute: a district court order was ignored and Fannie Mae has no standing. But the judge granted the summary judgment anyway. They obtained a writ of eviction and scheduled my eviction for June 12.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please take an immediate step by making a donation: http://www.jillstein.org/donate
Authorized and paid for by Jill Stein for President
PO Box 260217, Madison, WI 53726-0217
http://www.JillStein.org
Markin comment:
Every presidential candidate worth his or her salt (and vice-presidential candidates as well) should consider it an honor and a requirement to run for high office by being arrested as described below following in the tradition of Socialist party candidate Eugene V. Debs in 1920 when he ran his campaign from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. And why was Brother Debs in prison? For opposition to his generation’s imperial war, World War I. The one, to remind everyone, that was “to make the world safe for democracy.”
And here is a challenge to the candidates of the major bourgeois parties,
Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney (or is it the other way around?). Why were you not at that demonstration and subject to arrest for a righteous cause? They are more likely to be subject to arrest for other more heinous crimes. Barack Obama for his war crimes against the peoples of the world and Mitt Romney for simple tax evasion and being stupid and greedy in a public place. And tell everybody that is what Debs would say too.
************
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her vice presidential running mate Cheri Honkala were arrested today during a protest at the offices of mortgage company Fannie Mae on Banker's Row in Philadelphia.
Among those arrested along with Dr. Stein and Ms. Honkala were labor lawyer James Moran and Sister Margaret McKenna of the Medical Mission Sisters. An attorney who supports civil disobedience cases is providing legal assistance. All of those arrested are expected to come before a judge early on Thursday morning. At that time bail will either be set or they will be released on their own recognizance.
The protest was originally called for by the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign to demand that the giant mortgage company halt foreclosure proceedings against two Philadelphia residents in danger of losing their homes. Stein joined the protest after Cheri Honkala joined her as Stein's vice presidential running mate. Honkala, a former homeless single mother, has been confronting banks and mortgage companies for decades demanding that they adopt policies that will, "keep families in their homes."
At 1pm today about 50 protestors gathered outside of Fannie Mae's Philadelphia headquarters. They heard from Miss Fran and Rhonda Lancaster, the heads of two families evicted by Fannie Mae in its refusal to negotiate an alternative to foreclosure. Fannie Mae executive Zach Oppenheimer had previously promised in writing to meet with the two women in order to discuss other options. Yet no followup meeting ever took place, and so protestors today entered the Fannie Mae building and vowed to stay until Mr. Oppenheimer's word was honored.
At about 2:30pm, an hour after entering the building and beginning a sitdown protest, lower level Fannie Mae officials agreed to meet with Miss Fran and Ms. Lancaster. These meetings proved inconclusive, ending only with promises of more meetings. With Philadelphia police on hand with six paddy wagons and plainclothesman, a smaller subset of protestors stayed inside the building and risked arrest. Five were arrested, including Dr. Stein and Ms. Honkala.
In explaining why she joined the protest, Stein said that almost half of Americans now live in poverty or near poverty, eight million families face eviction from their homes due to foreclosures, and over a third of mortgage holders are "underwater" - meaning that they owe more to the lenders than their properties are worth on the market.
Said Stein, "The developers and financiers made trillions of dollars through the housing bubble and the imposition of crushing debt on homeowners. And when homeowners could no longer pay them what they demanded, they went to government and got trillions of dollars of bailouts. Every effort of the Obama Administration has been to prop this system up and keep it going at taxpayer expense. It's time for this game to end. It's time for the laws be written to protect the victims and not the perpetrators. It's time for a new deal for America, and a Green New Deal is what we will deliver on taking office. "
"The laws and the budgets and the procedures are designed to protect the lenders and to extract as much money as possible from the victims," Honkala explained. "This isn't the way it would be if we really had a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The first goal of government should be to keep families in their homes, and to provide restitution for the deception and fraud that has robbed millions of Americans of financial security."
Stein laid out a number of steps that will be part of a new deal for homeowners when and where the Green Party wins power. First, as President, Dr. Stein would issue an executive order establishing a moratorium on foreclosures of occupied dwellings. Second, municipalities governed by Greens will get homeowners out of underwater mortgages by seizing mortgages through eminent domain and letting non-profit community development organizations - not Wall Street banks - reissue the mortgages.
Noting that the Obama administration has only released 10% of the aid that Congress had promised to homeowners, Stein asserted that "There is much more interest in Washington in protecting the profits of banks than in getting this aid out to the families whose lives are falling apart. President Obama held a big press conference to announce a program that would supposedly help 1.5 million homeowners and so far it has actually helped only 1 per cent of that number. Real help goes to the CEOs who play golf with the President and the people get lip service. This will change only if the people stand up and say we're not going to put up with it anymore."
Statement from RHONDA LANCASTER (Excerpted from People’s Tribune):
My family has lived in this home in Germantown for over 35 years. When my mother got ill and could not afford her health care, a reverse mortgage idea was presented to me. They made it look like it was a great thing. It was going to take care of my mother, and when my mother passed away it would be just fine.
The nightmare started after my mom died. I notified the bank she had passed away, and two days later I was getting ready for her funeral. Relatives and friends were coming in from all over the country. The bank told me to stop everything and let them come in and do an appraisal.
The bank refused to accept me as the executor of her estate, although the proper papers had been filed at City Hall. From that point on it was a complete nightmare. I could get through to no one and no one could help me. They denied me my legal US rights as heir to my mother’s property.
Statement from MISS FRAN (Excerpted from People’s Tribune):
I have lived in Philadelphia all my life, and in this house since 1988. Once when I was forced to file for bankruptcy, my mortgage holder, Chase Bank, suddenly came to court and objected to my bankruptcy plan. Although the law requires them to notify me in advance, I had no warning of their action, so I had no lawyer and no time to prepare my evidence. The judge dismissed my file for bankruptcy and Chase began foreclosure proceedings.
I participated in Philadelphia’s Mortgage Foreclosure Diversion Program, so I was able to keep my home off the sheriff sale list. Then they claimed I missed a Conciliation Conference even though they had never notified me about it. When I complained, the court rescheduled the sheriff sale of my home from July 1, 2008, to September. I attended that sale on July 1 and was shocked to hear them put my house up for sale anyway. I was in the back of the auditorium and ran to the front making so much noise the sheriff’s lawyer had to stop the sale. Finally they brought in a letter from the sheriff saying they had obtained a court order that same day to sell the house. They had gone to court without even notifying me. The same judge who postponed the sale in the first place had turned around and vacated his own order, all without telling me.
The sale of my home went through on July 1, but my battle was just beginning. Although Chase Bank foreclosed on my home, I found out the sheriff changed the name on the documents to Fannie Mae. There is no bill of sale from Chase to Fannie Mae and no record of any transfer. Fannie Mae has no legal standing to evict me. But that didn’t stop them from trying. They sued to evict me in April 2011. I filed an objection, it was overruled, I answered them, and we were supposed to go to trial in February 2012. Then they filed for a summary judgment against me, which is only supposed to be granted when there is no dispute in the matter. I told them we most definitely do have a dispute: a district court order was ignored and Fannie Mae has no standing. But the judge granted the summary judgment anyway. They obtained a writ of eviction and scheduled my eviction for June 12.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please take an immediate step by making a donation: http://www.jillstein.org/donate
Authorized and paid for by Jill Stein for President
PO Box 260217, Madison, WI 53726-0217
http://www.JillStein.org
The Labor Party Question In The United States- An Historical Overview-Fight For A Worker Party That Fights For A Workers Government
Click on the headline to link to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives for an online copy of his 1940s documents on the labor party question in the United States in his time.
These notes (expanded) were originally intended to be presented as The Labor Question in the United States at a forum on the question on Saturday August 4, 2012. As a number of radicals have noted, most particularly organized socialist radicals, after the dust from the fall bourgeois election settles, regardless of who wins, the working class will lose. Pressure for an independent labor expression, as we head into 2013, may likely to move from its current propaganda point as part of the revolutionary program to agitation and action so learning about the past experiences in the revolutionary and radical labor movements is timely.
I had originally expected to spend most of the speech at the forum delving into the historical experiences, particularly the work of the American Communist Party and the American Socialist Workers Party with a couple of minutes “tip of the hat” to the work of radical around the Labor Party experiences of the late 1990s. However, the scope of the early work and that of those radical in the latter work could not, I felt, be done justice in one forum. Thus these notes are centered on the early historical experiences. If I get a chance, and gather enough information to do the subject justice, I will place notes for the 1990s Labor party work in this space as well.
*********
The subject today is the Labor Party Question in the United States. For starters I want to reconfigure this concept and place it in the context of the Transitional Program first promulgated by Leon Trotsky and his fellows in the Fourth International in 1938. There the labor party concept was expressed as “a workers’ party that fights for a workers’ government.” [The actual expression for advanced capitalist countries like the U.S. was for a workers and farmers government but that is hardly applicable here now, at least in the United States. Some wag at the time, some Shachtmanite wag from what I understand, noted that there were then more dentists than farmers in the United States. Wag aside that remark is a good point since today we would call for a workers and X (oppressed communities, women, etc.) government to make our programmatic point more inclusive.]
For revolutionaries these two algebraically -expressed political ideas are organically joined together. What we mean, what we translate this as, in our propaganda is a mass revolutionary labor party (think Bolsheviks first and foremost, and us) based on the trade unions (the only serious currently organized part of the working class) fighting for soviets (workers councils, factory committees, etc.) as an expression of state power. In short, the dictatorship of the proletariat, a term we do not yet use in “polite” society these days in order not to scare off the masses. And that is the nut. Those of us who stand on those intertwined revolutionary premises are few and far between today and so we need, desperately need, to have a bridge expression, and a bridge organization, the workers party, to do the day to day work of bringing masses of working people to see the need to have an independent organized expression fighting programmatically for their class interests. And we, they, need it pronto.
That program, the program that we as revolutionaries would fight for, would, as it evolved, center on demands, yes, demands, that would go from day to day needs to the struggle for state power. Today focusing on massive job programs at union wages and benefits to get people back to work, workers control of production as a way to spread the available work around, the historic slogan of 30 for 40, nationalization of the banks and other financial institutions under workers control, a home foreclosure moratorium, and debt for homeowners and students. Obviously more demands come to mind but those listed are sufficient to show our direction.
Now there have historically been many efforts to create a mass workers party in the United States going all the way back to the 1830s with the Workingmen’s Party based in New York City. Later efforts, after the Civil War, mainly, when classic capitalism began to become the driving economic norm, included the famous Terence Powderly-led Knights of Labor, including (segregated black locals), a National Negro Union, and various European social-democratic off -shoots (including pro-Marxist formations). All those had flaws, some serious like being pro-capitalist, merely reformist, and the like (sound familiar?) and reflected the birth pangs of the organized labor movement rather than serious predecessors.
Things got serious around the turn of the century (oops, turn of the 20th century) when the “age of the robber barons” declared unequivocally that class warfare between labor and capital was the norm in American society (if not expressed that way in “polite” society). This was the period of the rise the Debsian-inspired party of the whole class, the American Socialist Party. More importantly, if contradictorily, emerging from a segment of that organization, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) was, to my mind the first serious revolutionary labor organization (party/union?) that we could look to as fighting a class struggle fight for working class interests. Everyone should read the Preamble to the IWW Constitution of 1905 (look it up on Wikipedia or the IWW website) to see what I mean. It still retains its stirring revolutionary fervor today.
The most unambiguous work of creating a mass labor party that we could recognize though really came with the fight of the American Communist Party (which had been formed by the sections, the revolutionary-inclined sections, of the American Socialist Party that split off in the great revolutionary/reformist division after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917) in the 1920s to form one based on the trade unions (mainly in the Midwest, and mainly in Chicago with the John Fitzgerald –led AFL). That effort was stillborn, stillborn because the non-communist labor leaders who had the numbers, the locals, and, ah, the dough wanted a farmer-labor party, a two class party to cushion them against radical solutions (breaking from the bourgeois parties and electoralism). Only the timely intervention of the Communist International saved the day from a major blunder (Go to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives for more, much more on this movement, He, and his factional allies including one William Z. Foster, later the titular head of the Communist Party, were in the thick of things to his later red-faced chagrin).
Moving forward, the American Communist Party at the height of the Great Depression (the one in the 1930s, that one, not the one we are in now) created the American Labor Party (along with the American Socialist party and other pro-Democratic Party labor skates) which had a mass base in places like New York and the Midwest. The problem though was this organization was, mainly, a left-handed way to get votes for Roosevelt from class conscious socialist-minded workers who balked at a direct vote for Roosevelt. (Sound familiar, again?) And that, before the Labor Party movement of the 1990s, is pretty much, except a few odd local attempts here and there by leftist groups, some sincere, some not, was probably the last major effort to form any kind of independent labor political organization. (The American Communist Party after 1936, excepting 1940, and even that is up for questioning, would thereafter not dream of seriously organizing such a party. For them the Democratic Party was more than adequate, thank you. Later the Socialist Workers Party essentially took the same stance.)
So much then for the historical aspects of the workers party question. The real question, the real lessons, for revolutionaries posed by all of this is something that was pointed out by James P. Cannon in the late 1930s and early 1940s (and before him Leon Trotsky). Can revolutionaries in the United States recruit masses of working people to a revolutionary labor party (us, again) today (and again think Bolshevik)? To pose the question is to give the answer (an old lawyer’s trick, by the way).
America today, no. Russia in 1917, yes. Germany in 1921, yes. Same place 1923, yes. Spain in 1936 (really from 1934 on), yes. America in the 1930s, probably not (even with no Stalinist ALP siphoning). France 1968, yes. Greece (or Spain) today, yes. So it is all a question of concrete circumstances. That is what Cannon (and before him Trotsky) was arguing about. If you can recruit to the revolutionary labor party that is the main ticket. We, even in America, are not historically pre-determined to go the old time British Labor Party route as an exclusive way to create a mass- based political labor organization. If we are not able to recruit directly then you have to look at some way station effort. That is why in his 1940 documents (which can also be found at the Cannon Internet Archives as well) Cannon stressed that the SWP should where possible (mainly New York) work in the Stalinist-controlled (heaven forbid, cried the Shachtmanites) American Labor Party. That was where masses of organized trade union workers were.
Now I don’t know, and probably nobody else does either, if and when, the American working class is going to come out of its slumber. Some of us thought that Occupy might be a catalyst for that. That has turned out to be patently false as far as the working class goes. So we have to expect that maybe some middle level labor organizers or local union officials feeling pressure from the ranks may begin to call for a labor party. That, as the 1990s Socialist Alternative Labor Party archives indicates, is about what happened when those efforts started.
[A reference back to the American Communist Party’s work in the 1920s may be informative here. As mentioned above there was some confusion, no, a lot of confusion back then about building a labor party base on workers and farmers, a two -class party. While the demands of both groups may in some cases overlap farmers, except for farm hands, are small capitalists on the land. We need a program for such potential allies, petty bourgeois allies, but their demands are subordinate to labor’s in a workers’ party program. Fast forward to today and it is entirely possible, especially in light of the recent Occupy experiences, that some vague popular frontist trans-class movement might develop like the Labor Non-Partisan League that the labor skates put forward in the 1930s as a catch basin for all kinds of political tendencies. We, of course, would work in such formations fighting for a revolutionary perspective but this is not what we advocate for now.]
Earlier this year AFL-CIO President Trumka made noises about labor “going its own way.” I guess he had had too much to drink at the Democratic National Committee meeting the night before, or something. So we should be cautious, but we should be ready. While at the moment tactics like a great regroupment of left forces, a united front with labor militants, or entry in other labor organizations for the purpose of pushing the workers party are premature we should be ready.
And that last sentence brings up my final point, another point courtesy of Jim Cannon. He made a big point in the 1940s documents about the various kinds of political activities that small revolutionary propaganda groups or individuals (us, yet again) can participate in (and actually large socialist organizations too before taking state power). He lumped propaganda, agitation, and action together. For us today we have our propaganda points “a workers’ party that fights for a workers (and X, okay) government.” In the future, if things head our way, we will “united front” the labor skates to death agitating for the need for an independent labor expression. But we will really be speaking over their heads to their memberships (and other working class formations, if any, as well). Then we will take action to create that damn party, fighting to make it a revolutionary instrument. Enough said.
These notes (expanded) were originally intended to be presented as The Labor Question in the United States at a forum on the question on Saturday August 4, 2012. As a number of radicals have noted, most particularly organized socialist radicals, after the dust from the fall bourgeois election settles, regardless of who wins, the working class will lose. Pressure for an independent labor expression, as we head into 2013, may likely to move from its current propaganda point as part of the revolutionary program to agitation and action so learning about the past experiences in the revolutionary and radical labor movements is timely.
I had originally expected to spend most of the speech at the forum delving into the historical experiences, particularly the work of the American Communist Party and the American Socialist Workers Party with a couple of minutes “tip of the hat” to the work of radical around the Labor Party experiences of the late 1990s. However, the scope of the early work and that of those radical in the latter work could not, I felt, be done justice in one forum. Thus these notes are centered on the early historical experiences. If I get a chance, and gather enough information to do the subject justice, I will place notes for the 1990s Labor party work in this space as well.
*********
The subject today is the Labor Party Question in the United States. For starters I want to reconfigure this concept and place it in the context of the Transitional Program first promulgated by Leon Trotsky and his fellows in the Fourth International in 1938. There the labor party concept was expressed as “a workers’ party that fights for a workers’ government.” [The actual expression for advanced capitalist countries like the U.S. was for a workers and farmers government but that is hardly applicable here now, at least in the United States. Some wag at the time, some Shachtmanite wag from what I understand, noted that there were then more dentists than farmers in the United States. Wag aside that remark is a good point since today we would call for a workers and X (oppressed communities, women, etc.) government to make our programmatic point more inclusive.]
For revolutionaries these two algebraically -expressed political ideas are organically joined together. What we mean, what we translate this as, in our propaganda is a mass revolutionary labor party (think Bolsheviks first and foremost, and us) based on the trade unions (the only serious currently organized part of the working class) fighting for soviets (workers councils, factory committees, etc.) as an expression of state power. In short, the dictatorship of the proletariat, a term we do not yet use in “polite” society these days in order not to scare off the masses. And that is the nut. Those of us who stand on those intertwined revolutionary premises are few and far between today and so we need, desperately need, to have a bridge expression, and a bridge organization, the workers party, to do the day to day work of bringing masses of working people to see the need to have an independent organized expression fighting programmatically for their class interests. And we, they, need it pronto.
That program, the program that we as revolutionaries would fight for, would, as it evolved, center on demands, yes, demands, that would go from day to day needs to the struggle for state power. Today focusing on massive job programs at union wages and benefits to get people back to work, workers control of production as a way to spread the available work around, the historic slogan of 30 for 40, nationalization of the banks and other financial institutions under workers control, a home foreclosure moratorium, and debt for homeowners and students. Obviously more demands come to mind but those listed are sufficient to show our direction.
Now there have historically been many efforts to create a mass workers party in the United States going all the way back to the 1830s with the Workingmen’s Party based in New York City. Later efforts, after the Civil War, mainly, when classic capitalism began to become the driving economic norm, included the famous Terence Powderly-led Knights of Labor, including (segregated black locals), a National Negro Union, and various European social-democratic off -shoots (including pro-Marxist formations). All those had flaws, some serious like being pro-capitalist, merely reformist, and the like (sound familiar?) and reflected the birth pangs of the organized labor movement rather than serious predecessors.
Things got serious around the turn of the century (oops, turn of the 20th century) when the “age of the robber barons” declared unequivocally that class warfare between labor and capital was the norm in American society (if not expressed that way in “polite” society). This was the period of the rise the Debsian-inspired party of the whole class, the American Socialist Party. More importantly, if contradictorily, emerging from a segment of that organization, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) was, to my mind the first serious revolutionary labor organization (party/union?) that we could look to as fighting a class struggle fight for working class interests. Everyone should read the Preamble to the IWW Constitution of 1905 (look it up on Wikipedia or the IWW website) to see what I mean. It still retains its stirring revolutionary fervor today.
The most unambiguous work of creating a mass labor party that we could recognize though really came with the fight of the American Communist Party (which had been formed by the sections, the revolutionary-inclined sections, of the American Socialist Party that split off in the great revolutionary/reformist division after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917) in the 1920s to form one based on the trade unions (mainly in the Midwest, and mainly in Chicago with the John Fitzgerald –led AFL). That effort was stillborn, stillborn because the non-communist labor leaders who had the numbers, the locals, and, ah, the dough wanted a farmer-labor party, a two class party to cushion them against radical solutions (breaking from the bourgeois parties and electoralism). Only the timely intervention of the Communist International saved the day from a major blunder (Go to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives for more, much more on this movement, He, and his factional allies including one William Z. Foster, later the titular head of the Communist Party, were in the thick of things to his later red-faced chagrin).
Moving forward, the American Communist Party at the height of the Great Depression (the one in the 1930s, that one, not the one we are in now) created the American Labor Party (along with the American Socialist party and other pro-Democratic Party labor skates) which had a mass base in places like New York and the Midwest. The problem though was this organization was, mainly, a left-handed way to get votes for Roosevelt from class conscious socialist-minded workers who balked at a direct vote for Roosevelt. (Sound familiar, again?) And that, before the Labor Party movement of the 1990s, is pretty much, except a few odd local attempts here and there by leftist groups, some sincere, some not, was probably the last major effort to form any kind of independent labor political organization. (The American Communist Party after 1936, excepting 1940, and even that is up for questioning, would thereafter not dream of seriously organizing such a party. For them the Democratic Party was more than adequate, thank you. Later the Socialist Workers Party essentially took the same stance.)
So much then for the historical aspects of the workers party question. The real question, the real lessons, for revolutionaries posed by all of this is something that was pointed out by James P. Cannon in the late 1930s and early 1940s (and before him Leon Trotsky). Can revolutionaries in the United States recruit masses of working people to a revolutionary labor party (us, again) today (and again think Bolshevik)? To pose the question is to give the answer (an old lawyer’s trick, by the way).
America today, no. Russia in 1917, yes. Germany in 1921, yes. Same place 1923, yes. Spain in 1936 (really from 1934 on), yes. America in the 1930s, probably not (even with no Stalinist ALP siphoning). France 1968, yes. Greece (or Spain) today, yes. So it is all a question of concrete circumstances. That is what Cannon (and before him Trotsky) was arguing about. If you can recruit to the revolutionary labor party that is the main ticket. We, even in America, are not historically pre-determined to go the old time British Labor Party route as an exclusive way to create a mass- based political labor organization. If we are not able to recruit directly then you have to look at some way station effort. That is why in his 1940 documents (which can also be found at the Cannon Internet Archives as well) Cannon stressed that the SWP should where possible (mainly New York) work in the Stalinist-controlled (heaven forbid, cried the Shachtmanites) American Labor Party. That was where masses of organized trade union workers were.
Now I don’t know, and probably nobody else does either, if and when, the American working class is going to come out of its slumber. Some of us thought that Occupy might be a catalyst for that. That has turned out to be patently false as far as the working class goes. So we have to expect that maybe some middle level labor organizers or local union officials feeling pressure from the ranks may begin to call for a labor party. That, as the 1990s Socialist Alternative Labor Party archives indicates, is about what happened when those efforts started.
[A reference back to the American Communist Party’s work in the 1920s may be informative here. As mentioned above there was some confusion, no, a lot of confusion back then about building a labor party base on workers and farmers, a two -class party. While the demands of both groups may in some cases overlap farmers, except for farm hands, are small capitalists on the land. We need a program for such potential allies, petty bourgeois allies, but their demands are subordinate to labor’s in a workers’ party program. Fast forward to today and it is entirely possible, especially in light of the recent Occupy experiences, that some vague popular frontist trans-class movement might develop like the Labor Non-Partisan League that the labor skates put forward in the 1930s as a catch basin for all kinds of political tendencies. We, of course, would work in such formations fighting for a revolutionary perspective but this is not what we advocate for now.]
Earlier this year AFL-CIO President Trumka made noises about labor “going its own way.” I guess he had had too much to drink at the Democratic National Committee meeting the night before, or something. So we should be cautious, but we should be ready. While at the moment tactics like a great regroupment of left forces, a united front with labor militants, or entry in other labor organizations for the purpose of pushing the workers party are premature we should be ready.
And that last sentence brings up my final point, another point courtesy of Jim Cannon. He made a big point in the 1940s documents about the various kinds of political activities that small revolutionary propaganda groups or individuals (us, yet again) can participate in (and actually large socialist organizations too before taking state power). He lumped propaganda, agitation, and action together. For us today we have our propaganda points “a workers’ party that fights for a workers (and X, okay) government.” In the future, if things head our way, we will “united front” the labor skates to death agitating for the need for an independent labor expression. But we will really be speaking over their heads to their memberships (and other working class formations, if any, as well). Then we will take action to create that damn party, fighting to make it a revolutionary instrument. Enough said.
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