From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!-Vote Yes on California Prop 34!

Click on the headline to link to the “International Communist League” website.

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.
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Workers Vanguard No. 1009 28 September 2012

Tough on Crime” Anti-Death Penalty Measure

Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

Vote Yes on California Prop 34!

In a country that leads the world in the number of people behind bars, disproportionately black, the endurance of the death penalty is rooted in the foundation of American capitalism, which was built on the scarred backs of black slaves. Capital punishment is the supreme declaration of state authority and the monopoly of violence in the hands of this country’s racist capitalist rulers. The so-called “Golden State” of California leads the nation in death row inmates, with close to one-quarter of the more than 3,170 men and women condemned to die. Of the 729 death row prisoners, overwhelmingly concentrated at San Quentin, 14 have exhausted all appeals. The only thing standing between them and the death chamber are court-directed negotiations over which combination of deadly chemicals to inject in their veins to avoid the charge of “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Proposition 34 (the SAFE California Act), which is on the ballot in the November elections, calls to repeal the state’s death penalty and replace it with life without parole. As Marxists, we oppose the death penalty on principle—for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not accord the state the right to determine who lives and who dies, and welcome any measure against the death penalty or curtailing the reach of the state’s killing machine. While the measure is couched as a means of making the system of capitalist repression more effective and efficient, including by redirecting money to police departments, what is primary for us in calling for a “yes” vote is that the SAFE Act is a referendum on state-sanctioned murder.

The very name ascribed to this ballot initiative by its sponsors, the “Savings, Accountability and Full Enforcement for California Act,” expresses the cruel calculus of capitalist “justice,” weighing the costs of legal murder against the expense of relegating prisoners to a living death on what class-war political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal so aptly calls “life row.” Arguing that “California’s death penalty is an empty promise,” the act appeals for a more efficient and effective punishment. Whipping up the spectre of depraved criminals on the loose, the SAFE Act declares: “Killers and rapists walk our streets free and threaten our safety, while we spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on a select few who are already behind bars forever on death row.... By replacing the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole, we would save the state $1 billion in five years without releasing a single prisoner.” One hundred million dollars of these “savings” is pledged to the cops, courts and prosecutors.

Yet despite all of these sops to the forces of “law and order,” the California District Attorneys Association, the State Sheriffs’ Association and a number of other police agencies are literally screaming murder. Their “Vote No on Prop 34” Web site promotes speeding up the state’s killing machine. It proposes streamlining the appeals process to get rid of “delay tactics” and instituting a one-drug protocol of death, pointing to Ohio, where 14 death row prisoners have been killed by this method since 2009. Declaring that life without parole “will cost taxpayers more in healthcare costs” for aging inmates, these opponents of the SAFE Act argue that savings can be made by no longer housing death row prisoners in single cells. Reveling in barbarism, their “Mend It, Don’t End It” statement concludes with the bloodthirsty complaint that “cop killers, baby killers and serial killers who rightfully received the death penalty do not deserve the benefits they have at San Quentin.”

In our opposition to the death penalty, we are equally committed to the abolition of life without parole, the prisons and all the barbaric institutions of the capitalist state. Our purpose is to arm the working class with the understanding that the cops, courts, prisons and military make up the apparatus for the violent repression of the working class and the oppressed in defense of the power and profits of the capitalist rulers. It will take nothing short of proletarian socialist revolution to sweep this state away.

Voices from Death Row

Some of the condemned men on San Quentin’s death row have also raised their opposition to the SAFE Act. They have spoken out against being entombed for life in prison with their appeals cut off and forced to be unpaid slave laborers as restitution for their alleged crimes. Among these prisoners is Kevin Cooper, a black man framed up for the killing of a white family in 1983. In 2004, only hours before he was to be strapped to the death chamber gurney, Cooper was granted a stay of execution. Despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence and a more than 100-page opinion by Judge William Fletcher of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal arguing that the “State of California may be about to execute an innocent man,” in 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Cooper’s appeal of his sentence.

Cooper argues that the SAFE Act’s repeal of all avenues of appeal for those now sentenced to death is “a step backwards in our ability to challenge our convictions,” condemning them to life behind bars in prisons “worse than death row.” It is a profoundly searing indictment of this country’s judicial system that some prisoners prefer a death sentence on the grounds that this provides some means to prove their innocence and avoids the worse day-to-day violence and torture in the maximum-security prison chambers. The accused and convicted should get the best representation possible and the benefit of all legal redress. Nonetheless, as Cooper’s case itself demonstrates, death penalty appeals provide little more than a facade of “due process.”

In California, the death sentence carries one automatic appeal to the state Supreme Court. According to a 2011 report by senior U.S. Appeals court judge Arthur L. Alarcón and Professor Paula M. Mitchell of the Loyola Law School Los Angeles, the average wait between the original conviction and a decision by the California Supreme Court is ten years, and the death sentence has been upheld in more than 90 percent of the cases. In state habeas petitions, inmates wait eight to ten years simply for appointment of counsel. Since 1978, new evidentiary hearings have been granted in just 31 of the 689 appeals filed. Only after all state appeals have been exhausted can death row prisoners file habeas petitions with the federal courts. Of the 970 people condemned to death in California since 1978, only 54 have obtained new trials from such appeals; 32 other death row prisoners died awaiting a decision.

A major obstacle in this Kafkaesque maze of appeals is finding a lawyer with the qualifications and resources to take on a habeas petition. As San Quentin death row prisoner Darrell Lomax wrote: “There are over 300 people on death row in California who have been here for over 10 years, myself included, who have not yet received appointment of counsel. I have been waiting over 15 years to clear my name” (Socialist Worker, 12 April).

We profoundly sympathize with Cooper and other death house inmates who oppose the SAFE Act. Confined to cages within cages, behind layer after layer of stone walls, iron gates and beset by sadistic screws, the measure appears to deprive them of the sole possibility of relief, no matter how remote, in the racist capitalist courts. They don’t see the possibility of working-class and other social struggle outside the prison walls that might change their fate. And little wonder, as there has been precious little struggle, thanks above all to the endless betrayals by the trade-union misleaders.

But the executed have no appeals. Any fight for their freedom is forever silenced by death. As another prisoner on San Quentin’s death row, Donald Ray Young, wrote: “We said ‘I am Troy Davis.’ Many of us said that we were Stanley Tookie Williams. Cameron Todd Dillingham was another innocent person on death row; the Texas criminal justice system executed him in our name. If we had abolished capital punishment, all three of these men would still be alive, able to prove their innocence to the world. No one enjoys a prison sentence of life without the possibility of parole (LWOP), but it definitely keeps Mumia Abu-Jamal speaking truth to power” (San Francisco Bayview, 5 June).

Does any fighter for Mumia’s freedom think that he would be better off staying on death row because he might have a chance to appeal his frame-up conviction—repeatedly upheld by court after court—before the U.S. Supreme Court? Now off death row, for the first time in more than 30 years, Mumia is able to embrace his wife, family and other visitors, and has access to sunlight and exercise. But we found no “justice” in the Philadelphia D.A.’s decision last December to stop seeking a death sentence. As the Partisan Defense Committee wrote: “While it is welcome that Mumia will no longer be under the threat of state execution, it is an abomination that this innocent man, who has already spent 30 years entombed, is condemned to a living death in prison.... Trade unionists, opponents of the racist death penalty and fighters for black rights must continue the fight to free Mumia” (see WV No. 993, 6 January).

Our fight for Mumia and to abolish the racist death penalty is rooted in the program of the class struggle, looking to mobilize the social power of the workers both in the U.S. and internationally. This faces many obstacles, not least the pro-capitalist labor bureaucrats who overwhelmingly refuse to call their members into action to defend their economic interests, much less in defense of a black political prisoner.

The Warden, the D.A. and “Law and Order” Liberals

In 1972, the California Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as a violation of the state’s constitution. Later that year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was “wanton” and “freakish,” leading to a moratorium on its application. Those decisions reflected the tumultuous social struggles of the time, from the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s to the mass protests against U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants. The struggles on the streets and campuses reached into the prisons and even among U.S. troops in Vietnam, intersecting growing discontent in sections of the working class. After these struggles had subsided or were co-opted or smashed, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Today, opposition among sections of the bourgeoisie to the death penalty and prison overcrowding is at bottom driven by considerations of expediency, as seen in arguments that the current system of mass incarceration and death costs too much money and is “broken.” On the other side are those who believe that only the most monstrous measures of repression can keep the working class and oppressed cowed in the face of intensifying exploitation and mounting misery.

The main spokesman for the SAFE Act is Jeanne Woodford, a former San Quentin warden who oversaw four executions and was appointed Director of the Department of Corrections under Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another prominent supporter is former L.A. County District Attorney Gil Garcetti, a Democrat who was a key actor in the 27-year campaign of frame-up, cover-up and imprisonment of renowned Black Panther Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt). Now, Garcetti ghoulishly complains that California’s death penalty is “totally ineffective” because “most inmates are going to die of natural causes, not executions” (AP, 24 April).

Other endorsers include the two right-wing Republicans, Don Heller and Ron Briggs, who authored the 1978 California proposition called the “Death Penalty Act,” which expanded the categories and circumstances of crimes punishable by death or life without parole. For them, the state’s kill rate hasn’t been high enough. Briggs wrote in a Los Angeles Times (12 February) op-ed piece: “Never did we envision a multibillion-dollar industry that packs murderers onto death row for decades of extremely expensive incarceration. We thought we would empty death row, not triple its population.”

Joining this chorus are the liberal anti-death penalty advocates of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose Northern California chapter wrote:

“The facts prove that life in prison without the possibility of parole (LWOP) is swift, severe, and certain punishment. The reality is that people sentenced to LWOP have been condemned to die in prison and that’s what happens: They die in prison of natural causes, just like the majority of people sentenced to death. The differences: Sentencing people to death by execution is three times more expensive than sentencing them to die in prison.”

—“The Hidden Death Tax,” www.aclunc.org

Given the notorious overcrowding and denial of medical care that forced California prisons into federal court receivership, death by disease, aging and (not mentioned) suicide would clearly be a “bargain” by the calculus of these law-and-order liberals! Similarly, the “big savings” of $100-plus million a year that might be accrued from overturning the death penalty is a drop in the bucket compared to the $8.9 billion the state government spends to maintain its prison hellholes. But such doesn’t feature in the account books of those promoting life without parole as a thrifty alternative to death.

In its article “A Closer Look at SAFE California” (Socialist Worker, 24 May), the International Socialist Organization (ISO) points to the case of Stanley Tookie Williams, who was legally lynched at San Quentin in 2005 with the executioners digging into his arms for 20 minutes to inject their cocktail of death. Accepting the sick bourgeois lie that the prisons are meant for “rehabilitation,” the ISO points to Williams’ work behind bars for gang prevention as having “illustrated how people can change, undermining the claim that the death penalty is reserved for those beyond redemption”! They continue by complaining that “SAFE Act proponents unfortunately have chosen a strategy that negates this potential, instead highlighting life without the possibility of parole.” To promote the notion of “redemption” in prison is to buy into the entire notion of crime and punishment, a barbaric relic of ancient religious codes asserting that one can be “saved” through repentance.

An article titled “Sophie’s Choice 2012: Death Penalty vs. LWOP” by Chris Kinder, a leading spokesman for the Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal (LACMAJ), laments: “There’s nothing in the initiative about racism in the system, or why black death-row convicts outnumber whites way out of proportion to population.... Nor does it address why cops routinely get away with murdering people of color in this [sic] streets, or why cops and courts systematically frame up who they want to get without regard to the truth.” While Kinder ends by declaring that “the system itself needs to be overturned,” only someone with an abiding belief in the inherent justice of this system would expect that the cabal of former jailers and prosecutors who authored the SAFE Act would ever address the racial and class bias that is at the core of capitalist justice in this country.

For years, such touching faith in the capitalist state led the reformist left to demand a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal from the very courts that framed him up and sentenced him to death for his outspoken defiance of their racist injustice system. The reformists’ purpose was to “broaden the movement” by appealing to law-and-order liberals like the ACLU and others who promote “life” in prison without the possibility of parole.

As revolutionary Marxists, we do not seek to advise the bourgeoisie on the more “humane” or “just” administration of its increasingly decrepit and depraved rule. Whether it is the death penalty, life in prison without parole or imprisonment in general, we oppose the entire machinery of violence that is the capitalist state.

We will vote for Proposition 34. But we understand that ending the death penalty would not fundamentally change the violently racist and oppressive nature of capitalist class rule. It would not free the innocent, like Mumia, languishing in America’s dungeons or spare the victims of racist police executions on the streets. Nor would it alter the slower death of the growing ranks of the poor, jobless and homeless, or the agony of the sick who lack medical care. Our purpose is the fight to forge the nucleus of the revolutionary workers party that will lead the proletariat in overthrowing this system through socialist revolution. When those who labor rule, the death penalty will be abolished for good and the capitalists’ prisons smashed as initial steps in the emancipation of all the exploited and oppressed. 

 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- As The Afghan War Enters Its Twelfth Year - The People Are War-Weary, Very War Weary Although There Is No End In Sight- Five-Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan!

Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:

Several months ago Peter Paul Markin, my old merry prankster pal from the 1960s who has been through many a political struggle with me, compared notes about the condition of the struggle against Barack Obama’s Afghan War policy and the “beneath the radar” opposition to that policy. This past weekend (October 7-8-9, 2012) we attended a couple of events in Boston that have only reconfirmed the initial appraisal (see repost below).

The first event was the now monotonously familiar 11th annual anti-war commemoration of the start of the war in Afghanistan. The most noteworthy aspect of that event was that, with the demise of the Occupy movement that energized the larger crowds seen last year, we are back to the hard core political activists. (Unfortunately hubris, and about ten other factor contributed t to that result but I would only add here it did not have to play out that way).

Second was our participation in the Honk! Parade that ran from Somerville to Cambridge, two liberal-oriented cities just outside of Boston. For those not familiar with a Honk! Parade (as I was not before this year) this is an event where every known band, faux band, pick- up band, finger clapper or stick beater around puts on some kind of costume (the more outlandish the better) and makes music for the people along the route. Great color, great costumes, great fun, dare I say it, great people’s fun in the older medieval sense. I will give Peter Paul the last word though, since he marched with the Veterans for Peace contingent. The same great respect for VFPs as vets was exhibited (as elsewhere, see below) but also the response to the slogans of no more war, no more war especially as Iran looms on the horizon. The people are weary, very war-weary. Let’s stop the madness.
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Repost from the American Left History blog, June 2012:

Recently my old back in the 1960s days friend, Peter Paul Markin, himself a war veteran, were comparing notes about the virtual “under the radar” place that American imperial war policies (there is no other name for it with over 1000 bases in the world and over 700 billion plus dollars eaten up by the war budget each year) has taken in this year’s presidential campaign. And, additionally, the almost total lack of organized public outcry about those policies, most notably the lingering death sore of Afghanistan. That despite the fact that some far-sighted, hell, even some jaded bourgeois commentators have placed the odds of civil war in that benighted country (I will not even dignify such a war lord and mercenaries run place as a state) after the alleged American troop draw down scheduled now for 2014 at two to one in favor of civil war. Even by the American government’s own self-serving estimates the forecast is almost as grim.

I ask; what gives? Where are the mass rallies against the beast? The reason for Peter Paul and me comparing notes on this subject was simple enough. Between the two of us we have attended over the past several months in various capacities a whole series of parades and marches only one of which I will mention more on later that was specifically a peace parade. I will describe our purpose in using those settings as a way to bring the anti-war message home below. However right now I can state that we have come to agree, without a doubt, there is a vast war-weariness that if not organized in a public way runs pretty deep just under the surface among the plebeian masses of this country.

For those who do not know, Peter Paul, over the past decade going back before the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003 has attempted to move might and main along with his fellow Veterans For Peace (VFP)to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and lately to urge no war with Iran) to no avail. I, although not a veteran, have attempted in various journalistic endeavors and on the streets to make those same basic points to no avail as well. Those “no avails” though have never stopped us from continuing to push the rock up the mountain when the cause is righteous. And the struggle against these particular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is righteous and has brought us closer together of late. That has not always been the case, as Peter Paul tends to take a harder anti-capitalist look at the wars as systematic of the need to bring down the whole damn American house of cards and I more from a more anti-imperialist perspective of just trying to hold the American military monster in check.

We united on one idea earlier this year and that was the need to continue to get the anti-war message out to the general public. By any means necessary. That is where the parades idea came in play, although we claim no originally for the idea, none at all. The parades notion actually kind of hit us in the face as a way to bring any kind of peace message to the folks whom we do not normally run into in our rarified big city radical circles. Of course the original focus started out last year in 2011 with Peter Paul’s chapter of Veterans for Peace in Boston, the aptly named Smedley Butler Brigade (“war is a racket”), attempts to march in the “official” South Boston Allied War Council’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. Without going into all the particulars of the denial of permission for VFP to march (involving reams of material from a 1995 U.S. Supreme Court decision permitting such exclusions for “private” parades) that organization was shut out of the official parade. Needless to say these resourceful vets (mainly long-in-the-tooth Vietnam era vets who cut their teeth on such symbolic actions) just created their own peace parade to follow the official parade to let those who came to South Boston know there was another voice to be heard from on the questions of war and peace.

That parade in 2011 is where a first tentative recognition of war-weariness came in. Now for those not familiar with South Boston (“Southie”) this is, or was, according to Peter Paul, the last bastion of Irish-centered working class pro-war (or at least don’t question war policy) sentiment left in the world ( a little hyperbole from him, but I am used to it). His family roots stem from that community and I will defer to his analysis (although I would argue that my own hometown, Olde Saco up in Maine filled with grateful immigrant French-Canadians and old time Down East Yankees, would give his Irish a run for his money on unquestioning patriotic sentiment). Expecting the worst all were surprised by the positive reception in Southie. This spring when we marched (yes, I marched with Peter Paul and his VFP brethren like in olden VVAW times) the response by those same plebeian masses was even more cordial to say the least.

Not in the “down with the war, slay the dragon, down with the war budget, take care of things at home” sense that we have “preached” to high heaven about in this space, and others but in the tap of the fingers to the head salute, the ubiquitous throwing up of peace signs, the response when we called for troops out, and enough is enough, as we passed by. Salutes of the VFP flag by hoary old war veterans decked out in their military attire just put icing on the cake.

And that is how the Breslin-Markin antiwar “spring offensive” (with, ah, a little help from VFP and others obviously) took off. A Dorchester Day Parade just south of Southie in one of the more ethnically diverse Irish/Vietnamese/Latino/ Brazilian you name it neighborhoods of Boston (although neighborhoods like Southie that have provided more than their fair share of troops to America’s imperial adventures) produced an even more cordial response. Here some even took up our chants from the sidewalks, shook hands, and offered vocal support as we passed by. Ditto at several Memorial Day services in the area where there was much gnashing of teeth by those who have lost loved ones in the last decade’s wars (and over the post-service stresses that are only now coming to light in huge streams). More recently parades in affluence Rockport and working- class Portsmouth, New Hampshire have only confirmed the cordiality, openness to anti-war messages, and the war weariness. That last one, Portsmouth, by the way, held in a town that depends (read: would not survive) substantially for its local economy on naval appropriations for the huge shipyard there.

So the disconnect between American governmental war policy and the genuine war-weariness of the masses is real enough. But real enough as well, despite the openly expressed sentiments, is any sense of one being able to do anything about it other than patiently waiting for withdrawal due dates. And that is where my simple suggestion comes in. I, as well as other honest and knowledgeable anti-warriors, have recognized that we did not have any serious effect on Bush-Obama war doctrine in Iraq and have had precious little thus far in Afghanistan.

There is one place, and one thing that we can do to turn that around right now. Call on President Obama, who has the built-in executive constitutional power to do so, to pardon Private Bradley Manning now being held in pre-trail detention in Fort Leavenworth Kansas pending charges that could amount to a life sentence for the young soldier. For the forgetful Private Manning allegedly passed sensitive information about U.S. atrocities against civilians and other cover-ups in Iraq and Afghanistan to Wikileaks who then passed it on to a candid world. Thus Private Manning is the “poster person” for opposition to all that has failed, all that is wrong, all that was (and is )atrocious, and all that was (and is) criminal in Bush-Obama war policy. So raise the cry with us-Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan! President Obama Pardon Private Manning!

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-Motorcycle Days, Circa 1958

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Jody Reynolds performing his teen angst classic Endless Sleep.

CD Review

The Rock and Roll Era: 1958, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1987

Yes, 1958 was a good time to be a motorcycle boy, a de facto, de jure wild boy according to the chattering, clueless, disapproving parents of the time, especially the parents of impressionable teenage girls (and not just teenage girls either if they had a clue what was going on over at State U with the twenty somethings, including their Janie, when the music and liquor got going and the wild boys showed up to get it on). Of course parents didn’t count, count for much anyway, when trends, moods, and what was cool got discussed in front of night time mom and pop variety stores where corner boys of all descriptions and attitudes held forth. Or at after school, high school of course lesser grade need not bother to show up except maybe in early morning to get some candy bar or other sweet to get them through until growing time lunch, Doc’s Drugstore where all manner of high school boy and girl went for a soda and snack but mainly to hear some latest tune, maybe some hot Jerry Lee wild boy mad man thing, seventeen times in Doc’s amped up super juke box. In those quarters motorcycle wild boys were cool, if maybe just a little dangerous.

And maybe just slightly illegal too as their parents’ cops (as part of that parent-police-teacher-priest-politician-hell-maybe even mom and pop variety store owner authority continuum) frowned, no more than frowned, when some local detachment of the Devils’ Disciples’ roared through the Adamsville Beach. The sight of flashing blue lights on the boulevard meant usually one thing. Some wild boy had his motor too loud, or he wasn’t wearing a helmet, or he switched lanes without signaling, or maybe for just being ugly, cop’s eyes ugly, or some lame thing like that. Those small civic sins only added to the mystique though. Especially on sultry summer nights when the colors passed turning every guy’s eyes, even mine, to listen to that power and to set every girl, impressionable or not, to thinking, thinking Wild Boy Marlon Brando thinking about what was behind that power.

See before Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson put everybody straight about the seamy side of motorcycle life, life-style motorcycle life with its felonies and mayhem, Marlon and his wild boys (and maybe throw in James Dean and his “chicken run” cars although they were a little too tame to be as revered as the motorcycle boys were) had cleaned up the wild boy scene, made it okay to an easy rider, made it sexy. Not the weekend warrior flip turns and wheelies and then Monday morning back to the bank stuff but real alienated Johnnies just like you and me. Old Marlon had made alienated wild boys cool. Old sexy white tee-shirt, maybe a pack of Luckies rolled up one sleeve, a cap rakishly turn at a n angle on his head, but mainly an attitude, an attitude of distain, hell, maybe hatred, toward that ever present authority that told every kid, every boy and girl that you had better take what you can when you can because it won’t be there long. And that slight snarl that accompanied every word. Yah, cool, cool daddy cool.

And the girls, wells, they were doing that wondering, wondering about what was behind that power thrust, as those leather jackets and engineer boots roared by. To the detriment of their date while sitting in the front seat of his father’s borrowed plain vanilla box tail fin car that he had to almost declare a civil war to get for the evening and promise to mow some future lawn as compensation. Jesus. Or worst, infinitely worst, having, her date car-less, just been walked over to the beach to sit on that cold seawall. Her eyes flamed red, as she almost flagged down some local easy rider as he passed.

And the music befit the time of end of time times, the times when it seemed every little mishap in some godforsaken corner of this wicked old world turned into a major crisis causing everybody at some invisible authority’s urging to head for the air raid shelters and keep their heads down. And their butts up. Jerry Lee wild man piano stuff, always ready to break out, jail break out ever since he popped the question in high school confidential, Chuck leering at sweet little sixteens and you know what I mean, Eddie Cochran giving us a summer time blues anthem to hang our hopes on, and all kinds of one hit wonders trying to put a dent in our angst, our special teen angst that was ready to boil over, to break out and be free. Free from that invisible hand authority.

No wonder the wild boys had a field day. Those impressionable girls worried they would never get to “do it” but were fearful to “do it” nevertheless in that Pill-less world. And guys hoping that the girls were worrying about not “doing it” before the world exploded egged them on although not with as much concern as necessary about consequences. The wild boys, those easy riders, though said “take no prisoners” and that was attractive, that and that promise of power that had many a girl restless late at night.

So no wonder as well some young thing in the Jody Reynolds’ song Endless Sleep , maybe worried about getting pregnant after she let lover boy go further than she (and he) expected decided to go down to that sunless beach and let old Neptune have his way with her. And he, lover boy, maybe with a wild boy sensibility on the surface but more the weekend warrior when the deal went down, went looking for the dizzy dame, his dizzy dame and left old Neptune in the lurch. And many years later, maybe in some dream remembrance, they would throw the old records on the turntable, amp up the teen angst, the teen alienation, then sit back and listen to maybe the last minute in the 1950s when free-wheeling rock and roll blasted the night away. And the motorcycle boys held forth in the thundering night.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Hands Off Syria!

Click on the headline to link to the "International Communist League" website.

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.

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Workers Vanguard No. 1009	28 September 2012

Imperialists’ Hands Off Syria!

For the past year and a half, the Syrian population has been crushed between two reactionary forces that have ravaged the country in a devastating civil war. Faced with an insurgency dominated by forces centrally from the majority Sunni Muslim population and backed by sundry imperialist and regional powers, the murderous Ba’ath Party regime of Bashar al-Assad has sought to stamp out the rebellion through the massive use of firepower, including against residential areas. Insurgents have likewise carried out gruesome massacres of civilians. Key Syrian opposition leaders have appealed for imperialist military intervention, echoing the Libyan “rebels” who became willing tools for the NATO bombing campaign last year. While the imperialists are currently focusing on providing material and logistical support to the anti-Assad forces, the Obama White House has declared that military options are not “off the table.”

Revolutionary Marxists support neither side in this civil war, in which a victory of one combatant or the other would do nothing to further the cause of the working class and the oppressed. However, workers internationally do have a side in opposing military intervention by the imperialists. In the event of imperialist attack, we would stand for the defense of Syria while maintaining proletarian political opposition to Assad’s bloodsoaked rule.

The civil war grew out of a series of demonstrations in the provincial city of Dara’a in Syria’s southern Sunni region in March 2011 as “Arab Spring” protests were sweeping North Africa and the Near East. The demonstrations spread beyond Dara’a, and the Assad regime murderously unleashed troops and tanks on civilians. Increasing numbers of soldiers defected, forming the core of an array of anti-government militias. Key commanders of this so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA) were for years part of the Assad regime’s repressive machinery.

Presenting itself as the main political leadership of the opposition is the Syrian National Council (SNC), a coalition of exiles and opposition groups. A number of the principal spokesmen for this lash-up have longstanding ties to U.S. State Department and national security officials, as detailed by the London Guardian (12 July) article, “The Syrian Opposition: Who’s Doing the Talking?”

The SNC today is dominated by the reactionary Muslim Brotherhood, which controls the largest number of seats in the Council as well as the committee that distributes money and other aid to anti-Assad forces in Syria. Furthermore, Sunni jihadist groups from other Muslim countries have increasingly joined the armed rebellion. These developments have complicated matters for the U.S. rulers, who are conscious that those who just killed their ambassador to Libya were fundamentalists financed and armed by Washington last year to help overthrow Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Syria is a patchwork of ethnic, national and sectarian groupings, where the regime dominated by the Alawite minority holds sway over the Sunni majority, Kurds, Christians, Druze and others, posing the danger of the conflict degenerating into communal warfare. This situation is the legacy of the divide-and-rule policies of the colonial powers, which carved up the Near East following World War I (see article on page 4).

Although the Obama administration is wary of directly intervening militarily into the conflict, it has allocated some $25 million to the Syrian “rebels” in accordance with a secret order signed by the president earlier this year. All the while, Washington has maintained the pretense of not supplying “lethal weapons.” U.S. intelligence agents, working with their counterparts from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are “drawing on their experience in Libya” to help direct support to the anti-Assad forces (Wall Street Journal, 13 June). They work out of a secret “nerve center” set up in Adana, a Turkish city near the Syrian border, which is also home to Incirlik, the U.S. air base. According to the New York Times (21 June), arms are funneled into Syria “by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood.”

The imperialists have imposed on Syria a broad range of economic sanctions, with the Obama administration ratcheting up U.S. measures last month. Syria has been particularly hard hit by an oil embargo imposed a year ago by the European Union (EU). Until then, oil exports, almost all of which went to EU member states, were the mainstay of the Syrian economy, which has severely contracted under the embargo. The main casualties have been rural and urban laborers, especially the poor and most vulnerable, who face rampant inflation, massive layoffs and shortages of gasoline and other refined oil products as well as staple foods. Attempts to implement United Nations Security Council sanctions have been thwarted by opposition from Russia, which is also supplying the Assad regime with intelligence and arms, and China.

Behind Washington’s drive to effect “regime change” in Damascus is the determination of America’s imperialist rulers to perpetuate and extend their world dominance. Syria has historically occupied a pivotal position in the oil-rich Near East. The country exerts key influence in Lebanon, particularly through its support to the Shi’ite fundamentalist Hezbollah, and serves as the most significant Arab ally of Iran. Tehran’s influence in the region was given a major boost by the U.S. invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003 and the installation of a predominantly Shi’ite regime in Baghdad. For years, the U.S. rulers have been hostile toward Iran, as have been the Sunni monarchs in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, who have been major suppliers of arms to anti-Assad forces, especially to the Sunni jihadists. What the U.S. ended up getting through its murderous occupation of Iraq was an Iran-friendly regime.

French imperialism, now under Socialist Party president François Hollande, has been beating the drums for an “international coalition” to impose a “no-fly zone” over part of Syria. However, the White House has resisted any such move, even as the chorus of influential figures in Washington calling for U.S. military intervention now extends beyond right-wing Republicans like John McCain to include the likes of William Perry and Madeleine Albright. The latter two served, respectively, as secretary of defense and secretary of state under Democratic president Bill Clinton in the mid-late 1990s as the U.S. rained bombs on Iraq and the former Yugoslavia.

Just as the New York Times retailed Washington’s lies about Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, so today the bourgeois press prints any fabrication put out by the Syrian opposition. Thus, the press worldwide reported that the Syrian military had perpetrated the August 25 massacre of at least 245 men, women and children in Daraya, near Damascus. Yet an on-site investigation by veteran journalist Robert Fisk pointed to the killing of civilians by insurgents (Independent, 29 August). A local resident told Fisk: “One of the dead was a postman—they included him because he was a government worker.”

It was a U.S.-financed group of Iraqi exiles, Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, that generated the bogus reports of Hussein’s WMDs. This summer, it was the U.S.-backed Syrian opposition that put out patently spurious reports claiming that Assad was moving chemical weapons out of storage facilities and preparing to use them. When Obama last month warned of “enormous consequences,” the Syrian government countered that it would only use chemical weapons “in case of external aggression.”

Uniquely among the principal minorities in Syria, the Kurds as a people constitute a nation that extends into Turkey, Iran and Iraq. But their struggle against national oppression has been betrayed time and again by competing nationalist leaders who act as lackeys of the imperialists or of one local bourgeois regime or another. To achieve Kurdish self-determination requires the proletarian revolutionary overthrow of the four capitalist states and the formation of a Socialist Republic of United Kurdistan.

During the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt last year, we pointed to the working class, whose strikes played a major role in bringing down both despotic regimes, as the potential gravedigger of the bourgeois order. We underlined the urgent need for the proletariat to act as the leader of all the oppressed masses. However, while the proletariat continues to wage economic struggles, politically it is subordinated to Islamist and other bourgeois forces.

For the proletariat to emerge as a contender for power, it is necessary to undertake the forging of vanguard workers parties that oppose the imperialists and all domestic bourgeois forces—from the military bonapartists and liberal political figures to reactionary political Islam. There will be no end to ethnic and national oppression, no emancipation of women, no end to the exploitation of working people short of a thoroughgoing proletarian revolution that opens the road to the establishment of a socialist federation of the Near East, as part of the struggle for world proletarian revolution. 

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- From The "Ancient Dreams, Dreamed" Sketches-Peter Paul Markin’s “Masters Of War”

Masters Of War-Bob Dylan

Come you masters of war

You that build all the guns

You that build the death planes

You that build the big bombs

You that hide behind walls

You that hide behind desks

I just want you to know

I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’

But build to destroy

You play with my world

Like it’s your little toy

You put a gun in my hand

And you hide from my eyes

And you turn and run farther

When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old

You lie and deceive

A world war can be won

You want me to believe

But I see through your eyes

And I see through your brain

Like I see through the water

That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers

For the others to fire

Then you set back and watch

When the death count gets higher

You hide in your mansion

As young people’s blood

Flows out of their bodies

And is buried in the mud

You’ve thrown the worst fear

That can ever be hurled

Fear to bring children

Into the world

For threatening my baby

Unborn and unnamed

You ain’t worth the blood

That runs in your veins

How much do I know

To talk out of turn

You might say that I’m young

You might say I’m unlearned

But there’s one thing I know

Though I’m younger than you

Even Jesus would never

Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question

Is your money that good

Will it buy you forgiveness

Do you think that it could

I think you will find

When your death takes its toll

All the money you made

Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die

And your death’ll come soon

I will follow your casket

In the pale afternoon

And I’ll watch while you’re lowered

Down to your deathbed

And I’ll stand o’er your grave

’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991 by Special Rider Music

Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:

This story was originally published as Kenneth Edward Jackson’s“Masters Of War” with names and places fictionalized for many reasons (including literary license) but it is actually the story of Peter Paul Markin’s military service. We have decided to leave it in the original as it retains all of its power whether told as a Jackson or Markin story.-JLB]

As I mentioned in an earlier sketch, courtesy of my old yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, who seems to think I still have a few things to say about this wicked old world, recently, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod I came across a song that stopped me in my tracks, <i>Brothers Under The Bridge</i>. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct <i>East Bay Eye</i> (California, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a great depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramps camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger, most were, yes, in one way or another but some, and the one I am recalling in this sketch had a nuanced story that brought him down to the ravines. The story that accompanies the song to this little piece, Bob Dylan’s Masters of War, is written under that same sign as the earlier pieces.

I should note again since these sketches are done on an ad hoc basis, that the genesis of this story follows that of the “Brothers Under The Bridge” story previously posted (and now is developing into a series).The editor of the <i>East Bay Eye</i>, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A couple of weeks ago, after having no success in retrieving the old <i>Eye</i> archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the< i>Eye</i> went under before I could round them into shape.

The format of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to heard, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I have reconstructed this story here as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said. This is Kenneth Edward Jackson’s short, poignant, and hell for once, half-hopeful story, a soldier born under the thumb of the masters of war:

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Hell, you know I didn’t have to go to Vietnam, no way. Yah, my parents, when I got drafted, put some pressure on me to “do my duty” like a lot of the neighborhood guys in my half-Irish, half- French- Canadian up the old New Hampshire mill town of Nashua. Maybe, you’ve heard of that town since you said you were from up there in Olde Saco, Maine. Hell, they were the same kind of towns. Graduate from high school, go to work in the mills if they were still open, go into the service if you liked, or got drafted, come home, get married, have kids and let the I Ching cycle run its course over and over again. You laughed so you know what I mean. Yah, that kind of town, and tight so if you went off the rails, well it might not be in the <i>Nashua Telegraph</i> but it sure as hell got on the Emma Jackson grapevine fast enough, except if it was about her three boys. Then the “shames” silence of the grave. Nothing, not a peep, no dirty linen aired in public.

See though I was a little different. I went to college at the University of New Hampshire over in Durham, studied political science, and figured to become either a lawyer or teacher, maybe both if things worked out. So Emma and Hank (my father) were proud as peacocks when I graduated from there in 1967 and then announced I was going to Boston University to pick up a Master’s degree in Education and be on my way. That’s where I met Bettina, my ex-wife, who was studying for her Master’s in Government at the time but was mainly holding up a big share of the left-wing anti-war universe that was brewing at that time, especially as all hell broke loose in Vietnam when in early 1968 the North Vietnamese and their southern supporters ran rampaging through the south. That’s around the time that LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson, President of the United States at the time) got cold feet and decided to call it quits and retire to some podunk Texas place.

Bettina, a girl from New York City, and not just New York City but Manhattan and who went to Hunter College High School there before embarking on her radical career , first at the University of Wisconsin and then at B.U. was the one who got me “hip,” or maybe better “half-hip” to the murderous American foreign policy in Vietnam. Remind me to tell you how we met and stuff like that sometime but for now let’s just say she was so smart, so different, did I tell you she was Jewish, so full of life and dreams, big dreams about a better world that I went head over heels for her and her dreams carried me (and us) along for a while. [Brother Jackson did tell me later the funny details of their relationship but, as I always used to say closing many of my columns, that is a story for another day-JLB.]

Bettina was strictly SDS, big-time SDS (Students for a Democratic Society, 1960s version. Look it up on< i>Wikipedia</i> for more background-JLB), and not just some pacifist objector to the war, she really thought she was helping to build “the second front” in aid of the Vietnamese here in America, or as it was put at the time Amerikkka, and I went along with her, or half-way along really in her various actions, marches, and rallies. Later, 1969 later when SDS blew up into three separate and warring factions she went with the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) the group most committed to that idea of the second front. But that is all inside stuff and not really what was important in 1968. The summer of 1968 when I got, via my parents, notice that my friends and neighbors at the Nashua Draft Board had called my name. And me with no excuses, no draft excuses, none.

So that is when things got dicey, my parents pulling me to do my family, my Nashua, my New Hampshire, my United States, hell, my mother pulled out even my Catholic duty (my father, a deeply patriotic man, in the good sense, and a proud Marine who saw plenty of action in the Pacific in World War II, but kept quiet about it, just rolled his eyes on that one). Bettina, and her friends, and really, some of them my friends too, were pulling me to run away to Canada (she would follow), refuse to be inducted (and thus subject to arrest and jail time), or head underground (obviously here with connections that may have rivaled, may have I say, my mother’s neighborhood grapevine). In the end though I let myself be drafted and was inducted in the fall of 1968.

Bettina was mad, mad as hell, but not as much for the political embarrassment as you would think, but because she, well, as she put it, the first time she said it “had grown very fond of me,” and more than that she had her own self-worth needs, so we were secretly married (actually not so much secretly as privately, very privately, her parents, proudly Jewish and heavily committed Zionists and my parents, rosary-heavy Catholics who were a little slow, Vatican Council II slow, on the news that Jews were not Christ-killers and the like would not have approved ) just before I was inducted.

I will spare the Vietnam details, except to say I did my thirteen month tour (including a month for R&R, rest and recreation) from early 1969 to early 1970, a period when the talk of draw-down of the American troop commitment was beginning to echo through the camps and bases in Vietnam and guys were starting to take no chances, no overt chances of getting KIA (killed in action) or anything like that. I, actually saw very little fighting since as a college grad, and lucky, and they needed someone, I was a company clerk and stayed mainly at the base camp. But every night I fired many rounds any time I heard a twig break on guard duty or in perimeter defense. And more than a few times we had bullets and other ammo flying into our position. So no I was no hero, didn’t want to be, I just wanted to get back home to Bettina in one piece. And I did.

But something snapped in Vietnam, sometime in having had to confront my own demons, my own deep-seeded fears and coming out not too badly, and to confront through my own sights the way my government was savagely conducting itself in Vietnam (and later in other parts of the world) that made me snap when I came back to the “real world.” I had only a few months left and so I was assigned to a holding company down at Fort Dix in New Jersey. And all I had to do was stay quiet, do some light silly busy work paper work duty b.s., have a few beers at the PX and watch a few movies. Nada.

I guess Bettina really did win out in the end, the stuff she said about war, about American imperialism being some two-headed vulture, about class struggle and guys like me being cannon fodder was kind of abstract when she said it at some meeting at B.U., or shouted herself silly a t some rally on Boston Common or got herself arrested a few times at draft boards (ironic, huh).But after ‘Nam I knew she was on to something. Better, I was on to something. So, without telling Bettina, my parents, or anybody, the day I was to report to that holding company at Fort Dix I did. But at that morning formation, I can still see the tears rolling down my face, I reported in civilian clothes with a big peace button on my shirt and yelling for all to hear-“Bring The Troops Home.” I was tackled by a couple of soldiers, lifer-sergeants I found out later, handcuffed and brought to the Fort Dix stockade.

A couple of days later my name was called to go the visitors’ room and there to my surprise were my parents, my mother crying, my father stoic as usual but not mad, and Bettina. The Army had contacted my parents after my arrest to inform them of my situation. And Bettina, in that strange underground grapevine magic that always amazed me, found out in that way, had called them in Nashua to say who she was (no, not about us being married, just friends, they never did know). They had offered to bring her down to Fort Dix and they had come down together. What a day though. My parents, for one of very few times that I can remember said, while they didn’t agree with me fully, that they were proud and Nashua be damned. They were raising money on their home to get me the best civilian lawyer they could. And they did.

Of course for Bettina a soldier- resister case was just the kind of activity that was gaining currency in the anti-war movement in 1969 and 1970 and she was crazy to raise heaven and hell for my defense(including money, and money from her parents too although they also did not know we were married, and maybe they still don’t). She moved to hard town Trenton not too far from Fort Dix to be closer to the action as my court-martial was set. She put together several vigils, marches, rallies and fundraisers (including one where my father, a father defending his own, spoke and made the crowd weep in his halting New England stoic way).

The court-martial, a general court martial so I faced some serious time, was held in early 1970. As any court proceedings will do, military or civilian, they ran their typical course, which I don’t want to go into except to say that I was convicted of the several charges brought against me (basically, as I told the guys at VVAW later, for being ugly in the military without a uniform-while on duty) , sentenced to a year of hard labor at Fort Leavenworth out in Kansas, reduced in rank to private ( I was a specialist, E-4), forfeited most of my pay, and was to be given an undesirable discharge (not dishonorable).

I guess I do want to say one last thing about the trial thought. As any defendant has the right to do at trial, he or she can speak in their own defense. I did so. What I did, turning my back to the court-martial judges and facing the audience, including that day my parents and Bettina was to recite from memory Bob Dylan’s <i>Masters of War</i>. I did so in my best stoic (thanks, dad) Nashua, New Hampshire voice. The crowd either heckled me or cheered (before being ordered to keep quiet) but I had my say. So when you write this story put that part in. Okay? [See lyrics above-JLB]

So how come I am down here in some Los Angeles hobo jungle just waiting around to be waiting around. Well I did my time, all of it except good time, and went back home, first to Nashua but I couldn’t really stay there ( a constant “sore” in the community and worry to my parents) and then to Boston where I fit in better. Bettina? Well, my last letter from her in Leavenworth was that she was getting ready to go underground, things with her group (a group later associated with the Weather Underground) had gotten into some stuff a little dicey and she would not be able to communicate for a while. That was the last I heard from her; it has been a few years now.

I understand, and I feel happy for her. We were fond of each other but I was thinking in the stockade that a “war marriage” was not made to last, not between us anyway. Then after a few months in Boston, doing a little or this and a little of that, I drifted out here where things might pop up a little (it’s tough even with millions of people hating the war, hating it until it finally got over a couple of years ago to have an undesirable discharge hanging around your neck. I’m not sorry though, no way, and if I do get blue sometime I just recite that Masters Of War thing and I get all welled up inside).

I hear the new president, Jimmy Carter, is talking about amnesty for Vietnam guys with bad discharges and maybe I will check into it if it happens. Then maybe I will go to law school and pick up my life up again. Until then though I feel like I have got to stick with my “band of brothers” who got broken up, broken up bad by that damn war. Hey, sometimes they ask me to recite that <i>Masters Of War</i> thing over some night fire.

[The last connection I had with Kenneth Edward Jackson was in late 1979 when he sent a short note to me saying he had gotten his discharge upgraded, was getting ready to start law school and that he was publicly getting re-married to some non-political gal from upstate New York . Still no word from Bettina though.-JLB]

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-From The "Ancient Dreams, Dreamed" Sketches-Peter Paul Markin’s War- Circa 1969-An Explained Interlude

Shaved-head, close anyway, too close to distinguish that head, his, or rather private soldier government-issue mind on loan after drafted 1969 drafted purgatories and anguishes, go, not go, go, not go, not go, go, jail, not jail, go, from the ten-thousand, no one hundred-thousand other heads, all shave-headed. No way that close-cropped head, or those ten thousand, no, one hundred thousand others , would survive the Harvard Square (square is right), Village, burned-over Haight-Ashbury night as anything but soldier tourists looking at long-haired freaks smoking dope in some impromptu Kasbah or some vagrant common lawn.

But that wistful thought was so much ancient history, so much bad karma, ghost- danced against some ancient painted cavern-etched shamanic bad karmic night. As was the certitude, the absolute certitude, after only three, hell, one for truth, but three at the most, on more, half-humid, half ground frozen (and he knew, knew from close observation that hard fact just minutes before after having “done ten,” ten push-ups, that half- frozen part ) southern winter days (Georgia, hell-bent segregated Georgia places like Albany and Augusta, if not Atlanta, Sherman scorched and torched) that go, no go, jail, not jail, Canada or wherever, was decided the wrong way and that life from here on in would get quirky (nice way to put it, right, put it just short of facing phantom firing squads).

Start Day One. Four in the morning madness but this time not falling into too much to dream sweet good night of civilian life but cursing some stoolie “orderlie” who has just kicked off his blanket cover and yelled, yelled if you can believe that, right in his ear that if he was not up before that stoolie turned his head to yell at some other shaved- head across from his bunk that he would be “doing ten (or was it one hundred, or one thousand push-ups)”in front of the whole company of fellow raw recruits on some sweet red clay Georgia earth, frozen okay, when the sun came up.

Naturally the trap was set for him, yankee abolitionist John Brown doughboy him, as he, that damn stoolie, some confederate of Stonewall Jackson or one of those lost johnnie reb greybeards, could turn his ugly government-issue head bunk away before he could even uncover that frizzy green blanket and so as a result he was to be parlayed, relayed, surveyed and displayed before a motley of bleary- eyed raws and done, done to a boil.

Why, always why? As an example, a horribly example of slovenliness that would get some rolling hills hayseed Ohio farm boy too scared to say yes sir or no sir, some Kentucky un-shoed hills and hollows (yah, I know hollas) toothless illiterate dragged from mother womb coal veins, or some jet black ebony angel New York City street corner boy caught up in the court system, some petty larceny count to his credit, and warned, judge-warned, into the service, killed for lack of speed. Yes, that go, no go thing went the wrong way, very way wrong, as he sensed those phantom firing squads closing in.

At peek of light, no food in stomach, no eyes, no open eyes, and in bare tee-shirt, white government-issued and two sizes two big just then, he fell down to the earth, spitting mud-flecked red clay, spitting dust, spitting, spitting out the stars over Alabama (oops Georgia, all these southern red clays seem so very much the same, or would on further inspection) that portent no good, no earthy good. Cold, cold, cold as only a day time hot winter place can be night cold.

And he did “ten” for the entire cherished world to see. That ten, or the cold red clay doing of that ten, however, started a mental civil war between one government-issued private soldier and one hell-bend murderous warring government. Of such incidents great wars, and great struggles against war, swarm the earth, although the latter less frequently than one would suspect. Or hope.

Then those DNA-etched righteous furies kick-assed with his brain, those old time grandmother Catholic Worker stop the goddam wars and stop them now (exactly quoting Irish “shawlie”grandma wisdom, or else) reared their pug ugly (ur-government-issued ugly) head. And that shave-headed (as if shave-headed-ness had exposed on its surface for all the world to see as if written out longhand all the quaint, if shadow, last night I had the strangest dream, stop the war madness previously covered up by long-haired no thoughts and no risks ancient thoughts) red clay foam-flecked private soldier dreamed of crusades and leading great crusades, and marching men back into barracks and locking doors against the killing fields.

And arguing with sneer-snickering (remembering only no sir or yes sir) Ohio farm boys, Kentucky rednecks hell-bent on tunnel-rat-dom like some great cosmic chain held them together, and black as night New York City street-wise (well, half-wise)corner boys this-if this is not murder, if this is not to slay for no reason, then what is? Come and face the phantom firing squads too, come cry out to high heaven against the madness, the madness of men, and madnesses stopped by men, by little no “yes siring” men.

The die is cast, not as usual truthfully cast, not pure warrior in the frozen ground red clay night, not massive warrior-king leading home swords turned into plowshare armies, solitary avenging angel cast, but cast. Dreams of running away to elysian fields (or mudded Woodstock farm mires), dreams of lost love (of girls left behind and of secret betrayals), dreams of not doing this or that youth-desired thing keep rearing back and certain character flaws, certain wise guy, small town corner boy (unknown to black knight New York City corner boys all wide-eyed) know-it-all cut corners character flaws stream in the hot, humid, footsore march.

But in the end the drumbeat tattoo beats his beat, and fate.

Wild dreams, senseless wild dreams follow, follow in succession, day and night. Time has no measure, no measure at all and calendars only form fear for burning red eyes. Angels rage at hell’s door to no avail. Rant, mere rant against the barb wired fix. Sweats, real human sweats, ever present sweats in small airless rooms. Rooms not picked by man, or fit. The days of rage, rage against the light, and then the glimmer of the light. Fame, maybe unearned nickel and dime fame, as poster boy for break-out soldiers crying against the high hellish anguished night and murders, murders called by their right name. Then, that exact moment, those phantom firing squads turn to dust, ashes really, and he is set free.

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-The Struggle For The Communist League-Draft Rules of the Communist League-Working Men of All Countries, Unite! (1847)

Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.

Markin comment:

I will post any updates from that Occupy Boston site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History ’’series started in the fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.

* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

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Markin comment:

This foundation article by Marx or Engels goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in other posts in this space.

Marx/Engels Internet Archive-The Communist League

A congress of the League of the Just opened in London on June 2, 1847. Engels was in attendance as delegate for the League's Paris communities. (Marx couldn't attend for financial reasons.)

Engels had a significant impact throughout the congress -- which, as it turned out, was really the "inaugural Congress" of what became known as the Communist League. This organization stands as the first international proletarian organization. With the influence of Marx and Engels anti-utopian socialism, the League's motto changed from "All Men are Brothers" to "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!"

Engels: "In the summer of 1847, the first league congress took place in London, at which W. Wolff represented the Brussels and I the Paris communities. At this congress the reorganization of the League was carried through first of all. ...the League now consisted of communities, circles, leading circles, a central committee and a congress, and henceforth called itself the 'Communist League'."

The Rules were drawn up with the participation of Marx and Engels, examined at the First Congress of the Communist League, and approved at the League's Second Congress in December 1847.

Article 1 of the Rules of the Communist League: "The aim of the league is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property."

The first draft of the Communist League Programme was styled as a catechism -- in the form of questions and answers. Essentially, the draft was authored by Engels. The original manuscript is in Engels's hand.

The League's official paper was to be the Kommunistische Zeitschrift, but the only issue produced was in September 1847 by a resolution of the League's First Congress. It was First Congress prepared by the Central Authority of the Communist League based in London. Karl Schapper was its editor.

The Second Congress of the Communist League was held at the end of November 1847 at London's Red Lion Hotel. Marx attended as delegate of the Brussels Circle. He went to London in the company of Victor Tedesco, member of the Communist League and also a delegate to the Second Congress. Engels again represented the Paris communities. Schapper was elected chairman of the congress, and Engels its secretary.

Friedrich Lessner: "I was working in London then and was a member of the communist Workers' Educational Society at 191 Drury Lane. There, at the end of November and the beginning of December 1847, members of the Central Committee of the Communist League held a congress. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels came there from Brussels to present their views on modern communism and to speak about the Communists' attitude to the political and workers' movement. The meetings, which, naturally, were held in the evenings, were attended by delegates only... Soon we learned that after long debates, the congress had unanimously backed the principles of Marx and Engels..."

The Rules were officially adopted December 8, 1847.

Engels: "All contradiction and doubt were finally set at rest, the new basic principles were unanimously adopted, and Marx and I were commissioned to draw up the Manifesto." This would, of course, become the Communist Manifesto.
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The Communist League

Draft Rules of the Communist League-Working Men of All Countries, Unite! (1847)

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Written: June 1847;
Source: MECW Volume 6, p. 585;
First published: Gründungs dokumente des Bundes der Kommunisten (Juni bis September 1847), Hamburg, 1969;


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SECTION I
THE LEAGUE
Art. 1. The League aims at the emancipation of humanity by spreading the theory of the community of property and its speediest possible practical introduction.

Art. 2. The League is divided into communities and circles; at its head stands the Central Authority as the executive organ.

Art. 3. Anyone who wishes to join the League is required:

a. to conduct himself in manly fashion;
b. never to have committed a dishonourable action;
c. to recognise the principles of the League;
d. to have acknowledged means of subsistence;
e. not to belong to any political or national association;
f. to be unanimously admitted into a community, and
g. to give his word of honour to work loyally and to observe secrecy.

Art. 4. All League members are equal and brothers, and as such owe each other assistance in every situation.

Art. 5. All members bear League names.

SECTION II
THE COMMUNITY
Art. 6. A community consists of at least three and at most twelve members. Increase above that number will be prevented by division.

Art. 7. Every community elects a chairman and a deputy chairman. The chairman presides over meetings, the deputy chairman holds the funds, into which the contributions of the members are paid.

Art. 8. The members of communities shall earnestly endeavour to increase the League by attracting capable men -and always seek to work in such a way that principles and not persons are taken as guide.

Art. 9. Admission of new members is effected by the chairman of the community and the member who has introduced the applicant to the League.

Art. 10. The communities do not know each other and bear distinctive names which they choose themselves.

SECTION III
THE CIRCLE
Art. 11. A circle comprises at least two and at most ten communities.

Art. 12. The chairmen and deputy chairmen of the communities form the circle authority. They elect a president from among themselves.

Art. 13. The circle authority is the executive organ for all the communities of the circle.

Art. 14. Isolated communities must either join an already existing circle authority or form a new circle with other isolated communities.

SECTION IV
THE CENTRAL AUTHORITY
Art. 15. The Central Authority is the executive organ of the whole League.

Art. 16. It consists of at least five members and is elected by the circle authority of the place where it is to have its seat.

SECTION V
THE CONGRESS
Art. 17. The Congress is the legislative authority of the League.

Art. 18. Every circle sends one delegate.

Art. 19. A Congress is held every year in the month of August. The Central Authority has the right in important cases to call an extraordinary congress.

Art. 20. The Congress in office decides the place where the Central Authority is to have its seat for the current year.

Art. 21. All legislative decisions of the Congress are submitted to the communities for acceptance or rejection.

Art. 22. As the executive organ of the League the Central Authority is responsible to the Congress for its conduct of its office and therefore has a seat in it, but no deciding vote.

SECTION VI
GENERAL REGULATIONS
Art. 23. Anyone who acts dishonourably to the principles of the League is, according to the circumstances, (removed) either removed or expelled. Expulsion precludes re-admission.

Art. 24. Members who commit offences are judged by the (supreme) circle authority, which also sees to the execution of the verdict.

Art. 25. Every community must keep the strictest watch over those who have been removed or expelled; further, it must observe closely any suspect individuals in its locality and report at once to the circle authority anything they may do to the detriment of the League, whereupon the circle authority must take the necessary measures to safeguard the League.

Art. 26. The communities and circle authorities and also the Central Authority shall meet at least once a fortnight.

Art. 27. The communities pay weekly or monthly contributions, the amount of which is determined by the . respective circle authorities. These contributions will be used to spread the principles of the community of property and to pay for postage.

Art. 28. The circle authorities must render account of expenditures and income to their communities every six months.

Art. 29. The members of the circle authorities and of the Central Authority are elected for one year and must then either be confirmed anew in their office or replaced by others.

Art. 30. The elections take place in the month of September. The electors can, moreover, recall their officers at any time should they not be satisfied with their conduct of their office.

Art. 31. The circle authorities have to see to it that there is material in their communities for useful and necessary discussions. The Central Authority, on the other hand, must make it its duty to send to all circle authorities such questions whose discussion is important for our principle.

Art. 32. Every circle authority and failing that the community, even every League member, must, if standing alone, maintain regular correspondence with the Central Authority or a circle authority.

Art. 33. Every League member who wishes to change his residence must first inform his chairman.

Art. 34. Every circle authority is free to take any measures which it considers advisable for the security of the circle and its efficient work. These measures must, however, not be contrary to the general Rules.

Art. 35. All proposals for changes in the Rules must be sent to the Central Authority and submitted by it to the Congress for decision.

SECTION VII
ADMISSION
Art. 36. After the Rules have been read to him, the applicant is asked by the two League members mentioned in Art. 9 to reply to the following five questions. If he replies “Yes”, he is asked to give his word of honour, and is declared a League member.

These five questions are:

a. Are you convinced of the truth of the principles of the community of property?
b. Do you think a strong League is necessary for the realisation of these principles as soon as possible, and do you wish to join such a League?
c. Do you promise always to work by word and deed for spreading and the practical realisation of the principles of the community of property?
d. Do you promise to observe secrecy about the existence and all affairs of the League?
e. Do you promise to comply with the decisions of the League?

Then give us on this your word of honour as guarantee!

In the name and by the order of the Congress

Heide [Wilhelm Wolff]
Secretary
The President,
Karl Schill [Karl Schapper]


London, June 9, 1847