As 2014 Contract Battle Looms-ILWU Splits from AFL-CIO

Workers Vanguard No. 1030	20 September 2013

As 2014 Contract Battle Looms-ILWU Splits from AFL-CIO

On the eve of the recent AFL-CIO convention, the 42,000-member International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) split from the federation. In his August 29 letter of disaffiliation, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath pointed to increasing attacks on the longshore union by other AFL-CIO unions, ranging from the filing of unfair labor practice lawsuits to outright scabbing. These charges are all too true and then some. But the ILWU leadership’s hands are hardly clean in the sordid game of jurisdictional warfare that pits union against union in a scramble to defend their turf. McEllrath complains of the “compromising” policies of the AFL-CIO in “going along to get along” with the Obama administration. But the ILWU bureaucrats are equally culpable in subordinating the unions to the political fortunes of the Democratic Party, even if they have been disappointed with the hoped-for payoff for such treachery.

Today, the very existence of the ILWU in grain handling in the Pacific Northwest is on the line. Its members have been locked out for months by United Grain in Vancouver, Washington, and by Columbia Grain in Portland, Oregon. Scabs, protected by the latter-day Pinkertons of J.R. Gettier & Associates, are doing jobs held by the union for decades. Alongside the grain conglomerates’ drive to break the ILWU stand the shipping company bosses of the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), who are preparing for war with the union when its coastwide contract expires in July 2014.

Splitting from the AFL-CIO in the lead-up to this battle, the ILWU stands to be further isolated and risks making an even more open enemy of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, led by Richard Trumka. It is already reported that the ILWU will not be granted “solidarity charters,” which were awarded to the affiliates of the Change to Win coalition when they broke from the AFL-CIO in 2005. Instead, the ILWU is to be expelled from all regional and city labor councils. Despite the formation last year of a “Maritime Labor Alliance” composed of the ILWU, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA)—which organizes East and Gulf Coast ports—and four other unions, the ILWU can hardly bank on solidarity from the leaders of the ILA. At the AFL-CIO convention, the ILA announced it would stay in the AFL-CIO. Its president, Harold Daggett, was rewarded with a seat as a vice president of the federation, even as he gave more lip service to standing behind the ILWU.

In his letter to the AFL-CIO, McEllrath recounts the ILWU’s “long and proud history of militant independence,” from its roots in the Industrial Workers of the World, early pioneers of industrial unionism, to its role in the formative years of the CIO. But the CIO was born out of the militant class battles of the 1930s to organize the millions of workers in U.S. industry who were disdained by the craft-based AFL, which was led by sworn enemies of socialism and often outright racists. In these battles, workers mobilized their power as a class to shut down production through mass, militant picket lines, sit-down strikes and solidarity actions. They didn’t bow before the capitalist anti-labor laws but fought it out in opposition to the bosses and their cops, courts and security goons. Against the poisonous racial and ethnic hatreds so ably wielded by America’s rulers to divide and conquer the workers, the organizing drives in auto, steel, meatpacking and other industries brought thousands of black workers into the new industrial unions.

Such is not even the remotest perspective of the pro-capitalist labor tops today, from the Trumka bureaucracy to the ILWU leadership.

The Fall of the “House of Labor”

At its convention, the AFL-CIO outlined what is described as a “strategic shift” away from collective workplace organizing. The federation proposes to replenish its diminishing ranks by allowing workers to join as individuals through its “Working America” organization. It also will open its doors to the community-based workers’ centers that have sprung up around the country. These new members will provide more money and bodies for the bureaucrats’ “get out the vote” and lobbying efforts. The name of the game has become building coalitions with student labor activists and other “community” groups in order to beg the capitalist rulers to throw a few more crumbs labor’s way.

This scheme is a striking example of what not to do to build the unions. But it is a natural step for the labor misleaders, who have long refused to wage the class battles required to organize the mass of unorganized workers. For years, the AFL-CIO tops have argued that their hands are tied in waging any such struggle by myriad anti-union agencies and laws, from the National Labor Relations Board to the Taft-Hartley Act. The truth is that labor has never won anything of value playing by the bosses’ rules. The unions themselves were once outlawed as criminal conspiracies.

The attempt to turn the AFL-CIO into a labor-centered version of MoveOn.org is premised on and can only serve to reinforce the supposed obsolescence of organizing drives that bring to bear the unique social power of the working class to withhold its labor and cut off the flow of profits. It also further undermines any understanding of the workers as a distinct class, dissolving them into the mass of “the people.” As early American Communist and, later, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon observed of a plan by a New York central labor council to bring various perceived “friends of labor” into its ranks over 90 years ago:

“Civic bodies, church forums, ‘non-labor organizations’—the elements who go to make up such groupings are poor props for the unions to seek to lean upon. They may ‘feel’ for organized labor, but the organized workers never feel it in the shape of substantial support in their fight....

“The working class has the power not only to defeat the effort to destroy the unions, but to end the system of exploitation altogether. The principal thing lacking for the quick development of this power is the mistaken point of view illustrated by the program of the New York central body.”

— “Who Can Save the Unions?” 7 May 1921, reprinted in James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism (Prometheus Research Library, 1992)

Labor: Stop the Backstabbing!

Today, the few private-sector unions left standing are often at each other’s throats to preserve their jurisdictions. McEllrath cites one of the more notorious examples, pointing to the strikebreaking role played by the Operating Engineers union during the ILWU’s 2011-12 fight against an all-out union-busting offensive by the EGT grain consortium in Longview, Washington. Trumka stood by these scabs, ordering the Oregon AFL-CIO to rescind a motion condemning the Operating Engineers. More recently, members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) have been crossing ILWU picket lines at United Grain. An ILWU motion condemning this scabbing did not even make it to the floor for discussion at the July convention of the Washington state AFL-CIO.

Taking on this backstabbing in his president’s report in the July/August issue of the ILWU newspaper, the Dispatcher, McEllrath writes that the “ILWU sees the honoring of picket lines as a fundamental principle that can’t be compromised.” It is hard to imagine any other top union leader in this country even recalling this principle, much less being able to choke it out. But as the great Irish writer and wit Oscar Wilde famously put it: “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.”

For decades, the ILWU tops have invoked the struggles that forged the union to convince the ranks that the ILWU remains the last remaining bastion of labor militancy. The union’s founder, Harry Bridges, is eulogized as the epitome of fighting unionism. All this is belied, of course, by the actual history and practice of the ILWU leadership. The last coastwide ILWU strike was in 1971, more than 40 years ago. That strike was largely forced on Bridges by a membership seething over the massive loss of jobs under the 1960 Mechanization and Modernization (M&M) Agreement he negotiated and rammed down their throats.

Today, the ILWU bureaucracy’s answer to the PMA’s drive to increasingly mechanize operations on the docks is to claim jurisdiction over maintenance and other mechanical service jobs, a number of which are currently done by other unions. In Portland, for example, the ILWU filed a joint lawsuit with the PMA bosses to claim the equivalent of two jobs servicing refrigerated containers that have been worked by the IBEW for over 30 years. As a result, the ILWU has incurred the animosity of the IBEW, a union well versed in the dog-eat-dog world of jurisdiction.

The ILWU is an increasingly isolated outpost of organized labor at the ports, surrounded by tens of thousands of unorganized workers, from the port truckers to workers at intermodal rail facilities and the vast inland warehouse empires. Little to nothing has been done to organize these workers. In disaffiliating from the AFL-CIO, McEllrath pointed a finger at the Trumka bureaucracy’s “immigration reform policies,” in particular its support to a bill that “favors workers with higher education and profitability to corporations, as opposed to the undocumented workers such as janitors and farm workers who would greatly benefit from the protections granted by legalization.”

Many such workers are among the thousands of overwhelmingly immigrant port truckers. Yet far from championing citizenship rights for these workers or even a “pathway to citizenship,” the ILWU has, at best, turned a blind eye to their plight. At worst, as recounted by many of the drivers who recently walked off the job in protest against the grueling conditions they face at the Oakland port, they are treated with chauvinist contempt by many ILWU members. The solidarity of the truckers will be critical in the upcoming ILWU contract battle with the PMA, as the ILWU leadership no doubt recognizes on some level. Unlike in 2008, when the Bay Area Local 10 tops told longshoremen that the truckers’ picket lines were not “bona fide,” this time they called to honor the pickets, at least at the Stevedoring Services of America terminal.

In his Dispatcher column, McEllrath demands an end to the “ugliness of racial bigotry.” In particular, he pointed to reports of longshoremen on the picket lines at grain terminals in the Pacific Northwest hurling racial epithets at scabs and Gettier security guards. There is no question that these strikebreakers serve the class enemy. But it has nothing to do with the color of their skin. They are hirelings of companies that, in the tried-and-true practice of this country’s capitalist rulers, play the race card to further their aims. If the ILWU actually used its muscle, mobilizing its supporters to build picket lines that no scab would dare to cross, it would be in a position to turn the tables on the bosses. But not only has there been no such struggle, the ILWU in Portland and elsewhere embraces the regular port security guards as fellow union members. It is hard to fight an enemy that is welcomed into your own house!

McEllrath recounts that Bridges “made racial integration and anti-discrimination a cornerstone” of the union’s organizing strategy. Indeed, he did in the Bay Area, but in the name of “local autonomy” he left discrimination mostly unchallenged in the Pacific Northwest as well as at the San Pedro docks in Los Angeles. Thus, racial fault lines were built into the union from the beginning. Today, the deadly poison of racism is a threat to the very existence of the ILWU, with the potential to detonate divisions between the still overwhelmingly white Pacific Northwest, the largely black membership in the Bay Area and the majority Latino L.A./Long Beach local.

Racial and ethnic chauvinism has been further fueled by the “loyal to America” patriotism of the ILWU International leadership. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the ILWU bureaucracy lined up behind the “war on terror” on the docks, pointing a finger at port truckers as a potential “security threat.” Now the ILWU tops present the fight against the union-busting grain companies as one in defense of the “American grain industry” against Japanese and other foreign competitors. To this end, McEllrath & Co. uphold the concessionary deal they made with the U.S.-based TEMCO grain company, amid contentious negotiations with the Pacific Northwest Grain Handlers Association, as supposed evidence of TEMCO’s commitment to the well-being of its workers.

The lie that workers and their exploiters have common interests disarms labor in the face of the virtually unchallenged offensive by the bosses and their government to gut the unions in this country. If the unions are not only to survive but to become actual battalions of working-class struggle, they must champion the cause of black freedom and full citizenship rights for immigrants as part of a class-struggle fight to bring the masses of unorganized workers into the unions. As is particularly demonstrated in longshore, where work is dependent on world trade, the workers’ fight is international. Labor must repudiate the red-white-and-blue patriotism of its misleaders, who have shackled the unions to the interests and profitability of U.S. imperialism. The kind of leadership that labor needs is one that inscribes on its banners Marx and Engels’ call in the Communist Manifesto: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!”

Build a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

The present crisis is not the first faced by a weakened American labor movement. Throughout the 1920s, the AFL union leadership did little to organize the millions of workers who did the backbreaking work in the mills and on the assembly lines. In the four years after the October 1929 stock market crash, unemployment skyrocketed to over 12 million, so that virtually any worker could easily be replaced. The working class was confronted not just by joblessness but homelessness and starvation. By 1933, AFL membership was less than half of what it had been in 1920. But the next year, citywide strikes in Minneapolis, San Francisco and Toledo—led by Trotskyists, the Stalinist Communist Party (CP) and left-wing socialists respectively—set the stage for an outpouring of working-class militancy and laid the basis for the formation of the mass CIO industrial unions.

The gigantic class battles of the 1930s carried the American trade-union movement to unprecedented heights and advanced class consciousness in the working class. The most advanced elements were receptive to the idea of forming a workers party in opposition to the capitalist parties, Democratic as well as Republican. But the very leaders of the new industrial movement, including the social democrats and the CP, crippled it through their political support to Democratic Party president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Harry Bridges was among this number. During World War II, he imposed a no-strike pledge and other measures that served to increase the exploitation of ILWU members in order to advance the war aims of predatory U.S. imperialism.

In 1949-50, eleven unions associated with the CP, including the ILWU, were expelled from the CIO as part of the Cold War red purges. Driving out the key leaders and fighters for industrial unionism, the purges consolidated the labor bureaucracy that has presided over the steady erosion of union power to the point where today less than 7 percent of manufacturing and other industrial workers are organized. Aptly described over a century ago by early American socialist Daniel De Leon as the “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class,” the union officialdom, then and today, shares the exploiters’ belief in the inviolability of the profit system. This belief is concretized by their prostration before, and integration into, the capitalist Democratic Party.

The Obama administration is far from a disinterested observer of the upcoming contract struggle between the ILWU and the PMA. The union has enormous social power. With the offshoring of much manufacturing and the just-in-time delivery system, a strike would quickly paralyze whole sectors of the U.S. economy. It is precisely because longshoremen have their hands on the choke points of international commerce that there has been an offensive against their unions around the world. That Obama will stand with the PMA shipping bosses is as obvious as the flotilla of armed Coast Guard ships and helicopters his administration mobilized during the ILWU’s Longview battle to ensure that the first shipment of scab grain out of the EGT terminal met no interference. Today, Coast Guard ships again patrol the Columbia River to ensure the passage of grain worked by scabs in Vancouver and Portland. Meanwhile, with the PMA aiming to gut medical benefits, Obama’s health care “reform” will further roll back these hard-won gains by levying taxes on so-called “Cadillac” union health care programs.

The ILWU is in a tough spot. But there is no immediate hope if the union continues to surrender its power. Nor does splitting from the AFL-CIO open the way for the union to struggle. The road forward lies in the fight to forge a new, class-struggle leadership of the unions that will wage the battles out of which a revolutionary internationalist workers party can be built. Such a party will lead the “final conflict” to get rid of a system in which profits are reaped through the brutal exploitation of labor. When those who labor rule, the means of production will be taken out of the hands of the rapacious capitalist owners and made the collective property of society. The tremendous wealth of this country will then be used to provide for the many as opposed to profiting the few.

***Off The Road With On The Road- A Film Review-Take Three

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

On The Road, starring, Sam Riley, Garret Hedlund, Kristie Stewart, based on the be-bop Beat Generation novel by Jeanbon Kerouac, IFC Film, 2012

We will always have memories of blasted out Frisco town in the late 1940s, out on the Left Coast supplementing the Village in New York City and damn few other places as refuge, ready to take refugees, car-borne refugees, foot-sore hitchhikers, droused Greyhound bus denizens, coming in from the cold war red scare Denver/Chi Town/Jersey Shore/Village/Lowell/Hullsville American dreaded night. Drawing the restless, the bohemian (quaint word), the hapless, those ready to remake themselves as the alienated, aloof, alone, getting ready to make due in that small oasis once Denver, Lowell, Paterson, Saint Louis lost their hold on the imaginations of a generation that grew to manhood (and womanhood but this story, this story for what it is worth is driven by young male angst)the Great Depression but were not deformed by it, were not Jack Kerouac’s beaten down fellahin, but beat, beatified (not like in the high Catholic sense but more like some latter day liberation theology, the meek of the earth, the downtrodden). Those who would join the alienated bikers romping and stomping out of Oakland and the East Bay, the LaJolla “perfect wave” surfer boys plus their dry land surfer girls waiting, the be-bop hot rod speedster out in places like Modesto, and assorted rebels without a cause, to fall under the radar of what was the great American freeze out. Frozen out, left adrift, let dangle to come roaring back in the misbegotten angel streets of the 1960s.

We will always have Jack Kerouac’s novel, On The Road, that sent one, maybe two generations, on the road, on the road to some mystical discovery thing, to some search for language to explain our short existence, to make sense of things in the modern world that has no time for reflection on the big cosmic questions. Weary feet, rain bedraggled, sun-blistered, snow-drifted hitchhikes and speed demon cross-country traveler’s aid shared rides roads to sort out things in good time (but what do youth today of free rides and hard times thumb out against a misunderstanding world). To write, smoke, drink, ball, sulk, speed the road to, yes, the road to… Waiting in some Fresno hot field, some Steamboat Junction cross-road, some Winnemucca small town bus depot bench that day’s new paper rolled up for a bed, some Neola cornfield seeking bracero stoop labor to keep heading west, always west, or worst dumped in Moline at midnight with the damn town shut down. Hard times no question in that quest for, ah, truth, or a truth, or just to keep the music in one’s head moving.

We will always have Kerouac’s finely wrought be-bop word plays jumping off the page (cranking out a million words on benny, goof balls, at three in the morning) out in the desolate 1950s a chicken in every pot and two cars (if not three) cars in every garage, in every leafy suburban ranch house sub-division garage. We will always have Sal (a.k.a Jeanbon Kerouac late of working- class kid mill town Lowell, local football hero, lady’s man about town, good fellow well met, ready to break out at almost any price) and Dean, Dean Moriarty (a.k.a. Neal Cassady late of Denver reformatories and ready to break, break into any machine that moves, and maybe some that don’t), the father we did not know, those of who came later could not know, while we were sitting on those Jersey shores, sweating out in those Ames cornfields, hell, even sitting on the seawall down in those old Hullsville beach fronts looking for the great blue-pink great American West night.

We will always have Charlie, Sonny, Slim, Big Red, the Duke, Fatah, blowing out big brass, Johnny blowing out that big sassy, sexy sax, the Prez taking it up a notch, blowing it out into, what did Ginsberg call them, oh yeah, those negro streets, the street of the hipsters, even of those Mailer dissipated white hipsters trying to figure out what the black guys were up to. Trying to reach and sometimes making it, that high white note, that moment when they were one with the instrument, hell, it could have been a kazoo, when they went mano y mano with the sublime. After hours, of course, after the paying customers, the carriage trade, went home to bed and they blew to heaven, or tried to, with the boys, with the guys who knew exactly when that note floated out some funky cellar bar door winding its way down to the harbor.

We will always have Sal, Carlos, Bull, Dean and an ever changing assortment of , well, women, women, mainly, like I say, at their beck and call, riding, car-riding, riding hard over the hill and dale of this continent searching, well, just searching okay. We will always have the lost brothers, Sal and Dean, playing off of each other’s strengths (and weaknesses) as they try to make sense of their world, or if not sense then to keep high, keep moving, and keep listening. And we will always have a great American novel to pass on to the next wanderlust generation, if there is another wanderlust generation.

And that is exactly what is wrong with this long time in the making film adaptation of Kerouac’s cultural coming- of- age novel. I looked forward with great anticipation to the film, and came away with a fair- sized disappointment. Not with the main actors, Sam Riley, Garret Hedlund and Kristie Stewart since they were confined by the way the director (and screen-writers) wanted to play the novel. Take away the drugs, sex, rock and roll (oops, be-bop jazz), and, oh yeah, driving at high speed and/or hitchhiking, and there is no glue holding this thing together.

Now no one can deny, or such denials will go for naught after watching this film, that Kerouac was, frankly very oblique in his sexual references, and certainly in the amount of time he spent on discussing the ins and out of sex in the novel so it was quite disconcerting to find so much time spent on the sex scenes. Kerouac had that Gallic (and Irish) Catholic reticence (think of his small novel, Maggie Cassidy) to speak plainly of the“s” word except by implication, and that aspect of his adventures is not what drove us to imitate the “beats” (we already were a step, no half a step ahead, of the previous generation in that regard although still woefully ignorant when it came right down to it). Moreover, let’s face it women for the men, and it was mainly men, of the Beat generation women were ornaments, or drudges. While it does no good to project today’s mores backward they were kept around because as Dean/Neal shouted out one time “I love women.” End of story. Ms. Stewart is too much the post-1960s woman, thankfully, to be the essentially anonymous plaything of the novel.

While Road is not strictly a buddy adventure film I came out after watching the film thinking that maybe, just, maybe, it is impossible to put this novel in cinematic form, there is perhaps too much stream of consciousness, too much introspection, too much angst to corral on film, a 2012 sensibilities film anyway. We will however always have the novel, praise be.

In Honor Of The 64th Anniversary Year Of The Chinese Revolution of 1949- From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-Problems Of The Chinese Revolution (1927) –The Speech of Comrade Chen Duxiu on the Tasks of the Chinese Communist Party 

Markin comment (repost from 2012):

On a day when we are honoring the 63rd anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in this entry and the comment below take on added meaning. In the old days, in the days when I had broken from many of my previously held left social-democratic political views and had begun to embrace Marxism with a distinct tilt toward Trotskyism, I ran into an old revolutionary in Boston who had been deeply involved (although I did not learn the extend of that involvement until later) in the pre-World War II socialist struggles in Eastern Europe. The details of that involvement will not detain us here now but the import of what he had to impart to me about the defense of revolutionary gains has stuck with me until this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article from the pen of Leon Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution and the later gains of that third revolution (1949) however currently attenuated.

This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had escaped that pre-war scene in fascist-wracked Europe and found himself toward the end of the 1930s in New York working with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the period when that organization was going through intense turmoil over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. In the history of American (and international) Trotskyism this is the famous Max Shachtman-James Burnham led opposition that declared, under one theory or another, that the previously defendable Soviet Union had changed dramatically enough in the course of a few months to be no longer worth defending by revolutionaries.

What struck him from the start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth, on the question of that defense and consequently about the role that workers states, healthy, deformed or degenerated, as we use the terms of art in our movement, as part of the greater revolutionary strategy. Needless to say most of those who abandoned defense of the Soviet Union when there was even a smidgeon of a reason to defend it left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism.

That said, the current question of defense of the Chinese Revolution hinges on those same premises that animated that old Socialist Workers Party dispute. And strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely) on the question of whether China is now irrevocably on the capitalist road, or is capitalist already (despite some very un-capitalistic economic developments over the past few years), I find that many of those who oppose that position have that same cavalier attitude the old comrade warned me against back when I was first starting out. There may come a time when we, as we had to with the Soviet Union and other workers states, say that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day. In the meantime study the issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution.
************

Leon Trotsky

Problems of the Chinese Revolution

---

The Chinese Revolution and
the Theses of Comrade Stalin

The Speech of Comrade Chen Duxiu on
the Tasks of the Chinese Communist Party

Epilogue
May 17, 1927

52) What purpose does Marxism serve in politics? To understand that which is and to foresee that which will be. Foresight must be the foundation of action. We already know what has happened to the predictions of comrade Stalin: one week before the coup d’état of Chiang Kai-shek, he defended him and blew the trumpet for him by calling for the utilization of the right wing, its experiences, its connections (speech to the Moscow functionaries on April 5). In the theses analysed by us, Stalin gives another example of foresight which has also been tested by life. The central question of our criticism of Stalin’s theses was formulated by us above as follows: “Does there already exist a new centre of the revolution or must one first be created?” Stalin contended that after the coup d’état of Chiang Kai-shek there were “two governments, two armies, two centres: the revolutionary centre in Wuhan and the counter-revolutionary centre in Nanking”. Stalin contended that no soviets can be built because that would signify an uprising against the Wuhan centre, against the “only government” in Southern China. We called this characterization of the situation “false, superficial, vulgar”. We called this so-called Wuhan government the “leaders of Wuhan” and showed that in Southern China, after the abrupt veering of the civil war to another class line, there is no government as yet, that one must be first created.

In Pravda of May 15 the speech of comrade Chen Duxiu at the convention of the Chinese Communist Party (April 29) is reprinted.
Neither Stalin nor we had this speech when Stalin wrote his theses and we wrote a criticism of them. Chen Duxiu characterizes the situation not on the basis of a general analysis of the circumstances but on the basis of his direct observations. Now, what does Chen Duxiu say of the new revolutionary movement? He declares plainly that “it would be a mistake” to consider the Wuhan government an organ of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship: “It is not yet a government of the worker and peasant masses but solely a bloc of leaders”. But is this not word for word what we said against Stalin?
Stalin wrote: “There is now no other governmental power than the government of the revolutionary Guomindang.” We answered him on that: “These words fairly reek with the apparatus-like and bureaucratic conception of revolutionary authority. the classes come and go but the continuity of the Guomindang government goes on forever [allegedly]. But it is not enough to call Wuhan the centre of the revolution for it really to be that” (cf. above). Instead of making it clear to the Chinese revolutionists, to the Communists primarily, that the Wuhan government will break its head against a wall if it imagines that it is itself already the only government in China; instead of turning relentlessly against the decorative hypocrisy of the petty-bourgeois revolutionists who have already destroyed so many revolutions; instead of shouting right into the ear of the uncertain, faltering, vacillating centre of Wuhan: “Do not be misled by outward appearances, do not be dazzled by the glitter of our own titles and manifestos, begin to perform the hard daily work, set masses in motion, build up workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ soviets, build up a revolutionary governmental power” – instead of all this, Stalin hurls himself against the slogan of the soviets and supports the worst, the most provincial and bureaucratic prejudices and superstitious views of those ill-fated revolutionists who fear people’s soviets, and instead have faith in the sacred ink-blots on the notepaper of the Guomindang.

53) Comrade Chen Duxiu characterizes the situation on the basis of his own observations with exactly the same words with which we characterized the situation on the basis of theoretical consideration. No revolutionary government but only a bloc of leaders. But this does not at all mean that comrade Chen Duxiu himself draws correct conclusions from the circumstances correctly characterized by him. Since he is bound hand and foot by false directives, Chen Duxiu draws conclusions which radically contradict his own analysis. He says: “We have before us the task of beginning to build up a genuinely revolutionary and democratic government as soon as the situation in the sphere of the national government has changed and the threat of foreign intervention and the offensive of the militarists have disappeared.”

Here we must say directly and openly: put the question this way and you adopt the surest and shortest road to ruin. The creation of a genuinely revolutionary government basing itself on the popular masses is relegated to the moment when the dangers have disappeared. But the central danger consists precisely of the fact that instead of a revolutionary government in Southern China, there is for the time being only a bloc of leaders. Through this principal evil, all the other dangers are increased tenfold, including also the military danger. If we are to be guarded to the highest possible degree against the foreign and our “own” militarist bands, we must become strong, consolidate ourselves, organize, and arm ourselves. There are no other roads. We should not stick our heads in the sand. No artifice will help us here. The enthusiasm of the masses must be aroused, their readiness to fight and to die for their own cause. But for this the masses must be gripped as deeply as possible, politically and organizationally. Without losing even an hour, they must be given a revolutionary program of action and the organizational form of the soviets. There are no other roads. Postpone the creation of a revolutionary government until somebody has eliminated the danger of war in some way or other, and you take the surest and shortest road to ruin.
54) With regard to the agrarian movement, comrade Chen Duxiu admits honestly that the agrarian program of the Party (reduction of rent payments) is completely insufficient. The peasant movement, he says, “is being transformed into the struggle for land. The peasantry arises spontaneously and wants to settle the land question itself.” Further on, comrade Chen Duxiu declares openly: “We followed a too pacific policy. Now it is necessary to confiscate the large estates” If the content of these words is developed in a Marxian manner, it constitutes the harshest condemnation of the whole past line of the Communist Party of China, and the Comintern as well, in the agrarian question of the Chinese revolution. Instead of anticipating the course of the agrarian movement, of establishing the slogans in time and throwing them among the peasant masses through the workers, the revolutionary soldiers and the advanced peasants, the Chinese Communist Party remained a vast distance behind the spontaneous agrarian movement. Can there be a more monstrous form of chvostism? “We followed a too pacific policy.” But what does a pacific policy of a revolutionary party mean in the period of a spontaneous agrarian revolution? It signifies the most grievous historical mistake that a party of the proletariat can possibly commit. A pacific policy (the reduction of rent payments), while the peasant is already fighting spontaneously for land, is not a policy of Menshevik compromise but of liberal compromise. Only a philistine corrupted by alleged statecraft can fail to understand this, but never a revolutionist.

55) But from his correct, and therefore deadly, characterization of the relations of the party to the agrarian movement, comrade Chen Duxiu draws not only false, but positively disastrous conclusions. “It is now necessary,” he says, “to confiscate the large estates, but at the same time to make concessions to the small landowners who must be reckoned with.” In principle, such a way of posing the question cannot be assailed. It must be clearly determined who and in what part of China is to be considered a small landowner, how and to what limits he must be reckoned with. But Chen Duxiu says further:

“Nevertheless, it is necessary to await the further development of the military actions even for the confiscation of the large estates. The only correct decision at the present moment is the principle of deepening the revolution only after its extension.”

This road is the surest, the most positive, the shortest road to ruin. The peasant has already risen to seize the property of the large landowners. Our party, in monstrous contradiction to its program, to its name, pursues a pacific-liberal agrarian policy. Chen Duxiu himself declares that it is “now [?] necessary to confiscate the large estates”, but he immediately recalls that we “must not fall into left extremism” (Chen Duxiu’s own words) and he adds that we must “await the further development of the military actions” for the confiscation of the property of the large landowners, that the revolution must first be extended and only later deepened.

But this is simply a blind repetition of the old, well-known and outworn formula of national-liberal deception of the masses: First the victory, then the reform. First we will “extend” the country – for whom: for the large landowner? – and then, after the victory, we will concern ourselves very tranquilly with the “deepening”. To this, every intelligent and half-way sensible peasant will answer comrade Chen Duxiu: “If the Wuhan government today, when it finds itself encircled by foes and needs our peasant support for life and death – if this government does not dare now to give us the land of the large landowners or does not want to do it, then after it has extricated itself from its encirclement, after it has vanquished the enemy with our help, it will give us just as much land as Chiang Kai-shek gave the workers of Shanghai.” It must be said quite clearly: The agrarian formula of comrade Chen Duxiu, who is bound hand and foot by the false leadership of the representatives of the Comintern, is objectively nothing else than the formula of the severance of the Chinese Communist Party from the real agrarian movement which is now proceeding in China and which is producing a new wave of the Chinese revolution.
To strengthen this wave and to deepen it we need peasants’ soviets with the unfurled banner of the agrarian revolution, not after the victory but immediately, in order to guarantee the victory.
If we do not want to permit the peasant wave to come to nought and be splattered into froth, the peasants’ soviets must be united through workers’ soviets in the cities and the industrial centres, and to the workers’ soviets must be added the soviets of the poor population from the urban trade and handwork districts.
If we do not want to permit the bourgeoisie to drive a wedge between the revolutionary masses and the army, then soldiers’ soviets must be fitted into the revolutionary chain.
As quickly as possible, as boldly as possible, as energetically as possible, the revolution must be deepened, not after the victory but immediately, or else there will be no victory.
The deepening of the agrarian revolution, the immediate seizure of the land by the peasants, will weaken Chiang Kai-shek on the spot, bring confusion into the ranks of his soldiers, and set the peasant hinterland in motion. There is no other road to victory and there can be none.
Have we really carried through three revolutions within two decades only to forget the ABC of the first of them? Whoever carries on a pacific policy during the agrarian revolution, is lost. Whoever postpones matters, vacillates, temporizes, loses time, is lost. The formula of Chen Duxiu is the surest road to the destruction of the revolution.
Slanderers will be found who will say that our words are dictated by a hatred of the Chinese Communist Party and its leaders. Was it not once said that our position on the Anglo-Russian Committee signified a hostile attitude towards the British Communist Party? The events confirmed the fact that it was we who acted as loyal revolutionists towards the British Communists, and not as bureaucratic sycophants. Events will confirm the fact – they confirm it every day – that our criticism of the Chinese Communists was dictated by a more serious, more Marxist, revolutionary attitude towards the Chinese revolution than was the attitude of the bureaucratic sycophants who approve of everything after the fact, provided that they do not have to foresee for the future.
The fact that the speech of comrade Chen Duxiu is reprinted in Pravda without a single word of commentary, that no article revealing the ruinous course of this speech is devoted to it – this fact by itself must fill every revolutionist with the greatest misgivings, for it is the central organ of Lenin’s party that is involved!
Let not the pacifiers and flatterers tell us about “the unavoidable mistakes of a young Communist Party”. It is not a question of isolated mistakes. It is a question of the false basic line, the consummate expression of which is the theses of comrade Stalin.

The Necessary Final Accord

In the May 9 number of Sotsialisticheski Vestnik, it says in the article devoted to the theses of comrade Stalin:

“If we strip the envelope of words that is obligatory for the theses of a Communist leader, then very little can be said against the essence of the ‘line’ traced there. As much as possible to remain in the Guomindang, and to cling to its left wing and to the Wuhan government to the last possible moment: ‘to avoid a decisive struggle under unfavourable conditions’; not to issue the slogan ‘all power to the soviets’ so as not ‘to give new weapons into the hands of the enemies of the Chinese people for the struggle against the revolution, for creating new legends that it is not a national revolution that is taking place in China, but an artificial transplanting of Moscow sovietization’ – what can actually be more sensible for the Bolsheviks now, after the ‘united front’ has obviously been irremediably destroyed, and so much porcelain has been smashed under the ‘most unfavourable conditions’?” [8]

Thus, after Sotsialisticheski Vestnik, in its April 23rd number, acknowledged that Martynov analysed the tasks of the Chinese revolution in Pravda “very impressively” and “entirely in the Menshevik manner”, the leading article in the central organ of the Mensheviks declares in its latest number that “very little can be said against the essence of the ‘line’ traced” in the theses of comrade Stalin. This harmony of political lines hardly requires special elucidation.
But still more: The same article in Sotsialisticheski Vestnik speaks further on in a mocking tone – we quote literally! – of “the line of Radek which, covered with extreme ‘left’ slogans, (withdrawal from Guomindang, ‘propaganda of the soviet system’ etc.), simply desires in reality to give up the game and to step aside”. [9] The line of Radek is characterized here with the words of the leading articles and the feuilletons of Pravda. After all, it cannot be otherwise: Radek cannot say anything openly in the press about his line, for otherwise the Party would learn that Radek’s line is being confirmed by the whole course of events. The editors of Sotsialisticheski Vestnik not only describe “the line of Radek” with the words of Pravda but also evaluate them in full accord with the articles of Pravda: The line of the Opposition, according to Dan, gives the possibility, “covered with extreme ‘left’ slogans”, in reality “to give up the game and to step aside”. We have already read in the articles of Pravda that “a mass for the dead must be read” for the Chinese revolution, that the Chinese Communists must “retire within themselves”, that they must renounce “great deeds and great plans”, and that all this is the “sermon of the liquidation of the Chinese revolution“ – if the line of the Opposition is adopted. This was said literally, for example, in the leading article in Pravda of May 16, 1927. As we see, it is word for word the same thing that Dan says, or more correctly, Dan says of the Opposition word for word what Pravda has said in a series of its articles. Dan approves the theses of Stalin and derides the “liquidator” Radek, who covers his liquidation with extremely left phrases. Everything is clear now: The liquidationism of Radek is the same liquidationism which is evaluated as such by the renowned revolutionist Dan. That is the lesson that the leading articles in Sotsialisticheski Vestnik presents to those who are still capable of learning anything.
It is surely portentous that the quoted number of Sotsialisticheski Vestnik should arrive in Moscow on the eve of the opening of the session of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, which must consider the problem of the Chinese revolution in its full scope.

---

Notes

8. Sotsialisticheski Vestnik, no.9 [151] p.1.

9. Sotsialisticheski Vestnik, no.9, [151] p.2.

***Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night- A Pre-Miranda Nightmare- Dana Andrew’s “Boomerang”- A Film Review

DVD Review

Boomerang, starring Dana Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, directed by Elia Kazan, 1947
Most crime noir is NOT a lesson in plebeian civil virtue, good republican police procedure, or wavy grey area moral dilemmas. The best crime noir is where, sure, the bad guys has it coming and by fair means or foul the good guys, cops, privates dicks, or just guys and gals caught in the middle of something, made sure they got it, got in spades, right up to the chair. No quarter given, none taken and we, the audience we, were happy with the result, or at least were not going waste good mother-washed and ironed handkerchiefs over their fate. Or, alternatively, alternatively, best crime noir, that is, occurred when some femme fatale, good or bad, and, we, the male part of the we audience anyway, were not all that choosey which as long as she was fetching, wrapped up a guy so bad he couldn’t think straight, and led him, maybe led him right up to that aforementioned chair. Gladly, or half gladly anyway.

In the film under review, Boomerang, neither of these conditions exists yet this is still an interesting crime noir despite its sometimes cloying moral certitudes and raw virtuous civics lesson overhang. Moreover, watching this thing in a post-Miranda (1964) world made this reviewer finally realize what the fuss was all about when the Warren Court brought the wild west boys cop justice under a little control. A little I said, so don’t make too much of it. Let’s just get to the plot and you can figure out why, okay.

As the film opens a man of the cloth, a padre, gets dead-aim stone-cold killer shot out in the mean 1940s Middle America Connecticut streets by a someone, some guy. Back then, and maybe today too, this gangster-style or psycho-driven execution rated big 24/7 news and howls of protest, especially since the padre was on the way to neighborhood sainthood. So like any high profile murder case the cops and the DA are pressing, and being pressed, and pressed hard to find this killer who is still walking free to maybe do murder and mayhem again.

And here is where the Miranda part comes in. The cops, the newly anointed town reform civil leaders, the recently thrown-out corrupt city leaders, the newspapers, and the DA’s office are all crying for vengeance and a quick solution to the murder (and their PR problems). The cops, the pre-Miranda cops, led by Lee J. Cobb, are more than happy to oblige them when after a massive manhunt they turn up one drifter, grifter, down at the heels guy, played by Arthur Kennedy, as the fall guy. The frame is on, on big time. Of course, he is the fall guy after a little off-hand by the book, the unwritten book, rough stuff down sans lawyer at the precinct house and some very tricky footwork around the evidence bin, the human witness and murder weapon evidence bin. They have poor Brother Kennedy screaming “uncle” before long and he is tailor-made for the big house, and the chair. Open and shut.

But hold on a minute, a very long minute, the DA, played by Dana Andrews, has second thought qualms about this railroad job and despite every possible corrupt effort to derail him from the compliant judge, to the cops, to some newspaper guys, to those virtuous civic-minded city fathers, he is after all a truth-seeker. He plods on supported only by wifey, played by Jane Wyatt, who knowing her man, sticks by him through thick and thin. Natch. But, jesus, justice in this case was a close thing, and only came off because our DA boy actually listened up that day they had the ethics class in law school. So you see what I mean about this being an okay film even with no drop-dead bad guys, or drop-dead beautiful femme fatales.

Note behind the camera: Looking at the credits here you will note at least two names that deserve special mention, the director Elia Kazan and the actor Lee J. Cobb. No, not for their well-known cinematic efforts then, or later (films such as On The Waterfront, Viva Zapata, Death Of A Salesman, etc. between them), but for their less that stellar (I am being kind here considering we are dealing with classic “finks” and stoolies.”) performances before various congressional committees in high 1950s cold war, red scare times “dropping dimes, (hell, quarters and half dollars)” on their communist fellows (mostly one-time pinkish fellow-travelers but the effect was the same) in the entertainment industry. Obviously these two guys didn’t “get” the point in Boomerang after all. The hell with them.

From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 64th Anniversary Year Of The Chinese Revolution of 1949-

Markin comment (repost from 2012):

On a day when we are honoring the 63rd anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in this entry and the comment below take on added meaning. In the old days, in the days when I had broken from many of my previously held left social-democratic political views and had begun to embrace Marxism with a distinct tilt toward Trotskyism, I ran into an old revolutionary in Boston who had been deeply involved (although I did not learn the extend of that involvement until later) in the pre-World War II socialist struggles in Eastern Europe. The details of that involvement will not detain us here now but the import of what he had to impart to me about the defense of revolutionary gains has stuck with me until this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article from the pen of Leon Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution and the later gains of that third revolution (1949) however currently attenuated.

This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had escaped that pre-war scene in fascist-wracked Europe and found himself toward the end of the 1930s in New York working with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the period when that organization was going through intense turmoil over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. In the history of American (and international) Trotskyism this is the famous Max Shachtman-James Burnham led opposition that declared, under one theory or another, that the previously defendable Soviet Union had changed dramatically enough in the course of a few months to be no longer worth defending by revolutionaries.

What struck him from the start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth, on the question of that defense and consequently about the role that workers states, healthy, deformed or degenerated, as we use the terms of art in our movement, as part of the greater revolutionary strategy. Needless to say most of those who abandoned defense of the Soviet Union when there was even a smidgeon of a reason to defend it left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism.

That said, the current question of defense of the Chinese Revolution hinges on those same premises that animated that old Socialist Workers Party dispute. And strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely) on the question of whether China is now irrevocably on the capitalist road, or is capitalist already (despite some very un-capitalistic economic developments over the past few years), I find that many of those who oppose that position have that same cavalier attitude the old comrade warned me against back when I was first starting out. There may come a time when we, as we had to with the Soviet Union and other workers states, say that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day. In the meantime study the issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution.
*********

Workers Vanguard No. 966	8 October 2010

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Fight Against Capitalist Repression

(Quote of the Week)

In the name of the “war on terror,” the government has massively reinforced its arsenal of police surveillance and terror in a wholesale assault on democratic rights. More than 80 years ago, Victor Serge, an anarcho-syndicalist who was won to communism under the impact of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, showed how the bourgeois legal system serves to protect capitalist rule against the workers and the oppressed. As Serge stressed, the proletariat must see the fight against the bourgeois rulers? attacks on democratic rights and other gains as a necessary part of its struggle against the capitalist order.

In every country, the workers’ movement has had to win, in over half a century of struggle, the right to associate and the right to strike. Even in France this right is still not conceded to state employed workers nor those in industries considered to be of public utility (as if all industries aren’t), such as the railways.

In the conflicts between capital and labor, the army has often intervened against labor—never against capital.

In court the defense of the poor is nothing short of impossible, because of the cost of any judicial action; in effect, a worker can neither bring a case nor defend one.

The overwhelming majority of crimes are directly caused by poverty and come into the category of attacks on property. The overwhelming majority of prison inmates are from the poor....

To respect legality such as this is to be fooled by it. Nonetheless, it would be equally disastrous to ignore it. The advantages for the workers? movement are the greater the less one is fooled. The right to exist and to act legally is, for the organizations of the proletariat, something which must constantly be re-won and extended....

We believe that in countries where the reaction has not yet triumphed, destroying the previous democratic constitution, the workers will have to fight to defend every inch of their legal position, and in other countries fight to regain it.

—Victor Serge, What Every Revolutionary Should Know About State Repression (1926)

 

***Play It Again Hoagy, Play It Again, Man- Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust and Much More- A CD Review

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Hoagy Carmichael performing his piano magic.
Stardust and Much More, Hoagy Carmichael, BMG Records, 1989

Scene brought to mind by the battered, dust-laden cover of an old Hoagy Carmichael Bluebird Label record found in a back bedroom closet up at Josh Breslin’s cozy logwood cabin in wintry outback Maine a couple of years back. Long-fingered, soft-dashed, soft Stetson-brimmed hat slanted to the back of his head just short of falling off, always just short of falling off, cigarette, unfiltered of course, dangling, edge dangling off some forsaken lip, some browned tobacco lip, and the lip hanging off a slapdash calculatedly careless face, a face weary, wary, and just short, just short of yellow jaded, the keyboard, ivories tinkling, black setting off the white in the be-bop, no pre-be-bop night.

Making one think, and think hard, of Carib nights, of some vagrant maddening fragrance as Laren Bacall, full-blown hair falling off to one side of her head, steps into, no, sashays from parts unknown into any gin mill in old Port-o-town, the soft sound of silk against her slender thighs turning heads to watch her shape head toward some grizzled old ancient sea captain, Captain Bogie, and ask for a light for her cigarette, unfiltered of course, and an off-hand drink. Later, naturally, when all dust is settled wise, almost yellow jaded, old Cricket will piano back her up on some song, oh ya, How Little We Know, but who cares for anything then but that arched-browed come hither, and hope, hope against high heaven that she will ditch that lame sea captain, hero or not, and give a young buck a chance. Fat chance. And later still, still sashaying, silky thigh sashaying out some crooked barroom door cooing Am I Blue with that damn monkey of a sea captain in tow. Ya, damn. But don’t blame Hoagy.
*******
“Hey, Hoagy play Stardust for us, will you?” half-slurred one Josh Breslin, Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those who have followed his by-line in half the radical chic and public square vision alternative journals and newspapers that lay, unread, in the back rooms of fashionable houses around certain well-known progressive watering holes in the old U.S. of A. By the way that half-slur is no slur on his good name. See Josh, and his crowd of friends, old friends from wrong side of the track, car hell wheels, Saturday night beach heel wheels high school Olde Saco, Maine days are celebrating his sixtieth birthday at Key Joey’s. Ya, Josh has moved up in the world since those from hunger mill-town days. Along with his keep-in-touch townie crowd are newer friends, including his “father,” Peter Paul Markin, from the summer of love, circa 1967 days, merry prankster, magical mystery tour yellow brick school bus, drug-addled, acid-etched days when he first got some seven-colored vision of that new world he spent the next forty years writing about in those fugitive rags laying around those spiffy waterholes on the Left Coast. And newer friends still from the by-line circuit rag circuit and part-time watering hole excesses. Our boy, naturally, naturally for Josh that is, as with everything that he has every done, small, large o better left unsaid had tipped one too many spoons in the rummy and who knows what else fruit punch bowl. Now that the matter is cleared up we may proceed to the request and its fate.

“Man, my name’s not Hoagy, it’s Jason, Jason Dyer, and I never heard of a song called Stardust, as Jason, a surly sort of young neo-be-bop piano player, one who has seen some time as a bouncer, maybe, or done a little time in stir and survived, certainly from his look not one to be messed with, not messed with by a half-slurred man who has dipped that oar into too many rum-filled punch bowls.

Josh, non-plussed, charged on, “Hoagy, how about Lazy River?", and "come on just once for a birthday boy.” Man,” as our keyboard man Jason’s face reddens blood red, “Man, I don’t know any Lazy River, either, stop bugging me don’t keep bringing up songs my grandmother might have known, or maybe your grandmother.” Josh, sensing just the slightest menace in manner of that last remark retreated, physically retreated to a corner couch and seemingly half nods out from his half-slurring. Out, out for the count.

A couple of days later Josh related what happened to him when he kind of conked out (as he delicately put it) at his birthday party. See, Josh’s father, Prescott Breslin, Senior, a hard-working old mill-hand at MacAdams Textile Mill now long gone from Olde Saco (as is Prescott) was along with his wife, Delores (nee LeBlanc), Josh’s mother, crazy for Hoagy Carmichael’s Stardust in the booming Olde Saco Beach Casino days when that also long gone spot was the cat’s meow for all the be-bop, no, pre-be-bop boys and girls along coastal route one Maine (and hell down that road into New Hampshire too if they could raise the dough and get some gas rations). Hell, once, Hoagy actually came to the Casino and, well Prescott, a young soldier, oops, a young Marine, just then stationed down the road at Portsmouth Naval Base before heading out to the bloody Pacific and Delores, some raven haired French twist beauty just out of high school (Olde Saco, of course) never got over it and all through the 1940s and 1950s long after not be-bop, and then be-bop had morphed into rock and roll the fragrance riff of that song wafted through the hard-scrabble Breslin household.

But here is where our story does get a little twisty, and, frankly a little sad. If one believes one Joshua Lawrence Breslin, sometimes an iffy proposition. And one believes that the old boy didn’t have a little acid-etched flashback and try to put his old, newer pal off the scent. As Prescott, proud, southern proud, down around the hills and hollows of Kentucky coal mining country proud, lay dying he requested, constantly requested Stardust be played in his hospice room. And he passed to a better place with that song seeping through as his last sounds. Sad, right? But here is the twisty part. Prescott Breslin, Senior was exactly sixty years old when he passed over to the other side. Make of that what you will.

***Not Ready For Prime Time AARP Songs- The Beatles' "When I'm Sixty-Four"

A YouTube film clip of the Beatles performing When I'm Sixty-Four from the animated movie Yellow Submarine.

Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964 and thus already past sixty-four, comment:
Many of my fellows from the Generation of '68 (a. k. a. baby-boomers) will be, if you can believe this, turning sixty-four this year. So be it.

When I'm Sixty-Four - The Beatles

When I get olded, loosing my hair,
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me the Valentine,
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine

If I stay out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four.

You'll be older too,
And if you say the word I could stay with you.

I could be handy mending a fuse
When your lights have gone
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday morning go for a ride

Doing the garden, digging the weeds,
Who could ask for more
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four.

Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight,
if it's not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Grandchildren on your knee
Vera, Chuck & Dave

Send me a postcard, drop me a line
Stating point of view
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, wasting away

Give me your answer, fill in a form,
Mine for evermore,
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four.
*******
Ancient dreams, dreamed.
Ya, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie up a guy so bad he will go to the chair kind of smiling, okay maybe just half-smiling. Frank (read: future Peter Paul and a million, more or less, other guys) had it bad as a man could have from the minute Ms. Cora walked through the door in her white summer blouse, shorts, and the then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair, also white. She may have been just another blonde, very blonde frail serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint but from second one she was nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled at the screen for him to get the hell out of there at that moment. But do you think he would listen, no not our boy. He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end.

Nose flattened cold against the frozen, snow falling front window apartment project hang your hat dwelling, small, warm, no hint of madness, or crazes only of sadness, brother kinship sadness, sadness and not understanding of time marching as he, that older brother, goes off to foreign places, foreign elementary school reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic places and, he, the nose flattened against the window brother, is left to ponder his own place in those kind of places, those foreign-sounding places, when his time comes. If he has a time, has the time for the time of his time, in this red scare (but what knows he of red scare only brother scares), cold war, cold nose, dust particles in the clogging air night.

A cloudless day, a cloudless Korean War day, talk of peace, merciless truce peace and uncles coming home in the air, hot, hot end of June day laying, face up on freshly mown grass near fellowship carved-out fields, fields for slides and swings, diamonded baseball, no, friendlier softball fields the houses are too close, of gimps, glues, cooper-plated portraits, of sweet shaded elms, starting, now that he too, that nose-flattened brother, has been to foreign places in the time of his time, to find his own place in the sun but wondering, constantly wondering, what means this, what means that, and why all the changes, slow changes, fast changes, blip changes, but changes.

Nighttime fears, red-flagged Stalin-named fears, red bomb unnamed shelter blast fears, named, vaguely named, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg hated stalinite jews killed fears, jews killed our catholic lord fears and what did they do anyway fears against the cubed glass glistening flagless flag-pole rattling dark asphalt school yard night, alone, and, and, alone fears avoidance, clean, clear stand alone avoidance of old times sailors, tars, sailors’ homes AND deaths in barely readable fine- marked granite-grey lonely seaside graveyards looking out on ocean homelands and lost booty. Dead.


Endless walks, endless sea street seawall walks, rocks, shells, ocean water-logged debris strewn every which way, fetid marsh smells to the right, mephitic swamps oozing mud splat to the left making hard the way, the path, okay, to uptown drug stores, Rexall’s drug store, grabbing heist-stolen valentine, ribbon and bow valentine night bushel, signed, hot blood-signed, weary-feet signed, if only she, about five candidates she, later called two blondes, two brunettes, and a red-head, sticks all, no womanly shape to tear a boy-man up, would give a look his way, his look, his newly acquired state of the minute Elvis-imitation look, on endless sea streets, the white-flecked splash inside his head would be quiet.


Walks, endless waiting bus stop non-stop walks, up crooked cheap, low-rent, fifty-year rutted pavement streets, deeply gouged, one-lane snow-drift hassles, pass trees are green, coded, endless trees are green secret-coded waiting, waiting against boyish infinite time, infinite first blush of innocent manhood, boyhood times, gone now, for one look, one look, that would elude him, elude him forever such is life in lowly spots, lowly, lowly spots. And no dance either, no high school confidential (hell elementary school, man), handy man, breathless, Jerry Lee freak-out, at least no potato sack stick dance with coded name brunette. That will come, that will come.

City square no trespass standing, low-slung granite buildings everywhere, granite steps leading to granite doors leading to granite gee-gad counters, hated, no name hated, low-head hated, waiting slyly, standing back on heels, going in furtively, coming out ditto, presto coming out with a gold nugget jewel, no carat, no russkie Sputnik panel glitter for his efforts such is the way of young lumped crime, no value, no look, just grab, grab hard, grab fast, grab get yours before the getting is over, or before the dark, dark night comes, the dark pitched-night when the world no longer is young, and dreamed dream make no more sense that this bodily theft.

A bridge too far, an unarched, unsteeled, unspanned, unnerved bridge too far. One speed bicycle boy, dungarees rolled up against dog bites and geared meshes, churning through endless heated, sweated, no handkerchief streets, names, all the parts of ships, names, all the seven seas, names, all the fishes of the seas, names, all the fauna of the sea, names. Twelve-year old hard churned miles to go before sleep, searching for the wombic home, for the old friends, the old drifter, grifter, midnight shifter petty larceny friends, that’s all it was, petty and maybe larceny, hard against the named ships, hard against the named seas, hard against the named fishes, hard against the named fauna, hard against the unnamed angst, hard against those changes that kind of hit one sideways all at once like some mack the knife smack devilish thing

Lindo, lindos, beautiful, beautifuls, not some spanish exotic though, maybe later, just some junior league dream fuss though, some future cheerleader football dame though, some sweated night pasty crust and I, too slip-shot, too, well, just too lonely, too lonesome, too long-toothed before my time to do more than endless walks along endless atlantic streets to summon up the courage to glance, glance right at windows, non-exotic atlantic cheerleader windows. Such is the new decade a-borning, a-borning but not for me, no jack swagger, or bobby goof as they run the table on old tricky dick or some tired imitation of him. Me, I’ll take exotics, or lindos, if they every cross my path, my lonely only path

Sweated dust bowl nights, not the sweated exotic atlantic cheerleader glance nights but something else, something not endless walked about, something done, or with the promise of done, for something inside, for some sense of worth in the this moldy white tee shirt, mildewy white shorts, who knows what diseased sneakers, Chuck Taylor sneakers pushing the red-faced Irish winds, harder, harder around the oval, watch tick in hand, looking, looking I guess for immortality, immortality even then. Later, in bobby darin times or percy faith times, who knows, sitting, sitting high against the lion-guarded pyramid statute front door dream, common dreams, common tokyo dreams, all gone asunder, all gone asunder, on this curious fact, no wind, Irish or otherwise. Who would have figured that one?

Main street walked, main street public telephone booth cheap talk walked searching for some Diana greek goddess wholesale on the atlantic streets. Diana, blonde Diana, cashmere-sweatered, white tennis –shoed Diana, million later Dianas although not with tennis shoes, really gym shoes fit for old ladies to do their rant, their lonely rant against the wind. Seeking, or rather courage-seeking, nickel and dime courage as it turns out; nickel and dime courage when home provided no sanctuary for snuggle-eared delights. Maybe a date, maybe just a swirl at midnight drift, maybe a view of local lore submarine races, ah, to dream, no more than to dream, walking down friendly aisles, arm and arm along with myriad other arm and arm walkers on senior errands. No way, no way and then red-face, alas, red-faced no known even forty years later. Wow.

Multi-colored jacket worn, red and black, black and red, some combination reflecting old time glories, or promises of glory, cigarette, Winston small-filtered, natch, hanging from off the lip at some jagged angle, a cup of coffee, if coffee was the drink, in hand, a glad hand either way, look right, look left, a gentle nod, a hard stare, a gentle snarl if such a thing is possible beyond the page. Move out the act onto Boston fresh streets. Finally, that one minute, no not fifteen, not fifteen at all, and not necessary of the fame game, local fame, always local fame but fame, and then the abyss on non-fame, non- recognition and no more snarls, gentle or otherwise. A tough life lesson learned, very tough. And not yet twenty.


Drunk, whisky drunk, whisky rotgut whisky drunk, in some bayside, altantic bayside, not childhood atlantic bayside though, no way, no shawlie way, bar. Name, nameless, no legion. Some staggered midnight vista street, legs weak from lack of work, brain weak, push on, push on, find some fellaheen relieve for that unsatisfied bulge, that gnawing at the brain or really at the root of the thing. A topsy-turvy time, murder, death, the death of death, the death of fame, murder, killing murder, and then resolve, wrong resolve and henceforth the only out, war, war to the finish although who could have known that then. Who could have know that tet, lyndon, bobby, Hubert, tricky dick war-circus thing then.

Shaved-head, close anyway, too close to distinguish that head and ten-thousand, no on hundred-thousand other heads, all shave-headed. I fall down to the earth, spitting mud-flecked red clay, spitting, dust, spitting, spitting out the stars over Alabama that portent no good, no earthy good. Except this-if this is not murder, if this is not to slay, then what is? And the die is cast, not truthfully cast, not pure warrior in the night cast but cast. Wild dreams, senseless wild dreams follow, follow in succession. The days of rage, rage against the light, and then the glimmer of the light.

The great Mandela cries, cries to the high heavens, for revenge against the son’s hurt, now that the son has found his way, a strange way but a way. And a certain swagger comes to his feet in the high heaven black Madonna of a night. No cigarette hanging off the lip now, not Winston filter-tipped seductions, no need, and no rest except the rest of waiting, waiting on the days to pass until the next coming, and the next coming after that. Ah, sweet Mandela, turn for me, turn for me and mine just a little. Free at last but with a very, very sneaking feeling that this is a road less traveled for reason, and not ancient robert frost to guide you… Just look at blooded Kent State, or better, blooded Jackson State. Christ.

Bloodless bloodied streets, may day tear down the government days, tears, tear-gas exploding, people running this way and that coming out of a half-induced daze, a crazed half-induced daze that mere good- will, mere righteousness would right the wrongs of this wicked old world. But stop. Out of the bloodless fury, out of the miscalculated night a strange bird, no peace dove and no flame-flecked phoenix but a bird, maybe the owl of Minerva comes a better sense that this new world a-bornin’ will take some doing, some serious doing. More serious that some wispy-bearded, pony-tailed beat, beat down, beat around, beat up young stalwart acting in god’s place can even dream of.

Chill chili nights south of the border, endless Kennebunkports, Bar Harbors, Calais’, Monktons, Peggy’s Coves, Charlottetowns, Montreals, Ann Arbors, Neolas, Denvers by moonlight, Boulders echos, Dinosaurs dies, salted lakes, Winnemuccas flats, golden-gated bridges, malibus, Joshua Trees, pueblos, embarcaderos, and flies. Enough to last a life-time, thank you. Enough of Bunsen burners, Coleman stoves, wrapped blankets, second-hand sweated army sleeping bags, and minute pegged pup tents too. And enough too of granolas, oatmeals, desiccated stews, oregano weed, mushroomed delights, peyote seeds, and the shamanic ghosts dancing off against apache (no, not helicopters, real injuns) ancient cavern wall. And enough of short-wave radio beam tricky dick slaughters south of the border in deep fall nights. Enough, okay.

He said struggle. He said push back. He said stay with your people. He said it would not be easy. He said you have lost the strand that bound you to your people. He said you must find that strand. He said that strand will lead you away from you acting in god’s place ways. He said look for a sign. He said the sign would be this-when your enemies part ways and let you through then you will enter the golden age. He said it would not be easy. He said it again and again. He said struggle. He said it in 1848, he said it in 1917, he said it in 1973. Whee, an old guy, huh.

Greyhound bus station men’s wash room stinking to high heaven of seven hundred pees, six hundred laved washings, five hundred wayward unnamed, unnamable smells, mainly rank. Out the door, walk the streets, walk the streets until, until noon, until five, until lights out. Plan, plan, plan, plain paper bag in hand holding, well, holding life, plan for the next minute, no, the next ten seconds until the deadly impulses subside. Then look, look hard, for safe harbors, lonely desolate un-peopled bridges, some gerald ford-bored newspaper-strewn bench against the clotted hobo night snores. Desolation row, no way home.

A smoky sunless bar, urban style right in the middle of high Harvard civilization, belting out some misty time Hank Williams tune, maybe Cold, Cold Heart from father home times. Order another deadened drink, slightly benny-addled, then in walks a vision. A million time in walks a vision, but in white this time. Signifying? Signifying adventure, dream one-night stands, lost walks in loaded woods, endless stretch beaches, moonless nights, serious caresses, and maybe, just maybe some cosmic connection to wear away the days, the long days ahead. Ya that seems right, right against the oil-beggared time, right.

Lashed against the high end double seawall, bearded, slightly graying against the forlorn time, a vision in white not enough to keep the wolves of time away, the wolves of feckless petty larceny times reappear, reappear with a vengeance against the super-rational night sky and big globs of ancient hurts fester against some unknown enemy, unnamed, or hiding out in a canyon under an assumed name. Then night, the promise of night, a night run up some seawall laden streets, some Grenada night or maybe Lebanon sky boom night, and thoughts of finite, sweet flinty finite haunt his dreams, haunt his sleep. Wrong number, brother. Ya, wrong number, as usual.

White truce flags neatly placed in right pocket. Folded aging arms showing the first signs of wear-down, unfolded. One more time, one more war-weary dastardly fight against Persian gulf oil-driven time, against a bigger opponent, and then the joys of retreat and taking out those white flags again and normalcy. The first round begins. He holds his own, a little wobbly. Second round he runs into a series of upper-cuts that drive him to the floor. Out. Awake later, seven minutes, hours, eons later he takes out the white flags now red with his own blood. He clutches them in his weary hands. The other he said struggle, struggle. Ya, easy for you to say.

Desperately clutching his new white flags, his 9/11 white flags, exchanged years ago for bloodied red ones, white flags proudly worn for a while now, he wipes his brow of the sweat accumulated from the fear he has been living with for the past few months. Now ancient arms folded, hard-folded against the rainless night, raining, he carefully turns right, left, careful of every move as the crowd comes forward. Not a crowd, no, a horde, a beastly horde, and this is no time to stick out with white flags (or red, for that matter). He jumps out of the way, the horde passes brushing him lightly, not aware, not apparently aware of the white flags. Good. What did that other guy say, oh yes, struggle.

One more battle, one more, please one more, one fight against the greed tea party night. He chains himself, well not really chains, but more like ties himself to the black wrought-iron fence in front of the big white house with his white handkerchief. Another guy does the same, except he uses some plastic hand-cuff-like stuff. A couple of women just stand there, hard against that ebony fence, can you believe it, just stand there. More, milling around, disorderly in a way, someone starts om-ing, om-ing out of Allen Ginsberg Howl nights, or at least Jack Kerouac Big Sur splashes. The scene is complete, or almost complete. Now, for once he knows, knows for sure, that it wasn’t Ms. Cora whom he needed to worry about, and that his child dream was a different thing altogether. But who, just a child, could have known that then.

The Last Waltz, Indeed

Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964, comment:
Note: The term “last waltz” of the title of this piece is used as a simple expression of the truth. The life, or better, half-life of this sketch came about originally through reviewing, a few years ago, a long-running series of “Oldies But Goodies” CDs from the 1950s and early 1960s, the time of my coming of age time. After reviewing ten of these things I found out that the series was even longer, fifteen in all. Rather than turning myself into some local hospital for a cure I plugged on. Plugged on intrepidly with full knowledge that such things had their saturation point. After all how much could one rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those of us who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in those treasured compilations. How many times, after all, can one read about wallflowers, sighs, certain shes (or hes), the moonlight glow on high school dance night (if there was any) and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. Bastante! Enough!

Or so I thought until my old friend, my old mad monk, merry prankster, stone freak, summer of love (1967 version) compadre from Olde Saco up in Maine, Josh Breslin. Yes, that Josh Breslin, or rather Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those who have read his by-line over the years in half the radical chic or alterative vision publications in this country, called me up in a frenzy just after I had finally completed the last damn review. And as usual when he calls in the dead of night it was “girl” trouble, if that is the appropriate way to say it for sixty-somethings.

His frenzied problem? Josh’s Old Saco Class of 1967 was going to have its fortieth reunion, and through the now weathered Mainiac grapevine he found out that some middle school (then junior high) sweetheart, Lucy Dubois (Olde Saco is a central gathering spot for French-Canadians and French Canadian Americans, including Josh’s mother, Delores, nee LeBlanc), was going to show and he needed a refresher on the old time tunes. More importantly, he continue why he, madcap love ‘em and leave Josh, still had a “crush” on Ms. Dubois and what was he going to do about it come reunion night. So the following is just a little mood music from Josh’s backward trek.
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No question that those of us who came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s were truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents please. Or look it up on Wikipedia if you are too embarrassed to not know ancient history things. Join the bus.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that one’s parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.

Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable forty or fifty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation like the ones Peter Paul has been mad monk reviewing but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. Just don’t tell Lucy that, okay. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.

But what about the now seeming mandatory question, the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song that I really want to talk about. Or rather about Lucy Dubois’ (I won’t use her married name because she still lives up around Olde Saco). The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar).

Here the 1960 Mark Dinning tune Teen Angel fills the bill. Hey, I did really like this one, especially the soulful, sorrowful timing and voice intonation. Yes, I know, I know the lyrics are, well, not life-enhancing. And, yes, I also know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you? And what song did we, Josh Breslin and Lucy Dubois, trot out on that wintry November reunion night? Come on now, guess.
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....and a trip down memory lane.

MARK DINNING lyrics - Teen Angel

(Jean Surrey & Red Surrey)

Teen angel, teen angel, teen angel, ooh, ooh

That fateful night the car was stalled
upon the railroad track
I pulled you out and we were safe
but you went running back

Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love

What was it you were looking for
that took your life that night
They said they found my high school ring
clutched in your fingers tight

Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love

Just sweet sixteen, and now you're gone
They've taken you away.
I'll never kiss your lips again
They buried you today

Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
Teen angel, teen angel, answer me, please