This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
In
Honor Of The 97th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist
International-Take Five- A Worker’s Dread
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
They, the murky union leadership, the dockers’ leadership,
if that was what you could call it, wanted to call the whole thing off, call
all hands back to work just when they, the rank and file, had shut everything
on the waterfront down, and shut it down tight. Just because Lloyd George, that
bloody Liberal Party Welshman, called their bluff, called their number and they
came up short, the leadership so-called came up short. They didn’t have the
guts to take things into their own hands and so they were parlaying what to do
next. Hell, not a damn ship was moving, not a damn ship was being unloaded,
nothing. Tom Jackson could see as he looked out on the Thames that in the year
of our lord 1919 that there were more ships, ships from every port of call,
than he had ever seen filling up each and every estuary. And with a certain
pride he looked out just then because he had been the delegate in his area that
had responsible for closing most of the port down, and having those beautiful
ships, ships from each port of call as he liked to say to the boys over a pint
at the Black Swan after a hard day of
unloading those damn cargoes, sitting idle, sitting idle upon a workingman’s
decision that they stay idle. And now the damn leadership wanted to give up the
game.
Tom Jackson had been a union man, a dockers’ union man, for
all of his twenty –seven years, or at least since he knew what a union was, and
his father before him (that was how he got the job as a casual that started his
career) and the Jackson clan had been working men since, since he reckoned
Chartist times when old Ben Jackson led his clan out of Scotland to raise hell
about the working man’s right to vote, something like that, Tom wasn’t always
clear on the particulars of that history although he knew for certain that it
involved the Chartists of blessed memory.
Most of the time he had been content to be a union man, pay
his dues, and support any actions that the leadership proposed. And have a pint
or two with the boys at his beloved Black
Swan and then go home to Anne and the two little ones. But the damn war of
unblessed memory had changed things. He had been lucky enough to be exempt
since the government desperately needed men to unload the massive loads of
materials to be eaten up by the war. They had worked twelve, fourteen, sixteen
hour shifts to whittle down the backlog. At the same pay. And no one, no one
least of all Tom Jackson, complained while the war was on. They, he, saw the
work as their patriotic duty. But now, now that war was over the dock owners,
the shipping companies, and their agents wanted to keep all the dough for
themselves and keep the steady dockers working at that same damn rate. And
hence the strike.
Tom Jackson was also a Labor Party man, although unlike in
the union he held not office nor was he active in his local branch. He just
voted Labor, like his father before him (and before that Liberal when Gladstone
of father’s blessed memory was alive). The party was also ready to call it
quits, call all hands back. Tom Jackson was in a quandary. His assistant steward
(and pint or two companion in sunnier times), Bill Armstrong, was a headstrong
younger man who had been a member of the Social-Democratic Federation before
the war and since had been tinkering with the small groups of communists that
were running around London of late. Bill had told him that the Labor Party
would sell them out, the union leaders would sell them out but that a new
group, a group headed by the Bolsheviks over in Russia, the same ones they, the
dockers, had previously helped by not loading military equipment the government
wanted to send the White Guards that were fighting a civil war against those
same Bolsheviks, a grouping called the Communist International would not sell
them out.
Tom listened to what Bill had to say but dismissed it out of
hand. He was not going to get involved, get Anne and the two kids involved in
international intrigue. No, something would happen and things would work out.
Something did happen a couple of days later. The strike was officially called
off with nothing won. Tom was angry for a time but then, with a shrug of his
shoulders, he said he could not abandon his union, his Labor Party or his Black Swan for some new adventure…
A link to Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox blog for the latest from her site.
Frank Jackman comment:
Ifind Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox rather a mishmash of eclectic politics and basic old time left-liberal/radical thinking. And an on-going fetish for her running for office whatever seems to be worth looking at. In 2014 it was the Governor's race in California. Other years it has been for President and for Congress. That Congressional race made sense because it was against Congresswoman and U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who at one time was a darling of the liberals and maybe still is. But electioneering while necessary and maybe useful is not enough. So while her politics and strategy are not enough, not nearly enough, in our troubled times they do provide enough to take the time to read about and get a sense of the pulse (if any) of that segment of the left, the parliamentary left, to which she is appealing.
One though should always remember, despite our political differences, Ms. Sheehan's heroic action in going down to hell-hole Crawford, Texas to confront one President George W. Bush in 2005 when many others were resigned to accepting the lies of that administration or who “folded” their tents when the expected end to the Iraq War did not materialize in 2002-2003 after we had millions in the streets for a few minutes and not much after when it would have counted. Hats off on that one, Cindy Sheehan.
*************
Additional Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past.
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 various blogs and other networking media. 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. So read on.
***********
Another note from Frank Jackman
There are many ways in which people get “religion” about the issues of war and peace, about the struggle to oppose the imperial adventures of the American government. Learn that it is our duty to oppose those decisions as people who are “in the heart of the beast” as the late revolutionary Che Guevara who knew about the imperial menace both in life and death declared long ago. My own personal “getting religion” and those who I have worked with in such organizations as Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and later Veterans For Peace (VFP) came from a direct confrontation with the American military establishment either during or after our service. Those were hard confrontations with the reality of the beast back in those days and it is no accident that those who confronted the beasts directly then are still active today. Remain active as a whole new threat to world peace emanates from Washington into the Middle East highlighted by the air wars in Syria and Iraq and the now new lease on life in Afghanistan.
In a sense the military service confrontation form of “getting religion” on the issues of war and peace is easy to understand given the horrendous nature of modern warfare and its massive weapons overkill and disregard for “collateral damage.” Less easy to see is the radicalization of older women, mothers, mothers of soldiers like Cindy Sheehan in reaction to the senseless death of their loved ones. As pointed out above whatever political differences we have I will always hold Ms. Sheehan’s heroic actions in confronting one George W. Bush then President of the United States and the “yes man” for the war in Iraq started in 2003 (the various aspects of the Iraq saga have to be dated since otherwise confusion prevails) in high regard. She took him on down in red neck Texas asking a simple question-“if there were no weapons of mass destruction, not even close, why did my son die in vain?” Naturally no sufficient answer ever came from him to her. There she was a lonely symbol of the almost then non-existent anti-war movement. And then she started, as this blog of hers testifies to, to put the dots together, “got religion,” got to understand what Che meant long ago about that special duty radicals and revolutionaries have “in the heart of the beast.” And she too like those hoary military veterans I mentioned is still plugging away at the task.
Danny
Collins, starring Al Pacino, Annette Bening, Jennifer Garner, 2015
Every
book, song, and film needs a hook, something for the reader, listener, or watcher
to hang onto in order to invest his or her time for the duration. The hook in
the film under review, Danny Collins,
is a letter written to the title singer/songwriter character by John Lennon telling
him not to prostitute his creative energies for filthy lucre. (Lennon did write
a letter on that subject to an English singer not to Danny so that part is true.)The
letter though never got delivered to him until some forty plus years later. That
revelation though acts as an epiphany for our boy Danny, played by haven’t seen
him in a long time Al Pacino in a stellar performance, to turn his life around.
Go back to the basics of what he had originally intended to do with his musical
talents and hence the “tale of redemption” in the headline to this review.
So
Danny headed to a Hilton, a Hilton in New Jersey if you can believe that
redemption is possible in the Garden State. There he gives up, mostly, his wild
boy lifestyle and along the way hits on the more age-appropriate manager, played
by fetching Annette Bening. But Danny is not in Jersey for the sunny weather
but to square things with a son that he had never known, the result of a youthful
fling with some groupie. Of course fatherhood for a free-booting rock and roll legend
is bound to be a rocky road, and it is. Just as son-hood is for a straight working
class guy with an expectant wife and a hyper-active young daughter. Top all
that off with the fact that the son, Tom, has a rare maybe fatal disease and
you definitely have a rocky road to redemption.
But
Danny tries, tries hard first of all by helping out with the hyper-active granddaughter,
then helping his son get through what he had to get through with his treatments,
and most of all he tries to get back to that original music dream of his
playing stuff that he had written and canning the bubble gum music that made
his career. Our boy Danny stumbled a lot along the way, didn’t quite get it
right with his son and daughter-in-law for most of the film, didn’t quite connect
with that more age appropriate woman as hard as he tried, and wasn’t able, at
least in the film, to break from that music that gave him his old lifestyle.
But the guy tried, tried and maybe redemption would come later. Despite some
predictable syrupy stuff around the granddaughter and his son’s illness a pretty
good story line about the price of fame and fortune in the real world. At the
end is a nice touch with an interview with the singer whom John Lennon really sent
that letter to.
*****Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To TheChapel Of Love In Mind
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
There were some things about Edward Rowley’s youthful activities, those that he thought would bring some small honor to his name, that he would rather not forget, things that defined his life, gave him that “fifteen minutes of fame,” if only to himself and his, that everybody kept talking about that everyone deserved before they departed this life. That “fifteen minutes of fame” business which he thought had been uttered by the Pop-artist Andy Warhol in one of his prankster moments, one of his New York high society put-downs, was fine by him even if it had been the result of some small honor thing.
The subject of that small honor done in the spurt of his youth that had defined a lot of what came later is what got him thinking one sunny afternoon in September about five years ago as he waited for the seasons to turn almost before his eyes about the times around 1964, around the time that he graduated from North Adamsville High School, around the time that he realized that the big breeze jail-break that he had kind of been waiting for was about to bust out over the land, over America. (His world view did not encompass the entire world or what was the same thing the young nations part of that view but later after making plenty of international connections from here and there he could have said he was waiting for that breeze to bust out over the world.)
It was not like Edward was some kind of soothsayer, like some big think tank thinker paid well to keep tabs on social trends for those in charge so they didn’t get waylaid like they did with the “rebel without a cause” and “beat” phenomena or anything like that back then, like could read tea leaves or tarot cards like some latter day Madame La Rue who actually did read his future once down at the Gloversville Fair when she had come to that location with her daughter, Gypsy Anne, one hot August week when he was about twelve. Madame that day read that he was made for big events. The big event that he was interested in just then was winning a doll, a stuffed animal or something like that for dark-haired, dark-eyed just starting to fill outGypsy Anne at the Skee game which he was an expert at. (For those clueless about Skee, have forgotten or have never spent their illicit around carnivals, small time circuses, or penny-ante amusement parks, the game is simplicity itself once you get the hang of it and play about 10,000 hours’ worth of games you roll small balls, which come down a chute one you pay your dough, or credit/debit card the way they have the machines worked now a days, and you roll them like in bowling up to a target area like in archery and try to get a ton of points which gives you strips of coupons to win a prize depending on high your score is, and what you want. Like I say, simple.) And Edward did win her a stuffed animal, a big one, and got a very big long wet kiss for his heroics (and “copped a little feel” from that starting to fill out shape of hers and he finally solved, no, he solved for that one minute that budding girls turned to women were as interested in sex, or at least being “felt up” as the other guys around Harry’s Variety Store had told himthey were if approached the right way) down by the beach when she gave her best twelve year old “come hither” look, not the last time he would be snagged by that look by her or any other women later. No way though that tarot reading when he was twelve left an impression, left him with that vague feeling about the big breeze coming, not then when the hormones drove his big thoughts, and not for a long while.
That big breeze blowing through the land thing had not been Edward’s idea anyway, not his originally although he swore by it once he thought about the possibilities of breaking out of Podunk North Adamsville, but came from “the Scribe,” the late Peter Paul Markin, a corner boy at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys on Thornton Street where he occasionally hung out in high school since he had been childhood friends with the leader of that crowd, Frankie Riley, who read books and newspapers a lot and would go on and on about the thing on lonesome Friday nights when all the guys were waiting, well, just waiting for something to happen in woebegone North Adamsville where the town mainly went to sleep by ten, or eleven on Friday and Saturday night when Jack Slack’s closed late (for the younger set, Doc’s Drugstore, the place where he and Frankie hung in their younger days as well, the place where they all first heard rock and roll played loud on Doc’s jukebox by the soda fountain, every night was nine o’clock at night just when things were getting interesting as the shadows had time to spank vivid boy imaginations and you wonder, well, maybe not you, but parents wondered why their kids were ready to take the first hitchhike or hitch a freight train ride out of that “one-horse town” (an expression courtesy of the grandmothers of the town, at least the ones he knew, mostly Irish grandmothers with corn beef and cabbage boiling on their cast-iron stoves and smirks on their faces, if grandmothers could have smirks over anything, about how dear the price of everything was if you could get it a very big problem, including Edward’s Anna Riley, where he first heard the words).
Here is where that big breeze twelve million word description thing Markin was talking about intersected with that unspoken trend for Edward (unknown and unspoken since the corner at Jack Slacks’ did not have a resident professional academic sociologist in residence to guide them since those “hired guns” were still hung up on solving the juvenile delinquency problem and so as usual well behind the curve and Markin, the Scribe as smart as he was, was picking his stuff up strictly from newspapers and magazines who were always way also behind the trends until the next big thing hit them in the face). Edward’s take on the musical twists and turns back then is where he had something the kids at North Adamsville High would comment on, would ask him about to see which way the winds were blowing, would put their nickels, dimes and quarters in the jukeboxes to hear based on his recommendations.
Even Markin deferred to him on this one, on his musical sense, the beat or the “kicks” as he called then although he, Markin, would horn in, or try to, on the glory by giving every imaginable arcane fact about some record’s history, roots, whatever which would put everybody to sleep, they just wanted to heard the “beat” for crying out loud. Edward did have to chuckle though when he thought about the way, the main way, that Markin worked the jukebox scene since he was strictly from poverty, from the projects, poorer even than Edward’s people and that was going some if you saw the ramshackle shack of a house that he and his four older brothers grew up in. The Scribe used to con some lonely-heart girl who maybe had just broken up with her boyfriend, maybe had been dateless for a while, or was just silly enough to listen to him into playing what he wanted to hear based on what Edward had told him. But he was smooth in his way since he would draw a bee-line to the girl who just put her quarter in for her three selection on Jack Slack’s jukebox (Doc’s, sweet and kindly saint Doc whose place was a bee-hive after school for that very reason , had five for a quarter if you can believe that). He would become her “advisor,” and as the number one guy who knew every piece of teenage grapevine news in the town and whom everybody therefore deferred on that intelligence so he would let her “pick” the first selection, usually some sentimental lost love thing she could get weepy over, the second selection would be maybe some “oldie but goodie,” Breathless or At The Hop, which everybody still wanted to hear, and then on number three, the girl all out of ideas Markin would tout whatever song had caught his ear. Jesus, Markin was a piece of work. Too bad he had to end the way he did down in Mexico now lying in some unmarked grave in some town’s potter’s field back in the mid-1970s which guys from the old town were still moaning over.
That was Markin on the fringes but see Edward’s senses were very much directed by his tastes in music, by his immersion into all things rock and roll in the early 1960s where he sensed what he called silly “bubble gum” music (what high priest Markin called something like the “musical counter-revolution” but he was always putting stuff in political bull form like that) that had passed for rock. Which, go figure, the girls liked, or liked the look of the guys singing the tunes, guys with flipped hair and dimples like Fabian and Bobby Rydell but was strictly nowhere with Edward. The breeze Edward felt was going to bury that stuff under an avalanche of sounds going back to Elvis, and where Elvis got his stuff from like Lonnie Johnson and the R&B and black electric blues guys, the rockabilly hungry white boys, and forward to something else, something with more guitars all amped to big ass speakers that were just coming along to bring in the new dispensation.
More importantly since the issue of jailbreaks and sea changes were in the air Edward was the very first kid to grasp what would later be called “the folk minute of the early 1960s,” and not just by Markin when he wrote stuff about that time later before his sorry end. Everybody would eventually hone in on Dylan and Baez, dubbed the “king and queen” of the moment by the mass media always in a frenzy to anoint and label things that they had belatedly found about out about and run into the ground. But when folk tunes started showing up on the jukebox at Jimmy Jack’s Diner over on Latham Street where the college guys hung and where families went to a cheap filling dinner to give Ma a break from the supper meal preparations it was guys like the Kingston Trio, the Lettermen, and the Lamplighters who got the play after school and some other girls, not the “bubble gum” girls went crazy over the stuff when Edward made recommendations.
He had caught the folk moment almost by accident late one Sunday night when he picked up a station from New York City and heard Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie songs being played, stuff that Mr. Dasher his seventh grade music teacher had played in class to broaden youthful minds, meaning trying to break the Elvis-driven rock and roll habit. So that musical sense combined with his ever present sense that things could be better in this wicked old world drilled into him by his kindly old grandmother, that Anna Riley with her boiling kettles and smirks mentioned before, who was an old devotee of the Catholic Worker movement kind of drove his aspirations (and Markin’s harping with the political and so-called historical slant triggered by his own grandmother’s devotion to the Catholic Worker movement added in). But at first it really was the music that had been the cutting edge of what followed later, followed until about 1964 when that new breeze arrived in the land.
That fascination with music had occupied Edward’s mind since he had been about ten and had received a transistor radio for his birthday and out of curiosity decided to turn the dial to AM radio channels other that WJDA which his parents, may they rest in peace, certainly rest in peace from his incessant clamoring for rock and roll records and later folk albums, concert tickets, radio listening time on the big family radio in the living room, had on constantly and which drove him crazy. Drove him crazy because that music, well, frankly that music, the music of the Doris Days, the Peggy Lees, The Rosemary Clooneys, the various corny sister acts like the Andrews Sisters, the Frank Sinatras, the Vaughn Monroes, the Dick Haynes and an endless series of male quartets did not “jump,” gave him no “kicks,’ left him flat. As a compromise, no, in order to end the family civil war, they had purchased a transistor radio at Radio Shack and left him to his own devises.
One night, one late night in 1955, 1956 when Edward was fiddling with the dial he heard this sound out of Cleveland, Ohio, a little fuzzy but audible playing this be-bop sound, not jazz although it had horns, not rhythm and blues although sort of, but a new beat driven by some wild guitar by a guy named Warren Smith who was singing about his Ruby, his Rock ‘n’ Roll Ruby who only was available apparently to dance the night away. And she didn’t seem to care whether she danced by herself on the tabletops or with her guy. Yeah, so if you need a name for what ailed young Edward Rowley, something he could not quite articulate then call her woman, call her Ruby and you will not be far off. And so with that as a pedigree Edward became one of the town’s most knowledgeable devotees of the new sound.
Problem was that new sound, as happens frequently in music, got a little stale as time went on, as the original artists who captured his imagination faded from view one way or another and new guys, guys with nice Bobby this and Bobby that names, Patsy this and Brenda that names sang songs under the umbrella name rock and roll that his mother could love. Songs that could have easily fit into that WJDA box that his parents had been stuck in since about World War II.
So Edward was anxious for a new sound to go along with his feeling tired of the same old, same old stuff that had been hanging around in the American night since the damn nuclear hot flashes red scare Cold War started way before he had a clue about what that was all about. It had started with the music and then he got caught later in high school up with a guy in school, Daryl Wallace, a hipster, or that is what he called himself, a guy who liked “kicks” although being in high school in North Adamsville far from New York City, far from San Francisco, damn, far from Boston what those “kicks” were or what he or Edward would do about getting those “kicks” never was made clear. But they played it out in a hokey way and for a while they were the town, really high school, “beatniks.” So Edward had had his short faux “beat” phase complete with flannel shirts, black chino pants, sunglasses, and a black beret (a beret that he kept hidden at home in his bedroom closet once he found out after his parents had seen and heard Jack Kerouac reading from the last page of On The Road on the Steve Allen Show that they had severely disapproved of the man, the movement and anything that smacked of the “beat” and a beret always associated with French bohemians and foreignness would have had them seeing “red”). And for a while Daryl and Edward played that out until Daryl moved away (at least that was the story that went around but there was a persistent rumor for a time that Mr. Wallace had dragooned Daryl into some military school in California in any case that disappearance from the town was the last he ever heard from his “beat” brother).
Then came 1964 and Edward was fervently waiting for something to happen, for something to come out of the emptiness that he was feeling just as things started moving again with the emergence of the Beatles and the Stones as a harbinger of what was coming.
That is where Edward had been psychologically when his mother first began to harass him about his hair. Although the hair thing like the beret was just the symbol of clash that Edward knew was coming and knew also that now that he was older that he was going to be able to handle differently that when he was a kid. Here is what one episode of the battle sounded like:
“Isn’t that hair of yours a little long Mr. Edward Rowley, Junior,” clucked Mrs. Edward Rowley, Senior, “You had better get it cut before your father gets back from his job working on repairing that ship up in Maine, if you know what is good for you.” That mothers’-song was being endlessly repeated in North Adamsville households (and not just those households either but in places like Carver, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Ann Arbor, Manhattan, Cambridge any place where guys were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing hair a little longer than boys’ regular was the flash point) ever since the British invasion had brought longer hair into style (and a little less so, beards, that was later when guys got old enough to grow one without looking wispy, had taken a look at what their Victorian great-grandfathers grew and though it was “cool.” Cool along with new mishmash clothing and new age monikers to be called by.)
Of course when one was thinking about the British invasion in the year 1964 one was not thinking about the American Revolution or the War of 1812 but the Beatles. And while their music has taken 1964 teen world by a storm, a welcome storm after the long mainly musical counter-revolution since Elvis, Bo, Jerry Lee and Chuck ruled the rock night and had disappeared without a trace, the 1964 parent world was getting up in arms.
And not just about hair styles either. But about midnight trips on the clanking subway to Harvard Square coffeehouses to hear, to hear if you can believe this, folk music, mountain music, harp music or whatever performed by long-haired (male or female), long-bearded (male), blue jean–wearing (both), sandal-wearing (both), well, for lack of a better name “beatniks” (parents, as usual, being well behind the curve on teen cultural movements since by 1964 “beat” except on silly television shows and by “wise” social commenters who could have been “Ike” brothers and sisters, was yesterday’s news).
Mrs. Rowley would constantly harp about “why couldn’t Edward be like he was when he listened to Bobby Vinton and his Mr. Lonely or that lovely-voiced Roy Orbison and his It’s Over and other nice songs on the local teen radio station, WMEX (he hated that name Eddie by the way, Eddie was also what everybody called his father so you can figure out why he hated the moniker just then). Now it was the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a cranky-voiced guy named Bob Dylan that has his attention. And that damn Judy Jackson with her short skirt and her, well her… looks” (Mrs. Rowley like every mother in the post-Pill world refusing to use the “s” word, a throw-back to their girlish days when their mothers did not use such a word either and so everybody learned about sex is some strange osmotic out in the streets, in the school lavs, and from older almost as clueless older brothers and sisters just like now.)
Since Mrs. Rowley, Alice to the neighbors, was getting worked up anyway, she let out what was really bothering her about her Eddie’s behavior, "What about all the talk about doing right by the down-trodden Negros down in Alabama and Mississippi. And you and that damn Peter Markin, who used to be so nice when all you boys hung around together at Jimmy Jack’s Diner [Edward: corner boys, Ma, that is what we were and at Jack Slack’s alleys not Jimmy Jack’s that was for the jukebox and for checking out the girls who were putting dough in that jukebox] and I at least knew you were no causing trouble, talking about organizing a book drive to get books for the little Negro children down there. If your father ever heard that there would be hell to pay, hell to pay and maybe a strap coming out of the closet big as you are. Worse though, worse than worrying about Negros down South is that treasonous talk about leaving this country, leaving North Adamsville, defenseless against the communists with your talk of nuclear disarmament. Why couldn’t you have just left well enough alone and stuck with your idea of forming a band that would play nice songs that make kids feel good like Gale Garnet’s We’ll Sing In The Sunshine or that pretty Negro girl Dionne Warwick and Her Walk On By instead of getting everybody upset."
And since Mrs. Rowley, Alice, to the neighbors had mentioned the name Judy Jackson, Edward’s flame and according to Monday morning before school girls’ “lav” talk, Judy’s talk they had “done the deed” and you can figure out what the deed was let’s hear what was going on in the Jackson household since one of the reasons that Edward was wearing his hair longer was because Judy thought it was “sexy” and so that talk of doing the deed may well have been true if there were any sceptics. Hear this:
“Young lady, that dress is too short for you to wear in public, take it off, burn it for all I care, and put on another one or you are not going out of this house,” barked Mrs. James Jackson, echoing a sentiment that many worried North Adamsville mothers were feeling (and not just those mothers either but in places like Gloversville, Hullsville, Shaker Heights, Dearborn, Cambridge any place where gals were waiting for the new dispensation and wearing their skirts a little longer than mid-calf was the flash point) about their daughters dressing too provocatively and practically telling the boys, well practically telling them you know what as she suppressed the “s” word that was forming in her head. She too working up a high horse head of steam continued, "And that Eddie [“Edward, Ma,” Judy keep repeating every time Mrs. Jackson, Dorothy to the neighbors, said Eddie], and his new found friends like Peter Markin taking you to those strange coffeehouses in Harvard Square with all the unwashed, untamed, unemployed “beatniks” instead of the high school dances on Saturday night. And that endless talk about the n-----s down South, about get books for the ignorant to read and other trash talk about how they are equal to us, and your father better not hear you talk like that, not at the dinner table since he has to work around them and their smells and ignorance over in that factory in Dorchester. And don’t start with that Commie trash about peace and getting rid of weapons. They should draft the whole bunch of them and put them over in front of that Berlin Wall. Then they wouldn’t be so negative about America."
Scene: Edward, Judy and Peter Markin were sitting in the Club Nana in Harvard Square sipping coffee, maybe pecking at the one brownie between them, and listening to a local wanna-be folk singing strumming his stuff (who turned out to be none other than Eric Von Schmidt whose Joshua Gone Barbados and a couple of other songs would become folk staples and classics). Beside them cartons of books that they are sorting to be taken along with them when they head south this summer after graduation exercises at North Adamsville High School are completed in June. (By the way Peter’s parents were only slightly less irate about their son’s activities and used the word “Negro” when they were referring to black people, black people they wished their son definitely not to get involved with were only slightly less behind the times than Mrs. Rowley and Mrs. Jackson and so requires no separate screed by Mrs. Markin. See Peter did not mention word one about what he was, or was not, doing and thus spared himself the anguish that Edward and Judy put themselves through trying to “relate” to their parents, their mothers really since fathers were some vague threatened presence in the background in those households.)
They, trying to hold back their excitement have already been to some training sessions at the NAACP office over on Massachusetts Avenue in the Roxbury section of Boston and have purchased their tickets for the Greyhound bus as far as New York’s Port Authority where they will meet others who will be heading south down to Mississippi goddam and Alabama goddam on a chartered bus. But get this Peter turned to Edward and said, “Have you heard that song, Popsicles and Icicles by the Mermaids, it has got great melodic sense.” Edward made a very severe off-putting “no way” face. Yes, we are still in the time just before the sea change after which even Peter will chuckle about “bubble gum” music. Good luck though, young travelers, good luck.
NEW
WARS / OLD WARS –
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
US
“Democracy promotion” in the Middle East. . .
I subscribe to a
service of the US State Department which emails statements and reports regarding
US relations in the Middle East. On Tuesday I got six notices in quick
succession entitled U.S.
Security Cooperation With Oman, U.S.Security Cooperation With the United Arab Emirates, …Saudi
Arabia, …Bahrain, …Kuwait, …Qatar,
detailing arms sales, basing rights, joint military exercises and training
worth many tens of $billions. Question: Which one of these countries is ruled
by an intolerant, autocratic regime? Answer: all of the above.
SYRIA’S
CESSATION OF HOSTILITIES: How Does It Work and How are Factions
Reacting?
At
midnight on February 27, the guns fell silent in Syria—at least temporarily.
With numerous allegations of breaches beginning to surface, Syria’s ceasefire is already on shaky ground. This cessation
of hostilities, as it is formally called, followed two weeks of intensive
negotiations between the United States and Russia. Just before the clock struck
twelve, their efforts reached fruition when the UN Security Council unanimously
approved resolution 2268, endorsing a
Russian-American agreement from February 22 and demanding that Syrian and
international actors comply… Groups listed as terrorists by the UN Security
Council were automatically excluded. They include the self-proclaimed Islamic
State, the al-Qaeda-aligned Nusra Front, and a few other small organizations and
individuals on the jihadi fringes of Syria’s Sunni insurgency… War against the
Islamic State is not necessarily disruptive for the rest of Syria, as its
territory is fairly well delineated from other factions and it has no allies who
could take offense. The Nusra Front, however, is another matter entirely. It is
deeply embedded within the Sunni Islamist landscape, particularly in
northern Syria. Russian, Syrian, and American airstrikes that target the group
often end up hitting other factions as well, not to mention civilians. These
attacks always meet with howls of protest from the broader opposition, often
including factions backed by the United States. More
Building
on the Syrian Truce
The
best feasible outcomes for Syria in the foreseeable future, alongside continued
armed opposition to extremist groups and especially ISIS, would have the nature
of a frozen conflict. Frozen conflicts are unsatisfying and offensive to the
principles of national unity and territorial integrity, but they sometimes are
better than the available alternatives. They can lead to enough long-term
stability to get a conflict out of the headlines and off policy-makers' front
burner… The main underlying principle in addressing the Syrian problem and
trying to nurse a fragile truce into being something a little less fragile is
that it is the war itself, far more than any particular internal political
outcome or distribution of power, that has made Syria a problem for
international security, with threats of spreading regional instability and
far-flung violent extremism. More
GARETH
PORTER: 'Plan B' and the Bankruptcy of US Syria Policy
US
Secretary of State John Kerry provoked widespread speculation when he referred
in testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee last
week to “significant discussions” within US President
Barack Obama’s administration about a “Plan B” in Syria. The speculation was
further stoked by a “senior official” who told CBS News that options under consideration included
“‘military-like’ measures that would make it harder for the regime and its
allies to continue their assault on civilians and US-backed rebels.” …”. In
other words, the administration’s national security policymakers believe
something more should be done in Syria, but they are not at all clear what could
be done now. The official said three options were under discussion, none of
which is even close to being realistic in the present situation: an increase in
US Special Forces on the ground, an increase in arms assistance to fighters
opposing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and a no-fly zone.
More
US
Protecting al-Qaeda
In
UN
Security Council Resolution 2254, in which it was articulated that member
states be committed to the “sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial
integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic,” while calling on them to suppress ISIS,
al-Nusra, and “all other individuals, groups, undertakings, and entities
associated with Al Qaeda or ISIL”, it was also agreed upon that the Security
Council “expresses its support for a nationwide ceasefire in Syria.” …Yet when
push came to shove the main stumbling-block in the way of the CoH
[Cessation-of-Hostilities] was the oppositions demand that any truce be “conditional on the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front no longer being
targeted.” Sources close to the talks would tell Reuters that this
insistence was the main “elephant in the room” preventing a settlement… “The
West does not actually hand the weapons to al-Qaeda, let alone ISIS,” he said,
“but the system that they have constructed leads precisely to that end. The
weapons conduit that the West directly has been giving to groups such as the
Syrian Free Army (FSA), have been understood to be a sort of ‘Wal Mart’ from
which the more radical groups would be able to take their weapons and pursue the
jihad.” More
Turkey,
Kurds, and the US
There
is no question that tensions between Turkey and the
US have increased substantially as a result of differences over to what degree
the US is supporting the Syrian Kurdish nationalist Democratic Union Party (PYD) and
its armed affiliate, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which are the
strongest political and most effective forces fighting the Islamic State (IS)
and some of its affiliated groups in Syria. The PYD/YPG are also the strongest
entities among the 14 competing Kurdish nationalist organizations in Syria… When
Turkey and the US came to an agreement in July 2014 that allowed the US and NATO
air forces to use the ?ncirlik Air Base, enabling these forces to more
effectively attack IS, it seemed to patch up differences between Ankara and
Washington regarding Turkey’s low-profile strategy against IS. But as it turned
out, Ankara interpreted the agreement as a license to attack PKK bases in
northern Iraq as well as within Turkey. More
US
Counterterror Strategy in Yemen Has Crashed and Burned
As
they faced off with al-Qaeda in Yemen, US Presidents George W.
Bush and Barack Obama publicly praised the commitment of their
counterparts, Yemeni Presidents Ali Abdullah Saleh and Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi,
to combat terrorism. But in reality Yemen’s government appears to have privately
colluded with Islamist militants, allowing major prison breaks of al-Qaeda
operatives in both 2006 and 2014… The US used airstrikes to attack al-Qaeda in
Yemen without deploying significant ground forces. Some al-Qaeda operatives have
been killed under the program, but targeted killings ultimately generated huge
resentment and fed support for anti-Western militants. Local media have described drone attacks as massacres, and jihadi online fora
have been filled with pictures of victims’ bodies. Al-Qaeda leaders have grieved with victims’ families and accused the US of waging war against all Muslims.
More
What
the New York Times won’t tell you about the American adventure in
Ukraine
Ukraine
has gone from political crisis to armed conflict to humanitarian crisis with no
break in the regress since the American-cultivated coup in February 2014. But
for many months now we have had before us a textbook example of what I call the
Power of Leaving Out. The most daring attempt at “regime change” since righteous
Clintonians invented this self-deceiving euphemism in the 1990s has come to
six-figure casualties, mass deprivation, a divided nation and a wrecked
economy. If you abide within the policy cliques or the corporate-owned media, it
is best to go quiet as long as you can in the face of such eventualities. The
short of it, readers, is that all three chickens now take up their roosts at
once: The Poroshenko government is on the brink of collapse, neo-Nazi extremists
have forced it to renew hostilities in the east and there is no letup in the
blockade Kiev imposes on rebelling regions. The last differs from a punitive
starvation strategy only in degree. The very short of it is that the more or
less complete failure of Washington’s most adventurous assertion of power in the
post-Cold War period can no longer be papered over. More
It’s Christmas Season in America, ca. 2015, and when we look at the national landscape, we can hardly ignore the gore, both literal and figurative, that litters the landscape of the US in this historic epoch.
American streets are virtual shooting galleries, where cops pour the people’s sacrificial blood on the foul altars of the police state.
Where there is repression, there is too resistance: the mass protests of Black Lives Matter—so named because in this era of black political ascendancy (i.e., the age of Obama) black lives don’t matter.
But it is there, the stirrings of mass discontent with a rancid system of repression in defense of capital.
In the field of politics we see the tendrils of the emergence of fear and fascism—the capitalists represented not by the well-practiced actors of politics, but by the superrich themselves—who apparently no longer trust their minions to get the job—unlimited capital accumulation from the poor and working class—well and truly done. Fear of foreigners in a nation of foreigners, calls for walls—and war.
This is the politics of capitalism’s degeneration.
Marx said that the depravities of marching imperialism abroad always and ultimately returns home—with repression, prisons, cops and the nets and fetters of law.
Cops today look like the Robocops of yesterday’s fantasy fiction; Star Wars and its imperial storm troopers, killing machines to defend the rapacious criminal banks and the millionaires and billionaires now playing politicians.
A field of blood before us—unless the people are resolute enough to unite—and rebel—to write a new future for us all.
Ona Move! Long Live John Africa! Greetings to the 30th Annual Holiday Appeal!
Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.S.—Last night, I saw a report on the crises faced by many, many Vietnam-era vets, who, because of blood transfusions during the war, have contracted Hepatitis C. The VA recently announced, “Sorry there’s a cure (Sovaldi and Harvoni) but we can’t afford it. If you survive the next few years, we’ll see.” It sounds remarkably similar to what state gov’ts are saying to thousands of state prisoners, yes? MAJ
Jaan Laaman
15 December 2015
Hello, to my PDC comrades and to all you good activists, organizers, revolutionaries and PDC supporters, who are here tonight for this Partisan Defense Committee holiday event.
This is Jaan Laaman, coming to you from deep in the Sonoran Desert, at the u.s. prison in Tucson, Arizona. As many of you already know, I am a long held political prisoner and a long time recipient of political and material support from the PDC.
I’d surely enjoy being there with you right now, listening to remarks and having some good conversations. Actually, like other political prisoners around the country, I am right there with all of you, in positive and militant spirit and with these words.
There are many struggles, issues, worthy campaigns and organizations that reach out for and need people’s support. The concrete work the Partisan Defense Committee does and has been doing for 30 years (and I do know, because at this point, I have been in captivity for 31 years), is truly important for us class war prisoners. The PDC’s work is also pretty unique and it is certainly real revolutionary solidarity and support. Your participation and support at this event, as well as your continuing awareness of and support for political prisoners held by the u.s. government, is a solid act of solidarity and important to us behind the walls.
As u.s. imperialism reaches and prepares for more and new wars, particularly in Syria, while cops shoot and murder people of color and others daily, it is important that we continue to resist on all levels. As you talk, work and struggle, keep us class war prisoners, political prisoners in mind too. For more direct information on and from political prisoners, check out www.4strugglemag.org. Have a great event and remember— Freedom Is A Constant Struggle!!
Jaan Laaman (10372-016) U.S. Penitentiary Tucson P.O. Box 24550 Tucson, AZ 85734
Telling Some Truth, but Pushing a Myth-Notes on Ta-Nehisi Coates
Since last summer, when his book Between the World and Me was released, black commentator and ideologue Ta-Nehisi Coates has been fawned over by the bourgeois liberal and not-so-liberal press. The book, which is written in the form of a letter to his son, is nominally a memoir on being black in racist America. Coates has since won a MacArthur “genius grant” and the 2015 National Book Award for nonfiction. A.O. Scott of the New YorkTimes called the book “essential, like water or air,” and Bijan Stephen of The New Republic called it “precisely the document this country needs right now.” The book has been a New York Times best seller since it came out, and it made every major newspaper’s list of the top ten books of the year.
The popularity of Coates’s book intersects the end of the presidency of Barack Obama. Liberal commentators will make much ado about the first black president’s “legacy.” For the racist rulers of America, Obama’s election gave a much-needed facelift for U.S. imperialism. The image of a black man in the highest office of the land briefly provided a thin gloss on murderous capitalist class rule. Under Obama’s reign, there have been countless more victims of U.S. imperialist plunder and torture abroad. Meanwhile, conditions of life for black people—from joblessness and mass incarceration to segregated education and housing—have only deteriorated in this so-called democracy, a democracy for the rich. The last two years have also witnessed Black Lives Matter protests and other expressions of justified outrage in the streets over unrelenting racist cop terror. Yet, occurring in a long period without significant social and class struggle, such anger is coupled with little hope that anything fundamentally different from the situation in racist capitalist America today can ever exist.
Cue Coates’s book, which is perceived by many black and white petty-bourgeois liberal youth as “radical” simply because it acknowledges that racial oppression in America is real and structural, and that it victimizes even the economically better-off black elite (of which Coates is now a part). He also counters the pernicious “blame the victim” and “personal responsibility” rhetoric, which is preached by Obama (and Democrat Bill Clinton before him) to blame black people for their own oppression—all in the service of gutting social services and attacking the poor.
But Coates is an apologist for the racist capitalist system. In early 2008, he began writing for the moderate, centrist Atlantic. At that time, Coates was a defender, occasional tepid critic and general champion of the newly elected Obama, who was pushing the myth of a “post-racial” America. In May 2011, Coates wrote an article comparing Wall Street Democrat Obama to intransigent fighter for black freedom Malcolm X, titled “The Legacy of Malcolm X.” Its punchline was: “Why his vision lives on in Barack Obama.” That’s quite a distortion, but it’s hardly the first time Malcolm X’s name has been misused in the service of Democratic Party liberalism. Although not a Marxist, the real Malcolm X denounced the Democratic Party and exposed the con game of American “democracy.” He said, “A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat in disguise.” He understood that the U.S. government and its representatives, Democrats as well as Republicans, were deadly enemies of black freedom. Malcolm was hated and feared by the capitalist rulers for telling the truth about racist America. Coates, on the other hand, is loved by the liberal elements of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie because he pushes illusions in the same system of “democracy” that Malcolm X detested.
Coates’s book tells some truths about American history in order to push a myth. Referring to racist cop killings, he writes, “The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said it was imposed by a repressive minority.” Coates promotes the falsehood that the capitalist exploiters and white workers and poor are united in a “syndicate” called “white America” that is “arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control” black bodies. He further argues that, from the time of slavery to the present, the white population as a whole has materially benefited. He cynically writes that white people reside in “perfect houses with nice lawns,” living a dream that “smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake,” and that these “dreamers” maintain this suburban dream on the basis of denying that it comes from black oppression.
Class divisions in society do not figure in Coates’s book, and he has nothing to offer black workers. Coates quotes the infamous 19th-century apostle of slavery and white supremacy John C. Calhoun: “‘The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black.’... ‘And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals’.” Coates continues, in his own words, “And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality.” But the lie that white workers and white capitalists are “equals” and have more in common than black and white workers do is the historic lie the American capitalist rulers have used to keep the working class and oppressed divided. Promoting this lie is what puts Coates in the ideological good graces of the bourgeoisie, the tiny repressive minority class that clearly benefits and is raking in the profits.
In his writings over the past year, Coates claims he has been “radicalized,” i.e., that he no longer believes in the great progress for black people that he once attributed to Obama’s election. His book argues that nothing will change until the white “majoritarians” who collectively run American democracy wake up and realize the real truth of history. He tells his son at the conclusion of the book: “But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.” Such a despairing and cynical worldview can only lead guilty white liberal youth to inspect their navels while any potential for integrated struggle against racist oppression goes to its deathbed.
Coates got broad recognition for an article with the same theme in the June 2014 Atlantic titled “The Case for Reparations.” In that piece, he argues for “a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt,” and continues, “Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.” Echoing religious claptrap about original sin, Coates views white supremacy as an inherent flaw of humanity.
Coates is not historically unique in laying the responsibility for black oppression on the white population as a whole, whether desperately poor or in penthouse offices at JPMorgan Chase, nor in ascribing the source of the problem to ideas and “flaws” of human nature. As veteran American Trotskyist Richard Fraser laid out in 1953:
“Karl Marx proved conclusively, however, that it was not greed but property relations which make it possible for exploitation to exist. When applied to the Negro question, the theory of morality means that the root of the problem of discrimination and white supremacy is prejudice. This is the reigning theory of American liberalism and is the means by which the capitalists throw the responsibility for the Jim Crow system upon the population as a whole. If people weren’t prejudiced there would be no Negro problem. This contention is fundamentally false.”
— Richard S. Fraser, “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” (November 1953), printed in “In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, 1990
Coates’s pushing of white collective guilt conceals the fact that the oppression of black people as a race-color caste has a material basis. Black oppression is integral to the system of American capitalism, which was built on chattel slavery. It persists because it is a key prop for capitalist rule and profits. Full social, economic and political equality for black people cannot be achieved short of getting rid of capitalism through socialist revolution. The forcible segregation of the vast majority of black people at the bottom serves to divide the working class and to suppress wages for black, white and immigrant workers alike. The joining of the fight for black freedom to the struggle against all exploitation is the Achilles’ heel of the American capitalist behemoth.
We do not advocate begging the bourgeois state for reparations, a ridiculous proposition in a society where so many black people are denied jobs, not to mention welfare. And what of the millions of other victims of American capitalism: Native Americans, immigrants and, for that matter, poor and working-class whites? As black reformist left academic Adolph Reed argued against Coates in a January 21 interview with Doug Henwood on KPFA radio: “I can imagine going to talk to a long displaced steel worker in Western Pennsylvania who’s fretting now about further increase in economic insecurity.... And you’re going to explain to him or her that because of slavery they’ve got to be on the giving end of some transfer payments that will go to recompense blacks for harms done in the past.” What is necessary is hard class and social struggle to link the fight for black rights with the struggle for decent jobs, quality integrated housing, education and health care for all.
The only road to “reparations” for the huge injustices of slavery and exploitation is to end the capitalist system that maintains black oppression today and put the resources of U.S. society in the hands of the working class and in the service of the oppressed. Those genuinely seeking a strategy to end racial oppression must look to the working class, which stands as the one racially integrated and powerful force that can transform this society. We seek to win white, Latino and other minority workers to the understanding that fighting for black freedom is the key to winning their own liberation from the common enemy, the capitalist exploiters. As Karl Marx stated shortly after the Civil War, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”
Contrary to Coates, who argues that black people have no power to change society, black workers form a strategic part of the proletariat and are the most unionized section of the working class. They form an organic link to the downtrodden ghetto masses, who are valuable potential allies in the class struggle against the capitalist rulers. Our outlook is one of building a 70 percent black, Hispanic and other minority Bolshevik party. Class-conscious black workers, armed with a revolutionary Marxist program, can play a central role in building such a party, leading white workers, even backward ones, in battles against the capitalist class with the aim of workers rule. This is the only way to overcome centuries of racial oppression and open the road to the assimilation of black people into an egalitarian socialist society.
