*****From Veterans For Peace In Massachusetts-Stop The Damn Endless Wars-Revelations

*****From Veterans For Peace In Massachusetts-Stop The Damn Endless Wars-Revelations

What VFP Stands For - 

 

 

 

 

 

Revelations-From The Sam Eaton-Ralph Morris Series

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Ralph Morris had always considered himself a straight-up guy. Straight up when he dealt with customers in his high-precision electrical shop in Troy, New York inherited from his father after he retired before he himself recently retired and turned it over to his youngest son, James, who would bring the operation into the 21^st century with the high tech equipment precision electrical work needs nowadays. Straight up when he confronted the trials and tribulations of parenthood and told the kids that due to his political obligations (of which more in a minute) he would be away and perhaps seem somewhat pre-occupied at times he would answer any questions they had about anything as best he could (and the kids in turn when characterizing their father to me, told me that he was hard-working, distant but had been straight up with them although those sentiments said in a wistful, wondering, wishing more manner like there was something missing in the whole exchange and Ralph agreed when I mentioned that feeling to him that I was probably right but that he did the best he could). Straight up after sowing his wild oats along with Sam Eaton, Pete Markin, Frankie Riley and a bunch of other guys from the working class corners who dived into that 1960s counter-cultural moment and hit the roads, for a short time after the stress of eighteen months in the bush in Vietnam. Meaning sleeping with any young woman who would have him in those care-free days when we were all experimenting with new ways to deal with that fretting sexual issue and getting only slightly less confused that when we got all that god-awful and usually wrong information in the streets where most of us, for good or evil learned to separate our Ps and Qs. After which he promised his high school sweetheart, Lara Peters, who had waited for him to settle down to be her forever man. And straight up with what concerns us here his attitude toward his military service in the Army during the height of the Vietnam War where he did his time, did not cause waves while in the service but raised, and is still raising seven kinds of holy hell, once he became totally disillusioned with the war, with the military brass and with the American government (no “our government” his way of saying it not mine) who did nothing but make thoughtless animals out of him and his buddies.             

Giving this “straight up” character business is important here because Ralph several years ago along with Sam Eaton, a non-Vietnam veteran having been exempted from military duty due to being the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after his ne’er-do-well father died of a massive heart attack in 1965, joined a peace organization, Veterans For Peace (VFP), in order to work with others doing the same kind of work (Ralph as a  full member, Sam an associate member in the way membership works in that organization although both have full right to participate and discuss the aims and projects going forward) once they decided to push hard against the endless wars of the American government (both Ralph and Sam’s way of putting the matter). Without going into great detail Sam and Ralph had met down in Washington, D.C. on May Day 1971 when they with their respective groups (Sam with a radical collective from Cambridge and Ralph with Vietnam Veterans Against the War) attempted to as the slogan went-“shut down the government if it did not shut down the war.” Unfortunately they failed but the several days they spent together in detention in RFK Stadium then being used as the main detention area cemented a life-time friendship, and a life-time commitment to work for peace. (Sam’s impetus the loss of his best corner boy high school friend, Jeff Mullins, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in 1968 who begged him to tell everybody what was really going on with war if he did not make it back to tell them himself.)        

That brings us to the Ralph straight up part. He and Sam had worked closely with or been member of for several years in the 1970s VVAW and other organizations to promote peace. But as the decade ended and the energy of the 1960s faded and ebbed they like many others went on with their lives, build up their businesses, had their families to consider and generally prospered. Oh sure, when warm bodies were needed for this or that good old cause they were there but until the fall of 2002 their actions were helter-skelter and of an ad hoc nature. Patch work they called it. Of course the hell-broth of the senseless, futile and about six other negative descriptions of that 2003 Iraq war disaster, disaster not so much for the American government (Sam and Ralph’s now familiar term) as for the Iraqi people and others under the cross-fires of the American military juggernaut (my term). So they, having fewer family and work responsibilities were getting the old time anti-war “religion” fires stoked in their brains once again to give one more big push against the machine before they passed on. They started working with VFP in various marches, vigils, civil disobedience actions and whatever other projects the organization was about (more recently the case of getting a presidential pardon and freedom for the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle –blower soldier Chelsea Manning sentenced to a thirty-five year sentence at Fort Leavenworth for telling the truth about American atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan). Did that for a couple of years before they joined. And here is really where that straight up business comes into play. See they both had been around peace organizations enough to know that membership means certain obligation beyond paying dues and reading whatever materials an organization puts out-they did not want to be, had never been mere “paper members” So after that couple of years of working with VFP in about 2008 they joined up, joined up and have been active members ever since.        

Now that would be neither here nor there but Ralph had recently been thinking about stepping up his commitment even further by running for the Executive Committee of his local Mohawk Valley  chapter, the Kenny Johnson Chapter. (Sam as an associate member of his local chapter, the James Jencks Brigade is precluded as a non-veterans from holding such offices the only distinction between the two types of membership.) He ran and won a seat on the committee. But straight up again since he was committed to helping lead the organization locally and perhaps take another step up at some point he decided this year to go to the National Convention in San Diego (the geographic location of that site a definitive draw) and learn more about the overall workings of the organization and those most dedicated to its success.

So Ralph went and immersed himself in the details of what is going on with the organization. More importantly he got to hear the details of how guys (and it is mostly guys reflecting the origins of the organization in 1985 a time when women were not encouraged to go into the service), mostly guys from his Vietnam War generation as the older World War II and Korea vets pass on and the Iraq and Afghan war vets are still finding their “voice” came to join the organization. What amazed him was how many of the stories centered on various objections that his fellow members had developed while in whatever branch of the military they were in. See Ralph had kept his “nose clean” despite his growing disenchantment with the war while serving his eighteen months in country. He had been by no means a gung-ho soldier although he had imbibed all the social and political attitudes of his working class background that he had been exposed to concerning doing service, fighting evil commies and crushing anything that got in the way of the American government. He certainly was not a model soldier either but he went along, got along by getting along. These other guys didn’t.

One story stood out not because it was all that unusual in the organization but because Ralph had never run up against anything like it during his time of service from 1967-1970. Not in basic training AIT, not in Vietnam although he had heard stuff about disaffected soldiers toward the end of his enlistment. This guy, Frank Jefferson, he had met at one of the workshops on military resisters had told Ralph when he asked that he had served a year in an Army stockade for refusing to wear the uniform, refusing to do Army work of any kind. At least voluntarily. The rough details of Frank’s story went like this. He had been drafted in late 1968 and was inducted into the Army in early 1969 having had no particular reason not to go in since while he was vaguely anti-war like most college students he was not a conscientious objector (and still doesn’t since he believes wars of national liberation and the like are just and supportable, especially those who are facing down the barrel of American imperialism, was not interested in going to jail like some guys, some draft resisters, from his generation who refused to be inducted an did not even think about the option of Canada or some such exile. Moreover the ethos of his town, his family, his whole social circle was not one that would have welcomed resistance, would not have been understood as a sincere if different way of looking at the world. Add to that two guys had been killed in Vietnam from his neighborhood and the social pressure to conform was too great to buck even if he had had stronger convictions then. 

Three days, maybe less after Frank was deposited at Fort Jackson in South Carolina in January, 1969 for basic training he knew he had made a great mistake, had had stronger anti-war feelings, maybe better anti-military feelings than he suspected and was heading for a fall. This was a period when draftees, those fewer and fewer men who were allowing themselves to be drafted, were being channeled toward the infantry, the “grunts,” the cannon-fodder (words he learned later but not known as he came in) and that was his fate. He was trained as an 11 Bravo, killer soldier. Eventually he got orders to report to Fort Lewis in Washington for transport to Vietnam. On a short leave before he was requested to report Frank went back to Cambridge where he grew up and checked in with the Quakers which somebody had told him to do if he was going to challenge his fate in any way. The counsellor there advised him to put in a CO application at Fort Devens nearby. He did so, was turned down because as a Catholic objector he did not qualify under the doctrine of that church. (And he still held to his “just war” position mentioned above). He tried to appeal that decision through military then civilian channels with help from a lawyer provided by the Quakers (really their American Friends Service Committee) although that was dicey at best. Then, despite some counsel against such actions Frank had an epiphany, a day of reckoning, a day when he decided that enough was enough and showed up at parade field for the Monday morning report in civilian clothes carrying a “Bring The Troops Home” sign. Pandemonium ensued, he was man-handled by two beefy lifer-sergeants and was thrown in the stockade. Eventually he was tried and sentenced to six month under a special court-martial for disobeying orders which he served. He got out after during that stretch and continued to refuse to wear the uniform or do work. So back to the stockade and re-trial getting another six months, again for disobeying lawful orders. Fortunately that civilian lawyer had brought the CO denial case to the Federal Court in Boston on a writ of habeas corpus and the judge ruled that the Army had acted wrongly in denying the application. A few weeks later he was released. Frank said otherwise he still might forty plus years later be doing yet another six month sentence. So that was his story and there were probably others like that during that turbulent time when the Army was near mutiny.

Ralph said to himself after hearing the Jefferson story, yeah, these are the brethren I can work with, guys like Jefferson really won’t fold under pressure. Yeah, that’s right.           

*Films To While the Class Struggle By- What Is The Left?- “Guerilla: The Taking Of Patty Hearst”

Click on the title to link to the first part of a "YouTube" film clip of "Guerilla: The Taking Of Patty Hearst".

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin

DVD Review

Guerilla: The Taking Of Patty Hearst, Patty Hearst, Cinque, Bill and Emily Harris and other members of the SLA, directed by Robert Stone, 2004

Some films reviewed in this space are offered with the idea that viewing them will given the reader, especially the younger reader or those who are not familiar with the tumultuous events of the period, a fairly positive sense of what it was like to live through the turbulent 1960s and the early 1970s, the high water mark for the last time that we had the “monster” of American imperialism on the run or so we thought. A prime example of that type of review was one that I did a while back on the Black Panthers. Another more recent one was the animated/ documentary film footage provided in “Chicago 10”. Other film reviews are offered to be more thought-provoking or just plain provocative. The film under review, "Guerilla: The Taking Of Patty Hearst", is of the latter type.

This film does a good job of presenting the actual events around the kidnapping of the Hearst newspaper heiress, Patty Hearst, by the upstart and then unknown Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in the waning days of the militant leftist movement after the practical (in American terms) withdrawal from Vietnam War, through archival film footage, interviews and commenting by surviving members of the organization, reporters who covered the event, officials who were involved in the investigation and others with something to say about the matter. The startling, and perhaps sometimes bizarre train of events is well documented: the inexplicable murder of the Oakland Superintendent Marcus Foster; the kidnapping of UC/Berkeley college student Hearst; the ransom demand of food for the hungry of Oakland in exchange for her release that in turn ran amok; the abrupt change in the case with the apparent adaptive conversion by Hearst to the SLA cause; a serious of robberies including one in which a teller was killed; the massive, seemingly never-ending, on-going hunt for the SLA in the aftermath of that action: the widely viewed 'real time' police assault on an SLA “safe-house” that netted the leader, Cinque: the subsequent off-handed capture of new leaders Bill and Emily Harris and Patty Hearst; and, the subsequent trials, including Patty’s commutation of sentence. All in all, if you want a refresher course on the case it is all there for you.

However, above I characterized this as a thought-provoking film, and for my purposes that means what are the lessons to be learned from the experience, if any. I have tried to telegraph that concern by the phrase in the title “What is the Left?” and by the way I presented the story line in the last paragraph. So what is my problem some thirty odd years after the dust has settled on the case, which also preoccupied me at the time as well. Just this. Was the defense of the SLA then a matter of a leftist's duty, an important question to those of us on the left who take such matters seriously.

Among the things that this reviewer stands for, in addition to adherent to the teachings of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky and their progeny can be summed up in the slogan of the old Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW, Wobblies)- “an injury to one, is any injury to all”. I, thus, stand in that tradition, that of the old Communist Party-led International Labor Defense, and of later groups like the one I support today, the Partisan Defense Committee. The premise underlying that slogan is that it is very much in the interest of the international working class and of the left that we defend, and defend vigorously and with all the resources we are able to muster, every individual militant and group that falls under that umbrella. Going back to that period I defended, for example, such groups as the Weatherman (Weatherpeople?) and other guerilla-oriented organizations on the American left, whole-heartedly fought under the banner of the United Front Against Fascism to defend the Black Panthers against the governmental onslaught that they faced, and the brothers and sisters of what became known as the Ohio Seven. I did not defend, nor call for the defense, of the SLA.

Why? None of the leftist groups listed above were exactly popular in the broader population, including the left itself, so that is not the question. The serious question that I faced at that time was this- "Who are these people?" Weathermen I knew their politics and their left lineage, and some sympathizers personally. I knew their political history, where they came from and their foibles. Panthers, after the thaw of their 'go-it-alone' heavily black nationalist period, when whites could again talk to young blacks without having to watch their backs, stayed at the commune that I lived in back in those California days. And were gladly welcome. Believe me I knew who they were and where they came from. I could go on and on about the local collectives, communes, etc. that sprouted up like wheat in those days and that I helped defend.

But as the late Hunter S. Thompson noted toward the end of his drug-crazed saga of weirdness and blow back, “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas”, there was a point in the very late 1960s where one could sense that the victory that seemed so near, and so righteously fought for, was slipping away. I might have held onto the dream a little longer that others, and than I should have but there you have it. And that is the point. Others, who faced that same sense that we had “lost” or that ill-thought out exemplary actions or whatever would turn things around started to get a little crazy. To speak nothing of isolating themselves and staying isolated from the harsh realities of Nixon’s America. Some went to the country or the commune, others dropped away. Still others went back to the ancient tradition of nilihism.

That is the way that I looked at the actions of the SLA. The group had no known history, as a group. When it surfaced it had all the verbiage of anti-imperialism that many students and leftists spouted at the times. Hell, I had a girlfriend then who, in the end, was nothing but a garden-variety pacifist who had the whole lingo down better than I did at the time, a time when I was just turning to Marxism. Hell, in some towns in this country you couldn’t get anywhere on campus, even campaigning for some useless bourgeois candidate on the make without the obligatory “right on” or other gesture signifying the language of “youth nation”.

Moreover, on the senseless killing of the Oakland school superintendent, the Patty Hearst action and subsequent bank robberies seemed well beyond the pale. Especially the logic of kidnapping Patty on the basis of her biological relationship to her family. Left politics cannot work that way. If bourgeois, or their children, get in our way that is one thing, the Hearst kidnapping is another. Nothing was right here. I will not belabor the point but this organization seemed like nothing so much as one of those nihilistic groups that Dostoevsky castigated in the mid-19th century or like the remnants that turned bandit and lumpen after the defeat of the Russian Revolution of 1905. To finish up. Would I help the authorities in their manhunt for the group? Hell, no. Did I defend them, like some others did by hiding them out or raising monies for their defense? No. But let me tell you this. At that time I was not sure that I was right, I was queasy about placing them outside the left. Reviewing this film still makes me feel I made the right decision. But I am still queasy about it. You probably will be too.

Oil And Water Don’t Mix-Right-Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy’s Woman Of The Year

Oil And Water Don’t Mix-Right-Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy’s Woman Of The Year

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell  

Woman Of The Year, starring Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, directed by George Steven, screenplay written by Ring Lardner, Junior and friends so it has a great pedigree, 1942

Take a sports guy, Sam, you know an average newspaper sportswriter who spends plenty of time at games, in gin mills, and in smoky rooms playing cards. Take a newspaper reporter, same newspaper as the sports scribe, Tess, an international correspondent who is clueless about games but who has cache with FDR, Churchill and the movers and shakers of the world, the big 1940s world which means a world at war or getting ready for war. No way would they mix, right. No way would they light up the heavens with their passion. Well you would be wrong, wrong if you were discussing the film under review, Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy’s Woman Of The Year, although until the end it was a close thing, a very close thing.    

Naturally Sam and Tess, coming as they did from two different worlds had to have their pre-nuptial clash of civilizations before the light of love bit them. But as the film moved on it was inevitable that these two would wind up in bed together, although that too was a close thing (a nice touch while they were circling each other was Sam’s NOT taking advantage of Tess when she was in a drunken amorous state-cinematic conventions times have changed since then mostly). So they got married on the fly and lived happily ever after. Well, not quite, see that was where the battle royal really began. Sam did his sports thing, and Tess well Tess did her “woman of the year” worthy thing. But that was not going to wash with Sam who was kind of old-fashioned although ready to listen to reason when it came to a compromise with his spirited companion. But things got pretty bad as they progressed along in their marriage. Eventually Sam took off figuring, probably rightly, that he had made a mistake in going into that good night different world. Then Tess, seeing Sam was serious about his concerns and seriously gone from her bed, had an epiphany when her long-widowed father and her long in love with her father aunt tied the knot. With new resolve Tess decided she would be the wife, the pleasant housewife she thought Sam wanted. While everybody will give her an A for effort even seventy years later, even Sam, she was out of her depth in a kitchen in a very funny send-up scene trying to perform her domestic duties. In any case even seventy years later she should never be without the services of a cook, a good one. So Sam and milady Tess reunited and decided to let what would happen, happen. Oh yeah, oil and water do mix-at the movies. A classic film.       

*****In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style

*****In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style

From The Pen Of Josh Breslin 

 

 

 

Listen above to a YouTube film clip of a classic Song-Catcher-type song from deep in the mountains, Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. A song-catcher is an old devise, a mythological devise for taking the sound of nature, the wind coming down the mountains, the rustle of the tree, the crack a twig bent in the river, the river follow itself and making an elixir for the ears, simple stuff if you are brave enough to try your luck.  According to my sources Cecil Sharpe, a British musicologist looking for roots in the manner of Francis Child with his ballads in the 1850s, Charles Seeger, and maybe his son Peter too, in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Lomaxes, father and son, in the 1930s and 1940s)"discovered" the song in 1916 in the deep back hills and hollows of rural Kentucky. (I refuse to buy into that “hollas” business that folk-singers back in the early 1960s, guys and gals some of who went to Harvard and other elite schools and who would be hard-pressed to pin-point say legendary Harlan County down in Appalachia, down in the raw coal mining country of Eastern Kentucky far away from Derby dreams, mint juleps and ladies' broad-brimmed hats, of story and song insisted on pronouncing and writing the word hollows to show their one-ness with the roots, the root music of the desperately poor and uneducated. So hollows.)     

Of course my first connection to the song had nothing to do with the mountains, or mountain origins, certainly with not the wistful or sorrowful end of the love spectrum about false true lovers taking in the poor lass who now seeks revenge if only through the lament implied in the lyrics, although  even then I had been through that experience, more than once I am sorry to say. Or so I though at the time. I had heard the song the first time long ago in my ill-spent 1960s youth listening on my transistor radio up in my room in Olde Saco where I grew up to a late Sunday night folk radio show on WBZ from down in Boston that I could pick up at that hour hosted by Dick Summer (who is now featured on the Tom Rush documentary No Regrets about Tom’s life in the early 1960s Boston folk scene while at Harvard hustling around like mad trying to get a record produced to ride the folk minute wave just forming and who, by the way, was not a guy who said or wrote "hollas," okay ). That night I heard the gravelly-voiced late folksinger Dave Van Ronk singing his version of the old song like some latter-day Jehovah or Old Testament prophet something that I have mentioned elsewhere he probably secretly would have been proud to acknowledge. (Secretly since then he was some kind of high octane Marxist/Trotskyist/Socialist firebrand in his off-stage hours and hence a practicing atheist.) His version of the song quite a bit different from the Maybelle Carter effort here. I'll say.

All this as prelude to a question that had haunted me for a long time, the question of why I, a child of rock and roll, you know Bill Haley, La Verne Baker, Wanda Jackson, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and the like had been drawn to, and am still drawn to the music of the mountains, the music of the hills and hollows, mostly, of Appalachia. You know it took a long time for me to figure out why I was drawn, seemingly out of nowhere, to the mountain music most famously brought to public, Northern public, attention by the likes of the Carter Family, Jimmy Rodgers, The Seegers and the Lomaxes back a couple of generations ago.

The Carter Family hard out of Clinch Mountain down in Virginia someplace famously arrived on the mountain stage via a record contract in Bristol, Tennessee in the days when fledgling radio and record companies were looking for music, authentic American music, to fill the air and their catalogs. Fill in what amounted to niche music since the radio’s range back then was mostly local and if you wanted to sell soap, perfume, laundry detergent, coffee, flour on the air then you had to play what the audience would listen to and then go out and buy the advertiser’s products once they, the great unwashed mass audience, were filled into how wonderful they smelled, tasted, or felt after consuming the sponsors' products. The Seegers and Lomaxes and a host of others, mainly agents of the record companies looking to bring in new talent, went out into the sweated dusty fields sweaty handkerchiefs in hand to talk to some guy who they had heard played the Saturday night juke joints, went out to the Saturday night red barn dance with that lonesome fiddle player bringing on the mist before dawn sweeping down from the hills, went out to the Sunday morning praise Jehovah gathered church brethren to seek out that brother who jammed so well at that juke joint or red barn dance now repentant if not sober, went out to the juke joint themselves if they could stand Willie Jack’s freshly brewed liquor, un-bonded of course since about 1789, went down to the mountain general store to check with Mister Miller and grab whatever, or whoever was available who could rub two bones together or make the rosin fly, maybe sitting right there in front of the store. Some of it pretty remarkable filled with fiddles, banjos and mandolins.

But back to the answer to my haunting question. The thing was simplicity itself. See my father, Prescott, hailed (nice word, right) from Kentucky, Hazard, Kentucky, tucked down in the mountains near the Ohio River, long noted in song and legend as hard coal country. When World War II came along he left to join the Marines to get the hell out of there, get out of a short, nasty, brutish life as a coalminer, already having worked the coal from age thirteen, as had a few of his older brothers and his father and grandfather. During his tour of duty after having fought and bled a little in his share of the Pacific War against the Japanese before he was demobilized he had been stationed for a short while at the Portsmouth Naval Base. During that stay he attended like a lot of lonely soldiers, sailors and Marines who had been overseas a USO dance held in Portland where he met my mother who had grown up in deep French-Canadian Olde Saco. Needless to say he stayed in the North, for better or worse, working the mills in Olde Saco until they closed or headed south for cheaper labor in the late 1950s and then worked at whatever jobs he could find. (Ironically those moves south for cheaper labor were not that far from his growing up home although when asked by the bosses if he wanted move down there he gave them an emphatic “no,” and despite some very hard times later when there wasn't much work and hence much to eat he never regretted his decision at least in public to this wife and kids)

All during my childhood though along with that popular music, you know the big band sounds and the romantic and forlorn ballads that got many mothers and fathers through the war mountain music, although I would not have called it that then filtered in the background on the family living room record player and the mother’s helper kitchen radio.

But here is the real “discovery,” a discovery that could only be disclosed by my parents. Early on in their marriage they had tried to go back to Hazard to see if they could make a go of it there. This was after my older brother Prescott, Junior was born and while my mother was carrying me. Apparently they stayed for several months before they left to go back to Olde Saco before I was born since I was born in Portland General Hospital. So see that damn mountain music and those sainted hills and hollows were in my DNA, was just harking to me when I got the bug. Funny, isn’t it.            

[Sometimes life floors you though, comes at you not straight like the book, the good book everybody keeps touting and fairness dictates but through a third party, through some messenger for good or ill, and you might not even be aware of how you got that sings-song in your head. Wondering how you got that sings-song in your head and why a certain song or set of songs “speaks” to you despite every fiber of your being clamoring for you to go the other way. Some things, some cloud puff things maybe going back to before you think you could remember like your awestruck father in way over his head with three small close together boys, no serious job prospects, little education, maybe, maybe not getting some advantage from the G.I. Bill that was supposed lift all veteran boats, all veterans of the bloody atolls and islands, hell, one time savagely fighting over a coral reef against the Japanese occupiers if you can believe that, who dutifully and honorably served the flag singing some misbegotten melody. A melody learned in his childhood down among the hills and hollows, down where the threads of the old country, old country being British Isles and places like that. The stuff collected in Child ballads back then in the 1850s that got bastardized by ten thousand local players who added their own touches and who no longer used the song for its original purpose red barn dance singers when guys like Buell or Hobart added their take on what they thought the words meant and passed that on to kindred and the gens. The norm of the oral tradition of the folk so don’t get nervous unless there had been some infringement of the copyright laws, not likely.  

Passed on too that sorrowful sense of life of people who stayed sedentary too long, too long on Clinch Mountain or Black Mountain or Missionary Mountain long after the land ran out and he, that benighted father of us all, in his turn sang it as a lullaby to his boys. And the boys’ ears perked up to that song, that song of mountain sadness about lost blue-eyed boys, about forsaken loves when the next best thing came along, about spurned brides resting fretfully under the great oak, about love that had no place to go because the parties were too proud to step back for a moment, about the hills of home, lost innocence, you name it, and although he/they could not name it that sadness stuck.

Stuck there not to bear fruit for decades and then one night somebody told one of the boys a story, told it true as far as he knew about that father’s song, about how his father had worked the Ohio River singing and cavorting with the women, how he bore the title of “the Sheik” in remembrance of those black locks and those fierce charcoal black eyes that pierced a woman’s heart. So, yes, Buell and Hobart, and the great god Jehovah come Sunday morning preaching time did their work, did it just fine and the sons finally knew that that long ago song had a deeper meaning than they could ever have imagined.]         

   

COME ALL YE FAIR AND TENDER LADIES
(A.P. Carter)

The Carter Family - 1932

Come all ye fair and tender ladies

Take warning how you court young men

They're like a bright star on a cloudy morning

They will first appear and then they're gone

They'll tell to you some loving story

To make you think that they love you true

Straightway they'll go and court some other

Oh that's the love that they have for you

Do you remember our days of courting

When your head lay upon my breast

You could make me believe with the falling of your arm

That the sun rose in the West

I wish I were some little sparrow

And I had wings and I could fly

I would fly away to my false true lover

And while he'll talk I would sit and cry

But I am not some little sparrow

I have no wings nor can I fly

So I'll sit down here in grief and sorrow

And try to pass my troubles by

I wish I had known before I courted

That love had been so hard to gain

I'd of locked my heart in a box of golden

And fastened it down with a silver chain

Young men never cast your eye on beauty

For beauty is a thing that will decay

For the prettiest flowers that grow in the garden

How soon they'll wither, will wither and fade away

******

ALTERNATE VERSION:

Come all ye fair and tender ladies

Take warning how you court young men

They're like a star on summer morning

They first appear and then they're gone

They'll tell to you some loving story

And make you think they love you so well

Then away they'll go and court some other

And leave you there in grief to dwell

I wish I was on some tall mountain

Where the ivy rocks are black as ink

I'd write a letter to my lost true lover

Whose cheeks are like the morning pink

For love is handsome, love is charming

And love is pretty while it's new

But love grows cold as love grows old

And fades away like the mornin' dew

And fades away like the mornin' dew

Victory to the Junior Doctors!-Britain’s National Health Service on the Chopping Block

Workers Vanguard No. 1084	26 February 2016

Victory to the Junior Doctors!-Britain’s National Health Service on the Chopping Block

Quality Health Care for All, Free at the Point of Service!

 

LONDON, February 18—Junior-ranking doctors at the National Health Service (NHS) in England are resisting government attacks on their wages and working conditions. The enormous popularity of their struggle speaks to the discontent and frustration among Britain’s working people and minorities. Fully two-thirds of those surveyed supported the 24-hour strikes staged by junior doctors in January and February. Millions lust to see that public schoolboy smirk wiped from the face of Conservative prime minister David Cameron. [Britain’s “public” schools are elite private schools.] Since the Tory [Conservative] government’s re-election last May, an incessant flood of attacks has targeted everything from elementary trade union rights to council [public] housing to education. Now the Cameron government is intent on smashing its boot into what remains of the nationalised health system. That most revered—and rightly so—of the gains of Britain’s working people in the past century has already been crippled by decades of attacks under both Labour and Tory governments.

Beginning in 2012, the previous Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government under Cameron moved to tear up the junior doctors’ contract under the pretext of improving weekend hospital coverage and providing 24/7 care. Under the new contract the government unveiled last summer, these doctors would no longer receive extra pay for working evenings and daytime Saturday shifts. With a miserly base salary beginning at less than £23,000 [$33,000] per year, these doctors—who may remain “junior” for a decade or more—rely on overtime for much of their income.

While the government has trumpeted its offer of an 11 per cent increase in base salary, it is estimated that the new contract would slash junior doctors’ overall pay by some 26 per cent. Moreover, the end to extra pay for most overtime work would encourage desperate NHS hospitals to impose even longer shifts. There are severe staff shortages across the NHS, and the government has no plans for more hiring. Instead, they propose to work doctors and other staff into the ground. “Tired Doctors Make Mistakes,” reads a common junior doctors’ placard that resonates with all those who rely on their care.

On 11 February, the morning after the second 24-hour walkout, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt detonated his “nuclear option,” unilaterally imposing the new contract. With the arrogance and ham-fistedness characteristic of this government, Hunt touted the “support” of 20 NHS executives, many of whom immediately denied any advance knowledge of or agreement with his move. An online petition demanding that Parliament consider a motion of no confidence in the health secretary garnered more than 100,000 signatures in one day. Even Tory MPs [Members of Parliament] voiced consternation over the government’s handling of the issue. Dr. Hannah Mitchell, the daughter of a sitting Tory MP, described Hunt as “either dishonest or stupid” in a letter to the Guardian (12 February).

Vowing to consider further strike action, a spokesman for the British Medical Association (BMA), which represents the doctors, declared of the government: “If it succeeds with its bullying approach of imposing a contract on junior doctors that has been roundly rejected by the profession it will no doubt seek to do the same for other NHS staff.” No doubt, indeed. But a few 24-hour walkouts by junior doctors, who constitute a handful of the more than one million NHS employees, cannot by themselves reverse the capitalist government’s vicious onslaught on the NHS. Meanwhile, many demoralised junior doctors are talking of leaving medicine altogether, or moving to Wales or Scotland (which have different contracts) or abroad.

Three of the country’s biggest unions—Unite, Unison and the GMB—which represent hundreds of thousands of NHS workers, have the clout to bring the NHS, and much of Britain’s economy, to a standstill. But the union tops have not lifted a finger to mobilise their members in solidarity with the junior doctors. Their response to Hunt’s provocation was worse than pathetic. Unison general secretary Dave Prentis bemoaned the fact that unions will lose “faith” in the government’s intentions “if ministers just choose to impose what they want.” The Unite union, headed by Len McCluskey, offered to look “into the legal consequences of imposition” and, predicting a “mass exodus” from the NHS, to “assist junior doctors in the weeks and months to come as their employment circumstances change.”

The government’s vendetta against the junior doctors—and their determined resistance—have placed the future of the NHS at centre stage. A new study by the King’s Fund think tank states, “This is shaping up to be a make or break year for the NHS” (Guardian, 18 February). It could not be clearer that piecemeal privatisation and massive underfunding are wrecking the health service. The Tories are determined to escalate that process until nothing remains of the NHS but a logo. Scarcely a day goes by without some newly reported catastrophe—from the failure to meet the most minimal targets for accident and emergency care to a mental health system that can leave children waiting more than four months for an appointment.

A solid strike throughout the healthcare system—private as well as public—in defence of the junior doctors and of free medical care for all would electrify the proletariat and galvanise the many millions who are fed up with having their housing, healthcare, education and livelihoods hang by a thread. It is necessary to fight for a new leadership of the unions—one which does not sacrifice its members’ wages and jobs in a futile attempt to patch up a bankrupt system but instead pursues a class-struggle fight against capitalist misery. Tied to this is the forging of a revolutionary workers party that will champion the cause of all the oppressed.

The War Against the NHS

Following the passage of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, which signalled a fundamental shift towards private-sector healthcare, the Spartacist League/Britain noted:

“For the British bourgeoisie, the NHS presents an unwelcome overhead—not to mention the easy profits privatisation offers the financial speculators in the City. The interest of the capitalist class in the health of the population comes down to maintaining a workforce fit enough to exploit and soldiers to fight their wars and imperialist adventures. In times of social upheaval, the capitalists may shell out enough to placate the population, but they will always attempt to take those concessions back.”

— “Mobilise Union Power to Defend the NHS,” Workers Hammer No. 222, Spring 2013; reprinted in WV No. 1023, 3 May 2013

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and others on the left lionise the postwar Labour government headed by Clement Attlee as “socialist” because of the nationalisations it carried out. Most of these amounted to giant bailouts of bankrupt industries, for which the state assumed direct responsibility after generously compensating the former owners. But the establishment of the NHS in 1948 was a genuine and far-reaching gain. No longer did working-class families have to worry about paying for the doctor to treat a sick child, or to fear for the needless death of a mother due to infection after childbirth. Many received dental care and glasses for the first time in their lives. This reform was not the result of the kind hearts of the British ruling class. Rather, it was a byproduct of their fear of revolution, as the Soviet workers state, albeit bureaucratically degenerated under Stalinist rule, emerged triumphant from World War II and a wave of working-class militancy swept Europe.

So long as capitalist rule remains, even the most profound reform is reversible under the dictates of the profit system. As the postwar peace turned into a Cold War against the Soviet Union, the capitalists’ priorities shifted. Inroads into the NHS began only four years after its founding, as charges for prescriptions and glasses were introduced to help finance Britain’s involvement in the counterrevolutionary U.S.-led war against the North Korean deformed workers state and the insurgent workers and peasants of South Korea.

In 1990, “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher, whose hatred for the Soviet Union was rivalled only by her hatred for the trade unions, introduced an “internal market” into the NHS, planting the seeds of disintegration. A few years later, the New Labour government of Tony Blair vastly expanded the role of “private finance initiatives” (PFIs), supposedly to provide funds for building new hospitals and schools. The NHS trusts, which manage healthcare provision, were gradually transformed into “foundation trusts,” which borrowed on the financial market, entered joint enterprises with private companies and set their own terms of employment. Blair also created the “Extended Choice Network,” allowing handsomely remunerated private centres to treat NHS patients. Then came Cameron’s Health and Social Care Act, which created the clinical commissioning groups that control the lion’s share of the NHS budget, “a gateway for the outflow of billions in NHS funds to private firms,” as we wrote in our 2013 article.

Now the NHS is fragmented into a plethora of different organisations, some public and some private. As Neena Modi, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, noted in an article in the Guardian (9 February), “The private sector is said to have received 70% of contracts awarded over 2013-14, estimated at £20bn of the total NHS budget of £113bn.” Another £10 billion a year goes towards PFI repayments, and administrative costs of the “internal market” swallow up a further £5-10 billion of NHS funds. Among the private firms currently gouging the NHS are Richard Branson’s Virgin operation as well as the Hospital Corporation of America and Optum, a subsidiary of another U.S. healthcare giant, UnitedHealth Group. The CEO of NHS England is in fact a former executive of UnitedHealth.

The quality of care provided by these profit-hungry outfits can be gleaned from the experience of Circle, the pioneer in private sector involvement in the NHS. Last year, Circle pulled out of a £1 billion contract to run Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire after a Care Quality Commission inspection gave the facility an “inadequate” rating. The hospital’s privatisation had been upheld as a model for the whole NHS. Circle was only three years into its ten-year contract.

At 7 per cent, Britain’s healthcare budget is a lower percentage of GDP than that of almost any other West European country. To match the average rate of spending of other European countries, the annual NHS budget would have to rise by £43 billion. Yet the government demands billions in “efficiency” cuts while insisting that NHS trusts will be further penalised if they refuse to implement the new contract for junior doctors.

According to the Guardian (13 February), one in five general practice surgeries [doctor’s offices] in London, covering nearly one million people, may close in the next three years because they cannot find replacements for retiring doctors. Meanwhile, the NHS is short of some 15,000 hospital nurses. Coincidentally, that is just about the number of nurses who would have been recruited from outside Europe in the last few years if tighter immigration controls had not been applied. Now the government is also slashing the domestic supply of new nurses by abolishing the NHS bursaries which currently allow student nurses to pay no university fees [tuition] and to receive means-tested subsidies ranging between £1000 and £4000 a year. To make up for the lack of available nurses, the NHS pays parasitic private agencies to provide contract workers.

Defence of the NHS cannot be divorced from other social questions. It is tied to the fight against all racial, sexual and national discrimination and for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, who are heavily represented in the workforce; for an end to university tuition fees and a full living stipend for all students; for cancellation of the PFI debt and the return of privatised hospitals and other health facilities to the public sector; to shut down the parasitic private agencies.

Instead of the division of the workforce among 13 different unions and professional associations, which sows disunity and is used to justify scabbing and passivity, what is needed is a single union made up of all healthcare workers, including [employment] agency workers—from doctors and nurses to lab technicians and cleaners. Such a union could lead a struggle for a massive infusion of funds into the public health service. This includes the fight to expand education and training and increase hiring, under union control, with special programmes to reach out to minorities and immigrants, so that there would be enough doctors, nurses, technicians and other medical staff to care for the whole population. A revolutionary workers party would fight for the expropriation of the private healthcare, insurance and drug companies and for quality healthcare for all free at the point of use, as part of the struggle for socialist revolution.

Workers Need Revolutionary Leadership

It speaks to the spinelessness of the don’t-rock-the-boat apparatchiks who currently head the trade unions that they have left it to a layer of petty-bourgeois professionals to play a vanguard role in defence of the NHS. The union misleaders are driven by a desire not to defend the workers who pay their salaries but to police the working class and maintain class peace. They hide behind a respectful veneration of the bourgeoisie’s laws (and profits!), avoiding any infringement of the anti-union laws, which proscribe spontaneous or solidarity strike action. The capitalists and City [of London] speculators are certainly not so concerned about flouting the laws that supposedly regulate their activities! The union tops’ obeisance to the capitalist order goes a fair way to explain why working people find themselves in their current, parlous state—saddled with declining incomes and zero-hour contracts [with no guaranteed number of hours], working two or more jobs to make ends meet, etc.

In the absence of union struggle, the capitalists have gorged themselves on huge profits derived from the sweat and blood of the workers they exploit while reducing a large and growing part of the populace to penury. The “bedroom tax” on allegedly unoccupied bedrooms of people on housing benefits penalises especially those who can’t or won’t move out of the homes they’ve lived in for decades, e.g., the elderly and disabled. Now, the government proposes that families with a joint income of more than £30,000 (£40,000 in London) be forced to pay exorbitant market rents for council housing. This means that a London family could be penalised an estimated average of £12,000 per year!

Suicides, the leading cause of death among men aged 15-49, are steadily increasing. The lack of mental health facilities plays a role here. But so, surely, must the fact that many people—young and not-so-young—can no longer afford to set up their own households, that college-leavers are saddled with unbearable debts for much of their working lives, that young workers—and older workers who have been thrown out of work—can never expect a well-paid, full-time job.

Health means more than jabs [shots], pills and surgical knives: It means a decent place to live, plenty of good food to eat, safe working conditions, the promise of a future that is not just instability and despair. The inequities and manifold oppressions in capitalist society have their roots in a system based on production for bourgeois profit rather than for human need. To guarantee not only quality healthcare for all but all the other fundamental requirements of life demands the construction of a planned, collectivised economy in which those who labour rule. The only future that will allow the all-sided development of humanity, no longer haunted by material want, is one based on an enormous leap in the productive capacity of society—a global classless, communist society guided by the principle: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. Advances in science and technology beginning with the Industrial Revolution made it possible for Marx and Engels to envisage such a future; the prospect of deepening immiseration and bloody wars underlines how necessary it is to fight for it.

The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, undermined by decades of Stalinist misrule, was seized on by capitalist ideologues to proclaim that socialism was contrary to human nature. Yet today Jeremy Corbyn, the first Labour leader in decades to speak positively of socialism, enjoys the support of millions of working people in this country who are fed up with how the profiteers have wrecked their lives. However, Corbyn’s “parliamentary socialism” is truly a pipe dream, a contradiction in terms. Parliament is a capitalist institution, a cover for the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It is no more possible to achieve workers rule through Parliament than it is to defend the workers interests against the bosses while adhering to the bosses’ rules.

Workers need a revolutionary vanguard party, based on the teachings of Marx and Engels and on the experience of the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Led by the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, the Revolution demonstrated that it is necessary for the workers to replace the capitalist state with a workers state based on elected workers councils (soviets) in order to open the road to socialism. Although isolated and burdened by the backwardness of an overwhelmingly rural and peasant society and years of economic devastation and social dislocation caused by war and imperialist rampage, the workers state nevertheless used such resources as were available to begin to provide free healthcare and education for all. The Spartacist League is dedicated to building a party of the Bolshevik type, composed of the most conscious and dedicated workers and pro-socialist intellectuals, as part of a reforged Trotskyist Fourth International. The victory of the Fourth International on a global scale will bring about a truly humane epoch.

In Honor Of Women's History Month-From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-How The Bolsheviks Fought For Women's Emancipation

 

In Honor Of Women's History Month-From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-How The Bolsheviks Fought For Women's Emancipation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Honor Of Women's History Month-From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-How The Bolsheviks