An Encore-Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To The Chapel Of Love In Mind

An Encore-Just Before The Sea Change - With The Dixie Cups Going To The Chapel 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 "youth nation" 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 in the 1950s that had them all scared like hell that society was going down in the ditch. No, it was like he 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 out  Gypsy Anne at the Skee game of which he was an expert at.


(For those clueless about Skee, have forgotten or have never spent their illicit youths 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 once you pay your dough, or credit/debit card the way they have the machines worked nowadays, 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 his Gypsy Anne a stuffed animal, a big one, and got a very big long wet kiss for his heroics 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 (and by the way “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 him  they were if approached the right way).  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 his hormones drove his big thoughts, and not for a long while thereafter.

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. Markin, despite a serious larcenous heart which would eventually do him in, read books and newspapers a lot and would go on and on about the jail-break 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 a nine o’clock close 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 for 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 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 were 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 Markin 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 that had passed for rock(what high priest Markin called something like the “musical counter-revolution” but he was always putting stuff in political bull form like that). 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 out 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, after they 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 after giving up their "slave" names.)

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 lonely 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 had 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 way out in the streets, in the school boys' and girls' lavs Monday mornings before school when some Ben or Lisa would lie like crazy about their sex bouts weekend, 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 shorter 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 had 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 on your journey though, young travelers, good luck.

 

 

 

 

From The Recent Peace Archives-On The 15th Anniversary Of The Afghan War-Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops!-A Cautionary Tale- Private First Class Jack Dawson’s War

From The Recent Peace Archives-On The 15th Anniversary Of The Afghan War-Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops!-A Cautionary Tale- Private First Class Jack Dawson’s War

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman                                                                       

John Dawson who had been in my class in North Adamsville High School when we graduated back in 1964 is the source for this sketch. John, a Vietnam veteran who saw military service early in that war around the hellhole of Da Nang when the blossom was still on the American adventure there, was proud of his service and also knew that I had done my military service grudgingly a little later period of that war and had been involved after that service with the Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) and later worked with a group called Veterans for Peace (VFP). So we, when we met around town on the few occasions I passed through the old hometown or at a reunion, would argue about those Vietnam times and about then current American military policy. When 9/11 in 2001 happened and the subsequent occupation of Afghanistan and then later with the second Iraq war, the “shock and awe” war, both of which I opposed we had plenty of disagreements.

 

But John also knew that I had done a lot of work with returning veterans, had written several series under the title Brothers Under The Bridge publicizing the plight of those from the Vietnam War who could not adjust to the “real world” and had formed an alternative “community” in the style of the old hobo jungles out in the arroyos, river banks and bridges of Southern California. Knew also that whatever opposition I had to American governmental war policy that my brother-soldiers were not the target of that ire. He had urged his son, called Jack from childhood, to join up after 9/11 when Jack was gung-ho to go get the bastards who did that criminal deed in New York and elsewhere. After Jack finished up his tours of duty in early 2005 and returned state-side for discharge something snapped in him and his world turned upside down.  Jack fell through the cracks and after John had not heard from his son for a couple of years he contacted me through a mutual friend that I was still in contact with to see if I could through my extensive veterans’ contacts find out where he was, whether he was alright, and whether he wanted to come home. I found out what happened to Jack and the end of this sketch will detail what I found out. As with my old series about the Vietnam veterans from my time where I liked to put a piece under a particular sign I will put this one under- Private Jack Dawson’s Private War: 

 

Jack Dawson was angry, angry as hell if he was asked, and he was asked on more than one occasion that, those dirty Arabs, those cutthroat barbarians, those damn sand n----rs, those slimy rug merchants and anything that he could think to call them deserved to be taught a lesson, an American lesson(strangely until the news media started touting the names Al-Qaeda, Taliban, and mujahedeen around he did not think to call them those names although all three were by then reasonably well-known names for those extremist Islamists who were going to make life tough for the new American century). Hell, they had blown up the World Trade Center buildings without blinking an eyelash, were ready to do the same to the White House and probably thinking that the Pentagon would be a sweet ass legitimate target of war and the nerve center for the American war machine had hit that building across the Potomac as well.

Not only was one Jack Dawson angry (everybody called him Jack to distinguish between him and his father John) but he was made of the stuff that required him to personally do something about this latest menace to the peace of the world (like his father had that stuff and who had been an early soldier in Vietnam, not quite at the advisor stage but well before the huge troop build-ups in the mid to late 1960s, who had enlisted when Lyndon Baines Johnson called for troops in order hold back the “red menace,” our generation’s bugaboo). So in the fall of 2001 Jack Dawson dropped out of Northeastern University in Boston where he had been a Co-op student and enlisted in the United States Army.  (That Co-op is a five year work-study program very popular in my day with those working-class kids from places like North Adamsville who could not have swung the tuition without some real work to make ends meet. Jack was a prime example of that for this generation.) Before that decisive event he had tried to rally his friends and relatives, the young ones anyway, to follow his lead and join up as well as millions had done when those “Nips” (his term) blew away Pearl Harbor back in 1941 like his grandfather had told him about when he was just a kid.

Strangely although he harangued the hell out of them, made a nuisance at the Quad just off Huntington Avenue where he would use his bullhorn purchased for the occasion to gather in fellow recruits to the great mission of saving Western Civilization from the heathens, again he was almost totally unsuccessful in his ambitions. ( The Quad a place where students went to eat or chill out and at this campus unlike say Boston University in the old days not a place to be harassed by political salesmen of any kind or a place where anti-war activity fared any better especially in the heated atmosphere after 9/11.)  He did find a guy, a young guy from Wakefield who was thinking of dropping out of the Co-op program, out of school anyway, to join up with the Massachusetts National Guard where he served out his time guarding the Armory in Wakefield every weekend and did monthly duties monitoring traffic patterns in Boston in case emergency evacuations were necessary.

Amid the usual tears that generations of American families have gotten used to when the war drums start beating Jack Dawson left for basic training down at Fort Dix in New Jersey (the same post that his father trained at in the Vietnam times and I did as well) expecting to put fire into whatever recruits he found there to go destroy those who would destroy the innocent of his country, and just the plain innocent at the World Trade buildings. When the now freshly shave-headed Private Jack Dawson wrote his first letter home he made his father laugh a knowing laugh. The guys in his unit were mainly from the ghettos and barrios (he noted in his letter that he would have to avoid the word “n----r” and “spic” that he liberally used at home (learned from father John), the white hillbilly boys from the hills of Kentucky and farm boys from Ohio. The knowing laugh from father John was that those were the same comrades who populated his unit back in the day. What John knew from somewhat bitter experience in Vietnam with many of those same kinds of comrades when the hard fighting began was that the guys who wrote and talked about beating the war drums were not the guys who did the fighting. Private Jack was learning that lesson early on as John pointed out in a return letter. Still father John was proud that Jack would be the fourth generation of Dawsons who served their country when called to arms.

Private Jack went through basic like every other gung-ho physically fit recruit (he of wiry frame, six two, and one hundred and seventy five pounds, and good looking- that last a comment by his father). He learned to fire weapons, take drill, and walk nice long twenty mile walks. But here is where Jack learned the hard realities of war policy when the drums are beating and men are desperately needed to fill the units. Private Jack had missed the initial fighting in Afghanistan since the thing had been a “walkover” against the Taliban who evaporated under the hail of American aerial bombings and firepower on the ground. But the first units were scheduled to rotate out after a year once the occupation forces began the task of training the Afghans to fight for themselves. Jack had signed up with the expectation that he would go to computer school after basic.

Naturally once you decide to sign on the dotted line with “Uncle” you absolutely need to read the fine print since everything (backed up by plenty of court decisions supporting the government when cases have been brought on breach of contract grounds) is conditional. Conditional on the needs of the Army at any given moment. And at that moment the “grunt-hungry” army was in need of boots on the ground and so Private Jack was assigned to Fort Bragg for Advanced Infantry Training (AIT), the “paradise” of grunt-dom. Unhappy with this result since he expected to learn enough computer skills to get a good job after the service instead of wasting a few more years in a Co-op program to do the same thing and have overhanging debt for a long time Jack nevertheless dug in and became one of the best soldiers in his unit.

Of course in the world of the “new world order” in the fall of the year 2002 the only place where a grunt’s skills were needed by the American military was humping through the killing fields (some say the poppy killing fields) of a place like Helmut province in Afghanistan  and thus was Jack so ordered. Although he had some trepidations about going into a combat zone half way across the world with guys he trusted but hardly knew  he only needed to look at a photograph of the smoking ashes at Ground Zero to get his blood rising. And so in that fall of 2002 he left America (for the first time although the family had taken short trips to Canada) on the troop transports that were bringing his unit and his brigade to Kabul and then Helmut province. Jack left the States with his belief in his mission, in his country’s mission to stamp out the virus of Islamic craziness (his term), in the virtues that had been produced in country and by his family intact.

There is no need to go into all the gory details of war, of the ways of the Afghan war, of the kicking all of the doors in of some isolated village looking for terrorists who allegedly supported the Taliban on the information of paid informants (who half the time were paying off old time personal grudges on some poor guy whose only crime was not to be smart enough to get to the American paymasters first), of the calling in of American airpower to incinerate some off-hand village where a sniper’s fire might be pinning a platoon down (and on more than one occasion bringing the fire on themselves when some GI misread the coordinates or those friendly Afghan trainees panicked), of blowing of the head of some kid who had at the wrong moment popped his head up from the rocks (later when the field was cleared and the gruesome body discovered that child of about ten was listed as a “terrorist” KIA, in shades of Vietnam time). Nor of the fire fights in the night with real Taliban forces who killed the guy next to you, wounded the guy of the other side, maybe nicked you up too (Private Jack would receive two Purple Hearts from Afghan duty), of coming under attack by raw Afghan recruits who panicked when an ambush went awry, and of actually taking out a few bad guys (who in at least one case was working both sides, the Taliban who protected his poppy fields in exchange for tribute and the Americans for arms to protect his fields that he then sold to whoever had the money). Yeah all the confusions of war, all the modern confusions of wars with unsure aims and unlikely allies. Yeah, too the little acts of kindness when the unit brought in much needed water or other desperately needed materials and in return teaching American GIs how to ride a donkey, and how to celebrate various unknown holidays with feasting and dancing.

Yes, Private First Class Jack saw all that, saw the myriad faces of war in that tour of duty, in that year of living dangerously. Jack came back to the States with his belief in his mission, in his country’s mission to stamp out the virus of Islamic craziness (his term), in the civic virtues that had been produced in this country and by his family intact. Came back for some rest and recreation in the bosom of his family proud to have served and proud that his town recognized his efforts with “Welcome Home, Jack” signs all over the place. Then the other shoe of world politics, of international war strategy moved Afghanistan to the back-burner, made the place an afterthought, moved men and materials out for the new danger, and placed hard-boiled Iraq on the front-burner. And in the year 2004 if you were a grunt in the American Army then if you were not gainfully employed in those Afghan poppy fields then your “young ass” was stepping off the tarmac in the outskirts of Baghdad, I-raq.  And so once again Jack left the States with his belief in his mission, in his country’s mission to stamp out the virus of Islamic craziness (his term), in the civil virtues that had been produced in by country and by his family intact.

And yet again there is no to go into all the gory details of war, of the Iraq. Of playing some James Jones From Here To Eternity World War II civic pride and good old boys story. The wars come and go but the motifs stay. Once again Sergeant Jack had his fill of kicking all of the doors in of some isolated village looking for terrorists who allegedly supported the insurgents on the information of paid informants (they really should form an international union to peddle their wares to the gullible American paymasters who took too much stuff on good faith going back to Vietnam days as well), of yet again calling in American airpower to incinerate some off-hand village where a sniper’s fire might be pinning a platoon down, of yet again blowing some kid’s head off who had at the wrong moment popped his head up from the rocks (and don’t forget the yet again after the field was cleared and the gruesome body was discovered that child of about ten was listed as an “insurgent” KIA, in yet again shades of Vietnam time). Nor of the fire fights in the night with real insurgent forces who killed the guy next to you, wounded the guy of the other side, maybe nicked you up too (Sergeant Jack would receive a Bronze Star in Iraq), of coming under attack by raw Iraq recruits who panicked when an ambush went awry, and of actually taking out a few bad guys, guys who were selling arms to the insurgents provided by the American arms caches ripe for the taking guarded by raw Iraqi recruits.

Yeah all the confusions of war, all the modern confusions of wars with unsure aims and unlikely allies. Yeah too, the little acts of kindness when the unit brought in much needed water or other desperately needed materials and in return teaching American GIs how to ride a camel, and how to celebrate various unknown holidays with feasting and dancing. And at the end of his tour Sergeant Jack yet  again came back to the States with his belief in his mission, in his country’s mission to stamp out the virus of Islamic craziness (his term), in the virtues that had been produced in by country and by his family intact. Came back with his mission accomplished and his sense of duty filled and so left the Army when his time was up despite many entreaties for him to stay in.

Then all hell broke loose. Some of the details were sketchy as John Dawson related the story to me since he had not been in touch with his son for a couple of years at that point. The long and short of the matter was that Jack Dawson suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSS) from his experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. Part of the problem had to do with the two close deployments which when Jack told the in-take worker at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Bedford he dismissed out of hand. Told Jack that many guys had done multiple tours, no sweat, so suck it up and get back into the real world. Jack with not an inch of anti-war sentiment in him had seen things, had done some things in both occupations (my word not his, his was “engagement” like some prissy white-laced pure bride rather than cutthroat bastards the American government was lavishing with endless money and materials) that made him also instinctively hate the very word war whatever his politics. Those comments by that jackass in-take worker had Jack flying out the door never to return.

Of course like a lot of military- related issues, guys who were/are gung-ho, guys who have seen things and done things that would haunt them later when they got back to the “real world,” that I have seen over years (including my own horrors drowned in cocaine and whatever else I could get my hands on at one point) the first signs of problems came when Jack started to drink heavily, drank heavily into dawn at some lonely closing up barroom, drank during the day causing him to lose a job or two when his absenteeism became a problem for his team manager at the computer firms that had taken him on as a veteran as a favor to his father. Then came the drugs, at first a little marijuana to calm the nerves, then some cocaine and then the “graduate program” once heroin became the flavor of the month drug of choice and relatively inexpensive (strangely although Jack had like lots of working-class kids, and not just them, experimented with liquor in high school he had not smoked dope, even a puff, until after the Army although in any given barrack or tent Stateside or in Iraq or Afghanistan you could find about twelve varieties for your smoking pleasure). 

Then came the loss of menial jobs (day labor, pearl-diver, stuff like that), the breaking up with his fiancé, Tracey, a young woman whom he had met at Northeastern and who had waited for him despite several other tempting offers while he was overseas-no Dear John letters from her, that kind of girl- who could not endure the slide downhill, bailed out, also that kind of girl,  and subsequently married one of those tempting offers, and the first flirting with drug dealing to pay for the habit and keep body and soul together. That is when John Dawson started to lose contact with Jack as he travelled aimlessly around the country, did “mule” work to feed his habit.

Something happened, happened out on the West Coast or finished up there, I was not able to get all the details when I checked with my sources (very reliable on the drug scene) but some drug deal went south and Jack disappeared from view. Apparently Jack and another guy he met in Los Angeles, a guy, an Iraq veteran named Markham, also on his own downward slide had the bright idea that they would go out on their own, would stop “muling” for some rich boy dealer up in Frisco that had been working for in the Mexican triangle and become entrepreneurs on their own. Probably be-bop drug-crazed (I knew that part too well) they decided to start business with a shipment that were “muling” down in Sonora. Nobody told them that that was not a wise move and Markham who actually had the stuff in a suitcase was found in a dusty back street face down with two slugs in his heart. The Mexican police never went further than that in their investigation, wrote the thing off as a busted drug deal and forgot about it when nobody came to claim Markham’s body. Jack, as far as anybody knew though, got away with his life. That is the point that John lost all contact with Jack.

As I pointed out earlier I had contacts with various veterans organizations (not the VFW or American Legion stuff but veterans self-help or political groups who were willing to go down and dirty with the brothers) and so John asked me to find Jack if I could. Well eventually I did find him in an arroyo encampment down in Los Angeles which was essentially like the old hobo jungles that I frequented back in the 1970s when guys who couldn’t adjust after Vietnam set up an alternative life under the bridges, “brothers under the bridges” to steal a title from one of Bruce Springsteen’s songs (and which I used for several series I did on the “lost” brothers). He was in pretty tough circumstances and refused my help, said his help was a needle and a spoon and to be around guys who had been there, seen what he had seen. Refused too the offer of money to get back home that his father had sent me in case I found Jack. 

I could not tell John Dawson that about his son, the son he was so proud of who went off to war and who had lost his moorings, and so for a long time I did not tell him about his son’s fate out west. Said I was still looking and hoping to find him (which in a funny way I was but I knew from my 1970s experiences that the odds were not with me.) I did eventually tell John I had made contact but that Jack had told me that he would be in touch when he had worked things out in his head.

 

Although I was in contact with John periodically after that last discussion there was nothing further to report. Then back in 2011 when I was up in Maine for some conference I got a call from John on my cellphone. They had found Jack Dawson’s bruised and battered body along the railroad tracks near Carlsbad, California (a place I knew had plenty of “brothers under the bridge” after finishing up their Marine Corps duties at Camp Pendleton up the road in Oceanside). Cause of death a heart attack or an overdose, take your pick. I told John it was probably a heart attack, probably from the tough life he was living, without the rider of the overdose. (How do you tell a father his son was a stone-cold junkie.)  So yes while we are today commemorating the 14th long bloody year of the failed American expedition in Afghanistan (and apparently getting restarted in Iraq at some level if not yet “boots on the ground”) let’s remember Private Jack Dawson’s private war.          

*****International Women's Day, 1916; From The Archives Of Women And Revolution

*****International Women's Day, 1916;A From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-

-Greeting of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women for Peace and Against Chauvinism

From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-

 

 

Markin comment:

The following is a set of archival issues of Women and Revolution that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting articles from the back issues of  Women and Revolution during Women's History Month in March and periodically throughout the year.

Women and Revolution-1971-1980, Volumes 1-20  


http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/w&r/WR_001_1971.pdf

From The Archives-International Women's Day, 1916;A Greeting of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women for Peace and Against Chauvinism

Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution, Spring 2001, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.


****
International Women's Day, 1916;A Greeting of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women for Peace and Against Chauvinism

We reprint below a statement of greetings from the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women, an internationalist oppositional grouping within the French social democracy, on International Women's Day 1916. It is translated from the version published by the Gruppe Internationale, led by Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and Leo Jogiches, in the illegal Spartacusbriefe (No. 17, 30 March 1916).


Following the definitive betrayal by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) at the outbreak of World War I, when its entire Reichstag fraction (initially including even such revolutionists as Karl Liebknecht, who misguidedly yielded to considerations of party "discipline" and "unity") voted the war credits demanded by the government, the minority of revolutionary -internationalists within the party were reduced to tiny, isolated propaganda groups without a party press or a party apparatus.

"Without an organization," said Lenin, "the masses are deprived of the sole expression of their will." The task, then, which the left radicals in the German social democracy faced, was the creation of an organization that might begin to overcome the atomization of the working class. This task had to be accomplished under conditions of illegality and against the old party leadership which, in its fear of such attempts to reach the masses of disfranchised party members, had imposed a moratorium on all discussion and criticism of the "official" line and refused to hold the yearly party congresses required by SPD statutes.

Coinciding with the increasing class collaboration of the party executive from 1910 onward had been a cessation in the growth of party membership (indeed, membership would have dropped, for the first time ever, had it not been for disproportionate recruitment of women). The large masses of non-organized workers were unwilling to take risks for a party whose timidity had emboldened employers to ever harsher attacks on their living standards.

The SPD section for work among women led by Clara Zetkin constituted a laudable exception to the party's general drift to the right (see "Foundations of Communist Work Among Women: The German Social Democracy," Women and Revolution Nos. 8 and 9, Spring and Summer; 1975). While subscriptions to the central party press were falling off, Zetkin's Die Gleichheit ("Equality") was able to chalk up a large increase in subscribers; similarly, it was undoubtedly Zetkin's activizing radicalism which in large measure accounted for the growth in women members—an indication that the SPD's capitulation to national chauvinism was not an expression of the "will of the masses" but rather of the revisionist leadership's default of socialist principle.

But Zetkin was able to carry on her fight for socialist international working-class solidarity in the forum of Die Gleichheit only for a short time longer; with the collaboration of the Prussian authorities the party leadership was able to gain control, install a compliant editor and proceed to run the journal into the ground. Circulation fell off sharply, and soon Die Gleichheit was suspended.

The statement of the Paris Action Committee is of interest not merely for its uncompromising interna¬tional proletarian solidarity in the midst of the chauvinist hysteria of the imperialist holocaust but also for the solutions it advances to the crisis of proletarian leadership.

Revolted by the quiescence and then by the outright betrayal of the party leadership and correctly viewing the masses as far more revolutionary than this petty-bourgeoisified leadership, many revolutionists over¬reacted by adopting a theory of mass revolutionary initiative exemplified by the "spontaneism" of Rosa Luxemburg. According to this view, the party was to be primarily an educational organization, providing leadership when the masses did decide on their own to initiate the final collapse of capitalism.

Such glorification of the masses' undirected revolutionary will led the social-democratic lefts to downplay the role of proletarian leadership. Thus, Luxemburg could write in 1910, when the SPD party executive was throttling mass demonstrations in favor of electoral reform: "If the mass of party comrades comprehends and truly feels this [the need for militant struggle], then our leaders will also be found at their posts. 'It's the masses that are decisive'."

Similarly, in the Paris Action Committee's statement, there is the belief that the old social democracy will somehow be revived and reconstituted "from below." A complementary error was the divided left social-democrats' neglect of the crucial need for organiza¬tional unity achieved on a firm programmatic basis.

But the theoretical/organizational failings of the social-democratic left opposition display a deeper inadequacy: a failure to come to grips with the changed conditions generated by the dominance of imperialism by the turn of the century. In foreign affairs imperialism had meant an unprecedented aggressiveness of the major capitalist powers, posing an imminent threat of world imperialist conflict. Internally, the dominance of monopoly cartels interpenetrated with bank capital found reflection within the German Second Reich in a closing of ranks by the capitalist exploiters and an unparalleled intransigence toward the labor move¬ment. Now, for example, lockouts were financed by a joint fund set up by all significant German industry. This hard-nosed stance of the German bourgeoisie vis-a-vis the social-democratic threat found expression politi¬cally in a strengthening of the reactionary bloc between industry and the East Elbran junkers with the aim of excluding the SPD from parliament. Within the labor movement itself, imperialism was accompanied by increasing divisions within the working class—not only industrialist-fostered "yellow unionism" but also what Lenin termed a "labor aristocracy" of relatively well-paid workers.

In the face of this challenge, the German social democracy remained tied to its old policy of verbal militancy and practical impotence. In particular, the entire left still clung to the Kautskyan theory of the "party of the entire class," i.e., including both those backward, reactionary layers which had not even achieved trade-union consciousness and a labor aristocracy whose relatively, elevated status made it prone to accept the status quo. Proponents of proletarian "unity" overlooked the fact that backward and non-revolutionary layers in the party would certainly generate spokesmen for their views within the party leadership.

While the Gruppe Internationale, which published this greeting, consisted of uncompromising revolution¬ists who were to found the German Communist Party, in failing to lend an organizational form to their views, they could offer no real solution to the social-democratic betrayal of the SPD leadership. It was only in the codification of Bolshevik practice in the early Comintern (particularly in the "Theses on Tactics" and "Guidelines on Organization") that the division between maximum and minimum program, enunciat¬ed in the Erfurt Program of 1891, was to be transcended in the creation of a party of a new type, the Leninist vanguard party of the proletariat, in which a conscious leadership of professional revolutionaries would be able to intervene decisively at crucial world-historical junctures precisely because it rested on an alert, class-conscious rank and file. Not Kautskyan "unity"-mongering, but such tactics as the united front simultaneously unmasked the old social-democratic misleaders and achieved working-class unity around the achievement of particular shared, strictly limited goals.

The statement of the Paris Action Committee of Socialist Women reprinted below is thus essentially a backward-looking document, harking back to the great traditions of the Second International and attempting to preserve a synthesis—"the great socialist family"— that had been first eroded and then dissolved by a triumphant imperialism. But the Second International had died in an act of definitive class-collaborationist betrayal. It was the Third International which was to continue the fight for international proletarian revolu¬tion through the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war directed against the international bourgeoisie under the leadership of an effective and disciplined international party of the working class.

To socialist and proletarian women of all countries the Committee sends an expression of its warmest sympathy on International Women's Day. From the ' bottom of its heart it hopes and desires that a great many socialist women's organizations will succeed— more freely and openly than it has itself been able to— in calling upon women everywhere to express their dearest wish, the wish for an immediate end to the frightful struggle that for 19 months now has been inundating the world in blood, and in uttering in numerous mass meetings with a clear voice the, word "peace" tabooed in our country.

We feel ourselves in solidarity with the socialist proletarians of the so-called enemy nations, with the proletarians whom we no more confuse with their exploiters than we would be confused with our own hangmen. We feel this solidarity the more strongly the more zealously our own, our true enemies, the capitalists, strive to incite us against foreign proletari¬ans. Thus under the present conditions it is particularly to the socialist and proletarian women of countries at war with us and especially to the proletarian women of Germany that we offer the assurance of our most heartfelt, warmest sympathy, and above all to Clara Zetkin and all the women comrades who, heroically and inspired with glowing conviction, are struggling for socialism and for peace without counting the costs to themselves.

The Committee renews the vow of proletarian solidarity made by its members at the time of their entry into the great socialist family. To each and every one it sends fraternal greetings, sad, painful greetings, but greetings supported by the unshakable belief in the future of the proletariat.

For the Committee: Louise Saumoneau, Paris

 

 

 

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- José Rebull-On Dual Power

Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History journal entry listed in the title.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
******

Leon Trotsky On Dual Power From His History Of The Russian Revolution.

Leon Trotsky
The History of the Russian Revolution
Volume One: The Overthrow of Tzarism

Chapter 11
Dual Power

What constitutes the essence of a dual power? [1] We must pause upon this question, for an illumination of it has never appeared in historic literature. And yet this dual power is a distinct condition of social crisis, by no means peculiar to the Russian revolution of 1917, although there most clearly marked out.

Antagonistic classes exist in society everywhere, and a class, deprived of power inevitably strives to some extent to swerve the governmental course in its favour. This does not as yet mean, however, that two or more powers are ruling in society. The character of political structure is directly determined by the relation of the oppressed classes to the ruling class. A single, government, the necessary condition of stability in any régime, is preserved so long as the ruling class succeeds in putting over its economic and political forms upon the whole of society the only forms possible.

The simultaneous dominion of the German Junkers and the bourgeoisie – whether in the Hohenzollern form or the republic – is not a double government, no matter how sharp at times may be the conflict between the two participating powers. They have a common social basis, therefore their clash does not threaten to split the state apparatus. The two-power régime arises only out of irreconcilable class conflicts – is possible, therefore, only in a revolutionary epoch, and constitutes one of its fundamental elements.

The political mechanism of revolution consists of the transfer of power from one class to another. The forcible overturn is usually accomplished in a brief time. But no historic class lifts itself from a subject position to a position of rulership suddenly in one night, even though a night of revolution. It must already on the eve of the revolution have assumed a very independent attitude towards the official ruling class; moreover, it must have focused upon itself the hopes of intermediate classes and layers, dissatisfied with the existing state of affairs, but not capable of playing an independent rôle. The historic preparation of a revolution brings about, in the pre-revolutionary period, a situation in which the class which is called to realise the new social system, although not yet master of the country, has actually concentrated in its hands a significant share of the state power, while the official apparatus of the government is still in. the hands of the old lords. That is the initial dual power in every revolution.

But that is not its only form. If the new class, placed in power by a revolution which it did not want, is in essence an already old, historically belated, class; if it was already worn out before it was officially crowned; if on coming to power it encounters an antagonist already sufficiently mature and reaching out its hand toward the helm of state; then instead of one unstable two-power equilibrium, the political revolution produces another, still less stable. To overcome the “anarchy” of this twofold sovereignty becomes at every new step the task of the revolution – or the counter-revolution.

This double sovereignty does not presuppose – generally speaking, indeed, it excludes – the possibility of a division of the power into two equal halves, or indeed any formal equilibrium of forces whatever. It is not a constitutional, but a revolutionary fact. It implies that a destruction of the social equilibrium has already split the state superstructure. It arises where the hostile classes are already each relying upon essentially incompatible governmental organisations – the one outlived, the other in process of formation – which jostle against each other at every step in the sphere of government. The amount of power which falls to each of these struggling classes in such a situation is determined by the correlation of forces in the course of the struggle.

By its very nature such a state of affairs cannot be stable. Society needs a concentration of power, and in the person of the ruling class-or, in the situation we are discussing, the two half-ruling classes-irresistibly strives to get it. The splitting of sovereignty foretells nothing less than civil war. But before the competing classes and parties will go to that extreme – especially in case they dread the interference of third force – they may feel compelled for quite long time to endure, and even to sanction, a two-power system. This system will nevertheless inevitably explode. Civil war gives to this double sovereignty its most visible, because territorial, expression. Each of the powers, having created its own fortified drill ground, fights for possession of the rest of the territory, which often has to endure the double sovereignty in the form of successive invasions by the two fighting powers, until one of them decisively installs itself.

The English revolution of the seventeenth century, exactly because it was a great revolution shattering the nation to the bottom, affords a clear example of this alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil war.

At first the royal power, resting upon the privileged classes or the upper circles of these classes – the aristocrats and bishops, – is opposed by the bourgeoisie and the circles of the squirearchy that are close to it. The government of the bourgeoisie is the Presbyterian Parliament supported by the City of London. The protracted conflict between these two régimes is finally settled in open civil war. The two governmental centres – London and Oxford – create their own armies. Here the dual power takes territorial form, although, as always in civil war, the boundaries are very shifting. Parliament conquers. The king is captured and awaits his fate.

It would seem that the conditions are now created for the single rule of the Presbyterian bourgeoisie. But before the royal power could be broken, the parliamentary army has converted itself into an independent political force. It has concentrated in its ranks the Independents, the pious and resolute petty bourgeoisie, the craftsmen and farmers. This army powerfully interferes in the social life, not merely as an armed force, but as a Praetorian Guard, and as the political representative of a new class opposing the prosperous and rich bourgeoisie. Correspondingly the army creates a new state organ rising above the military command: a council of soldiers’ and officers’ deputies (“agitators”). A new period of double sovereignty has thus arrived: that of the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independents’ army. This leads to open conflicts. The bourgeoisie proves Powerless to oppose with its own army the “model army” of Cromwell – that is, the armed plebeians. The conflict ends with a purgation of the Presbyterian Parliament by the sword of the Independents. There remains but the rump of a parliament; the dictatorship of Cromwell is established. The lower ranks of the army, under the leadership of the Levellers the extreme left wing of the revolution – try to oppose to the rule of the upper military levels, the patricians of the army, their own veritably plebeian régime. But this new two-power system does not succeed in developing: the Levellers, the lowest depths of the petty bourgeoisie, have not yet, nor can have, their own historic path. Cromwell soon settles accounts with his enemies. A new political equilibrium, and still by no means a stable one, is established for a period of years.

In the great French revolution, the Constituent Assembly, the backbone of which was the upper levels of the Third Estate, concentrated the power in its hands – without however fully annulling the prerogatives of the king. The period of the Constituent Assembly is a clearly-marked period of dual power, which ends with the flight of the king to Varennes, and is formally liquidated with the founding of the Republic.

The first French constitution (1791), based upon the fiction of a complete independence of the legislative and executive powers, in reality concealed from the people, or tried to conceal, a double sovereignty: that of the bourgeoisie, firmly entrenched in the National Assembly after the capture by the people of the Bastille, and that of the old monarchy still relying upon the upper circles of the priesthood, the clergy, the bureaucracy, and the military, to say nothing of their hopes of foreign intervention. In this self-contradictory régime lay the germs of its inevitable destruction. A way out could be found only in the abolition of bourgeois representation by the powers of European reaction, or in the guillotine for the king and the monarchy. Paris and Coblenz must measure their forces.

But before it comes to war and the guillotine, the Paris Commune enters the scene – supported by the lowest city layers of the Third Estate – and with increasing boldness contests the power with the official representatives of the national bourgeoisie. A new double sovereignty is thus inaugurated, the first manifestation of which we observe as early as 1790, when the big and medium bourgeoisie is still firmly seated in the administration and in the municipalities. How striking is the picture – and how vilely it has been slandered! – of the efforts of the plebeian levels to raise themselves up out of the social cellars and catacombs, and stand forth in that forbidden arena where people in wigs and silk breeches are settling the fate of the nation. It seemed as though the very foundation of society, tramped underfoot by the cultured bourgeoisie, was stirring and coming to life. Human heads lifted themselves above the solid mass, horny hands stretched aloft, hoarse but courageous voices shouted! The districts of Paris, bastards of the revolution, began to live a life of their own. They were recognised – it was impossible not to recognise them! – and transformed into sections. But they kept continually breaking the boundaries of legality and receiving a current of fresh blood from below, opening their ranks in spite of the law to those with no rights, the destitute Sansculottes. At the same time the rural municipalities were becoming a screen for a peasant uprising against that bourgeois legality which was defending the feudal property system. Thus from under the second nation arises a third.

The Parisian sections at first stood opposed to the Commune, which was still dominated by the respectable bourgeoisie. In the bold outbreak of August 10, 1792, the sections gained control of the Commune. From then on the revolutionary Commune opposed the Legislative Assembly, and subsequently the Convention, which failed to keep up with the problems and progress of the revolution – registering its events, but not performing them – because it did not possess the energy, audacity and unanimity of that new class which had raised itself up from the depths of the Parisian districts and found support in the most backward villages. As the sections gained control of the Commune, so the Commune, by way of a new insurrection, gained control of the Convention. Each of the stages was characterised by a sharply marked double sovereignty, each wing of which was trying to establish a single and strong government – the right by a defensive struggle, the left by an offensive. Thus, characteristically – for both revolutions and counter-revolutions – the demand for a dictatorship results from the intolerable contradictions of the double sovereignty. The transition from one of its forms to the other is accomplished through civil war. The great stages of revolution – that is, the passing of power to new classes or layers – do not at all coincide in this process with the succession of representative institutions, which march along after the dynamic of the revolution like a belated shadow. In the long run, to be sure, the revolutionary dictatorship of the Sansculottes unites with the dictatorship of the Convention. But with what Convention? A Convention purged of the Girondists, who yesterday ruled it with the hand of the Terror – a Convention abridged and adapted to the dominion of new social forces. Thus by the steps of the dual power the French revolution rises in the course of four years to its culmination. After the 9th Thermidor it begins – again by the steps of the dual power – to descend. And again civil war precedes every downward step, just as before it had accompanied every rise. In this way the new society seeks a new equilibrium of forces.

The Russian bourgeoisie, fighting with and co-operating with the Rasputin bureaucracy, had enormously strengthened its political position during the war. Exploiting the defeat of czarism, it had concentrated in its hands, by means of the Country and Town unions and the Military-Industrial Committees, a great power. It had at its independent disposition enormous state resources, and was in the essence of the matter a parallel government. During the war the czar’s ministers complained that Prince Lvov was furnishing supplies to the army, feeding it, medicating it, even establishing barber shops for the soldiers. “We must either put an end to this, or give the whole power into his hands,” said Minister Krivoshein in 1915. He never imagined that a year and a half later Lvov would receive “the whole power” – only not from the czar, but from the hands of Kerensky, Cheidze and Sukhanov. But on the second day after he received it, there began a new double sovereignty: alongside of yesterday’s liberal half-government-today formally legalised – there arose an unofficial, but so much the more actual government of the toiling masses in the form of the soviets. From that moment the Russian revolution began to grow up into an event of world-historic significance.

What, then, is the peculiarity of this dual power as it appeared in the February revolution? In the events of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the dual power was in each case a natural stage in a struggle imposed upon its participants by a temporary correlation of forces, and each side strove to replace the dual power with its own single power. In the revolution of 1917, we see the official democracy consciously and intentionally creating a two-power system, dodging with all its might the transfer of power into its own hands. The double sovereignty is created, or so it seems at a glance, not as a result of a struggle of classes for power, but as the result of a voluntary “yielding” of power by one class to another. In so far as the Russian “democracy” sought for an escape from the two-power régime, it could find one only in its own removal from power. It is just this that we have called the paradox of the February, revolution.

A certain analogy can be found in 1848, in the conduct of the German bourgeoisie with relation to the monarchy. But the analogy is not complete. The German bourgeoisie did try earnestly to divide the power with the monarchy on the basis of an agreement. But the bourgeoisie neither had the full power in its hands, nor by any means gave it over wholly to the monarchy. “The Prussian bourgeoisie nominally possessed the power, it did not for a moment doubt that the forces of the old government would place themselves unreservedly at its disposition and convert themselves into loyal adherents of its own omnipotence” (Marx and Engels).

The Russian democracy of 1917, having captured the power from the very moment of insurrection tried not only to divide it with the bourgeoisie, but to give the state over to the bourgeoisie absolutely. This means, if you please, that in the first quarter of the twentieth century the official Russian democracy had succeeded in decaying politically completely than the German liberal bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. And that is entirely according to the laws of history, for it is merely the reverse aspect of upgrowth in those same decades of the proletariat, which now occupied the place of the craftsmen of Cromwell and the Sansculottes of Robespierre.

If you look deeper, the twofold rule of the Provisional Government and the Executive Committee had the character of a mere reflection. Only the proletariat could advance a claim to the new power. Relying distrustfully upon the workers and soldiers, the Compromisers were compelled to continue the double bookkeeping – of the kings and the prophets. The twofold government of the liberals and the democrats only reflected the still concealed double sovereignty of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. When the Bolsheviks displace the Compromisers at the head of the Soviet – and this will happen within a few months – then that concealed double sovereignty will come to the surface, and this will be the eve of the October revolution. Until that moment the revolution will live in a world of political reflections. Refracted through the rationalisations the socialist intelligentsia, the double sovereignty, from being a stage in the class struggle, became a regulative principle. It was just for this reason that it occupied the centre of all theoretical discussions. Everything has its uses: the mirror-like character of the February double government has enabled us better to understand those epochs in history when the same thing appears as a full-blooded episode in a struggle between two régimes. The feeble and reflected light of the moon makes possible important conclusions about the sunlight.

In the immeasurably greater maturity of the Russian proletariat in comparison with the town masses of the older revolutions, lies the basic peculiarity of the Russian revolution. This led first to the paradox of a half-spectral double government, and afterwards prevented the real one from being resolved in favour of the bourgeoisie. For the question stood thus: Either the bourgeoisie will actually dominate the old state apparatus, altering it a little for its purposes, in which case the soviets will come to nothing; or the soviets will form the foundation of a new state, liquidating not only the old governmental apparatus but also the dominion of those classes which it served. The Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries were steering toward the first solution, the Bolsheviks toward the second. The oppressed classes, who, as Marat observed, did not possess in the past the knowledge, or skill, or leadership to carry through what they had begun, were armed in the Russian revolution of the twentieth century with all three. The Bolsheviks were victorious.

A year after their victory the same situation was repeated in Germany, with a different correlation of forces. The social democracy was steering for the establishment of a democratic government of the bourgeoisie and the liquidation of the soviets. Luxemburg and Liebknecht steered toward the dictatorship of the soviets. The Social Democrats won. Hilferding and Kautsky in Germany, Max Adler in Austria, proposed that they should “combine” democracy with the soviet system, including the workers’ soviets in the constitution. That would have meant making potential or open civil war a constituent part of the state régime. It would be impossible to imagine a more curious Utopia. Its sole justification on German soil is perhaps an old tradition: the Württemberg democrats of ’48 wanted a republic with a duke at the head.

Does this Phenomenon of the dual power – heretofore not sufficiently appreciated – contradict the Marxian theory of the state, which regards government as an executive committee of the ruling class? This is just the same as asking: Does the fluctuation of prices under the influence of supply and demand contradict the labour theory of value? Does the self-sacrifice of a female protecting her offspring refute the theory of a struggle for existence? No, in these phenomena we have a more complicated combination of the same laws. If the state is an organisation of class rule, and a revolution is the overthrow of the ruling class, then the transfer of power from the one class to the other must necessarily create self-contradictory state conditions, and first of all in the form of the dual power. The relation of class forces is not a mathematical quantity permitting a priori computations. When the old régime is thrown out of equilibrium, a new correlation of forces can be established only as the result of a trial by battle. That is revolution.

It may seem as though this theoretical inquiry has led us away from the events of 1917. In reality it leads right into the heart of them. It was precisely around this problem of twofold power that the dramatic struggle of parties and classes turned. Only from a theoretical height is it possible to observe it fully and correctly understand it.


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Note
1. Dual power is the phrase settled upon in communist literature as an English rendering of dvoevlastie. The term is untranslatable both because of its form twin-powerdom – and because the stem, vlast, means sovereignty as well as power. Vlast is also used as an equivalent of government, and in the plural corresponds to our phrase the authorities. In view of this, I have employed some other terms besides dual power: double sovereignty, two-power régime, etc. [Trans.]

*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Nicola di Bartolomeo-The Activity of the Bolshevik-Leninists in Spain and its Lessons

Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History journal entry listed in the title.

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discover” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

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The Programme of the Spanish Bolshevik-Leninists-from Revolutionary History, Volume One, Number Two.

The statement here following was put out on 19 July 1937 by the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain, the small Spanish Trotskyist group led by Grandizo Munis. It is reproduced here from Fight, monthly paper of the Marxist Group of CLR James, vol.1, no.10, September 1937, pp.4-5.

The group, only eight people altogether, left after the entry of the Izquierda Communista into the POUM, put out La Voz Leninista and three issues of its journal. (During this period of demoralisation the Spanish Trotskyists had split, the other group putting out a paper called El Soviet.) The money for this actually came from Leon Narvitch, an agent of the GPU who had penetrated the Spanish Trotskyists after the work he had already done in informing on the POUM. After a POUM action squad had avenged the death of Andres Nin and Narvitch’s body was found at the start of February 1938 in the environs of Barcelona, practically the entire Spanish Trotskyist organisation was rounded up on 12 February and charged with killing him, spying for Franco, striking, sabotage, and organising the May Days insurrection. Just for good measure was added the accusation that they were planning to kill Negrin, Prieto, and Stalinists Comorera, La Pasionaria, and José Díaz.

After much pressure and torture the trial was fixed for 29 January 1939, but three days before it was to take place Franco’s troops entered Barcelona. Both jailers and prisoners scrambled to escape, and Munis and his comrade Carlini got across the French border. From there he proceeded to Mexico, from which he led the Spanish Trotskyists in exile, and became a close political ally of Trotsky’s widow, Natalia, in objecting to what they believed to be the rightward drift of the US SWP during the Second World War. They opposed the American Military Policy, the support for the actions of the Red Army in Eastern Europe, and later the support for Tito and Mao Tse-tung. Munis returned to Spain to take part in the Barcelona strike of 1951, and was picked up again the following year and given another 10 years in prison. After his release he retired to France where he led a small far-left organisation.


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What do the Trotskyists want?

1. To defeat Fascism with the only effective weapon, the weapon of the proletarian revolution. To destroy Fascism and its roots, which flourish only in the rotten soil of capitalist democracy, by the expropriation of the exploiters and by the total destruction of the old state apparatus. During a transition period we wish to set up the dictatorship of the proletariat, directed solely against the remains of the bourgeoisie, who, with the aid of foreign capitalism, will try to re-establish private property and the bourgeois regime. The best example of attempts like this are the dishonest manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie at the present time, and above all of the PSUC. The dictatorship of the proletariat will be genuine working class democracy, because the privileges of money will have disappeared and the workers, freed from capitalist exploitation, will decide their fate for themselves.

2. So long as the proletariat is not in a position to take power, we shall defend the democratic rights of the workers within the framework of the capitalist transitory regime. That is why we have publicly, and without any sort of manoeuvre, demanded the United Front of Struggle, CNT-POUM-FAI; we shall never allow the class enemy to destroy workers’ organisations, even when it is a question of our political adversaries. Yesterday we demanded the protection of the POUM; today we protest against those who want to exclude the FAI from the popular tribunals; and tomorrow, with arms in hand, we shall defend the CNT. We have been and we remain partisans of proletarian democracy.

3. We stand for the formation of revolutionary councils of workers, peasants and soldiers. These councils should be democratically elected in each factory, village and company. It must be possible to recall the delegates at any moment if the majority so decide. Councils of this sort were formed during the July days. The true wish of the masses is allowed the freest possible play in them. These councils will have for their task the defence of the conquests of the revolution, the maintenance of public order, and the control of the economy and distribution. Each party will propose its solutions: the masses will decide.

4. We are against the so-called Popular Front Government, which is in reality a government in which the vast majority of the people is not represented. We are against class collaboration because it is a trap for the representatives of the working class. Compromises in such a government lead inevitably to treason. The only solution is to set up everywhere revolutionary councils, to convoke a congress of all the delegates of the councils, and to elect a Central Committee from the delegates of the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ councils, which will take in hand the management of the country. In such a revolutionary council there will be no treachery, and it will thus be able to bring the war to a victorious conclusion.

5. Our aim is the complete expropriation of the capitalists. So far the banks have not been touched, and the means of exchange are under the control of the bourgeois government. We categorically reject the ‘municipalisation’ feverishly demanded by the PSUC, which means in reality taking away the enterprises from the syndicates, and putting them under the control of the reactionary government. Our slogan is complete socialisation, and the establishment of a monopoly of foreign trade, under the direction of an economic committee of the revolutionary council.

6. We demand the nationalisation of the land: that is to say the abolition of private landlordism. The usurers shall no longer be able to take the land from the peasants. We stand for the collectivisation of agricultural enterprises only where the peasants consent to it without constraint. Distribution of the land must be made by the peasants’ councils according to the principle: ‘The land for those who work it’.

7. We are of the opinion that only a centralised army under a united command can ensure military victory. But it must be a revolutionary army in which each soldier enjoys political rights, in which the officers are elected and can be recalled by assemblies of soldiers. The same salary for everyone. The united command under control of a Council of War of the Revolutionary Council. In such an army, the enthusiasm of the soldiers and their revolutionary vigilance will counterbalance the lack of material and technique. It will be a victorious army.

8. We stand for the right of national minorities to dispose of themselves, and for the absolute freedom of the people of Morocco, including the right of separation, Morocco for the Moroccans; the moment that this slogan is publicly proclaimed it will foment insurrection among the oppressed masses of Morocco and cause disintegration in the mercenary fascist army. We stand for a Federation of Socialist Republics, because this corresponds best to the interests of the working class. It must be constituted without constraint by the free and fraternal unification of all the workers.

9. We fight the Stalinist bureaucracy which pretends to construct ‘socialism’ in Russia while sabotaging the socialist revolution in Spain and throughout the entire world. Our final aim is the world revolution and the establishment of socialism over the whole world, which is the only guarantee against the usurpation of the proletarian conquests by a bureaucratic layer like that of the Soviet Union. We are against non-intervention as practised by the Peoples’ Commissars of the Third International and by the bourgeois ministers of the Second International. We demand the revolutionary, intervention of the proletariat and the transformation of the Spanish revolution into European revolution.

10. The old organisations have led us into an impasse. Deeply convinced that victory against the fascist barbarians and the whole capitalist class depends entirely upon capable leadership, we shall concentrate our efforts on the creation during the struggle of a new revolutionary party, to be equal to that task. Its granite base will be the programme of scientific socialism, laid down by Marx and Engels, and continued by Lenin and Trotsky. Before the disgraceful treason of the Second and Third, Internationals we shall bring together again all consistent revolutionaries in the new, the Fourth International, which will be the world party of social revolution. Beneath its unsullied banner socialism will triumph! Comrades! We know that our first task is to put Franco’s bands to rout. But you, like us, know that military victory is inseparable from the social revolution. Openly and without manoeuvres we fight against a policy which seems to us disastrous. The deepening of the social revolution, far from weakening the united front in the trenches, will strengthen the fighting spirit of our militias. We wish to revive the spirit of July 1936.

With the enthusiasm of those days and the arms and experience of today, we shall celebrate July 1936 in a socialist Spain free from the capitalist yoke.

To all revolutionaries who feel that they are approaching us, we appeal; come and join our ranks! In friendly discussion we shall clear up points of disagreement and, united in struggle, we shall put to rout our common enemy!

Down with Fascism and capitalism!
Long live the Spanish proletarian revolution!
Long live the world revolution!
Barcelona, 19 July 1937
Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain
(Fourth International)