A View From The International Left-Against Black Nationalist Slanders of Marx and Engels

Workers Vanguard No. 1095	9 September 2016

Against Black Nationalist Slanders of Marx and Engels

We reprint the following article, with one minor factual correction, from Spartacist South Africa No. 13 (Spring 2015), newspaper of the South African section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

Recently we have increasingly been hearing the charge that Marx and Engels were indifferent to the suffering and subjugation meted out by the European colonialists and that the founders of scientific socialism harboured racist views. This slanderous lie—long peddled by the Black Consciousness Movement, Pan-Africanists and other nationalists—is particularly common on university campuses. For instance, during our sub-drive campaign amidst the “Rhodes Must Fall” protests [against monuments to colonial pigs like Cecil Rhodes], we frequently argued with students who dismissed the ideas of Marx and Engels as inappropriate for the African context simply because they were European (white). This is the logic of so-called “intersectionality”—a view promoted by feminists, black nationalists and reformist leftists, among others—according to which if you haven’t personally experienced a particular form of oppression you can’t fight it. Such an approach denies the possibility of mobilising the proletariat to champion the cause of all the exploited and oppressed.

One proponent of this narrow nationalist anti-Marxist slander is Jackie Shandu, a nationalist demagogue who is head of Policy, Research and Political Education for the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in KwaZulu-Natal. In an opinion piece filled with distortions, inaccuracies and outright lies, Shandu asserts: “In Marx, therefore, we are still dealing with a white supremacist that believed and stated that the only way forward for all of humanity is through Western intervention, paternalism and leadership” (“Battle for the soul of the Economic Freedom Fighters: Class first or race first?”, Daily Maverick, 18 December 2014).

What a load of crap! It truly beggars belief to claim that Marx was a “white supremacist.” During the bloody Civil War of 1861-65 that smashed slavery in the United States, Marx and Engels not only fully supported the abolitionist cause, but also actively fought to mobilise the British working class in support of a Northern victory. This effort contributed to preventing the British bourgeoisie from intervening on the side of the Southern Confederacy (the slave owners). Marx and Engels wrote extensively about the Civil War, which they saw as one of the century’s major battles, a social overturn and a harbinger of socialist revolutions to come. As Marx later wrote, in Volume I of Capital, “every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”

As for their attitude toward the bloody crimes of the European colonialists, you just have to read Marx and Engels’ writings on the suppression of the anti-British Sepoy rebellion in India to see that they were anything but cheerleaders for colonial “paternalism.” For example, in May 1858, Engels wrote an article denouncing the atrocities in Lucknow, where the British army took the city, pillaged it, and then stole the land of the people they had just conquered and massacred. In that article, Engels wrote: “The fact is, there is no army in Europe or America with so much brutality as the British. Plundering, violence, massacre…are a time-honored privilege, a vested right of the British soldier.” Does that sound like indifference to colonial subjugation?!

While Marx and Engels always condemned the monumental crimes committed by the colonial powers against the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas, they also initially held the view that colonial penetration of such backward regions would be a vehicle for promoting their economic and social modernisation. For example, in 1853 Marx wrote, “England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating.” This view turned out to be incorrect. History would subsequently show that even though the advanced capitalist countries introduced certain elements of modern industrial technology into their colonies and semicolonies, the overall effect was to arrest the social and economic development of those areas.

Scientific socialism is based not on received wisdom but on observation and analyses of social reality as it develops. Marx and Engels learned from their observations, and would go on to develop a very different attitude toward colonialism. Particularly important in prompting the change in their views on the oppression of weak, backward states by stronger, more advanced ones was the major role that Britain’s hold on Ireland played in retarding the political consciousness of the English proletariat. By the 1870s, they began to advocate independence for Ireland. An indication of their later views on the colonial question is given by a letter that Engels wrote to Karl Kautsky in September 1882. In it, Engels points to the corrupting influence of stolen colonial booty on the proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries, and advocates independence for the colonies.

The most powerful refutation of the nationalists’ slanders of Marx and Engels is seen, however, not in their own writings and political activity, but in the revolutionary-internationalist legacy carried forward by later Marxists. Above all, by the Bolsheviks under the leadership of V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, who led the working class to victory in the 1917 October Revolution. By ripping power out of the hands of the capitalist-imperialists, the October Revolution blazed the way not only for the proletariat of the West, but also the oppressed masses of the colonial world. After taking power, the Bolsheviks put an end to Russia’s involvement in the imperialist mass slaughter of World War I, and made public the secret treaties and deals that the various European powers had made to carve up the world among themselves. For example, in 1918 they published the Sykes-Picot treaty outlining the division of the Near East between the British and French imperialists.

These anti-imperialist acts were a concrete expression of the understanding that revolutionary Marxists must champion the national liberation of peoples subjugated by the advanced capitalist (imperialist) powers, as a necessary part of the struggle to overthrow the imperialist rulers through proletarian revolution from within. This understanding was hammered home by Lenin and other leaders of the early Communist International (Comintern), founded in 1919. For example, the “Twenty-One Conditions” adopted at the Comintern’s Second Congress in 1920 demanded that the Communist parties in the imperialist countries support “every liberation movement in the colonies not only in words but in deeds,” and carry out “systematic propaganda among their own country’s troops against any oppression of colonial peoples.” The “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions” adopted at the same Congress asserted the importance of “establishing the closest possible alliance between the West-European communist proletariat and the revolutionary peasant movement in the East, in the colonies, and in the backward countries generally.”

Compare this to the activities of the ANC and other African nationalists of the time, who were busy sending endless deputations to the British monarch and parliament, begging for this or that reform and all the while reassuring them of the loyalty of “his majesty’s subjects” in Africa. For example, the resolutions of the Second Pan-Africanist Congress, held in 1921 in London, demanded not the dismantling of the colonialist structures, but merely that “natives of Africa must have the right to participate in the [colonial] government as fast as their development permits.” These nationalist movements were not “revolutionary,” or even bourgeois-democratic, but rather advocated that the educated and “civilised” African elite be given an opportunity to work out with the imperialist powers a peaceful and ever-so-gradual transition from colonialism to neo-colonialism. While these would-be exploiters sometimes tried to mobilise popular support among the African toilers, their programme and class standpoint were always fundamentally hostile to the interests of the working people.

One just has to recall the saga of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, an idol of Pan-Africanism and “African socialism.” When the Trade Union Congress of Ghana prepared to call a 1950 General Strike in support of Nkrumah’s slogan, “Self-Government NOW,” he vacillated and tried to postpone the strike because he didn’t want to disrupt the negotiations with the colonial authorities then under way. When self-government was finally granted, in 1957, it was a “tidy” transition presided over by the colonial authorities, with the explicit blessing of the Duchess of Kent (acting as Queen Elizabeth’s official representative). After Nkrumah became Prime Minister of Ghana, the British imperialists continued to get their cut, while the bourgeois-nationalist government carried out a vicious anti-labour policy. In 1961, Nkrumah left his vacation in the Soviet Union early to participate in the crushing of the 1961 General Strike.

The same goes for the would-be heirs of Nkrumah, like Jackie Shandu and the EFF. Notwithstanding their rhetoric about “Marxism-Leninism” (which they combine with the Third World nationalism of Fanon), these self-declared “revolutionaries” seek to maintain capitalism and merely renegotiate the terms of imperialist subordination with “white monopoly capital” (with a bigger share of profits going to them and their cronies). For instance, prior to the 2014 elections Julius Malema, commander-in-chief of the EFF, invited investors to Alexandra township to assure them that their investments won’t be touched when they get into government. Slandering Marx and attacking Marxism is just the ideological expression of their class hostility to the proletariat.

Shandu and the EFF’s anti-Marxist, anti-working-class politics are combined with vicious nationalist demagogy in the service of the very same racist divide-and-rule that was promoted by the British imperialists and the apartheid rulers. Another one of Shandu’s recent opinion pieces (“A volatile case of Afrikan vs. Indian in KwaZulu-Natal,” 7 April 2015, Daily Maverick) peddles anti-Indian poison under the guise of championing the rights of black workers exploited by Indian bosses. In fact, the real aims of Shandu and the EFF have nothing to do with fighting the exploitation of workers at the hands of their bosses and everything to do with increasing the access of small-time black capitalists to tenders and markets at the expense of their Indian competitors. The same thing that animates outfits like the Mazibuye African Forum (which includes members of the EFF and the ANC, as well as the National Freedom Party, a split from Inkatha)—a black business forum that spews poisonous anti-Indian racism and organises anti-Indian mobilisations in support of the demand that Indians be excluded from access to BEE [Black Economic Empowerment] deals.

Among other distortions/lies peddled by the “economic freedom fighter” Shandu, is the claim that the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA, the forerunner of the SACP) was “founded…under the slogan ‘White Workers of the World Unite’” and that the Communists “never ‘problematised’ race and racism in the South African context.” Though founded by white immigrant communists, the CPSA was not racist, as Shandu claims. Among its pioneering central leaders were people like David Ivon Jones and Sidney Percival Bunting, who were intransigent fighters against black oppression that fought to recruit black communists. Both Bunting and Jones had earlier split from the right-wing South African Labour Party (SALP) to form the International Socialist League (ISL). They split in opposition to both the racism of the SALP tops and their support for the imperialist First World War. At the First Congress of the ISL in 1916, Bunting moved that the new party “affirm that the emancipation of the working class requires the abolition of all forms of native indenture, compound and passport systems; and the lifting of the native worker to the political and industrial status of the white” (quoted in Allison Drew, Between Empire and Revolution: A Life of Sidney Bunting, 1873-1936). In 1919, Bunting condemned the white trade unions for their racist indifference to black workers, writing in The International: “It is humiliating to have to keep on emphasising that the essence of the Labour movement is Solidarity, without which it cannot win. The outstanding characteristic of the capitalist system in South Africa being its Native labour, the outstanding movement of the country must clearly be the movement of its Native labourers” (quoted in Edward Roux, S.P. Bunting: A Political Biography).

The ISL founded the CPSA in 1920 when it resolved to affiliate with the (Third) Communist International. Although people like Jones and Bunting fought for the party to turn its face towards the black working masses, other leaders of the early CPSA preferred an orientation toward the white trade union movement and were loath to combat the racism of this movement. In 1922, during the reactionary Rand Revolt strike, the Communist Party capitulated to the racist demands of white miners for preserving the colour bar in the mines. It was during this strike that the racist slogan of “Workers of the World Fight and Unite for a White S.A.” was raised (though not by the CPSA) amidst pogroms against blacks and Indians carried out by Afrikaner Commandos. While he was critical of the strike, Bunting didn’t raise his criticisms publicly during the strike. He rationalised their stance on the colour bar by maintaining that the party should struggle for improved working conditions for blacks.

In 1928, during the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, the Communist Party adopted the “Native Republic” slogan at the urging of the Comintern leadership. Although this slogan correctly pointed to the centrality of the task of black emancipation in South Africa, it saw the “Native Republic” as a capitalist republic, which was to be achieved as the first, bourgeois-democratic, “stage” of the South African revolution. Only later (at some unspecified time) was this supposed to be followed by a second, socialist, “stage.” Thus, the slogan basically took the fight for proletarian revolution off the agenda and instead cleared the way for the Communist Party to bury itself in the ANC (for more, see “South Africa—Early Years of the Communist Party”, reprinted in WV Nos. 991 and 992, 25 November and 9 December 2011).

The fact that nationalist demagogues like Shandu and Co. are today able to retail their alternative versions of nationalism as some kind of solution for the continued oppression of the black majority, is in no small part thanks to the continued betrayals of the SACP (and COSATU) reformist misleaders in pursuit of the Stalinist “two-stage” programme (called the “National Democratic Revolution” in South Africa). The “first stage” came in 1994 with the ascension of the ANC-led Tripartite Alliance to power and the establishment of a neo-apartheid system. As has been repeatedly demonstrated by a long history of Stalinist betrayals of proletarian revolution—from the 1927 Shanghai massacre to the decimation of the millions-strong communist movement of Indonesia in 1965—the “second stage” is not the socialist revolution but the bloody massacre of the workers by their erstwhile nationalist “allies,” like in the Marikana massacre of 2012.

Shandu, the EFF, and various other nationalists in the Black Consciousness and Pan-Africanist traditions, may today denounce the Marikana massacre and the ANC, but the reality is that the programmes they pursue are fundamentally no different from that of the ANC. Witness the ease with which the ANC has co-opted a good chunk of the AZAPO and PAC leaderships since 1994. In contrast, we Trotskyists never gave any support to the ANC-led Alliance, and told the truth in 1994, writing: “A vote for the ANC—including its Communist Party members and affiliated trade-union leaders of COSATU—is a vote to perpetuate the racist oppression and superexploitation of the black, coloured (mixed-race) and Indian toilers in a different political form.” We have a programme that points the way to the national liberation of the black majority and all of the non-white toilers through smashing neo-apartheid capitalism, establishing a black-centred workers government, and fighting like hell for the international extension of the revolution to the advanced capitalist countries. We fight for the political independence of the proletariat from all bourgeois parties—whether the ANC or EFF, PAC or AZAPO, or any other.

This programme is an application of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution to the specific conditions of South African capitalism, with its combined and uneven development and heavy overlap of racial oppression with class oppression. It represents a continuation of genuine Marxism. For this reason, we fight to politically smash the nationalist slanders of Marx and Engels, and to arm all those who want to get rid of racist capitalist exploitation with the political and theoretical weapons they left us.

From The Honduras Solidarity Movement-On The Assassination Of Berta Caceres

From The Honduras Solidarity Movement-On The Assassination Of Berta Caceres  

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