*****The Latest From The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left

*****The Latest From The Rag Blog-A Voice Of The Old New Left   
 

Click below to link to The Rag Blog  

http://www.theragblog.com/


Ralph Morris had recently written a letter to his old friend and comrade Sam Lowell from the Vietnam anti-war struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s about how the advent of the Internet and with it the instrument of blogging many old time radicals like themselves had gained a new lease on life or at least some kind of cyber-audience after years of small rallies, small demonstrations, writing for small unread journals and preaching to the choir. Well, maybe not so many old time radicals since that lot has been as subject to the hazards of the actuarial charts as any other aging demographic and additionally subject to the change of heart politics that come over people as they age, and age especially in the post 9/11 world when many of them have unquestionably sided with whatever Washington regime was most belligerent in its use of military weaponry to make Americans “safe” in a dangerous world. Ralph noted a few blogs that he had “followed” (following in cyberspace not requiring anything more than a click to link you in as a follower, or another clink to opt out of status, and not anything as sinister as some cult nightmare thing that every parent worries about happening to their kids) including The Rag Blog out of Texas where he noted that every well-known and half-well-known name from the counter-cultural and oppositional politics of the 1960s apparently had found a home.

Ralph encouraged Sam to “follow” that blog to see what he meant. Sam did so for a while and wrote back to Ralph that he thought it was ironic that so many still-living personalities from that time like Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers, Bernadette Dohr, the late Carl Davidson and a host of others who had run themselves ragged (and others, too many others, many leaving the movement never to return as a result ) with whatever ill-conceived theory they could come up with to seem “smart” against the most vicious powerful enemies of all humankind, chiefly in the "heart of the beast," the United States government.

Life, or at least the life of their theories, has not been kind to them and now a goodly number of them (check the Rag Blog if you don't believe is what both Ralph and Sam recommended when another old radical friend discounted what they had seen)  have made that unkind condition a basis for further muddying the waters when what we need is some clarity. Sam and Ralph had always been rank and file radicals in the days when being so was a badge of distinction and still carry on the struggle as best they can while aging less than gracefully. That aging though apparently has not stopped Sam from getting bilious about those who “led” back in the day and who when the deal went down and the government unleashed its fangs went back to academia, the think tanks, and the small unread journals while guys like him who kept the faith have done so at some considerable personal expense.

So Sam never a theorist, never a writer although not a Jimmy Higgins (a guy who set up the chairs at meetings stuff like that) decided to write something about those old time radicals still selling the same snake oil as they did in sunnier days. Here is what he had to say straight up:    
 

When we were young, meaning those of us who were militant leftist baby-boomers back in the days that I now call the “Generation Of ‘68,” (that expression not made up by me but my old time radical friend Ralph Morris who serve some time in prison for participating in various actions and who saw that the people he was being led by make their significant actions in that year) we would chuckle/gasp/shriek in horror when some Old Leftists tried to tell us a few of the ABCs of radical politics (mainly Communist Party, Socialist Worker Party adherents, an occasion labor union bureaucrat devotee of the moribund Socialist Party, Max Shachtman on a rant, Albert Shanker ditto, some left-overs from the Workmen’s Circle and ageless Wobblies). (The designation “Generation of ’68 " for those not in the know signifying 1968 being a watershed year for lots of things from Tet in Vietnam bringing home the reality of the lost war to the general population [the military leaders and a few civilians in their more candid moments knew years before what a lost deal it was] to the American bourgeois political party  upheavals that led to Chicago Democratic Party Convention shedding of any pretense of civility in the summer and the May events in Paris which showed the limits of that student-based vision of the "newer world" we sought once the struggle for power, for state power was seriously on the agenda and we had to look elsewhere for some segment of society that had the social power to lead that struggle.)

Those scorned old leftists, again mainly old Stalinist Communist Party hangers-on (thuggish  Stalinists to boot) who survived the 1950s red scare by keeping their heads down (not a cowardly thing, the only cowardly thing being “snitching” to save your worthless neck when the "red-hunters" came knocking at your door, to do that surviving by any other means necessary including that down-turned head waiting for sunnier days when you could once again get a hearing in the public square) or moribund Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party members who survived the red scare by keeping their heads down (ditto on the above) as they carried the revolutionary torch forward and who had come of political age in the 1930s and 1940s had nothing to tell us.

Yes, we young stalwart in-your-face-rebels were going to re-invent the world we had not made and we needed no old fogies to put a damper on our efforts. See we were going to re-invent that world without the hurts and sorrows accumulated from millennia of previous struggles to push the rock up the hill of human progress. Yeah, sure easy to see now but then as the poet said “to be alive was very heaven.”

Well, we fell significantly short of that aim, had that Promethean rock come speeding down over our heads the minute the American government felt the least bit threatened. (Chicago 1968, Kent State 1970 and for me personally May Day 1971 when we without anywhere near adequate forces or much of a strategy beyond taking to the streets and trying to shut down specific targets were going to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war stand as signposts to those failures.) Today I am still not sure whether in retrospect those scorned Old Leftists of old had anything going or not except cautionary tales but all I know is we are now cast in somewhat the same light. We are now the Old New Leftists.

Problem is that unlike our ‘68 generation, warts and all, there is no sizable younger crowd of young stalwart in-your-face-rebels to thumb their noses up at us. And there should be, should be youthful voices crying to the high heavens. (Recent small stirrings out of the remnant of Occupy and Black Lives Matter do not negate the  greater youthful indifference to our message.)  That has not stopped many old radicals, many who have not succumbed to old age and hubris, from trying to be heard. And one of the place they have congregated, for better or worse, at least from what I can see is at this site.          

So I find this The Rag Blog website very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody with some kind of name familiar to me and who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. The remembrances and recollections recorded no question are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least any that  would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time New Left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the  last forty plus years. That socialist “paradise” is still as forlorn and faraway as ever. Still this is a must read blog for today’s young left-wing militants.

Recently I wrote a short piece, Looking For A Few Good Revolutionary Intellectuals, on a left-wing political blog centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the active left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out and I named some of the possible locations that I had noted they were hiding away in). One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a few years back (Fall, 2011), the continuing failed efforts to stop the incessant American war machine, and the lack of serious and righteous response to the beating that the working classes and oppressed in this country (and internationally) have taken from the ruling class (classes) and their hangers-on a certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young radicals and revolutionaries that I had run into in the various campsites and had talked to on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses.

I noted there, and the point is germane here as I try to place the remnant of old New Left represented by the contributors in The Rag Blog in perspective, that it is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory which I mentioned in the article still hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its capitalist globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high-speed communications, the increased weight that non-working-class specific questions play in world politics; immigration, the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.

That said I have also made a note that some of theories from the old days are now being re-tread by some of the old New Left denizens of this blog as if nothing had changed since the 1960s made me think that making the revolution the old-fashioned Marxist working class way is the beginning of wisdom. In the interest of full disclosure though back in the day I was as likely as anybody to adhere to all kinds of new theories (mainly because the old theories being old must be irrelevant, a notion that was widespread then) but life, political life, itself has already made its judgments on the worth of those theories for pulling humankind ahead. The class struggle exists, although in a very one-sided manner right now, one-sided on their side not ours, and any theory, any plan worth its salt, worth the righteous oppressed rising up against the robber barons should reflect that and at its core the teachings of Marx and his progeny still make sense.   

One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out,  more times than I care to mention included my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. 

Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on. 

The 2016 Vote That Really Matters-California Propositions: Yes on 62, No on 66!-Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

The 2016 Vote That Really Matters-California Propositions: Yes on 62, No on 66!-Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

Workers Vanguard No. 1096	23 September 2016

California Propositions: Yes on 62, No on 66!

Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

Last year, the United States ranked fifth in the world in the number of people executed at the hands of the state, coming in just behind Saudi Arabia. While the medieval rulers of that country behead the accused in a public square, America’s capitalist rulers prefer the more “humane” method of lethal injection, perpetrated out of public view in prison death chambers. Last year, the Supreme Court rejected a suit brought by three death row inmates in Oklahoma against the state’s use of a drug that is the chemical equivalent of being burned alive. Arguing that the inmates had failed to come up with an “available and preferable” means of being put to death, the Court’s majority decision written by Justice Samuel Alito concluded:

“While most humans wish to die a painless death, many do not have that good fortune. Holding that the Eighth Amendment demands the elimination of essentially all risk of pain would effectively outlaw the death penalty altogether.”

Indeed, the purpose of the death penalty is to inflict cruel and unusual punishment as a statement of the ultimate authority of the state and its monopoly on the means of violence. A barbaric legacy of medieval torture, its endurance in the United States is rooted in the origins of American capitalism, which was built on the hideously brutalized labor of black chattel slaves.

The profits that were wrung out of the slave trade and plantation labor were maintained through terror and murder. After the defeat of the Southern slavocracy in the Civil War and the dismantling of Radical Reconstruction by the Northern bourgeoisie, Jim Crow segregation was enforced by lynch mobs. By the 1930s, such extralegal murder was increasingly supplanted by state-sanctioned executions. Black men and women accounted for over two-thirds of those put to death between 1930 and 1967, when amid the mass struggles of the civil rights movement a de facto moratorium on capital punishment was temporarily imposed. Today, more than 40 percent of those on death row are black.

As Marxists, we oppose the death penalty on principle—for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not accord the state the right to determine who lives and who dies. Our opposition to capital punishment extends as well to China, North Korea and the other bureaucratically deformed workers states, where execution is a prop for the rule of the parasitic bureaucracies.

In the U.S., the death penalty, while rooted in anti-black racism, is upheld as the ultimate punishment for anyone deemed as a threat to the capitalist social order. Working-class fighters who have been killed at the hands of the state include: the Haymarket anarchists, abolitionists and labor organizers who fought for the eight-hour day, hanged in 1877; IWW organizer Joe Hill, shot by a firing squad in 1915; anarchist workers Sacco and Vanzetti, sent to the electric chair in 1927.

Hundreds of other labor militants have died at the hands of strikebreaking cops and scabs. But it was out of such struggles that the industrial unions in this country were forged in the 1930s, bringing black workers, who were among the most militant fighters, into their ranks. And it will be out of future hard-fought working-class battles that the vital instrument for getting rid of this decaying system of exploitation, racial oppression and state-sanctioned murder will be forged: a multiracial revolutionary workers party to lead the fight for a socialist America.

The Death Penalty Debate

America’s imperialist rulers are accustomed to killing on massive scales—from the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the killing fields of Vietnam, to today’s wars, occupations and drone strikes against the peoples of the Near East. At home, the rulers’ racist cops have a kill rate that is greater by orders of magnitude than that of any other advanced capitalist country, with one study putting it at 70 times that of the combined total of seven European countries. The U.S. also holds a commanding global lead in the numbers of people behind bars, claiming 22 percent of the world’s prison population.

Exposure of cases of innocent men and women sentenced to death, and in some cases executed, has stoked growing antipathy toward capital punishment. The number of executions is down considerably, especially compared to the late 1990s. But for much of the bourgeoisie the main concern is not the justice system’s proclivity to frame up and kill innocent people nor the unspeakable torture inflicted by the drug cocktails used to carry out executions. Instead, what concerns a wing of the bourgeoisie, Democrats and Republicans alike, is that it is spending too much money on prisons and that the death penalty is similarly too expensive. On the other side are those who believe that only the most monstrous measures of repression can keep the working class, black people and the poor sufficiently cowed in the face of increasing destitution. This debate is reflected in various state referendums that will be voted on as part of the November elections.

In Nebraska, where a Republican-dominated legislature voted to repeal the death penalty in 2015 arguing that “taxpayers have not gotten the bang for their buck,” there will be a state referendum on maintaining capital punishment. In Oklahoma, a resolution calling to amend the state’s constitution to enshrine the death penalty, deny that it is “cruel and unusual” punishment and allow for any method of execution, will be on the ballot. In California, which leads the nation in the number of people on death row, there will be two propositions representing both sides in the death penalty debate.

Proposition 66, which is endorsed by a cabal of state prosecutors, cops and prison guards, calls for speeding up executions. To get around the legal challenges to lethal injections, it would make the state’s cocktail of death secret. It would also cut back the appeals process for death row inmates—rights that were already curtailed by Bill Clinton’s gutting of habeas corpus in the 1990s—while forcing lawyers, however inexperienced, to take their cases.

In opposition, Proposition 62 known as “The Justice That Works Act,” calls for replacing the death penalty with life in prison without parole. A CounterPunch (29 August) article “Death to the Death Penalty in California” by Marjorie Cohn, a law professor and a former president of the National Lawyers Guild, argues that Prop. 62 would guarantee “that the worst criminals would never be released,” require “convicted murderers to work and pay restitution” to their victims and “save taxpayers $150 million per year.”

Such is the cruel calculus of death at the hands of the capitalist state, weighing the costs of legal murder against the expense of relegating prisoners to a living death on what class-war political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal so aptly calls “life row.” Nonetheless, as principled opponents of the death penalty, we welcome any measure against state-sanctioned murder. We say: vote “yes” on Prop. 62, “no” on Prop. 66! As we wrote in calling for a vote for a similar proposition on the California ballot in 2012 (WV No. 1009, 28 September 2012):

“As revolutionary Marxists, we do not seek to advise the bourgeoisie on the more ‘humane’ or ‘just’ administration of its increasingly decrepit and depraved rule. Whether it is the death penalty, life in prison without parole or imprisonment in general, we oppose the entire machinery of violence that is the capitalist state.”

As Marxists, we understand that ending the death penalty will not fundamentally change the violently racist and oppressive nature of capitalist class rule. It will not free the innocent, like Mumia, languishing in America’s dungeons or spare the victims of racist police executions on the streets. Nor will it alter the slower death of the growing ranks of the poor, jobless and homeless, or the agony of the sick lacking proper medical care. Our purpose is to fight to forge the nucleus of the revolutionary workers party that will lead the proletariat in overthrowing this system through socialist revolution. When those who labor rule, the death penalty will be abolished for good and the capitalists’ prisons smashed as the initial steps in the emancipation of all the exploited and oppressed.

*****Remembrances Of Things Past-With Jeff Higgins’ Class Of 1964 In Mind

*****Remembrances Of Things Past-With Jeff Higgins’ Class Of 1964 In Mind

 

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

 

There was always something, some damn thing to remind Jeff Higgins, Class of 1964, a fateful year in his life and not just because that was the year that he graduated from North Quincy High School down in outer edge of the Southeastern corner of Massachusetts. He had recently, well, let's call it 2014 because who knows when some iterant reader might read this and because that as will be pointed in a second has significant for why Jeff Higgins that it was one damn thing after another when dealing with that class issue. If you did the math quickly in your head while I was pointing to the significance you would know that year represented the fiftieth anniversary of the his graduation and furthermore had  gone through something of a serious traumatic experience which left him numb every time something came up about that year, some remembrance. If you knew Jeff in 1964, or better in 2014, with his three messy divorces and several affairs from flings to some more serious relationships along with scads of children and grandchildren now from the marriages not the affairs, you would know that it was about a woman, always about a woman, he eternally afflicted as old as he was.

About a woman this time, this eternally afflicted time, named Elizabeth Drury whom he had had a brief puff of air affair with in that same 2014 but which had seemingly vanished in his dust of memory until he went up in the attic to clean up some stuff. (By the way not Liz, which would show a certain informality, a certain good sport and not standing on ceremony or Betty, a nickname which conveyed continued childhood in those days as old as a woman might be, so no way she was not anything but a proper Elizabeth-type, who held maybe Queen Elizabeth I, you know the so-called Virgin Queen, the one who ruled England for a long time and had more lovers than you could shake a stick at but all we knew then was that she was the Virgin Queen, as her model, even in high school.) 

Yeah finally getting rid of most of stuff which had been gathering dust, maybe mold for years, in anticipation of selling his house and moving to a more manageable condo, down-sizing they call it in the real estate trade, and found a faded tattered copy of his class’ remembrance card. You know those time vault cards that card companies like Hallmark, the source of this one, put out so that people, or this case the whole class by some tabulations, can put down favorite films, people, records, who was President, and other momentous events from some important year like a graduation to be looked at in later years and ahhed over. That yellowed sheet brought back not just memories of that faded long ago year but of Elizabeth in the not so faded past. So, yes, it was always some damn thing.      

But maybe we had better take you back to the beginning, back to how 1964 and Elizabeth Drury had been giving one Jeffery Higgins late of North Quincy nothing but pains. Jeff had been for many, many years agnostic about attending class reunions, had early on after graduation decided that he needed to show his back to the whole high school experience which was a flat-out zero once he thought about every indignity and hurt he had suffered for one reason or another, and to the town, a small hick town anyway which needed to be fled to see the big old world. A lot of that teenage angst having to do with his humble beginnings as a son of a “chiseler,” not meant as a nice term, a father who worked in the then depleting now depleted granite quarries when there was work for which the town was then famous and which represented the low-end of North Quincy society. The low-end which others in the town including his fellow classmates in high school who were as socially class conscious as any Mayfair swells made him feel like a nobody and a nothing for no known reason except that he was the son of a chiseler which after all he could not help. (Of course those social exclusions played themselves out under the veil of his not dressing cool, living off the leavings of his older brothers, living off of Bargain Center rejected materials not even cool when purchased, you know, white shirts with stripes when that was not cool, black chinos with cuffs like some farmer, ditto, dinky Thom McAn shoes with buckles for Chrissake, just as his younger brothers lived off his in that tight budget world of the desperate working poor, of his not having money for dates even with fellow bogger’s daughters, and hanging corner dough-less, girl-less corners with fellow odd-ball bogger outcasts). So Jeff had no trouble drifting away from that milieu, had no trouble putting dust on his shoes to get out and head west when the doings out west were drawing every wayward youth to the flame, to the summers of love.

And there things stood in Jeff’s North Quincy consciousness for many years until maybe 2012, 2013 when very conscious that a hallmark 50^th class reunion would be in the works and with more time on his hands as he had cut back on the day to day operation of his small law practice in Cambridge he decided that he would check out the preparations, and perhaps offer his help to organize the event. He had received notification of his class’ fortieth reunion in 2004 (which he had dismissed out of hand only wondering how the reunion committee had gotten his address for while he was not hiding from anything he was also not out there publicly since he did not have clients other than other lawyers whom he wrote motions, briefs, appeals and the like for, until he realized that as a member of the Massachusetts bar he would have that kind of information on his bar profile page) so via the marvels of modern day technology through the Internet he was able to get hold of Donna Marlowe (married name Rossi) who had set up a Facebook page to advertise the event.

That connection led to Jeff drafting himself onto the reunion committee and lead directly to the big bang of pain that he would subsequently feel. Naturally in a world filled with social media and networking those from the class who either knew Donna or the other members of the committee or were Internet savvy joined the class’ Facebook page and then were directed to a class website (as he found out later his generation unlike later ones was on the borderline of entering the “information superhighway” and so not all classmates, those still alive anyway, were savvy that way). On that website set up by tech savvy Donna (she had worked in the computer industry at IBM during her working career) each classmate who joined the site had the ability to put up a personal profile next to their class photograph like many other such sites and that is where Sam saw Elizabeth Drury’s profile and a flood of memories and blushes.            

In high school Jeff had been smitten by Elizabeth, daughter of a couple of school teachers who worked in Marshfield and therefore stationed well above the chiselers of the town. But in things of the heart things like class distinctions, especially in democratically-etched America, are forgotten, maybe not rightly forgotten when the deal goes down but there is enough of façade to throw one off if one gets feeling a certain way,and sometime makes one foolhardy. That had almost happened to Jeff, except his corner boy Jack Callahan put him wise. Jeff and Elizabeth had several classes together senior year and sat across from each other in English class and since both loved literature and were school-recognized as such they had certain interests in common. So they talked, talked in what Jeff thought was very friendly and somewhat flirty manner (or as he thought later after the flame had burned out maybe he just hoped that was the case) and he formed an intention (that is the way he said it the night he related the story to me so forgive the legal claptrap way he said it) to ask her out even if only to Doc’s Drugstore for an after school soda and a listen to the latest platters on Doc’s jukebox which had all the good stuff that kids were dancing to in those days. He figured from there he could work up to a real date. But sometimes the bumps and bruises of the chiseler life left one with a little sense and so before making attempts at such a conquest Jeff consulted with Jack Callahan to see if Elizabeth was “spoken for” (Jeff’s term if you can believe that).

See Jack, a star football player even if a chiseler's son got something of an exemption from the rigid routine of the social structure of the Senior class just by being able to run through defensive lines on any given granite grey autumn afternoon and had excellent “intelligence” on the whole school system’s social network, in other words who was, or was not, spoken for. (By the way that “grapevine” any high school grapevine, maybe middle school too would put the poor technicians at the CIA and the spooks at NSA to shame with the accuracy of the information. It had to be that resourceful otherwise fists would fly.) The word on Elizabeth, forget it, off-limits, an “ice queen.” So Jeff saved himself plenty of anguish and he moved on with his small little high school life.

Seeing Elizabeth's name and profile though that many years later made him curious, made him wonder what had happened to her and since he was now “single” he decided he would write her a private e-mail to her profile page something which the website was set up to perform and which the reunion committee was recommending alumnus to do. That “single” a condition that he now considered the best course after three shifts of alimony, child support and college tuitions made him realize that it was infinitely cheaper to just live with a woman and be done with it. Jeff wrote a short message asking whether she remembered him and she replied that she very well did remember him and their “great” (her term) conversations about Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway and Edith Wharton. That short message and reply “sparked” something and they began a flurry of e-mails giving outlines of their subsequent history, including the still important one to Jeff whether she was “spoken for.” She was not having had two divorces although no kids in her career as a professor at the State University.

Somehow these messages led Jeff to tell her about his talk with Jack Callahan. And she laughed not at the “intelligence” which was correct but not for the reasons that Jack gave (her father was an abusive “asshole,” her term for her standoffishness and reputation as an “ice queen”). She laughed because despite her being flirty, at least that was what she thought she was attempting to do because she certainly was interested when they would talk Jeff had never asked her out and then one day just stopped talking to her for no known reason. Damn.                    

They say, or at least Thomas Wolfe did in the title of one of his novels-you can’t go home again but neither Jeff nor Elizabeth after that last exchange of e-mails about the fateful missing chance back in senior year would heed the message. They decided to meet in Cambridge one night to see if that unspoken truth had any substance. They did meet, got along great, had many stories to exchange and it turned out many of the same interests (except golf a sport which relaxed Jeff when he was all wound up but which Elizabeth’s second husband had tried to teach her to no avail). And so their little affair started, started with great big bursts of flames but wound up after a few months smoldering out and being blown away like so much dust in the wind once Elizabeth started talking about marriage. Jeff was willing to listen to living together but his own strange marital orbit had made him very strongly again any more marriages. So this pair could not go home again, not at all, and after some acrimonious moments they parted.           

Jeff knew that was the best course, knew he had to break it off but it still hurt enough that any reference to 1964 made him sad. As he took a look at the sentiment expressed in that tattered yellowed document he had a moment reprieve as he ahh-ed over the information presented. Had he really forgotten that there was not Vice-Presidential succession then when Lyndon Johnson became President after the assassination of home state Irish Jack Kennedy. That My Fair Lady was popular then as now. That the Beatles had appeared on Ed Sullivan’s Show and done a film, that Chapel of Love had been a hit that year as well. That 1964 was the year the Mustang that he would have died for came out into the world. That gas was only about thirty cent a gallon, and that another Elizabeth, Elizabeth Taylor, married one Richard Burton for the first time (although not the last). And on the note he put the yellowed tattered document in the trash pile. He would remember things past in his own way. 

A View From The International Left-South Africa-Mass Student Protests Demand Free Education Now

Workers Vanguard No. 1097	7 October 2016

South Africa-Mass Student Protests Demand Free Education Now

OCTOBER 4—A showdown is taking place in South Africa between university students on one side and campus administrations and the state on the other. Student protests which started last year under the call “Fees Must Fall” (see “Student Protests Shake South Africa,” WV No. 1082, 29 January) have resumed and been met with massive state repression. Yesterday, at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), protesters stopped an attempt to restart classes. In retaliation, the administration today unleashed cops and security guards to crush any protest, turning the campus into a virtual war zone.

For two weeks, campus administrations and the government have unleashed private security guards and cops—many of whom are organized in the trade-union federation COSATU—on protesting students. Braving tear gas, pepper spray, stun grenades and rubber bullets, the protesters have succeeded in shutting down almost every university in the country. The bourgeois-nationalist Tripartite Alliance government—composed of President Jacob Zuma’s African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and COSATU—together with the capitalist media have violence-baited the students and threatened them with even greater state repression. Scores have been arrested, even more have been attacked and injured, and many have been thrown out of their dorms.

On September 28, the University of Johannesburg was transformed into a battleground as private security guards attacked and pepper-sprayed students and journalists and threatened female students with rape. In scenes reminiscent of the apartheid era, police at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape shot rubber bullets at protesters and dragged students across the ground to police cars.

The Wits administration carried out a bogus referendum via text message on September 29, promising that, if a majority voted for classes to resume, it would call on the government and police “to protect the university’s property and safeguard the lives of all students and staff.” As one student put it, “this probably means we can expect army presence—people who are trained to kill.” Other students denounced this sham poll, in which less than half of the student body voted to return to class, noting this fearmongering tactic was an attempt to break their strike. On the other hand, the ANC youth group, which has called for an end to the protests, congratulated those students who voted to return to class. On September 29, the government declared that “university students are being influenced by ‘regime change agents’,” and instructed the cops to act in an “uncompromising way” if the protests continue. As one headline put it: “Zero Tolerance.”

The SACP has denounced the protesters and urged students to isolate “the tiny minority of violent and destructive elements.” Drawing an explicit parallel to the state massacre of 34 striking platinum miners in Marikana in 2012, the higher education minister, Blade Nzimande, threatened the student protesters that they would be “dealt with.” These are the same words that he and other SACP leaders used when they played the role of bloodhounds against the miners and their union. An indication of the resonance that this strike still holds for the black working class and students was shown in a chant by Wits students: “Kill us like you killed people in Marikana.” The slogan “we can’t breathe” has also been a refrain at some protests, recalling the last words spoken by Eric Garner as he was being choked to death by New York City cops in 2014.

It is imperative that the trade unions mobilize their power in defense of the protesters. Students have appealed to the organized labor movement to join their struggle, and on September 23 they marched on COSATU headquarters demanding: “We want COSATU to say when are they calling workers to mobilise.” However, with the exception of staff and teachers at some universities, the union leadership has refused to do so. COSATU and the SACP issued a joint statement on September 21 that hailed the government’s green light to fee increases as “progressive” and lectured the students to redirect their protests from the campuses and the government to institutions of capital. They thereby attempt to divert the students’ anger away from the government, which in fact rules on behalf of capital.

The supposedly more militant metal workers union NUMSA shares the same programmatic framework. While their September 30 statement condemns the violence against the protesters, it also calls on the very state that is carrying out these attacks to investigate itself for “offenses.”

We reprint below a September 22 leaflet issued by Spartacist/South Africa, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

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The response was immediate. On 19 September, within hours of higher education minister Blade Nzimande giving university administrations the green light to increase fees by up to 8 percent next year, students across the country mobilised to shut down campuses and renew the mass protests for free education. Blade’s pronouncement is rightly seen as a slap in the face to the hundreds of thousands who protested last year and early this year. The fact that he also announced the government’s “commitment” to help cover the cost of increases for students from households earning less than R600,000 [US$44,000] per year is faint solace. This just means keeping the price of higher education at its current level for students from poor and working-class families, who are already crushed by mountains of student debt or excluded outright by high fees. In neo-apartheid South Africa, where race and class largely overlap, the exclusion of the poor and workers from higher education means the continued exclusion of most blacks and coloureds. We support the students’ protests against fees and call for free, quality education through to tertiary, with a state-paid living stipend. Abolish the student debt!

Nzimande (who is also general secretary of the SACP) responded to the renewed protests by trying to ridicule the student protesters, portraying them as a bunch of hooligans and/or idiots who want to “destroy our universities in the name of defending no-fee increases for the rich” and are being “misled” by various rogues pursuing “their own narrow political agenda.” With these grotesque slanders, Dr. Nzimande is in good company with the vice-chancellors and other senior managers who earn millions running elite universities like Wits University and University of Cape Town on behalf of the big bourgeoisie. They have issued a steady stream of vomitous press statements depicting militant student activists as little more than violent thugs. This is reminiscent of the racist stereotypes spewed by the apartheid regime during the Soweto uprising of 1976. At the time, thousands of protesting students, workers and township poor were referred to as “tsotsis” [gang members] and “rioting mobs” to justify being mowed down by the apartheid police state. One statement issued by Wits University’s Senior Executive Team on 20 September promised to “identify” and prosecute “those who perpetrated acts of violence on our campus today.” It should not be very hard for the Wits administration to identify the source of violence on their hallowed campus: The administration themselves have paid millions for hundreds of private security guards, many of them equipped with riot gear, to occupy the campus and suppress student protests together with cops from the Metro Police.

Like cops and security guards everywhere, those on Wits and other campuses act as the armed enforcers of the capitalist ruling class to quell social protest seen as “disruptive” to the day-to-day workings of the racist capitalist system. In the past two days alone, cops have repeatedly fired on protesters with stun grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets, injuring and arresting dozens. Yesterday, one female student was badly burned by a police stun grenade while students tried to protest in Braamfontein, Johannesburg. Along with cops and security guards, university administrations across the country have used a whole slew of court interdicts, trumped-up disciplinary charges and other repressive measures to isolate and harass those activists identified as “ring-leaders” of last year’s protests against fees and outsourcing. Drop all the charges against anti-fees and anti-outsourcing protesters! Reinstate all suspended and expelled activists now! Cops and security guards off campus! Abolish the campus administrations—for student-teacher-worker control of the universities!

The fact that dozens of the more militant student activists from last year’s protests have been disciplined and even expelled from campuses without any large protests in opposition is one measure of the demobilising and treacherous role played by the leadership of the Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA). The PYA—an alliance of the ANC Youth League, Young Communist League and South African Students Congress—is the “junior” version of the ANC/SACP/COSATU Tripartite Alliance, which acts to contain social unrest and maintain the capitalist “stability” demanded by the Randlords and ratings agencies.

As the dominant political force in most of the protests, the PYA leaders largely sought to ride the wave of student militancy during last year’s protests, and many are attempting to do so again this year when student anger is at its height. But as soon as Zuma announced in October last year that there would be no fee increase for 2016, the PYA began working overtime to stop further protests, openly acting as the lackeys of the university management. This went as far as the national PYA leaders’ January 2016 press conference denouncing Fees Must Fall protesters who wanted to continue protesting as “counter-revolutionaries” seeking to “hijack” students’ grievances for “regime change,” even implying that they were trained by the CIA. A PYA press statement declared: “There is no reason for strikes to continue when the people’s government has addressed all relevant immediate concerns of students.”

Those student militants revolted by this kind of self-serving treachery need to understand that it is not just a result of the personal qualities (or lack thereof) of the individual sell-out leaders. Underlying their treachery are the bankrupt politics of their parent organisations, which are based on nationalism and class-collaboration. These politics cannot be wished away or swept under the rug in the name of achieving an illusory “student unity,” as many activists seem to hope—they must be argued and fought out in the open. They are not limited to the university terrain, but are the same politics responsible for betraying the promise of liberation from white minority rule. As the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance become increasingly discredited, a host of political misleaders—from black nationalists like the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and Pan Africanist Congress/Student Movement, to the reformist leaders of the metalworkers union NUMSA—are trying to re-package and sell alternative versions of these pro-capitalist politics as something “new.”

The extreme racial and class divide in the education system is but one measure of how the legacy of apartheid—from “Bantu education” to the Group Areas Acts to the migrant labour system—continues to stamp every aspect of life in South Africa. This is not a “mistake” or an “oversight” that could be fixed if only the ANC would return to the “good old days” of the bourgeois-populist Freedom Charter. Far from being a “people’s government,” the Tripartite Alliance government is a bourgeois government that has administered neo-apartheid capitalism for over 20 years. This flowed from the whole political framework of the ANC-led Congress Alliance, which was always premised on maintaining capitalism. The result was the negotiated settlement that ended formal apartheid in 1994 while preserving the power of the Randlords, a betrayal of black freedom. The massive profits of the (still mainly white) South African capitalists continue to be derived from the superexploitation of the mainly black working class.

The true face of neo-apartheid was shown most clearly with the Marikana massacre in 2012, when the cops gunned down 34 striking mineworkers—a massacre reminiscent of the crushing of black dissent under apartheid. Marikana showed not only the racist, repressive nature of the “new South Africa,” but the enormous potential power of the South African proletariat. In the face of the government’s brutal crackdown, the mineworkers remained defiant, keeping the mines shut until they finally won their demands. This is the kind of social power that must be brought to bear in solidarity with the protesting students, who are under the gun of the same capitalist state that has the blood of Marikana on its hands. The working class must stand at the head of the struggles of all the oppressed in a struggle to overthrow capitalist rule. Mobilising this potential power is above all a political question, the question of leadership. What’s desperately needed is to break with the Tripartite Alliance and forge a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party, rooted among the most class-conscious workers, armed with a revolutionary Marxist programme and capable of acting as a tribune of all the oppressed.

Such a party must be built in sharp opposition to all variants of nationalism and based on the strict political independence of the working class from the capitalist state and all bourgeois parties. Julius Malema’s EFF is no different from the ANC in its thoroughly bourgeois programme, notwithstanding its use of more “radical” populist rhetoric. The bankruptcy of the EFF’s bourgeois nationalist populism was crassly demonstrated just last month, following the local elections, when the EFF voted in Johannesburg, Tshwane and elsewhere to back the white-racist, union-busting Democratic Alliance—the “lesser devil,” by Malema’s lights—in forming minority governments.

Against all the schemes for “cleaning up” the racist capitalist system, what’s needed is to fight for a black-centred workers government to break the power of the Randlords, expropriate capitalist property and begin the socialist reconstruction of society. Workers revolution—including the necessary international extension to the advanced capitalist countries that dominate the world economy—alone can open the road to the liberation of the black masses and do away with the myriad forms of oppression that capitalism rests upon and reinforces. Spartacist/South Africa fights to build the Leninist-Trotskyist party needed to lead this struggle.

From Courage to Resist- Help support war objector Ryan Johnson

Help support war objector Ryan Johnson

 

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Ryan Johnson imprisoned for avoiding Iraq decade ago Help support the Ryan and Jennifer Johnson today! https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=122025 Courage to Resist. October 24, 2016 Please help support Ryan and Jennifer Johnson during this challenging time by making a tax-deductible donation to their support fund, hosted by Courage to Resist. Doing so will enable Jennifer to make trips to visit Ryan in prison, give Ryan access to phone cards, help Jennifer with medical expenses, and offset some of the couple’s lost income over the next ten months. Please help support Ryan and Jennifer Johnson during this challenging time by making a tax-deductible donation to their support fund, hosted by Courage to Resist. Doing so will enable Jennifer to make trips to visit Ryan in prison, give Ryan access to phone cards, help Jennifer with medical expenses… US Army soldier Ryan Johnson was convicted of refusing to deploy to the Iraq War, and remaining away from the military for 4,175 days (nearly 11½ years). After surrendering himself to the US Army three months ago, Ryan pled guilty to AWOL and Missing Movement before a “Special Courts Martial” at Fort Irwin, California, on September 26, 2016. US military judge Colonel Michael Hargis sentenced Ryan to 10 months of confinement in a military prison, reduction in rank to E-1 (from E-2), and a bad conduct discharge—after he is released from the Naval Consolidated Brig at Miramar, near San Diego, California. Ryan’s civilian attorney, James Branum of Oklahoma, is currently preparing a clemency packet with supporting letters from friends and family, in the hopes that the sentenced will be reduced. Read more: http://couragetoresist.org/2016/10/ryan-johnson/ Please consider donating to the Ryan and Jen Johnson Support Fund today! https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=122025

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A View From The Left- ISO on Syria-Pimps for U.S. Imperialism

Workers Vanguard No. 1097	7 October 2016

ISO on Syria-Pimps for U.S. Imperialism

For five years, the U.S. imperialists and a host of lesser powers have been stirring the Syrian cauldron, inflicting unspeakable suffering on the peoples of Syria. Today, much of the country is a wasteland, hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered and more than half the population has been driven from their homes, either as internally displaced persons or as refugees abroad.

As Marxists, we fight for a socialist federation of the Near East based on proletarian revolutions that sweep away the capitalist rulers of the region. We say the international proletariat has no side in the Syrian civil war between the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad, rooted in the Alawite religious minority, and the various rebel groups dominated by different Sunni Islamists, some of which are backed by the U.S. But working people have a side against the U.S. and other imperialist powers such as Britain and France. Thus, while implacable opponents of everything the reactionary cutthroats of the Islamic State (ISIS) stand for, we take a military side with ISIS when it aims its fire against the imperialist armed forces and their proxies in the region, including the Kurdish nationalist forces in Iraq and Syria. At the same time, we also oppose the other capitalist powers involved in Syria—such as Russia, Iran and Turkey—and demand that they get out.

Our political position is framed by the Marxist understanding that U.S. imperialism is the greatest enemy of the world’s workers and oppressed. In standing for the defense of ISIS against the blows of the imperialists, we recognize that any setback for Washington coincides with the interests of the international proletariat, both in the Near East and, crucially, here in the U.S. We aim to turn the multi-sided disillusionment and anger of working people in the U.S. into class struggle against their capitalist rulers. It is through such struggle that the proletariat can be won to the need to build a revolutionary workers party that will lead the fight for socialist revolution to destroy the imperialist beast from within.

This Marxist understanding is rejected by reformist groups like the Stalinoid Workers World Party (WWP) and Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). Denying the possibility of international proletarian revolution, both groups are virtually uncritical of Assad’s capitalist regime, falsely painting his dictatorship as progressive and anti-imperialist. For all their anti-imperialist posturing, both WWP and PSL have many times found themselves on the same side as U.S. imperialism. WWP celebrated the 2008 election of Barack Obama, who has continued and intensified U.S. military intervention in the Near East. More recently, both groups cheered on the Kurdish nationalists who in late 2014 were combating ISIS in Kobani, even as these nationalists were acting as the ground troops for the U.S.

And then there is the thoroughly wretched International Socialist Organization (ISO), historically allied with the international tendency led by the late Tony Cliff. The ISO recently ran an article by Ashley Smith titled “Anti-Imperialism and the Syrian Revolution” (socialistworker.org, 25 August), which is essentially an apologia for U.S. imperialism. Smith’s article criticizes, among others, WWP and PSL for their support to Assad. But what the ISO counterposes to this is support to the “democratic” rebels, and through them, to the U.S., the world’s foremost imperialist power.

While claiming to stand against U.S. intervention in Syria, the ISO, in fact, complains that the U.S. has not intervened enough. According to the ISO, Assad is still in power “thanks in no small measure to the fact that the U.S., while accepting some supplying of the rebels, denied these forces the heavy weaponry they pleaded for to stop the regime’s assault.” Later in the article, Smith bemoans the fact that early in the civil war “the U.S. blocked the shipment of heavy weaponry, such as anti-aircraft systems, that would have strengthened secular and democratic forces that have borne the brunt of the Assad regime’s terror.”

The ISO deceitfully paints the Sunni Islamist-dominated rebellion in Syria as a “popular struggle against dictatorship and for democracy.” To be sure, the Cliffites have long had a certain penchant for Islamic fundamentalism, having, for example, supported the coming to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 2012 (only to then support the military coup against it a year later when its rule proved to be unpopular). In Syria, the ISO has embraced some deeply reactionary Islamic fundamentalist forces. One of the slogans of what the ISO calls the “Syrian Revolution” was: “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to their graves!”

For the ISO, the alpha and omega of all struggle is “democracy.” There is no such thing as abstract democracy, which always has a class content. Capitalist democracy is the dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class and oppressed. For genuine Marxists, the starting point is the class line: what furthers the cause of the working class and the struggle for its rule, which on an international basis would lay the material groundwork for a classless, stateless communist society. This requires, first and foremost, the political independence of the working class from all agencies of the bourgeois order—such as the Assad regime and, most certainly, U.S. imperialism.

In his article on Syria, Smith attacks hawk Hillary Clinton from the right. He notes that “she calls for the U.S. to enforce a no-fly zone in Syria, and some of her advisers support air strikes against the Assad regime for the stated aiming [sic] of stopping attacks on civilians.” “But,” Smith then goes on to lament, “Clinton certainly does not support the original aspirations of the Syrian Revolution” because, “at most,” she and Obama advocate “a negotiated solution that preserves the core of the Syrian state.” The ISO’s article is essentially a call to arms for U.S. imperialism to increase its support of the rebels in Syria.

The ISO goes so far as to claim that “the U.S. retreated in general from outright regime change as its strategy in the Middle East after the failure of its invasion and occupation of Iraq.” Tell that to Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi! In 2011, in an operation heavily pushed by Clinton, the U.S. and NATO intervened in support of Libyan rebels against Qaddafi, resulting in his lynching that October. Like it does in Syria today, the ISO then supported the Libyan opposition, sundry forces that included Islamists, monarchists and CIA assets that from the beginning appealed for imperialist military intervention. We had no side in the Libyan civil war, but once the U.S. and European imperialists intervened we declared, “Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack!”

Today, Libya is in the throes of chaos as Islamist and tribal factions compete for control of this oil-rich country. All these forces are hostile to the interests of working people and the oppressed. At the same time, the imperialist-installed Government of National Accord (GNA) and its current allies are acting as the proxy ground troops of U.S. imperialism as it pursues ISIS forces in Surt (Sirte), against which the U.S. has launched over 200 airstrikes since early August. The tribal forces that now claim adherence to ISIS truly stand in the tradition of these cutthroats, having carried out numerous atrocities, including the February 2015 beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic migrant laborers in Surt. But as opponents of U.S. imperialism, we stand for the military defense of ISIS forces in Surt against the U.S. and its GNA proxies.

Anti-Communism Is at the Root

In his article, Smith writes, “How could opponents of U.S. imperialism end up supporting a dictator [Assad].... The answer starts with the Stalinist left’s support of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China during the Cold War era. It supported those state capitalist dictatorships not only as opponents of U.S. imperialism, but as positive models of socialism.” Rather, one should ask, how could the supposed socialists of the ISO end up embracing U.S. imperialism? The answer starts with their abandonment of the defense of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states. The ISO was founded on virulent anti-Communist hostility to the Soviet Union, home of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the world’s first and only successful workers revolution. Rejecting defense of the workers states inevitably leads to embracing one’s “own” ruling class.

The October Revolution of 1917 was the shaping political event of the 20th century. The seizure of state power by the working class led to the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist exploiters, laying the basis for a planned collectivized economy. But in the context of unprecedented devastation caused by World War I followed by nearly four years of civil war, continued isolation and economic backwardness, a conservative bureaucratic caste under the leadership of Joseph Stalin was able to seize political power from Soviet workers beginning in 1923-24. This was a political, not a social, counterrevolution. The Stalinist bureaucracy continued to rest parasitically on the proletarian property forms created by the October Revolution. The bureaucracy’s false dogma of building “socialism in one country,” its conciliation of imperialism and its systematic erosion of the political consciousness of the Soviet working class ultimately paved the way for capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92.

Through all those years, genuine Trotskyists fought for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution. Based on our defense of the gains of the Russian Revolution and our program for new October Revolutions around the world, we fought for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and replace it with a regime based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism. This is the program we pursue today toward the remaining deformed workers states: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.

For his part, the ISO’s political godfather, Tony Cliff, broke from the Trotskyist movement in 1950, opposing defense of North Korea and China against U.S. and British imperialism in their counterrevolutionary Korean War. Cliff would go on to found what later became the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which was allied with the ISO until the early 2000s. In the U.S., the ISO’s precursors emerged from the followers of Max Shachtman, who broke from Trotskyism in 1940 and would quickly go on to reject the Soviet Union as a workers state. Where Shachtman called the Soviet Union a “bureaucratic collectivist” state, Cliff labeled it “state capitalist.” But the aim was the same: to renounce defense of the October Revolution.

In his article, Smith writes that those who argue that “the U.S. government is pulling the strings in the rebellion in Syria” display an arrogant dismissal “of the capacity of exploited and oppressed people to fight for liberation.” In reality, it is the ISO and its forefathers that have a long history of not only dismissing but opposing the struggles of the exploited and oppressed for liberation. Following the peasant-based 1949 Chinese Revolution, which liberated that country from capitalist rule, Shachtman signed a declaration denouncing the Chinese Communists titled, “Stalinism Is Not Socialism,” which was translated into Chinese. His Labor Action (28 September 1953) proudly boasted: “This leaflet had been dropped over China by U.S. bombers in May 1950 presumably through the sponsorship of the State Department.”

The ISO was founded in 1977, when these descendents of Shachtman allied themselves to the British SWP and formally adopted Cliff’s “state capitalist” line. During the Cold War, the Cliffites claimed to be “third campist” against both the U.S. and Soviet Union. In reality, the “neither Washington nor Moscow” crowd has always found itself in the camp of Washington whenever there has been a hard counterposition between imperialism and the degenerated and deformed workers states.

The Cliffites supported all manner of reactionary forces opposed to the Stalinists in power—from the sadistic, CIA-backed Afghan mujahedin who butchered school teachers for teaching girls to read to the Vatican-backed, anti-Communist, anti-Jewish and anti-woman Solidarność movement in Poland. In August 1991, when Boris Yeltsin’s imperialist-backed forces of counterrevolution staged a coup in Moscow, the Cliffites triumphantly proclaimed: “Communism has collapsed.... It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 31 August 1991).

Today, the ISO paints Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a continuation of the Soviet Union, with Smith writing that “Russia—profoundly weakened since its defeat in the Cold War a quarter century ago—is reasserting its imperial power through its all-out support for the Assad regime.” Post-Soviet Russia is a capitalist state. That the ISO has joined the U.S. rulers’ current anti-Russia hysteria is predictable and fits neatly with the Democratic Party circles that they inhabit.

For Smith, the main enemy in Syria is Assad and “Russian imperialism.” Russia is not imperialist but rather a regional power that inherited the nuclear arsenal and industrial infrastructure of the former Soviet Union (see “Is Russia Imperialist?” WV No. 1071, 10 July 2015). Such is the ISO’s vitriol against Russia that Smith even attacks the presidential candidates of the bourgeois Green Party to whom the ISO is giving electoral support this November. He complains that Jill Stein and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka, “have appeared on Russia’s state-sponsored, English-language RT television network to speak in opposition to U.S. war crimes, while remaining silent about Putin’s and Assad’s atrocities.”

The Syrian civil war has seen plenty of atrocities committed against civilians from all sides, from minorities slaughtered or driven out of their villages and towns by various rebels to the bombing of Aleppo by Russian and Syrian forces. But the greatest enemy of the Syrian masses is U.S. imperialism, whose wars across the Near East, including airstrikes in Syria, have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people. As for the Green Party, it is hardly an opponent of U.S. imperialism. Stein’s election platform calls for cutting in half the U.S. military budget, which is many times more than the combined total of all its imperialist rivals. So Stein is for fewer bombs than Hillary, but is nonetheless dedicated to preserving an arsenal to enforce the predatory and murderous interests of America’s rulers abroad.

The ISO’s grotesque line on the Syrian civil war did not fall out of the sky. Its origins lie not in Syria or the Near East. Rather, it is the continuation of their repeated abject capitulation to and support for U.S. imperialism, originating in their unbridled hostility to the Soviet Union. Having time and again supported “democratic” imperialism against Soviet “totalitarianism,” it is hardly a stretch for the ISO to stand on the side of U.S. imperialism in Syria in the name of “democracy.”

*****Channeling The Grateful Dead Minus…

*****Channeling The Grateful Dead Minus…

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

No I was never a “Dead Head,” never would have accepted that designation in any case if somebody tried to lay that moniker on me, tried to tie me down with that crowd who lived and breathed (still do) for every tune the Grateful Dead ever produced. In the old days, the days of the 1960s mad dash to seek a newer world that got trashed about seven million ways before the deal went down and “the authorities,” as my mother used to say when speaking of the ruling class or its agents, pulled the hammer down and soured a whole generation, no, make that three generations now, working on a fourth recently born, since they are still furiously trying to keep us in lock-down mode, I went out in San Francisco by the moniker Prince of Love. So it wasn’t about the moniker, wasn’t about being type-cast, just wasn’t into the group, although half, more than half of whatever group I was travelling with at any particular time would have Dead-Heads and Dead music coming out the sound system to be heard in Afghanistan or some such place, personal musical preference is all. 

By the way that "Prince Of Love" moniker was strictly among the brethren, those who were, literally, my mates on the yellow brick road converted school bus, Captain Crunch's bus purchased according to rumor never confirmed by me or admitted to by the Captain for obvious reasons, obvious legal reasons, by money made in a big dope deal, a marijuana/hash deal with some guys south of the border. Hell maybe I shouldn't be saying anything about the source now because who knows who is listening and looking and who knows if there isn't some infinite statute of no limitations on such transactions although I heard somewhere that murder was the only crime tagged with that designation. That old yellow brick road school bus converted into an itinerant home  for wandering waywards and seekers  was a mode of transportation which while not ubiquitous on the California roads, that distinction would go to Volkswagen mini-buses, they were not an infrequent sight and after a while were not remarked on by anybody but tourists averting their eyes and the eyes of their children aged five and up,and cops, the cops usually looking  for that fatal violation, you know, the rear license plate light out, a sagging tire, too many people on the bus which allowed them to haul the beast to the side of the road and give some each dweller some hassle, some hassle man.( That "on the bus," our version of "on the bus" being an expression stolen from Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, our blessed mothers and fathers who had come on the road a few year before us to signify "cool," to signify that one had made the leap from square-dom, to signify until one "got off the bus," that the iterant life was worth pursuing for a while anyway until the dope, the road itself, or about six thousand other reasons to go home, or go stationary for a while.

A group of us sometimes sticking together for months like the Be-Bop Kid, Peter Markin, my closest friend since he hailed from North Adamsville about twenty miles north of my hometown of Carver, Tiny Slim Tim as you might suspect a giant whose real name was Dexter something and Butterfly Swirl (Catherine Clark) from down in Carlsbad who was “slumming” from the perfect wave surfer crowd she hung with in high school to see what the next best thing was in the frenetic California night until she she decided to "get off the bus" and go back to her perfect yellow-haired pruned surfer boy and who every guy on the bus took a shot at, including Be-Bop, and me stuck together longest. (Markin as it turned would stay out on the road for years after the rest of us "got off" the road since psychologically he had much more invested that most of the rest of us in seeing what he called the "new breeze coming through the land" before he ended up badly down in Mexico, all sister crazy, over a busted drug deal he was trying to put together with the cartel boys who were not pleased).

Others, Mustang Sally (you can figure that one out if you know the song by the same name which went over as a wild rock hit when Mustangs, the cars, became the "boss" vehicle replacing the '57 Chevy in the imaginations of the generation of '68), Reefer Jones (ditto on the figuring out the "reefer" part just throw yourselves back to any urban college dorm, student ghetto apartment, rock concert and high school boys’ or girls’ lav when it filtered down to the teenagers after say 1965, 66 and sniff the air for a second-hand high and you will be on the right track), Guy Fawkes (after the high holy Catholic Church English plotter against the Protestant King James I who has had a resurgence lately between the NSA and the young libertarians, at least for wearing anonymous masks), Digger Stewart (after the 17^th century English communists led by Gerrard Winstanley up on Saint George’s Hill for a while anyway, a movement before its time which unfortunately depended on the good graces of Lord Fairfax who soon withheld his favor and the whole affair when tumbling down but communists even today I notice still pay homage to those efforts and there is even an appropriate modern folk song The World Turned Upside Down commemorating that struggle) stayed for shorter periods.

I called the Captain Crunch Express home for a couple of years as we went up and down the coast looking for the heart of Saturday night, looking for the great blue-pink American West night as the Be-Bop Kid described it and everybody kind of bought into that idea, hell, maybe just looking to turn the world upside down like those Diggers up on Saint George Hill just looking to be left along to wander although none of us at the time either wanted to work the land somewhere almost all being strictly urban dwellers or find some old broken down house and convert it into a wayward-driven commune, and see if that life was any better than the gruel that was on tap for us by "straight" society, the gruel force-fed to us for no known reason.

The “Express” named after the guy, Captain Crunch (real name Slade Stokes, Haverford College Class of 1958), an older guy of indeterminate means (nice way to put that dope-injected rumor, right) who actually knew Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, knew everybody who was anybody in the West Coast alternative cultural scene (for example could get “boss” tickets for 20 of us to the Fillmore to see the Jefferson Airplane when the Be-Bop Kid “married Butterfly Swirl, before she tired of the road, and after she tired of me, but that is a long story for another time), who bought and rigged the bus complete with outrageous high end sound system, or wink, wink,  got it in some drug trade barter deal, and was some kind of father we never knew a la Jack Kerouac-Neal Cassady/drug lord/ philosopher king to us.

No, as well, I never went to one of the Dead’s sold-out stoned out concerts at the Fillmore (which the Captain also could get tickets for since he knew the Dead drummer whose name I forget and who I think passed away a few years ago), and something of a ceremonial rite of passage for those who did consider themselves “Dead Heads” and insisted that each and every time out they eat so much acid (LSD, blotter, and so on not battery acid or some such thing), smoke so many reefers (for the clueless see reference above to Reefer Jones, student ghettos, dorms  and the like about 1965 and after), swallow some many bennies (speed my drug of choice then and later in law school where I used them just to get through the damn silly case studies we were required to know at the cost of being berated by some professor who had shark’s teeth and was not afraid to use them or leave incriminating slashes) just like the very first time they heard the Dead in order to get that same guitar rush that drove them to eternal fan-dom.

And taking something from sports figures and their superstitions like the baseball players who eat exactly the same thing every day they on some kind of streak, a positive streak, who wear the same outfit, the same faded denim, throng sandals, flowered shirt, male, granny dress, sandals, flowers in hair, female, each time to be washed clean by the Dead magic. Of course those who never gave up the tradition had pretty threadbare outfits something just south of tramp/bum/hobo before Jerry went over the top, went to see the “fixer” man to get well one more time, one time too many. (Jerry should have read Nelson Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm to know you can never mess with the fixer man, never trust him either especially if he is a junkie too, can never get washed clean no matter what they say).The fixer man no friend as the lyrics to The Pusher Man by Steppenwolf make perfectly clear, goddam. So like I say despite the voodoo macabre stuff I have any number of friends who were/are ardent fans and they seem to be, well, normal, normal except in those flashback moments where they see “colors, man, colors,”  speak of having “far out” experiences when they would/will get ready for a Dead concert.

Remind me to tell you sometime about a friend of mine, a stone-cold Dead Head, from back in Carver, my growing up hometown about thirty miles south of Boston, who to give you an idea of the tenor of the times back then went from a foul-mouthed corner boy looking to do a nickel or dime in some state pen for armed robbery, or at least straight up robbery although if you are going to make a career of that you should probably be armed against the crazies out there, if the ‘60s hadn’t come along, actually using that moniker "foul-mouth" in high school, he said it turned the girls on, and maybe it did, to “Far-Out Phil” when he came West to join us. So even the best of them would succumb to the western winds and the ghost dance night until the wheels kind of fall off ….for a while.  

But here is my take on the Dead just to keep things in perspective, just to keep things right. I, after a couple of years on the road out there, and maybe not directly in the inner circle of the hippie/drug/literary scene but close enough to get tangled up in the new dispensation I liked to look at the connections, the West Coast connections, where a lot of the energy of the 1960s got its start or if started elsewhere got magnified there. Liked to draw the lines, if you will, from the wild boy alienated, there is no other word that says it so well, bikers over in Oakland and the edges of other working-class towns, mostly white, mostly with some kind of Okie/Arkie background roaring up the streets of Squaresville in search of the village daughters and putting the fear in the average citizen who thought Attila the Hun’s kin had descended, but remember that alienated part that is the hook-in to all the other stuff. Hot rod after midnight “chicken run” runners out in the valleys, alienated too but with a little dough and some swag and a hell-bend desire to go fast, go very fast, if for no other reason than to break out of  valley ennui (although they would punch somebody out, fag bait somebody if they ever used such a word in their presence- if they knew what it meant) and surfer boys, coast boys and with a little more laid back approach in search of the perfect wave (read: Nirvana), maybe not quite so alienated because of that golden tan blonde dish sitting on the beach waiting to see if Sir Galahad finds the holy grail, golden tan blonde dishes like Butterfly Swirl who was a fox even when she wore a granny dress, to the “beat” guys Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg and friends running across America just to keep running, writing up a storm, wenching, whoring , pimping, white blue-eyed hipsters “speaking” be-bop to a jaded world, to sainted Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (and our Captain Crunch, leader of our own merry prankster psychedelic bus), the Hell’s Angels (bad dudes, bad dudes, no question), Fillmore with strobe light beams creating dreams, et. al and you have the skeleton for what went on then, right or wrong. Wasn’t that a time, yes, Lord, wasn’t that a time. And the Dead were right in the mix.         

Honor An Historic Leader Of The American Abolitionist Movement-John Brown Late Of Harper's Ferry

Honor An Historic Leader Of The American Abolitionist Movement-John Brown Late Of Harper's Ferry