AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Thursday, November 17, 2016

*****Support "Courage To Resist"-The Organization Supporting Chelsea Manning And Other Military Resisters

A Good Woman On His Mind-The Trials and Tribulations of Lance Lawrence

By Seth Garth

Sam Lowell had never seen anybody as skirt –crazy as his old friend Lance Lawrence, a guy that he had met in college, met at Boston University when by the luck the draw they became roommates freshman year and had remained in contact, sometimes with serious lapses of time, sometimes like now over forty years later almost daily. Day one freshman year they had hardly gotten their books from the bookstore when Lance had propositioned some young thing (his expression for the fair sex, for young women, okay, which he has used until this day even though who he is speaking or thinking of had lost the sweet bloom of youth long ago), Not only had propositioned her but had coaxed her (Sam’s gentile word for a lot more than some innocent coaxing) up into their dorm room on Bay State Road (leaving Sam, for the first but not the last hanging somewhere not in the dorm). That seduction, no that coaxing a definite no-no in the hard-pressed later 1960s when freshman were supposed officially by the in locus parentis school authorities to be above such sexual desire and ways to relieve those desires. Nothing ever came of that indiscretion and like a million other Lance indiscretions for which he became something like campus famous never looked back, never thought such conduct was anything but the natural order. Lance’s natural order and if pressed today would probably wonder what the hell anybody was talking about, making a big deal about it as just the way he operated in his silver spoon world. And he had had since those fresh bloom days three, count them, three full-fledged divorces and a myriad of affairs to put paid to that sense of wonder.

No question Lance was a good-looking guy, a good-looking guy in that sly, wicked way that guys back in the day looked to the opposite sex and which no longer commands those longing loving looks from forlorn midnight sitting by the telephone young women who charted his life and theirs by their meaningful glances (now waiting almost anyplace by the cellphone). Tall, not too tall, lanky, a little wiry which meant don’t mess with him and which on occasion especially under drink was very good advice, a long tousle of dark black hair and bedroom eyes (that remark made Sam mad when girls, his date girls, would ask him who the guy with the bedroom blue eyes was with a slightly suggestive sexual emphasis that usually did rouse to his benefit later in the evening). So, yes, Lance was a piece of work. And although Lance had lost several steps in the aging process he still believed that he had what it took to get the now no longer young “mature” women who engaged his attention a quick tumble just like that first freshman day.

So yes skirt-crazy as ever. Skirt-crazy through those three marriages two which broke up due to that very chasing (the third, his first flighty one when he expected to be shipped out to Vietnam and had worried himself to perdition that he would die unsung, and unmarried, was due to her chasing some football player type while he was in Dear John Vietnam without a scratch on him). Of late Lance had been momentarily down in the dumps due to the break-up of his latest affair, an affair with Minnie Murphy whom he had had an affair with, the gentile way that he put it to Sam one night over drinks at Sam’s favorite watering hole in Cambridge, Joey’s Grille, although they had been shacked up for at least a decade before she gave him his walking papers. The breakdown of the Lance crisis had not been that he had done his damnest to earn those walking papers by his ever-lasting philandering, which he had, or at least that went unspoken but you never knew with quiet Minnie, a habit of hers drilled in childhood by a drunken father who made it his business to shut his whole brood up. No, Lance was beside himself with the fact that he was lady-less, was without a companion after an almost endless string going back, well, going back to that first freshman wayward day. Had been alone almost a month at that point.

Lance at least in Sam’s presence had never before been known to be reflective about his romantic downturns so Sam was rather surprised when Lance mentioned how his inattention, his distance, his indifference to Minnie’s feelings and he self-absorption had left Minnie no choice but to flee the scene, to go on her own quiet quest to “find herself” without the tensions of having to bear whatever mood Lance was in at any given time.

Sam should have known that such self-analysis was a “cover,” a convenient way to introduce some latest scheme to grab some skirt rather than own up to his boorishness with Minnie. (Sam, a victim of his own two divorces and scads of college-weighted kids always had a soft spot in his heart for Minnie, especially after one meaningful night when he half-drunk brought up the subject and Minnie, gently as was her way always, told him that she had some feelings that way too but Lance was her man and that was that, damn Lance.)

What had Lance down in the dumps was his latest “search” for some skirt. See, as he told Sam that bleary self-confession barroom drinking night he had recently joined a senior-oriented in-line dating service, Seniors Please, and had been hard-pressed to find his niche, his place in such an off-hand way of meeting women, “mature” women but Sam knew in his mind Lance was working the same game plan he had used to floor women since he was about six. Lance, as long as Sam had seen him operate under all weathers, always depended on those piecing bedroom eyes and a gift of blarney that would make any honest Irishmen weep for their inadequacies. That meant that he would meet some woman at a bar or at work (or at a bookstore when that was in style and there were bookstores, brick and mortar bookstores, where women would congregate to get their weekly reading materials and as it turned out when he found out later lingering around if any prospective men within fifty miles of the place the idea being that a guy who at least read a book was a likely prospect. Yeah, the bar was pretty low.). Then work his magic based on some chemistry between them or some lust (on her part as likely as his also something Lance had found out from experience).

This on-line dating business was ass-backward. You filled out a “profile” of rather simpleton and non-responsive questions, some bullshit prompted lines about what you were looking for (sex of course, not only the province of the young), and a decent photo. The hook though was when you placed your profile on-line and got a few bites you couldn’t respond because you were not a member of the service and had to pay the entry fee which Lance begrudgingly did. Once he did that he got very few responses that he was interested in (what he would later find were benighted trolls, a blight on all social media sites and something he had never expected “cougars,” older women “stalking” younger men, that could be an eighty year old hunting for sixty year old, Jesus). The photo and bullshit written profile did not play to his strong suit, did not play to that chemistry. The old days were long gone when you met somebody live say at a party, clicked, and exchanged phone numbers (or when out to parked car if it was that kind of night). So what was an “active” man to do when there were no other obvious ways to meet women when there were none at work or in the law profession in general who were around his age and were interested in anything but making partner, where the “meat market” bars were way behind him and where his hijinks in the art museum he was advised to go to in order to meet women only gave him a headache.

Lance made Sam laugh with some of the stuff he mentioned he had run into (out loud because some of the situations were funny and secretly that finally the playboy of the western world had been taken down a peg or two). That cougar older woman hunting young man business but also the way Lance talked about what women, seemingly rational and intelligent women, put on-line. The expected bullshit “profile” stuff about finding a soul-mate and eternal love but also some impossible stuff like seriousness, good manners, and gentlemanly behavior. Jesus, Lance told Sam what the hell did they expect from guys who probably had at least a passing acquaintance with the 1960s and looser styles and mores. But the photographs were the tip-off that Lance was in deep trouble. He could not believe that these same women who were looking for eternal love unabashedly put photographs of themselves with their broods of grandchildren in the lead photographs (although Lance loved his own brood of grandkids he hardly would advertise himself as grandpa of the year). Could not believe that they put amply photographs of their pets (sometimes looking cuter than their owners) among their selections. Had flipped out when one woman had a photograph of her big bruiser of an adult son who looked like a professional football player all surly beside his mother looking for all the world like he would bust some guy’s nose if he looked cross-eyed at his dear mother.

Lance went on with his funny descriptions until he and Sam had had enough to drink and decided to head for their respective homes. As they parted after going out the door Lance said to Sam that he had to go home and boot up the computer to see if greeklady123 or coolocean47 (on-line monikers that everybody assumed on site) had responded to his messages. Yeah, Lance was a skirt-crazy guy, no question.

*****The Roots Is The Toots-With Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven In Mind

*****The Roots Is The Toots-With Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven In Mind

A YouTube clip to give some flavor to this subject.

Over the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale (reflecting the necessarily international brother and sisterhood of the downtrodden and oppressed to get out from under the thumb of the now globalized economic royalists who run the show to their small benefit), Union Maid (reflecting the deep-seeded need to organize the unorganized and reorganize the previously organized sections of the labor movement in America), Which Side Are You On (reflecting, well, that is easy enough to figure out without further explanation, which side are you when the deal goes down), Viva La Quince Brigada (reflecting that at certain times and certain places we must take up arms like in the 1930s Spanish Civil War against the night-takers before they get out of their shells and wreak havoc on the world), Universal Soldier (reflecting the short-fall in the ability of humankind to step forward without going off the deep end of killing each other for no known reason, none good anyway), and such under the title Songs To While The Class Struggle By. And those songs have provided our movement with that combination entertainment/political message that is an art form that we use to draw the interested around us. Even though today those interested in struggling may be counted rather than among the countless that we need to take on the beasts and the class struggle to be “whiled away” is rather one-sidedly going against us at present. The bosses are using every means from firing militants to targeting and setting union organizing drives up for failure by every means possible to employing their paid propagandists to complain when the masses are not happy with having their plight groveled in their faces like they should be and are ready to do something about it while the rich, well, while away in luxury and comfort.

Not all life however is political, or rather not all music lends itself to some kind of explicit political meaning but yet spoke to, let’s say, the poor sharecropper or planation worker on Mister’s land at the juke joint on Saturday listening to the country blues, unplugged, kids in the early 1950s at the jukebox listening to high be-bop swing heralding a new breeze to break out of the tired music of their parents, other kids listening, maybe at that same jukebox later in the decade now worn with play and coins listening to some guys from some Memphis record company rocking and rolling (okay, okay not just some record company but Sam Phillip’s Sun Records and not just some guys from the cornfields but Warren Smith, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis), or adults spending some dough to hear the latest from Tin Pan Alley (some Cole Porter, Irvin Berlin, Gershwin Brothers summertime and the living is easy tune)or some enchanted evening Broadway musical. And so they too while away to the various aspects of the American songbook and that rich tradition is which in honored here.

This series which could include some modern protest songs as well like Pete Seeger’s Where Have All The Flowers Gone or Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind, is centered on roots music as it has come down the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain amusing here. Listen up.

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And as if you needed more motivation to listen up to Mister Chuck Berry and his 1950s youth anthem run through this sketch:

The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Sam Lowell thought it was funny how things worked out in such contrary fashion in this wicked old world, not his expression that “wicked old world” for he preferred of late the more elastic and ironic “sad old world” reflecting since we are in a reflecting mood the swift passage of time and of times not coming back but that of his old time North Adamsville corner boy Peter Markin, Markin, who seemingly was possessed by the demon fight in his brain against the night-takers whatever their guise and who will be more fully introduced in a moment. (Markin aka Peter Paul Markin although nobody ever called him that except his mother, as one would expect although he hated to be teased by every kid from elementary school on including girls, girls who liked him too as a result, and his first ill-advised wife, a scion of the Mayfair swells who tried, unsuccessfully, to impress her leafy suburban parents with the familiar waspy triple names inherited from the long ago Brahmin forbear stowaways on the good ship Mayflower.)

Neither of those expressions referred to above date back to their youth since neither Sam nor Markin back then, back in their 1960s youth, would have used such old-fashioned religious-drenched expressions to express their take on the world since as with all youth, or at least youth who expected to “turn the world upside down” (an expression that they both did use in very different contexts) they would have withheld such judgments or were too busy doing that “turning upside down” business and they had no time for adjectives to express their worldly concerns. No, that expression, that understanding about the wickedness of the world had been picked up by Sam from Markin when they had reconnected a number of years previously after they had not seen each other for decades to express the uphill battles of those who had expected humankind to exhibit the better angels of their nature on a more regular basis. Some might call this a nostalgic glancing back, especially by Markin since he had more at stake in a favorable result, on a world that did not turn upside down or did so in a way very different from those hazy days.

The funny part (or ironic if you prefer) was that Sam had been in his youth the least political, the least culture-oriented, the least musically-oriented of those corner boys like Markin, Jack Dawson, Jimmy Jenkins and “max daddy” leader Fritz Fallon, that “max daddy” another expression coined by Markin so although he has not even been properly introduced we know plenty about his place in the corner boy life, his place as “flak,” for Fritz’s operation although Fritz always called him “the Scribe” when he wanted something written up about his latest exploits and needed to play on Markin’s vanity, Markin with his finger-tip two thousand arcane facts stored in that brain ready to be fired at a moment’s notice for his leader. His leader who kept the coins flowing into the jukebox at Phil’s House of Pizza (don’t ask how that “coins flowing” got going since Fritz like most of the corner boys came “from hunger” but just take on faith that they got there. That shop had been located down a couple of blocks from the choppy ocean waters of Adamsville Beach (and still is although under totally different management from the arch-Italian Rizzo family that ran the place for several generation to some immigrant Albanians named Hoxha).

That made it among other things a natural hang-out place for wayward but harmless poor teenage corner boys. The serious “townie” professional corner boys, the rumblers, tumblers, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters hung around Harry’s Variety with leader Red Riley over on Sagamore far from beaches, daytime beaches although rumors had been of more than one nighttime orgy with “nice” girls looking for kicks with rough boys down among the briny rocks. Fritz and the boys would not have gone within three blocks of that place. Maybe more from fear, legitimate fear as Fritz’s older brother, Timmy, a serious tough guy himself, could testify to the one time he tried to wait outside Harry’s for some reason, a friend stopping to buy a soda on a hot summer day Fritz said, and got chain-whipped by Red for his indiscretion. Moreover Phil’s provided a beautiful vantage point for scanning the horizon for those wayward girls who also kept their coins flowing into Phil’s jukebox (or a stray “nice” girl passing by after Red and his corner boys threw her over).

Sam had recently thought about that funny story that Markin had told the crowd once on a hot night in the summer of 1965 when nobody had any money and were just holding up the wall at Phil’s about Johnny Callahan, the flashy and unstoppable halfback from the high school team (and a guy even Red respected having made plenty of money off of “sports” who bet with him on Johnny’s prowess on any given Saturday although Johnny once confessed that he too, rightly, avoided Harry’s after what had happened to Timmy). See Johnny was pretty poor in those days even by the median working poor standard of the old neighborhoods (although now, courtesy of his incessant radio and television advertising which continues to make everyone within fifty miles of North Adamsville who knew Johnny back in the day aware of his new profession, he is a prosperous Toyota car dealer down across from the mall in Hull about twenty miles from North Adamsville, the town where their mutual friend Josh Breslin soon to be introduced came from).

Johnny, a real music maniac who would do his football weight-lifting exercises to Jerry Lee’s Great Balls of Fire, Gene Vincent’s Be-Bop-A-Lula and stuff like that to get him hyped up, had this routine in order to get to hear songs that he was dying to hear, stuff he would hear late at night coming from a rock station out of Detroit and which would show up a few weeks later on Phil’s jukebox just waiting for Johnny and the kids to fill the coffers, with the girls who had some dough, enough dough anyway to put coins into that jukebox.

Johnny would go up all flirty to some young thing (a Fritz expression coped from Jerry Lee and not an invention of Markin as he would later try to claim to some “young thing” that he was trying to “score”) or depending on whatever intelligent he had on the girl, maybe she had just had a fight with her boyfriend or had broken up with him so Johnny would be all sympathy, maybe she was just down in the dumps for no articulable reason like every teen goes through every chance they get, whatever it took. Johnny, by the way, would have gotten that intelligence via Markin who whatever else anybody had to say about him, good or bad, was wired into, no, made himself consciously privy to, all kinds of boy-girl information almost like he had a hook into that Monday morning before school girls’ locker room talkfest (everybody already knew that he was hooked into the boys’ Monday morning version and had started more rumors and other unsavory deeds than any ten other guys).

Now here is what Johnny “knew” about almost every girl if they had the quarter which allowed them to play three selections. He would let them pick that first one on their own, maybe something to express interest in his flirtation, maybe her name, say Donna, was also being used as the title of a latest hit, or if broken up some boy sorrow thing. Brenda Lee’s I Want To Be Wanted, stuff like that. The second one he would “suggest” something everybody wanted to listen to no matter what but which was starting to get old. Maybe an Elvis, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee thing still on the jukebox playlist but getting wearisome. Then he would go in for the kill and “suggest” they play this new platter, you know, something like Martha and the Vandelas Dancing in the Streets or Roy’s Blue Bayou both of which he had heard on the midnight radio airwaves out of Detroit one night and were just getting play on the jukeboxes. And bingo before you know it she was playing the thing again, and again. Beautiful. And Johnny said that sometimes he would wind up with a date, especially if he had just scored about three touchdowns for the school, a date that is in the days before he and Kitty Kelly became an “item.” An item, although it is not germane to the story, who still is Johnny’s girl, wife, known as Mrs. Toyota now.

But enough of this downstream stuff Sam thought. The hell with Johnny and his cheapjack tricks (although not to those three beautiful touchdowns days, okay) this thing gnawing at him was about old age angst and not the corner boy glory days at Phil’s, although it was about old time corners boys and their current doings, some of them anyway. So yeah he had other things he wanted to think about (and besides he had already, with a good trade-in gotten his latest car from Mr. Toyota so enough there), to tell a candid world about how over the past few years the country, the world, the universe had been going to hell in a hand-basket. In the old days, like he kept going back to he was not the least bit interested in anything in the big world outside of sports, and girls, of course. And endlessly working on plans to own his own business, a print shop, before he was twenty-five. Well, he did get that small business, although not until thirty and had prospered when he made connections to do printing for several big high-tech companies, notably IBM when they began outsourcing their work. He had prospered, had married (twice, and divorced twice), had the requisite tolerated children and adored grandchildren, and in his old age a woman companion to ease his time.

But there had been for a long time, through those failed marriages, through that business success something gnawing at him, something that Sam felt he had missed out on, or felt he had do something about. Then a few years ago when it was getting time for a high school class reunion he had Googled “North Adamsville Class of 1966” and came upon a class website for that year, his year, that had been set up by the reunion committee, and decided to join the site to keep up with what was going on, keep up with developments there (he would wind up not going to that reunion as he had planned to although that too is not germane to the story here except as one more thing that gnawed at him because in the end he could not face going home, believed in the end after a painful episode, a feud with a female fellow classmate that left bitter ashes in his mouth, hers too from what he had heard later, what Thomas Wolfe said in the title of one of his novels, you can’t go home again.

After he had registered on the site giving a brief resume of his interests and what he had been up to these past forty years or so years Sam looked at the class list, the entire list of class members alive and deceased (a rose beside their name signifying their passing, some seventy or so maddening to his sad old world view) of who had joined and found the names of Peter Paul Markin and Jimmy Jenkins among those who had done so. (Sam had to laugh, listed as Peter Paul Markin since everybody was listed by their full names, revenge from the grave by his poor mother, and that leafy suburban first wife who tried to give him Mayflower credentials, he thought.) Jack Dawson had passed away a few years before, a broken man, broken after his son who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan had committed suicide, according to Markin, as had their corner boy leader, Fritz Fallon, homeless after going through a couple of fortunes, his own and a third wife’s.

Through the mechanism established on the site which allowed each class member who joined to have a private e-mail slot Sam contacted both men and the three of them started a rather vigorous on-line chat line for several weeks going through the alphabet of their experiences, good and bad, the time for sugar-coating was over unlike in their youth when all three would lie like crazy, especially about sex and with whom in order to keep their place in the pecking order, and in order to keep up with Fritz whom lied more than all three of them combined. Markin knew that, knew Fritz’s lying about his scorecard with under the satin sheets women, knew it better than anybody else but to keep his place as “scribe” in that crazy quill pecking order went along with such silly teenage stuff, stuff that in his other pursuits he would have laughed at but that is what made being a teenager back then, now too, from what Sam saw of his grandchildren’s trials and tribulation.

After a while, once the e-mail questions had worked their course, all three men met in Boston at the Sunnyvale Grille, a place where Markin had begun to hang out in after he had moved back to Boston from the West Coast (read “hang out”: did his daytime drinking) over by the waterfront, and spent a few hours discussing not so much old times per se but what was going on in the world now, and how the world had changed some much in the meantime. And since Markin, the political maniac of the tribe, was involved in the conversations maybe do something about it at least that is what Sam had hoped since he knew that is where he thought he needed to head in order to cut into that gnawing feeling plaguing him. Sam was elated, and unlike in his youth he did not shut his ears down, when those two guys would talk politics, about the arts or about music. He had not listened back then since he was so strictly into girls and sports, not always in that order (which caused many problems later including one of the grounds for his one of his divorces, not the sports but the girls).

This is probably the place for Sam to introduce Peter Paul Markin although he had already given an earful (and what goes for Markin goes to a lesser extent for Jimmy who tended to follow in Pete’s wake on the issues back then, and still does). Markin as Sam already noted provided that noteworthy, national security agency-worthy service, that “intelligence” he provided all the guys (and not just his corner boys, although they had first dibs) about girls, who was “taken,” a very important factor if some frail (a Fritz term from watching too many 1940s gangster and detective movies and reading Dashiell Hammett too closely, especially The Maltese Falcon),was involved with some bruiser football player, some college joe who belonged to a fraternity and the brothers were sworn to avenge any brother’s indignities, or worse, worse of all, if she was involved with some outlaw biker who hung out in Adamsville and who if he hadn’t his monthly quota of college boy wannabes red meat hanging out at Phil’s would not think twice about chain-whipping you just for the fuck of it (“for the fuck of it” a term Jimmy constantly used so it was not always Markin or Fritz who led the verbal life around the corner), who was “unapproachable,” probably more important than that social blunder of ‘hitting on” a taken woman since that snub by Miss Perfect-Turned-Up-Nose would make the rounds of that now legendary seminar, Monday morning before school girls’ locker room (and eventually work its way through Markin to the boys’ Monday morning version ruining whatever social standing the guy had spent since junior high trying to perfect in order to avoid the fatal nerd-dweeb-wallflower-square name your term).

Strangely Markin had made a serious mistake with Melinda Loring who blasted her freeze deep on him and he survived to tell the tale, or at least that is what he had the boys believe. Make of this what you will though he never after that Melinda Loring sting had a high school girlfriend from North Adamsville High, who, well, liked to “do the do” as they called it back then, that last part not always correct since everybody, girls and boys alike, were lying like crazy about whether they were “doing the do” or not, including Markin.

But beyond, well beyond, that schoolboy silliness Markin was made of sterner stuff (although Sam would not have bothered to use such a positive attribute about Markin back then) was super-political, super into art and what he called culture, you know going to poetry readings at coffeehouses, going over to Cambridge to watch foreign films with subtitles and themes that he would try to talk about and even Jimmy would turn his head, especially those French films by Jean Renoir, and super into music, fortunately he was not crazy for classical music (unlike some nerds in school then who were in the band and after practice you would hear Beethoven or somebody wafting through the halls after they had finished their sport’s practice)but serious about what is now called classic rock and roll and then in turn, the blues, and folk music (Sam still shuttered at that hillbilly stuff Markin tried to interest him in when he thought about it). That was how Markin had first met Josh Breslin, still a friend, whom he introduced to Sam at one of their meetings over at the Sunnyvale Grille.

Josh told the gathering that Markin had met him after high school, after he had graduated from Hull High (the same town where Johnny Callahan was burning up the Toyota sales records for New England) down at the Surf Ballroom. (Sam had his own memories of the place, some good, some bad including one affair that almost wound up in marriage.) Apparently Josh and Peter had had their wanting habits on the same girl at one Friday night dance when the great local cover band, the Rockin’ Ramrods held sway there, and had been successively her boyfriend for short periods both to be dumped for some stockbroker from New York. But their friendship remained and they had gone west together, gone on that Jack Kerouac On The Road trail for a number of years when they were trying their own version of turning the world upside down on. Josh also dabbled (his word) in the turning upside down politics of the time.

And that was the remarkable thing about Markin, not so much later in the 1960s in cahoots with Josh because half of youth nation, half the generation of ’68 was knee-deep in some movement, but in staid old North Adamsville High days, days when to just be conventionally political, wanting to run for office or something, was seen as kind of strange. See Peter was into the civil rights movement, nuclear disarmament, and social justice stuff that everybody thought he was crazy to be into, everybody from Ma to Fritz (and a few anonymous midnight phone-callers yelling n----r-lover and commie into the Markin home phone). He had actually gone into Boston when he was a freshman and joined the picket-line in front of Woolworths’ protesting the fact that they would not let black people eat in their lunchrooms down south (and maybe Markin would say when he mentioned what he was up to Woolworth’s, or North Adamsville residents, were not that happy to have blacks in their northern lunchrooms either ), had joined a bunch of Quakers and little old ladies in tennis sneakers (a term then in use for airhead blue-haired lady do-gooders with nothing but time on their hands) calling on the government to stop building atomic bombs (not popular in the red scare Cold War “we were fighting against the Russians” North Adamsville, or most other American places either), running over to the art museum to check out the exhibits (including some funny stories about him and Jimmy busting up the place looking at the old Pharaoh times slave building Pyramids stuff uncovered by some Harvard guys way back), and going to coffeehouses in Harvard Square and listening to hokey folk music that was a drag. (Sam’s take on that subject then, and now.)

So Markin was a walking contradiction, although that was probably not as strange now as it seemed back then when every new thing was looked at with suspicion and when kids like Peter were twisted in the wind between being corner boys and trying to figure out what that new wind was that was blowing though the land, when Sam and the other corner boys, except Jimmy and sometimes Jack would try to talk him out of stuff that would only upset everybody in town.

But here is the beauty, beauty for Sam now that he was all ears about what Peter had to say, he had kept at it, had kept the faith, while everybody else from their generation, or almost everybody, who protested war, protested around the social issues, had hung around coffeehouses and who had listened to folk music had long before given it up. Markin had, after his Army time, spent a lot of time working with GIs around the war issues, protested the incessantly aggressive American foreign policy dipped internally into wars and coups at the drop of a hat and frequented off-beat coffeehouses set up in the basements of churches in order to hear the dwindling number of folk artists around. He had gotten and kept his “religion,” kept the faith in a sullen world. And like in the old days a new generation (added to that older North Adamsville generation which still, from the class website e-mail traffic had not gotten that much less hostile to what Markin had to say about this “wicked old world,” you already know the genesis of that term, right, was ready to curse him out, ready to curse the darkness against his small voice).

One night when Peter and Sam were alone at the Sunnyvale Grille, maybe both had had a few too many high-shelf scotches (each now able to afford such liquor unlike in the old days when they both in their respective poverties, drank low-shelf Johnny Walker whiskey with a beer chaser when they had the dough, if not some cheapjack wine), Peter told Sam the story of how he had wanted to go to Alabama in high school, go to Selma, but his mother threatened to disown him if he did, threatened to disown him not for his desire to go but because she would not have been able to hold her head up in public if he had, and so although it ate at him not to go, go when his girlfriend, Helen Jackson, who lived in Gloversville, did go, he “took a dive” (Markin’s words).

Told Sam as well a redemptive story too about his anti-war fight in the Army when he refused to go to Vietnam and wound up in an Army stockade for a couple of years altogether. (Sam thought that was a high price to pay for redemption but it may have been the Scotch at work.) Told a number of stories about working with various veterans’ groups, throwing medals over Supreme Court barricades, chainings to the White House fence, sitting down in hostile honked traffic streets, blocking freeways complete with those same hostile honkings, a million walks for this and that, and some plain old ordinary handing out leaflets, working the polls and button-holing reluctant politicians to vote against the endless war budgets (this last the hardest task, harder than all the jailings, honkings, marches put together and seemingly the most fruitless).

Told too stories about the small coffeehouse places seeing retread folkies who had gone on to other things and then in a fit of anguish, or hubris, decided to go back on the trail. Told of many things that night not in feast of pride but to let Sam know that sometimes it was easier to act than to let that gnawing win the day. Told Sam that he too always had the “gnaw,” probably always would in this wicked old world. Sam was delighted by the whole talk, even if Markin was on his soapbox.

That night too Peter mentioned in passing that he contributed to a number of blogs, a couple of political ones, including an anti-war veterans’ group, a couple of old time left-wing cultural sites and a folk music-oriented one. Sam confessed to Markin that although he had heard the word blog he did not know what a blog was. Peter told him that one of the virtues of the Internet was that it provided space (cyberspace, a term Sam had heard of and knew what it meant) for the average citizen to speak his or her mind via setting up a website or a blog. Blogs were simply a way to put your opinions and comments out there just like newspaper Op/Ed writers or news reporters and commentators although among professional reporters the average blog and blog writers were seen as too filled with opinions and sometimes rather loose with the facts.

Peter said he was perfectly willing to allow the so-called “objective” reporters state the facts but he would be damned if the blog system was not a great way to get together with others interested in your areas of interest, yeah, stuff that interested you and that other like-minded spirits might respond to. Yeah that was worth the effort.

The actual process of blog creation (as opposed to the more complex website-creation which still takes a fair amount of expertise to create) had been made fairly simple over time, just follow a few simple prompts and you are in business. Also over time what was possible to do has been updated for ease, for example linking other platforms to your site and be able to present multi-media works lashing up say your blog with YouTube or downloading photographs to add something to your presentation. Peter one afternoon after Sam had asked about his blog links showed him the most political one that he belonged to, one he had recently begun to share space with Josh Breslin, Frank Jackman and a couple of other guys that he had known since the 1960s on and who were familiar with the various social, political and cultural trends that floated out from that period.

Sam was amazed at the various topics that those guys tackled, stuff that he vaguely remembered hearing about but which kind of passed him by as he had delved into the struggle to build his printing shop after high school and the marriage, first marriage, house, kids and dog bites. He told Markin that as he scrolled through the site he got dizzy looking at the various titles from reviews of old time black and white movies that he remembered watching at the old Strand second run theater uptown, poetry from the “beat” generation, various political pieces on current stuff like the Middle East, the fight against war, political prisoners most of whom he had never heard of except the ones who had been Black Panthers or guys like that who were on the news after they were killed or carted off to jail, all kinds of reviews of rock and roll complete with the songs via YouTube, too many reviews of folk music that he never really cared for, books that he knew Peter read like crazy but that Sam could not remember the titles of. The guys really had put a lot of stuff together, even stuff from other sites and announcements for every conceivable left-wing oriented event in Boston or the East Coast. He decided that he would become a Follower which was nothing sinister like some cult but just that you would receive notice when something was put on the blog.

Markin had also encouraged him to write some pieces about what interested him, maybe start out about the old days in North Adamsville since all the guys mined that vein for sketches (that is what Peter liked to call most of the material on site since they were usually too short to be considered short stories but too long to be human interest snapshots). Sam said he would think about the matter, think about it seriously once he read the caption below which was on a sidebar of the blog homepage:

“This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of our interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hardworking, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn our attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back in the day.”

Sam could relate to that, had something to say about some of those songs. Josh Breslin laughed when he heard that Sam was interested in doing old time rock and roll sketches. He then added, “If we can only get him to move off his butt and come out and do some street politics with us we would be getting somewhere.” Peter just replied, “one step at a time.” Yeah, that’s the ticket.

A View From The International Left -South Africa-Free Student Protesters! Cops Off Campus!

Workers Vanguard No. 1099	4 November 2016

South Africa

Free Student Protesters! Cops Off Campus!

OCTOBER 30—South Africa’s neo-apartheid government has ramped up its violent repression against university students fighting for free, quality education for all. Campus strikes and protests roiled South Africa late last year, leading the government to freeze previously announced university fee increases. Mass protests flared up again in September when the higher education minister (and head of the Communist Party), Blade Nzimande, announced that fees would once again be increased. As described by our comrades of Spartacist/South Africa in a September 22 leaflet, the Tripartite Alliance government of the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party (SACP) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) sent their cops and campus security guards to brutally suppress these protests with clouds of tear gas, hails of rubber bullets and mass arrests (see “Mass Student Protests Demand Free Education Now,” WV No. 1097, 7 October).

In the weeks since, the repression has intensified. The police announced this week that 831 “Fees Must Fall” protesters have been arrested since February! On October 20, Tshwane University of Technology student leader Benjamin Lesedi Phehla was killed after a car plowed into a student march. An October 25 protest statement sent to the South African government by the Partisan Defense Committee (a legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League) stated:

“We stand in solidarity with the protesting students and their demand for free quality education, without which black youth are condemned to low-paid jobs or forced into South Africa’s existing unemployed masses. A mere 3.2 percent of black youth aged 18 to 29 attend schools of higher education, and of that figure, 85 percent drop out.”

That the student protests have continued in the face of fierce repression is one expression of the volatile situation throughout the country. The protests have tapped into the profound discontent of the oppressed over the betrayed promises of liberation from white minority rule. The Tripartite Alliance leaders are widely discredited among workers, the township poor and youth, not least due to the naked police repression the government metes out. The true face of racist, neo-apartheid South Africa was shown most starkly in the police massacre of 34 striking miners in Marikana in 2012. That some of those being rounded up in the student protests today are leaders of the Tripartite Alliance’s own youth organizations is an indication of the loss of authority of the former “liberation struggle” leaders. Having awakened widespread expectations of a better life for the impoverished black masses, the Tripartite Alliance leaders have fronted for the racist, exploitative capitalist system under which these expectations can never be met. We reprint below an October 19 statement by Spartacist/South Africa.

* * *

On Sunday, in an early morning police raid on Wits Junction residence, police arrested Mcebo Dlamini, former Wits SRC [Student Representative Council] president and a prominent leader of the Fees Must Fall (FMF) protests. Dlamini faces trumped up charges including assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, public violence and theft. Today he was outrageously denied bail after the state prosecutors argued he is a “flight risk” because he was born in Swaziland, outside the colonial-drawn South African borders! Dlamini’s persecution is part of a transparent, coordinated attempt by the bourgeois state to crush the mass protests for free higher education by cutting off their head. From Pretoria to Cape Town to Durban, student leaders have been arrested, detained and threatened with arrest by the cops. Protest leaders at Wits have been told of a “hit list” drawn up by police and university managements, who are working hand in hand to target student militants. According to the police, more than 500 people have been arrested in connection with FMF protests over the past eight months. At University of KwaZulu-Natal, eleven students have been in prison for a month. At the University of Cape Town, student leader Masixole Mlandu was denied bail last week and faces at least a week in Pollsmoor, a maximum-security prison infamous for brutality, where the white-supremacist apartheid regime routinely sent black liberation fighters to teach them a lesson. Another student arrested this weekend at Wits was abducted by the cops and dumped in Limpopo after reportedly being stripped naked and tortured.

The capitalist state and university administrations have increasingly responded with naked police repression, bolstered by cynical, racist propaganda smearing the protesters as “violent thugs” who are violating the rights of a “silent majority” that “just wants to learn.” This hypocrisy was laid bare for anyone who cares to see during the past few weeks, as one university after another ordered the resumption of the academic programme, enforced through the barrel of a gun. Police occupation forces have not only dispersed and hunted down protesting students, going so far as shooting a Catholic priest who tried to protect protesters who sought refuge in his church. They have also opened fire on individuals trying to attend classes, as well as campus workers who have simply tried to defend students from police violence. This weekend saw the Wits administration imposing a 10 p.m. curfew—a racist clampdown on black students, who are the overwhelming majority that live on campus. Even those who complied with this lockdown and stayed in their res halls have been assaulted and shot at by police. Many students have rightly defied this curfew, which they’ve denounced as [Wits vice-chancellor] “Habib’s Apartheid.” Down with the racist Wits curfew!

The student protesters have fought militantly and bravely to shut down the universities as their only means of disrupting the system and voicing their anger at being excluded—financially and through racist discrimination—from higher education. Campus workers at Wits and other universities have downed tools in solidarity with the students and in opposition to the police clampdown, as have some, mainly black, academic staff. But achieving the protests’ just demands is going to come down to a battle of class forces in society, and the reality is that in and of itself stopping the academic programme does little to hurt the interests of the mainly white capitalist ruling class that the bourgeois Tripartite Alliance government and the university vice-chancellors alike serve. The students don’t just need convincing and compelling arguments on their side, they need social power. These apartheid-style police state tactics need to be met with mass, militant protest centred on the country’s overwhelmingly black proletariat which has the ability to hurt the capitalists where it counts—their profits. The working class uniquely has this power, based on its organisation and central role in the system of capitalist production.

The key to unlocking this power is a political struggle against the labour lieutenants of capital who currently occupy the leadership of the working-class organisations. The leaders of the SACP and COSATU have made it perfectly clear where they stand with numerous statements denouncing the protests as “violent” and calling for them to end. That is not an accident, but flows from their pro-capitalist, class-collaborationist politics. As part of the bourgeois Tripartite Alliance, together with the bourgeois ANC, the SACP and COSATU tops are directly responsible for the attacks that this capitalist government carries out on workers and the oppressed as part of administering the neo-apartheid system. This includes state persecution of student leaders like Mcebo Dlamini, notwithstanding the fact that he and many other protest leaders are part of the Progressive Youth Alliance, the junior affiliate of the Tripartite Alliance. While not part of the Tripartite Alliance, the leaders of NUMSA, AMCU and other “independent” unions fundamentally share the same pro-capitalist programme. To date, they have at most declared verbal “solidarity” with the student protests, while refusing to mobilise their base to defend the protesters against the capitalist state.

The working class needs a revolutionary vanguard party that acts as a tribune of all the oppressed, based on an understanding of the proletariat’s historic role as the gravedigger of capitalism and on the strict political independence of the working class from the capitalist state and all bourgeois parties. In neo-apartheid South Africa, where racial and class oppression continue to overlap heavily, the struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism is inextricably tied to the fight for the national liberation of the black majority, in which the proletariat must take the lead—the fight for a black-centred workers government. This means a sharp political struggle against all variants of nationalism—the lie that the black population as a whole shares a common interest standing higher than class divisions—which deny the class struggle and subordinate the proletariat to its class enemies. We of Spartacist/South Africa are dedicated to the perspective of building the Leninist-Trotskyist party needed to put an end to racist neo-apartheid as part of the struggle for new October Revolutions around the world. Every student or teacher who cares about education, every class conscious worker must demand: Free all student protesters! Drop the charges! No cops on campus! Forward to free, quality education for all!

Send Protest Letters!

We call on trade unions, student organizations and anti-racist activists internationally to stand in solidarity with the South African student activists. Send protest statements demanding the release of all arrested protesters and the dropping of all charges to: Mr. Jacob Zuma, President of the Republic of South Africa, Private Bag X1000, Pretoria, 0001, South Africa; email: presidentrsa@presidency.gov.za and Dr. Blade Nzimande, Minister of Higher Education and Training, Private Bag X174, Pretoria, 0001, South Africa; email: Sako.M@dhet.gov.za.

A View From The Left-WikiLeaks Reveals Truths

Workers Vanguard No. 1099	4 November 2016

WikiLeaks Reveals Truths

Democrats Go Ballistic

WikiLeaks’ exposure of the inner workings of the American capitalist ruling class has injected a bit of truth into the coming elections. In the last several months, hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign have shined a spotlight on the threadbare pretenses of the Democrats as the “lesser evil.” No less than the other major party of the bourgeoisie, the Republicans, they are a corrupt political machine that represents the interests of big business tycoons and the banks. The leaks underscore that, on top of rigging the primary process to try to ensure another reign of the Clinton dynasty, the Democratic Party is steeped in cronyism, corporate sycophancy and public deceit.

The dangerous demagogue and billionaire Donald Trump and his right-wing supporters like fascist David Duke have cynically welcomed the leaks for exposing government corruption. Meanwhile, scrambling to distract from their own machinations, the Democrats and the compliant liberal media have all but branded WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as Moscow’s agent, invoking the spectre that Russia is sabotaging American “democracy.”

The delightfully entertaining email dumps confirm the fraud of capitalist democracy, which is simply democracy for the profit-driven rulers, the bourgeoisie. As V.I. Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution explained, capitalist governments are “instruments for the oppression of workers by the bourgeoisie, institutions of a hostile class, of the exploiting minority.” The working people “never decide important questions under bourgeois democracy, which are decided by the stock exchange and the banks” (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918).

In 2008, Barack Obama, still pushing his “hope and change” ruse, had practically his entire cabinet mapped out by Wall Street financiers. WikiLeaks revealed a list of recommendations for cabinet level positions made by then-Citigroup banking executive Michael Froman, a longtime Obama consigliere and now U.S. trade representative, most of which were adopted.

Clinton’s permanent love affair with Wall Street is demonstrated in leaked transcripts of her lavishly paid 2013 speeches to finance plutocrats. She reassured the banksters that a politician needs “both a public and a private position”—the “private” being secret deals and the “public” being lies to her constituents. In excerpts of a discussion with the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Clinton expressed a touching concern for wealthy people who experience “bias” for leading “successful and/or complicated lives.”

This summer, the trove of hacked emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) prompted the resignation of DNC chair and Clinton crony Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The emails revealed a party ploy to undermine Bernie Sanders and steal the thunder from his “political revolution” jingle, which was creating a youthful fan base of Sandernistas along with some not insignificant labor union support.

In one email from March, a DNC official noted that while Clinton already ripped off “important elements of Bernie’s ideas and rhetoric,” she should throw a bone to Sanders’s “self-righteous ideologues” at the convention: “We want them to go home happy and enthusiastic in working their asses off for Hillary.” Certainly Sanders is doing his share to achieve that. From the get-go, Sanders made it clear he would never break loyalty, either to the Democrats or to the economic system of the “billionaire class.”

Clinton’s attempt to present a populist face with slogans like “Wall Street must work for Main Street” is hogwash. As a former six-year board member of Wal-Mart, she couldn’t bring herself to support even Sanders’s modest push for a $15 federal minimum wage. But her loyal supporters in the trade-union bureaucracy, which acts to bind the workers to the capitalist order, were unfazed. In other WikiLeaks revelations, one Hillary toady, American Federation of Teachers top Randi Weingarten, is captured devising strategies to punish unions who refused to back Clinton to the hilt. For example, Weingarten wrote, “we will go after” the National Nurses United “and there [sic] high and mighty sanctimonious conduct.”

Dr. Strangelove in a Pantsuit

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has promised to pull more skeletons out of the closet before Election Day. Unable to deny the current revelations and in a panic to cover up future ones, the Democrats are claiming that both Assange and Donald Trump are agents of an evil empire and that the Russian government is responsible for hacking the emails. Resurrected Cold Warriors from the New York Times have been especially fervent in promoting this Russia-bashing, as exhibited by their August 31 headline: “How Russia Often Benefits When Julian Assange Reveals the West’s Secrets.” Meanwhile, MSNBC (or, as rad-lib journalist Jeffrey St. Clair aptly calls it, MSDNC) host Joy Reid railed on Twitter against “authoritarian, communist Russia.”

Capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92 destroyed the Soviet Union, a degenerated workers state. The imperialist rulers had long fought to overturn the collectivized economy issuing from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Today, Washington’s demonization of the Vladimir Putin regime—which has committed numerous atrocities, not least the murderous colonial occupation of Chechnya—is in the service of the imperialist drive to curtail capitalist Russia’s strength as a nuclear-armed regional power and potential rival.

Clinton has made it clear to neocons and militarists that she is ready for a war with Russia, for instance by calling for a no-fly zone in Syria. Trump’s less bellicose stance toward Putin seems rational in comparison. Journalist and filmmaker John Pilger recently noted: “Trump is loathed by those with power in the United States for reasons that have little to do with his obnoxious behaviour and opinions. To the invisible government in Washington, the unpredictable Trump is an obstacle to America’s design for the 21st century” (johnpilger.com, 27 October). In fact, Trump, with his venomous racist and sexist outbursts, is a gift that keeps on giving for the Democrats, as he drives black, Latino and women voters into the arms of the widely despised Clinton.

As for Clinton’s claims that Russia is trying to “influence the outcome of the election” in favor of Trump, it is Washington that virtually copyrighted “regime change.” The blood-soaked U.S. rulers have a long history of “influencing” elections in other countries, or simply organizing coups or direct military intervention, from the Bay of Pigs and Allende’s Chile to Libya and backing and bankrolling the 2014 fascist-spearheaded coup in Ukraine.

Imperialist Lies and Retribution

Assange first appeared on the American rulers’ hit list for releasing a massive leak of files documenting torture and civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq back in 2010. Since then, he has been witchhunted and threatened with arrest if he leaves the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been confined as a de facto prisoner for four years since Ecuador granted him political asylum. Sweden’s request for extradition on bogus sexual assault allegations is in the direct service of sending him to the U.S. so he can be jailed, likely on espionage charges (see “Hands Off Julian Assange!” WV No. 1010, 12 October 2012). Undoubtedly under pressure from the U.S., the government of Ecuador recently cut off Assange’s internet, claiming that it did not want to facilitate a “major impact” on the presidential election. Happily, it seems that this maneuver is not affecting the planned WikiLeaks releases.

To get a sense of Assange’s potential fate, one need only consider the situation of Chelsea Manning. Over six years ago, Manning, a former army private, gave WikiLeaks the notorious “Collateral Murder” video showing the gunning down of Reuters reporters and Iraqi civilians by the U.S. military, along with numerous military logs and diplomatic cables. Subjected to the torture of solitary confinement, she now languishes in prison with a 35-year sentence. In September, Assange bravely said he would turn himself in to U.S. authorities if Obama granted clemency to Manning. Unlikely. The Obama administration used the 1917 Espionage Act against leakers and whistle-blowers more than all prior administrations combined. As for Clinton, her venom against Assange was captured in her quip: “Can’t we just drone this guy?”

By unmasking the bourgeoisie’s lies and intrigues, courageous individuals like Assange, Manning and Edward Snowden have carried out a service to workers and the oppressed throughout the world. Early on, liberals celebrated WikiLeaks’ revelations about Bush-era war crimes and spying. Then, when the media seized on the spurious rape accusations to smear Assange, many jumped ship. Now, under the “Dump Trump” hype (read “Vote Hillary”), more liberals have thrown Assange under the bus in the fear that negative publicity about Clinton will lead to a Trump victory. Assange made his political proclivities clear, aptly declaring that the major party candidates amount to a choice between “cholera or gonorrhea.”

The Fraud of Bourgeois Democracy

Deception, manipulation and dishonesty are the normal workings of a political system whose purpose is to protect the profits and rule of a tiny class from the masses of the population they exploit. American history teems with examples of fabrications and manipulation used to coerce a reluctant populace to go to war and to justify repressive measures. For his part, Assange hopes his releases will bring about a degree of government “transparency.” But asking the executive committee of the ruling class to be transparent to the masses is like asking the fox to announce his intentions to the chickens. Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky explained that secret diplomacy is “a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests.”

Elections under bourgeois democracy allow the oppressed masses to “choose” who will subjugate them during the next few years. Regardless of who becomes the next Commander-in-Chief, the government is not “ours,” but part of the machine to maintain capitalist class rule. Because they sometimes use kinder words, the Democrats are often more effective at carrying out attacks on the working class and the oppressed than Republicans. As Gore Vidal, the late great American author remarked:

“There is only one party in the United States, the Property party…and it has two wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently (nervous laugh on that)—and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”

—“State of the Union” (1975)

Every exposure of the rulers’ deceits is of value to the working class, but it is going to take more than leaks and whistles to fundamentally change this rotten society. The manifold discontent engendered by endless war, racial oppression, economic misery and state repression needs to be directed against the capitalist class enemy, with the social power of the multiracial proletariat mobilized on behalf of all the exploited and oppressed. For such a struggle to go forward to victory, it is necessary to build a revolutionary workers party to lead a socialist revolution that breaks the power of the bourgeoisie and establishes workers rule.