Sunday, January 15, 2017

*****America, Where Are You Now...."- Steppenwolf’s The Monster-Take Four


*****America, Where Are You Now...."- Steppenwolf’s The Monster-Take Four

 

 

 

A YouTube Film Clip Of Steppenwolf Performing Monster- Ah, Those Were The Days

 

 From The Pen Of Bart Webber

America where are you now?

Don't you care about your sons and daughters?

Don't you know we need you now

We can't fight alone against the monster

Chorus Line From The Monster

Back in 2011 Frank Jackman’s friend from back in the old growing up hometown days in the late 1960s in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston toward the ocean, Sam Lowell, had written, under the influence of a rage he was feeling about the never-ending war in Afghanistan (still never-ending as of this 2015 writing as the announcement that five thousand American troops will hunker down in that benighted country until at least 2017), a review of an album of heavy-duty rock band they both loved to listen to back in the day, Steppenwolf. Sam’s impetus for writing that review had been a recent listening to the group’s song Monster on YouTube where he heard the words quoted above, the words that sent him reeling back to another never-ending war time in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s. But here is the rub, back then Sam was probably the least political of the guys who hung out around Jimmy Jack’s Diner holding up the wall, checking the passing girls out, and occasionally putting a few quarters in the jukebox inside at the counter or in one the red vinyl-covered seats at a booth if they had eating money as well to hear what was what just then.

Those Steppenwolf lyrics about parents “abandoning” their kids leaving them alone and untutored in the ways of the harsh world to fight the monster machine that would devour them in a fit of consumer-culture death if not fought had hit home not because of the raging war but because of his own difficulties with his parents, his own having to go it alone to find his own path, a path that took many wrong turns.  Frank a little more attuned to the swirl of the political maelstrom around him “got” the less personal aspect of fighting against the imperial government machine at all costs in the song and tried unsuccessfully to convey that understanding to Sam even though he too had had his own running battles mainly with his mother over what the hell he was to do in the world, about why he did not want to do the things his parents craved for him to do.        

Frank got “religion” earlier than Sam in another way since shortly after the unsuccessful attempts to “hip” Sam to the need to fight the monsters who were devouring their humanity he got a letter in late 1968, a very official letter, from his friends and neighbors (that is how they put the greeting in any case) at the Carver draft board telling him his number was up, that assuming that he was physically fit enough, he was subject to being called up (when he later went up to Boston to take his physical at the Army Base down near the harbor he found that if a guy was still basically breathing and did not fall over to the touch he was fit despite the slew of medical excuses other guys had tried to fake the doctors out with so he was found fit ). He freaked that letter-opening day, freaked the day he took his physical knowing he had passed and knowing too that the way Charley (although he would not know the significance of that name until later) was chewing up the American Army despite the beating he took during his Tet offensive that he would be called, no question, and he freaked the day the very early one morning he headed to the Boston Army Base to be inducted. That despite Frank’s immense hesitations about going, although stuck down in Carver he was unaware as he would later become aware of that there were ways to fight his induction. But see every other thing in his blessed life went the other way, there was nothing to guide him in his hesitations. Certainly not the super-patriotism of his parents, Christ, they would wind supporting the war effort until the very end and even wrote a letter to their Congressman telling him to tell President Ford to send troops to Vietnam in 1975 as all hell was breaking around Saigon and the North Vietnamese were rolling to cut off that town. Of course by that time he was in one of his frequent periods of not talking to them for years at a time.

Nor did it help unlike in some places where middle class families fearful for their sons were at least listening to the options, that all the guys, all the guys he knew in old time working-class Carver, who had not jumped at the chance of enlisting but waited until they were given notice went, maybe kicking and screaming like Frank but went, and that while he had certain defined views about politics they were as he would figure out later pretty simple and not reason enough to go to jail or flee to Canada over, the choices that he had heard about but kind of dismissed out of hand. 

 

So Frank went to Boston and took the oath, went in and while not being the best of soldiers he was not the worse and guys in his unit would wind up saying of him that when he arrived in Vietnam and he settled in he got them out a few messes that did not look like they would get out of alive or in one piece when Charley came a-calling. Later, say late 1971 after he was discharged, early 1972 talking to a Quaker girl he was interested in over in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out after the few days that he spent in Carver convinced him that he had to flee that town, about what had happened to him in Vietnam he realized just how much he hated the monster government for doing what it did to him, about the slaughter of the innocence and about how he had to wash himself clean to get back his humanity. And so he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and after that died down after a few years he joined that Quaker girl in her forthright efforts to bring a little peace in the world.       

Sam, and here is the funny way paths divert, had had a serious injury when he was a kid, a serious injury to his left arm which despite many severe and long-drawn-out procedures was about ninety percent useless and so was declared early on 4-F, not fit for military service, by those same friends and neighbors who had left Frank to hang out and dry. Thus while Sam tepidly held some of the same opinions that his fellow students who were causing holy hell on the campus at Boston University where it seemed every other day they were protesting or striking against something, sometimes to do with the war, other times about some grievance local or societal, he was rather outside of all of that.

Even when Frank had fruitlessly argued with him about what their parents were leaving them to fight against he had fluffed it off. Later after Frank got back for Vietnam he was a bit more thoughtful for a while, tried to listen when Frank talked about stuff, about the bloody madness going on in his name but Sam was too busy trying to survive law school and start a practice in Carver to listen much. So of course they drifted apart something that if either of them had been asked let’s say as they graduated from high school in 1967 they would have scoffed at. Frank headed west, went to California after that thing with the Quaker girl had run out, after he had let his “wanting habits” addictions get the best of him and that thread of the story is still murky (mostly drug-related and some small felonies from what Sam had heard from somebody who had run into Frank in San Francisco at a peace event in the late 1980s). Sam went on to thrive in his small town law practice, eventually taking on a partner, having a family including two sons, and generally having a good life.                 

But then Sam got “religion,” got it not through anything he did, or did not do, but through the times, through another act of governmental hubris. After 9/11 (and like Pearl Harbor and a few other events in American history just saying the words stand by themselves, no explanation necessary) the bulk of the population in America was beside itself with unfocused rage, was out for some kind of vengeance, any target would do, convenient, distant, the bigger the better, but some kind of Moslem/ Arab payback was best. Like in a lot of time of emergency situations, military emergencies, some of the young get caught up in the crush of the action. Wanted to play the patriot game for keeps. The long and short of it was that Bradley Lowell, Sam’s older son, enlisted in Army, went to Officer Candidate School and came out a second lieutenant, came out just as all hell was breaking loose in Washington about Iraqi Saddem weapons of mass destruction and that the only way to make things right was to invade that benighted country, destroy it out of hand. Puff. Sam, beside himself when he heard that Bradley would be deployed, would be in the thick of it as an officer in an infantry unit, tried like hell to talk him out of going, talked to him about refusing to go, about going to jail, tried to talk to him about what had happened during war to guys like his old friend Frank Jackman. No soap, Brad Lowell was gung-ho. And as the fates would have it one Bradley Lowell was felled by an IED and laid his head down in Iraq on his second tour of duty in 2005.         

For a while Sam was inconsolable, as was his wife, Laura, and it took a lot of thinking to figure out what he was to do to keep Brad’s memory alive. As the situation in Iraq got more unstable and as the American casualties kept piling up Sam decided to go to an anti-war rally in Boston at the Commons one spring afternoon in 2006. (Laura taking the loss of Bradley hard in that way refused to go in public to such an event.) The crowd of a few hundred was not big like in the times of his youth during Vietnam when one day the whole Commons had been filled (he had not attended that rally since he was studying for an exam but he had heard about it from his roommate who had attended and believed that the war would be over shortly-in the event it lasted almost five years more) but he was fine with the idea of just protesting as best he could. As fate would have it Frank Jackman, back a few months before from the West Coast to attend to his wife’s mother’s care for a while up in Lynnfield, also was in attendance that day. That day he was wearing his dark blue embossed with the white dove of peace Veterans for Peace tee-shirt, an organization that Frank had joined just before the Iraq invasion in 2002 after many years of ad hoc work with a myriad of peace and social justice groups, and Sam thinking back to Frank’s VVAW days sort of recognized his old school boy friend, as he approached him (both men both thicker than in their slender youths, showing lots less hair, now grey-white, and lots more wrinkles and Frank sporting a longish beard and thus not unlike about half the male section of their generation so neither man could be blamed if they did not immediately recognize each other). Once the light of recognition hit they gathered to each other like in old times. Sam told Frank about his son Bradley and they both shed a tear for Brad, for their lost youth, and for the endless wars that have plagued their world.

They agreed to meet at the Sunnyvale Grille in downtown Boston a few days later and go over how they were going to continue the anti-war struggle in the face of a great deal of indifference (not of the soldiers deaths, like Brad’s, but of the unchecked damn war policies of two consecutive governments) from the general public who opposed the war before it started but had gone along with it once the deal went down. That meeting was the first time that they both discussed the commonly remembered Steppenwolf song Monster which a few years later prompted Sam to write that album review, trying to sum up the hard fact that the now oldsters Frank Jackman and Sam Lowell had to lend the kids a helping hand, or pass the torch on to them. Here is what Sam had to say:                

The heavy rock band Steppenwolf (maybe acid rock is better signifying that the band started in the American dream gone awry 1960s night when the likes of the Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, The Byrds and groups like the transformed from muppet Beatles and Stones held forth, rather than in the ebb-tide 1970s when the harder sounds of groups like Aerosmith and Black Sabbath were  needed to drown out the fact that  we were in decisive retreat), one of many that was thrown up by the musical counter-culture of the mid to late 1960's was a cut above and apart from some of the others due to their scorching lyrics provided mainly, but not solely, by gravelly-voiced lead singer John Kay. That musical counter-culture not only put a premium on band-written materials, as against the old Tin Pan Alley somebody wrote the lyrics, somebody else sang the song division before Bob Dylan and the Beatles made singer-songwriters fashionable but also was a serious reaction to the vanilla-ization of rock and popular music in the earlier part of the decade that drove many of us from the AM radio dials and into “exotic” stuff like electric blues (country too, come to think of it) and the various strands of folk music.    

Some bands played, consciously played, to the “drop out” notion popular at the times. “Drop out” of rat-race bourgeois society and its money imperative, its “white picket fence with little white house attached” visions. (Those my own visions which I pursued as it turned out.) That is the place where many of the young, the post-World War II baby-boomer young, now sadly older, had grown up and were in the process of repudiating for a grander vision of the world, the “world turned upside down” as an old time British folk tune had it. Drop out and create a niche somewhere (a commune maybe out away from the rat-race places some of which did spring up in the likes of Taos, Oregon, Big Sur and the hills of old Vermont which if you care to see what hellish thing happened to that old vision once the seers got older you can go to and witness first hand these days), so some physical somewhere perhaps but certainly some other mental somewhere and the music reflected that disenchantment.

That mental somewhere involved liberal use of drugs to induce, well, who knows what it induced but it felt like a new state of consciousness so make of that what you will. The drugs used, in retrospect, to make you less “uptight” not a bad thing then, or today. The whole underlying premise though whether well thought out or not was that music, the music of the shamans of the youth tribe, was the revolution. (An idea, as a man who abhorred politics then and am only a little more enamored of now but have a greater purpose to be out in the streets than then when it was a pose if I showed up at all, I held to lightly for a while) An idea that for a short while before all hell broke loose with the criminal antics of Lyndon Johnson and one Richard M. Nixon, all hell broke loose with Tet, with May 1968, with Chicago 1968, with the “days of rage,” with Altamont and with a hundred other lesser downers I subscribed to. Those events, a draft notice, some hard time in Vietnam, made my old time school boy friend Frank Jackman get “religion” on the need for “in-their-face” political struggle. Me, though it took longer, took a generation longer to lose my innocence about American war policy.         

Musically much of that stuff was ephemeral, merely background music, and has not survived (except in lonely YouTube cyberspace). Yeah, Neal Young, the Airplane, the Doors, the Byrds still sound good but a lot of it is wha-wha music now you know Ten Years After, a lot of Rod Stewart, even the acid-etched albums by the Beatles and Stones, (it is no wonder that the latter do not have any tunes from Their Satanic Majesties on their playlists out on the concert tours these days). Others, flash pan “music is the revolution,” period exclamation point, end of conversation bands assumed a few pithy lyrics would carry the day and dirty old bourgeois society would run and hide in horror leaving the field open, open for, uh, us. That music too, except for gems like The Ballad Of Easy Rider, is safely ensconced in vast cyberspace.

Steppenwolf was different, was political from the get-go taking on the deadliness of bourgeois culture, worse the chewing up of their young in unwinnable wars with no apologies or second thoughts, the pusher man, the draft resister and lots of other subjects (and a few traditional songs too about the love that got away, things like that).  Not all the lyrics worked, then or now. (See below for some that do). Not all the words are now some forty plus years later memorable. After all every song is written with some current audience in mind, and notions of immortality as the fate of most songs are displaced. Certainly some of the less political lyrics seem entirely forgettable. As does some of the heavy decibel rock sound that seems to wander at times like, as was the case more often than not, and more often that we, deep in some a then hermetic drug thrall, would have acknowledged, or worried about.

But know this- when you think today about trying to escape from the rat-race of daily living then you have an enduring anthem Born To Be Wild that still stirs the young (and not so young). If Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone was one musical pillar of the youth revolt of the 1960's then Born To Be Wild was the other.

 

And if you needed (or need) a quick history lesson about the nature of American society in the 1960's, what it was doing to its young, where it had been and where it was heading (and seemingly still is as we attempt to finish up the Afghan wars and the war signals for deep intervention into the Syria civil war or another war in Iraq get louder, or both are beating the war drums fiercely) then the trilogy under the title "The Monster" said it all.

Then there were songs like The Pusher Man a song that could be usefully used as an argument in favor of decriminalization of drugs today and get our people the hell out of jail and moving on with their lives and others then more topical songs like Draft Resister to fill out their playlist. The group did not have the staying power of others like The Rolling Stones but if you want to know, approximately, what it was like for rock groups to seriously put rock and roll and a hard political edge together give a listen to the group sometime. And listen to how right my old friend Frank Jackman had been about their political messages

Words and music by John Kay, Jerry Edmonton, Nick St. Nicholas and Larry Byrom

(Monster)

Once the religious, the hunted and weary

Chasing the promise of freedom and hope

Came to this country to build a new vision

Far from the reaches of kingdom and pope

Like good Christians, some would burn the witches

Later some got slaves to gather riches

But still from near and far to seek America

They came by thousands to court the wild

And she just patiently smiled and bore a child

To be their spirit and guiding light

And once the ties with the crown had been broken

Westward in saddle and wagon it went

And 'til the railroad linked ocean to ocean

Many the lives which had come to an end

While we bullied, stole and bought our a homeland

We began the slaughter of the red man

But still from near and far to seek America

They came by thousands to court the wild

And she just patiently smiled and bore a child

To be their spirit and guiding light

The blue and grey they stomped it

They kicked it just like a dog

And when the war over

They stuffed it just like a hog

And though the past has it's share of injustice

Kind was the spirit in many a way

But it's protectors and friends have been sleeping

Now it's a monster and will not obey

(Suicide)

The spirit was freedom and justice

And it's keepers seem generous and kind

It's leaders were supposed to serve the country

But now they won't pay it no mind

'Cause the people grew fat and got lazy

And now their vote is a meaningless joke

They babble about law and order

But it's all just an echo of what they've been told

Yeah, there's a monster on the loose

It's got our heads into a noose

And it just sits there watchin'

Our cities have turned into jungles

And corruption is stranglin' the land

The police force is watching the people

And the people just can't understand

We don't know how to mind our own business

'Cause the whole worlds got to be just like us

Now we are fighting a war over there

No matter who's the winner

We can't pay the cost

'Cause there's a monster on the loose

It's got our heads into a noose

And it just sits there watching

(America)

America where are you now?

Don't you care about your sons and daughters?

Don't you know we need you nowWe can't fight alone against the monster

© Copyright MCA Music (BMI)
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC
--Used with permission--

Born To Be Wild
Words and music by Mars Bonfire

Get your motor runnin'

Head out on the highway

Lookin' for adventure

And whatever comes our way

Yeah Darlin' go make it happen

Take the world in a love embrace

Fire all of your guns at once

And explode into space

I like smoke and lightning

Heavy metal thunder

Racin' with the wind

And the feelin' that I'm under

Yeah Darlin' go make it happen

Take the world in a love embrace

Fire all of your guns at once

And explode into space

Like a true nature's child

We were born, born to be wild

We can climb so high

I never wanna die

Born to be wild

Born to be wild

© MCA Music (BMI)
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC

--Used with permission--

THE PUSHER

From the 1968 release "Steppenwolf"

Words and music by Hoyt Axton

You know I've smoked a lot of grass

O' Lord, I've popped a lot of pills

But I never touched nothin'

That my spirit could kill

You know, I've seen a lot of people walkin' 'round

With tombstones in their eyes

But the pusher don't care

Ah, if you live or if you die

God damn, The Pusher

God damn, I say The Pusher

I said God damn, God damn The Pusher man

You know the dealer, the dealer is a man

With the love grass in his hand

Oh but the pusher is a monster

Good God, he's not a natural man

The dealer for a nickel

Lord, will sell you lots of sweet dreams

Ah, but the pusher ruin your body

Lord, he'll leave your, he'll leave your mind to scream

God damn, The Pusher

God damn, God damn the Pusher

I said God damn, God, God damn The Pusher man

Well, now if I were the president of this land

You know, I'd declare total war on The Pusher man

I'd cut him if he stands, and I'd shoot him if he'd run

Yes I'd kill him with my Bible and my razor and my gun

God damn The Pusher

Gad damn The Pusher

I said God damn, God damn The Pusher man\

© Irving Music Inc. (BMI)

--Used with permission--

 

The Ghost Of Tom Joad-Resurrected-With John Ford’s Film Adaptation Of John Steinbeck’s “Grapes Of Wrath” In Mind

The Ghost Of Tom Joad-Resurrected-With John Ford’s Film Adaptation Of John Steinbeck’s “Grapes Of Wrath” In Mind 








By Zack James

The ghost of Tom Joad weighted heavily on Bart Webber’s fertile mind, some would say futile including a couple of ex-wives who nevertheless bled him dry, ever since he had first read John Steinbeck’s Grapes Of Wrath in high school. He was not sure whether he had read it as part of an English class assignment, not likely since he was not into reading then as much as he would later turn his after-burners on and read everything that he could lay his grubby rawhide hands on, or had read it in the library in the days when he was trying to break from his reckless addition to the midnight creeps of corner boy life. The midnight creep being simple nighttime burglaries of waiting and inviting homes-not all of them loaded with riches but as likely to be low-hanging fruit convenient places in the working class neighborhood of Carver where he had come of age. 

Reason: simplicity itself-that was where goods that could be “fenced” were found which allowed him and his corner boys to survive if not in style then to have date night money during high school. One night he and Jimmy Jenkins his closest corner boy were almost nabbed by the coppers as they came out a house which had a silent security system guarding the premises something unusual at the time although almost an afterthought now. The haul brought about twenty bucks and he began to think better of the idea of avoiding hard time in county or the state pen for such little benefit. And so the summer between junior and senior year he dived into whatever the library had to offer to keep him occupied. Now some forty years later as he thought about it more that was probably the place where he read the book.

But the genesis of his admiration for John Steinbeck’s best-known work was not what was making his carry a heavy Tom Joad load lately. That had been directly prompted by two separate events, or better occurrences. First he had gone to an exhibit of photography at the local art museum (that designation being a little disingenuous since that was the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston which is much more that a local hang-out but that is what drives Bart’s expressions sometimes and so we will indulge his habits and move on) which featured some of the photography of Dorothea Lange who was famous for her work with the hard scrabble farm migrants from which a character like Tom would have come, would have come out of the hills of Oklahoma like the second coming or something. The photos not only struck a chord as pieces of history but made him rage inside against his own Joad-like beginnings, a feeling that was never very far from the surface.
The second occurrence was one night when his wife, Loretta (wife number three and a keeper after those two previous blood-lettings) happened to have gone to the local library (this was a correct designation since it was merely a branch of the Cambridge library system) looking for some DVDs of interest. For some reason the John Ford film adaptation of Steinbeck’s book was featured prominently in the DVD section and having always loved Henry Fonda and she not having seen the film or read the book thought that Bart would enjoy seeing the film with her.                       

Bart certainly had enjoyed the film that night but a few days later he began to flash back in his mind how vividly he felt the fate of Tom Joad, of Tom Joad’s people as they were thrown out of dust bowl Oklahoma and left to their own circumscribed capacities to get to sunny California, the new garden of Eden the best way they could. Which was none too good. He had been most struck by the totally destitute condition the Joad clan was in when they were hustled off the land just ahead of the bulldozers come to do their foreclosure best to obliterate a couple or three generations of work on the land (the dust balls having set the whole frame up as well as the world-wide Depression that they were incapable of doing anything about even if they understood how the damn thing melted down-which they didn’t taking it as providence lacking any other suitable explanation).        

But it was really Tom Joad and his fate which gathered Bart’s attention. Tom had, as the film opened, just gotten out of prison for a homicide that he had committed a few years before over some girl or something at a dance. (Half of Bart’s corner boys had before they were done been through some prison or other and as mentioned it had been a close thing in his own case, a very close thing.) He went looking for his people back in Podunk Oklahoma and they were not at the old homestead but had begun the first stage of the trek to the “promised land”. Tom caught up with them at a relative’s homestead and decided that he would head west with them despite that decision being a violation of his parole conditions. Along the way, the tough road west in a beaten down jalopy held together mostly by prayers, the tough Highway 66 through the high desert into Southern California Tom and the family sensed that once again they will be left out of the garden. That they had been sold a bill of goods. That proved to be the case as they hit the overcrowded farm stoop labor company store camps where a million other Joads were losing their illusions if not their dreams.     

The part of the film though that drew Bart’s fervent attention was when Tom, a guy like him and his corner boys really as far as their early up-bringings had made them very conscious of their poverty but also clueless about what had caused that condition and more importantly what to do about it-if anything. But Tom out west “got religion,” saw that nothing was going to change, no family, including his, was going to get ahead in this wicked old world if they just sat there and took it, let the bosses beat them down and then throw them away. Some Okie/Arkie hard-headed gene about what was right and what was wrong got kick-started. He would devote himself to taking care of whoever and whatever of the beaten down peoples of this good rich earth where he saw things going wrong.

Bart didn’t know if Tom’s epiphany would have survived the Okie/Arkie settling down after the war when everybody was expecting to make it on their own and let the devil take the hinter post. Sure there were the aimless hot-rodders and Hell Angels motorcyclists who lived for the moment and didn’t give a damn about living the ticky-tacky life but mostly the brethren did. All Bart knew was that the weight of Tom’s commitment to some rough-hew justice as he settled in the West was driving him crazy of late since the current political situation pointed to his own having to get back out on the streets, to “get religion” again after years of conducting an “armed truce” with what was happening in Washington and elsewhere. Hell he was getting too old for this. Then the ghost of Tom Joad entered his brain with these words from the film:

“I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look, wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build, I'll be there, too.     


Damn old Tom Joad, damn him to hell.  

Scenes From An Ordinary 1960s Be-Bop Life-Scene Ten: California Dreamin’, Maybe, January 1970

Scenes From An Ordinary 1960s Be-Bop Life-Scene Ten: California Dreamin’, Maybe, January 1970


I waved good-bye to Angelica, once again, as she drove off from the ocean front campsite that we had been camping out on, the Leo Carrillo State Park near Point Magoo about fifty miles or so north of Los Angeles. She will now drive the road back in her green Ford Hertz unlimited mileage, mid-size rental (paid for, as she explained one night, by her parents whose golden age of the automobile-frenzied minds counted it as a strike against me, a very big strike, that when I had “kidnapped” their daughter on the 1969 blue-pink summer road west down in Steubenville, Ohio I didn’t even have a car). She planned (on my advise) to drive back mostly on the ocean-abutted, white-capped waves smashing against jagged ancient shore rocks Pacific Coast Highway down through Malibu and Santa Monica to take one last look at the Pacific Ocean as the final point on her first look ocean trip, to the LAX to take a flight back to school days Muncie, Indiana.

She will also be driving back to the airport and getting on that miserable plane east knowing as I do since we talked about it incessantly during her stay, that some right things, or at least some maybe right things, like our being together last summer heading free west and for these two January weeks in front of the sea, our homeland the sea, before her classes started again, got caught up in the curious web of the human drama. For no understandable reason. Hey, you already knew this if you have ever had even that one teeny-weeny, tiny, miniscule love affair that just had no place to go, or no time to take root, or just got caught out there in the blue-pink night. Ya, you know that story. But let me take some minutes to tell you this one. If it seems very familiar and you “know” the plot line well then just move on.


To get you up to speed after Angelica and I had been on the heartland hitchhike road (and places like Moline, Neola, and Omaha are nothing but the heartland, good or bad), she, well, she just got tired of it, tired of the lacks, tired of the uncertainties of the road. Hell, hell-on-wheels, I was getting a tired of it myself except I was a man on a mission. The nature of that mission is contained in the headline to this scene, and all the previous scenes in this series, so that need not detain us here. So in Neola, Iowa, Neola, Iowa of all places aided by “fairy grandmother” Aunt Betty, who ran the local diner where Angelica worked to help make us some dough to move on, and her own sense of dreams she called it quits back in September. Aunt Betty drove us to Omaha where Angelica took the bus back east, Indiana east from Nebraska, to hometown Muncie and I hit Interstate 80 West headed first to Denver before the snows, or so I hoped.

Honestly, although we exchanged addresses and telephone numbers where messages could be left, or where we could speak to each other (her parents’ house not being one of them), and made big plans to reunite in California in January during her school break, I didn’t really think that once we were off the road together that those plans would pan out.


Now I may not remember all my reasoning at the time this far removed, the now of my telling this story many years later, but I had had enough relationships with women to sense this one was good, very good, while it lasted but it could no survive the parting. Not one of those overused “absence makes the heart grow fonder” things you hear about. And, truth to tell, because I thought that was the way things would play out, I started getting focused back on Boston Joyel more than a little as I walked a lot, stood at the shoulder of the hitchhike road a lot, and fitfully got my rides on the road west.


But see this is where you think you have something figured out just so and then it goes awry. Angelica called, left messages, sent letters, even a telegram, to Denver (to the commune where, Jack and Mattie, my traveling companions on the final leg west whom I had met earlier in the spring on a different trip down to D.C., were staying). She sent more communications saying that she was still coming in early December to Los Angeles as well where we three stayed with a few artistic friends of Jack and Mattie’s. Cinema-crazed artistic friends, including one budding film director who moreover had great dope connections right into the heart of Mexico. This is where they would stay while I planned to push the hitchhike road north heading to San Francisco.


I once, in running through one of the scenes in this hitchhike road show, oh ya, it was the Neola scene, mentioned that in Angelica what you saw was what you got, what she said was what she meant, and both those were good things indeed. And so if I had thought about it a minute of course she was coming to California in January and staying with me for her two week break, and maybe longer. So when January came she contacted me though John and Mattie, who like I said were now staying with this very interesting experimental film-maker, David, in the Hollywood hills and canyons. I started back south to L.A. in order to meet her at the airport. From there I had it planned that we would go to Point Magoo mentioned above and camp out like in the “old days” at the ocean front state park.


Needless to say when I greeted her at LAX we both were all smiles, I was in more than all smiles mode, because I had been “stag” for a while and she was, well, fetching as always, or almost always. Here though is where I noticed that the road really is not for everyone. In Neola, and later getting on the bus back home in Omaha, poor Angelica looked pretty haggard but at the airport, well like I said, she was fetching.


And, guess what, she brought her sleeping bag that we got for her in a Lexington, Kentucky Army-Navy Store when we first seriously started on the road west. And the first thing she said about it was, referring to a little in-joke between us, “it fits two, in a pinch.” Be still my heart. So we gathered up her stuff, did the airport exit stuff (easier in those days) and picked up the outside shuttle to the Hertz car rental terminal. We were jabbering away like crazy, but best of all, we were like, a little, those first days last summer back in that old-time Steubenville truck stop diner and cabin when I first met her.


Of course, part of the trip for her, part of what she went as far as she could with me on the hitchhike road for, was to get to California and see what it was all about, and what the ocean was all about since she was a heartland girl who had never seen the ocean before. When we got to Point Magoo she flipped out, she flipped out mostly at the idea that we would stay, could stay right on the beach in front of the ocean. And just like a kid, just like I did when I was kid and saw the ocean, when she saw the Pacific, she jumped right in. Hell, she was so excited she almost got caught in a small riptide. I had to go drag her out. I won’t say we had fun every minute of those weeks acting out our ocean nomad existence, but most minutes, and I could see that she felt the same way.


Naturally, as time drifted away toward her return flight date we talked more and more about what the future, if any, held in store for us. She was adamant about not going back on the road, she was adamant as well that she wanted to finish school and make something of herself. I had no serious defense against that practical wisdom. And, truthfully, I wasn’t, toward the end of her stay, pushing the issue, partially because even I could see that it made sense but also, we had had a “flare-up” over the Boston Joyel question (I am being polite here).


But it was more than that; the flat out, hungry truth was, like I told you last scene, that out in the desert ghost dance scene, I really didn’t know how to deal with a Midwestern what you see is what you get woman like Angelica. I was more used to virtuous Irish Catholic girls who drove me crazy as a kid getting me all twisted up about religion, about nice girls, and about duplicity when I found out what the real score was with this type of young girl/ woman later. I was also, and Joyel was the epitome of this type, totally in sync (well, as much as a man can be) with the Harvard Square folksy, intellectual, abstract idealist, let’s-look at everything from twenty-two different angles, what is the meaning of human relationships 24/7 kind of woman. And fatally attracted to them (and still am). This Angelica look at things only a couple of ways, let’s work things out easy-like, heavens, let’s not analyze everything to the nth degree flipped me out. Angelica was a breath of fresh air and, maybe, maybe, about ten years later, and two divorces later to boot, I would have had that enough sense god gave geese to hold onto her with both hands, tightly, very tightly. But I was in my blue-pink search phase and not to be detoured.


Of course all this hard work of trying to understand where we stood put a little crack in our reason for being together in the first place. The search for, search for something. Maybe, for her, it was just that life minute at the ocean and then on to regular life minutes out in the thickets of the white picket fences. She never said it then in so many words but that seemed to be the aim. And to be truthful, although I was only just barely thinking about it at the time, as the social turmoil of the times got weird, diffuse, and began to evaporate things started to lose steam. As we were, seemingly, endlessly taking our one-sided beatings as those in charge started a counter-offensive (a counter-offensive still going on) people, good people, but people made of human clay nevertheless got tired of the this and that existence, even Joyel. Joyel of Harvard Square folksy, intellectual, abstract idealist, let’s-look at everything from twenty-two different angles, what is the meaning of relationships 24/7 was also weary and wary of what was next and where she fit into “square” society. Christ, enough of that, we know, or knew, that song too well.


A couple of days before Angelica was to leave, and on a day when the sun seemed especially bright, especially bright for then smog-filled Los Angeles January, and warm, not resident warm but Boston and Muncie warm, sat like two seals sunning ourselves in the glow of mother ocean she nudged me and asked me if I had a joint. Now Angelica liked a little vino now and then but I can’t recall her ever doing a joint (grass, marijuana, herb, ganja, whatever you call it in your woods). So this is new. The problem, although not a big one in ocean-side state park 1970 Southern California, was that I was not “holding.” No problem though, a few spots down the beach was an old well-traveled, kind of beat-up Volkswagen van that I knew, knew just as sure as I was standing on that white sand beach, was “holding.” I went over, asked around, and “bingo” two nice big joints came traveling with me back to our campsite. Oh, daddy, daddy out in the be-bop blue-pink night thank you brother van man. For just a minute, just that 1970 California minute, the righteous did inherit the earth.


Back at our camp site Angelica awaited the outcome of my quest, although she also wanted to wait until later, until the day’s sun started going down a bit more to go into that smoked-filled good night. When that later came Angelica was scared/ thrilled, as she tried to smoke the one I lit up for her and started coughing like crazy, but that was nothing then. Everybody, at least everybody I knew, went through that same baptism. But Jesus, did we get mellow, that stuff, as most stuff then was primo, not your ragweed bull stuff that ran the rounds later. And why should it have not been so as we were so close to the then sane Mexican border of those days to get the good stuff.


But all of this build-up over this dope scene is so much filler, filler in those days when if you didn’t at least take a pipe full (inhale or not, like it or not) you were a square “squared.” What the stuff did for Angelica, and through Angelica to me, got her to open up a little. No, not about family, or old boyfriends, or her this and that problems. No, but kind of deep, kind of deep somewhere that she maybe didn’t know existed. Deep as I had ever hear her before. She talked about her fate, the fate of the fates, about what was going on in the world, no, not politics; she was organically incapable of that. Mystics stuff, getting in touch with the sea homeland stuff, earth mother stuff too in a way. Dope-edged stuff sure but when she compared the splashing foam-flecked waves to some cosmic force that I forget how she put it (remember I was dope-addled as well) then for just that moment, just that moment when the old red-balled sun started to dip to the horizon on one of those fairly rare days when it met the ocean I swear that Angelica knew, knew in her heart, knew in her soul even, what the blue-pink American West dream stuff I had bombarded here with was all about. That was our moment, and we both knew it.


So when leaving came, leaving came, a couple of days later and we both, I think, as we packed up her things, including that well-used sleeping bag, knew we had come to a parting of the roads. As I put her stuff in the rental car she sweetly blurted out something I was also thinking, “I’ll always remember that night we made the earth under the cabin in Steubenville shake.” And I thought I bet she will, although she forgot the part about the making the roof of the cabin move too. And so there I was, waving as she drove off to her Angelica dreams. And I never saw her again.


Postscript: That last statement about never seeing her again is not exactly true. I have, at least up until a few years ago, and you have probably too, seen her in films and magazines. I don’t know all the later details, because I eventually lost contact with John and Mattie after they went to Mexico and got caught up, got badly caught up in, the small-time end of the international drug trade of the time, but Angelica eventually moved out to California with her boyfriend, and connected with David, the film-maker I mentioned before. And it seems I am a prophet for the still and moving cameras caught that look, that look I sensed when I first met Angelica because she went on to have a successful small part movie and commercial-making career. She was not the in-your-face-beautiful leading lady in the films but the who-was-that-other-good-looking-ah-fetching actress who you started thinking about later and really set your soul ablaze. The one that would, if you knew her, set your silly, twisted philosophical head straight after about two minutes with her. Or, if in a commercial, her look told you that, yes, maybe I had better buy about a dozen of those widgets she is selling although what on earth I will do with them is beyond me. Ya that look, that Muncie fresh, guileless look. I hope, hope to high heaven, that she got her version of the blue-pink night as well.

As The Obama Regime Ends-One Last Desperate Effort-Mister President Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!

Now That We Need To Hunker Down Against The Next Presidential Circus/War- Where Is Vladimir Lenin When You Need Him




 





By Frank Jackman

 

Before the now mercifully past American Presidential Election I had in a short piece under a similar title as here (except then the circus was still in town and which major contender would win was marginally still up in the air) I mentioned that I was nervous, nervous as a kitten. An expression that  one of my ex-wives used to say when she was frustrated by something I had done or said and was afraid to speak her mind since she did not necessarily know what my reaction would be, would I take it in good humor, take it in stride or go off on some mindless fury. I also noted for the record although I hardly deserved a good conduct medal for it that I had changed quite a bit since those youthful hot and heavy days before I stopped myself short on the personal business that day as today I wanted to talk “high” politics.

Today what I want to speak of, speak of with that same nervousness that that ex-wife was apprehensive about is the results of those forlorn dismal  American Presidential elections that have elected  the next war-monger-in-chief which has me worried to perdition, to hell and back if you like that idea better. No, I am not weepy-eyed over Donald Trump’s pasting which he had coming. No, I am still not weepy-eyed over how the media had jumped all over Hillary about a few mild and minor indiscretions in her nefarious private e-mail server (nobody, not the mainstream media anyway has taken her to task for her real crimes, jail time crimes to borrow a phrase from Dump the Trump, on the destruction of Libya which had her fingerprints all over it. We will not even talk about the ignoble Iraq War vote from way back in the early 2000s).

What worries me is that for the next four, and maybe eight years those of us who stand outside and to the left of the two party system that tweedle-de-dee, tweedle-do-dum’s this system are going to be working overtime fighting a rearguard action against the next wars on the American foreign policy menu and another rearguard action trying to defend working people, hard-working working people from taking it on the chin like they have for the past couple of decades, maybe more. In short, it is not the party system that is dysfunctional, it is the capitalist system that has outlived its usefulness. And that, sisters and brothers ain’t no lie.               

Before that pre-election comment invoking the “ghost” of the august name of Vladimir Lenin to come and “save” us I had written another short piece about my take on the elections. In that piece I mentioned that the beginning of political wisdom was to tell the truth, the unvarnished truth. The truth like the words written in the last couple of lines in that last paragraph about the system’s fate. I also mentioned in the piece that "speak the truth no matter how bitter,” was a mantra that the great Russian evolutionary and civil war military leader Leon Trotsky was fond of quoting when there was nothing but dust being blown in the faces of the masses, of the working stiffs from the factories who were the backbone of the Bolshevik cause when the deal when down in October, 1917, when to not speak the truth would have turned the whole damn thing on its head.

I pointed out as well not  without a little tongue-in-cheek that it was probably a sacrilege to mention the name Leon Trotsky in the same breathe as the two reprobates running for the office of official warmonger-in-chief of the United States, one Hillary Clinton and one Donald Trump. But these are harsh times for revolutionaries. Hard times for any truth-tellers but unfortunately we don’t always get to choose what we are up against, what we need to comment on. 

Since I had already committed one sacrilege, actually two with the pre-election piece invoking Lenin’s name the first time, I hereby am going to commit another by again invoking the name of Vladimir Lenin, Trotsky’s fellow outstanding Russian revolutionary and political leader of the Bolsheviks who turned the world upside down in 1917. He too spoke the truth at a time when not to do so would turned the whole damn thing on its head as well. I gave as an example of that truth, a classic statement of his in the Soviet in pre-October was that he was prepared with his fellow Bolsheviks to take control of the government to get Russia out of World War I and get the country’s working people and peasants on the road to socialism. They, the big time socialist politicians of the time who were deep inside the capitalist Provisional Government laughed at him, called him crazy for thinking his then small following could run the show.

I also mentioned another time when Lenin spoke the truth. I noted that it was maybe not the hard momentary truth necessary to get the job done in Russia in the fall of 1917 but a wider longer lasting truth that has some application today-strange as it seems almost one hundred years later.       

Lenin, Trotsky and others who were committed to an internationalist socialist perspective knew that Russia could not go that trail alone even though it was the first nation to attempt the effort. They also knew that the old socialist organizations, particularly the Second International which they all belonged to in the pre-war period which had worked okay, well had worked sort of okay, in peacetime fell apart the minute war loomed and the vast majority surrendered to the dictates of their own bourgeoisies. A new, third, Communist International was necessary to bring about international socialism and so they created that organization in the early months of 1919 when they had a little breathing room in the civil war struggle they were waging against the Whites and their international capitalist allies.

At that conference Lenin proposed a series of theses about what needed to be done, what perspective the international movement needed to be clear about. That document-Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat [see below] outlined the general tasks for the epoch of capitalist decay (a situation we are even more graphically in today). Spoke the truth than no band-aids to the capitalist system like a lot of socialists who knew better were proposing. The old system had to go.             

I noted as well after reading this document recently I made a comment that in broad outline the strategy and the polemic against political opponents seemed like with a little up-dating the theses could have been written today when the same needs are to be met.  After reading that document I was for the moment not quite so nervous, nervous as a kitten about the future struggles ahead. Then I thought about the monsters we are up against for the next four, maybe eight years and got nervous all over again. Forward.   
******
Workers Vanguard No. 1098
21 October 2016
 
From the Archives of Marxism-“Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”-by V.I. Lenin

We reprint below Theses by Lenin that counterpose the soviet system of workers democracy established by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia to the fraud of capitalist democracy. Lenin presented the Theses to the First Congress of the Third (Communist) International in March 1919, while Europe was being shaken by revolutionary working-class upheavals. In January of that year a workers uprising in Berlin was crushed and Communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were assassinated.

The Communist International was founded in opposition to the Second (Socialist) International. Most of the parties of the Second International had betrayed the working class by supporting their own imperialist ruling classes in the slaughter of World War I. The Communist International won substantial numbers of workers from the old Socialist (Social Democratic) parties to revolutionary communism.

This translation of the Theses is taken from Lenin’s Collected Works. The Berne International Conference that Lenin references sought to re-establish the Second International, which had collapsed at the start of WWI.
*   *   *
1. Faced with the growth of the revolutionary workers’ movement in every country, the bourgeoisie and their agents in the workers’ organisations are making desperate attempts to find ideological and political arguments in defence of the rule of the exploiters. Condemnation of dictatorship and defence of democracy are particularly prominent among these arguments. The falsity and hypocrisy of this argument, repeated in a thousand strains by the capitalist press and at the Berne yellow International Conference in February 1919, are obvious to all who refuse to betray the fundamental principles of socialism.


2. Firstly, this argument employs the concepts of “democracy in general” and “dictatorship in general,” without posing the question of the class concerned. This non-class or above-class presentation, which supposedly is popular, is an outright travesty of the basic tenet of socialism, namely, its theory of class struggle, which socialists who have sided with the bourgeoisie recognise in words but disregard in practice. For in no civilised capitalist country does “democracy in general” exist; all that exists is bourgeois democracy, and it is not a question of “dictatorship in general,” but of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, i.e., the proletariat, over its oppressors and exploiters, i.e., the bourgeoisie, in order to overcome the resistance offered by the exploiters in their fight to maintain their domination.


3. History teaches us that no oppressed class ever did, or could, achieve power without going through a period of dictatorship, i.e., the conquest of political power and forcible suppression of the resistance always offered by the exploiters—a resistance that is most desperate, most furious, and that stops at nothing. The bourgeoisie, whose domination is now defended by the socialists who denounce “dictatorship in general” and extol “democracy in general,” won power in the advanced countries through a series of insurrections, civil wars, and the forcible suppression of kings, feudal lords, slaveowners and their attempts at restoration. In books, pamphlets, congress resolutions and propaganda speeches socialists everywhere have thousands and millions of times explained to the people the class nature of these bourgeois revolutions and this bourgeois dictatorship. That is why the present defence of bourgeois democracy under cover of talk about “democracy in general” and the present howls and shouts against proletarian dictatorship under cover of shouts about “dictatorship in general” are an outright betrayal of socialism. They are, in fact, desertion to the bourgeoisie, denial of the proletariat’s right to its own, proletarian, revolution, and defence of bourgeois reformism at the very historical juncture when bourgeois reformism throughout the world has collapsed and the war has created a revolutionary situation.


4. In explaining the class nature of bourgeois civilisation, bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois parliamentary system, all socialists have expressed the idea formulated with the greatest scientific precision by Marx and Engels, namely, that the most democratic bourgeois republic is no more than a machine for the suppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, for the suppression of the working people by a handful of capitalists. There is not a single revolutionary, not a single Marxist among those now shouting against dictatorship and for democracy who has not sworn and vowed to the workers that he accepts this basic truth of socialism. But now, when the revolutionary proletariat is in a fighting mood and taking action to destroy this machine of oppression and to establish proletarian dictatorship, these traitors to socialism claim that the bourgeoisie have granted the working people “pure democracy,” have abandoned resistance and are prepared to yield to the majority of the working people. They assert that in a democratic republic there is not, and never has been, any such thing as a state machine for the oppression of labour by capital.


5. The Paris Commune [of 1871, when the Parisian working class briefly seized power]—to which all who parade as socialists pay lip service, for they know that the workers ardently and sincerely sympathise with the Commune—showed very clearly the historically conventional nature and limited value of the bourgeois parliamentary system and bourgeois democracy—institutions which, though highly progressive compared with medieval times, inevitably require a radical alteration in the era of proletarian revolution. It was Marx who best appraised the historical significance of the Commune. In his analysis, he revealed the exploiting nature of bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois parliamentary system under which the oppressed classes enjoy the right to decide once in several years which representative of the propertied classes shall “represent and suppress” (ver- und zertreten) the people in parliament. And it is now, when the Soviet movement is embracing the entire world and continuing the work of the Commune for all to see, that the traitors to socialism are forgetting the concrete experience and concrete lessons of the Paris Commune and repeating the old bourgeois rubbish about “democracy in general.” The Commune was not a parliamentary institution.


6. The significance of the Commune, furthermore, lies in the fact that it endeavoured to crush, to smash to its very foundations, the bourgeois state apparatus, the bureaucratic, judicial, military and police machine, and to replace it by a self-governing, mass workers’ organisation in which there was no division between legislative and executive power. All contemporary bourgeois-democratic republics, including the German republic, which the traitors to socialism, in mockery of the truth, describe as a proletarian republic, retain this state apparatus. We therefore again get quite clear confirmation of the point that shouting in defence of “democracy in general” is actually defence of the bourgeoisie and their privileges as exploiters.


7. “Freedom of assembly” can be taken as a sample of the requisites of “pure democracy.” Every class-conscious worker who has not broken with his class will readily appreciate the absurdity of promising freedom of assembly to the exploiters at a time and in a situation when the exploiters are resisting the overthrow of their rule and are fighting to retain their privileges. When the bourgeoisie were revolutionary, they did not, either in England in 1649 or in France in 1793, grant “freedom of assembly” to the monarchists and nobles, who summoned foreign troops and “assembled” to organise attempts at restoration. If the present-day bourgeoisie, who have long since become reactionary, demand from the proletariat advance guarantees of “freedom of assembly” for the exploiters, whatever the resistance offered by the capitalists to being expropriated, the workers will only laugh at their hypocrisy.


The workers know perfectly well, too, that even in the most democratic bourgeois republic “freedom of assembly” is a hollow phrase, for the rich have the best public and private buildings at their disposal, and enough leisure to assemble at meetings, which are protected by the bourgeois machine of power. The rural and urban workers and the small peasants—the overwhelming majority of the population—are denied all these things. As long as that state of affairs prevails, “equality,” i.e., “pure democracy,” is a fraud. The first thing to do to win genuine equality and enable the working people to enjoy democracy in practice is to deprive the exploiters of all the public and sumptuous private buildings, to give the working people leisure and to see to it that their freedom of assembly is protected by armed workers, not by scions of the nobility or capitalist officers in command of downtrodden soldiers.
Only when that change is effected can we speak of freedom of assembly and of equality without mocking at the workers, at working people in general, at the poor. And this change can be effected only by the vanguard of the working people, the proletariat, which overthrows the exploiters, the bourgeoisie.


8. “Freedom of the press” is another of the principal slogans of “pure democracy.” And here, too, the workers know—and socialists everywhere have admitted it millions of times—that this freedom is a deception while the best printing-presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists, and while capitalist rule over the press remains, a rule that is manifested throughout the world all the more strikingly, sharply and cynically the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example. The first thing to do to win real equality and genuine democracy for the working people, for the workers and peasants, is to deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying up publishing houses and bribing newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed. The capitalists have always used the term “freedom” to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death. In capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion. In this respect, too, the defenders of “pure democracy” prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people, who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capitalist enslavement. Genuine freedom and equality will be embodied in the system which the Communists are building, and in which there will be no opportunity for amassing wealth at the expense of others, no objective opportunities for putting the press under the direct or indirect power of money, and no impediments in the way of any workingman (or groups of workingmen, in any numbers) for enjoying and practising equal rights in the use of public printing-presses and public stocks of paper.


9. The history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrated, even before the war, what this celebrated “pure democracy” really is under capitalism. Marxists have always maintained that the more developed, the “purer” democracy is, the more naked, acute and merciless the class struggle becomes, and the “purer” the capitalist oppression and bourgeois dictatorship. The Dreyfus case [witchhunt against Jewish army officer in the 1890s] in republican France, the massacre of strikers by hired bands armed by the capitalists in the free and democratic American republic—these and thousands of similar facts illustrate the truth which the bourgeoisie are vainly seeking to conceal, namely, that actually terror and bourgeois dictatorship prevail in the most democratic of republics and are openly displayed every time the exploiters think the power of capital is being shaken.


10. The imperialist war of 1914-18 conclusively revealed even to backward workers the true nature of bourgeois democracy, even in the freest republics, as being a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Tens of millions were killed for the sake of enriching the German or the British group of millionaires and multimillionaires, and bourgeois military dictatorships were established in the freest republics. This military dictatorship continues to exist in the Allied countries even after Germany’s defeat. It was mostly the war that opened the eyes of the working people, that stripped bourgeois democracy of its camouflage and showed the people the abyss of speculation and profiteering that existed during and because of the war. It was in the name of “freedom and equality” that the bourgeoisie waged the war, and in the name of “freedom and equality” that the munition manufacturers piled up fabulous fortunes. Nothing that the yellow Berne International does can conceal from the people the now thoroughly exposed exploiting character of bourgeois freedom, bourgeois equality and bourgeois democracy.


11. In Germany, the most developed capitalist country of continental Europe, the very first months of full republican freedom, established as a result of imperialist Germany’s defeat, have shown the German workers and the whole world the true class substance of the bourgeois-democratic republic. The murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg is an event of epoch-making significance not only because of the tragic death of these finest people and leaders of the truly proletarian, Communist International, but also because the class nature of an advanced European state—it can be said without exaggeration, of an advanced state on a world-wide scale—has been conclusively exposed. If those arrested, i.e., those placed under state protection, could be assassinated by officers and capitalists with impunity, and this under a government headed by social-patriots [Social Democrats], then the democratic republic where such a thing was possible is a bourgeois dictatorship. Those who voice their indignation at the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg but fail to understand this fact are only demonstrating their stupidity, or hypocrisy. “Freedom” in the German republic, one of the freest and advanced republics of the world, is freedom to murder arrested leaders of the proletariat with impunity. Nor can it be otherwise as long as capitalism remains, for the development of democracy sharpens rather than dampens the class struggle which, by virtue of all the results and influences of the war and of its consequences, has been brought to boiling point.


Throughout the civilised world we see Bolsheviks being exiled, persecuted and thrown into prison. This is the case, for example, in Switzerland, one of the freest bourgeois republics, and in America, where there have been anti-Bolshevik pogroms, etc. From the standpoint of “democracy in general,” or “pure democracy,” it is really ridiculous that advanced, civilised, and democratic countries, which are armed to the teeth, should fear the presence of a few score men from backward, famine-stricken and ruined Russia, which the bourgeois papers, in tens of millions of copies, describe as savage, criminal, etc. Clearly, the social situation that could produce this crying contradiction is in fact a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.


12. In these circumstances, proletarian dictatorship is not only an absolutely legitimate means of overthrowing the exploiters and suppressing their resistance, but also absolutely necessary to the entire mass of working people, being their only defence against the bourgeois dictatorship which led to the war and is preparing new wars.


The main thing that socialists fail to understand and that constitutes their shortsightedness in matters of theory, their subservience to bourgeois prejudices and their political betrayal of the proletariat is that in capitalist society, whenever there is any serious aggravation of the class struggle intrinsic to that society, there can be no alternative but the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the dictatorship of the proletariat. Dreams of some third way are reactionary, petty-bourgeois lamentations. That is borne out by more than a century of development of bourgeois democracy and the working-class movement in all the advanced countries, and notably by the experience of the past five years. This is also borne out by the whole science of political economy, by the entire content of Marxism, which reveals the economic inevitability, wherever commodity economy prevails, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that can only be replaced by the class which the very growth of capitalism develops, multiplies, welds together and strengthens, that is, the proletarian class.


13. Another theoretical and political error of the socialists is their failure to understand that ever since the rudiments of democracy first appeared in antiquity, its forms inevitably changed over the centuries as one ruling class replaced another. Democracy assumed different forms and was applied in different degrees in the ancient republics of Greece, the medieval cities and the advanced capitalist countries. It would be sheer nonsense to think that the most profound revolution in human history, the first case in the world of power being transferred from the exploiting minority to the exploited majority, could take place within the time-worn framework of the old, bourgeois, parliamentary democracy, without drastic changes, without the creation of new forms of democracy, new institutions that embody the new conditions for applying democracy, etc.


14. Proletarian dictatorship is similar to the dictatorship of other classes in that it arises out of the need, as every other dictatorship does, to forcibly suppress the resistance of the class that is losing its political sway. The fundamental distinction between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of other classes—landlord dictatorship in the Middle Ages and bourgeois dictatorship in all the civilised capitalist countries—consists in the fact that the dictatorship of the landowners and bourgeoisie was the forcible suppression of the resistance offered by the vast majority of the population, namely, the working people. In contrast, proletarian dictatorship is the forcible suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, i.e., an insignificant minority of the population, the landowners and capitalists.


It follows that proletarian dictatorship must inevitably entail not only a change in democratic forms and institutions, generally speaking, but precisely such a change as provides an unparalleled extension of the actual enjoyment of democracy by those oppressed by capitalism—the toiling classes.


And indeed, the form of proletarian dictatorship that has already taken shape, i.e., Soviet power in Russia, the Räte [council]-System in Germany, the Shop Stewards Committees in Britain and similar Soviet institutions in other countries, all this implies and presents to the toiling classes, i.e., the vast majority of the population, greater practical opportunities for enjoying democratic rights and liberties than ever existed before, even approximately, in the best and the most democratic bourgeois republics.


The substance of Soviet government is that the permanent and only foundation of state power, the entire machinery of state, is the mass-scale organisation of the classes oppressed by capitalism, i.e., the workers and the semi-proletarians (peasants who do not exploit the labour of others and regularly resort to the sale of at least a part of their own labour power). It is the people, who even in the most democratic bourgeois republics, while possessing equal rights by law, have in fact been debarred by thousands of devices and subterfuges from participation in political life and enjoyment of democratic rights and liberties, that are now drawn into constant and unfailing, moreover, decisive, participation in the democratic administration of the state.


15. The equality of citizens, irrespective of sex, religion, race, or nationality, which bourgeois democracy everywhere has always promised but never effected, and never could effect because of the domination of capital, is given immediate and full effect by the Soviet system, or dictatorship of the proletariat. The fact is that this can only be done by a government of the workers, who are not interested in the means of production being privately owned and in the fight for their division and redivision.


16. The old, i.e., bourgeois, democracy and the parliamentary system were so organised that it was the mass of working people who were kept farthest away from the machinery of government. Soviet power, i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the other hand, is so organised as to bring the working people close to the machinery of government. That, too, is the purpose of combining the legislative and executive authority under the Soviet organisation of the state and of replacing territorial constituencies by production units—the factory.


17. The army was a machine of oppression not only under the monarchy. It remains as such in all bourgeois republics, even the most democratic ones. Only the Soviets, the permanent organisations of government authority of the classes that were oppressed by capitalism, are in a position to destroy the army’s subordination to bourgeois commanders and really merge the proletariat with the army; only the Soviets can effectively arm the proletariat and disarm the bourgeoisie. Unless this is done, the victory of socialism is impossible.


18. The Soviet organisation of the state is suited to the leading role of the proletariat as a class most concentrated and enlightened by capitalism. The experience of all revolutions and all movements of the oppressed classes, the experience of the world socialist movement teaches us that only the proletariat is in a position to unite and lead the scattered and backward sections of the working and exploited population.


19. Only the Soviet organisation of the state can really effect the immediate break-up and total destruction of the old, i.e., bourgeois, bureaucratic and judicial machinery, which has been, and has inevitably had to be, retained under capitalism even in the most democratic republics, and which is, in actual fact, the greatest obstacle to the practical implementation of democracy for the workers and working people generally. The Paris Commune took the first epoch-making step along this path. The Soviet system has taken the second.


20. Destruction of state power is the aim set by all socialists, including Marx above all. Genuine democracy, i.e., liberty and equality, is unrealisable unless this aim is achieved. But its practical achievement is possible only through Soviet, or proletarian, democracy, for by enlisting the mass organisations of the working people in constant and unfailing participation in the administration of the state, it immediately begins to prepare the complete withering away of any state.


21. The complete bankruptcy of the socialists who assembled in Berne, their complete failure to understand the new, i.e., proletarian, democracy, is especially apparent from the following. On February 10, 1919, [Swedish Social-Democratic leader Hjalmar] Branting delivered the concluding speech at the international Conference of the yellow International in Berne. In Berlin, on February 11, 1919, Die Freiheit, the paper of the International’s affiliates, published an appeal from the Party of “Independence” to the proletariat. The appeal acknowledged the bourgeois character of the [German Social Democrat Philipp] Scheidemann government, rebuked it for wanting to abolish the Soviets, which it described as Träger und Schützer der Revolution—vehicles and guardians of the revolution—and proposed that the Soviets be legalised, invested with government authority and given the right to suspend the operation of National Assembly decisions pending a popular referendum.


That proposal indicates the complete ideological bankruptcy of the theorists who defended democracy and failed to see its bourgeois character. This ludicrous attempt to combine the Soviet system, i.e., proletarian dictatorship, with the National Assembly, i.e., bourgeois dictatorship, utterly exposes the paucity of thought of the yellow socialists and Social-Democrats, their reactionary petty-bourgeois political outlook, and their cowardly concessions to the irresistibly growing strength of the new, proletarian democracy.


22. From the class standpoint, the Berne yellow International majority, which did not dare to adopt a formal resolution out of fear of the mass of workers, was right in condemning Bolshevism. This majority is in full agreement with the Russian Mensheviks [social democrats] and [peasant-based] Socialist-Revolutionaries, and the Scheidemanns in Germany. In complaining of persecution by the Bolsheviks, the Russian Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries try to conceal the fact that they are persecuted for participating in the Civil War on the side of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. Similarly, the Scheidemanns and their party have already demonstrated in Germany that they, too, are participating in the civil war on the side of the bourgeoisie against the workers.
It is therefore quite natural that the Berne yellow International majority should be in favour of condemning the Bolsheviks. This was not an expression of the defence of “pure democracy,” but of the self-defence of people who know and feel that in the civil war they stand with the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.


That is why, from the class point of view, the decision of the yellow International majority must be considered correct. The proletariat must not fear the truth, it must face it squarely and draw all the necessary political conclusions


 

On The 111th Anniversary Of Russian Revolution of 1905 As We Honor Of The Three L’s –Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht-Honor An Historic Leader Of The American Labor Movement-“Big Bill Haywood

On The  Anniversary Of Russian Revolution of 1905 As We Honor Of The Three L’s –Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht-Honor An Historic Leader Of The American Labor Movement-“Big Bill Haywood 




 EVERY JANUARY WE HONOR LENIN OF RUSSIA, ROSA LUXEMBURG OF POLAND, AND KARL LIEBKNECHT OF GERMANY AS THREE LEADERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT. DURING THE MONTH WE ALSO HONOR OTHER HISTORIC LEADERS AS WELL ON THIS SITE.


Book Review

Big Bill Haywood, Melvyn Dubofsky, Manchester University Press, Manchester England, 1987


If you are sitting around today wondering, as I occasionally do, what a modern day radical labor leader should look like then one need go no further than to observe the career, warts and all, of the legendary Bill Haywood. To previous generations of radicals that name would draw an automatic response. Today’s radicals, and others interested in social solutions to the pressing problems that have been bestowed on us by the continuation of the capitalist mode of production, may not be familiar with the man and his program for working class power. Professor Dubofsky’s little biographical sketch is thus just the cure for those who need a primer on this hero of the working class.

The good professor goes into some detail, despite limited accessibility, about Haywood’s early life out in the Western United States in the late 19th century. Those hard scrabble experiences made a huge imprint on the young Haywood as he tramped from mining camp to mining camp and tried to make ends mean, any way he could. Haywood, moreover, is the perfect example of the fact that working class political consciousness is not innate but gained through the hard experiences of life under the capitalist system. Thus, Haywood moved from itinerant miner to become a leading member of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and moved leftward along the political spectrum along the way. Not a small part in that was due to his trial on trumped up charges in Idaho for murder as part of a labor crackdown against the WFM by the mine owners and their political allies there.

As virtually all working class militants did at the turn of the 20th century, Big Bill became involved with the early American socialist movement and followed the lead of the sainted Eugene V. Debs. As part of the ferment of labor agitation during this period the organization that Haywood is most closely associated with was formed-The Industrial Workers of the World (hereafter IWW, also known as Wobblies). This organization- part union, part political party- was the most radical expression (far more radical than the rather tepid socialist organizations) of the American labor movement in the period before World War I.

The bulk of Professor Dubofsky’s book centers, as it should, on Haywood’s exploits as a leader of the IWW. Big Bill’s ups and downs mirrored the ups and downs of the organization. The professor goes into the various labor fights that Haywood led highlighted by the great 1912 Lawrence strike (of bread and roses fame), the various free speech fights but also the draconian Wilsonian policy toward the IWW after America declared war in 1917. That governmental policy essentially crushed the IWW as a mass working class organization. Moreover, as a leader Haywood personally felt the full wrath of the capitalist government. Facing extended jail time Haywood eventually fled to the young Soviet republic where he died in lonely exile in 1928.

The professor adequately tackles the problem of the political and moral consequences of that escape to Russia for the IWW and to his still imprisoned comrades so I will not address it here. However, there are two points noted by Dubofsky that warrant comment. First, he notes that Big Bill was a first rate organizer in both the WFM and the IWW. Those of us who are Marxists sometimes tend to place more emphasis of the fact that labor leaders need to be “tribunes of the people” that we sometimes neglect the important “trade union secretary” part of the formula. Haywood seems to have had it all. Secondly, Haywood’s and the IWW’s experience with government repression during World War I, repeated in the “Red Scare” experience of the 1950’s against Communists and then later against the Black Panthers in the 1960’s should be etched into the brain of every militant today. When the deal goes down the capitalists and their hangers-on will do anything to keep their system. Anything. That said, read this Haywood primer. It is an important contribution to the study of American labor history.




*****A Voice From The Left-The Latest From The Steve Lendman Blog

*****A Voice From The Left-The Latest From The Steve Lendman Blog



                                  Henry Wallace 1948

 A link below to link to the Steve Lendman Blog

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Over the years that I have been presenting political material in this space I have had occasion to re-post items from some sites which I find interesting, interesting for a host of political reasons, although I am not necessarily in agreement with what has been published. Two such sites have stood out, The Rag Blog, which I like to re-post items from because it has articles by many of my fellow Generation of ’68 residual radicals and ex-radicals who still care to put pen to paper and the blog cited here, the Steve Lendman Blog.  The reason for re-postings from this latter site is slightly different since the site represents a modern day left- liberal political slant. That is the element, the pool if you will, that we radicals have to draw from, have to move left, if we are to grow. So it is important to have the pulse of what issues motivate that milieu and I believe that this blog is a lightning rod for those political tendencies. 

I would also add that the blog is a fountain of rational, reasonable and unrepentant anti-Zionism which became apparent once again in the summer of 2014 when defense of the Palestinian people in Gaza was the pressing political issue and we were being stonewalled and lied to by the bourgeois media in service of American and Israeli interests. This blog was like a breath of fresh air then. Still is.

An additional Jackman comment (Fall 2014):

The left-liberal/radical arena in American politics has been on a steep decline since I was a whole-hearted denizen of that milieu in my youth somewhere slightly to the left of Robert Kennedy back in 1968 say but still immersed in trying put band-aids on the capitalist system. That is the place where Steve Lendman with his helpful well informed blog finds himself. It is not an enviable place to be for anyone to have a solid critique of bourgeois politics, hard American imperial politics in the 21st century and have no ready source in that milieu to take on the issues and make a difference (and as an important adjunct to that American critique a solid critique of the American government acting as front-man for every nefarious move the Israeli government makes toward increasing the oppression of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank). 

Of course I had the luxury, if one could call it that, which a look at Mr. Lendman's bio information indicates that he did not have, was the pivotal experience in the late 1960s of being inducted, kicking and screaming but inducted, into the American army in its losing fight against the heroic Vietnamese resistance. That signal event disabused me, although it took a while to get "religion," on the question of the idea of not depending on bourgeois society to reform itself coming out of Democratic Party left-liberal politics, especially falling in love with Robert Kennedy’s idea of “seeking a newer world.” On specific issues like the fight against the death penalty, the fight for the $15 minimum wage, immigration reform and the like I have worked with that left-liberal/ radical milieu, and gladly, but as for continuing to believe against all evidence that the damn thing can be reformed that is where we part company. Still Brother Lendman keep up the good work and I hope you find a political home worthy of your important work.                  

A Jackman disclaimer:

I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. 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 was the freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. Those jackboot theories, mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power, were theories that I earnestly adhered to sometimes more than one at the same time. Nevertheless by our exclusionism we were replicating the worst habits of the old Old Left (those who came of political age and fought the great class battles of the 1930s when kept their generation above water for a long time but which now despite the importance of studying have run out of steam). That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including 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.