*****Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now -Build The Resistance

*****Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Then, And Now  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Several years ago, I guess about four years now, in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement with the shutting down of its campsites across the country by the police acting in concert with other American governmental bodies I wrote a short piece centered on the need for revolutionary and radical intellectuals, or those who had pretensions to such ideas to take their rightful place on the activist left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines. Or wherever they were hiding out, hiding out maybe as far back in some cases as the Vietnam War days which saw much of the current senior contemporary academia turn from the streets to the ivied-buildings, maybe hiding out in bought and paid for think tanks with their bright-colored “wonk” portfolios like some exiles-in-waiting ready to spring their latest wisdom, maybe posing as public intellectuals although with no serious audience ready to act on their ideas since they were not pushing their agendas beyond the lectern, maybe some in the hard-hearted post 9/11 world having doubts about those long ago youthful impulses that animated "the better angels of their natures" have turned to see the “virtues” of the warfare state and now keep their eyes averted to the social struggles they previously professed to live and die for, or maybe a la Henry David Thoreau retiring to out in some edenic gardens in Big Sur or anywhere Oregon like some 60s radicals did never to be heard from again except as relics when the tourists pass through town.

One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a certain stock-taking was in order (and which is in 2015 and beyond still in order). A stock-taking at first centered on those young radicals and revolutionaries that I ran into in the various campsites and on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses they professed to be fighting for (and with not a little hostility from that same work-a-day mass hostile to people hanging out and not working, or not doing much of anything, as well but mainly indifference to the fight these idealistic youth were pursuing, really their fight too since that had been pummeled by the main Occupy culprits, the banks who got bailed out, the mortgages companies who sold them a false bill of goods, the corporations more than ready to send formerly good paying jobs off-shore leaving Wal-Mart for the unemployed. Now a few years later it is apparent that they, the youth of Occupy have, mostly, moved back to the traditional political ways of operating via the main bourgeois parties who let the whole thing happen (witness the New York mayor’s race, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders et. al) or have not quite finished licking their wounds (they couldn’t believe as we elders could have told them after all the anti-Vietnam War actions, including the massive May Day 1971 arrests that the government had no problem crushing their own, their own young if they got out of line).

Although I initially addressed my remarks to the activists still busy out in the streets I also had in mind those intellectuals who had a radical streak but who then hovered on the sidelines and were not sure what to make of the whole experiment although some things seemed very positive like the initial camp comradery, the flow of ideas, some half-baked on their faces but worthy of conversation and testing, the gist for any academic. In short, those who would come by on Sundays and take a lot of photographs and write a couple of lines about what they saw but held back. (I would argue and this may be the nature of the times that the real beneficiaries of Occupy were all those film students and artists, media-types who made the site their class project, or their first professional documentary.) Now in 2015 it is clear as day that the old economic order (capitalism if you were not quite sure what to name it) that we were fitfully protesting against (especially against the banks who led the way downhill and who under the sway of imperialism's imperative made it clear finance capitalism writ large is in charge) has survived another threat to its dominance. The old political order, the way of doing political business now clearly being defended by one Barack Obama and his hangers-on, Democrat and Republican, with might and main is still intact (with a whole ready to take his place come 2016).

The needs of working people although now widely discussed in academia and on the more thoughtful talk shows have not been ameliorated (the increasing gap between the rich, really the very rich, and the poor, endlessly lamented and then forgotten, the student debt death trap, and the lingering sense that most of us will never get very far ahead in this wicked old world especially compared to previous generations). All of this calls for intellectuals with any activist spark to come forth and help analyze and plan how the masses are to survive, how a new social order can be brought forth. Nobody said, or says, that it will be easy but this is the plea. I have reposted the original piece with some editing to bring it up to date.          
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No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon, a founding member of the American Communist Party in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and when that revolution began to seriously go off the rails followed the politics of the Trotsky-led International Left Opposition  and eventually helped found the Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned elsewhere  that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution in less developed capitalist countries and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined. A century later with some tweaking, unfortunately, those same theories and the same need for organization are still on the agenda although, as Trotsky once said, the conditions are overripe for the overthrow of capitalism as it has long ago outlived its progressive character in leading humankind forward.   

The conclusion that I originally drew from that initial  observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them, and plenty of them, especially those who can write, is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders, guys like Cannon, like Debs from the old Socialist Party, like Ruthenburg from the early Communist Party, to lead the fight for state power.

In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. He led the anti-war movement in Germany by refusing to vote for the Kaiser’s war budgets, found himself in jail as a result, but also had tremendous authority among the left-wing German workers when that mattered. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have, as mentioned previously, held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. Not so Communist Party leaders like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder (to speak nothing of Gus Hall from our generation of '68) or Max Shachtman in his later years after he broke with Cannon and the SWP. That basically carried us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spent a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. I find that position stands in need of some amendment now.

Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to lead the struggle to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolutions of the 19th century continues to hold true. That said, rather than some tweaking, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.

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

Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.

As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the “new” working class or a “new” vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle, an idea that goes back to the days of Marx himself.

And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem was that “he was the problem” with his impressionistic theories based on, frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray (in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives out in bloody nomadic jungles of the American continent). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion codifying the experiences of the third Chinese revolution that the countryside (the “third world with its then predominant peasantry now increasingly proletarianized) would defeat the cities (mainly the West but the Soviet Union as well in some circles) that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. The late Mandel’s students from the 1960s have long gone on to academia and the professions (and not an inconsiderable few in governmental harness-how the righteous have fallen). Debray’s guerilla foci have long ago buried their dead and gone back to the cities. The “cities” of the world now including to a great extent China had broken the third world countryside though intense globalization. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?

*****Got Them Down-Hearted Blues-With The Empress Of The Blues Bessie Smith In Mind

*****Got Them Down-Hearted Blues-With The Empress Of The Blues Bessie Smith In Mind  

From The Pen Of Sam Eaton

Sure 1920s guys, gals too, black guys, black gals sweating out their short, brutalized lives on Mister’s 28,000 acres of the best bottomland along the river in Mississippi or some such number of acres,  probably it didn't matter to have an official count on the acres to them because all of the land went endlessly to the horizon and the work too had plenty to have the blues about. Had suffered the double whack of having to put up with Mister's Mister James Crow laws to boot which only added to the misery of those endless acres. Sure maybe some woe begotten poor white trash down in hard-boiled Appalachia in those famed hills and hollows had plenty of blues too although they did not call them that even in those few integrated evenings when the whole town went to Rence Jackson's dirty red barn in need of a serious paint job but this is about the blues, the musical blues and not some general social issues commentary. So those “no account” whites don’t play a role here at this time, don't play except as devotes of generic old country British Isles ballads like the ones collected by Francis Child back in the 1850s which thrilled the Brahmins of Brattle Street on a wild utilitarian Saturday night. Actually whites in general don't play a role in the blues since their access to such songs by the likes of the various Blinds, Robert Johnson, and the belting barrelhouse mamas would be minimal in an age when "race" record pieced everybody off into their own tangent. They will not play a role until the music heads north in a generation, or so,  and the “white negro” hipsters (to use big daddy Norman Mailer’s term for the little daddies who hung around the back streets of cool, Harlem 125th Street cool at that time), “beats (to use Jack Kerouac term hustled from some dead-pan beat down hustler, a white negro hipster if it came right down to it named Huncke via high brow John Clellon Holmes for Christ sake),” folkies (to use the Lomaxes’, father and son, expression), college students (to use oh I don’t know the U.S. Department of Education’s expression), and assorted others (junkies, grifters, midnight sifters, drifters on the wing, winos trying to sober up, good time prostitutes, the denizens of Hayes-Bickford's, the Automat, places like that, no hip as a rule) decided that that beat in their heads had Mother Africa who spawned us all had to be investigated but all that indeed was later.

Like I said the real blues aficionados, if only by default, had their say, had their lyrics almost written for them by the events of everyday human existence what with talking in their own "code words" about how Mister and his Mister James Crow laws fitted him, Mister, and his just fine at the expense of those black guys, their women and their righteous children (righteous when they, his children and their children smote the dragon come freedom summer times, come Mississippi and Alabama too goddamn times but that is a story for their generations to tell I want to talk about the great-grand pa’s and ma’s and their doings).

Here is how the scene played out as near as I can figure from a wide-ranging reading of most of the lyrics from that time (and always remember when you speak of "blues," speak of the folk in general this is mostly an oral tradition handed down and bastardized as it gotten handed down so there are very few definitive lyrics but rather more a sense of what miseries were being talked about. How Mister James Crow said every day of the week, even the Lord’s Day, Sunday that if you were black, get back, if you were white and right you were alright and proved it by separate this and separate that, keeping his street clear of stray “negros,” yeah, with small “n” if he was being kind that day, another today socially not acceptable expression if not, telling the brethren to go here, not go there, look this way but not that (and by all means not peeking at his womenfolk), walk there but not here, or face nooses and slugs for his troubles.

So yeah the blues almost cried out to be the order of things. Working all day for chump change in Mister’s fields or worse share-cropper-ing and having Mister take the better portion and leaving the leavings he didn’t want, meaning what he couldn’t sell to his profit as the rest.

Yeah, so there is no way that black guys could not have had the blues back then except some old nappy Tom who didn’t get the word but they were far fewer than you might think the others just fumed at who knows what psychic costs (now too but that in dealt with by the step-child of the blues, maybe second step-child via in your face if there is space hip-hop nations, the angry ones who put words to the rages of the modern “post racial” American society that somebody has jerked them around with lately). Hey and to Mister’s miseries, very real, very scary when the nightriders came, woman trouble (maybe at night the worse kind of trouble if Mister wasn’t in your face all day with her where you been, do this, do that, put it right here, put it right there), trouble with Sheriff Law (stay off the sidewalks, keep your head down, stay down in the bottom lands or else) and trouble with Long Skinny Jones if you mess with his woman, get your own (or face his razor and gun down on Black Mountain).

Plenty of stuff to sing about come Saturday night after dark at Smilin’ Billy’s juke joint complete with his home-made brew, freshly batched, which insured that everybody would be at Preacher Jack’s  Sunday service to have their sins, lusts, greeds, avarices, covets, swaggers, cuts, from the night before (or maybe just minutes before) washed clean under the threat of damnation and worse, worse for listening to the “devil’s music” (funny because come the white rock and roll teen explosion a generation later Mister, some Mister, said that too was the devil’s music which confused those clean cut angelic angst-filled teens although not enough to stop listening to Satan and his siren song) by a guy like Charley Patton, Son House (who had the worst of both worlds being a sinner, loving his whiskey more than somewhat which Howlin’ Wolf took him to task for down in Newport one year in the early 1960s at a jam session, and a preacher man), Lucky Quick, Sleepy John, Robert J, and lots of hungry boys who wanted to get the hell out from under Mister and his Mister James Crow laws by singing the blues and making them go away.          

That’s the guys, black guys and they had a moment, a country blues moment back in the 1920s and early 1930s when guys, white guys usually as far as I know, from small label record companies like Paramount, RCA, the radio company looking to feed the hours on their stations with stuff people would listen to (could listen to in short wave range times and hence regional roots work). They were agents who were parlaying two ideas together getting black people, black people with enough money  (and maybe a few white hipsters, Village, North Beach, Old Town denizens tired of the same old, same old if they were around and if they were called that before the big 1950s “beat” thing), buy, in this case, “race records,” that they might have heard on that self-same radio, nice economics, scoured the South looking for talent and found plenty in the Delta (and on the white side of that same coin plenty in the Southern hill-billy mountains, and hills and hollows too).

But those black blues brothers were not what drove the race label action back then since the rural poor had no money for radios or records for the most part and it was the black women singers who got the better play, although they if you look at individual cases suffered under the same Mister James Crow ethos that the black guys did. There they were though singing barrelhouse was what it was called mostly, stuff with plenty of double meanings about sex and about come hither availability and too about the code that all Southern blacks lived under. And the subjects. Well, the subjects reflected those of the black guys in reverse, two-timing guys, guys who would cut their women up as soon as look at them, down-hearted stuff when some Jimmy took off with his other best girl leaving her flat-footed, the sins of alcohol and drugs (listen to Victoria Spivey sometime on sister cocaine and any number of Smiths on gin), losing your man to you best friend. Some sound advice too like Sippy Wallace’s don’t advertise your man, and some bad advice about cutting up your no good man and taking the big step-off that awaited you, it is all there to be listened to.   

And the queen, the self-anointed queen, no, better you stay with the flow of her moniker, the empress, of barrelhouse blues was Bessie Smith, who sold more records than anybody else if nothing else. But there is more to her claim than mere record sales since she left a treasure trove of songs, well over two hundred before her untimely early death in the mid-1930s (untimely in the Mister James Crow South after an car accident and they would not admit an empress for chrissakes into a nearby white hospital, yes, rage, rage against the night unto the nth generation-black lives matter).

Guys, sophisticated guys, city guys, black guys mainly, guys like Fletcher Henderson, Tin Pan Alley kind of guys in places like high holy Harlem and Memphis, Saint Louis would write stuff for her, big fat sexy high white note sax and chilly dog trombone players would back her up and that was that. Sure Memphis Minnie could wag the dog’s tail with her lyrics about every kind of working guy taking care of her need (and you know she needed a little sugar in her bowl just like Bessie and a million, million other women, and a quick listen to any of a dozen such songs will tell you what that need was or you can figure it out and if you can’t you had better move on), the various other Smiths could talk about down-hearted stuff, about the devil’s music get the best of them, Sippy Wallace could talk about no good men, Ivy Stone could speak about being turned out in the streets to “work” the streets when some guy left town, address unknown, and Victoria Spivey could speak to the addictions that brought a good girl down but Bessie could run it all.

From down-hearted blues, killing her sorrows with that flask of gin, working down to bed-bug flop houses, thoughts of killing that no good bastard who left her high and dry, seeing a good Hustlin’ Dan man off to the great yonder after losing that bout with TB coughing, blowing high and heavy in the thick of the Jazz Age with the prince of wails, looking for a little sugar in her bowl, and every conceivable way to speak of personal sorrows.

Let me leave it like this for now with two big ideas. First if you have a chance go on YouTube and listen and watch while she struts her stuff on Saint Louis Woman all pain, pathos and indignity as her good man throws her over for, well, the next best thing. That will tell you why in her day she was the Empress. The other is this-if you have deep down sorrows, some man or woman left you high and dry, maybe you need a fixer man for what ails you, you have deep-dyed blues that won’t quite unless you have your medicine then you have to dust off your Billie Holiday records and get well. But if the world just has you by the tail for a moment, or things just went awry but maybe you can see the light of day then grab the old Bessie Vanguard Record or later Columbia Record multiple albums (four double record sets from beginning to end) and just start playing you won’t want to turn the thing off once Bessie gets under your skin.

That’s what I done more than once when I was down on my luck living in flea-bitten rooming house in a cold-water flat with me and my bed, bureau, desk and chair and a battered old RCA record player and just let it wail, let the fellow stew-ball tenants usually behind on their rents anyway howl against the night. Bessie was on the square.                

Reflections On Inauguration Day, 2017-The First Days Of The Resistance-Down With The Trump Government!

Reflections On Inauguration Day, 2017-The First Days Of The Resistance-Down With The Trump Government! Build The Resistance! 

By Fritz Taylor

Frank Jackman, the old time 1960s radical, sometimes writer and a guy who thought he knew a few things about the world, about the American world anyway was as bowled over as anybody on the morning after. No, not the morning after some drunken carouse or tome virtuous sexual escapade as had happened many a time although the latter not much of late but The morning after the 2016 election to wake up his Internet server homepage announcing that one Donald J. Trump had been a surprise victor in the American presidential race against one Hillary Rodham Clinton, heiress of the Clinton high-flying, well-financed and organized political dynasty soon to turn to dust (or had already turned to dust and we just catch up with the fact the morning after). 

It wasn’t like Frank had not seen certain signs that there was an uprising going on down at the base of society, the base of society that he was very familiar with since that stratum was where had had come from, come from the Riverdale “projects,” had come of age there. So he knew of hunger, of being hungry for the main chance, of not getting the fucking brass ring, of being left behind although truth to tell he had survived and not badly so he was little rusty in the hunger department. Yeah, Frank knew that there were a lot of frustrated angry people out in the vast American dark night, some who loathed the idea that a black man had been President of the United States for not one but two terms. Loathed the idea that a well-educated articulate woman might just take over the reins of power right after him, who loathed the idea that their cities and towns were looking a lot more like a world-wide melting pot than the old stand-by white European melting pot they had grown up with whether or not they had read old Professor Moynihan on the subject, who loathed that everybody but them and theirs was getting ahead in the globalization race to the bottom, and who loathed the whole political correctness thing that one Donald J. Trump was saying was fucked up.

He knew all that by heart but Frank had more current experiences going through the saw mill of the discontents down at the base that should have tipped him off more decisively to avoid that morning surprise. He and his golfing buddies, Sid, Kaz, Keith and Pat had during the whole previous year been around golf courses, public golf courses not Trump venues where older white guys go to die-or pass away the time until then. (The standing joke among that golfing brethren was that if Trump won he would privatize those public courses or burn them down-take your pick).They had run into serious Trump supporters along the way from guys who said they had voted for Obama or had not voted for a long while but had sent money to the billionaire Trump and wished him god speed. But Frank had been carried away just as much as the whole traditional and social media networks being way off the mark (except followers of the trollers who were wreaking havoc on the planet for kicks-and the “fake news” in favor of Trump) by the improbability of a political novice who was not a general like Grant or Eisenhower beating a seasoned political operative and her vaunted organization like a gong.

Shame on him for believing anything the paid pundits, commentators, bloggers, gurus and their tenacious hangers-on had to say about anything, anytime on any subject. That was then though, the morning after blues. By that late afternoon Frank had regrouped himself and began to understand what he needed to do to project his new political profile. He had been rather neutral about the outcome of the election prior to that morning since for a variety of other reasons he would be opposing Mrs. Clinton and her very upfront and frankly scary war policies which she intended to thrust on the country when she was sworn in (and he had taken much flak from friends and loved ones for not believing that there was a qualitative difference between this pair of rogues). But the reality of the Trump triumph and the accompanying sweep of everything in sight by the ghoulish Republicans, those who favored him or not, who had their own reactionary agenda to push through had placed him on immediate war footing.                      

That “war footing” idea was no literary flourish although those same friends and loved one would tell you that Frank was entirely capable of such flourishes but an understanding that it would be necessary to begin the resistance to Trump and his government whatever it looked like (and in the end it looked very much like a rogue’s gallery of the 1% that he had been campaigning against for the previous decade or so-in who were being tagged by Trump in person in some cases to put their grimy fingers on the affairs of state). That afternoon he wrote a blog for a website, American Politics, that he wrote for occasionally arguing that the election results along with the general dead-end trend of American politics and the extreme divisiveness pulling society apart, putting it into two distinct and visible camps had confirmed against his better hopes from the evidence of the past year that the country was in a state of cold civil war (with the unstated implication going back to ante-bellum times that the nation was on the cusp of that turning into a “hot” one).         

From that afternoon on he would when making commentary use that slogan or mantra if you will-“the cold civil war has started” whenever he posted anything politically relevant on his various sites (although a strong argument could be made that it had only come into the open and that had started years before-at the very beginning of the Obama era-maybe earlier on the economic side with the tremendous loss of decent jobs). Frank though is, has been an activist, a left-wing of some sort of activist since he was a kid. Since back in 1960 when he was a slip of a teenage boy hanging out with Quakers and pacifists publicly protesting against the escalation of nuclear weaponry in favor of disarmament. So the axis of his slogan was not to make abstract and academic political points, he would leave that to the egg-on-face pundits and bull-shitters but to help prepare for the social struggles ahead once old Trump was sworn in. To get people prepared to go into the streets since the electoral process had proven bankrupt. He argued and would continue to argue that unlike the died-in-the-wool Democrats who were miffed about how unfair things had turned out and looked forward to some future utopian electoral victory with a “better” candidate that the resistance needed to be organized on the streets-and maybe given the way the political deck was stacked the only place that mattered for the duration.            

Of course you can only effectively argue about what needs to be done when something happens-something like the inauguration of one Donald J. Trump and so Frank would point out that from day one, from noontime come January 20^th the resistance needed to be publicly organized. What Frank meant, what he  determined was necessary to show his new state of mind was that he decided he would go down to Washington on Inauguration Day and protest the swearing in of the next President of the United States. This was no mean task since Frank had purposefully avoided going to that event for all of his long political life seeing the event as a waste of time (and in recent years worthless as a place to protest since there were so many restrictions placed on protestors as to defeat the purpose). Helping him in his decision to go down the few hundred miles from his home in Dalton about forty miles west of Boston was that the next day there was to be a Women’s March on Washington and so the weekend would be one of activity and struggle.    

Frank had over the previous several years since he had slowed down his professional activities as a lawyer been to Washington on a number of occasions to protest the Obama war policies in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and wherever else that administration was bloodying its hands and also in defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning when his trial was going on at Fort Meade just outside Washington. (As one of his last acts in office Obama would commute Chelsea’s horrendous thirty-five year sentence for essentially telling the truth about American atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq via his Wiki-Leaks revelations to his thankful credit from supporters and opponents like Frank alike).

Of late Frank usually would fly to Washington but this time he decided to drive the four hundred or so miles in order to take three young passengers with him who had no resources to go otherwise. He would foot the travel bill since the cost of travel by car would be about the same as a flight for himself. (One an Iraq War veteran who was trying to stabilize his life after a serious bout with drugs and two graduate students who by definition are poverty-stricken)  He had also decided to use his hotel loyalty points in Baltimore order to have lodging for all four since anyplace closer would have been over-the-top expensive and given the lateness of his decision to go most protester-friendly places like U/U churches were filled up and or spoken for.  On the 19^th of January having picked up the three guys in Cambridge they headed south to Washington to do political battle the next day.

The next day after spending a restless and talkative night at that Baltimore hotel location the four men headed by car to the nearest Metro station at Glenmont on the Redline to get to downtown Washington. The train was not crowded (as opposed to the next day’s efforts, the gigantic Women’s March, where they would have to wait for a long time both to get into that same station and to board the train) and they made downtown in good time (and didn’t have to worry about where to park amid all the restrictions on the streets that day). They got off at Judiciary and proceeded to head toward the security checkpoint on Fourth near the National Gallery of Art so they could get a spot on the parade route to give Trump the old raspberry on opening day. (One of the reasons that Frank in recent years had decided not to go to any Inaugurations to protest was the whole security apparatus set-up, the “running of the gauntlet,” which effectively acted to tamp down any serious in-your-face protest so he knew that they would be limited in what they could carry for signs, etc.)           

That day it never got to the raspberry on the parade route point though. As Frank and his companions were standing in the slow-moving security check-point line a group of young people who later identified themselves to Frank as part of Surge Washington which had been formed mostly by young people who were students or who worked in Washington to protest in a peaceful but forceful way the impeding coronation of Trump sat down in front of the security tent and blocked the entrance. Classic tried and true honored civil disobedience. Naturally that event stopped Frank and his companions in their tracks since unlike others trying to get through the checkpoint they would not cross the line set up by their fellow protesters. This action, part of several around city, were acts of   symbolic speech and while later he and his companions would discuss the value of the particular action they were all under the bane of “picket lines mean don’t cross” an old labor slogan honored many times more in the breech than the observance.

This action which was intended to shut down the checkpoint for a couple of hours and then move on to other such locales wound up being Frank and his companions’ activities for the day and they never did get to the parade route to protest. So they moved with the protesters whenever they moved. 

Not only were they acting in political solidarity with the protesters but Frank was there to defend them against the sometimes angry spectators who could not get through whatever he thought of the tactic. (There were several testy situations when some Bikers for Trump tried to break the line at Fourth Street but were dissuaded by the Secret Service agents who had closed the checkpoint tight so nobody was getting through anyway). Their mostly young faces had heartened him that there would be another generation to pass the protest torch on to. Moreover since he was admitted as a lawyer in D.C. he could represent them if they were arrested. Throughout the day there were arrests around the city, a couple of hundred according to news sources, but no at any of the actions that Frank’s groupings were at. So that is how Frank (and his companions) spent his first day of resistance, his first day as a “soldier” in the brewing cold civil war which has been unleashed in the American dark night. 

[Frank and his friends would attend the Women’s March on Washington the next day which was spectacular but really uneventful except as a wonderful realization that there were plenty of people, plenty of women who had joined, or were ready to join the resistance. Yes, they came to Washington half a million strong to make a first full day point.]

Join the resistance! 

Walter Mitty Goes Noir-John Beal’s “Key Witness” (1947)-A Film Review

Walter Mitty Goes Noir-John Beal’s “Key Witness” (1947)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Key Witness, starring John Beal, Trudy Marshall, Jimmy Lloyd, 1947        

Recently in reviewing a lesser Humphrey Bogart noir vehicle, In A Lonely Place which for my money was didn’t click, I mentioned in passing that not all noir was created equal. By that reference I had absent-mindedly assumed that there were certain parameters below which the genre would not fall. That “would not fall” being somewhere in the sphere of the low budget, low rent, low star power, B-film which strangely enough back in the day the Hollywood studios depended on to keep the audiences coming to their theaters (they conveniently owned the whole line of distribution). However the film under review, Key Witness, the 1947 use of the title not the 1960s film starring Jeffrey Hunter, no way, seemed determined to go below the low bar radar even greedy Hollywood should have left on the cutting room floor.           

I also mentioned in that Bogart review that he had performed more noteworthy iconic roles earlier in his career which gave rise to the world-weary, world-wary male actors in noir set films. This film is driven by the “exploits” of a more Walter Mitty-type persona named if you can believe this-Milton Higby (played by no name John Beal). Milton is a nine to five draftsman who moreover is henpecked by his every loving wife for almost everything from not asking for a raise to not cleaning the dishes and whatever else in between. Cleary we will be treated to no second coming of Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe. And we aren’t

The most decisive thing Milton can do is tell his every loving wife that she should go on a trip to some forlorn aunt. That decision cleared the way for the craziness to come as Milton under the influence of a fellow draftsman co-worker goes to the track where he hits it big and inside of staying at home goes partying with his buddy and his girl-and her girlfriend. A girlfriend who before long is found on her living room floor very dead by Milton after he came to from some alcoholic stupor. A fall guy waiting to fall-no question. He goes on the lam though while every police agency in the country is looking for him for murder most foul, murder one.       

For an innocent guy he makes all the wrong decisions as he hits the hobo/tramp/bum highway picking up a fellow tramp along the way. They stumble into a dead guy and Milton decides that the best way out is to assume the dead man’s identity. Nice move. Except that somewhere in nowhere Arizona he got hit by a car and wound up in a hospital which assumed he was the dead man. More importantly the dead man was the missing scion to some serious fortune and so Milton accepted that role when a lawyer and then his “father” came to claim him. Whee.

Things go along swell for several months including his “father’s” backing for some novelty inventions that he had worked on. The stuff flew out of the factory doors. But this is where things got dicey. His work buddy (played by no name Jimmy Lloyd) and his every loving wife (played by no name Trudy Marshall were trying to clear his name and glammed onto his new life. No problem. No problem when the dead woman’s estranged husband had confessed to the murder most foul, murder one. Except now Milton was on the spot for the killing of his “father’s” real son. Yeah, they had the gallows ready to hang him high, hang him real high. Except just before midnight his old tramp buddy came in and cleared him. And the whole crew lived happily ever after one big happy family including the tramp –literally. My reaction after watching this vehicle was WTF. That says it all.        

Bogie On The Edge- Humphrey Bogart’s “In A Lonely Place” (1950)-A Film Review

Bogie On The Edge- Humphrey Bogart’s “In A Lonely Place” (1950)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell  

In a Lonely Place, starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, directed by Nicolas Ray, 1950    

Not all noir is created equal and not all Bogie films (Humphrey Bogart of “don’t Bogart that joint” of blessed memory) are either. Although the film under review, In A Lonely Place,  an off-hand look at the frills and foibles of Hollywood back in the day when the studio bosses ran the show and ran everybody ragged is an acknowledged respectable example of the noir it does not pack the wallop of such vehicles as Sunset Boulevard and Out Of The Past. Moreover although some critics have claimed that Bogart’s acting as the troubled screenwriter Dixon Steele is among his best work for me the character of Steele does not hold a candle to his iconic roles as Captain Morgan in To Have And Have Not, Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep and Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.             

Here is what makes this a very good film and Bogie’s performance if not great then a good secondary effort. Dix Steele like a lot of guys went off to war during World War II which may have contributed to his lack of success as a screenwriter working the Hollywood rackets after the war. May have also contributed to his erratic and combustible behavior (maybe some heavy boozing too). Looking for some worthwhile project to write up his agent convinces him to do an screen adaptation of a book. He is skeptical, an attitude which is confirmed when a wannabe starlet cum hat check girl at his local gin mill hangout reads the book and tells him the outline of the plot. A stinker-no question (although the hat check girl was all dreamy-eyed about it). The problem is that the hat check girl told him the story line after he had cajoled her into telling him about the plot in his apartment (after declaring no romantic intension). Well that is not really the problem if you thing about it but the fact that after Dix gave her cab fare home she wound up very dead in some canyon ditch the next morning.             

Enter prime suspect Dix. It all adds up. His violent behavior shown a couple of times at the gin mill and out on the mean Hollywood streets , far-fetched story of the girl in his place just to recite a plot-line, and his ungentlemanly conduct of not seeing her to the cab after midnight. Even I had him figured for the fall-for a while. To the rescue though comes one B-film starlet, Lauren, played by real life B-movie queen Gloria Grahame (and really a very good actor who never got the juicy roles she deserved) who lived in an adjacent apartment and who claimed she had seen Dix at his place at the time of the murder. Thanks, babe. Naturally besides the thanks Dix figured to make a big play for the good-looking Lauren who seemed interested in return. They start up what became a tempestuous love affair which on the positive end has Dix working like seven banshees on some real writing.

On the negative side though the coppers, including a guy who served under Dix in the war, have him targeted as the fall guy for all the obvious reasons mentioned before. Dix falls down though, can’t take the pressure, had recurring bouts of violent behavior which only added fuel to the fire of the coppers’ suspicion of his involvement in the hat check girl murder. That affected Lauren who became rightfully afraid of Dix and in the end ran out on him after he puts his hands on her. Too late, the “in a lonely place” too late Dix and Lauren find out from the coppers that the hat check girl’s jealous boyfriend had confessed to the murder. So it goes.     

Down In The Delta Muds-With County Blues Man Son House In Mind

Down In The Delta Muds-With County Blues Man Son House In Mind

By Jack Callahan

No question the country blues guys, and here I am talking about the guys because you know down in the Mister James Crow South where the blues came into royalty out of the sweats of Mister’s planation, out of the Saturday night juke joint sweats of another kind, it was the guys who bore the brunt of the blues tradition although the blues women, your Bessie and a ton of other Smiths, Memphis Minnie, Sweet Maybelline, Little Ida Simms got the big crowds in the cities and on the circuit, carried a ton of baggage with them. Sang of those temptations until their voices got sore. Talked code words about Captain this and Mister that and their sweated suns which they would not utter short of a strange fruit tree, talked about a two-timing woman who you just spent your last dime on going off with your best friend, talked about taking the measure of that best friend out of his hide if he ever caught up with him, or her, talked being on the low-down, the old style low-down, talked about Mister’s prison too his James Crow prisons all wrapped up in a bow.

 

 

The guys who came out of the muds, out of that silted delta mud oozed out of the south-flowing Big Muddy flowing to the sunless seas, the guys who made the first “race records” that got recorded back in the 1920s, maybe slightly earlier and who to a man had sorrow stories, or created sorrow. Yeah down in the muds a blues guy like Son House did every kind of thing to keep himself afloat, and got the miseries too. Of course it always, always involved, and this is no kidding in his case women, booze, a jack-roll fight over some woman or the thought of some woman, and fighting off the devil in horror of the lord in the sweated sulky night.   

Now I would have taken all of this story-telling about wine, women and song with the grain of salt, would have dismissed it out of hand like a lot of stuff you hear in the urban legend night about stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with cities, would have brought it down to the level of some old-timer legend except I actually saw this incident I want to tell you about. Want to tell you about Son’s burden, about that fight with the devil that he lost more than won happen when I was a kid, a kid back in the 1960s and I got caught up with the big folk explosion that carried a lot of us along who were looking for roots music and if the blues, the muddy Delta blues ain’t roots music then nothing in America is. 

Of course the day to day folk stuff, the hanging out at coffeehouses, hanging out at midnight Hayes-Bickford where for the price of a cup of dissolute coffee you could listen to guys and gals pound their energies out to the winos and weirdos who populated the place checking out the next big thing as he or she tried to hone her art was over in Harvard Square in Cambridge, one of Meccas. But if you wanted to immerse yourself in the bigger picture then you had to head for Newport down in Rhode Island about fifty miles from where I grew up in Carver. And the bigger picture in say 1962, 1963 was the “discovery” of a lot of old-time country blues guys by folk aficionados who headed South looking for those damn roots that they would hear about when some white guys like Dave Van Ronk or Geoff Muldaur would play something they heard from somebody who had “gone South” to dig it out. In the process finding these old-time guys that guys like Harry Smith and the Lomaxes, father and son, had recorded early on and who then fell under the radar. And while they had fallen under the radar some of them, the younger ones who had stayed in the South and had not gone to Detroit or Chicago with the migration, were still very much alive. Not only alive but with some skills still left and they were brought up to Newport to thrill the young urban mainly college students who were crazy for the blues they had heard on records or like I said the folk performers who were doing covers of their work. There were some very famous sessions where guys like Son House, Bukka White, Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt would, sweating pouring out of them with those ancient National steel guitars, duel among themselves for the honor of being the king of the country blues. And those sessions were great, a great karmic energy time which you can actually still see on YouTube if you have the inclination.

But there was also a session that I attended, kind of fell into when I heard that one of the younger guys who had headed north and got wrapped up in the electric blues, Howlin’ Wolf, was playing in one of the small studios set aside to produce stuff with some sidemen and the idea was they would record the stuff live and see what happened. Well there were maybe twelve or fifteen of us, people kept coming in and out so an exact number was hard to put a finger except a couple of guys sitting there in awe (beside me) were James Montgomery and Big Bill Timmons, when Wolf got his head of steam up to do How Many More Years practically eating the harmonica on the piece.

Wolf was a perfectionist, a serious professional musician, and something in the performance did not sit well with him so he wanted a retake. Just as they started up again, Smokey Jim as it turned out blowing a big high white note sexy sax to key the thing, Son House came walking in a little raggedy, a sway that did not go with sobriety, and the deep red of his eyes betrayed him. Whiskey drunk, whiskey sorrows for sure. He started to sing along slightly off-kilter in that measured moaning voice of his when he was sinning and then Wolf stopped himself in his tracks and started berating the legendary bluesman (legendary to all our young white urban mostly student devotees eyes) for being nothing but a worn out drunk who needed to get the hell out of the room if he knew what was good for him. Started talking some Booker T. race pride stuff way before Malcolm came fiercely on our horizons (we were still King boys and girls then in one person, one vote days). Some guy, some friend of Wolf’s came and escorted him out.  Gave him the boot really.

What did we know of that Son House whose Dead Letter Blues was all the craze in Cambridge who had had a life-long struggle with booze, that it had at one point killed his career. Here’s the big point though one time in the Village a couple of years later he told us, red in the eye that night too that he had had a life-long struggle with the devil he called it, the booze, and the devil won more often than not. Said it more in sorrow that anger although he was just rambling along about his life, about the women who had left him, some two-timing, some tired of the beatings, some just tired of the smell of booze, about the preacher man declaiming in front of his congregation that rolled their eyes when he would talk about this struggle between good and evil. And his story wasn’t that unusual as we started getting the background of these guys. James Crow, woman, booze, the Captain, the Mister, some back alley street-fighting, name it.  Yeah, they carried some serious baggage.                

The 100th Anniversary Year Of The Bolshevik-Led October Revolution In Russia-Lessons Of The Resistance Then -The Communist Manifesto

NINETY YEARS OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO-Preface to Communist Manifesto by Leon Trotsky

Written: October 30,1937

First Published: In Afrikaans in South Africa for the first edition of the The Communist Manifesto in that language. First published in English the February 1938 edition The New International, New York; This version from Fourth International, New York, Volume IV, 10, October 1948, Pages 28-31;

Translated: Fourth International

Transcription/HTML Markup: David Waiters

Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2003. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the
GNU Free Documentation License

It is hard to believe that the centennial of the Manifesto of the Communist Party is only ten years away! This pamphlet, displaying greater genius than any other in world literature, astounds us even today by its freshness. Its most important sections appear to have been written yesterday. Assuredly, the young authors (Marx was twenty-nine, Engels twenty-seven) were able to look further into the future than anyone before them, and perhaps than anyone since them.

As early as their joint preface to the edition of 1872, Marx and Engels declared that despite the fact that certain secondary passages in the Manifesto were antiquated, they felt that they no longer had any right to alter the original text inasmuch as the Manifesto had already become a historical document, during the intervening period of twenty-five years. Sixty-five additional years have elapsed since that time. Isolated passages in the Manifesto have receded still further into the past. We shall try to establish succinctly in this preface both those ideas in the Manifesto which retain their full force today and those which require important alteration or amplification.

1. The materialist conception of history, discovered by Marx only a short while before and applied with consummate skill in the Manifesto, has completely withstood the test of events and the blows of hostile criticism. It constitutes today one of the most precious instruments of human thought. All other interpretations of the historical process have lost all scientific meaning. We can state with certainty that it is impossible in our time to be not only a revolutionary militant but even a literate observer in politics without assimilating the materialist interpretation of history.

2. The first chapter of the Manifesto opens with the following Ninety Years of the Communist Manifesto words: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." This postulate, the most important conclusion drawn from the materialist interpretation of history, immediately became an issue in the class struggle. Especially venomous attacks were directed by reactionary hypocrites, liberal doctrinaires, and idealistic democrats against the theory which substituted the struggle of material interests for "common welfare," "national unity/' and "eternal moral truths" as the driving force of history. They were later joined by recruits from the ranks of the labor movement itself, by the so-called revisionists, i.e., the proponents of reviewing ("revising") Marxism in the spirit of class collaboration and class conciliation. Finally, hi our own time, the same path has been followed in practice by the contemptible epigones of the Communist International (the "Stalinists"): the policy of the so-called People's Front flows wholly from the denial of the laws of the class struggle. Meanwhile, it is precisely the epoch of imperialism, bringing all social contradictions to the point of highest tension, which gives to the Communist Manifesto its supreme theoretical triumph.

3. The anatomy of capitalism, as a specific stage in the economic development of society, was given by Marx in its finished form in Capital (1867). But even in the Communist Manifesto the main lines of the future analysis are firmly sketched: the payment for labor power as equivalent to the cost of its reproduction; the appropriation of surplus value by the capitalists; competition as the basic law of social relations; the ruination of intermediate classes, i.e., the urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry; the concentration of wealth in the hands of an ever-diminishing number of property owners, at the one pole, and the numerical growth of the proletariat, at the other; the preparation of the material and political
preconditions for the socialist regime.

4. The proposition in the Manifesto concerning the tendency of capitalism to lower the living standards of the workers, and even to transform them into paupers, had been subjected to a heavy barrage. Parsons, professors, ministers, journalists, Social Democratic theoreticians, and trade union leaders came to the front against the so-called "theory of impoverishment." They invariably discovered signs of growing prosperity among the toilers, palming off the labor aristocracy as the proletariat, or taking a fleeting tendency as permanent. Meanwhile, even the development of the mightiest capitalism in the world, namely, U.S. capitalism, has transformed millions of workers into paupers who are maintained at the expense of federal, municipal, or private charity.

5. As against the Manifesto, which depicted commercial and industrial crises as a series of ever more extensive catastrophes, the revisionists vowed that the national and international development of trusts would assure control over the market, and lead gradually to the abolition of crises. The close of the last century and the beginning of the present one were in reality marked by a development of capitalism so tempestuous as to make crises seem only "accidental" stoppages. But this epoch has gone beyond return. In the last analysis, truth proved to be on Marx's side in this question as well,

6. "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." This succinct formula, which the leaders of the Social Democracy looked upon as a journalistic paradox, contains in fact the only scientific theory of the state. The democracy fashioned by the bourgeoisie is not, as both Bernstein and Kautsky thought, an empty sack which one can undisturbedly fill with any kind of class content. Bourgeois democracy can serve only the bourgeoisie. A government of the "People's Front," whether headed by Blum or Chautemps, Caballero or Negrin, is only "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie," Whenever this "committee" manages affairs poorly, the bourgeoisie dismisses it with a boot.

7. "Every class struggle is a political struggle." "The organization of the proletariat as a class [is ] consequently its organization into a political party." Trade unionists, on the one hand, and anarcho-syndicalists, on the other, have long shied away—and even now try to shy away—from the understanding of these historical laws. "Pure" trade unionism has now been dealt a crushing blow in its chief refuge: the United States. Anarcho-syndicalism has suffered an irreparable defeat in its last stronghold—Spain. Here too the Manifesto proved correct,

8. The proletariat cannot conquer power within the legal framework established by the bourgeoisie. "Communists openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions." Reformism sought to explain this postulate of the Manifesto on the grounds of the immaturity of the movement at that time, and the inadequate development of democracy. The fate of Italian, German, and a great number of other "democracies" proves that "immaturity" is the distinguishing trait of the ideas of the reformists themselves.

9. For the socialist transformation of society, the working class must concentrate in its hands such power as can smash each and every political obstacle barring the road to the new system. "The proletariat organized as the ruling class"—this is the dictatorship. At the same time it is the only true proletarian democracy. Its scope and depth depend upon concrete historical conditions. The greater the number of states that take the path of the socialist revolution, the freer and more flexible forms will the dictatorship assume, the broader and more deepgoing will be workers' democracy,

10. The international development of capitalism has predetermined the international character of the proletarian revolution. "United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat." The subsequent development of capitalism has so closely knit all sections of our planet, both "civilized" and "uncivilized," that the problem of the socialist revolution has completely and decisively assumed a world character. The Soviet bureaucracy attempted to liquidate the Manifesto with respect to this fundamental question. The Bonapartist degeneration of the Soviet state is an overwhelming illustration of the falseness of the theory of socialism in one country.

11. "When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character." In other words: the state withers away. Society remains, freed from the straitjacket. This is nothing else but socialism. The converse theorem: the monstrous growth of state coercion in the USSR is eloquent testimony that society is moving away from socialism.

12. "The workingmen have no fatherland." These words of the Manifesto have more than once been evaluated by philistines as an agitational quip. As a matter of fact they provided the proletariat with the sole conceivable directive in the question of the capitalist "fatherland." The violation of this directive by the Second International brought about not only four years of devastation in Europe, but the present stagnation of world culture. In view of the impending new war, for which the betrayal of the Third International has paved the way, the Manifesto remains even now the most reliable counselor on the question of the capitalist "fatherland,"
Thus, we see that the joint and rather brief production of two Young authors continues to give irreplaceable directives upon the most important and burning questions of the struggle for emancipation. What other book could even distantly be compared with the Communist Manifesto1? But this does not imply that after ninety years of unprecedented development of productive forces and vast social struggles, the Manifesto needs neither corrections nor additions. Revolutionary thought has nothing in common with idol-worship. Programs and prognoses are tested and corrected in the light of experience, which is the supreme criterion of human reason. The Manifesto, too, requires corrections and additions. However, as is evidenced by historical experience itself, these corrections and additions can be successfully made only by proceeding in accord with the method lodged in the foundation of the Manifesto itself. We shall try to indicate this in several most important instances.

1. Marx taught that no social system departs from the arena of history before exhausting its creative potentialities. The Manifesto excoriates capitalism for retarding the development of the productive forces. During that period, however, as well as in the following decades, this retardation was only relative in nature. Had it been possible in the second half of the nineteenth century to organize economy on socialist beginnings, its tempos of growth would have been immeasurably greater. But this theoretically irrefutable postulate does not invalidate the fact that the productive forces kept expanding on a world scale right up to the world war. Only in the last twenty years, despite the most modern conquests of science and technology, has the epoch of out-and-out stagnation and even decline of world economy begun. Mankind is beginning to expend its accumulated capital, while the next war threatens to destroy the very foundations of civilization for many years to come. The authors of the Manifesto thought that capitalism would be scrapped long prior to the time when from a relatively reactionary regime it would turn into an absolutely reactionary regime. This transformation took final shape only before the eyes of the present generation, and changed our epoch into the epoch of wars, revolutions, and fascism.

2. The error of Marx and Engels in regard to the historical dates flowed, on the one hand, from an underestimation of future possibilities latent in capitalism, and, on the other, an overestimation of the revolutionary maturity of the proletariat. The revolution of 1848 did not turn into a socialist revolution as the Manifesto had calculated, but opened up to Germany the possibility of a vast future capitalist ascension. The Paris Commune proved that the proletariat, without having a tempered revolutionary party at its head, cannot wrest power from the bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the prolonged period of capitalist prosperity that ensued brought about not the education of the revolutionary vanguard, but rather the bourgeois degeneration of the labor aristocracy, which became in turn the chief brake on the proletarian revolution, In the nature of things, the authors of the Manifesto could not possibly have foreseen this "dialectic."

3. For the Manifesto, capitalism was—the kingdom of free competition. While referring to the growing concentration of capital, the Manifesto did not draw the necessary conclusion in regard to monopoly, which has become the dominant capitalist form in our epoch and the most important precondition for socialist economy. Only afterwards, in Capital, did Marx establish the tendency toward the transformation of free competition into monopoly. It was Lenin who gave a scientific characterization of monopoly capitalism in his Imperialism.

4. Basing themselves on the example of "industrial revolution" in England, the authors of the Manifesto pictured far too unilaterally the process of liquidation of the intermediate classes, as a wholesale proletarianization of crafts, petty trades, and peasantry. In point of fact, the elemental forces of competition have far from completed this simultaneously progressive and barbarous work. Capitalism has ruined the petty bourgeoisie at a much faster rate than it has proletarianized it. Furthermore, the bourgeois state has long directed its conscious policy toward the artificial maintenance of petty-bourgeois strata. At the opposite pole, the growth of technology and the rationalization of largescale industry engenders chronic unemployment and obstructs the proletarianization of the petty bourgeoisie. Concurrently, the development of capitalism has accelerated in the extreme the growth of legions of technicians, administrators, commercial employees, in short, the so-called "new middle class." In consequence, the intermediate classes, to whose disappearance the Manifesto so categorically refers, comprise even in a country as highly industrialized as Germany about half of the population. However, the artificial preservation of antiquated petty-bourgeois strata in no way mitigates the social contradictions, but, on the contrary, invests them with a special malignancy, and together with the permanent army of the unemployed constitutes the most malevolent expression of the decay of capitalism.

5. Calculated for a revolutionary epoch the Manifesto contains (end of Chapter II) ten demands, corresponding to the period of direct transition from capitalism to socialism. In their preface of 1872, Marx and Engels declared these demands to be in part antiquated, and, in any case, only of secondary importance. The reformists seized upon this evaluation to interpret it in the sense that transitional revolutionary demands had forever ceded their place to the Social Democratic "minimum program," which, as is well known, does not transcend the limits of bourgeois democracy. As a matter of fact, the authors of the Manifesto indicated quite precisely the main correction of their transitional program, namely, 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the readymade state machinery and wield it for its own purposes." In other words, the correction was directed against the fetishism of bourgeois democracy. Marx later counterposed to the capitalist state, the state of the type of the Commune. This "type" subsequently assumed the much more graphic shape of Soviets. There cannot be a revolutionary program today without Soviets and without workers' control. As for the rest, the ten demands of the Manifesto, which appeared "archaic" in an epoch of peaceful parliamentary activity, have today regained completelytheir true significance. The Social Democratic "minimum program," on the other hand, has become hopelessly antiquated.

6. Basing its expectation that "the German bourgeois revolution ... will be but a prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution," the Manifesto cites the much more advanced conditions of European civilization as compared with what existed in England in the seventeenth century and in France in the eighteenth century, and the far greater development of the proletariat. The error in this prognosis was not only in the date. The revolution of 1848 revealed within a few months that precisely under more advanced conditions, none of the bourgeois classes is capable of bringing the revolution to its termination: the big and middle bourgeoisie is far too closely linked with the landowners, and fettered by the fear of the masses; the petty bourgeoisie is far too divided and in its top leadership far too dependent on the big bourgeoisie. As evidenced by the entire subsequent course of development in Europe and Asia, the bourgeois revolution, taken by itself, can no more in general be consummated. A complete purge of feudal rubbish from society is conceivable only on the condition that the proletariat, freed from the influence of bourgeois parties, can take its stand at the head of the peasantry and establish its revolutionary dictatorship. By this token, the bourgeois revolution becomes interlaced with the first stage of the socialist revolution, subsequently to dissolve in the latter, The national revolution therewith becomes a link of the world revolution. The transformation of the economic foundation and of all social relations assumes a permanent (uninterrupted) character.

For revolutionary parties in backward countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa, $ clear understanding of the organic connection between the democratic revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat—and thereby, the international socialist revolution—is a life-and-death question.

7. While depicting how capitalism draws into its vortex backward and barbarous countries, the Manifesto contains no reference to the struggle of colonial and semicolonial countries for independence. To the extent mat Marx and Engels considered the social revolution "in the leading civilized countries at least," to be a matter of the next few years, the colonial question was resolved automatically for them, not in consequence of an independent movement of oppressed nationalities but in consequence of the victory of the proletariat in the metropolitan centers of capitalism. The questions of revolutionary strategy in colonial and semicolonial countries are therefore not touched upon at all by the Manifesto. Yet these questions demand an independent solution. For example, it is quite self-evident that while the "national fatherland" has become the most baneful historical brake in advanced capitalist countries, it still remains a relatively progressive factor in backward countries compelled to struggle for an independent existence.
"The Communists," declares the Manifesto, "everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things." The movement of the colored races against their imperialist oppressors is one of the most important and powerful movements against the existing order and therefore calls for the complete, unconditional, and unlimited support on the part of the proletariat of the white race. The credit for developing revolutionary strategy for oppressed nationalities belongs primarily to Lenin.

8. The most antiquated section of the Manifesto—with respect not to method but to material—is the criticism of "socialist" literature for the first part of the nineteenth century (Chapter III) and the definition of the position of the Communists in relation to various opposition parties (Chapter IV). The movements and parties listed in the Manifesto were so drastically swept away either by the revolution of 1848 or by the ensuing counterrevolution that one must look up even their names in a historical dictionary. However, in this section, too, the Manifesto is perhaps closer to us now than it was to the previous generation. In the epoch of the flowering of the Second International, when Marxism seemed to exert an undivided sway, the ideas of pre-Marxist socialism could have been considered as having receded decisively into the past. Things are otherwise today. The decomposition of the Social Democracy and the Communist International at every step engenders monstrous ideological relapses. Senile thought seems to have become infantile. In search of all-saving formulas the prophets in the epoch of decline discover anew doctrines long since buried by scientific socialism.

As touches the question of opposition parties, it is in this domain that the elapsed decades have introduced the most deepgoing changes, not only in the sense that the old parties have long been brushed aside by new ones, but also in the sense that the very character of parties and their mutual relations have radically changed in the conditions of the imperialist epoch. The Manifesto must therefore be amplified with the most important documents of the first four congresses of the Communist International, the essential literature of Bolshevism, and the decisions of the conferences of the Fourth International.

We have already remarked above that according to Marx no social order departs from the scene without first exhausting the potentialities latent in it. However, even an antiquated social order does not cede its place to a new order without resistance. A change in social regimes presupposes the harshest form of the class struggle, i.e., revolution, If the proletariat, for one reason or another, proves incapable of overthrowing with an audacious blow the outlived bourgeois order, then finance capital in the struggle to maintain its unstable rule can do nothing but turn the petty bourgeoisie ruined and demoralized by it into the pogrom army of fascism. The bourgeois degeneration of the Social Democracy and the fascist degeneration of the petty bourgeoisie are interlinked as cause and effect.

At the present time, the Third International far more wantonly than the Second performs in all countries the work of deceiving and demoralizing the toilers. By massacring the vanguard of the Spanish proletariat, the unbridled hirelings of Moscow not only pave the way for fascism but execute a goodly share of its labors. The protracted crisis of the international revolution, which is turning more and more into a crisis of human culture, is reducible in its essentials to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

As the heir to the great tradition, of which the Manifesto of the Communist Party forms the most precious link, the Fourth International is educating new cadres for the solution of old tasks. Theory is generalized reality. In an honest attitude to revolutionary theory is expressed the impassioned urge to reconstruct the social reality. That in the southern part of the Dark Continent our cothinkers were the first to translate the Manifesto into the Afrikaans language is another graphic illustration of the fact that Marxist thought lives today only under the banner of the Fourth International. To it belongs the future. When the centennial of the Communist Manifesto is celebrated, the Fourth International will have become the decisive revolutionary force on our planet.

The 100th Anniversary Year Of The Bolshevik-Led October Revolution In Russia-Lessons Of The Resistance Then -Leon Trotsky

BOOK REVIEW

TROTSKY-An Appreciation of His Life, JOEL CARMICHAEL, ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, NEW YORK, 1975



As readers of this space may know I make no bones about being an admirer of the work of Leon Trotsky (see archives). I also believe that the definitive biography of the man is Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume set. Nevertheless, others have written biographies on Trotsky that are either less balanced than Deutscher’s or come at it from a different angle with a different ax to grind. Joel Carmichael’s is a standard liberal democratic take on Trotsky’s life and work. Mr. Carmichael, as others before and after him like Irving Howe, takes on the huge task of attempting to whittle down one of the big figures of 20th century history against the backdrop of that mushy Cold War liberalism that retarded the intellectual development of even fairly critical Western minds in the post-World War II period.

That standard academic response invoked admiration for the personality and intellectual achievements of Trotsky the man while abhorring his politics, especially those pursued as a high Soviet official when he had political power. In the process Mr. Carmichael tries to account for Trotsky’s ‘fall’ from power in the psycho-biographic parlance that was popular in the 1970’s. In short, Mr. Carmichael concludes essentially that if only Trotsky was less of a loner and a better Bolshevik Party infighter his personal fate and history may have worked out better. Hell we, Trotsky’s admirers, have been screaming about his very important failure to umambiously lead the 1923-24 fight against the Stalinization of the Bolshevik Party (also known following the French revolutionary example as the Themidorian reaction) struggle for years. All without benefit of pseudo-Freudian analysis, by the way. In the end Mr. Carmichael’s take on Trotsky demonstrates more about the weakness of the liberal psycho-biographical method than a serious examination into Trotsky’s politics. There are some chasms that cannot be breeched and this is one of them.

In classic fashion Carmichael, as others have done as well, sets up Trotsky’s virtues early. Thus he recognizes and appreciates the early romantic revolutionary and free-lance journalist in the true Russian tradition who faced jail and exile without flinching; the brilliant, if flawed, Marxist theoretician who defied all-comers at debate and whose theory of permanent revolution set the standard for defining the strategic pace of the Russian revolution; the great organizer of the revolutionary fight for power in 1917 and later organizer of the Red Army victory in the Civil War; the premier Communist literary critic of his age; the ‘premature’ anti-Stalinist who fought against the degeneration of the revolution; the lonely exile rolling the rock up the mountain despite personal tragedy and political isolation. However, my friends, Carmichael’s biographical approach tries to debunk an intensely political man by one who plainly is a political opponent of everything that Trotsky stood for. I only wish he had been more honest and open about it rather than use psycho-babble as a device. Thus, all Carmichael’s patently obvious and necessary recognition of Trotsky as one of the great figures of the first half of the 20th century is a screen for taking Trotsky off of Olympus.

And here again Carmichael uses all the wearisome formulas in the liberal democratic handbook; the flawed nature of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution as applied to Russia in 1917 and also to later semi-colonial and colonial countries; the undemocratic nature of the Bolshevik seizure of power in regard to other socialist parties; the horrors of the Civil War which helped lead to the degeneration of the revolution; Trotsky’s recognized tendency as a Soviet official to be attracted to administrative solutions; his adamant defense of the heroic days of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet Union, even in its degenerated state, against all comers until the end of his life; his weakness as a party political organizer in the fierce intra-party factional struggles and later in attempting to found new communist parties and a new international.

Of course the kindest interpretation one can make for Carmichael’s polemic, like that of Irving Howe who approached Trotsky’s life from the social-democratic perspective, is that he believes like many another erstwhile biographer that Trotsky should have given up the political struggle and become- what? Another bourgeois academic or better yet an editor of Partisan Review or The Nation? Obviously Mr. Carmichael did not pay sufficient attention to the parts that he considered Trotsky’s virtues. The parts about the intrepid revolutionary with a great sense of history and his role in it. And the wherewithal to find his place in it. Does that seem like the Trotsky that Carmichael has written about? No. A fairer way to put it is this. Trotsky probably represented the highest expression of what it was like to be a communist man, warts and all, in the sea of a non-Communist world. And that is high historical praise indeed. Let future biographers take note.