3/25 & 6 National Conference for the Full Normalization of US-CUBA Relations in NYC

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National Conference for the Full Normalization of US-CUBA Relations

END ALL US ECONOMIC, FINANCIAL, AND TRAVEL SANCTIONS AGAINST CUBA!
RETURN GUANTANAMO BAY TERRITORY TO CUBAN SOVEREIGNTY!
STOP US-FUNDED COVERT "REGIME CHANGE" PROGRAMS AGAINST CUBA!

Location:
FORDHAM SCHOOL OF LAW
150 W 62nd St, New York, NY 10023
Near Lincoln Center, two blocks from Central Park. Take A, B,C, D, or 1
subway train to 59th Street/Columbus Circle Station

List of about 20 workshops at the conference.
http://nationalcubaconference.org/work-shops.html

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The July 26th Committee of Boston will be organizing car pooling to
NYC for this.

US-CUBA NORMALIZATION COMMITTEE

Endorsements for the March 25-26, 2017 National Conference on US-Cuba
Normalization at Fordham Law School

Signatures-Endorsements for Invitation to March 25-26, 2017 National
Conference on US-Cuba Normalization at Fordham Law School

Updated 2-15-2017

Pam Africa, International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal
Akubundi Amazu, All African Peoples Revolutionary Party, San Jose, CA
Amadi Ajamu, December 12th Movement
S.E. Anderson, Black Left Unity Network, Author Black Holocaust for
Beginners
Arnold August, Author and Journalist (Canada)
Tom Balanoff, President, Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
Local 1, Chicago*
Iris Baez, Anthony Baez Foundation
Nellie Bailey, WBAI Radio, Host and Producer Behind the News
Clever Banganayi, Deputy General Secretary, Friends of Cuba Society,
South Africa
Fr. Luis Barrios, John Jay College of Criminal Justice – CUNY
Thomas Blanton, Solidaridad Exportaciones, Washington, DC
Keith Bolender, Author, Voices from the Other Side
Nancy Cabrero, Casa de las Americas
Leslie Cagan, Peace and Justice Organizer
Joe Callahan, Minnesota Cuba Committee
William Camacaro, Alberto Lovera Bolivarian Circle
Emily Coffey, Engage Cuba Colorado Council
Mariela Castro Espin, Director, Cuban National Center for Sex Education
(CENESEX)
Greg Clave, Co-Chair, National Network on Cuba
Omowale Clay, December 12th Movement
Dr. Andy Coates, Former President, Physicians for a National Healthcare Plan
Jason Corley, July 26 Coalition
Dr. John Cox, Professor of Global Studies, University of North Carolina
Charlotte, Director, Center for Holocaust, Genocide &Human Rights Studies
Tim Craine, Greater Hartford Coalition on Cuba
Jodi Dean, Professor, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
James Early, Institute for Policy Studies Board, Former Director
Cultural Heritage Policy
Smithsonian Institution Center Folklife and Cultural Heritage
Steve Early. Author and Journalist, Trade Union Organizer
Todd Eaton, NYProtest
Fritz Edler, former Local Chairman, Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers
and Trainmen Division 482, Washington, DC, Railroad Workers United
Soffiyah Elijah
Steve Eckardt, Chicago Cuba Coalition
Howard Ehrman, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor, Family Medicine and Public
Health, University of Illinois Chicago
Mark Emanation, American Federation of Musicians Local 14*
Bryan Epps, Director, Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and
Educational Center
Malia Everette, Founder and CEO, AltruVistas
Erin Feely-Nahem, LMSW, Cuba Solidarity New York
Jim Ferlo, President Pittsburgh-Matanzas Sister Cities Partnership,
member Pennsylvania State Senate 2003-15
Jon Flanders, Former President International Association of Machinists,
Local 1145, Retired
Franklin Flores, Casa de las Americas
Ellen David Friedman, Labor Notes Policy Committee
Mark Friedman, Los Angeles, Marine Biology Instructor, Los Angeles
Maritime Institute and Redondo Beach CA United School District
Glen Ford, Executive Editor, Black Agenda Report
Albert Fox, Tampa, FL, Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy Foundation
Jane Franklin, Author: Cuba and the U.S. Empire: A Chronological History
Pat Fry, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
Martin Garbus, Attorney
William Gerena-Rochet, DiaspoRicans/Disporiquenos Network, New York City*
Joan P. Gibbs, Esq
Margaret (Peggy) Gilpin, WBAI Cuba In Focus
Piero Gleijeses. Professor of United States Foreign Policy, Johns
Hopkins University
Stan Goff, Author and Anti-War Activist, US Special Forces (Retired)
Robert Grace, Former Executive Board Member, New York State Public
Employees Federation
Bob Guild, Marazul Charters
Teresa Gutierrez, International Action Center
Larry Hamm, Chairman, People’s Organization for Progress
Tamara Hansen, Author, Cuba solidarity activist, Coordinator, Vancouver
Communities in Solidarity
Tarik Haskins, Universal Zulu Nation
Doug Henwood, author Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom,
contributing editor, The Nation magazine, publisher Left Business Observer
Dr. Alberto Jones, President, Caribbean American Children Foundation
Ben Jones, Artist and Activist, Jersey City, NJ
Alicia Jrapko, Co-Chair, National Network on Cuba
Ron Kaminkow, General Secretary, Railroad Workers United
Chuck Kaufman, Alliance for Global Justice
Stephen Kimber, Professor, School of Journalism, University of King’s
College, Halifax, Canada, Author, What Lies Across the Water: The Real
Story of the Cuban Five
Margaret Kimberley, Editor and Senior Columnist, Black Agenda Report
Dequi Kioni-Sadiki, Chair, Malcolm X Commemoration Committee
Steve Kramer, Vice President 1199SEIU, 1199SEIU Caribbean and Latin
America Democracy Committee
Michael Krinsky, Attorney
Cheryl LaBash, Co-Chair, National Network on Cuba
Ray Laforest, Co-Founder Haiti Support Network
Gloria La Riva, Coordinator, Cuba and Venezuela Solidarity Committee
Dr. Eloise Linger, Professor Emerita, SUNY Old Westbury, former leader
in the section for scholarly relations with Cuba, Latin American Studies
Association (LASA)
Joe Lombardo, United National Antiwar Coalition
Jeff Mackler, National Secretary, Socialist Action
Esperanza Martell, Professor, Hunter College
Pamela Ann Martin, Philadelphia, longtime activist working to end the US
embargo, consultant on legal travel to Cuba
Chris Matlhako, General Secretary, Friends of Cuba Society, South Africa
Luis Matos, World Organization for the Rights of the People to Healthcare
Brother Shepard McDaniel, Universal Zulu Nation
Dr. Rosemari Mealy, Author: Fidel and Malcolm X – Memories of a Meeting
Bob Miller, July 26 Coalition, Sheet Metal and Rail Transportation
(SMART) Union Local 60
Peter Miller, July 26 Coalition of Boston
Rafael Cancel Miranda, Puerto Rican Independence Fighter
Anne Mitchell, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
Roberto Monticello, Cuban-American Filmmaker, part of US delegation with
President Obama in Cuba
Radhames Morales, Fuerza de la Revolucion
Derrick Morrison, New Orleans Social Justice Activist
Luci Murphy, Art for the People, Washington, DC
Omari Musa, DC Metro Coalition in Solidarity with the Cuban Revolution
Ike Nahem, Cuba Solidarity New York, July 26 Coalition
Estevan Nembhard, New York District Organizer, Communist Party USA
August Nimtz, Professor of Political Science and African American and
African Studies, University of Minnesota
Sally O’Brien, WBAI Cuba In Focus
Nino Pagliccia, Author, Editor Cuba Solidarity in Canada: Five Decades
of People to People Foreign Relations
Vijay Prashad, Author and Journalist, Professor of International
Studies, Chair in South Asian History, Trinity College
Luis Proyect, The Unrepentent Marxist
Benjamin Ramos Rosado, New York Cuba Solidarity Project
Merle Ratner, Co-Coordinator, Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and
Responsibility Campaign*
Carla Riehle, Minnesota Cuba Committee
Lee Robinson, African Awareness Association, Richmond, VA
Dr. Peter Roman. Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of
Social Sciences Hostos Community College/CUNY
Suzanne Ross, Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC)
Pepe Rossy, Albany (New York) Cuba Solidarity
Azza Rojbi, Journalist, Coordinator, Friends of Cuba Against the
Blockade, Vancouver, Canada
Ursula Rozum, Green Party, Central New York
Larry Rubin, Solidaridad Exportaciones, Washington, DC
Malcolm Sacks, Venceremos Brigade
Angelica Salazar, AltruVistas
Cesar Sanchez, July 26 Coalition
Isaac Saney, Co-Chair, Canadian Network on Cuba, Senior Instructor,
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
Brock Satter, Mass Action Against Police Brutality*
Bob Schwartz, Disarm/Global Health Partners
Joel Schwartz, Civil Service Employees Association*
Banbose Shango, Co-Chair, National Network on Cuba
Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, President, New York State Nurses Association
Michael Steven Smith, Attorney, Law and Disorder Radio
Stansfield Smith, Chicago ALBA Solidarity
Wayne Smith, Retired US State Department official, Chief of Mission, US
Interests Section (now US Embassy) in Havana 1979-82
Johnnie Stevens, Workers World Party
Jan Strout, US Women and Cuba Collaboration
Heide Trampus, Coordinator Worker-To-Worker, Canada-Cuba Labour
Solidarity Network
Walter Turner, President, Board of Directors, Global Exchange
Joel Tyner, Dutchess County, NY Legislator, District 11, representing
Rhinebeck and Clinton
Bandele Tyehimbe, Pan African Connection, USA Revolutionary Party,
Dallas, Texas
Lisa Valanti, Pittsburgh CUBA Coalition
Estela Vazquez, Vice President, 1199SEIU
Amy Velez, New York, Coalition for District Alternatives (CODA)
Frank Velgara, ProLibertad Freedom Campaign, Frente Socialista de Puerto
Rico – Comite de Nuevo York
Nalda Vigezzi, Co-chair, National Network on Cuba
Jennifer Wager, Professor, Essex County College
Gail Walker, IFCO/Pastors for Peace
Victor Wallis, Managing Editor, Socialism and Democracy
Michael Warren, Attorney
Mary-Alice Waters, Socialist Workers Party
Aminifu Williams, People’s Organization for Progress
Louis Wolf, DC Metro Coalition in Solidarity with the Cuban Revolution,
Co-Editor Covert Action
Information Bulletin
Dr. Helen Yaffe, Fellow in Economic History, London School of Economics,
Author, Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution
Juanita Young, Longtime fighter against police brutality and killings,
Mother of Malcolm Ferguson,murdered by NYPD
Matilde Zimmermann, Professor Emerita, Sarah Lawrence College

* Organization Listed for Identification Purposes Fordham Law School
Student Organizations Latin American Law Students Association
National Lawyers Guild Chapter
Universal Justice

Additional Endorsing Organizations All African Peoples Revolutionary
Party ANSWER
2017 NYC Voter Campaign For Community Control Of The Police
Capital District Socialist Party of New York State
City College of New York Guillermo Morales-Assata Shakur Community and
Student Center
Engage Cuba Colorado Council
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), James Connolly Upstate New York
Regional General Membership Branch
International Committee for Peace, Justice, and Dignity
Jericho Movement, DC
National Jericho Movement
National Network on Cuba
Party for Socialism and Liberation
Pittsburgh-Matanzas Sister Cities Partnership
Railroad Workers United
Solidarity Committee of the Capital District of New York
The Jericho Movement, DC
Universal Zulu Nation
Safiya Bukhari-Albert Nuh Foundation

National and Local Cuba Solidarity Organizations Albany Cuba Solidarity
July 26 Coalition of Boston
Chicago Cuba Coalition
Cuba Si!, New York-New Jersey
DC Metro Coalition in Solidarity with the Cuban Revolution
Greater Hartford Coalition on Cuba
Minnesota Cuba Committee
Pittsburgh CUBA Coalition
Pittsburgh-Matanzas Sister Cities Partnership

For more information: 917-887-8710
Email: info@nationalcubaconference.org
National Conference Committee for CUBA AND US Normalizaton.
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Songs For Our Times-Build The Resistance-Woody Guthrie's' "Deportee"

Songs For Our Times-Build The Resistance-Woody Guthrie's' "Deportee"  

During, let’s say the Obama administration or, hell, even the Bush era, for example  we could be gentle angry people over this or that notorious war policy and a few others matters and songs like Give Peace A Chance, We Shall Overcome, or hell, even that Kumbaya which offended the politically insensitive. From Day One of the Trump administration though the gloves have come off-we are in deep trouble. So we too need to take off our gloves-and fast as the cold civil war that has started in the American dark night heads to some place we don’t want to be. And the above song from another tumultuous time, makes more sense to be marching to. Build the resistance!

Deportee
(aka. "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos")
Words by Woody Guthrie, Music by Martin Hoffman

The crops are all in and the peaches are rott'ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"

My father's own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except "deportees"?

      

*****This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind

*****This Land IS Your Land- With Folk Troubadour Woody Guthrie In Mind         

          

      

By Bradley Fox

Back in 2014, the summer of 2014 to hone in on the time frame of the story to be told, Josh Breslin the then recently retired old-time alternative newspaper and small journal writer for publications like Arise Folk and Mountain Music Gazette who hailed from Olde Saco, Maine was sitting with his friend Sam Lowell from Carver down in cranberry bog country out in Concord in the field behind the Old Manse where the Greater Boston Folk Society was holding its annual tribute to folksinger Woody Guthrie he had thought about all the connections that he, they had to Woody Guthrie from back in the 1960s folk minute revival and before. He mentioned that orphan thought to Sam whom he queried on the subject, wanted to know his personal take on when he first heard Woody. And as well to Laura Perkins, Sam’s long-time companion who had been sitting between them and whom Josh had an on-going half flame going back who knows how far but who had made it clear to Josh on more than one occasion that she was true blue to Sam although she had thanked him for the attention compliment. Sam was aware of Josh’s interest but also of Laura’s position and so he and Josh got along, had in any case been back and forth with some many collective wives and girlfriends that attracted both of them since they had similar tastes going back to ex-surfer girl Butterfly Swirl that they just took it in stride.  Here is what Sam had to say:   

Some songs, no, let’s go a little wider, some music sticks with you from an early age which even fifty years later you can sing the words out to chapter and verse. Like those church hymns like Mary, Queen of the May, Oh, Jehovah On High, and Amazing Grace that you were forced to sit through with your little Sunday best Robert Hall white suit first bought by poor but proud parents for first communion when that time came  complete with white matching tie on or if you were a girl your best frilly dress on, also so white and first communion bought, when you would have rather been outside playing, or maybe doing anything else but sitting in that forlorn pew, before you got that good dose of religion drilled into by Sunday schoolteachers, parents, hell and brimstone reverends which had made the hymns make sense.

Like as well the bits of music you picked up in school from silly children’s songs in elementary school (Farmer In The Dell, Old MacDonald, Ring Around Something) to that latter time in junior high school when you got your first dose of the survey of the American and world songbook once a week for the school year when you learned about Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, classic guys, Stephen Foster and a lot on stuff by guys named Traditional and Anonymous. Or more pleasantly your coming of age music, maybe like me that 1950s classic age of rock and roll when a certain musician named Berry, first name Chuck, black as night out of Saint Lou with a golden guitar in hand and some kind of backbeat that made you, two left feet you, want to get up and dance, told Mr. Beethoven, you know the classical music guy, and his ilk, Mozart, Brahms, Liszt, to move on over there was a new sheriff in town, was certain songs were associated with certain rites of passage, mainly about boy-girl things.

One such song from my youth, and maybe yours too, was Woody Guthrie surrogate “national anthem,” This Land is Your Land. (Surrogate in response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America in the throes of the Great Depression that came through America, came through his Oklahoma like a blazing dust ball wind causing westward treks to do re mi California in search of the Promise Land). Although I had immersed myself in the folk minute scene of the early 1960s as it passed through the coffeehouses and clubs of Harvard Square that is not where I first heard or learned the song (and where the song had gotten full program play complete with folk DJs on the radio telling you the genesis of a lot of the music if you had the luck to find them when you flipped the dial on your transistor radio or the air was just right some vagabond Sunday night and for a time on television, after the scene had been established in the underground and some producer learned about it from his grandkids, via the Hootenanny show, which indicated by that time like with the just previous “beat” scene which scared the wits of square Ike American that you were close to the death-knell of the folk moment).

No, for that one song the time and place was in seventh grade in junior high school, down at Myles Standish in Carver where I grew up, when Mr. Dasher would each week in Music Appreciation class teach us a song and then the next week expect us to be able to sing it without looking at a paper. He was kind of a nut for this kind of thing, for making us learn songs from difference genres (except the loathed, his loathed, our to die for, rock and roll which he thought, erroneously and wastefully he could wean us from with this wholesome twaddle) like Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home, or Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade and stuff like that. So that is where I learned it.

Mr. Dasher might have mentioned some information about the songwriter or other details on these things but I did not really pick up on Woody Guthrie’s importance to the American songbook until I got to that folk minute I mentioned where everybody revered him (including most prominently Bob Dylan who sat at his knee, literally as he lay wasting away from genetic diseases in Brooklyn Hospital, Pete Seeger, the transmission belt from the old interest in roots music to the then new interest centered on making current event political protest songs from ban the bomb to killing the Mister James Crow South, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott who as an acolyte made a nice career out of continued worshipping at that shrine) not so much for that song but for the million other songs that he produced seemingly at the drop of a hat before that dreaded Huntington’s disease got the better of him.

He spoke in simple language and simpler melody of dust bowl refugees of course, being one himself, talked of outlaws and legends of outlaws being a man of the West growing up on such tales right around the time Oklahoma was heading toward tranquil statehood and oil gushers, talked of the sorrow-filled deportees and refugees working under the hot sun for some gringo Mister, spoke of the whole fellahin world if it came right down to it. Spoke, for pay, of the great man-made marvels like dams and bridge spans of the West and how those marvels tamed the wilds. Spoke too of peace and war (that tempered by his support for the American communists, and their line which came to depend more and more on the machinations of Uncle Joe Stalin and his Commissariat of Foreign Affairs), and great battles in the Jarama Valley fought to the bitter end by heroic fellow American Abraham Lincoln Battalion International Brigaders in civil war Spain during the time when it counted. Hell, wrote kids’ stuff too just like that Old MacDonald stuff we learned in school.     

The important thing though is that almost everybody covered Woody then, wrote poems and songs about him (Dylan a classic Song to Woody well worth reading and hearing on one of his earliest records), affected his easy ah shucks mannerisms, sat at his feet in order to learn the simple way, three chords mostly, recycled the same melody on many songs so it was not that aspect of the song that grabbed you but the sentiment, that he gave to entertain the people, that vast fellahin world mentioned previously (although in the 1960s folk minute Second Coming it was not the downtrodden and afflicted who found solace but the young, mainly college students in big tent cities and sheltered college campuses who were looking for authenticity, for roots).                 

It was not until sometime later that I began to understand the drift of his early life, the life of a nomadic troubadour singing and writing his way across the land for nickels and dimes and for the pure hell of it (although not all of the iterant hobo legend holds up since he had a brother who ran a radio station in California and that platform gave him a very helpful leg up which singing in the Okie/Arkie “from hunger” migrant stoop labor camps never could have done). That laconic style is what the serious folk singers were trying to emulate, that “keep on moving” rolling stone gathers no moss thing that Woody perfected as he headed out of the played-out dustbowl Oklahoma night, wrote plenty of good dustbowl ballads about that too, evoking the ghost of Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes Of Wrath as he went along. Yeah, you could almost see old Tom, beaten down in the dustbowl looking for a new start out in the frontier’s end Pacific, mixing it up with braceros-drivers, straw bosses, railroad “bulls,” in Woody and making quick work of it too.      

Yeah, Woody wrote of the hard life of the generations drifting West to scratch out some kind of existence on the land, tame that West a bit. Wrote too of political things going on, the need for working people to unionize, the need to take care of the desperate Mexico braceros brought in to bring in the harvest and then abused and left hanging, spoke too of truth to power about some men robbing you with a gun others with a fountain pen, about the beauty of America if only the robber barons, the greedy, the spirit-destroyers, the forever night-takers would let it be. Wrote too about the wide continent from New York Harbor to the painted deserts, to the fruitful orchards, all the way to the California line, no further if you did not have the do-re-mi called America and how this land was ours, the whole fellahin bunch of us, if we knew how to keep it. No wonder I remembered that song chapter and verse.             

Songs For Our Times-Build The Resistance-Barry McGuire's "Eve Of Destruction

Songs For Our Times-Build The Resistance-Barry McGuire's "Eve Of  Destruction    

During, let’s say the Obama administration or, hell, even the Bush era, for example  we could be gentle angry people over this or that notorious war policy and a few others matters and songs like Give Peace A Chance, We Shall Overcome, or hell, even that Kumbaya which offended the politically insensitive. From Day One of the Trump administration though the gloves have come off-we are in deep trouble. So we too need to take off our gloves-and fast as the cold civil war that has started in the American dark night heads to some place we don’t want to be. And the above song from the 1960s, another tumultuous time, makes more sense to be marching to. Build the resistance!      

BARRY MCGUIRE LYRICS

Play "Eve Of Destruction" on Amazon Music

"Eve Of Destruction"

The eastern world it is exploding
Violence flarin', bullets loadin'
You're old enough to kill but not for votin'
You don't believe in war but whats that gun you're totin'?
And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin'

But you tell me
Over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe
We're on the eve of destruction

Don't you understand what I'm tryin' to say
Can't you feel the fears I'm feelin' today?
If the button is pushed, there's no runnin' away
There'll be no one to save with the world in a grave
Take a look around you boy, it's bound to scare you boy

And you tell me
Over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe
We're on the eve of destruction

Yeah my blood's so mad feels like coagulating
I'm sitting here just contemplatin'
I can't twist the truth it knows no regulation
Handful of senators don't pass legislation
And marches alone can't bring integration
When human respect is disintegratin'
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin'

And you tell me
Over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe
We're on the eve of destruction

Think of all the hate there is in Red China
Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama
You may leave here for four days in space
But when you return it's the same old place
The pounding of the drums, the pride and disgrace
You can bury your dead but don't leave a trace
Hate your next door neighbor but don't forget to say grace

And tell me
Over and over and over and over again my friend
You don't believe
We're on the eve of destruction
Mmm, no, no, you don't believe
We're on the eve of destruction

The Max Daddy Of The Jazz Scene -When Chet Baker Held Forth In The Be-Bop Night

The Max Daddy Of The Jazz Scene-When Chet Baker Held Forth In The Be-Bop Night  

Lenny Gorman comment:

Jazz was/is a sometime thing with me but when you keep running up against the name Chet Baker in every important study of the subject you have to check out the "daddy." So here we are-be-bop-be-bop -listen to the guy blow those high white notes... 

From the Archives of Marxism-“Communism and the Family”-by Alexandra Kollontai

Workers Vanguard No. 1086	25 March 2016

From the Archives of Marxism-“Communism and the Family”-by Alexandra Kollontai

We print below excerpts from a 1918 speech by Alexandra Kollontai delivered to the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women. This translation is taken from a pamphlet titled “Communism and the Family,” published in London by the Workers’ Socialist Federation sometime between 1918 and 1920. At the time, Kollontai was a leading Bolshevik, though she later fell into line with Stalinism. She was the only woman on the Bolshevik Central Committee on the eve of the October Revolution. Kollontai served in the first workers and peasants government as Commissar of Social Welfare and was a leader of Zhenotdel, the department that oversaw party work among women.

In her speech, Kollontai vividly described the early Soviet workers state’s perspective to eradicate women’s oppression, which is based on the institution of the family. She pointed to the immense possibilities for the emancipation of women in a communist future in which socialized domestic services as well as collectivized care and responsibility for all children would liberate woman and child alike from the chains of the family.

Bolshevik legislation provided women with a level of equality and freedom that had yet to be attained in advanced “democratic” capitalist countries, freeing them from the medieval grip of the Russian Orthodox church and rigid patriarchal hierarchy. The Bolsheviks sought to implement the promise of women’s emancipation and bring women into full participation in economic, social and political life. But at every step their efforts were confronted with the grim poverty and social and economic backwardness in mainly peasant Russia. In addition, the country’s economy had been devastated by World War I and by the Civil War (1918-1920), in which the Bolshevik regime fought against the armies of counterrevolution and imperialist intervention. As Leon Trotsky explained:

“The real resources of the state did not correspond to the plans and intentions of the Communist Party. You cannot ‘abolish’ the family; you have to replace it. The actual liberation of women is unrealizable on a basis of ‘generalized want.’ Experience soon proved this austere truth which Marx had formulated eighty years before.”

—The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

Recognizing that the full emancipation of women is only possible on the basis of material abundance, the Bolsheviks looked to the extension of the revolution to the advanced capitalist countries, especially Germany. In 1923, the Communist International (Comintern) leadership and the German Communist Party failed to seize a revolutionary opportunity, ignominiously calling off a planned insurrection, after which demoralization swept Russia. By 1923-24, the failure to extend the revolution, the evisceration of the Russian working class in the Civil War and continuing economic scarcity enabled a bureaucratic caste, headed by Stalin, to usurp control of the Bolshevik Party, the workers state and the Comintern.

Through its futile pursuit of accommodation with imperialism, the Stalinist bureaucracy abandoned the fight for international revolution. The equality of women as envisioned by the Bolsheviks never fully came about as the Stalinists ultimately abandoned the communist fight for women’s liberation. In 1930, announcing that the woman question had been officially resolved, Zhenotdel was liquidated. The revised Family Code of 1936 criminalized abortion, made divorce more difficult to obtain and the bureaucracy called for a “reconstruction of the family on a new socialist basis.” (For more details, see “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 59, Spring 2006.)

While the parasitic bureaucracy undermined the revolution, the USSR remained a workers state with a collectivized economy, and the gains achieved by Soviet women could not be wholly erased. Capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR in 1991-92, the door to which had been opened by Stalinist misrule, ushered in untold misery for the peoples of the former Soviet Union, not least women.

In this speech, Kollontai loosely used the term “Communist State,” sometimes in reference to the Soviet workers state and other times referring to a future communist society. The Marxist understanding of a workers state is one, like the Soviet Union, in which capitalist rule has been overthrown and replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat. To speak of a “communist state” is erroneous because under communism, a classless global society of material abundance based on generations of economic and social development, the state (and also the institution of the family) will have withered away.

*   *   *

The Woman No Longer Dependent on the Man.

Will the family be maintained in the Communist State? Will it be just as it is today? That is a question which is tormenting the women of the working class, and which is likewise receiving attention from their comrades, the men. In recent days this problem has particularly been agitating all minds among the working women, and this should not astonish us: Life is changing under our very eyes; former habits and customs are gradually disappearing; the entire existence of the proletarian family is being organised in a manner that is so new, so unaccustomed, so “bizarre,” as to have been impossible to foresee. That which makes women at the present day all the more perplexed is the fact that divorce has been rendered easier in Soviet Russia. As a matter of fact, by virtue of the decree of the People’s Commissaires of December 18th, 1917, divorce has ceased to be a luxury accessible only to the rich; henceforth the working woman will not have to petition for months, or even for years, for a separate credential entitling her to make herself independent of a brutish or drunken husband, accustomed to beat her. Henceforth, divorce may be amicably obtained within the period of a week or two at most. But it is just this ease of divorce which is a source of such hope to women who are unhappy in their married life, which simultaneously frightens other women, particularly those who have become accustomed to considering the husband as the “provider,” as the only support in life, and who do not yet understand that woman must become accustomed to seek and to find this support elsewhere, no longer in the person of the man, but in the person of society, of the State.

From the Genetic Family to the Present Day.

There is no reason for concealing the truth from ourselves: the normal family of former days, in which the man was everything and the woman nothing—since she had no will of her own, no money of her own, no time of her own—this family is being modified day by day; it is almost a thing of the past. But we should not be frightened by this condition. Either through error or through ignorance we are quite ready to believe that everything about us may remain immutable while everything is changing. It has always been so, and it will always be so. There is nothing more erroneous than this proverb! We have only to read how people lived in the past, and we shall learn immediately that everything is subject to change and that there are no customs, nor political organisations, nor morals, which remain fixed and inviolable. And the family in the various epochs in the life of humanity has frequently changed in form; it was once quite different from what we are accustomed to behold today. There was a time when only one form of family was considered normal, namely, the genetic family; that is to say, a family with an old mother at its head, around whom were grouped, in common life and common work, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. The patriarchal family was also once considered the sole norm; it was presided over by a father-master whose will was law for all the other members of the family; even in our days, such peasant families may still be found in Russian villages. In fact, in those places the morals and the family laws are not those of the city worker; in the country there still are a large number of customs no longer found in the family of a city proletarian. The form of the family, its customs, vary according to race. There are peoples, such as, for instance, the Turks, Arabs, Persians, among whom it is permitted by law for a husband to have many wives. There have been, and there still are at present, tribes which tolerate the contrary custom of permitting a wife to have several husbands. The habitual morality of the present-day man permits him to demand of a young girl that she remain a virgin until legitimate marriage; but there were tribes among whom the woman, on the contrary, made it a matter of pride to have had many lovers, decorating her arms and legs with rings to indicate their number.... Such practices, which could not but astonish us, practices which we might even qualify as immoral, are found among other peoples to have the sanction of holiness, peoples who in their turn consider our laws and customs to be “sinful.” Therefore there is no reason for our becoming terrified at the fact that the family is undergoing a modification, that gradually the traces of the past which have become outlived are being discarded, and that new relations are being introduced between man and woman. We have only to ask: “What is it that has become outlived in our family system and what, in the relations of the working man and working woman and the peasant and peasant woman, are their respective rights and duties which would best harmonize with the conditions of life in the new Russia, in the worker’s Russia which our Soviet Russia now is?” Everything compatible with this new condition would be maintained; all the rest, all the superannuated rubbish which has been bequeathed to us by the cursed epoch of servitude and domination which was characteristic of the landed proprietors and the capitalists, all this shall be swept aside together with the exploiter class itself, with these enemies of the proletariat and of the poor.

Capitalism Destroyed the Old Family Life.

The family in its present form is also simply one of the legacies of the past. Formerly solid, compact in itself, indissoluble—for such was considered to be the character of marriage that had been sanctified by the priest in person—the family was equally necessary to all its members. Were it not for the family, who would have nourished, clothed, and trained the children, who would have guided them in life? The orphans’ lot in those days was the worst that could befall one. In the family such as we have become accustomed to it is the husband who earns and supports wife and children. The wife, on her part, is occupied with the housekeeping and the bringing up of the children, as she understands it. But already for a century this customary form of the family has been undergoing a progressive destruction in all the countries in which capitalism is dominant, in which the number of factories is rapidly growing, as well as other capitalist enterprises which employ working men. The family customs and morals are being formed simultaneously with the general conditions of the life surrounding them. What contributed most of all to change the family customs in a radical manner was without doubt the universal spread of wage labor on the part of woman. Formerly, it was only the man who was considered to be the support of the family. But for the past fifty or sixty years we have beheld in Russia (in other countries even somewhat earlier) the capitalist regime obliging women to seek remunerative work outside of the family, outside of the house.

30,000,000 Women Bearing a Double Burden.

The wages of the “providing” man being insufficient for the needs of the family, the wife in her turn found herself obliged to look for work that was paid for; the mother was obliged also to knock at the door of the factory offices. And year by year the number of women of the working class who left their homes in order to swell the ranks of the factory, to take up work as day labourers, saleswomen, office help, washerwomen, servants, increased day by day. According to an enumeration made before the beginning of the world war, in the countries of Europe and America there were counted about sixty million women earning a living by their own work. During the war this number increased considerably. Almost half of these women are married, but it is easy to see what sort of family life they must have—a family life in which the wife and mother goes to work outside of the house, for eight hours a day, ten if you include the trip both ways! Her home is necessarily neglected, the children grow up without any maternal care, left to themselves and all the dangerous risks of the street, in which they spend the greater part of their time. The wife, the mother, who is a worker, sweats blood to fill three tasks at the same time: to give the necessary working hours as her husband does, in some industry or commercial establishment, then to devote herself as well as she can to her household and then also to take care of her children. Capitalism has placed on the shoulders of the woman a burden which crushes her: it has made of her a wage-worker without having lessened her cares as a housekeeper and mother. We therefore find the woman crushed under her triple, insupportable burden, forcing from her often a swiftly smothered cry of pain, and more than once causing the tears to mount to her eyes. Care has always been the lot of woman, but never has woman’s lot been more unfortunate, more desperate than that of millions of working women under the capitalist yoke to-day, while industry is in its period of greatest expansion.

Workers Learn to Exist Without the Family Life.

The more widespread becomes the wage labor of woman, the further progresses the decomposition of the family. What a family life, in which the man and wife work in the factory in different departments; in which the wife has not even the time to prepare a decent meal for her offspring! What a family life when father and mother out of the twenty-four hours of the day, most of which are spent at hard labor, cannot even spend a few minutes with their children! It was quite different formerly; the mother, mistress of the house, remained at home, occupied with her household duties and her children, whom she did not cease to watch with her attentive eye—to-day, from early in the morning until the factory whistle blows, the working woman hastens to her work, and when evening has come, again, at the sound of the whistle, she hurries home to prepare the family’s soup and to do the most pressing of her household duties; after an all too scant sleep, she begins on the next day her regular grind. It is a real workhouse, this life of the married working woman! There is nothing surprising, therefore, in the fact that under these conditions the family ties loosen and the family itself disintegrates more and more. Little by little all that formerly made the family a solid whole is disappearing, together with its stable foundation. The family is ceasing to be a necessity for its members as well as for the State. The ancient forms of the family are becoming merely a hindrance.

What was it that made the family strong in the days of old? In the first place, the fact that it was the husband and father who supported the family; in the second place, that the home was a thing equally necessary to all the members of the family; and in the third and last place, that the children were brought up by the parents. What is left of all this to-day? The husband, we have just seen, has ceased to be the sole support of the family. The wife, who goes to work, has become the equal of her husband in this respect. She has learned to earn her own living and often also that of her children and her husband. This still leaves us as the function of the family the bringing-up and the support of the children while very young. Let us now see whether the family is not about to be relieved also even of this task just mentioned....

The Dawn of Collective Housekeeping.

The individual household has passed its zenith. It is being replaced more and more by collective housekeeping. The working woman will sooner or later need to take care of her own dwelling no longer; in the Communist society of tomorrow this work will be carried on by a special category of working women who will do nothing else. The wives of the rich have long been freed from these annoying and tiring duties. Why should the working woman continue to carry out these painful duties? In Soviet Russia the life of the working woman should be surrounded with the same ease, with the same brightness, with the same hygiene, with the same beauty, which has thus far surrounded only the women of the richer classes. In a Communist society the working woman will no longer have to spend her few, alas, too few hours of leisure, in cooking, since there will be in Communist society public restaurants and central kitchens to which everybody may come to take his meals.

These establishments have already been on the increase in all countries, even under the capitalist regime. In fact, for half a century the number of restaurants and cafes in all the great cities of Europe increased day by day; they sprang up like mushrooms after an autumn rain. But while under the capitalist system only people with well-lined purses could afford to take their meals in a restaurant, in the Communist city, anyone who likes may come to eat in the central kitchens and restaurants. The case will be the same with washing and other work: the working woman will no longer be obliged to sink in an ocean of filth or to ruin her eyes in darning her stockings or mending her linen; she will simply carry these things to the central laundries each week, and take them out again each week already washed and ironed. The working woman will have one care less to face. Also, special clothes-mending shops will give the working women the opportunity to devote their evenings to instructive readings, to healthy recreations, instead of spending them as at present in exhausting labor. Therefore, the four last duties still remaining to burden our women, as we have seen above, will soon also disappear under the triumphant Communist regime. And the working women will surely have no cause to regret this. Communist society will only have broken the domestic yoke of woman in order to render her life richer, happier, freer, and more complete.

The Child’s Upbringing Under Capitalism.

But what will remain of the family after all these labors of individual housekeeping have disappeared? We still have the children to deal with. But here also the state of the working comrades will come to the rescue of the family by substituting for the family; society will gradually take charge of all that formerly was on parents. Under the capitalist regime, the instruction of the child has ceased to be the duty of the parents. The children were taught in schools. Once the child had attained school age, the parents breathed more freely. Beginning with this moment the intellectual development of their child ceased to be an affair of theirs. But all the obligations of the family toward the child were not therefore finished. There was still the duty of feeding the child, buying it shoes, clothing it, making skilled and honest workers of them, who might be able when the time came to live by themselves and to feed and support their parents in their old age. However, it was very unusual when a worker’s family was able to fulfil entirely all these obligations towards their children; their low wages did not permit them even to give the children enough to eat, while lack of leisure prevented the parents from devoting to the education of the rising generation the full attention which it demanded for this duty. The family was supposed to bring up the children. But did it really? As a matter of fact, it is the street which brings up the children of the proletariat. The children of the proletarians are ignorant of the amenities of family life, pleasures which we still shared with our own fathers and mothers.

Furthermore, the low wages of the parents, insecurity, even hunger, frequently bring it about that when hardly ten years of age, the son of the proletarian already becomes in his turn an independent worker. Now, as soon as the child (boy or girl) begins to earn money, he considers himself the master of his own person to such an extent that the words and counsels of his parents cease having any effect upon him, the authority of the parents weakens and obedience is at an end. As the domestic labors of the family die out one by one, all obligations of support and training will be filled by society in place of the parents. Under the capitalist regime the children were frequently, too frequently, a heavy and unbearable burden to the proletarian family.

The Child and the Communist State.

Here also the Communist society will come to the aid of the parents. In Soviet Russia, owing to the care of the Commissariats of Public Education and of Social Welfare, great advances are being made, and already many things have been done in order to facilitate for the family the task of bringing up and supporting the children. There are homes for very small babies, day nurseries, kindergartens, children’s colonies and homes, infirmaries, and health resorts for sick children, restaurants, free lunches at school, free distribution of text books, of warm clothing, of shoes to the pupils of the educational establishments—does all this not sufficiently show that the child is passing out of the confines of the family and being placed from the shoulders of the parents on those of collectivity?

The care of children by the parents consisted of three distinct parts: (1) the care necessarily devoted to the very young babies; (2) the bringing up of the child; (3) the instruction of the child. As for the instruction of children in primary schools and later in gymnasiums [European secondary school] and universities, it has become a duty of the State, even in capitalist society. The other occupations of the working class, its conditions of life, imperatively dictated, even to capitalist society, the creation for the purposes of the young, of playgrounds, infants’ schools, homes, etc., etc. The more the workers became conscious of their rights, the better they were organised in any specific State, the more society would show itself to be concerned with relieving the family of the care of the children. But bourgeois society was afraid of going too far in this matter of meeting the interests of the working class, lest it contribute in this way to the disintegration of the family. The capitalists themselves are not unaware of the fact that the family of old, with the wife a slave and the man responsible for the support and well-being of the family, that the family of this type is the best weapon to stifle the proletarian effort toward liberty, to weaken the revolutionary spirit of the working man and working woman. Worry for his family takes the backbone out of the worker, obliges him to compromise with capital. The father and the mother, what will they not do when their children are hungry? Contrary to the practice of capitalist society, which has not been able to transform the education of youth into a truly social function, a State work, Communist society will consider the social education of the rising generation, as the very basis of its laws and customs, as the corner-stone of the new edifice. Not the family of the past, petty and narrow, with its quarrels between the parents, with its exclusive interests in its own offspring, will mould for us the man of the society of to-morrow. Our new man, in our new society, is to be moulded by Socialist organisations such as playgrounds, gardens, homes, and many other such institutions, in which the child will pass the greater part of the day and where intelligent educators will make of him a Communist who is conscious of the greatness of this sacred motto: solidarity, comradeship, mutual aid, devotion to the collective life.

The Mother’s Livelihood Assured.

But now, with the bringing up gone and with the instruction gone, what will remain of the obligations of the family toward its children, particularly after it has been relieved also of the greater portion of the material cares involved in having a child, except for the care of a very small baby while it still needs its mother’s attention, while it is still learning to walk, clinging to its mother’s skirts? Here again the Communist State hastens to the aid of the working mother. No longer shall the child-mother be bowed down with a baby in her arms! The Workers’ State charges itself with the duty of assuring a livelihood to every mother, whether she be legitimately married or not, as long as she is suckling her child, of creating all over maternity houses, of establishing in all the cities and all the villages, day nurseries and other similar institutions in order thus to permit the woman to serve the State in a useful manner and simultaneously to be a mother.

Marriage No Longer a Chain.

Let the working mothers be re-assured. The Communist Society is not intending to take the children away from the parents nor to tear the baby from the breast of its mother; nor has it any intention of resorting to violence in order to destroy the family as such. No such thing! Such are not the aims of the Communist Society. What do we observe to-day? The outworn family is breaking. It is gradually freeing itself from all the domestic labors which formerly were as so many pillars supporting the family as a social unit. Housekeeping? It also appears to have outlived its usefulness. The children? The parent-proletarians are already unable to take care of them; they can assure them neither subsistence nor education. This is the situation from which both parents and children suffer in equal measure. Communist Society therefore approaches the working woman and the working man and says to them:

“You are young, you love each other. Everyone has the right to happiness. Therefore live your life. Do not flee happiness. Do not fear marriage, even though marriage was truly a chain for the working man and woman of capitalist society. Above all, do not fear, young and healthy as you are, to give to your country new workers, new citizen-children. The society of the workers is in need of new working forces; it hails the arrival of every newborn child in the world. Nor should you be concerned because of the future of your child; your child will know neither hunger nor cold. It will not be unhappy nor abandoned to its fate as would have been the case in capitalist society. A subsistence ration and solicitous care are assured to the child and to the mother by the Communist Society, by the Workers’ State, as soon as the child arrives in the world. The child will be fed, it will be brought up, it will be educated by the care of the Communist Fatherland; but this Fatherland will by no means undertake to tear the child away from such parents as may desire to participate in the education of their little ones. The Communist Society will take upon itself all the duties involved in the education of the child, but the paternal joys, the maternal satisfaction—such will not be taken away from those who show themselves capable of appreciating and understanding these joys.”

Can this be called a destruction of the family by means of violence? Or a forcible separation of child and mother?

The Family a Union of Affection and Comradeship.

There is no escaping the fact: the old type of family has seen its day. It is not the fault of the Communist State, it is the result of the changed conditions of life. The family is ceasing to be a necessity of the State, as it was in the past; on the contrary, it is worse than useless, since it needlessly holds back the female workers from a more productive and far more serious work. Nor is it any longer necessary to the members of the family themselves, since the task of bringing up the children, which was formerly that of the family, is passing more and more into the hands of the collectivity. But, on the ruins of the former family we shall soon behold rising a new form which will involve altogether different relations between men and women, and which will be a union of affection and comradeship, a union of two equal persons of the Communist Society, both of them free, both of them independent, both of them workers. No more domestic “servitude” for women! No more inequality within the family. No more fear on the part of the woman to remain without support or aid with little ones in her arms if her husband should desert her. The woman in the Communist city no longer depends on her husband but on her work. It is not her husband but her robust arms which will support her. There will be no more anxiety as to the fate of her children. The State of the Workers will assume responsibility for these. Marriage will be purified of all its material elements, of all money calculations, which constitute a hideous blemish on family life in our days. Marriage is henceforth to be transformed into a sublime union of two souls in love with each other, each having faith in the other; this union promises to each working man and to each working woman simultaneously, the most complete happiness, the maximum of satisfaction which can be the lot of creatures who are conscious of themselves and of the life which surrounds them. This free union, which is strong in the comradeship with which it is inspired, instead of the conjugal slavery of the past—that is what the Communist Society of to-morrow offers to both men and women. Once the conditions of labor have been transformed, and the material security of the working women has been increased, and after marriage such as was performed by the Church—this so-called indissoluble marriage which was at bottom merely a fraud—after this marriage has given place to the free and honest union of men and women who are lovers and comrades, another shameful scourge will also be seen to disappear, another frightful evil which is a stain on humanity and which falls with all its weight on the hungry working woman: prostitution.

No More Prostitution.

This evil we owe to the economic system now in force, to the institution of private property. Once the latter has been abolished, the trade in women will automatically disappear.

Therefore let the woman of the working class cease to worry over the fact that the family as at present constituted is doomed to disappear. They will do much better to hail with joy the dawn of a new society which will liberate the woman from domestic servitude, which will lighten the burden of motherhood for woman, and in which, finally, we shall see disappear the most terrible of the curses weighing upon women, known as prostitution.

The woman who is called upon to struggle in the great cause of the liberation of the workers—such a woman should know that in the New State there will be no more room for such petty divisions as were formerly understood: “These are my own children; to them I owe all my maternal solicitude, all my affection; those are your children, my neighbour’s children; I am not concerned with them. I have enough to do with my own.” Henceforth the worker-mother, who is conscious of her social function, will rise to a point where she no longer differentiates between yours and mine; she must remember that there are henceforth only our children, those of the Communist State, the common possession of all the workers.

Social Equality of Men and Women.

The Workers’ State has need of a new form of relation between the sexes. The narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand until it embraces all the children of the great proletarian family. In place of the indissoluble marriage based on the servitude of woman, we shall see rise the free union, fortified by the love and the mutual respect of the two members of the Workers’ State, equal in their rights and in their obligations. In place of the individual and egotistic family, there will arise a great universal family of workers, in which all the workers, men and women, will be, above all, workers, comrades. Such will be the relation between men and women in the Communist Society of to-morrow. This new relation will assure to humanity all the joys of the so-called free love ennobled by a true social equality of the mates, joys which were unknown to the commercial society of the capitalist regime.

Make way for healthy, blossoming children; make way for a vigorous youth that clings to life and to its joys, which is free in its sentiments and in its affections. Such is the watchword of the Communist Society. In the name of equality, of liberty, and of love, we call upon the working women and the working men, peasant women and peasants, courageously and with faith to take up the work of the reconstruction of human society with the object of rendering it more perfect, more just, and more capable of assuring to the individual the happiness which he deserves. The red flag of the social revolution which will shelter, after Russia, other countries of the world also, already proclaims to us the approach of the heaven on earth to which humanity has been aspiring for centuries.