The 100th Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution -Books To While Away The Class Struggle By-COMRADE TULA-Victor Serge-A Book Review

The 100th Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution -Books To While Away The Class Struggle By-COMRADE TULA-Victor Serge-A Book Review

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin

Book Review


COMRADE TULA-Victor Serge

Generally, historical novels leave me dissatisfied as real history provides enough dramatic tension. However, every once in a while a novel comes along that illuminates a historical situation better than a history and begs for some attention. Victor Serge’s political parable falls in that category. His subject is a fictional treatment of the Great Terror highlighted by the Moscow Trials in the Soviet Union of the 1930’s. This Great Terror liquidated almost the whole generation of those who made the October Revolution of 1917 and administered the early Soviet state as well as countless other victims. Adding a personal touch, as an official journalist of the Communist International Serge knew many of that generation. The political and psychological devastation created by this catastrophe is certainly worthy of novelistic treatment. In fact it may be the only way to truly comprehend its effects. Serge is particularly well-placed to tell this story since he was a long-time member of the Trotsky-led Left Opposition in the Soviet Union and barely got out of there at the height of the Terror as a result of an international campaign of fellow writers to gain his freedom. The insights painfully learned from his experiences in the Soviet Union place his book in the first rank.


The plot line is rather simple- a disaffected Russian youth of indeterminate politics, as an act of hubris, kills a high level Soviet official in the then Stalinized Soviet Union and sets in motion a whirlwind of governmental reaction. As if to mock everything the Russian Revolution had stood until that time this youth ultimately goes free while a whole series of oppositionists of various tendencies, officials investigating the crime and other innocent, accidental figures are made to ‘confess’ or accept responsibility for the crime with their lives in the name of defending the Revolution (read Stalinist rule).

While the plot line is simple the political and personal consequences are not, especially for anyone interested in drawing the lessons of what went wrong with the Russian Revolution. The central question Serge poses is this- How can one set of Communists persecute and ultimately kill another set of Communist who it is understood by all parties stand for the defense of the same revolution? Others such as Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon, Andre Malraux in Man’s Fate and George Orwell in several of his books have taken up this same theme of political destruction with mixed success and ambiguous conclusions. In any case, aside from the tales of bureaucratic obfuscation in turning a simple criminal matter into a political vendetta which Serge treats masterfully, the answer does not resolve itself easily.

What Serge concludes, based I believe on his own personal trial of fire in that same period, and makes his novel more valuable than the others listed above is that one must defend ones revolutionary integrity at all costs. His personal conduct bears this out. The history of the period also bears this out not only in the Soviet Union but in Spain and elsewhere. For every Bukharin, Zinoviev or out of favor Stalinist factionalist who compromised himself or herself there were many, mainly anonymous Left Oppositionists and other such political people who did not confess, who did not abandon their political program and went to exile and death rather than capitulate. History being a cruel and, at times, arbitrary master may have not honored them yet. However, those courageous fighters need no revolutionary good conduct certificate before it, the reader of these lines, or me.

In Boston- Smedley Butler Brigade- VFP Invitation To March With Us On Armistice Day-Saturday November 11th

In Boston- Smedley Butler Brigade- VFP Invitation To March With Us On Armistice Day-Saturday November 11^th-We would be pleased to have you join us. 

Put Your Marching Sneakers On… Armistice Day For Peace Saturday November 11, 2017

It is that time again. Every year for well over a decade we have had our Armistice Peace March behind the “official” Veterans Day parade in Boston. We continue that tradition this year as well.

Meet at the Corner Of Beacon Street and Charles at the far end of Boston Common at Noon 

We will form up at the corner of Beacon Street and Charles at the edge of the Boston Common at noon for an approximately 1 PM step off. (Depending when the “officials” step off.) We will have flags, banners, etc. but you can bring your own posters especially this year around the war clouds forming over North Korea and Iran.

Armistice Day Program starts at Sam Adams Park in Fanuiel Hall at about 2:00 PM   

After the finish of the march at City Hall Plaza we will walk across the street for our Armistice Day program at Sam Adams Park at Fanueil   Hall from about 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM. This year’s MC will be our Smedley Butler Brigade-VFP coordinator Vietnam veteran Dan Luker. We are lining up speakers knowledgeable about the impending war clouds over Korea and Iran and the long continuing ones over Afghanistan.  We will have music, poetry and other speakers. As usual we will have our canopy up where you can purchase VFP clothing, media, and buttons.    

See you all on Saturday November 11^th at noon at Beacon and Charles –thanks- Executive Committee-Smedley Butler Brigade-VFP

  

Refuse Fascism on right-wing ‘civil war’ claims of national Nov. 4 protests

“There are a lot of threats and lies being spread by white supremacists and fascists online against our nonviolent Nov. 4 protests,” the group said

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Last Year Of World War I Continues -The Balfour Declaration-Defend The Palestinian People

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Last Year Of World War I Continues  (Remember The War To End All Wars) ... Some Remembrances

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman  

The events leading up to World War I from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources to the supposedly eternal pledges not honored by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those parties in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. Also decisive although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International although not for long), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experience in Russia and Europe in the 19^th century), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of progressive capitalism, and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as the sinkhole trenches of Europe are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.   

The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last war. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.

The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s  prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America Big Bill Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war) and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “club fed” and ran for president in 1920 out of his jail cell),  were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well as the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. So imagine in 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.                   

Over the next period as we continue the last year of the long night of the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.      

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Last Year Of World War I Continues (Remember The War To End All Wars) ... Some Remembrances

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Last Year Of World War I Continues  (Remember The War To End All Wars) ... Some Remembrances

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman  

The events leading up to World War I from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources to the supposedly eternal pledges not honored by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those parties in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. Also decisive although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International although not for long), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experience in Russia and Europe in the 19^th century), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of progressive capitalism, and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as the sinkhole trenches of Europe are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.   

The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last war. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.

The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s  prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America Big Bill Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war) and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “club fed” and ran for president in 1920 out of his jail cell),  were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well as the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. So imagine in 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.                   

Over the next period as we continue the last year of the long night of the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.      

From Veterans For Peace- People’s Peace Treaty with North Korea

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People’s Peace Treaty with North Korea

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Alarmed by the threat of a nuclear war between the U.S. and North Korea, Veterans For Peace, joined by other U.S. peace groups have come together to send an open message to Washington and Pyongyang that we are strongly opposed to any resumption of the horrific Korean War. What we want is a peace treaty to finally end the lingering Korean War!

Inspired by the Vietnam-era People’s Peace Treaty, we have initiated a People’s Peace Treaty with North Korea, to raise awareness about the past U.S. policy toward North Korea, and to send a clear message that we, the people of the U.S., do not want another war with North Korea. This is not an actual treaty, but rather a declaration of peace from the people of the United States.  

Our goal is to collect as many signatures as possible by the end of 2017, and to publicize the People's Peace Treaty in conjunction with nationally coordinated peace actions on Armistice Day, November 11.  The People's Peace Treaty will be sent to the governments and peoples of Korea, as well as to the U.S. Government. 

Please add your voice for peace by signing the People’s Peace Treaty with North Korea.

People’s Peace Treaty with North Korea

A Message of Peace from the People of the United States

      Deeply concerned with the increasing danger of the current military tensions and threats between the Governments of the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea), which may re-ignite the horrendous fighting in the Korean War by design, mistake or accident,

     Recalling that the United States currently possesses about 6,800  nuclear weapons, and has threatened the use of nuclear weapons against North Korea in the past, including the most recent threat made by the U.S. President in his terrifying speech to the United Nations (“totally destroy North Korea”),

     Regretting that the U.S. Government has so far refused to negotiate a peace treaty to replace the temporary Korean War Armistice Agreement of 1953, although such a peace treaty has been proposed by DPRK many times from 1974 on, 

     Convinced that ending the Korean War officially is an urgent, essential step for the establishment of enduring peace and mutual respect between the U.S. and DPRK, as well as for the North Korean people’s full enjoyment of their basic human rights to life, peace and development – ending their long sufferings from the harsh economic sanctions imposed on them by the U.S. Government since 1950,

NOW, THEREFORE, as a Concerned Person of the United States of America(or on behalf of a civil society organization), I hereby sign this People’s Peace Treaty with North Korea, dated November 11, 2017, Armistice Day (also Veterans Day in the U.S.), and

1)  Declare to the world that the Korean War is over as far as I am concerned, and that I will live in “permanent peace and friendship” with the North Korean people (as promised in the 1882 U.S.-Korea Treaty of Peace, Amity, Commerce and Navigation that opened the diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Korea for the first time);

2) Express my deep apology to the North Korean people for the U.S. Government’s long, cruel and unjust hostility against them, including the near total destruction of North Korea due to the heavy U.S. bombings during the Korean War;

3)  Urge Washington and Pyongyang to immediately stop their preemptive (or preventive) conventional/nuclear attack threats against each other and to sign the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons;

4) Call upon the U.S. Government to stop its large-scale, joint war drills with the armed forces of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and Japan, and commence a gradual withdrawal of the U.S. troops and weapons from South Korea;

5) Call upon the U.S. Government to officially end the lingering and costly Korean War by concluding a peace treaty with the DPRK without further delay, to lift all sanctions against the country, and to join the 164 nations that have normal diplomatic relations with the DPRK;

6)  Pledge that I will do my best to end the Korean War, and to reach out to the North Korean people – in order to foster greater understanding, reconciliation and friendship.

---

Initial signers: 
Christine Ahn, Women Cross DMZ
Medea Benjamin, Code Pink
Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies
Jackie Cabasso, Western States Legal Foundation, UFPJ
Marjorie Cohn, Professor Emerita, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
Gerry Condon, Veterans For Peace
Noam Chomsky, Emeritus Professor, M.I.T.
Blanch Weisen Cook, Professor of History and Women's Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
Clare Coss, Playwright and librettist
Joe Essertier, World Beyond War - Japan
Bill Fletcher, Jr., former president of TransAfrica Forum
Irene Gendzier, Emeritus Professor, Boston University
Joseph Gerson, Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security
Matthew P. Hoh, Senior Fellow, Center For International Policy
Louis Kampf, Emeritus Professor, M.I.T.
Asaf Kfoury, Professor of Mathematics, Boston University
John Kim, Veterans For Peace
David Krieger, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
John Lamperti, Emeritus Professor, Dartmouth College
Kevin Martin, Peace Action
Emanuel Pastreich, Kyung Hee University
Sophie Quinn-Judge, Temple University (retired)
Steve Rabson, Emeritus Professor, Brown University
Alice Slater, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
Gar Smith, Environmentalists Against War
David Swanson, World Beyond War, RootsAction
Ann Wright, Women Cross DMZ, Code Pink, VFP

Background: 
> President Jimmy Carter, “What I’ve Learned from North Korea’s Leaders,” Washington Post, Oct. 4, 2017
> Col. Ann Wright (Ret.), “A Path Forward on North Korea, “ Consortiumnews, March 5, 2017
> Leon V. Sigal, “Bad History,” 38 North, Aug. 22, 2017
> Prof. Bruce Cumings, “A Murderous History of Korea,“ London Review of Books, May 18, 2017
> Joseph Essertier, "Let's Put to Rest These Myths About U.S.-North Korea Relations, World Beyond War, Sep. 27, 2017

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-The First World War and the Struggle for Proletarian Power

The100^thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-The First World War and the Struggle for Proletarian Power    

Workers Vanguard No. 1106 24 February 2017 TROTSKY LENIN The First World War and the Struggle for Proletarian Power (Quote of the Week) Sparked by an International Women’s Day demonstration on 8 March 1917 (February 23 by the old Julian calendar), the February Revolution in Russia toppled the autocratic rule of Tsar Nicholas II amid the interimperialist First World War. But the Provisional Government that came to power—and was supported by the Mensheviks and petty-bourgeois Socialist-Revolutionaries—was a bourgeois government that continued to prosecute the war. At the same time, Soviets (councils) of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants Deputies were formed, posing a situation of dual power—i.e., whether it would be the proletariat or the bourgeoisie that would ultimately rule. Writing before his return from exile in Switzerland, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin outlined a course to turn the imperialist war into a fight for working-class power. Lenin’s struggle for this strategy was vital for the victory of the Bolshevik-led proletarian socialist October Revolution. To achieve peace (and still more to achieve a really democratic, a really honourable peace), it is necessary that political power be in the hands of the workers and poorest peasants, not the landlords and capitalists. The latter represent an insignificant minority of the population, and the capitalists, as everybody knows, are making fantastic profits out of the war. The workers and poorest peasants are the vast majority of the population. They are not making profit out of the war; on the contrary, they are being reduced to ruin and starvation. They are bound neither by capital nor by the treaties between the predatory groups of capitalists; they can and sincerely want to end the war. If political power in Russia were in the hands of the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, these Soviets, and the All-Russia Soviet elected by them, could, and no doubt would, agree to carry out the peace programme which our Party (the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party) outlined as early as October 13, 1915, in No. 47 of its Central Organ, Sotsial-Demokrat (then published in Geneva because of the Draconic tsarist censorship). This programme would probably be the following: 1) The All-Russia Soviet of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies (or the St. Petersburg Soviet temporarily acting for it) would forthwith declare that it is not bound by any treaties concluded either by the tsarist monarchy or by the bourgeois governments. 2) It would forthwith publish all these treaties in order to hold up to public shame the predatory aims of the tsarist monarchy and of all the bourgeois governments without exception. 3) It would forthwith publicly call upon all the belligerent powers to conclude an immediate armistice. 4) It would immediately bring to the knowledge of all the people our, the workers’ and peasants’, peace terms: liberation of all colonies; liberation of all dependent, oppressed and unequal nations. 5) It would declare that it expects nothing good from the bourgeois governments and calls upon the workers of all countries to overthrow them and to transfer all political power to Soviets of Workers’ Deputies. 6) It would declare that the capitalist gentry themselves can repay the billions of debts contracted by the bourgeois governments to wage this criminal, predatory war, and that the workers and peasants refuse to recognise these debts.... For these peace terms the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies would, in my opinion, agree to wage war against any bourgeois government and against all the bourgeois governments of the world, because this would really be a just war, because all the workers and toilers in all countries would work for its success. —V.I. Lenin, “Letters from Afar, Fourth Letter: How to Achieve Peace” (March 1917)

A View From The Left -Trump Bashes Black Football Players The NFL, Racism and U.S. Imperialism

Workers Vanguard No. 1120	20 October 2017

Trump Bashes Black Football Players

The NFL, Racism and U.S. Imperialism

Donald Trump has declared war against black NFL players who refuse to stand for the national anthem. His white yahoo fan base ate up Trump’s September 22 call to arms, in which he denounced as a “son of a bitch” any athlete who “disrespects our flag.” After over 200 players engaged in anthem protests the next Sunday, rabid fans booed their own teams, a hostile display later topped off by a wave of jersey-burning. Two weeks later, Vice President Mike Pence staged a provocative walkout from the Colts-49ers game in his home state of Indiana. At one Missouri bar, a doormat was made out of the jerseys of Colin Kaepernick, who kicked off the anthem protests last season, and another protester, Marshawn Lynch of the Oakland Raiders. The jerseys were put together to read: “Lynch Kaepernick.” In the face of such blatant racist reaction, black athletes in the NFL and other sports courageously continue their protests, which have struck a chord among opponents of racial oppression nationwide.

The NFL is a multibillion-dollar business, its players almost 70 percent black, its owners and executives almost 100 percent white. Concerned that Trump’s in-your-face racism might provoke an uprising on their sports plantations, some of the filthy rich team owners, a number of them big Trump donors, linked arms with their players during the anthem. As revolting as it was cynical, this display of “unity” was not long-lived. The NFL masters, beginning with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, are now cracking the whip to get their players up on their feet for “The Star Spangled Banner,” the anthem of racist capitalist America, written by Maryland slaveholder Francis Scott Key.

On October 10, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell issued a letter to team executives and owners complaining that the dispute “is threatening to erode the unifying power of our game” and demanding resolution. Indeed, the whole purpose of playing the national anthem at sports events is to promote the myth of national unity, disappearing the stark class and racial divisions in this country, in order to rally the population behind the wars and military adventures of U.S. imperialism. The whole show in football was bought and paid for by the government, which shelled out millions to NFL owners and executives to promote an orgy of patriotism.

As reported by ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith, until 2009 players stayed in the locker room during the playing of the anthem. Moving them to the field was a “marketing strategy.” The Department of Defense, under President Barack Obama, paid the NFL $5.4 million between 2011 and 2014, and the National Guard paid $6.7 million between 2013 and 2015, to stage these patriotic ceremonies on the field.

The purpose of the spectacle is to facilitate roping in more poor and working-class youth to go off to fight the rich man’s wars against the downtrodden masses of the world. In 2010, the U.S. Army released a study titled Blacks in the U.S. Army, Then and Now. Pointing with concern to the decline of black recruitment, the study blamed so-called “Black influencers” for insufficiently motivating black youth to enlist.

Among the greatest of such “influencers” are those who have made it into the big leagues of American sports, one of the few professions where black people have the chance of making seven or eight figures in a few, short, brutal years. The price demanded by America’s racist rulers is that these players keep their heads down and their mouths shut. As NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar put it:

“As long as we keep shuffling and entertaining, express our gratitude and keep our mouths shut like small children, then we can stay. But if we mention the conditions of those people outside, we are threatened with expulsion from the white Garden of Eden.”

Such was the fate of Kaepernick, a former quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers. Over a year ago, Kaepernick defiantly announced: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.... There are bodies in the streets and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” This season the talented Kaepernick is out of a job, blackballed by NFL executives, many of whom have denounced him as a “traitor.” He has now filed a grievance charging the owners with collusion.

Seattle Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett, who was among the few NFL players to forthrightly defend Kaepernick’s protest against racist cop terror, is now the target of the police in Las Vegas after he visited the city for the Mayweather-McGregor fight. When gunshots rang out, the police grabbed Bennett, threw him to the ground, handcuffed him and held a gun to his head. After Bennett publicly protested, a letter to Goodell from the Las Vegas Police Protective Association demanded that the commissioner take action to silence this black player, noting his “disrespect for our Flag, and everything it symbolizes.” The NFL Players Association (NFLPA) must defend Bennett and all the anthem protesters.

In an appeal to his fellow players on October 13, Los Angeles Chargers tackle Russell Okung called for them to take collective action against racism: “As Kap’s message has now been distorted, co-opted and used to further divide us along the very racial lines he was highlighting, we as players have a responsibility to come together and respond collectively.” Indeed, the racial oppression of black people is the main weapon wielded by the capitalist rulers to divide the workers and weaken their struggles.

Many supporters of the protests argue that the protests themselves are an act of patriotism, an exercise of the right to freedom of speech and expression that is supposedly embodied in the “stars and stripes.” Typical is an October 11 NFLPA statement that professes “a tremendous respect for our country, our flag, our anthem and our military.” This country’s flag and anthem stand for the forcible subjugation of the majority of the black population at the bottom of this society, the raw exploitation of labor, and the carnage of marauding capitalist state forces, from the cops on the streets to the military overseas.

That reality isn’t going to change until the racist ruling class is brought to its knees by the multiracial working class—Teamsters, longshoremen, transit workers and so on—standing up and fighting. That means taking on the misleaders of the labor movement, whose loyalty is to U.S. imperialism. At almost every union meeting, members are expected to stand for the national anthem or the pledge of allegiance. This practice symbolizes the labor tops’ fundamental political outlook—their allegiance to the lie that higher profits for U.S. corporations will bring the good life to American working people. The red-white-and-blue trade-union bureaucrats must be ousted in a fight for a class-struggle leadership, one whose banner will be the red flag of international working-class solidarity! Such a leadership will prepare the workers for some hard-fought battles against the capitalist exploiters as part of forging a revolutionary workers party in which black workers will play a leading role.

For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

The reformist International Socialist Organization recently reprinted a column from the Nation by sports writer Dave Zirin, pointing to Trump’s full-throated racism, sexism and general megalomaniacal ravings. Zirin complains that Trump “belongs in a psychological textbook as a case study, not in the White House” (“Trump Spurs Athletes to Action,” socialistworker.org, 25 September). Actually, Trump is the id of racist American capitalism. That is, he expresses its most primal urges for domination without any hypocritical nods to “democratic values”—the cover for the dictatorship of the capitalist exploiters.

CounterPunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair, himself a radical liberal, incisively captured the Trump presidency in an August 18 column. Skewering the “mock outrage” from the bourgeois media to the Democratic Party over Trump’s apologias for the murderous armed fascist gangs that rampaged through the streets of Charlottesville with their swastikas, Confederate flags and torches, St. Clair pointed out:

“Trump is a familiar character to most of the world. He is the unvarnished embodiment of the American bully, who has stalked the planet for the last century taking what it wants and leaving corpses and ruin in its wake. There is in Trump no pretense to the humane, no guise of benevolence, or cloak of empathy.... The elites fear Trump because he gives the game away. He personifies the reality they’ve been working for decades to conceal.”

Barack Obama, in contrast, was a master at sugarcoating the brutality of American imperialist rule, at home and abroad. In 2016, he offered that while it was “tough” for the cops and military to stomach, Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem was “how democracy works.” Such pious pronouncements have made the Democratic Party the bourgeoisie’s preferred party to rally the nation for war. During Obama’s last year in office, the U.S. military bombed dark-skinned peoples in seven countries and had special forces in 70 percent of the world’s nations.

In the case of Charlottesville, even members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued statements denouncing “racial hatred” and proclaiming that “our diversity is our strength.” Behind the lip service to diversity stands imperialism’s need for its black soldiers: despite declining recruitment numbers, some 20 percent of active-duty enlisted personnel are black (well above the percentage of black people in the population at large). That is a fault line that America’s military commanders can ill afford to see ruptured by fascist gangs emboldened by the racist rants of the Commander-in-Chief.

Black soldiers have been part of every one of this country’s wars. Many black soldiers who served in World War I came home only to be lynched, many still in uniform, by white racist mobs. Black soldiers endured Jim Crow segregation in the military to fight in World War II, which the rulers lyingly claimed was a “war for democracy” against Hitler’s Nazis. When they returned, many black vets refused to go back to second-class citizenship. Robert F. Williams, a black Marine veteran, played a leading role in organizing members of his North Carolina NAACP chapter to arm themselves for self-defense during the civil rights struggles of the late 1950s. Hounded out of the U.S., Williams escaped to Cuba in 1961.

Amid the social upheavals of the 1960s, as younger activists rejected the pro-Democratic Party liberal politics of Martin Luther King Jr. and Co. and moved toward “black power” radicalism, black athletes became increasingly politicized. Muhammad Ali was stripped of his boxing title and livelihood for refusing to be drafted. Linking U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants to the vicious oppression of black people in America, Ali defiantly proclaimed:

“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor, hungry people in the mud for big, powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me n----r, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father.”

Today, the mainly black football players put their bodies, and ultimately their lives, on the line to entertain heavily white crowds of spectators. Like a latter-day Roman emperor, Trump treats black NFL players like gladiators who should honor the U.S. imperialist empire by getting their brains bashed out on the field and be grateful “for the privilege of making millions of dollars.”

Ordered to respect the flag, black athletes are expected to ignore the vicious, racist reality of America. But it doesn’t ignore them or their families. If the cops can threaten to blow off the head of a millionaire sports star like Michael Bennett, if NBA superstar LeBron James can have the gate of his Brentwood mansion spray-painted with the “N” word, what black person in America is safe? But capitalism has not simply spawned victims. It has also created its own gravedigger, the multiracial working class, without whose labor the capitalist owners cannot reap their riches. Black workers, who remain a significant force in strategic industries, are potentially the most combative section of the working class.

The road to black freedom and to breaking the chains of wage slavery lies in the struggle to forge a revolutionary internationalist workers party that fights for a workers government. As we wrote in our article, “Salute Colin Kaepernick’s Protest Against Cop Terror!” (WV No. 1095, 9 September 2016), “The anthem of this fight will be the words of the ‘Internationale’: ‘No more tradition’s chains shall bind us; Arise, ye slaves no more in thrall! The earth shall rise on new foundations; We have been naught, we shall be all!’”

In Boston- The Russian Revolution and the Black Liberation Movement November 4 | 1:00 – 4:00 PM / Saturday

Duncan McFarland

3:15 PM

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*The Russian Revolution and the Black Liberation Movement*

*November 4 | 1:00 – 4:00 PM*

The Russian Revolution was one of the most important events in modern
history and a great victory for socialists, communists and the Left. The
October Revolution had great impact and on the black liberation movement in
the US, which is closely intertwined with the working class struggle. There
will be ample time for discussion of these issues and the 100th anniversary
of the revolution.

Edward Carson, Chair, Communist Party USA-Boston

Nino Brown, Party for Socialism and Liberation

Johanna Fernández, Baruch College (CUNY) (by skype)

Mark Solomon, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism

Panel Moderated by Nicole Aschoff, Editorial staff of Jacobin Magazine

Encuentro 5

9A Hamilton Place

Boston, MA 02108

*We regret that e5 is not wheelchair accessible at this time.*

*LUNCH WILL BE SERVED.*

*Sponsored by the Boston Socialist School
<http://www.bostonsocialistunity.org/>and the Center for Marxist Education
<http://www.centerformarxisteducation.org/>. *

*contact for information: mcfarland13@gmail.com <mcfarland13@gmail.com>*
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Once Again, The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes-Bette Davis’ The Golden Arrow” (1936)-A Film Review

Once Again, The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes-Bette Davis’ The Golden Arrow” (1936)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon 

The Golden Arrow, starring Bette Davis, George Brent, 1936

Of course when I mention as in the title above Bette Davis’ eyes I am not considering the song made famous by Kim Carnes Bette Davis Eyes but the real Bette Davis and she is the girl with those dewy eyes I am referring to. Here is something funny, actually something of a confession for a film critic who has in his long career reviewed many films like the one under review here The Golden Arrow, I had never seen or certainly I do not remember from childhood a Bette Davis movie before I hear folk-singer/songwriter Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row in 1965 where he sang as part of the lyrics “and puts her hands in her back pockets Bette Davis-style” and that got me intrigued about her old time black and white movies appeal (although whether she ever really put her hands in her back pockets Bette Davis-style is still an open question). That interest got me doing as my old friend and colleague endlessly reminds when I follow his lead a “run” on her films most notably All About Eve. It also got me interested in her biography enough to find out that she was born in Lowell, Ma about fifty miles from where Sam Lowell grew up the same town where Jack Kerouac came of age (and fled) before making his big dent on his (and my) generations with the timeless On The Road which Sam, book critic Zack James and I have spent the last few month commemorating the 60^th anniversary of with various appreciations. Must be something about that mill-town Merrimack River cascading down the rushes.            

But enough of biography and old-time lyrical references except to mention that looking back in my files (both old-time hard copy and work processor saved which tells the tale of how long I have been writing this stuff for a living) I did a number of reviews, six, of Bette Davis movies back in 1965-1966 when I was doing that “run” and have not done anymore since then until now. The “now” a result of Sam Lowell in his role of film critic emeritus (he hypes it up to film editor but I will let that pass out of our old-time friendship) deciding that he didn’t want to review the assigned by Pete Markin The Golden Arrow to concentrate on finishing up his “run” on a series of B-film noir movies produced in the 1950s by the English Hammer Production Company and foisted the assignment on me. I am not complaining or only a little but I have a feeling that I will also be on a “run” with Ms. Davis’ long list of screen credits.    

Mention of a long and illustrious career brings the inevitable question of what was good and what was not in that career. I have long ago under Sam Lowell’s guidance I will admit given up on understanding why perfectly good actors, and Ms. Davis is one with two Oscars and ten nominations up her sleeve, succumb to less worthy film scripts. Not that The Golden Arrow is horrible quite the contrary it is a nice slim little romantic comedy but it hardly let’s Ms. Davis show her stuff, show those Bette Davis eyes to good effect.

I might as well give you, as Sam Lowell made a long career out of saying, “the skinny” on this slender piece and you decide. Daisy, the role played by Ms. Davis, is a high-end society heiress who is whiling away the hours until the next best thing comes along avoiding newspaper reporters like the plague, like seven plagues. Along comes “penny a word” down at the heels reporter Johnny Jones, played by George Brent last seen in this space when my associate Alden Riley reviewed In This Our Life when the affable Brent was given the heave-ho no go engagement by Ms. Davis so that she could run off with her sister’s husband, to try for an interview under mistaken circumstances.

Despite Johnny’s horrible but honorable profession and his personal ethics (he will not publish the results of their conversation) Daisy likes him. Likes him enough that she proposes a deal-they get married so she can avoid the paparazzi and gold-diggers after her so-called fortune and he can write that great American novel he had in him and which is thwarted by his struggle for daily bread working the newspaper gag. He buys in. Except he doesn’t buy into Daisy’s board of directors who want to control his actions. Rebellion takes the form of dating another high society dame to fend off the feelings he has for Daisy. Daisy who seemed indifferent suddenly realizes that she loves the poor bugger penniless reporter. What to do. Well what to do was using her feminine wiles to get him jealous. And in the end when Johnny finds out that his Miss Daisy is not rich but just employed an advertising ploy to sell soap they unite and head off into the sunset. If you only watch one Bette Davis film this is not the one. After re-watching that All About Eve that I had reviewed many years ago watch that. If you have time on your hands then watch this one.