This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
In Honor Of The Late Rocker Chuck Berry Who Helped Make It All Possible-Once Again-Out In The Be-Bop Night-The School Dance- A CD Review
CD Review The Rock ‘N’ Roll Era: The ‘50s: Last Dance, Time-Life, 1990 I have spent tons of time and reams of cyberspace “paper” in this space reviewing the teenage culture of the 1950s, especially the inevitable school dance and the also inevitable last dance. That event was the last chance for even shy boys like me to prove that we were not wallflowers, or worst. Below is a an excerpt from a commentary that I did in reviewing the film American Graffiti that captures, I think, what this compilation is also reaching for: “Part of the charm of the American Graffiti segment on the local high school dance is, as I have noted previously, once you get indoors it could have been anyplace U.S.A. (and I am willing to bet anytime U.S.A., as well. For this baby-boomer, that particular high school dance, could have taken place at my high school when I was a student in the early 1960s). From the throwaway crepe paper decorations that festooned the place to the ever-present gym bleachers to the chaperones to the platform the local band (a band that if it did not hit it big would go on to greater glory at our future weddings, birthday parties, and other important occasion) covering the top hits of the day performed on it was a perfect replica. Also perfect replica were the classic boys’ attire for a casual dance, plaid or white sports shirt, chinos, stolid shoes, and short-trimmed hair (no beards, beads, bell-bottoms, it's much too early in the decade for that) and for the girls blouses (or maybe sweaters, cashmere, if I recall being in fashion at the time, at least in the colder East), full swirling dresses, and, I think beehive hair-dos. Wow! Of course, perfect replica were the infinite variety of dances (frug, watusi, twist, stroll, etc) that blessed, no, twice blessed, rock and roll let us do in order to not to have to dance too waltz close. Mercy. And I cannot finish up this part without saying perfect replica hes looking at certain shes (if stag, of course, eyes straight forward if dated up, or else bloody hell) and also perfect replica wallflowers, as well. Not filmed in American Graffiti, although a solo slow one highlighted the tensions between Steve and Laurie) Ron Howard and Cindy Williams) but ever present and certainly the subject of some comment in this space was that end of the night dance. I’ll just repeat what I have repeated elsewhere. This last dance was always one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you? And after the dance? Well, I am the soul of discretion, and you should be too. Let’s put it this way. Sometimes I got home earlier than the Ma agreed time, but sometimes, not enough now that I think about it, I saw huge red suns rising up over the blue waters. Either way, my friends, worth every blessed minute of anguish, right?” That said, the sticks outs here include: the legendary Chuck Berry’s Back In The U.S.A. (fast); Tommy Edwards’ It’s All In The Game (slow, ouch); the late Bo Diddley’s Who Do You Love? (fast and sassy); and, The Flamingos I’ll Be Home (slow). How is that for dee-jaying even-handedness?
Songs To While Away The Social Struggle By-Jim Morrison And The Doors
Peter Paul Markin comment:
A while back, maybe a half a decade ago now, I started a series in this space that I presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By where I posted some songs, you know, The Internationale, Which Side Are You On?, Viva La Quince Brigada, Solidarity Forever and others like Deportee, Where Have All The Flowers Gone, Blowin’ In The Wind, This Land Is Your Land while not as directly political had their hearts in the right place, that I thought would help get us through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future. Those “dog days” in America anyway, depending on what leftist political perspective drove your imagination could have gone back as far as the late 1960s and early 1970s when all things were possible and the smell of revolution could be whiffed in the air for a while before we were defeated, or maybe later when all abandoned hope for the least bit of social justice in the lean, vicious, downtrodden Reagan years of unblessed memory or later still around the time of the great world- historic defeats of the international working class in East Europe and the former Soviet Union which left us with an unmatched arrogant unipolar imperialist world. That one pole being the United States, the “heart of the beast” from which we work. Whatever your personal benchmark they were nevertheless if you had the least bit of political savvy clearly dog days.
I began posting these songs at a time, 2009, when it was touch and go whether there would be some kind of massive uprising against the economic royalists (later chastised under the popular sobriquet “the one-percent”) who had just dealt the world a blow to the head through their economic machinations in what is now called the Great Recession of 2008. Subsequently, while there were momentary uprisings, the Arab Spring which got its start in Tunisia and Egypt and enflamed most of the Middle East one way or another, here in America the defensive uprising of the public workers in Wisconsin and later the quick-moving although ephemeral Occupy movement, and the uprising in Greek, Spain and elsewhere in Europe in response to the “belt-tightening demanded by international financial institutions to name a few, the response from the American and world working classes has for lots of reasons if anything further entrenched those interests.
So as the “dog days” continue I have resumed the series. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs selected; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this kind of formation would mean political death for any serious revolutionary upheaval and would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. I like to invite others to make additional comments on certain pivotal songs, groups and artists and here is one by my old friend Josh Breslin, whom I met out in California during the heyday of the summer of love 1967, that reflects those many possibilities to “turn the world upside down” back in the 1960s and early 1970s before the “night of the long knives” set in:
WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin
My old friend from the summer of love 1967 days, Peter Paul Markin, always used to make a point then of answering, or rather arguing which tells a lot about the kind of guy he was (is) when he gets his political hind legs up with anybody who tried to tell him back in the day that “music is the revolution.” Strangely when I first met him in San Francisco that summer you would have been hard-pressed to tell him that was not the case but after a few hit on the head by the coppers, a tour of duty in the military at the height of the Vietnam War, and what was happening to other political types trying to change the world for the better like the Black Panthers he got “religion,” or at least he got that music as the agency of social change idea out of his head. Me, well, I was (and am not) as political as Markin so that I neither got drowned in the counter-culture where music was a central cementing act, nor did I have anything that happened subsequently that would have given me Markin’s epiphany.
I would listen half-attentively (a condition aided by being “stoned” a lot of the time) when such conversations erupted and Markin drilled his position. That position meaning, of course that contrary to the proponents (including many mutual friends who acted out on that idea and got burned by the flame, some dropping out, some going back to academia, some left by the wayside and who are maybe still wandering) that eight or ten Give Peace A Chance, Kumbaya, Woodstock songs would not do the trick, would not change this nasty, brutish, old short-life world into the garden, into some pre-lapsian Eden. Meaning that the gathering of youth nation unto itself out in places like Woodstock, Golden Gate Park, Monterrey, hell, the Boston Common, or even once word trickled down the way the word has always trickled down to the sticks once the next new thing gets a workout, Olde Saco Park, in the town up in Maine where I grew up would not feed on itself and grow to such a critical mass that the quite nameable enemies of good, kindness starting with one Lyndon Johnson and one Richard M. Nixon and working down to the go-fers and hangers-on, and leave us alone would sulk off somewhere, defeated or at least defanged.
Many a night, many a dope-blistered night before some seawall ocean front Pacific Coast campfire I would listen to Markin blast forth against that stuff, against that silliness. As for me, I was too “into the moment,” too into finding weed, hemp, mary jane and too into finding some fetching women to share it with to get caught up in some nebulous ideological struggle. It was only later, after the music died, after rock and roll turned in on itself, turned into some exotic fad of the exiles on Main Street that I began to think through the implications of what Markin, and the guys on the other side, were arguing about.
Now it makes perfect sense that music, or any mere cultural expression standing alone, would be unable to carry enough weight to turn us back to the garden (I won’t use that “pre-lapsarian’ again to avoid showing my, and Markin’s, high Roman Catholic up-bringing and muddy what I want to say which is quite secular). I guess that I would err on the side of the “angels” and at least wish that we could have carried the day against the monsters of the American imperium we confronted back in the day. (Although I had a draft deferment due to a serious physical condition, not helped by the “street” dope I was consuming by the way, I supported, and something vehemently and with some sense of organization, a lot of the political stuff Markin was knee deep into, especially Panther defense when we lived in Oakland and all hell was raining down on the brothers and sisters.)
Thinking about what a big deal was made of such arguments recently (arguments carried deep into the night, deep in smoke dream nights, and sometimes as the blue–pink dawn came rising up to smite our dreams) I thought back to my own musical appreciations. In my jaded youth (if one could be jaded in Podunk Olde Saco, although more than one parent and more than one teacher called me “beatnik” back then whatever that meant to them) I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. Perhaps it was some off-shoot DNA thing since my people on my mother’s side (nee LeBlanc) were French-Canadian which had a deep folk heritage both up north and here although such music was not played in the house, a house like a lot of other ethnics where in the 1950s everybody wanted to be vanilla American (Markin mentioned that same thing about his Irish-etched parents). So it initially started as a reaction to my parents’ music, the music that got them through the Great Depression of the 1930s and later waiting for other shoe to drop (either in Normandy where my father first went to Europe under some very trying conditions or at home waiting in Olde Saco), and that became a habit, a wafting through the radio of my childhood home habit. You know who I mean Frank (Sinatra for the heathens), Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, Peggy Lee, Doris Day and the like. Or, maybe, and this is something that I have come closer to believing was the catalyst along with the DNA stuff I already mentioned, my father’s very real roots in the Saturday night mountain barn dance, fiddles blazing, music of his growing up poor down in Appalachia. (Again such music except every once in a while Hank Williams who I didn’t know about at the time was not played in the house either. Too “square” I guess.)
The origin of my immersion into roots music first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House(and that raspy, boozy country voice on Death Letter Blues), Skip James ( I went nuts over that voice first heard after he had been “discovered” at the Newport Folk Festival I think in 1963 when he sang I’d Rather Be The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man on the radio after I had just broken up with some devil woman, read girl), Mississippi John Hurt (that clear guitar, simple lyrics on Creole Belle), Muddy Waters (yes, Mannish-Boy ), Howlin’ Wolf ( I again went nuts when I heard his righteous Little Red Rooster although I had heard the Stones version first, a version originally banned in Boston) and Elmore James ( his Dust My Broom version of the old Robert Johnson tune I used to argue was the “beginning” of rock and roll to anybody who would listen).
Then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis (stuff like One Night With You, Jailhouse Rock and the like before he died in about 1958 or whatever happened to him when he started making stupid movies that mocked his great talent making him look foolish and which various girlfriends of the time forced me to go see at the old Majestic Theater in downtown Olde Saco), Jerry Lee (his High School Confidential, the film song, with him flailing away at the piano in the back of a flat-bed truck blew me away although the film was a bust, as was the girl I saw it with), Chuck (yeah, when he declared to a candid world that while we all gave due homage to classical music in school Mister Beethoven better move on over with Roll Over Beethoven), Roy (Roy the boy with that big falsetto voice crooning out Running Scared, whoa), Big Joe (and that Shake, Rattle and Roll which I at one point also argued was the “beginning” of rock and roll, okay, I liked to argue those fine points) and Ike Turner (who I ultimately settled on with his Rocket 88 as that mythical beginning of rock and roll).
Then later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, the folk music minute before the British invasion took a lot of the air out of that kind of music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan (even a so-so political guy like me, maybe less than so-so then before all hell broke loose and we had to choose sides loved Blowin’ in the Wind), Dave Von Ronk (and that raspy old voice, although was that old then sing Fair And Tender Ladies one of the first folk songs I remember hearing) Joan Baez (and that long ironed-hair singing that big soprano on those Child ballads), etc.
I am, and have always been a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully or consciously rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music (paying final conscious tribute to the mountain DNA in my bones) and so on.
All those genres are easily classified as roots music but I recall one time driving Markin crazy, driving him to closet me with the “music is the revolution” heads he fretfully argued against when I mentioned in passing that The Doors, then in their high holy mantra shamanic phase with The End and When The Music’s Over epitomized roots music. That hurt me to the quick, a momentary hurt then, but thinking about it more recently Markin was totally off base in his remarks.
The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derived from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of The Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native- American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. More than one rock critic, professional rock critic, has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up The Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here, and it is not a far stretch to classify their efforts as in the great American roots tradition. I argued then and will argue here almost fifty years later when that original statement of mine was more prophetic The Doors put together all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll, played the people’s music, played to respond to a deep-seeded need of the people before them, for keeps.
So where does Jim Morrison fit in an icon of the 1960s if he was not some new age latter day cultural Lenin/Trotsky. Some icon that Markin could have latched onto. Jim was part of the trinity, the “J” trinity for the superstitious – Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young. The slogan of the day (or hour) – “Drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then.
Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including Markin in his higher moments (you figure out what that “higher,” means since you are bright people) felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen. The righteous headed to the “promise land.” Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.
Know this as well if you are keeping score. Whatever excesses were committed by our generation and there were many, many made by the generation that came of political and cultural age in the early 1960s, the generation I call the generation of ’68 to signify its important and decisive year internationally, were mainly made out of ignorance and foolishness. Our opponents, exemplified by outlaw big cowboy President Lyndon B. Johnson and one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, and their minions like J. Edgar Hoover, Mayor Richard Daley and Hubert Humphrey spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty plus years of “cultural wars” in revenge by their protégés, hangers-on and now their descendants has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. And Markin would surely endorse this sentiment. Enough.
<strong>Click on the headline to link to the
<em>International Communist League </em> website.</strong>
<b>Markin
comment:
</b>
I place some material
in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not
necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I
think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist
revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators
in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to
sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just
world that animates our efforts.
*************
Workers Vanguard No. 1008
14 September 2012
Bitter Defeat of Illinois Caterpillar Strike-Bosses Declare Class War, Union Tops Fold
In a bitter and ominous defeat for labor, on August 17 a
15-week-long strike against the Caterpillar corporation by 780 members of
International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Local Lodge
851 in Joliet, Illinois, ended when workers narrowly voted to accept a draconian
contract. With profits at an all-time high, and growing, the construction and
mining equipment giant demanded blood, and got almost every drop. Workers hired
at the plant before May 2005 will have their wages frozen, while workers hired
after that will receive a minuscule one-time 3 percent raise in the six years of
the contract. Health care premiums will double, the defined-benefit pension plan
will be eliminated, and seniority rights will be weakened. At an August 19 union
meeting, several workers told Workers Vanguard salesmen that they were
angry about the level of scabbing during the strike. Many have criticized their
union representatives for negotiating a rotten contract.
Compounding a decades-long war on labor, resulting in a decline in
both the incomes and general well-being of working people, the magnitude and
scope of contract concessions demanded by the bosses have accelerated since the
beginning of the Great Recession. Strikes have been infrequent (there were only
19 major walkouts in 2011), and those that did not suffer outright defeat
served, with rare exception, only to mitigate the extent of the damage. Routs
such as the one at Caterpillar are increasingly the rule. Robert Bruno, a
professor at the University of Illinois, pointed out that Caterpillar broke the
link between a company’s profit and what it pays its workers. He predicted,
“Other companies now will follow suit” (Chicago Tribune, 18 August).
The labor movement has been crippled by union leaders who,
parroting the bosses, have told their members that sacrifice is needed to assure
the continued existence of American industry against foreign competition. This
chauvinist appeal has been used to sell givebacks in health insurance coverage,
work rules, seniority rights and wage scales. In the 1980s, the corporations
mounted an assault on the wages of younger union members by introducing a lower
entry-level tier. Wages have since been reduced to near Walmart levels by the
infamous “two-tier” system, leading many embittered younger members to call into
question the value of unions at all. Caterpillar in 2006 was among the first in
major industry to introduce a two-tier wage system that
permanently relegates a section of the workforce to the bottom.
However, it was the 2008 auto contracts forced upon workers at GM, Ford and
Chrysler by UAW top Ron Gettelfinger and the newly elected president Barack
Obama—part of the bailout of the auto bosses—that opened the floodgates for
two-tier agreements in other union contracts throughout this country.
It used to be commonplace to reassure angry workers that when
things got better their sacrifice would be rewarded. That was then. Alongside
large-scale and long-term unemployment, corporate profits have, on the average,
risen at an annual rate of 4.8 percent over the past three years. Caterpillar is
simply rolling in dough, amassing a record $4.9 billion in profits last year,
and it topped that rate with a cool $1.7 billion in profits during the second
quarter of this year. This is coming right out of the hides of the workers. In
the midst of the strike, the Joliet plant manager, Carlos Revilla, claimed that
the top-tier workers were paid 34 percent above “market level” and declared:
“Paying wages well above market levels makes Joliet uncompetitive” (New York
Times, 22 July). In brief, the bosses are aiming for one tier—the lowest
wage they can get away with paying.
So much for the fabled goose that lays eggs of gold. As Karl Marx
pointed out, the growth of wealth and profits at one pole of the capitalist
system (the owners of the means of production) necessitates the growth of misery
and want at its other pole (the working class). The left-leaning British
Guardian (27 July) offers this grim assessment of the plight of workers:
“Human agency consists of two choices: take it or leave it. To want more say in
what you do for a living, for how much and under which conditions, and to want
the same for others, is crazy.” With considerably less empathy, the Wall
Street Journal (17 August) article on the Caterpillar contract said it
straight out: “The vote to return to work is the latest sign that unionized
employees have little power to buck employers’ demands for concessions.”
Such obituaries were common in the years prior to and at the onset
of the Great Depression. In the early 1930s—as now—there were legions of the
unemployed supposedly eager to snatch up the jobs of the employed if these dared
to resist the bosses’ demands. The labor statesmen of those days agreed to
concession after concession and union membership plummeted. But in grinding down
those they exploit, the capitalists sow the seeds of class struggle. Seemingly
out of nowhere in 1934, massive citywide strikes in Toledo, Minneapolis and San
Francisco—all led by reds—erupted. In the years that followed leading up to
World War II, there were thousands of strikes and the giant industrial unions of
the CIO were forged. Social Security and unemployment benefits, designed to
placate the workers, did little to quench the fires of labor militancy.
By 1934 the ferocity of the Depression had abated little. Although
there was an uptick in hiring, unemployment continued at record levels.
Nevertheless, workers increasingly looked for union organization to end their
atomization and desperate circumstances, in the process gravitating toward those
with experience in the class struggle for guidance. The historic 1934
Minneapolis truckers strike, which led the way for nationwide expansion of the
Teamsters union, was centrally led by Trotskyist militants. As James P. Cannon
recounted in The History of American Trotskyism (1944):
“Trotskyism introduced into all the plans and preparations of the
union and the strike, from beginning to end, the class line of militancy; not as
a subjective reaction—that is seen in every strike—but as a deliberate policy
based on the theory of class struggle, that you can’t win anything from the
bosses unless you have the will to fight for it and the strength to take it.”
The essence of this message resonated throughout the country. Using
the means at their disposal—from facing down the scabs and their armed
guardians, the police, to seizing the plants—the workers shut down production.
Nothing came out of the struck factories and no one went in to replace the
strikers. For the most part, the bosses were forced to accede to the workers’
main demands. Throughout this tumultuous period, the union tops, with few
exceptions, maintained their ties and allegiance to the Democratic Party, which
no less than the Republicans is a party of the capitalist class. But the
workers’ increasing militancy challenged labor’s ties to the Democrats, with
many considering moving to form some sort of labor party.
The reformist Communist Party, which led thousands of the most
militant workers and influenced a number of unions, sidetracked that impulse by
all but explicitly throwing its support to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1936
presidential election. This was the American version of the Stalinist “popular
front” policy, which sought to find allies for the Soviet Union among the “good”
imperialists. Within five years, U.S. workers were drawn into the
interimperialist World War II, killing their class brothers on the battlefields
of Europe and Asia, just as two and a half decades before their fathers and
uncles were mobilized through patriotic calls to join in the fratricidal carnage
of WWI.
At the end of World War II, the victorious U.S. imperialists
launched the Cold War against the USSR, the homeland of proletarian revolution.
Simultaneously they employed their “America first” supporters in the trade-union
bureaucracy to drive the reds out of the union movement. That helped set off,
from the mid 1950s to today, a fairly steady decline in membership to the
current dismal levels.
The grinding exploitation of the profit-driven capitalist system
will again goad the workers into action. To end capitalism’s depredations, such
militancy requires a class-struggle leadership to forge a revolutionary
proletarian party to overturn through socialist revolution the American
imperialist behemoth, the main enemy of all the world’s working and oppressed
people.
Click on the headline to link to the <em>International Communist League </em> website.</strong>
<b>Markin comment:
</b>
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
*************
<b>Workers Vanguard No. 1008
14 September 2012
For International Solidarity with South African Miners!
</b>
On August 30, some 100 protesters marched outside the South African Consulate in New York City to denounce the August 16 police massacre of 34 striking mineworkers and the arrest of some 270 workers at Lonmin Platinum’s Marikana mine in South Africa. This united-front protest, initiated by the Partisan Defense Committee, demanded: “Free Jailed Miners—Drop All Charges! Victory to the Striking Miners!” In an effort to generate support for the embattled miners, the PDC—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—appealed to trade unions and leftists as well as black and immigrant organizations with diverse political viewpoints for unity in action.
Some of those who endorsed the demonstration represent unions that have been under attack in the U.S., like Dan Coffman, president of International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 21 in Longview, Washington, which fought against the multinational EGT’s union-busting drive, and Kevin Gundlach, president of the South Central Federation of Labor in Wisconsin, which has been under state government attacks.
Other endorsers included Steve Hedley of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers Union in Britain; Kenneth Riley, president of International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422 in Charleston; the New York City chapter of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists; Kareem Lover of Harlem’s Circle of Brothers; the International Haiti Support Network; the Occupy Wall Street Labor Outreach Committee; and black academic Cornel West. Among those attending the protest were the Internationalist Group, which endorsed and spoke, and the League for the Revolutionary Party. One of the speakers was Matthew Swaye, a young activist of Stop Stop and Frisk who has been targeted by the NYPD for filming cops going after black and Latino youth.
Kevin Harrington, vice-president of Transport Workers Union Local 100 in New York, brought solidarity greetings, and a number of transit workers were present. He remarked that the attack on South African mineworkers is against “the right of workers to organize and is an attempt to smash trade-unionism,” adding that such attempts are also “alive and well in the U.S.”
An SL spokesman noted: “This massacre exposes the truth that the blood of black workers is just as cheap today under the neo-apartheid capitalism of the ‘new South Africa’ as it was under apartheid.” He commented that the Tripartite Alliance government “only offers a continuation of capitalist exploitation and oppression. Similarly, in the U.S. the bourgeois parties—Democrats, Republicans and Greens —represent the interests of the capitalist exploiters. We say: Break with the parties of capital! What’s necessary is an internationalist multiracial workers party!”
A PDC speaker remarked: “August 16, 2012, will go down in history for one of the bloodiest crimes ever committed against the workers movement in South Africa.... The pain and suffering of this gruesome mass murder must be burnt into the memory of the working class—here and internationally—and all other opponents of capitalist oppression, as a reminder of the lengths to which the bourgeoisie and its repressive state machine will go to protect their class rule and profits.”
The Marikana slaughter recalls the most infamous apartheid-era slaughters—Sharpeville 1960 and Soweto 1976—which caused massive international outrage.
However, in response to this latest massacre the AFL-CIO tops and much of the left have alibied the perpetrator—the Tripartite Alliance government of the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party and the COSATU union federation—which sent its police to protect the mine owners’ profits. A statement by the AFL-CIO called “for calm to return to the platinum mine...so that miners can return to work.” We say: Victory to the miners’ strike, which has continued and grown after the vicious attacks by the police!
Other demonstrations and acts of protest took place internationally. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers sent a letter to South African president Jacob Zuma recalling its support to the anti-apartheid struggle and commenting: “We did not organize against such tyranny only to see such blatant attacks on workers unfold under the government of the ANC.” During a protest organized by labor and community activists on August 25 at the South African Consulate in Toronto, a comrade of the Trotskyist League of Canada called for cops out of the unions and for a black-centered workers government in South Africa. In London on August 31, the Spartacist League/Britain protested outside the England-South Africa cricket match along with representatives of the Foil Vedanta Campaign, an organization fighting against destruction brought about by the British-Indian mining giant Vedanta. In highlighting the criminal history in Africa of the London-based Lonmin company, an SL/B speaker stressed the significance of “solidarity from workers in Britain, not least the black and Asian population from former British colonies.”
In leaflets and chants, our comrades have raised the call: An injury to one is an injury to all! For international labor solidarity with the striking miners!
For The Fifty- Steve McQueen’s “The Great Escape” (1963)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Film Editor Emeritus Sam Lowell
The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, James Coburn, Charles Bronson and a fistful of male stars to round out the cast, 1963
One of the great things about my long stay at this site (and at the now on-line American Film Gazette) is that Pete Markin, my editor (and Ben Gold at the Gazette) almost without exception let me review almost anything cinematic from virtually any genre and not grumble about my choices. That is true of this encore presentation the classic iconic (the big motorcycle chase for one thing) 1960s World War II movie The Great Escape as well. The encore part needs a little explanation since my first review of the film was written for my high school newspaper the North Adamsville High Magnet back when I was a sophomore. Of course that review of the film seen at the now long gone Strand Theater in Adamsville Center one Saturday afternoon was all about detailing the action, detailing how the good guy Allied officers outwitted the nasty Nazi night-takers who were trying (and almost succeeding) in over-running all of Europe and who knows where else, and concentrating on the long drama (with intermission) as it unfolded. What it did not entail, what got missed, was the little point about the murder of the fifty officers who were captured after the great escape and executed against even the barest minimum of Geneva Convention standards. What got missed then but not now as well is the dedication in the film (and in this headline) of those fifty murdered men who after all were only doing what the fog rules of war were expecting of them-escape and/or create as much havoc for the enemy as possible if you cannot.
The storyline is actually pretty simple for an almost three hour movie. A group of hard ass Allied officers who have already off-camera created problems for the German High Command by a collective untold number of escapes from other POW camps are transferred to a state-of-the-art facility. Needless to say from about minute one they individually attempt to escape. No go. Then a senior British officer just recaptured and transferred comes up with the big plan –a massive escape of 250 men to tie down as many German troops as possible. The bulk of the film then concentrates of the logistics, the temporary set-backs, and the division of labor among the officers who brought different skill sets to the table. Then the big day came but due to some problems only about seventy men escaped. As I have already telegraphed of that lot fifty were captured and executed, a few escaped, and a few were captured and returned to the camp.
The central figure in all of this, the one highlighted throughout the film is Hilts, played by Steve McQueen, who between bouts of solitary (with American as apple pie glove and ball in hand to while away the time) and that aforementioned great motorcycle chase gave the Germans all they could handle. Alas he was one of the captured and returned ones. Yeah, this one, this based on a true story about the camp and the Nazi night-takers actions is for the fifty. Enough said.
Veterans for Peace: Ring Church Bells on Armistice Day
8/9/2018
Veterans for Peace is calling on churches to ring their bells at 11 AM on Sunday, November 11 - Armistice Day - in recognition of the futility of war and to show our commitment to world peace.
This year is the 100th anniversary of the original Armistice Day, a day of celebration marking the
end of fighting during World War I (the Great War). Today, Armistice Day is a call to Americans, in recognition of the horrors and futility of that war, to rededicate themselves to world peace.
While November 11 was declared Veteran's Day in 1954, Armistice Day legislation (1919; 1926 and 1938) remains in place to this day. Read excerpts from that legislation
here.
Veterans For Peace (VFP) is an international organization made up of military veterans, military family members, and allies dedicated to building a culture of peace, exposing the true costs of war, and healing the wounds of war. Their goal is to change public opinion in the U.S. from an unsustainable culture of militarism and commercialism to one of peace, democracy, and sustainability. They do this primarily, although not exclusively, through grassroots organizing and education at the local level.
Learn more about the organization
Veterans for Peace, or the local chapter,
Smedley Butler Brigade. Contact Doug Stewart, VFP Chapter Leader in Boston and member of the Eliot Church of Newton, a Mass. Conference church,
here.
Last Train from Gun Hill, starring Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, 1959
I have often had occasion to mention that when I was growing up in the Acre section of North Adamsville in the 1950s the “golden age” of the Western, on the screen and on television that my fellow corner boys and I were sucked in by the myths surrounding the Old West like the good guy wore white and the bad guys black, the only good injun was a dead one, that rough justice came out of the barrel of a gun and lots of other stuff copied from the old dime store novels on which the shows were created from. Moreover many a Saturday afternoon double feature matinee at the old long gone Strand Theater were spent watching mostly in Technicolor those myths getting a workout on the screen (this before finding the virtues of film noir when the theater owner to save cash would do 1940s retrospectives and later when the theater was a “screen” for taking some sweet girl to the balcony for a little, well, you know a little. The film under review, Last Train From Gun Hill, gives plenty of ammunition to bolster those old blasé myths about the West, the taming of the West but with a little twist.
The twist here is that unlike most early Westerns where the “only good injun is a dead injun” a Native American woman (we are after all in the 2000s and to use the film’s “squaw” is nothing if not demeaning) taking her son home from visit with her father has been raped and murdered by a couple of young drunk Anglo cowboys who did not have an ounce of political correctness or morality for that matter in their entire bodies. What they did have, or at least one of them had, was a rich cattle baron father, one tough hombre named Craig Belsen played by Anthony Quinn, to squelch any backlash against his errant son Rick who can do no wrong, no legal wrong anyway, in the old man’s eyes. Keeping son Rick from a well-deserved hangman’s noose is what drives this plotline. Why Craig gives a rat’s ass about this ne’er-do-well son is beyond reason, except he is the heir to that big spread and to the “ownership” of the town, the town of Gun Hill.
Problem, big problem in the end. That Native American woman, that “squaw,” was wife of tough as nails lawman Matt Morgan, played by cleft-chinned Kirk Douglas, who did his taming of the West a few towns over. Craig and Matt are old compadres but that won’t keep Sonny Boy from a big step off, from a date with the hangman and a burial in some Boot Hill, if Matt has anything to do with the matter once he knows from a saddle initials hint who he was dealing with. If it was just a matter of grabbing the kid and heading back on the next train (the last train, a late one, and hence the title) to sweet justice (or a fatal “attempted” escape on the way back) our Matt is up against it. No help from the bought-off townspeople not even the law. Well almost no help except Belsen’s much abused and put upon mistress who helps even up the odds for the ever inventive Morgan.
That no help and that long wait for the train while the forces of evil are arrayed against him that round out the film. As to be expected the two protagonists have to go mano a mano with each other. That is when 1950s Hollywood Western script return to form as the good guys beat the bad guys without a whimper. Still it was nice to see somebody stick up for the let’s face it historically much abused Native Americans who were there long before the wild and tamed West ever got their names.
In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)- "You’re On The Bus, Or Off The Bus"- An Ode To Aging Hippies- Ken Kesey’s “The Further Inquiry”
In Honor Of Jean Bon Kerouac On The 60th Anniversary Of “On The Road” (1957)
By Book Critic Zack James
To be honest I know about On The Road Jack Kerouac’s epic tale of his generation’s search for something, maybe the truth, maybe just for kicks, for stuff, important stuff that had happened down in the base of society where nobody in authority was looking or some such happening strictly second-hand. His generation’s search looking for a name, found what he, or someone associated with him, maybe the bandit poet Gregory Corso, king of the mean New York streets, mean, very mean indeed in a junkie-hang-out world around Times Square when that place was up to its neck in flea-bit hotels, all-night Joe and Nemo’s and the trail of the “fixer” man on every corner, con men coming out your ass too, called the “beat” generation. (Yes, I know that the actual term “beat” was first used by Kerouac writer friend John Clemmon Holmes in an article in some arcane journal but the “feel” had to have come from a less academic source so I will crown the bandit prince Corso as genesis)
Beat, beat of the jazzed up drum line backing some sax player searching for the high white note, what somebody told me, maybe my oldest brother Alex who was washed clean in the Summer of Love, 1967 but must have known the edges of Jack’s time since he was in high school when real beat exploded on the scene in Jack-filled 1957, they called “blowing to the China seas” out in West Coast jazz and blues circles, that high white note he heard achieved one skinny night by famed sax man Sonny Johns, dead beat, run out on money, women, life, leaving, and this is important no forwarding address for the desolate repo man to hang onto, dread beat, nine to five, 24/7/365 that you will get caught back up in the spire wind up like your freaking staid, stay at home parents, beaten down, ground down like dust puffed away just for being, hell, let’s just call it being, beatified beat like saintly and all Jack’s kid stuff high holy Catholic incense and a story goes with it about a young man caught up in a dream, like there were not ten thousand other religions in the world to feast on- you can take your pick of the meanings, beat time meanings. Hell, join the club they all did, the guys, and it was mostly guys who hung out on the poet princely mean streets of New York, Chi town, Mecca beckoning North Beach in Frisco town cadging twenty-five cents a night flea-bag sleeps (and the fleas were real no time for metaphor down in the bowels where the cowboy junkies drowse in endless sleeps, raggedy winos toothless suck dry the dregs and hipster con men prey on whoever floats down), half stirred left on corner diners’ coffees and groundling cigarette stubs when the Bull Durham ran out).
I was too young to have had anything but a vague passing reference to the thing, to that “beat” thing since I was probably just pulling out of diapers then, maybe a shade bit older but not much. I got my fill, my brim fill later through my oldest brother Alex. Alex, and his crowd, more about that in a minute, but even he was only washed clean by the “beat” experiment at a very low level, mostly through reading the book (need I say the book was On The Road) and having his mandatory two years of living on the road around the time of the Summer of Love, 1967 an event whose 50th anniversary is being commemorated this year as well and so very appropriate to mention since there were a million threads, fibers, connections between “beat” and “hippie” despite dour grandpa Jack’s attempts to trash those connection when the acolytes and bandit hangers-on came calling looking for the “word.” So even Alex and his crowd were really too young to have been washed by the beat wave that crashed the continent toward the end of the 1950s on the wings of Allan Ginsburg’s Howl and Jack’s travel book of a different kind (not found on the AAA, Traveler’s Aid, Youth Hostel brochure circuit if you please although Jack and the crowd, my brother and his crowd later would use such services when up against it in let’s say a place like Winnemucca in the Nevadas or Neola in the heartlands).
Literary stuff for sure but the kind of stuff that moves generations, or I like to think the best parts of those cohorts. These were the creation documents the latter of which would drive Alex west before he finally settled down to his career life as a high-road lawyer (and to my sorrow and anger never looked back which has caused more riffs and bad words than I want to yell about here).
Of course anytime you talk about books and poetry and then add my brother’s Alex name into the mix that automatically brings up memories of another name, the name of the late Peter Paul Markin. Markin, for whom Alex and the rest of the North Adamsville corner boys, Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Si, Josh (he a separate story from up in Olde Saco, Maine and so only an honorary corner boy after hitching up with the Scribe out on a Russian Hill dope-filled park), Bart, and a few others still alive recently had me put together a tribute book for in connection with that Summer of Love, 1967, their birthright event, just mentioned. Markin was the vanguard guy, the volunteer odd-ball unkempt mad monk seeker, what did Jack call his generation’s such, oh yeah, holy goofs, who got several of them off their asses and out to the West Coast to see what there was to see. To see some stuff that Markin had been speaking of for a number of years before 1967 (and which nobody in the crowd paid any attention to, or dismissed out of hand, what they called “could give a rat’s ass” about in the local jargon which I also inherited in those cold, hungry bleak 1950s cultural days in America) and which can be indirectly attributed to the activities of Jack, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, that aforementioned bandit poet who ran wild on the mean streets among the hustlers, conmen and whores of the major towns of the continent, William Burroughs, the Harvard-trained junkie and a bunch of other guys who took a very different route for our parents who were of the same generation as them but of a very different world.
But it was above all Jack’s book, Jack’s travel adventure book which had caused a big splash in 1957(after an incredible publishing travail since the story line actually related to events in the late 1940s and which would cause Jack no end of trauma when the kids showed up at his door looking to hitch a ride on the motherlode star, and had ripple effects into the early 1960s and even now certain “hip” kids acknowledge the power of attraction that book had for their own developments, especially that living simple, fast and hard part). Made the young, some of them anyway, like I say I think the best part, have to spend some time thinking through the path of life ahead by hitting the vagrant dusty sweaty road. Maybe not hitchhiking, maybe not going high speed high through the ocean, plains, mountain, desert night but staying unsettled for a while anyway.
Like I said above Alex was out on the road two years and other guys, other corner boys for whatever else you wanted to call them that was their niche back in those days and were recognized as such in the town not always to their benefit, from a few months to a few years. Markin started first back in the spring of 1967 but was interrupted by his fateful induction into the Army and service, if you can call it that, in Vietnam and then several more years upon his return before his untimely and semi-tragic end down some dusty Jack-strewn road in Mexico cocaine deal blues. With maybe this difference from today’s young who are seeking alternative roads away from what is frankly bourgeois society and was when Jack wrote although nobody except commies and pinkos called it that for fear of being tarred with those brushes. Alex, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Jack Callahan and the rest, Markin included, were strictly “from hunger” working class kids who when they hung around Tonio Pizza Parlor were as likely to be thinking up ways to grab money fast any way they could or of getting into some hot chick’s pants any way they could as anything else. Down at the base of society when you don’t have enough of life’s goods or have to struggle too much to get even that little bit “from hunger” takes a big toll on your life. I can testify to that part because Alex was not the only one in the James family to go toe to toe with the law back then when the coppers were just waiting for corner boy capers to explode nay Friday or Saturday night, it was a close thing for all us boys as it had been with Jack when all is said and done. But back then dough and sex after all was what was what for corner boys, maybe now too although you don’t see many guys hanging on forlorn Friday night corners anymore.
What made this tribe different, the Tonio Pizza Parlor corner boys, was mad monk Markin. Markin called by Frankie Riley “Scribe” from the time he came to North Adamsville from across town in junior high school and that stuck all through high school. The name stuck because although Markin was as larcenous and lovesick as the rest of them he was also crazy for books and poetry. Christ according to Alex, Markin was the guy who planned most of the “midnight creeps” they called then. Although nobody in their right minds would have the inept Markin actually execute the plan. That was for smooth as silk Frankie now also like Alex a high-road lawyer to lead. That operational sense was why Frankie was the leader then (and maybe why he was a locally famous lawyer later who you definitely did not want to be on the other side against him). Markin was also the guy who all the girls for some strange reason would confide in and thus was the source of intelligence about who was who in the social pecking order, in other words, who was available, sexually or otherwise. That sexually much more important than otherwise. See Markin always had about ten billion facts running around his head in case anybody, boy or girl, asked him about anything so he was ready to do battle, for or against take your pick.
The books and the poetry is where Jack Kerouac and On The Road come into the corner boy life of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor life. Markin was something like an antennae for anything that seemed like it might help create a jailbreak, help them get out from under. Later he would be the guy who introduced some of the guys to folk music when that was a big thing. (Alex never bought into that genre, still doesn’t, despite Markin’s desperate pleas for him to check it out. Hated whinny Bob Dylan above all else.) Others too like Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsburg and his wooly homo poem Howl from 1956 which Markin would read sections out loud from on lowdown dough-less, girl-less Friday nights. And drive the strictly hetero guys crazy when he insisted that they read the poem, read what he called a new breeze was coming down the road. They could, using that term from the times again, have given a rat’s ass about some fucking homo faggot poem from some whacko Jewish guy who belonged in a mental hospital. (That is a direct quote from Frankie Riley at the time via my brother Alex’s memory bank.)
Markin flipped out when he found out that Kerouac had grown up in Lowell, a working class town very much like North Adamsville, and that he had broken out of the mold that had been set for him and gave the world some grand literature and something to spark the imagination of guys down at the base of society like his crowd with little chance of grabbing the brass ring. So Markin force-marched the crowd to read the book, especially putting pressure on my brother who was his closest friend then. Alex read it, read it several times and left the dog- eared copy around which I picked up one day when I was having one of my high school summertime blues. Read it through without stopping almost like Jack wrote the final version of the thing on a damn newspaper scroll in about three weeks. So it was through the Scribe via Alex that I got the Kerouac bug. And now on the 60th anniversary I am passing on the bug to you.
Book Review
Visions Of Cody, Jack Kerouac, Viking Press, New York, 1973
The first three paragraphs are taken from a previous review about Jack Kerouac and his leading role in establishing the literary ethos of the "beat" generation. Those comments aptly apply in reviewing "Visions Of Cody" as well:
"As I have explained in another entry in this space in reviewing the DVD of “The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg”, recently I have been in a “beat” generation literary frame of mind. I mentioned there, as well, and I think it helps to set the mood for commenting on Jack Kerouac’s seminal ‘travelogue’, “On The Road”, that it all started last summer when I happened to be in Lowell, Massachusetts on some personal business. Although I have more than a few old time connections with that now worn out mill town I had not been there for some time. While walking in the downtown area I found myself crossing a small park adjacent to the site of a well-known mill museum and restored textile factory space.
Needless to say, at least for any reader with a sense of literary history, at that park I found some very interesting memorial stones inscribed with excerpts from a number of his better known works dedicated to Lowell’s “bad boy”, the “king of the 1950s beat writers, Jack Kerouac. And, just as naturally, when one thinks of Kerouac then Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady and a whole ragtag assortment of poets, hangers-on, groupies and genuine madmen and madwomen come to mind. They all show up, one way or another (under fictional names of course), in this book. So that is why we today are under the sign of “On The Road”.
To appreciate Kerouac and understand his mad drive for adventure and to write about it, speedily but precisely, you have to start with “On The Road”. There have been a fair number of ‘searches' for the meaning of the American experience starting, I believe, with Whitman. However, each generation that takes on that task needs a spokesperson and Jack Kerouac, in the literary realm at least, filled that bill not only for his own generation that came of age in the immediate post World War II era, but mine as well that came of age in the 1960s (and, perhaps, later generations but I can only speculate on that idea here)."
That said, “Visions Of Cody” is an extension of that “On The Road” story line that made Kerouac famous, although "Visions" is more diffuse and much more concerned with literary imager than with the storyline developed in the earlier Kerouac/Paradise narrative. Here Jack as Dulouz and Neal Cassady as Cody Pomeray do more running around on the road, partying, reflecting on the nature of the universe, partying, speculating on the nature of the American experience, partying and… well, you get the drift. In some places the descriptive language is stronger than “On The Road”, reflecting Kerouac’s greater ease with his spontaneous writing style in the early 1950s when this was written (although not widely published until after his death.).
Additionally, included here is a long series of taped interviews between Jack and Neal over several days and, presumably, while both were on a running drug “high”. These tapes reflect very nicely the very existential nature of 1950s “beat”, or at least one interpretation of that term. They produce all the madness, genius, gaffs, gaps, whimsy and pure foolishness that come from an extended drug experience. Despite all reports to the contrary not everything observed until the “influence” comes out pure literary gold, and that is true here as well. But there is a lot of good stuff nevertheless, although here it could have been cut in half and we still would have gotten that “beat” beat.
Book Review
The Further Inquiry, Ken Kesey, Viking Press, New York, 1990
In a recent DVD review of the late Dennis Hopper’s role as a fugitive radical in the 1990 comedy on the subject of the 1960s counter-culture, Flashback, I noted, no I exclaimed, no I shouted out that I was not to blame for this reach back but that the reader should blame it on Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters (including “beatnik” holdover/ bus driver Neal Cassady). Or blame it on a recent re-read of Tom Wolfe’s classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that pays “homage” to Kesey, his Pranksters, their psychedelically-painted bus "Further", and their various adventures and misadventures. Or, better, blame it on Jack Kerouac and that self-same central character Cassady (as Dean Moriarty) for his On The Road. The same sentiment can serve here in reviewing Ken Kesey’s concept book on the occasion of the 25th anniversary (1989) of the famous coast to coast (West to East, if you can believe that) bus ride/drug trip/self-awareness adventure/madcap escape that Tom Wolfe chronicled in the above-mentioned novel.
I used the words "concept book" here in exactly the right sense. Kesey, although having apparently exhausted himself in the literary field after his early successes with One Flew Over The Cukoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion still had enough savvy in him to come up with an appropriate way to celebrate his most well-known adventure. The book is set up in the form of a trial transcript. Wait a minute who is on trial at this late date? Ken Kesey, for cooking up the perhaps ill-advised adventure, or on some belatedly-revealed drug charge? No. The WASP West Coast college students out on a romp who formed the core of the Merry Pranksters finally get their comeuppance from the neo-con counter-revolutionaries ? No. Here is the funny part. It’s the bus driver, stupid-Neal Cassady-the refugee from the “beat" generation, and one of the "fathers" of the 1960s cultural uprising. And what is the charge (or charges)? Well, the modern day version of “corrupting the youth.” That makes sense, right? He should have pleaded guilty, very guilty, and be done with it.
Along the way on this "bus ride" we get plenty of "contrite" testimony about the evil genie out of the bottle Cassady, heart-rending tales about the spell he put on those “innocent” young people, about his non-stop spiel, and about his fantastic, if just slightly unorthodox, driving habits. We also get plenty of testimony in his defense, as well. And all of this is accompanied by over one hundred photographs from the old “family” album, including many, many photos of the arch-villain Cassady himself. Just a point here though. You should read Wolfe’s book before you try to read this one-this is strictly for aficionados of the “beat” and “hippie” cultural movements.
Note: The volatile figure of Neal Cassady was central to Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (as Dean Moriarty, and as Cody Pomeroy in Visions of Cody, a similar exposition). Although Neal is central to this book, a reading of Wolfe’s book places his role in a much more secondary position- something of a highly energetic, fast-talking grand old man of the “beat” generation teaching the youth “the ropes” and passing the “break the mold” bug to a new generation. That seems about right. Kerouac will be remembered as long as youth yearn for the open road, literally or spiritually. Kesey, to a lesser extent, will hold that same position. Neal Cassady will be remembered mainly for being the guy, an important guy, who glued everything together.
Finally, off of a reading of Cassady’s “testimony” here, which is somewhat painful to read at this far remove, is more incoherent drug-induced ranting than “hipness”, or wisdom for the ages. A reading of any single page of Kerouac (or Kesey, for that matter) will provide much more insight into that period. Some of the other “testimony” of the other “witnesses” reads rather obtusely as well. But hell, these guys (Kerouac, Kesey, Ginsberg, et al.) went looking for, and got, their authentic "All-American" drugstore cowboy/untutored plebeian philosopher king/jack-of-all trades/ manly sex symbol for the post-World War II world, warts and all. Neal Cassady was his name.
In Honor Of The “Old Man”- On The Anniversary Of The Death Of Leon Trotsky-Eighty Years Ago By Pierre Frank Click on the headline to link to a review of the early life of Leon Trotsky in his political memoir, My Life.
Markin comment:
Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, a man who not only was able theoretically to articulate the arc of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the theory of permanent revolution) but personally led the defend of that revolution against world imperialism and its internal Russian White Guard agents. Oh yes, and also wrote a million pro-communist articles, did a little turn at literary criticism, acted in various Soviet official capacities, led the Communist International, led the opposition first in Russia and then internationally to the Stalinist degeneration of that revolution, and created a new revolutionary international (the Fourth International) to rally the demoralized international working class movement in the face of Hitlerite reaction. To speak nothing of hunting, fishing, raising rabbits, collecting cactii and chasing Frida Kahlo around Mexico (oops, on that last one). In short, as I have characterized him before, the closest that this sorry old world has come to producing a complete communist man within the borders of bourgeois society (except that last thing, that skirt-chasing thing, although maybe not). All honor to his memory. Forward to new Octobers!
Usually on this anniversary I place a selection of Trotsky’s writings on various subjects in this space. This year, having found a site that has material related to his family life, the effect of his murder on that family, and other more personal details of his life I am placing that material here in his honor. The forward to new Octobers still goes, though. ********** Markin comment:
Of course the writer of the memorial, Pierre Frank, did no small amount throughout his political career as a "leading" member of the post-Trotsky, post-World War II, confused, sometimes massively confused, international leadership to bring down the Fourth International. At least one that Trotsky might have recognized as his own. ******* Pierre Frank
Eighty Years Ago
Published: Fourth International, Autumn 1959
Next November 7th will complete eighty years since Leon Trotsky was born. By his theoretical contribution and his militant life, he takes his place in the class of the most eminent proletarian revolutionaries, that of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg. But if these others are accepted as such in the workers' movement (which does not mean that their teachings are not trodden underfoot), the place of Trotsky, even at the present beginnings of "destalinization," has not yet been recognized. True, the crudest Stalinist lies are no longer repeated, for they would no longer find any listeners; but a number of lies and false ideas continue to drag on, including among those who think that they have been delivered from Stalinism. How many try to get out of it by saying: The struggle between Trotsky and Stalin is ancient history, outlived, a personal rivalry about more or less abstract theories, and Trotskyism -- apart from a few faithful followers -- no longer exists. This was not at all the opinion of Stalin who, after claiming that Trotskyism was dead, went on setting up -- in vain -- the most monstrous judicial machinations to kill it. Nor is it the opinion of Stalin's present successors, either. If they have not rehabilitated Trotsky and the Left Opposition, it is because they realize that it is not outlived ancient history, but one of the burning problems of the present day.
The figure and the teachings of Trotsky will inevitably find the place they deserve in the course of the anti-bureaucratic movement of the masses, and not in the bureaucracy's measures of self-defense to protect its political power and privileges.
Among some who perhaps do not lack sympathy but do lack a sense of history, what contributes to their failure to appreciate Leon Trotsky is the contrast between the last part of his life (from 1928 on) and his period of glory and power in the first years of the Russian Revolution. Max Eastman wrote in a recent article that Trotsky was a man of indecision who did not know how to fight against Stalin -- all this based on a "psychoanalysis" for the American petty bourgeois. Without expressing themselves so stupidly, there are not lacking people who think that if after all Trotsky was defeated by Stalin, it was because he pierced himself with his own sword at a given moment by his vision of the glorious period of the Russian Revolution, without understanding the new situation that was then opening up. It is, however, easy to verify the fact that it was Trotsky who really understood the new situation, whereas Stalin did not have the faintest idea of where he would be led by the struggle he started after Lenin's death. Power not only contributes to corrupt those who wield it; it also sets them on a pedestal which deforms their real stature. If someone like Trotsky lost the power, that must be his fault, and he was not so great a man as all that -- such is the reasoning of petty-bourgeois thinkers. We are convinced that the future will say that the whole greatness of Trotsky was shown most clearly in that last and so dramatic period of his existence -- such a period as none of the other great revolutionaries had to go through. Marx and Engels at the end of their days saw the workers' movement accept the doctrines that they -- for a long time almost alone -- had developed and advocated. Rosa was assassinated in a revolutionary period. Lenin died respected, just It the turning in the Russian Revolution, before he could join battle against the rising bureaucracy. It was to Trotsky, who, together with Lenin, had had the glory of leading the proletariat to power, that it fell to carry on that struggle. In it, the state that emerged from the first victorious proletarian revolution became the instrument of a narrow-minded and reactionary social layer of the new society, who systematically resorted to methods of violence within the workers' movement against the revolutionaries, cite a degree that even the reformists had not reached. In the Soviet Union alone, the number of members of the Bolshevik Party liquidated by Stalin -- according to the statement of Khrushchev at the session of the Central Committee in which he defeated Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich -- reached 1,600,000. This figure alone indicates what was then the power of the bureaucratic reaction. Its hatred was aimed with its full force against Trotsky.
Trotsky's third exile never had an equal not so much because of the agents of Stalin who never ceased to exist around Trotsky and Leon Sedov; but this exile was in practice doubled by a cloistering imposed by various capitalist governments and by the interventions of the Soviet government. True, Trotsky could leave his home, engage in physical exercise (walking, fishing, hunting, etc), but it was in fact forbidden to him to take a direct part himself in the workers' movement. It is necessary to recall the rage poured out by the Soviet press when it was learned that Trotsky had left Istanbul to give a lecture in Copenhagen. The lion had escaped from his cage; few interventions were necessary to make the Social-Democratic Danish government understand what attitude it must take. Trotsky, a man of the masses to the highest degree, a militant the essential part of whose life had been passed in workers' organizations, in fact during this last exile found himself in a sort of prison with invisible bars, for he could communicate with the world and especially with the workers' movement only through visitors under the more or less discreet control of the police of the country he was in.
What is more, he had no exchange of thoughts, no relations, with the workers' leaders of his generation: the Social-Democracy and Stalinism had divided up between them the old leaders of the workers' movement. The more recent strata -- those of the First World War and its postwar period -- provided the elements for the bureaucratic apparatuses. Those who gathered around him were quite young militants, without a past, without training. It is easy to understand that this great difference in age and experience added to his isolation from the big labor formations kept up by apparatuses.
On the occasion of the publication this year of his Diary for the years 1934-35, some persons have discovered a "human" side to Trotsky. That is because they never knew how to read Trotsky. It is not at all hard to see in all his works how much he understands -- because he shares -- the feelings of the masses risen up against all oppression. And with him, as with Marxism's other great ones, these feelings take on all the more force in that they find their source in the understanding of causes and in the conviction that mankind now possesses the means to put an end to those inhuman conditions in which the great majority of them live. Nobody was more sorely tried than he and Natalia by the most hideous manifestations of Stalinism; those who were at their side saw how they suffered each time that their children were struck down by Stalinism. But they also saw the firmness with which they faced it, and how Trotsky in his grief redoubled his strength to carry on the struggle to which he had devoted his existence.
It is not simple to summarize Trotsky's theoretical contribution to Marxism, so considerable is it.
Above all, there is the theory of the permanent revolution, formulated when he was 26, in connection with Czarist Russia, but which, because of the trend taken by the world revolution from the U S S R toward the East, in colonial and semi-colonial countries -- contains its strategic basis for nearly two thirds of humanity in our times. While the Stalinist conceptions about "socialism in a single country" and "revolution by stages" have been swept away by such gigantic facts as the Chinese Revolution, the theory of the permanent revolution is still officially ignored by some, reviled by others, who remain in tow to native bourgeoisies without strength and without future.
The fundamental strategy for the struggle for power in the advanced capitalist countries (united front and transitional programme) had been formulated by the Communist International at its IIIrd and IVth Congresses, in fact by Lenin and Trotsky. It was defended and systematically elaborated by Trotsky against Stalinist revisions (sometimes sectarian, sometimes opportunist, conceptions of the united front -- renunciation of the struggle for power and a transitional programme, and a policy of alliances with wings of the bourgeoisie, such as the Popular Front etc). Trotsky further proceeded to study in a practically exhaustive way declining capitalism's forms of defense (fascism, Bonapartism).
The creation of a first workers' state in an economically backward country and its isolation in the world raised the most complex problems on every plane. The victory of the bureaucracy and its absolute power under the tyrannical leadership of Stalin helped to aggravate all these problems. It is to Trotsky that we are indebted for the greatest clarity about these questions. On the problems of industrialization, planning, the proportions of the various branches of the economy, relations with the peasantry, relations of economic questions with soviet democracy, on political problems in the workers' state (separation of state and party, plurality of parties, etc), on cultural problems, on all problems posed today with a force rendered doubly explosive, both because of the level attained by the Soviet Union and because of the Stalinist methods of repressing independent initiative in any field whatever -- on all these problems Trotsky provided the correct method of approach, and often indeed solutions that are still valid today. That the bureaucracy, forced to take action along lines indicated by him so many years ago, should continue to manifest hostility toward Trotsky, without however resorting to the worst calumnies of the Stalin era, is easy to understand: at the basis of all Trotsky's answers there is to be found as the essential element the intervention of the masses by the reestablishment of soviet democracy.
We are leaving aside very many manifestations of Trotsky's thought in the most varied fields, in which most often he no more than sketched out the way of treating them, but which will unquestionably constitute for future Marxists -- as is the case for very many passages in the work of Marx -- a guide for tackling new problems.
There is in Trotsky's work one point on which many an admirer of today is skeptical: that is his creation of the Fourth International and his conviction that it was, as early as before the Second World War, indispensable for ensuring the future of revolutionary Marxism and of the workers' movement. We shall not take up this whole question again here, where the militants of the Fourth International have so often had occasion to deal with it. We wish only to insist on the continuity of the international and internationalist activity of Trotsky. He had been one of the representatives of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party to the Second International, and had seen its weaknesses; he had been at the foundation of the Third International, had there, together with Lenin, played the leading role, and had tried to make' it into a genuine international leadership of the revolutionary workers' movement; and had seen that one of the essential factors in its disintegration had consisted of abandoning an internationalist conception in favor of "socialism in a single country." To that it must be added that Trotsky had taken not at all lightly the error he had committed, compared to Lenin, on the question of the party. It was necessary to keep revolutionary Marxist principles intact, including that of the party -- and, after 1914, there could be no question of anything except an international party. It is there that is to be found the explanation of the immense efforts expended by Trotsky in his last years on the turbulent problems of an organization so numerically weak as the Fourth International, efforts which remain incomprehensible to those who do not understand that in so doing Trotsky was showing that he had adopted the Leninist conception of the party. On this question too, we are sure that the future will show that Trotsky was right. No one can yet foresee the forms of organization by which we shall pass from today's Fourth International of cadres to tomorrow's Fourth International of mass parties, but for us there is no doubt that the mass revolutionary Marxist movement of tomorrow will connect up with the Third International of the time of Lenin and Trotsky through the Fourth International founded in 1938 under Trotsky's leadership.
The error that Trotsky most often committed in more than one circumstance was to be ahead, and even very much ahead, of events. In that also, it may be said in passing, Trotsky found himself in the company of Marx and Engels. Although the brakes of reformism and the Soviet bureaucracy continue to have a strong effect on the mass movement throughout the world, they have lost much of their power. There is very little left of the Stalin cult five years after his death. And so we can, on this eightieth anniversary of Trotsky's birth, affirm with the greatest confidence that on his ninetieth anniversary his memory and his work will be honored by the great masses of the entire world.
Veterans for Peace is calling on churches to ring their bells at 11 AM on Sunday, November 11 - Armistice Day - in recognition of the futility of war and to show our commitment to world peace.
