A View From The Left-The Marxist Theory of the State

A View From The Left-The Marxist Theory of the State Workers Vanguard No. 1120	20 October 2017

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Marxist Theory of the State

(Quote of the Week)

As the proletarian revolution in Russia was unfolding, V.I. Lenin wrote The State and Revolution to reclaim the Marxist theory of the state from the distortions of the opportunists. Lenin underlined the need for the working class to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie and replace it with the dictatorship of the proletariat, which, extended internationally, would lay the basis for the withering away of the state in a communist society.

The completion of The State and Revolution was “‘interrupted’ by...the eve of the October revolution,” as Lenin noted in the postscript, concluding, “It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of the revolution’ than to write about it.” He continued his critique the following year in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.

Marx continued:

“Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”...

Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people—this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism.

Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists has been completely crushed, when the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then “the state...ceases to exist,” and “it becomes possible to speak of freedom.” Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realised, a democracy without any exceptions whatever. And only then will democracy begin to wither away, owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copybook maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state.

—V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (August-September 1917)

Staying The Course In Tough Political Times-Organizing Cadre-On The 100th Anniversary Of The Russian October Revolution

Staying The Course In Tough Political Times-Organizing Cadre-On The 100^th Anniversary Of The Russian October Revolution

Frank Jackman comment:

No question we, those of us who adhere to a radical or revolutionary, hell, even a liberal political perspective, are living in tough times here in America (hey, make that the world, or a lot of it). The monsters who have previously been in the shadows have come out with their bloody fangs on full display. Someone recently mentioned to me that we of the left, particularly the pro-socialist left, should wake up every day bending in prayer to the East for one Donald Trump who has been the catalyst for the current wave of people interested in fighting back, in building the resistance mostly right now from a liberal political perspective. But as life, the real everyday political life of the times, showed us back in the 1960s when I for one went from a pretty straight forward liberal who was crazy for Robert Kennedy to more radical assumptions about the way we have to move to bring serious social change that we can live with things can change rapidly in socially turbulent times. A whole slew of people, mostly young but with a smattering of older folks, shared that same trajectory with me.         

Once you get the “masses” in motion the question, as we also learned from the 1960s experience as the Vietnam War wound down or people retreated to “identity” politics is keeping them in motion, keep them interested in “staying the course.” And that is the simple point I want to make today in commenting on this article posted below I found in one of the left-wing presses that find their way to my door.  

Now over the years I have read quite a few articles from the socialist and communist press just to keep informed about what is going on out on the edges of rational politics and most of the time I let the articles pass into cyberspace. A few I will have the site moderator, Peter Paul Markin, post which may be of interest to the radical public without comment by since I am entirely capable of making  comments if necessary under my own name in my own space. Those occasions for my comment tend to be significantly fewer but this one got me thinking, kept me up late one night in fact. What kept me up was the idea of staying the course, the mass of people who have been politicized recently staying the course, unlike Markin, myself and mighty few others over the years who have held the socially progressive banner as high as possible in good times and bad. We are rare political animals for sure.            

What struck me in this tribute by the speaker to a fallen comrade who “stayed the course” in support of her political perspectives was the comment about how Leon Trotsky, a certified revolutionary for all of his adult life, some forty years, mentioned that revolutionaries, and here we can add radicals and hopefully liberals as well, live for the future. Stay the course and don’t let get beaten down at any particular point which might drive them back into the mud. Stick with the idea that even if we are small, relatively small, today in terms of active cadre who have been through some experiences, good and bad, we can take heart that politics at certain times and the state of cold civil war we are in here in America right now is one such time will galvanize the masses. But people who know something, who are or want to be cadre, who can organize have to be around. Enough said for now.      

******

Workers Vanguard No. 1106 24 February 2017 In Memory of Martha Phillips 1948–1992 The following remarks were delivered by Jon Bride, member of the International Executive Committee of the International Communist League, at a February 12 meeting in the Bay Area. Twenty-five years ago, our comrade Martha Phillips was murdered in Moscow. She died in the front lines of the fight against counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. The ICL waged an international campaign to press for an investigation into this heinous crime, but it remains unsolved. Russia was the birthplace of the communist program. Martha understood that Soviet Russia belonged to the workers of the whole world and that we were coming home to defend the gains of the October Revolution. For Trotskyists the USSR had never been a foreign country, and we can say truly that Martha died in her homeland. Before joining our tendency, Martha had been a member of the American SWP [Socialist Workers Party]. There she took on the “pint-sized Kautskyites,” as she called them, who were seeking to build a “peaceful, legal” anti-Vietnam War movement. This was a gigantic popular front with liberal Democrats, whose purpose was to prevent a defeat for U.S. imperialism. Martha was won to Spartacism and fought for “Military Victory to the NLF” [National Liberation Front] and “All Indochina Must Go Communist!” She died in Moscow fighting for the same revolutionary internationalist program she defended against the renegades in the SWP who had reconciled themselves with their own bourgeoisie. Martha did not have an easy life. She had a handicapped child. In midlife, she began a serious study of the Russian language. Later, she got a job teaching in a Soviet school. Her Soviet friends were astounded that any foreigner would live like that. She could have found an easier way to survive, but Martha wanted to get a better sense of how Soviet working people lived. Martha was the leader and principal spokesman of the ICL group in Moscow. This job was not made easier for her, as a Jewish woman communist, in a period when anti-Jewish bigotry and backward social attitudes were proliferating in the final days of the Soviet Union. She was one of several outstanding women leaders in the ICL; her interview with Soviet women in Women and Revolution [No. 40, Winter 1991-92] is testimony to Martha’s conviction that a Leninist party must be a tribune of the people. Trotsky once said that all genuine revolutionaries live for the future; that is, they refuse to sacrifice principle for temporary expedient. Martha refused to allow herself to be daunted by the temporary setbacks of today or yesterday. When asked by skeptics how many members we had, she always replied: “A few less than Lenin had at the time of Zimmerwald.” She often made the point that at the time of the February Revolution, the Mensheviks had larger numbers, more writers, etc. But Lenin had a hard cadre trained in a revolutionary program. That is what made the difference. For her entire political life, Martha was a party person from head to toe, understanding that it was the subjective element that was indispensable to proletarian victory. ****** "I want to die a communist"-and he did

Workers Vanguard No. 1119	6 October 2017

Edward Cliffel

1939–2017

Our comrade Ed Cliffel died in Orlando, Florida, at the age of 78. At his side were his wife, Linda, and daughter Lauren. Also, two comrades were sent to be with him in his final hours. Ed had been in New York assisting Workers Vanguard and the central party leadership when he became gravely ill and had to be hospitalized. He died on September 23, only three weeks after a diagnosis of aggressive metastatic cancer.

Edward James Cliffel was born in Cleveland on 28 August 1939 and grew up in a working-class family. In a 2012 interview, recorded as part of a younger comrade’s oral history project aimed at preserving the experiences and knowledge of senior party cadre, he described his family’s politics as “right-wing Catholic” and anti-Communist. He was moved by the injustice of his father’s life—just working and sleeping—and thought the working class deserved better. In 1957, he enrolled at Case Institute of Technology but left two years later after getting involved in other pursuits—mainly politics but also playing bridge. Having worked as a postal worker for a year and a half, Ed then returned to education, eventually earning a master’s degree in psychology. His professional knowledge and understanding of people were invaluable to the party in many situations. His job was psychology, but Ed’s profession was communist politics.

Ed was a leader of our organization for nearly four and a half decades. He was elected an alternate member of the Spartacist League Central Committee (CC) in 1977. He was a member of the Central Control Commission from 1980 to 1983. He became a full CC member in 1983 and served in that capacity until his death. Ed became a full member of the International Executive Committee (IEC) of the ICL beginning in 1992. He took a hard stand in defense of Leninism on the national question in the fight leading up to our Seventh International Conference earlier this year (see Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 65, Summer 2017). He actively participated in that conference, even as he was recovering from open-heart surgery, and became a consultative member of the IEC.

Ed joined the party in 1973 as part of a fusion process between the Spartacist League and the Cleveland Marxist Caucus (CMC). At 34 years old, he was older than most of those we were recruiting at that time. While many of those who burned with revolutionary fervor during those tumultuous years of anti-racist and antiwar struggles soon returned to the more comfortable options available to them, Ed was steadfast in placing his life in the service of his communist convictions.

The Cleveland Marxist Caucus was a loose collective of friends and sometime cothinkers who were moving toward systematic study of Marxism. The political origins of the CMC members lay in the breakup of the New Left, coming individually from the Cleveland Students for a Democratic Society, the Movement for a Democratic Society and Weatherman. Other members came out of the Cleveland women’s liberation movement.

In this period, the SL and its youth organization had a number of regroupments with local New Leftist groupings that were studying Marxism and becoming convinced of the need for a revolutionary party. One of these was the Buffalo Marxist Caucus, which had ties with and strongly influenced the CMC. Our fusion with the Buffalo Marxist Caucus in November 1972 paved the way for winning Ed and other CMC members, including his lifelong friend and comrade, Corky.

Ed authored the article for WV that described the CMC’s roots and its process of fusion:

“The group’s definitive break with New Leftism, opening the door to development on the basis of Marxism, thus came from the piecemeal recognition that isolated sectors of the oppressed, organized around struggles for immediate needs, do not automatically come to socialist conclusions. The group’s illusions as to the revolutionary potential of the lumpenized ‘community’ dwindled as the destructive effects of lumpenization were realized. Such struggles do not spontaneously come together and unite in socialist revolution...but must be united behind the class struggle of the workers through the agency of a mass, working-class vanguard party.”

— “Cleveland Workers Vanguard Committee Formed,” WV No. 17, March 1973

As a party member, Ed moved from Cleveland to New York in 1974. He played a leading role in the NYC local, including as education director, and wrote for the party press. Ed transferred to Chicago in March 1979 and, over time, became the central political leader of that local. A frequent and effective public spokesman, Ed was the SL’s presenter at a formal debate with the Chicago-based Sojourner Truth Organization in 1981 on “The Polish Events and the Russian Question.” The account in WV No. 275 (27 February 1981) includes extensive quotes from Ed’s remarks—he wiped the floor with his anti-Soviet opponent.

Comrade Ed possessed a keen understanding of the U.S. and its peculiarities, of the many ways in which black oppression has been and remains at the core of American history and political life. In a 1995 exchange with an official of the International Association of Machinists who defended the union bureaucracy’s chauvinist protectionism, Ed skewered the union tops:

“The class collaborationism of the union officialdom has sapped the organized strength of the working class. Nor is that all. The savage attacks on the living standards of working people and on the very ability of the poor and helpless to live, the slashing of health care at all levels, the McJobs and empty futures of youth, the rampant racist attacks and massive incarceration of blacks (a social agenda neatly fitting with that of the Ku Klux Klan) are, no less, the products of this treacherous collaboration. Those who you defend, with the bosses, have made this bed. Others, however, must sleep in it.”

— “Exchange on Boeing Strike,” WV No. 634, 1 December 1995

Ed was arguably WV’s best writer, and drafted many of our front-page articles. His prose was always eloquent and persuasive, drawing on a broad range of sources—from Shakespeare and the King James Bible to popular movies. He presented complex issues concisely and often with mordant humor. His knowledge was wide-ranging, as reflected in his incisive remarks in meetings and contributions to our internal bulletins.

To cite one example, Ed was instrumental in strengthening our programmatic understanding of the Chinese deformed workers state. In 1997, he initiated a discussion on a formulation that had appeared in Spartacist which defended “the right of independence for a Tibetan soviet republic.” Ed pointed out that there was no objective basis for an independent soviet Tibet, one of the most backward and inaccessible regions on earth. By offering such an illusory perspective, we were making a “curtsy toward ‘human-rights’-led counterrevolution,” i.e., the Tibetan “independence” movement of the Dalai Lama and his imperialist sponsors. Ed was right and was the author of an article correcting the line in the Spartacist piece. It was published in WV No. 695 (28 August 1998) under the headline “‘Free Tibet’: Rallying Cry for Counterrevolution in China.”

Ed was a presence, his booming laugh irresistible. He was a voracious reader of everything, from politics and history to science, poetry and literature, and enjoyed a wide range of music—classical, jazz, Sinatra, Meat Loaf. He thought outside the box and was one of the most creative, independent and critical Marxist thinkers in our party. Ed was always looking for political discussion and debate—usually over copious amounts of alcohol. His mind was brilliant and his spirit was kindly belligerent; his gusto for life was Falstaffian. He had a deep sense of the human condition. In his public political work, people of every background quickly opened up to him.

Ed’s death is a great loss to the ICL. It is an indescribable diminution of our collective knowledge, culture and political understanding. We extend our condolences to Linda, Ed’s companion for 45 years, and Lauren. Linda has told us that Ed used to say, “My one wish is to die a communist.” Indeed, Ed lived as he had wanted to and died with his boots on, in the trenches of the struggle for a communist future.

Memorial meetings for comrade Ed Cliffel are being organized in Chicago and New York. Please contact us for more information.

A View From The Left-Self-Determination and Socialist Revolution

A View From The Left-Self-Determination and Socialist Revolution

Workers Vanguard No. 1119 6 October 2017 TROTSKY LENIN Self-Determination and Socialist Revolution (Quote of the Week) In many of his writings, V.I. Lenin emphasized that the fight of subjugated peoples against their national oppression was a necessary link in the struggle of the international working class for socialist revolution. Lenin’s intransigent fight for the self-determination of nations, that is, the right to separate and establish an independent state, was crucial for the Bolshevik Party in winning the confidence of the various nationalities imprisoned within the tsarist empire. Not only the right of nations to self-determination, but all the fundamental demands of political democracy are only partially “practicable” under imperialism, and then in a distorted form and by way of exception (for example, the secession of Norway from Sweden in 1905). The demand for the immediate liberation of the colonies that is put forward by all revolutionary Social-Democrats is also “impracticable” under capitalism without a series of revolutions. But from this it does not by any means follow that Social-Democracy should reject the immediate and most determined struggle for all these demands—such a rejection would only play into the hands of the bourgeoisie and reaction—but, on the contrary, it follows that these demands must be formulated and put through in a revolutionary and not a reformist manner, going beyond the bounds of bourgeois legality, breaking them down, going beyond speeches in parliament and verbal protests, and drawing the masses into decisive action, extending and intensifying the struggle for every fundamental democratic demand up to a direct proletarian onslaught on the bourgeoisie, i.e., up to the socialist revolution that expropriates the bourgeoisie.... Increased national oppression under imperialism does not mean that Social‑Democracy should reject what the bourgeoisie call the “utopian” struggle for the freedom of nations to secede but, on the contrary, it should make greater use of the conflicts that arise in this sphere, too, as grounds for mass action and for revolutionary attacks on the bourgeoisie. —V.I. Lenin, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (January-February 1916)

Once Again On The - 75th Anniversary Of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman’s “Casablanca” -

Once Again On The - 75^th Anniversary Of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman’s “Casablanca” -

By Bart Webber (October 2017)

I have spent much ink this year starting almost at the beginning of the year writing about the classic black and white film Casablanca a staple at every retro-film locale including the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I first saw it with a “hot date” back in the late 1960s. “Hot date” in those days for those not around then or who have forgotten (shame on you) in the female department being a gal who wore short dresses (mini-skirts being a heavy fashion sea-change brought over I think by the English rock invasion which in any case replaced the severe stiff collared shirt and long flouncy, I guess that is the right word, skirt of earlier high school times) and long hair. Long hair also something of a sea-change brought not from over the ocean deeps but locally by imitation of folk-singing icon Joan Baez among the folk set which I was hung up on. (Many a young woman with less than candid straight hair had told me that she spent not a few hours “ironing” her hair to perdition to get that cool “look”)      

More important than the skirt-hair combo attached to the folk scene aficionado-hood a date who did not mind going on a cheap date (hell the theater admission was about a dollar maybe two so there was something left over for the obligatory popcorn) when I told her what film we would be seeing. (That cheap movie date acceptance usually having already having been charted by a first or second date Harvard Square coffeehouse date where for the price of two long sipped cups of coffee and a shared pastry you could sit and talk to while away the night, sometimes depending on the night accompanied by some rising folk singer working out his or her performance kinks playing for the “basket” passed through the audience.)    

Now I am talking about Casablanca but when the Brattle did a retro usually there were twelve to twenty films in the repertoire almost all of which I would have either seen in my youth with my old friend Sam Lowell, who later became a film critic for a bunch of alternative newspapers like back in the day like The Rolling Stone, or by myself on Saturday afternoon double feature days at the Strand Theater in North Adamsville where we grew up. The young woman in this Casablanca scenarios and maybe others as well somehow had asked her mother who had been there on the first run about the film and so was intrigued about this hot on-screen romance during wartime between Rick and Ilsa. I am sure the mother young and in love with some departed soldier boy ready to go to Europe or the Pacific to do battle against that age’s night-takers filled her head with all the classic expressions and all the intimate moments when the two wartime star-crossed lovers had to go their separate ways reflecting just a bit her own concerns. Maybe she couldn’t explain the twenty some years after tear in her eye when reciting the plotline to that young daughter but she must have reflected on that line “We’ll always have Paris” dovetailing with her own broody thoughts back then.    

Here’s what was really nice about that particular date and I may have owed it all to the film (and a mother’s reflections too not recognized at the time.  That movie coupled with a quick after film stop at equally cheap Harvard Square Hayes Bickford for coffee (always an iffy proposition depending on when the stuff was brewed also iffy) and some kind of pastry that had been sitting on the stainless steel dessert shelves for who knows how long got me away without having to call “Dutch treat.” (Of course going to a local coffeehouse for coffee and pastry was out of the question once the gold bars had been spent on the movie and that mandatory popcorn.) The Hayes in those days not only a waystation for winos, the homeless and friendless and con artists but a place where rising folk-singers and their hangers-on hung out on the cheap.

Naturally that Hayes-Bickford coffee take in led to a play by play recording of her and my takes on the film. Maybe naturally as well from a viewing perspective the conversation turned into a guy-gal thing me thinking about the resistance action parts and she with the romance lingering fragrance. I remember I concentrated on Rick Blaine’s moving off dead-center “a curse on both your houses” I ain’t doing nothing for nobody approach at the beginning of the film to his giving up his life’s love for the cause of fighting the night-takers one more time.

The key to me was that Rick was not just some grumbling ex pat stuck in Casablanca trying to get over a broken love affair but that he had a past, a good past, as we find out when he is introduced to the Germans come to check on the Vichy French and they seem to know all about his past (including the color of his eyes). Rick had smuggled guns to the Ethiopians during the Italian invasion and fought for the Loyalist side in Spain so he had no love lost for the German night-takers when they showed up in Casablanca to keep that eye on their Vichy French collaborators. Moreover even as an American in Paris where he had met and fallen in love with Ilsa when the Germans were ready to come marching into Paris it was no accident that he (and he assumed love Ilsa) had to get out of Paris quickly before they had a chance to pick him up. So his later actions, his so-called “gesture for love” giving those damn letters of transport away gratis made more sense.                

Of course that gal, that Mary Beth to finally give her a name, came back at me on that “gesture of love” business which she felt I had expressed kind of sarcastically when she pointed out that Rick’s new found interest in life, in being more than a “saloon-keeper,” a “gin-joint operator” and a drunk and womanizer all changed when spring flower Ilsa showed up at his doors. Mary Beth honed in on the scene where after first being re-introduced to Ilsa and introduced to the legendary Lazlo and after castigating his longtime employee Sam for playing the sentiment “their” song he gets good and drunk and starts thinking about those Paris days. From that point on he comes alive, starts to think about him and Ilsa high-tailing it. When that came to nothing, when he saw that the troubles of three people in a big old world turning in on itself he made the fateful gesture-and committed to the struggle. So just as naturally as going to the Hayes-Bickford to chat about the film we agreed to disagree and leave it at that.      

But got me as well another six months of very nice dates so my memories of that gorgeous film with the six million quotable and unforgettable lines from “play it again, Sam” (Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa request to Humphrey Bogart  Rick’s main entertainment provider Dooley Wilson to play the sentimental As Time Goes By) to that “We will always have Paris” (when Rick responds to Ilsa’s bewilderment that he is letting her take that last plane to Lisbon with those wicked blood-stained letters of transit provided by him to her husband Czech liberation leader Victor Laszlo so he  can continue to do his work against the night-takers running the world in those days) are still pristine.              

As we commemorate the 75^th anniversary of that premier of that film I am not the only one who is crazy for this movie since I am enclosing a link to an interview done by Terry Gross on her Fresh Air show on NPR with film historian Noah Isenberg on  the making of the classic Hollywood film in his new book, We'll Always Have Casablanca. "  Needless to say when I get my greedy little hands on that item I will be reviewing it in this space. This guy has me and even know it all Sam Lowell who knows a lot about all the characters particularly the fate of Paul Henreid l beaten six ways to Sunday with what he knows about that film. Kudos.  

http://www.npr.org/2017/10/11/557101633/75-years-later-a-look-at-the-life-legend-and-afterlife-of-casablanca

When Legendary Bank Robber Pretty James Preston Made The Bankers Squeal-And All The Women Sweat-With Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton And Cate Blanchett’s “Bandits” (2001) In Mind-A Special Guest Commentary

When Legendary Bank Robber Pretty James Preston Made The Bankers Squeal-And All The Women Sweat-With Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton And Cate Blanchett’s “Bandits” (2001) In Mind-A Special Guest Commentary   

By Special Guest Scott Allen, contributing editor North Adamsville Ledger

Bandits, starring Cate Blanchett, Billy Bob Thornton, Bruce Willis, 2001  

The legendary Pretty James Preston, bank robber, solo bank robber, would have had the so-called “Sleep-over bandits,” Terry and Joe, a couple of cons, a couple of holy goofs really, masquerading as bank robbers in the film Bandits, for lunch and had time for a nap. And I am just the guy who knows that hard fact for after all I was the guy who put together the legend, wrote up Pretty James’ exploits right up until the end. See I was nothing but a young cub reporter, a clog in the back- room police beat death march for the heralded North Adamsville Ledger in the 1970s when Pretty James was robbing, arms in hand, every bank and department store not entombed in concrete around Eastern Massachusetts when I saw my chance for a by-line in maybe the Boston Globe, maybe television. anything but that stinking police backroom that smelled of stale coffee and staler donuts. My “in” was that I knew Pretty James in high school and once I connected with him, once he knew he could trust me as far as he could trust anybody I became essentially his publicity flak, his press agent to make that legend that he always craved deep down inside. Don’t get me wrong Pretty James wanted the dough, and plenty of it fast and easy but that legend business was never far below the surface when we would meet in downtown Boston across from the JFK Federal Building which he insisted on to put a thumb in the government’s eye just for kicks, because he could do the deed.   

(By the way Pretty James’ mode of operation, modus operandi okay, was always to show plenty of firepower when on a job. One night over beers at Shacky’s he told me that was the only thing, other than surprise, that will keep everybody afraid to breathe, including bank guards and department store security. Somehow he got some M-16s, AR-15s which are semi-automatic assault rifles they used in Vietnam where they were not worth crap, would jam up in the mud, and would go into with one in every hand. Although people still don’t believe it thinking I made it up as part of the Pretty James legend on an early job he did actually fire the guns, in the air, after he left the building just to prove that he was willing to do what was necessary to get the dough-easy or hard. For a long time, almost ten years he never had to do any more shooting, so he probably was right to “show the colors” early on. All I did was verify with a witness on the street that he had fired the weapons when I did my report on the action, nothing more.)              

In lots of ways touting Pretty James was a piece of cake, easy once he started consulting me, always theoretically to be sure, about what actions would draw some attention to him, what the world wanted from a lone gunman essentially in the days when bank robbing still had some cache. Pretty James had plenty of advantages-one being that he was a stone-cold bank robber whose instincts until the end were unerring, knew what would draw and what would not. Big granite-etched banks which in those days of symbolic show were pictures of safe harbors for a depositor’s money were prime targets. As the banking industry went suburban, went to cheapjack trailers and small storefronts they were not although as Pretty, lets’ just call him Pretty from here on in to save space since you know who I am talking about, kept telling me even I could stick-up, his term, half of them. When he decided to vary up his game and hit department stores he avoided the ones that had kids’ clothes and toys as too dangerous while, as will become apparent in a minute a women’s clothing store was the cat’s meow. Hell, some women, and I still have my notes and still have my disbelief would go shopping just to see if Pretty was going to hit their shopping spree place that day. As already noted, better unlike Terry and Joe who were something out of the late Jimmy Breslin’s The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight worked alone, didn’t have to deal with informers who got caught, sharing plans that might go awry-or the dough. Even better, from a commercial legend point of view and a newspaper’s as well Pretty went into the bank or store in broad daylight with no ruse just plenty of nerve and firepower. He could lead off the late edition or the 6 o’clock news and jump ratings. Best of all he really was “pretty” a wiry good- looking guy in the mold of the bad-ass biker criminal that Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy chased in 48 Hours so all the women would sweat over him, and in the real contact cases cover him and hide him out. I remember in high school girls who were supposed to be social butterflies, who were on the top of the totem pole, who wouldn’t dream of even noticing a low-rent biker were known to show up at Pretty house and get taken whatever way they wanted. You didn’t go to Pretty’s at midnight for anything else but to curl his toes. Sweet.

          

Sure, I will get to the two deadbeat amateur bank robbers Terry and Joe, along with their collective squeeze, their so-called hostage, Kate and how they took a page from the late George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle caper that Jimmy Skaggs started way back when grabbing the bank manager and holding his or her family hostage while they brought the manager to his little bank and grabbed the cash-no sweat. The only thing they did, a variation if you will, was grab the bank personnel the night before. Big deal. But first let me explain how I worked my Pretty legend magic once I got his go ahead.

Every reporter, hell, maybe everybody who can write more than a sentence or two knows that half, maybe more, of what you put out in print, in behalf of making a legend is pure bullshit, crap. Here is what most of those who can write don’t know though people, the great unwashed masses, lead such dull existences that they will believe almost all of what they read or heard about-if it makes them feel good, if they connect. Like I said I already had a running start with the women, young and old as it turned out because of Pretty’s looks to make the clincher though I needed the guys. I will say that Pretty, determined, single-minded Pretty, was hard on his women, those who protected him, and those who wanted to. I won’t say at this late date he was a “love them and leave them” guy but he surely was no hearts and flowers to the ladies guy, except that last gal, that Sally something and here I will be on safe ground not giving a last name because even a “simp” knows that once she blew town she changed that moniker more than once. Toward the end I would get letters from some disheartened women who tried to protect Pretty, hide him out and while none of them finked on him to the coppers they also didn’t think he was that great in the sack, seemed preoccupied with the next hit, the next target, what it would take to keep the trail hot. That is when I knew I would have to double-down on his reputation, advise him a little to get even more daring with his exploits.       

I played the old Robin Hood gag that writers have been using forever-taking from the rich and giving to the poor. What a laugh if you knew Pretty. Maybe he left a fifty- cent tip for some diner waitress he was looking to screw, looking to have play his flute as he called it, but the guy was nothing but a self-indulgent fool, would go through the dough living high off the hog at the Ritz for months at a time with a different woman, maybe two, every night, stuff like that. But giving dough away was not his thing, he told me so flat-out and I kind of knew from my own family that he hungered for a lot of things he didn’t have as kid. I made his giving a hundred here, two hundred there to his women like charity with a little twist of paying off the whole of Babylon thrown in. Pretty never paid for his women, never paid for sex and you can believe than, huh, take it to the bank. I had him giving dough to the families of those in “the projects” over in Adamsville where he grew up and also to the Sacred Heart Church where he went once, maybe twice as a kid. Pure gold, although don’t go to either location looking for examples of how much he gave to anybody. Zilch. Still an easy sell especially once he branched out into an occasional department store heist and people would be waiting in line, especially older women, older meaning then in their thirties, maybe with a couple of kids, a tired ass of a husband and a bleak future to see if he was going to show up and rob that place that day and maybe they would get some of his largesse.           

That is the public bullshit, the crap for public consumption but go back a bit to where I described Pretty as a stone-cold bank robber, a guy who robbed whatever he robbed in broad daylight, armed to the teeth and taking no prisoners as the saying goes. I don’t know if Pretty knew about Willie Sutton, an early famous bank robber who was credited with the observation when asked later about why he robbed banks-that is where the money is.  I never mentioned Willie or his observation you don’t crowd one legend with tales of another, especially if you are tasked with making the new guy’s up but Pretty went after the dough with something like that kind of concentration to get the dough. A few people, a few heroes who tried to stop him took the fall and early on I used the old gag that being a hero was for cops and professionals leave Pretty alone, get out alive. In the end though I couldn’t save him “rep” when on that last caper, the big Granite National Bank job over in Braintree he wasted four customers who tried to rush him after a silly bank guard who thought the bank’s money was his or something took a shot at him and Pretty unloaded. Ran into the streets, they say he was looking down the block, looking for that Sally who had his ride, or maybe that is the way I wrote it was gunned down in a hail of bullets. That Sally never did surface, never contacted me in any way to give her side of the story but I like to think for one fucking time in his too short life Pretty tried to protect somebody by taking those slugs without a murmur. Maybe that is why she never peeped to me. Never did get that Globe job though. Yeah, Pretty was a piece of work while he lasted.

Now to the holy goofs, the Sleepy Hollow Bandits or whatever they called themselves who have given me something to whale on courtesy of site manager Greg Green who took Seth Garth’s advice and hired me to do this one-shot special guest reviewer job. I didn’t know Seth then back when Pretty was tearing up the place but met him later when he mentioned that he had read everything I had written about Pretty being a hometown North Adamsville boy. He is the one who encouraged me to tell the tale about a real bank robber not some misplaced schoolboy antics which went out with Bonnie and Clyde. And I have but part of the deal was to tell what was seriously wrong with the legend these dopes Terry and Joe were trying to put together.

You already know about their stealing Jimmy Skaggs’ playbook move to ease the way on getting into the bank. That though was old even back in the 1970s because the coppers through an informer, the guy who sold Jimmy’s guys the guns, were able to wrap that caper up without a muss or fuss. The worst thing though was maybe the guys had heard of Willie Sutton, its hard to say because their first freaking bank robbery was done without plan, without thinking things through and Pretty would tell you, Willie too, you need a plan, plan, plan plan, especially if you are going to last for ten years like Pretty did without catching day one of jailtime. I won’t even go into the double-dipping, actually triple-dipping since they had a third guy as a driver to split the dough with. Pretty would have freaked big time on that shares stuff. He told me once he actually took a cab from a bank robbery scene in Stoughton, the car was across from the bank, he got in, where to and that was it. Gave the cabbie ten bucks and thought he was a great guy for doing so. His haul one hundred thou not bad for a day’s work minus that ten bucks. (I was always careful about how much the bank takes were since it was in the coppers and banks’ interest to jack up the take to make the “perp” look harder than he was and for the bank to grab some easy fed insurance money. I also took a skeptical eye to whatever Pretty said his haul was since in the interest of his legend he might jack up the heist price. On the Stoughton caper, for example, the take was fifty thou not one hundred so maybe that ten bucks to the cabbie really was big to Pretty)       

You know how hard Pretty was on his women, except maybe that last one, mainly us them to hide him out, fuck them and then move on, no strings around him, no revealing plans or ideas. The cardinal sin of these holy goofs, this Terry and Joe comedy act if you think about it was grabbing that weirdo Kate, not because she wasn’t a good-looking little redhead but because when you throw a woman in the mix you get nothing but trouble with a capital “T.” You know this Kate stirred both men, and she played them on that seesaw. Got them crazy for no good reason. Let me tell you what Pretty told me about the one time he thought about taking a woman along, some twist he met at a gin mill in New York while he was on “vacation.” She was maybe nineteen and build for trouble, big trouble if a guy let himself get involved with her. Well Pretty did for a while. Got hot as nails for her. Decided that he needed a look-out (probably what he expected Sally to do on that last doomed caper I don’t know since the last time I saw him was in a morgue) and so he brought the twist along. When showtime came she vanished, went long gone and the caper depended on that look-out job she was supposed to perform since this bank was across from a police station. He barely got out alive with twenty-five thou (actually ten and some change) and never went that route again. You know I could go on and on about these goofs, about Pretty but you can see by now that Pretty would have had them for lunch. Maybe dinner too.     

Our Lady Of The Mountain-With Hazel Dickens In Mind    

By Zack James

Jack Callahan caught the folk minute bug when he was in high school in his hometown of Carver back in maybe 1961, 1962 he was not sure now exactly which with the elapse of almost sixty years and his memory not what it once had been. Knew it could not be before that since Jack Kennedy, of his own clan and brethren was President then so 1961 would be the earliest. Caught that bug after having heard some songs that held him in thrall over a fugitive radio station from Rhode Island, a college station, that every Sunday night would have a two hour show called Bill Marlowe’s Hootenanny where he, Bill Marlowe, would play all kinds of songs. Songs from the latest protest songs of the likes of then somewhat unknown but soon to explode onto scene as the media-ordained king of folk Bob Dylan and sullen severe Phil Ochs to old country blues, you know, Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and above all Mississippi John Hurt who were “discovered” and feted by adoring mostly white urban college students who had a famous “king of the blues’ shoot-out one year down at the Newport Folk Festival to Bob   Wills and Milton Brown Western Swing and everything in between. A fast paced glance at a very different part of the American songbook from which he knew either from his parent’s dreary (his term) 1940s Frank Sinatra-Andrews Sisters-Inkspots material to budding rock and roll. What got to Jack, what caused him to pay attention though was the mountain music that he heard, things like East Virginia, Pretty Polly and his favorite the mournful Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies sung by Linda Lane, a now forgotten treasure of a singer from deep in the Tennessee hills somewhere whose voice can still haunt his dreams.     

Now this adhesion to folk minute was quite by accident since most Sunday nights if Jack was listening to anything it was Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour out of WNAC in Chicago where the fix was on for the electric blues and rhythm and blues that were the precursors of that rock which would be the staple of his early musical tastes (and reaction to that parent’s dreary 1940s music but that story has been told elsewhere and this is about mountain music so forward). Usually in those days something had gone awry or some ghost was in the air in radio wave land, classmate Irwin Silver the science wiz of his school tried to explain it one day but he never really caught the drift of the science behind it,   and he had caught that station and then the Rhode Island Station, WAFJ. Although he was becoming something of an aficionado of blues just then and would become something of a folk one as well his real love then was the be-bop classic rock and roll music that was the signature genre for his generation (and again for those who missed the point the bane of his parents). He never lost the love of rock or the blues but he never went all out to discover material he had never heard before like he did with mountain music. 

One summer, this was 1964 he thought, while he was in college in Boston, he had decided rather than a summer job he would head south down to mountain country, you know West Virginia, Kentucky maybe rural Virginia and see if he could find some tunes that he had not heard before. (That “no job” decision did not set well with his parents, his poor parents who both worked in the local industry, the cranberry bogs, when that staple was the town’s claim to fame so he could go to college but that is a story for another day). Now it was not strange in those days for all kinds of people, mostly college students with time on their hands, archivists, or musicians to travel down to the southern mountains and elsewhere in search of authentic American music by the “folk.” Not professional archivists like Pete Seeger’s father, Charles, or the Lomaxes, father and son, or inspired amateurs like Harry Smith from earlier times but young people looking for roots which was a great occupation of the generation that came of age in the 1960s in reaction to their parents’ generation trying might and main to favor vanilla Americanization, golden age modernization and forget the hunky, dusty, dirty immigrant pasts. (A sad admission in an immigrant country except for those indigenous peoples who ground we stand on today making no discrimination between sacred or profane land, or mocking those distinctions. Sadder today when vast tracts of people are being denied access to their sacred and profane lands down along the gringo-imposed southern American border and working the northern ones now too. But that story too is for another day.)      

A lot of the young, and that included Jack who read the book in high school, had first been tuned into Appalachia through Michael Harrington’s The Other America which prompted them to volunteer to help their poor brethren. Jack was somewhat animated by that desire to help but his real purpose was to be a gadfly who found some hidden trove of music that others had not found. In this he was following the trail started by the Lally Brothers, a local Boston folk group who were dedicated to the preservation of mountain music and having headed south had “discovered” Buell Hobart, the lonesome fiddler and had brought him north to do shows and be acclaimed as the “max daddy” of the mountain world.    

Jack had spent a couple of weeks down in Kentucky after having spent a couple of weeks striking out in West Virginia where, for a fact, most of the rural folk were either rude or suspicious of his motives when he inquired about the whereabouts of some old-time red barn musicians he had read about from outside Wheeling. Then one night, one Saturday night he found himself in Prestonsburg, down in southeast Kentucky, down in coal country where the hills and hollows extent for miles around. He had been brought to that town by a girl, a cousin of his high school friend Jimmy Jenkins who was later killed in hellhole Vietnam on his father’s side from back home in Carver. Jimmy had told Jack to look her up if he ever got to Hazard where his father had hailed from and had lived before World War II had driven him to the Marines and later to love of his mother from Carver.  

This girl, a pretty girl to boot, Nadine, had told Jack that mountain music had been played out in Hazard, that whatever legends about the coal wars and about the music had long gone from that town. She suggested that he accompany her to an old-fashioned red barn dance that was being held weekly at Fred Brown’s place on Saturday nights on the outskirts of Prestonsburg if he wanted to hear the “real deal” (Jack’s term). That night when they arrived and paid their dollar apiece jack saw a motley crew of fiddlers, guitar player, and a few of what Nadine called mountain harps.

The first half of the dance went uneventfully enough but the second half, after he had been fortified with what the locals called “white lightning,” illegal whiskey, this woman came up to the stage after being introduced although he did not for some reason remember her name at first, maybe the sting of the booze and began to play the mountain harp and sing a song, The Hills of Home, that had everybody mesmerized. She sang a few other songs that night and Jack marveled at her style. When Jack asked Nadine who that woman singer was she told him a gal from “around those parts” (her expression) Hazel Dickens and wasn’t she good. When Jack got back to Boston a few weeks later (after spending more time with friendly Nadine in that searching for mountain music) he contacted the Lally Brothers to see if they could coax her north for college audiences to hear. They did so although Hazel initially was fearful of coming north to what she thought was a crime-ridden black plague city but which turned out since she was to play at Harvard’s Memorial Hall an ivy-covered sanctuary which she would visit several times later in her career and recognize as the start of her break-out from the hills and hollows of home to a candid world.  That was Jack Callahan’s small proudly boasted contribution to keeping the mountain music tradition alive. For her part Hazel Dickens did before she dies several years ago much, much more to keep the flame burning.            

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Juliet Mitchell On Freud And Marx-"Pyschoanalysis And Feminism"- A Book Review (March 1975)

Markin comment:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
***********
From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-Juliet Mitchell On Freud And Marx-"Pyschoanalysis And Feminism"- A Book Review (March 1975)

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FEMINISM by Juliet Mitchell. New York: Random House, Pantheon Books, $8.95 hardcover, 456 pp.

A Review by Ed Clarkson

The pioneering theories of Sigmund Freud have engendered stormy controversy in scientific, literary and political circles ever since their embryonic formulation around the turn of the century. The birth of the psychoanalytic movement was attended by a split between co-workers Freud and Breuer, and dissension was frequently to beset the developing psychoanalytic school as many of Freud's collaborators and followers rejected central tenets of his theories—the role of the unconscious, the importance of sexuality and its energizer libido, and the critical significance of the Oedipus conflict in personality development.

Likewise in the communist movement heated debates have raged over the validity of Freudianism as a science of human behavior. As a consequence of the growing bureaucratic degeneration of the backward and isolated Soviet workers state, Freudian theory came under attack in the Soviet Union in the mid-1920's from both Stalinist-Bukharinist bureaucratic philistines in the party and the intelligentsia following Pavlov, whose ideas had the dual advantage of being more ostensibly materialistic and having a Russian origin—no small consideration for the proponents of ^"socialism in one country."

Marxism vs. Freudianism?

It was the embattled Trotsky who insisted against the vulgar materialists that Freudian psychoanalytic theory required attentive consideration. In a 1926 essay on culture and socialism, which is breathtaking in its brilliance, Trotsky evaluates Freud as follows:
"The school of the Viennese psychoanalyst Freud proceeds in a different way [than Pavlov]. It assumes in advance that the driving force of the most complex and delicate of psychic processes is a physiological need. In this general sense it is materialistic, if you leave aside the question whether it does not assign too big a place to the sexual factor at the expense of others, for this is already a dispute within the frontiers of materialism.

But the psychoanalyst does not approach problems of consciousness experimentally, going from the lowest phenomena to the highest, from the simple reflex to the complex reflex; instead, he attempts to take all these intermediate stages in one jump, from above downwards, from the religious myth, the lyrical poem, or the dream, straight to the physiological basis of the psyche....

"The attempt to declare psychoanalysis 'incompatible' with Marxism and simply turn one's back on Freudian-ism is too simple, or, more accurately, too simplistic. But we are in any case not obliged to adopt Freudianism. It is a working hypothesis that can produce and undoubtedly does produce deductions and conjectures that proceed along the lines of materialist psychology."

Psychological theories conflict with dialectical materialism when they attempt to demonstrate that human beings are innately incapable of organizing society in such a manner that would qualitatively advance their material conditions of existence. For instance, Robert Audrey's theory of territoriality and Konrad Lorenz' theory of aggression are counterposed to Marxism precisely because they set out to prove that human cooperation beyond the narrow limits established by class, particularly capitalist, society is impossible.

There is a historical fatalism to be found in Freud's thought, especially in his pessimistic post-WWI writings, in which Thanatos (the death wish) hovers over a self-immolating humanity. Because Freud's petty-bourgeois world view does intrude upon his effort to formulate a scientific theory .of behavior, many in the working-class movement regard Freudianism with hostility.

In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) Freud declares that the possibilities • for human satisfaction and happiness are "limited from the start by our constitution," and "the natural human aversion to work gives rise to the most difficult social problems." The abolition of private property would "in no way alter the individual difference in power and influence." Commenting on a by then Stalinized Soviet Union, Freud confirms his skepticism by accepting the bureaucracy's claims of "socialist" society:

"The Russian Communists, too, hope to be able to cause human aggressiveness to disappear by guaranteeing the satisfaction of all material needs and by establishing equality in other respects among all members of the community. That, in my opinion, is an illusion. They themselves are armed to-day with the most scrupulous care and not the least important of the methods by which they keep their supporters together is hatred of everyone beyond their frontiers." -"Why War?," Collected Papers, Vol. 5

Freud and Feminism

While his views on Marxism and the Soviet Union brought Freud denunciation by the Stalinists and fellow-traveling intellectuals, His theories of femininity similarly evoked considerable antipathy from "feminists. For Freud, two themes were of "paramount importance" in analysis: "the wish for a penis in women and, in men, the struggle against passivity [toward other men]... “("Analysis Terminable and Interminable^ *° Collected Papers Vol. 5). To feminists this theory of penis envy seemed to doom women td the status of biological second-class citizenship—men in wish, but not in being.

In the context of the general anti-Marxist and anti-Freudian biases of New Left feminism, the "socialist-feminism" of Juliet Mitchell's first book, Woman's Estate (1971), appeared as a left bulge in "Movement" feminism. A quasi-Marxist and a "scientific" Freudian, Mitchell argued that Marxism was both relevant to the liberation of women (which it certainly is) and in harmony with the feminist "principle" of women" organizing separately as women (which it is not). Woman's Estate even criticized, albeit mildly, the implications of the anti-Leninist basis of New Left feminism:
"Feminist consciousness will not \// 'naturally' develop into socialism, nor should it. If we simply develop feminist consciousness (as radical feminists suggest) we will get, not political consciousness, but the equivalent of national chauvinism among Third World nations or economist!) among working-class organizations."

The penchant of American behaviorist psychologists to focus on "antisocial" behavior, recently expressed in the extreme by Skinner's apologetics for a benevolent totalitarianism, has prompted the radical petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, yesterday sympathetic to the "progressive" pragmatism of Skinner's Walden II, to search elsewhere for a psychological justification for their liberalism. Much in vogue in the feminist milieu have been the humanist psychology of Maslow, the hyper-genital theories of Reich and the "schizophrenia-is-good-for-you" ravings of Laing.

Debunking Reich and Laing

Juliet Mitchell's most recent book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, is an 1 attempt to come to terms with a declining movement which has become hardened in its anti-Marxism, anti-Freudianism and virulent bourgeois feminism. By this time, the reconciliation attempted in Woman's Estate between an eclectic Marxism, Freudianism and anti-capitalist feminism had obviously become untenable. Something had to give; it was Juliet Mitchell's "Marxism."

For those who prefer Freud to his detractors, Psychoanalysis and Feminism will prove, at least in part, an eminently satisfying work. Mitchell presents an intelligent and for the most part accurate exposition of the core elements of Freudian theory, especially the analysis of femininity. This is combined with insightful critiques of the "radical psychotherapists" Reich and Laing and of Freud's feminist critics, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Eva Figes, Germaine Greer, Shoal-Smith Firestone and Kate Millet.

Mitchell argues convincingly that most criticisms of psychoanalysis are based on a misunderstanding of an important distinction in Freudian psychology: the distinction between the psychic representation of the conflict of social reality with instinctual forces (the data of psychoanalysis) and the biological instincts themselves. Freud fully realized that he was dealing only with the former; the latter he regarded as the subject of investigation for a future, more advanced science.

Reich asserts the matter in more "basic" terms: the repression of sexual energy is bad, its "ultimate" orgasmic expression good; heterosexual genitality is natural, homosexuality unnatural; the vagina is thus the biological counterpart of the penis. Lost are Freud's insights into the inherently bisexual natural of human sexual development and the extent to which the conflict between human drives and social reality both shape (through sublimation) and distort happiness and role. For Reich, instinct is all. Similarly, where Freud analyzes both normal and abnormal behavior as manifested through the a-logical operations of the unconscious, Laing sees the delusional world of the schizophrenic as a logical response to a current conflict. For Laing, humans are simply reactive.
Although Mitchell is frequently brilliant and incisive in her defense of the "science" of psychoanalysis, she is disquieted by Freud's insistence that all understanding of behavior, in the final analysis, must be grounded on the bedrock of biology. In Mitchell's schema biological determinism has no place, and her uneasiness with its presence in Freudian theory leads her to distort precisely that area of Freudianism she is most concerned to defend—his hypotheses concerning the "psychological consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes."

Freudianism and the Oppression of Women

Generally Freud carefully distinguishes between the psychological impact of biological factors and the factors themselves. When Freud takes up the problem of the psychological development of women, however, he sidesteps this distinction.
Freud posits that the fear of castration for males is caused not merely by the sight or conception of penisless beings (women), but in addition by an actual, although perhaps implied, threat of castration. The female case is different:

"A momentous "discovery which little girls are destined to make [is that] they notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of larger proportions, at once recognize it as the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ, and from that time forward fall a victim to envy for the penis.... A little girl... makes her judgment and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without and wants to have it." (our emphasis)

— "Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes," Collected Papers, Vol. 5

For Freud, the esteem for the penis is established not socially, but phylo-genetically: "The penis (to follow Ferenczi) owes its extraordinarily high narcissistic cathexis to its organic significance for the propagation of the species" (ibid.). The penis is valorized because of its role in reproduction.

Although the clitoris is "analogous to the male organ," Freud regards the vagina as the "true female organ" (Female Sexuality). Freud thus considers women as constitutionally inferior to men.

Freud's error is a logical one, based, no doubt, on the intrusion of male chauvinist assumptions into his scientific thinking. His letters to his wife are1 adequate testimony to his susceptibility to such influences. They reek of sexism, although of the icky-poo, "women-as-the-salt-of-the-earth" variety. Mitchell's aversion to Freud's biologicisms, however, is motivated not by political opposition to their anti-feminist implications, but by the desire for an idealistic revision of psychoanalysis which could provide the long-sought feminist "answer" to Marxist dialectical materialism.

Mitchell Contra Engels
In Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Mitchell sweeps aside the self-proclaimed Marxist orientation of Woman's Estate and poses anew the, "fundamental question of the cause of women's oppression:

"The longevity of the oppression of women must be based on something more than conspiracy, something more complicated than biological handicap and more durable than economic exploitation (although in differing degrees all these may feature)."

The missing link turns out to be "culture"; specifically, patriarchal culture:
"It seems to be the case that contemporary anthropology supports Freud's contention that human society in many ways equals patriarchy rather than Engels' notion that patriarchy can be limited to strictly literate civilization."

Using the anthropological theories of academic doyen Claude Levi-Strauss, Mitchell argues that since the exchange of women by men between kinship groupings (exogamy) has characterized all human societies, all human society has been patriarchal, i.e., "fathers not men" have "determinate power." The Oedipus complex now becomes for Mitchell the internalized manifestation of the cultural tyranny represented in the incest taboo. With the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, "man finally enters into his humanity."

Mitchell realizes that kinship systems are obviously neither operative nor relevant in modern capitalist society and therefore maintains that the bourgeois nuclear family is socially redundant, merely "created to give that law [the patriarchal law] a last hearing." The struggle against the oppression of women no longer must be directed against capitalism or even the "domination of men," but must become a "struggle based on a theory of the social non-necessity at this stage of development of the laws instituted by patriarchy."

This contention that fathers have "determinate" power flies in the face of the fact that their role in anthropologically earlier (avuncular) societies was not significantly greater than the mother's. Nor is the father's son prohibited from copulating with the father's wife (the Oedipus complex as understood by Freud), although biological mother-son sexual relationships have apparently generally been taboo. The most primitive societies seldom have mechanisms for identifying either the father’s sons or his mates (i.e., the nuclear family).

Incest (the prohibition of heterosexual copulation between certain biologically related individuals) only imperfectly correlates with the more primitive forms of unilinearity (kinship determined by membership to either the mother's or the father's clan) and exogamy (marrying out of one's clan). The incest taboo as such is a more recent historical development associated with increasingly differentiated social arrangements and the rise of the monogamous family.

Completely absent from Mitchell's analysis is any sense why the "law of patriarchy" should endure. Basing his hypothesis on inadequate anthropological data (Morgan's studies), Engels wrongly inferred that a matriarchal stage preceded the development of patriarchy. But the essence of Engels' method, however, is the appreciation of the role of social relationships (the emergence of private property) in causing a qualitative perforation of the condition of women. Mitchell draws her analysis, however, from Freud's unfounded, fanciful hypothesis that in the dawn of primitive society exogamy and the incest taboo resulted from the successful alliance of sons against the sexual privileges of the all-powerful father, which resulted in the cannibalization of the father and the sharing out of his women.

Forward to the Pages of Ms.

Psychoanalysis and Feminism thus floats above any concern for the actual oppression of women. The degradation suffered by women imprisoned within the nuclear family and oppressed by capitalist society simply becomes the equivalent perforce of men exchanging women. Prostitution, social isolation, divestiture of legal rights, sole responsibility for child raising—all features of the monogamous nuclear family noticeably absent in most primitive societies —recede in importance for Juliet Mitchell. The bourgeois nuclear family is "not in itself important. V Rather, it is the kinship system, which "in our society... barely can be seen to regulate social relationships," that is the source of women's oppression, because "it is within kinship structures that women, as women, are situated"!

Mitchell has accomplished an idealist subversion of even that rudimentary Marxist understanding revealed in Woman's Estate. Now she conceptualizes culture as having its own dynamic (exactly what, remains unstated) and being transmitted through the unconscious independent of material conditions. Mitchell now recognizes "two autonomous areas: the economic mode of capitalism and the ideological mode of patriarchy."

In Woman's Estate Mitchell envisioned the revolution as the product of a coalition of oppressed groups, each raising its consciousness of its own particular oppression by a theoretical operation-bootstrap and then working to a point of solidarity. From her revised perspective, Mitchell has come to consider even a tactical unity between the women's liberation movement and the labor movement as unnecessary:

"Because patriarchy is by no means identical with capitalism the successes and strengths of the two revolutionary movements [the women's liberation movement and the working-class movement] will not follow along neatly parallel paths."

Not only are these paths not "neatly parallel," but they may in fact diverge. Mitchell readily admits that "It is perfectly possible for feminism to make more gains under social democracy than it does in the first years of socialism." Indeed, if capitalism has already rendered women's oppression redundant, then it is difficult to explain why the liberation of women could not occur under any form of capitalist government, from reformist Laborism or the popular front to fascism. In fact, the most optimum conditions could well be a fascism where there are sufficiently strong drives toward racial purity as to necessitate the challenging of the "utility" of the incest taboo.

The politics of Psychoanalysis and Feminism are a justification for "Movement” feminism at any of its-stages, from the radical, anti-capitalist; New Left period through its current trivial, careerist and venal expression. For Juliet Mitchell the battle against cultural oppression no longer need be waged in the streets; the need for a Popular Front against Patriarchy can 'be propagated with equal efficacy from the pages of MS.

From The Archives- JOIN US! Attention Veterans & Peace Activists – Please join Veterans For Peace and The Leftist Marching Band for Armistice / Veterans ! ! Day for Peace November 11, 2019

JOIN US! Attention Veterans & Peace Activists – Please join Veterans For Peace and  The Leftist Marching Band for    Armistice / Veterans
!  ! Day for Peace November 11, 2019
 
Armistice / Veterans Day Parade for Peace & Faneuil Hall Peace Event Veterans for Peace will proudly walk behind the first parade on Armistice / Veterans Day in Boston. We honor and celebrate the original intention for Armistice Day – a Day of Peace.  We will gather between 12:00 pm (noon) and 12:30 pm  on the corner of Charles and Beacon Streets. 1st Parade steps off at 1:00 pm – our parade will follow the same route  then we will continue to Faneuil Hall for our  Armistice Day for Peace Event Veterans from different eras will recite original works of Poetry, Prose and Song Smedley D. Butler Brigade, Veterans For Peace Chap. 9, Boston, MA                                           www.smedleyvfp.org