Thursday, November 07, 2019

*A Red Partisan- John Reed's Bird's Eye View Of The Russian Revolution of 1917

Click on title to link to the fourth part of a four-part series by John Reed, up close and personal on the Russian revolution of 1917, originally published in "The Liberator" in 1918.

Lenin on WWI: For Revolutionary Defeatism (Quote of the Week) In August 1914 at the onset of World War I, a bloody interimperialist war to redivide the world, the Second (Socialist) International collapsed as the leaders of its national sections, with few exceptions, supported their own capitalist governments. In response, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin launched a fight to split those parties and win subjectively revolutionary elements to proletarian internationalism.


Workers Vanguard No. 1159
23 August 2019
TROTSKY
LENIN
Lenin on WWI: For Revolutionary Defeatism
(Quote of the Week)
In August 1914 at the onset of World War I, a bloody interimperialist war to redivide the world, the Second (Socialist) International collapsed as the leaders of its national sections, with few exceptions, supported their own capitalist governments. In response, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin launched a fight to split those parties and win subjectively revolutionary elements to proletarian internationalism. Lenin’s program of revolutionary defeatism, which saw the defeat of one’s “own” imperialist bourgeoisie as a motor force for the proletarian seizure of power, was strikingly confirmed in the October 1917 Russian Revolution led by the Bolshevik Party.
Is it not treachery to Social-Democracy when we see the German socialists’ amazing change of front (after Germany’s declaration of war); the false phrases about a war of liberation against tsarism; forgetfulness of German imperialism, forgetfulness of the rape of Serbia; the bourgeois interests involved in the war against Britain, etc., etc.? Chauvinist patriots vote for the Budget!...
Even given the total incapacità and impotence of the European socialists, the behaviour of their leaders reveals treachery and baseness: the workers have been driven into the slaughter, while their leaders vote in favour and join governments! Even with their total impotence, they should have voted against, should not have joined their governments and uttered chauvinistic infamies; should not have shown solidarity with their “nation,” and should not have defended their “own” bourgeoisie, they should have unmasked its vileness.
Everywhere there is the bourgeoisie and the imperialists, everywhere the ignoble preparations for carnage; if Russian tsarism is particularly infamous and barbarous (and more reactionary than all the rest), then German imperialism too is monarchist: its aims are feudal and dynastic, and its gross bourgeoisie are less free than the French. The Russian Social-Democrats were right in saying that to them the defeat of tsarism was the lesser evil, for their immediate enemy was, first and foremost, Great-Russian chauvinism, but that in each country the socialists (who are not opportunists) ought to see their main enemy in their “own” (“home-made”) chauvinism.
—V.I. Lenin, “The European War and International Socialism” (late August-September 1914)

Trotskyist Defense of the Workers States (Quote of the Week) Writing at the outbreak of World War II, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky underlined how revolutionary Marxists must strive to win the international proletariat to defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state.


Workers Vanguard No. 1160
6 September 2019
TROTSKY
LENIN
Trotskyist Defense of the Workers States
(Quote of the Week)
Writing at the outbreak of World War II, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky underlined how revolutionary Marxists must strive to win the international proletariat to defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state. Such defense, based on the collectivized property forms in the Soviet Union, did not constitute political support to the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy, which had renounced the struggle for workers revolution internationally. The Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense against imperialism and counterrevolution and for proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucracy today applies to China and the other remaining deformed workers states of Cuba, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam.
Mistakes on the question of defense of the USSR most frequently flow from an incorrect understanding of the methods of “defense.” Defense of the USSR does not at all mean rapprochement with the Kremlin bureaucracy, the acceptance of its politics, or a conciliation with the politics of her allies. In this question, as in all others, we remain completely on the ground of the international class struggle....
We are not a government party; we are the party of irreconcilable opposition, not only in capitalist countries but also in the USSR. Our tasks, among them the “defense of the USSR,” we realize not through the medium of bourgeois governments and not even through the government of the USSR, but exclusively through the education of the masses through agitation, through explaining to the workers what they should defend and what they should overthrow. Such a “defense” cannot give immediate miraculous results. But we do not even pretend to be miracle workers. As things stand, we are a revolutionary minority. Our work must be directed so that the workers on whom we have influence should correctly appraise events, not permit themselves to be caught unawares, and prepare the general sentiment of their own class for the revolutionary solution of the tasks confronting us.
The defense of the USSR coincides for us with the preparation of world revolution. Only those methods are permissible which do not conflict with the interests of the revolution. The defense of the USSR is related to the world socialist revolution as a tactical task is related to a strategic one. A tactic is subordinated to a strategic goal and in no case can be in contradiction to the latter.
—Leon Trotsky, “The USSR in War” (September 1939), published in In Defense of Marxism (1942)

*The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday- From The Film Archives-In Honor Of The Birthday Anniversary Of Bolshevik Leader Leon Trotsky

Click on title to link to part one (of five, just click from part one) of YouTube's film clips detailing the highlights (and lows) of the life and death of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky. In Honor Of His Birthday Anniversary.

*From The Archives Of Marxism- Leon Trotsky On The Lessons Of The Russian Revolution- On The 94th Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution

Workers Vanguard No. 968

5 November 2010

In Honor of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution

For New October Revolutions!

(From the Archives of Marxism)

November 7 (October 25 by the calendar used in Russia at the time) marks the 93rd anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the workers’ seizure of power in Russia gave flesh and blood reality to the Marxist understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Despite the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state, culminating in its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, the October Revolution was and is the international proletariat’s greatest victory; its final undoing, a world-historic defeat. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fought to the bitter end in defense of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe, while calling for workers political revolutions to oust the parasitic nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies that ruled these states. This is the same program we uphold today for the remaining workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.

Having been expelled from the USSR in 1929 by Stalin, Trotsky spent the remainder of his life in exile. In November 1932, he gave a speech to a Danish social-democratic student group in Copenhagen. He outlined the political conditions and the social forces that drove the Russian Revolution, stressing the decisive role of the Bolshevik Party. Illuminating the worldwide impact of the Russian Revolution and its place in history, Trotsky underlined the necessity of sweeping away the decaying capitalist order and replacing it with a scientifically planned international socialist economy that will lay the material basis for human freedom.

The ICL fights to forge workers parties modeled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks to lead the struggle for new October Revolutions around the globe.

* * *

Revolution means a change of the social order. It transfers the power from the hands of a class which has exhausted itself into those of another class, which is on the rise....

Without the armed insurrection of November 7, 1917, the Soviet state would not be in existence. But the insurrection itself did not drop from Heaven. A series of historical prerequisites was necessary for the October revolution.

1. The rotting away of the old ruling classes—the nobility, the monarchy, the bureaucracy.

2. The political weakness of the bourgeoisie, which had no roots in the masses of the people.

3. The revolutionary character of the peasant question.

4. The revolutionary character of the problem of the oppressed nations.

5. The significant social weight of the proletariat.

To these organic pre-conditions we must add certain conjunctural conditions of the highest importance:

6. The Revolution of 1905 was the great school, or in Lenin’s words, the “dress rehearsal” of the Revolution of 1917. The Soviets, as the irreplaceable organizational form of the proletarian united front in the revolution, were created for the first time in the year 1905.

7. The imperialist war sharpened all the contradictions, tore the backward masses out of their immobility and thereby prepared the grandiose scale of the catastrophe.

But all these conditions, which fully sufficed for the outbreak of the Revolution, were insufficient to assure the victory of the proletariat in the Revolution. For this victory one condition more was needed:

8. The Bolshevik Party....

In the year 1883 there arose among the emigres the first Marxist group. In the year 1898, at a secret meeting, the foundation of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was proclaimed (we all called ourselves Social-Democrats in those days). In the year 1903 occurred the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In the year 1912 the Bolshevist fraction finally became an independent Party.

It learned to recognize the class mechanics of society in struggle, in the grandiose events of twelve years (1905-1917). It educated cadres equally capable of initiative and of subordination. The discipline of its revolutionary action was based on the unity of its doctrine, on the tradition of common struggles and on confidence in its tested leadership.

Thus stood the Party in the year 1917. Despised by the official “public opinion” and the paper thunder of the intelligentsia press, it adapted itself to the movement of the masses. Firmly it kept in hand the control of factories and regiments. More and more the peasant masses turned toward it. If we understand by “nation,” not the privileged heads, but the majority of the people, that is, the workers and peasants, then Bolshevism became in the course of the year 1917 a truly national Russian Party.

In September 1917, Lenin, who was compelled to keep in hiding, gave the signal, “The crisis is ripe, the hour of the insurrection has approached.” He was right. The ruling classes had landed in a blind alley before the problems of the war, the land and national liberation. The bourgeoisie finally lost its head. The democratic parties, the Mensheviks and social-revolutionaries, wasted the remains of the confidence of the masses in them by their support of the imperialist war, by their policy of ineffectual compromise and concession to the bourgeois and feudal property-owners. The awakened army no longer wanted to fight for the alien aims of imperialism. Disregarding democratic advice, the peasantry smoked the landowners out of their estates. The oppressed nationalities at the periphery rose up against the bureaucracy of Petrograd. In the most important workers’ and soldiers’ Soviets the Bolsheviki were dominant. The workers and soldiers demanded action. The ulcer was ripe. It needed a cut of the lancet.

Only under these social and political conditions was the insurrection possible. And thus it also became inevitable. But there is no playing around with the insurrection. Woe to the surgeon who is careless in the use of the lancet! Insurrection is an art. It has its laws and its rules.

The Party carried through the October insurrection with cold calculation and with flaming determination. Thanks to this, it conquered almost without victims. Through the victorious Soviets the Bolsheviki placed themselves at the head of a country which occupies one sixth of the surface of the globe....

Let us now in closing attempt to ascertain the place of the October Revolution, not only in the history of Russia but in the history of the world. During the year 1917, in a period of eight months, two historical curves intersect. The February upheaval—that belated echo of the great struggles which had been carried out in past centuries on the territories of Holland, England, France, almost all of Continental Europe—takes its place in the series of bourgeois revolutions. The October Revolution proclaims and opens the domination of the proletariat. It was world capitalism that suffered its first great defeat on the territory of Russia. The chain broke at its weakest link. But it was the chain that broke, and not only the link.

Capitalism has outlived itself as a world system. It has ceased to fulfill its essential mission, the increase of human power and human wealth. Humanity cannot stand still at the level which it has reached. Only a powerful increase in productive force and a sound, planned, that is, Socialist organization of production and distribution can assure humanity—all humanity—of a decent standard of life and at the same time give it the precious feeling of freedom with respect to its own economy. Freedom in two senses—first of all, man will no longer be compelled to devote the greater part of his life to physical labor. Second, he will no longer be dependent on the laws of the market, that is, on the blind and dark forces which have grown up behind his back. He will build up his economy freely, that is, according to a plan, with compass in hand. This time it is a question of subjecting the anatomy of society to the X-ray through and through, of disclosing all its secrets and subjecting all its functions to the reason and the will of collective humanity. In this sense, Socialism must become a new step in the historical advance of mankind. Before our ancestor, who first armed himself with a stone axe, the whole of nature represented a conspiracy of secret and hostile forces. Since then, the natural sciences, hand in hand with practical technology, have illuminated nature down to its most secret depths. By means of electrical energy, the physicist passes judgment on the nucleus of the atom. The hour is not far when science will easily solve the task of the alchemists, and turn manure into gold and gold into manure. Where the demons and furies of nature once raged, now rules ever more courageously the industrial will of man.

But while he wrestled victoriously with nature, man built up his relations to other men blindly, almost like the bee or the ant. Belatedly and most undecidedly he approached the problems of human society. He began with religion, and passed on to politics. The Reformation represented the first victory of bourgeois individualism and rationalism in a domain which had been ruled by dead tradition. From the church, critical thought went on to the state. Born in the struggle with absolutism and the medieval estates, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people and of the rights of man and the citizen grew stronger. Thus arose the system of parliamentarism. Critical thought penetrated into the domain of government administration. The political rationalism of democracy was the highest achievement of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.

But between nature and the state stands economic life. Technology liberated man from the tyranny of the old elements—earth, water, fire and air—only to subject him to its own tyranny. Man ceased to be a slave to nature, to become a slave to the machine, and, still worse, a slave to supply and demand. The present world crisis testifies in especially tragic fashion how man, who dives to the bottom of the ocean, who rises up to the stratosphere, who converses on invisible waves with the Antipodes, how this proud and daring ruler of nature remains a slave to the blind forces of his own economy. The historical task of our epoch consists in replacing the uncontrolled play of the market by reasonable planning, in disciplining the forces of production, compelling them to work together in harmony and obediently serve the needs of mankind. Only on this new social basis will man be able to stretch his weary limbs and—every man and every woman, not only a selected few—become a full citizen in the realm of thought.

—“Leon Trotsky Defends the October Revolution” (Militant, 21 January 1933)

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-From The Archives- *Political Journalist's Corner- John Reed's 1919 "The Revolutionary Age" Article, "Aspects Of The Russian Revolution"

Click on title to link to the John Reed Internet Archive's 1919 "The Revolutionary Age" article by John Reed, "Aspects of the Russian Revolution".

All That Glitters Is Not Gold-Sean Connery’s 007-“Goldfinger” (1964)- A Film Review

All That Glitters Is Not Gold-Sean Connery’s 007-“Goldfinger” (1964)- A Film Review




DVD Review

By Guest Film Critic Si Lannon  


Goldfinger, starring Sean Connery, Honor Blackman, Gert Frobe, based on the James Bond character by British spy thriller novelist Ian Fleming, 1964

I have only myself to blame for this one, for this review of Goldfinger after having reviewed the first film in the James Bond 007 series Doctor No based on master spy thriller novelist Ian Fleming’s iconic character. I find myself, as on other recent occasions, going on what my old friend and colleague Sam Lowell called a “run.” That is grabbing everything one can in a series on some subject, here the Sean Connery James Bond films, and playing out your hand. I suppose I could shift the blame and lay my new tendency on that old curmudgeon Sam since he is notorious in film critic circles for going crazy when he goes on a “run.” I will nevertheless take full credit/blame here since what these Bond films evoke in memories of 1960s drive-in theater antics-and sexual longings of course. [For a recent example of his influence although he is no longer in charge of day to day operations but now working under the title of film critic emeritus Sam has been on something of a tear having already done five or six reviewing 1950s B-film noirs from the ten film Hammer Production series. Pete Markin]        

When I reviewed Doctor No, the first Bond film by Connery, there was a great deal of anticipation built up by the advertising campaign promoting the film. Especially of the sexy young women who would be catnip for Bond. That was one draw although not the biggest one. The biggest one was to see that film at the local drive-in theater where, well, where the real live girls were. I have already mentioned our poor boy working-class roots where we were always seeking some small time con/scam to do things for little money from guys who had no serious dough. For the drive-in experience that was in the days before the theater owners got wise and started charging by the carload when they charged single admissions to load up the car with say six guys and only have maybe three showing (with the other guys in the trunk or down on the backseat floor).

That same scam was done once again in order to see this Goldfinger film which was if anything more hyped up that the initial offering since part of the draw was showing a gold-plated young woman who got caught in the deadly Midas touch. But the “real deal” was that we were now older and less shy about “hitting” on the young women who were hanging out at the well-known area in back of the refreshment stand who also came through in the same carload manner that we did. So the innocence of the first film gave way to more foggy windshields, sighs (you know what I mean) and such.                

Thus this recent viewing of Goldfinger was the first time I actually saw the film all the way through. Needless to say I didn’t remember most of what happened, how could I, except that mesmerizing gold-painted young woman and that great lead-in title song by Shirley Bassey. Here’s the play this time around. In the day (before 1971) when the benchmark dollar and pound were pegged to the price of gold the British Treasury Board of Governors was worried about controlling the flow of that precious metal and efforts by rogue elements like the Auric Goldfinger of the title to corner the market. So 007 James Bond was on the case to figure out how this character was getting his gold around the various international restrictions. The chase was on but not before our boy James gets a very rude awakening (literally) finding a young woman he was having a quick roll in the hay with all gold-plated as a warning signal for him to back off. (Forgetting that such as desecration would only bestir our man to greater revengeful deeds especially after that gal’s vengeance seeking sister laid her head down trying to off the bastard.)        

Naturally Bond is ready for anything including that attempt by the dead woman’s sister to kill Goldfinger and gum up the works. What Goldfinger was up to in collusion with the nasty Red Chinese (in the days when the People’s Republic was called Red China in Western terminology) who provided men and technology in aid of Goldfinger’s nefarious plan was to neutralize the gold at Fort Knox and make a killing on the steeply increased value of his gold holdings not by stealing it but by making it unusable by making it radioactive-nice touch, right. James of course learns of this plan while he was a prisoner of the greedy Goldfinger. The idea was to have Goldfinger’s confederate Pussy Galore (a very suggestive name and the subject of lots of sexual jokes among the corner boys in my neighborhood hang-out spots), played by Honor Blackman, and her all-female team of pilots spray deadly gas in the area knocking out everybody. Then blowing the gate at Fort Knox unobstructed and putting a radioactive devise in the vault with all the gold bars making them useless as a currency. Goldfinger’s whole plan went asunder when handsome Johnny James Bond snagged Pussy and made her his ally faking the deadly spray and leaving the American troops to fight off the Chinese invaders (sound familiar). In the end Goldfinger lost his life as expected by trying to go mano a mano with Bond. Bond and Pussy go under the sheets once again as the film ends. You know I am glad based on this story line that I spent my first time dealing with this film fogging up car windshields-okay,       


The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes- Before The Deluge-Bette Davis’ “Jezebel” (1938)-A Film Review

The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes- Before The Deluge-Bette Davis’ “Jezebel” (1938)-A Film Review




DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Jezebel, starring Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, George Brent, 1938

No today I am not going to bemoan the fact that once again I have started on something like my old friend and fellow film critic Sam Lowell called a “run,” a run meaning jumping on a subject, here the films of the girl with the Bette Davis eyes Bette Davis herself, and running it into the ground if that is where it would finally lead. No today I have a bigger idea, an idea about what could and could not be cinematically produced today in quite the same way that it was yesterday as in the case of this film under review Jezebel (a topic which could equally include the role Ms. Davis did not get the classic Gone With The Wind as well). What I am talking about, although I will have to temper this with the recent happenings ostensibly around the issue of preservation of Confederate memorials, is the way the so-called gentile ante-bellum South was portrayed in the film from the cotton is king gentry to the fate of lowly blacks slaves whether in the house or in the field. I won’t belabor the point further since this film passes for a romantic drama of the times except to note that this subject is worthy of some kind of doctoral dissertation if it hasn’t already sparked one.  

So what is the hullabaloo all about. Julie, a strong-willed Southern belle of means who through a guardian, male of course, has a big plantation outside of New Orleans in ante-bellum days (the year the film’s plot is supposed to start, 1852, lets us know that civil war clouds are brewing, that various compromises will come undone before the decade is over although the failure to keep those compromises intact was hardly the problem of why the bloody conflict seared the country asunder-continuing slavery in half the country was). Julie, played by Ms. Davis last seen in this space by me giving her fiancé played by George Brent also starring here the heave-ho to run away with her sister’s husband in In This Our Life, besides being head-strong is leading her beau, Pres, a merry chase. Pres, played by Henry Fonda last seen in this space as Tom Joad fresh from Oklahoma’s McAllister Prison for killing a man getting ready to run out to California looking for Paradise but finding nothing but anguish and once again a need to be on the run from John Law in the film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath, is a son of Southern gentry who through his banking connections has dealing with the cotton-starved North. By the way to round out the leading roles this shameless, hence Jezebel, Julie has thrown over Buck Cantrell, a free-spirit sportsman gentleman reflecting the old values of the Old South, the role that the afore- mentioned George Brent played, for Pres.                   

Of course you can lead a guy, even an ante-bellum member of the Southern gentry on that merry chase only so far before he sends you to the big step-off. The actual event if you can believe this that triggered the adios from Pres was when Miss Julie decided for spite to wear a red dress to some silly cotillion and received nothing but the cold shoulder and humiliation from the assembled guests who were shocked beyond belief that an unmarried woman would break the code and not wear white. That is only the most egregious example of how the gentile slow slavery-drive customary code Southern way of life differed from the Northern busy building factories shoulder to the wheel way of life. The sporting life complete with mint juleps and an off-hand duel when somebody, some man, thought he was being insulted were others. Old Buck Cantrell was the epitome of the old ways that were crumbling a bit even then.     

But back to the core romance. Or rather failed romance once Pres gave Julie the heave-ho and she refused out of vanity, spite, ill-humor or some combination of them all to go after him. That finishes the prologue here. The big deal, the way the coming civil war gets noticed and is played out is when Pres, having gone North to forget Julie and learn some capitalist business skills, comes back after a year with a fresh as a daisy Northern wife a happening which was treated by some of the gentry around Julie, notably Buck, as an affront to Southern womanhood. Of course Miss Julie having pined away for Pres for her transgression is both frantic and bitter when she finds out she has been thrown over for another woman. But this hussy will seek her revenge-seek to make Pres jealous of Buck when she starts playing court to him. No go. Pres is all in for his wife as he makes clear to her constantly. (Here is where a scene that I think would be cut today comes in when now knowing she has lost Pres Miss Julie gathers around her a coterie of slaves and has a sing-along with them dancing and prancing “all the darkies are gay” style as Stephen Foster would put it in a song.)  Moreover dear old Buck knowing that he has been used by Miss Julie in her scheme winds up under a winding sheet having lost a duel to Pres’ younger brother when the lad called him out for his ill-mannered behavior toward his sister-in-law.      


Now Ms. Davis may have done an Oscar-worthy performance in this film although I think she was robbed when she played the tart/waitress in the film adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and failed to get the coveted award but apparently those who directed and produced the film could not leave her as a fallen sullen Jezebel. They needed some redemption for her. The way Miss Julie was able to rehabilitate herself was by nursing Pres when he came down with the yellow fever that periodically swept the city and surrounding areas of New Orleans when the authorities, mimicking today’s climate change deniers, failed to drain the swamps and take other precautions. Not only did she nurse him but arguing with Pres’ wife that she should accompany him to the deserted island where the known yellow fever cases were dumped. That wife relented and Miss Julie got to pay penance. Not Ms. Davis’ best picture despite her performance but good. You can think through how such an ante-bellum scenario it would be set up today.      

U.S. Out of the Near East! Syria: No to YPG Alliance with U.S. Imperialism, Enemy of Kurdish National Liberation!

Workers Vanguard No. 1164
1 November 2019
 
U.S. Out of the Near East!
Syria: No to YPG Alliance with U.S. Imperialism, Enemy of Kurdish National Liberation!
OCTOBER 28—The most recent developments in the Kurdish areas of northeastern Syria have made clear, yet again, the truth: U.S. imperialism is the greatest enemy of the dismembered, stateless Kurdish nation. For five years, the Kurdish nationalist Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its military arm, the People’s Protection Committees (YPG), have acted as foot soldiers for the U.S. war against the ISIS reactionaries, thus subordinating the national aspirations of the Kurds in Syria to the interests of American imperialism. After Donald Trump announced that U.S. troops would be pulled out of Syria, allowing the Turkish army and its Arab Islamist mercenaries to slaughter Kurds south of the Turkish border, it appeared that the U.S.-Kurdish alliance might be unraveling, as we noted in WV No. 1163 (18 October). But the YPG has since continued its alliance with the imperialists, and it is the Kurdish masses who will, as always, suffer the consequences.
As part of the cease-fire agreement brokered by the White House between Turkey and the vastly outgunned YPG-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), SDF fighters were forced out of a “safe zone” that extends 18 miles into Syrian Kurdistan. After Vladimir Putin’s Russia cut a deal with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan to jointly patrol the Syria-Turkey border area, further screwing the Kurds, Trump declared that hundreds of U.S. troops would remain to “protect” oil facilities in eastern Syria, with the SDF again acting as U.S. auxiliaries. Washington’s control of the oil fields, which Russia has aptly called “banditry,” is meant to starve the Syrian bourgeois regime of Bashar al-Assad of revenue. Meanwhile, Assad’s forces have moved into some of the area formerly held by the Kurds.
The YPG’s continuing role as U.S. tools was highlighted yesterday when Trump announced that Special Ops commandos had succeeded in killing ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in northwestern Syria. As he reveled in the gory details, Trump gave a shout-out to the YPG, who, according to U.S. officials, “continued to provide information to the C.I.A. on Mr. al-Baghdadi’s location even after Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw the American troops left the Syrian Kurds to confront a Turkish offensive alone” (New York Times, 27 October).
Notwithstanding howls from various Democratic Party presidential hopefuls over Trump’s “betrayal” of the Kurds, U.S. intervention in Syria was never about defending them against ISIS. The Obama administration helped fund and arm a raft of Islamist insurgents and other forces that had risen up against Assad in 2011. Just recently, the Trump administration pledged $4.5 million to the reactionary White Helmets who are fighting alongside Turkey and are linked to extremist Islamists. The U.S. rulers’ aim has always been to further strengthen their grip on the oil-rich Near East and, in particular, to go after Assad’s backers, Russia and Iran. Trump’s current policy for maintaining U.S. domination of the region includes shifting some forces from Syria into Iraq; it also includes adding 1,800 more troops and more military hardware to its presence in Saudi Arabia, with the aim of supporting that ISIS-like theocracy as it wages relentless war against the Houthis in Yemen.
As we emphasized at the outset of the Syrian civil war, the working class internationally had no side in that multi-sided inter-communal conflict, which has mainly pitted the Sunni majority against the politically dominant Alawite minority, as well as Arabs against Kurds. But workers did have a side in opposition to U.S. imperialism and its proxies, including the YPG/SDF. Today we repeat that it is in the class interests of U.S. workers to demand: All American troops and bases out of Syria, Iraq and the rest of the Near East. U.S. imperialism: Hands off the world! We also call for the immediate withdrawal of all Turkish, Russian and Iranian forces from Syria.
Opposition to the U.S. imperialists is essential to the struggle for self-determination of the Kurdish people, who are divided among and oppressed by four capitalist states—Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq. As Marxist internationalists, we call for a united, independent Kurdistan and would also support Kurdish secession from any one of the oppressor states. This position is crucial to our program for proletarian revolutions in the region, which would lay the basis for a socialist federation of the Near East that would include a Socialist Republic of United Kurdistan.
ISIS: Washington’s Frankenstein’s Monster
By enlisting in the U.S. war against ISIS, the YPG/SDF, along with the Kurdish bourgeois nationalists in Iraq, sold themselves to the same imperialists who gave birth to the Islamist killing machine that went on to butcher Kurds, Yazidis, Christians and many others. Following the destruction of the Soviet Union almost 30 years ago, America’s rulers have justified their campaigns of imperialist terror in the Near East and Central Asia, as well as Africa, by waving the bloody shirt of Islamist terrorism. In fact, the Islamist terrorists were largely made in the U.S.A. Beginning with the anti-Soviet Cold War at the end of World War II, Washington embraced religious reactionaries as potential tools against “godless Communism” (and left-leaning bourgeois-nationalist regimes).
In the 1980s, the U.S. armed and financed the mujahedin cutthroats in Afghanistan to kill Soviet soldiers and drown in blood a modernizing regime that sought to implement minimal reforms, especially for women. Among the CIA’s beneficiaries were Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. (For more on this history, see “The 1998 Embassy Bombings, Osama bin Laden and the CIA: The Afghan Connection,” WV No. 761, 6 July 2001.) Zarqawi went on to head the Iraqi affiliate of Al Qaeda. The 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, which devastated the country, sparked communal warfare between the now-dominant Shia majority and an aggrieved Sunni minority that had been on top previously. It was that ruinous conflict that fed Al Qaeda, and out of which ISIS emerged.
In Syria in 2012, the CIA launched a $1 billion effort to finance, arm and organize a ragtag coalition of “moderate rebels” under the rubric of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), whose alumni today include Turkey’s murderous Islamist proxies, notorious for beheading Kurds in the “safe zone.” As journalist Max Blumenthal has reported, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency knew that these “moderates” were linked to Jabhat al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, and were intent on establishing a “Salafist principality in eastern Syria,” i.e., an “Islamic State” (consortiumnews.com, 21 October). These were the “hard men with the guns” whom Hillary Clinton praised as those who could bring about a “political transition” in Damascus (thegrayzone.com, 16 October).
It was only when these outfits (including one called the Bin Laden Front) proved useless in overthrowing Assad that the U.S. turned to the YPG as a proxy force to wield against its Frankenstein’s monster, ISIS. In their pact with the imperialist devil, the PYD/YPG misleaders, who are allied with the petty-bourgeois nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey, turned their fighters into “boots on the ground” for the Pentagon. We insisted that “by selling their souls to the U.S. imperialists, the Kurdish nationalists have committed a crime for which the long-dispossessed Kurdish masses will pay the price” (WV No. 1084, 26 February 2016).
For a United, Independent Kurdistan
It did not take a crystal ball to foresee this betrayal, which is but the latest in a long history of maneuvers by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois Kurdish nationalists to ingratiate themselves with the imperialists and/or oppressive regional capitalist regimes. This treachery dates back to even before the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, when the Kurdish nation was carved up by the British and French imperialists.
In Iraq in the 1960s, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) tied its fortunes to the CIA, the Israeli Mossad and the Shah of Iran after the Arab nationalist Ba’ath regime launched an attack on Iraqi Kurds. In return, the KDP hunted down Iranian Kurds, turning them over to the blood-drenched regime of the Shah. In 1975, the Shah made a deal with Ba’athist leader Saddam Hussein and cut off support to the KDP, with the CIA following suit. This led to an Iraqi onslaught against the Kurds.
In 1991, the KDP and its rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), sided with the U.S. in its war against Iraq. Vainly expecting that Washington would back them, the Kurds then rose up against Saddam Hussein. The U.S. stood aside while the Iraqi regime brutally suppressed them. The KDP and PUK went on to serve as military auxiliaries to the U.S. occupation force following the 2003 invasion. With the U.S. manipulating and reinforcing sectarian divisions, the Kurdish pesh merga joined with Shia militias in crushing Sunni insurgents in Falluja in 2004 as American troops leveled the city.
Additionally in Syria (officially known as the Syrian Arab Republic), the Kurds have suffered oppression under the country’s Arab rulers. In the 1960s, some 20 percent of Kurds were stripped of Syrian citizenship, and many of their land. In the late 1970s, the Ba’athist regime of Hafez al-Assad (father of the current Syrian president) carried out further seizures of Kurdish land and gave it to Arab settlers—part of an “Arabization” drive that also banned Kurdish books and even names. At the same time, as tensions arose between Turkey and Syria, the Assad regime allowed the PKK, which has always been brutally repressed in Turkey, to move into Syrian Kurdistan. Then in 1998, Assad, under pressure from Turkey, banned the PKK, imprisoned a number of its leaders and expelled its founder, Abdullah Öcalan. The following year, Turkey captured Öcalan with CIA assistance.
The true allies of the Kurdish toilers are not the imperialists or the regional bourgeois oppressors but those who are exploited and oppressed by the same class enemy. The proletariat of Turkey includes a sizable Kurdish component. Turkey’s capitalist rulers thrive on fomenting chauvinist hatred of the Kurds in order to divide the workers. To unite their forces and enhance their ability to struggle in their class interests, it is vital for Turkish workers to champion the cause of Kurdish self-determination, including defending the PKK against state repression. We call for military defense of the PKK without giving political support to its petty-bourgeois program.
In the course of class and social struggles and through the intervention of a Leninist vanguard party, the workers of the Near East can be broken from the chauvinism and other backward prejudices that currently bind them to their exploiters. It is necessary to cohere Leninist-Trotskyist nuclei that will fight to build revolutionary workers parties, national sections of a reforged Fourth International. Such parties must be based on the understanding that the fight against national, ethnic and religious oppression and to liberate women—the “slaves of slaves”—is essential to the struggle for proletarian revolution to sweep away capitalist rule and break the chains of imperialist subjugation. Centrally important to this perspective is the presence of hundreds of thousands of Kurdish and Turkish workers in Germany, where they have the potential to form a bridge between class struggles in the Near East and in the imperialist powerhouse of Europe.
For Class Struggle at Home Against U.S. Imperialism
For the multiracial working class in the U.S., opposition to the imperialist depredations of America’s rulers is key to advancing its interests. When Trump announced the (partial) troop withdrawal from Syria, self-described “socialist” Bernie Sanders fumed that “you don’t turn your back on allies,” while fellow “progressive” Elizabeth Warren railed that “Trump recklessly betrayed our Kurdish partners.” With their long track records of supporting American intervention abroad, Sanders and Warren are no less committed to furthering U.S. imperialist domination than are the Republicans and more openly pro-war Democrats such as Hillary Clinton. Sanders, for example, has long championed “regime change” in Syria, a declaration that the U.S. should impose regimes of its choosing on any country it can overpower.
For the Democrats, Trump’s real crime in pulling back U.S. troops was to hand Syria over to Russia (as well as to Iran). Sanders, Warren & Co. want to concentrate on those they’ve declared to be the main enemies, capitalist Russia and the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state. Warren made this clear in a Foreign Affairs (January/February 2019) article published shortly after she declared her presidential candidacy, writing that U.S. entanglement in the Near East has “distracted Washington from growing dangers in other parts of the world: a long-term struggle for power in Asia, a revanchist Russia that threatens Europe, and looming unrest in the Western Hemisphere, including a collapsing state in Venezuela that threatens to disrupt its neighbors.”
When “labor friendly” capitalist pols like Warren and Sanders appear at union rallies and picket lines, it is to strengthen the political ties that bind the working class to the capitalist-imperialist system of exploitation, oppression and war. Those ties must be broken as part of the struggle to build a workers party, the necessary instrument to lead the fight to sweep away the U.S. imperialist beast through socialist revolution. This is the task to which the Spartacist League in the U.S., section of the International Communist League, is dedicated.

Labor Needs a Class-Struggle Leadership UAW Holds Off GM Bosses, But Strikers Sold Short

Workers Vanguard No. 1164
1 November 2019
 
Labor Needs a Class-Struggle Leadership
UAW Holds Off GM Bosses, But Strikers Sold Short
After staying out solid for more than 40 days, United Auto Workers (UAW) members last week ratified a contract with General Motors by a margin of 57 to 43 percent. The four-year contract wasn’t a victory, but it wasn’t a defeat either. Many workers are embittered, believing, as one worker told us, “We could’ve won so much more.” But UAW members can walk back into their plants knowing that they held the line against the vicious auto giant. The strikers, through their organization and discipline, gave a taste of the unique social power of labor, bringing production to a halt and inflicting nearly $3 billion in losses on the company. But they were crippled by a union misleadership committed to abiding by the rules of the bosses and their state and politicians.
GM, which is sitting on some $35 billion in profits over the last three years, wanted to squeeze more out of the workers, including by saddling them with higher health care costs. The attacks on health care were beaten back; in fact, this was the first contract in many years where the UAW made no major givebacks.
Above all, strikers wanted to immediately bring in the temporary workers as full employees and to put an end to the two-tier system, which was introduced with the 2007 contract like “a cancer into the union,” as one striker put it. A popular slogan on the picket lines was: “Everyone Tier One!” While the contract cuts from eight to four years the time for Tier Two workers to reach Tier One, it leaves the second tier intact for new hires. Meanwhile, GM parts and warehouse workers remain grossly underpaid. As for temp workers, who together with lower-tier workers make up some 40 percent of the workforce—they are shafted.
While some temps will be brought in as regular employees, the new contract requires that temps work three continuous years to reach Tier Two (reduced to two years in 2021). As numerous workers pointed out, the “continuous” provision gives GM the option to lay off temp workers for 31 days or more, which would reset the clock and keep the hated category of “perma-temps.” Meanwhile, part-time temps got nothing. Several strikers told Workers Vanguard that the UAW should have fought to bring back the old system, in which workers were made full employees after 90 days of probation. By agreeing to GM’s demands to keep the temp system, the union leadership gave the bosses the nod to hire many thousands more as temps. While performing the same work as regular employees, these workers receive paltry benefits, virtually no job protection and make meager wages, now frozen at $16.67 per hour for new hires, slightly above the proposed $15 per hour national minimum wage.
The contract also codifies plant closures in Lordstown, Ohio; Warren, Michigan; and outside Baltimore, Maryland. Thousands will be unemployed or forced to move or commute hundreds of miles, and others now worry that they’ll be next. While GM has “promised” to keep open the Detroit-Hamtramck plant, the auto bosses always strive to shut down what is no longer profitable. The previous contract stipulated that Lordstown was to have a product line until 2023, but it was shuttered earlier this year. The bosses will seek to violate a contract when it suits their interests. For their part, the unions must never give up the right to strike. Down with the no-strike clause!
With the strike over, the UAW has now turned to negotiations with Ford. It is vital for workers in the auto industry and beyond to draw the lessons of the class battle with GM, the longest company-wide auto strike in the U.S. since the early 1970s. Doubtless, Ford and Fiat Chrysler workers have noticed that the only way the UAW was able to hold back the GM bosses was by striking. Still laboring under an extended contract, these workers themselves must prepare to mobilize in strike action.
There was no shortage of determination on the part of the striking GM workers. The fact that 43 percent voted “no” gives a measure of the workers’ resolve to continue the strike, even as the union tops threatened to abandon them by stopping GM negotiations if the “no” vote carried. Older white male strikers repeatedly told us they wanted to stay out in defense of the temp workers, many of whom are women, black and other minorities, recognizing that the division of the workforce into temps and lower tiers is corrosive to the union and its fighting capacity. This solidarity shows that class struggle can begin to break down the racial and other divisions promoted by the capitalists to keep the wage slaves divided.
At least 10 percent of the workforce didn’t vote at all, and many who voted in favor did so despite having strong objections to the contract, but they worried that they could not get anything better under the current union leadership. They had good reason to worry. GM’s handsome ratification bonus of $11,000 for full employees and $4,500 for temps had the quality of a bribe; as one striker put it, “When it’s so big, you know they want to screw us big.”
Those Who Labor Must Rule
If there is one lesson to be drawn from the GM strike, it is the need for a class-struggle leadership of labor, one based on the understanding that the capitalist bosses and the workers share no common interests. Such a leadership would have mobilized all workers at the Big Three in a common front against the automakers. Against the capitalists’ courts, injunctions and cops, it would have built mass picket lines, drawing in allies from working-class, black and Latino communities. A fighting union leadership would have given it organization and direction.
Instead, the workers are saddled with pro-capitalist union tops whose strategy is not hard class struggle, but pushes illusions in false “friends of labor” like Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party. Sanders and other capitalist politicians may express support for this or that strike, but they represent the capitalist order, which is based on profit derived through the exploitation of labor. Where this strategy gets you was revealed a decade ago when the UAW tops worked with their “friends” in the Obama administration to bail out the auto bosses by taking it out of the hides of the workers, who were forced into “sacrifices” from which the union has yet to recover. For his part, Sanders supported the bailout at the time.
In this GM strike, the UAW tops worked overtime to restrain the fighting spirit of the workers. They made a mockery of the old union principle of “no contract, no work” and “one out, all out,” including by keeping Ford and Fiat Chrysler workers on the job despite their contract expiring on the same day as GM. They kept the picket lines small and let GM move 70 days’ worth of inventory from the plants and storage lots to the dealerships. This left militant workers who tried to defend their picket lines vulnerable to arrest by the cops, the thugs of the capitalist state, which exists to defend the rule and profits of the bosses. Now, at least three Flint workers have been fired for alleged threats of “violence” during the strike. The union must fight for their immediate rehiring. No reprisals!
There is a lot of justified bitterness at the UAW leadership, currently led by Gary Jones. Amid the government’s ongoing corruption investigation of UAW officials, which has resulted in nearly a dozen arrests, several angry workers expressed an attitude of “lock ’em up” after learning the contract had passed. A couple told us that they might stop paying their dues. No! When the capitalist government intervenes into labor, it is not to clean up financial chicanery but to weaken the unions. UAW members should demand that the Feds get their hands off the union and should pay their dues. Labor must clean its own house!
The union tops’ real corruption is political. Their defeatist approach directly flows from their support to the capitalist system and its agencies and representatives. They see the bosses as the workers’ prospective partners. They blame job losses not on American capitalists but on foreign workers, all the while peddling the lie that U.S. capitalist profitability will somehow “trickle down” and benefit workers in the U.S.
The great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote, “If there is no struggle there is no progress,” adding, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” With workers having been ground down by a decades-long one-sided class war, there has been an uptick in strikes in the last two years, beginning with the 2018 West Virginia school strike. As GM workers geared up to walk out, UAW-organized janitors at GM plants went on strike, and the UAW also struck Mack Trucks this month (both have since returned to work); seven unions jointly shut down parts of the Asarco copper mines in Arizona and Texas; and teachers and school staff walked out in Chicago.
The labor movement needs a leadership forged in opposition to the pro-capitalist, pro-Democratic Party politics of the UAW and other union misleaders. The struggle for a union leadership worthy of the name cannot be separated from the need to build a workers party that fights for a workers government. Such a party would not be a reformist organization like the British Labour Party or other European social-democratic parties, which merely seek to administer and reform the capitalist system. Rather, its aim would be to further the class struggle, to mobilize workers in the U.S. in solidarity with their class brothers and sisters abroad, to champion the fight for black rights, women’s equality and for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. The purpose of such a party is not just to get a bigger piece of the pie, but the whole damn pie—a socialist revolution that expropriates the capitalist class and establishes a society where those who labor rule, where production is not for the profit of the tiny class of capitalist parasites but to serve the needs of all.
Only this perspective can provide an answer to the hemorrhaging of jobs. Capitalists will always look to minimize labor costs, including through the use of technology and by moving production to where labor is cheapest. The “answer” of the UAW and other union tops is to promote chauvinist protectionism—a program supported particularly by the Democrats—by calling to shut down plants in Mexico and to move that production to the U.S. This pits U.S. workers against their class brothers and sisters in other countries, playing right into the hands of the employers. The union tops have promoted protectionist poison for decades. The result? The decimation of the union movement and the proliferation of non-union jobs throughout the U.S.
Toyota, Volkswagen and other foreign-owned corporations have opened plants in this country, especially in the South. These non-union plants are flooded with temps, a preview of the Big Three’s vision for their own plants. On top of that, tens of thousands of workers toil in non-union parts plants and warehouses throughout the U.S. What is long overdue is a concerted struggle by the UAW to organize these workers. This requires a concerted fight against the bosses’ divide-and-rule strategy. Above all, it is necessary to combat black oppression, which has long been wielded by the capitalist rulers to weaken labor as a whole and obscure the class line between capitalist and worker.
The growing disappearance of decent-paying union jobs and the growth of perma-temp and low-paying work has hit black people hardest. The poverty rate in Detroit, which is nearly 80 percent black, is 35 percent, three times the national average, and for children it stands at more than 50 percent. At one time the capital of the UAW and a center of working-class black America, areas of Detroit resemble New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—both disasters the products of racist America’s capitalist order.
Capitalism is anarchic and irrational, as exemplified by the boom-bust cycle that leaves workers at the mercy of the market. To stem the devastation of America’s working people, it is essential to fight for good, quality jobs: this means calling for an end to layoffs by shortening the workweek at no loss in pay and a sliding scale of wages to keep up with the cost of living. By necessity, the struggle for such demands raises the question: which class shall rule? It is out of the inevitable class battles that capitalist contradictions produce and through the intervention of Marxists into these and other struggles that a revolutionary multiracial workers party can be built, one committed to a society with a new ruling class—the workers.

Free All Imprisoned Catalan Independentistes Now! Independence for Catalonia! For a Workers Republic! The following article is a translation of a supplement issued on October 19 by our comrades of the Ligue trotskyste de France and published in French, Spanish and Catalan. The Catalan version was distributed at a protest of at least 350,000 on October 26 in Barcelona against the jailing of Catalan nationalist leaders.

Workers Vanguard No. 1164
1 November 2019
 
Free All Imprisoned Catalan Independentistes Now!
Independence for Catalonia! For a Workers Republic!
The following article is a translation of a supplement issued on October 19 by our comrades of the Ligue trotskyste de France and published in French, Spanish and Catalan. The Catalan version was distributed at a protest of at least 350,000 on October 26 in Barcelona against the jailing of Catalan nationalist leaders.
Massive demonstrations that erupted on October 14 in Catalonia expressed anger over the sentencing of Catalan politicians and activists to prison terms ranging from nine to 13 years. In a show trial that triggered a wave of Castilian chauvinism against the Catalans, leaders of Catalan nationalist parties, including Oriol Junqueras, former vice president of the Generalitat of Catalonia (the autonomous government), and Carme Forcadell, former president of the Parlament, were convicted for having organized the October 2017 referendum on independence [when 90 percent voted for an independent republic]. The charges are outrageous: “sedition,” “disobedience,” “embezzlement.” Not only were nine of the 12 defendants sentenced to prison, but the Supreme Court renewed a European arrest warrant against Carles Puigdemont, the former president of the Generalitat, who fled to Belgium in October 2017. These convictions and the persecution of prominent Catalan bourgeois politicians are an ominous warning to the oppressed Catalan, Basque and Galician nations that the “indissoluble unity” of the Spanish prison house of peoples is not negotiable.
In the hours following the convictions, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Barcelona and other cities in Catalonia, including Perpinyà (Perpignan) [in France]. Solidarity demonstrations also took place in Donostia (Basque Country), Corsica and Brittany. A huge rally aiming to block the Barcelona airport was brutally attacked by joint units of the Spanish national police and the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan autonomous police. Dozens of protesters were injured; a 22-year-old lost an eye when he was hit by a flash-ball fired by the cops. The pro-independence demonstrations culminated in a general strike—the fourth in two years—with a demonstration on October 18 of more than 500,000 people in Barcelona. It was also attacked by the cops; nearly 200 people had to be hospitalized. Half of all public transportation was blocked by the strike, which was particularly strong at the university and in the public services. Notably, the dockers struck and demonstrated.
In the spirit of proletarian internationalism, the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) demands the immediate release of all those who have been imprisoned and arrested because they support the just cause of independence for Catalonia. Free all Basque and Catalan nationalist prisoners imprisoned in Spain and France! Hands off Carles Puigdemont! There is a single Basque nation and a single Catalan nation, which are divided and oppressed by the Spanish and French states. The movement for the independence of Catalonia in the “Spanish” part also threatens the “one and indivisible Republic” of French imperialism. Thus, the French bourgeoisie is no less hostile to the independence of these two nations than the Spanish bourgeoisie. In October 2017 [French president Emmanuel] Macron declared: “The rule of law exists in Spain, with constitutional statutes. He [the Spanish prime minister] wants to enforce them and he has my full support” (Libération, 14 October). Independence for Catalonia and Euskal Herria [the Basque Country], in the North and South! For the right to independence of Galicia!
The Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), led by Pedro Sánchez, who is currently the head of the Spanish state, is the main orchestrator of the repression. In recent weeks, he has carried out preventive arrests under the absurd pretext of fighting terrorism. The Audiencia Nacional (organ of the Ministry of Justice) has brought charges of “terrorism” against the group Tsunami Democràtic, whose only “crime” is to have played a major role in the recent demonstrations. Sánchez is threatening to invoke Article 155 of the Constitution to suppress any trace of Catalan autonomy, as his predecessor of the neo-Francoist Popular Party, Mariano Rajoy, had done in 2017. The social democrats, faithful unto death to the Spanish monarchy, have consistently played a central role in fanning anti-Catalan chauvinism among workers and the oppressed throughout the Spanish state. Down with the monarchy! The Spanish misleaders of the CCOO and UGT union federations also play a central role in spreading Castilian chauvinism. They refused to support the general strike in Catalonia!
For Political Independence of the Workers Movement!
Catalan bourgeois politicians have full confidence in the European Union [EU], but workers must have no illusions that it might support Catalonia against the repression of the Spanish state. The EU is not a supranational state, but a consortium of bankers and bosses dominated by German (and secondarily French) imperialism. It serves to maximize capitalist profits by maximizing the exploitation of workers throughout Europe. The imperialists are also determined to trample on the national sovereignty of the weaker member countries. The EU is inherently deeply hostile to the struggles of oppressed nations for their emancipation. In response to the sentencing of the Catalan leaders, the European Commission declared that it fully respects the Spanish constitutional order, “including Spanish judicial decisions” (euobserver.com, 15 October). Down with the EU! For a Socialist United States of Europe, united on a voluntary basis!
Catalonia has none of the attributes of a state—essentially, armed forces—that would enable it to resist the Spanish state. The cause of Catalan independence cannot be entrusted to the Catalan bourgeoisie, which advocates for “dialogue” with the Spanish government. The successive Catalan governments, led by the right-wing bourgeois party PDeCAT (Catalan European Democratic Party) and its predecessor, the CiU, have acted in concert with Madrid and occasionally in collusion with the Esquerra Republicana (Republican Left party) and the CUP (Popular Unity Candidacy), to implement anti-labor austerity and ruthlessly attack unions. These attacks included unleashing the Mossos against striking workers and pro-independence activists.
We fight to make the struggle for national emancipation a motor force for proletarian revolution. The working class, by mobilizing its enormous social power at the head of all the oppressed, can make independence a reality. We seek to imbue the workers throughout both Spain and France with the understanding that the fight for Catalan independence and Basque independence is crucial for their own emancipation from capitalist wage slavery. This battle must be waged against the current misleadership of the working class, as part of the struggle to forge Leninist-Trotskyist parties, sections of a reforged Fourth International, the necessary instrument to lead the working class to power.

Wednesday, November 06, 2019

From The 100th Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution-Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary Government

The 100th Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution-Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary Government 


Workers Vanguard No. 1112
19 May 2017
TROTSKY
LENIN
Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary Government
(Quote of the Week)
The 1917 February Revolution in Russia overthrew the autocratic rule of Tsar Nicholas II amid the interimperialist First World War. However, the Provisional Government that emerged afterward was capitalist and continued to prosecute the war. Against the petty-bourgeois Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, whose representatives (such as Victor Chernov and Irakli Tsereteli) joined the Provisional Government, the Bolshevik Party led by V. I. Lenin fought for proletarian revolution to sweep away capitalist rule.
When people speak about “revolution,” “the revolutionary people,” “revolutionary democracy,” and so on, nine times out of ten this is a lie or self-deception. The question is—what class is making this revolution? A revolution against whom?
Against tsarism? In that sense most of Russia’s landowners and capitalists today are revolutionaries. When the revolution is an accomplished fact, even reactionaries come into line with it. There is no deception of the masses at present more frequent, more detestable, and more harmful than that which lauds the revolution against tsarism.
Against the landowners? In this sense most of the peasants, even most of the well-to-do peasants, that is, probably nine-tenths of the population in Russia, are revolutionaries. Very likely, some of the capitalists, too, are prepared to become revolutionaries on the grounds that the landowners cannot be saved anyway, so let us better side with the revolution and try to make things safe for capitalism.
Against the capitalists? Now that is the real issue. That is the crux of the matter, because without a revolution against the capitalists, all that prattle about “peace without annexations” and the speedy termination of the war by such a peace is either naïveté and ignorance, or stupidity and deception....
The conclusion is obvious: only assumption of power by the proletariat, backed by the semi-proletarians, can give the country a really strong and really revolutionary government. It will be really strong because it will be supported by a solid and class-conscious majority of the people. It will be strong because it will not, of necessity, have to be based on a precarious “agreement” between capitalists and small proprietors, between millionaires and petty bourgeoisie, between the Konovalovs-Shingaryovs and the Chernovs-Tseretelis.
It will be a truly revolutionary government, the only one capable of showing the people that at a time when untold suffering is inflicted upon the masses it will not be awed and deterred by capitalist profits. It will be a truly revolutionary government because it alone will be capable of evoking and sustaining the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses and increasing it tenfold.
—V. I. Lenin, “A Strong Revolutionary Government” (May 1917)

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-Four Dreams-Finding Whistler’s Mother-Gazing On The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes-Following Allan Ginsberg’s Flowers-Searching For The Father We Never Knew

Upon The 50th Anniversary Of The Death Of "King Of The Beats" Jack Kerouac-Four Dreams-Finding Whistler’s Mother-Gazing On The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes-Following Allan Ginsberg’s Flowers-Searching For The Father We Never Knew




By Lance Lawrence       

[Apparently, although site manager Greg Green, the guy who gives out the assignments, has never said so in so many words, I am the “go to” person this year as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the passing of the most well-known, some say “King” of the Beats who flourished mainly in the 1940s and 1950s, mill town Lowell’s own Ti Jean (Jack) Kerouac. Although there has been a fair amount of speculation around the collective water cooler about why I am now doing my fourth different introduction to various archival writings by others over the forty some year history of this publication both as hard copy and now for the past decade or so on-line nobody has a clue to why that is so. Part of that is that they too wanted to write some introductory material giving their slants on fifty years without two-million-word Jack or to update pieces, mainly book reviews and “how Jack influenced me” stuff.

Part, and this is the part I do know about and am telling here for the first time to fend off the charges of favoritism, I actually met Jack a few  times when he was living down in Saint Petersburg with his third wife Stella and his beloved (and hated too it was that kind of relationship) toward the end of his life. In those days he was drinking heavily, and I was too, that before the twelve-step program saved my sobriety and my life. We met, quite by accident, in Jimmy Jack’s Tavern which I do not believe is still there at least I couldn’t find it under that name when I Google d it, since I had stepped in for my early day drinking and there he was getting ready to do his serious early day drinking. Since it was early and since there was some kind of unspoken and assumed bond between early day drinkers we started to chat. Got animated when he found out that I had grown up in Chelmsford the next town over from Lowell and were able to identify places we had mutually been to and other local news. Above all we spoke almost in reverence about various youthful exploits along the mighty Merrimac River which drove our imaginations then and later, especially for him, as writers. In those days I was not writing for any publication or had any assignments along those lines, was actually doing a short-hand version of what Jack had done in the late 1940s and chronicled in his famous On The Road but mainly drinking my blues away stumbling and tumbling down the road to some next place where I might stick, might make myself feel better. After a few days I left Saint Pete and drifted, I think, to Key West or maybe Miami. Later when I heard that Jack had cashed his check I, not knowing and probably not caring if I had known, that the cause of death was from complications from that lifelong drinking I lifted a shot of Johnny Walker Red whiskey in his memory.                  

How Greg Green found out that I had met Jack Kerouac and from there assumed that I had profound things to say or that having met him should be the “go to” guy based on that flimsy premise I don’t know. Now that I have spilled the beans maybe Greg can speak to that. I am happy to do these introductions whatever the reason but over the past several months that I have been working and reviewing pieces I have had to think through how Jack Kerouac has influenced me. Certainly not as a drinking buddy, the short time we passed our time but maybe style of writing or dropping certain verbal bombshells which he had a habit of doing. That remains to be seen as we go through the year-long commemoration.

What is clear already is that the Beat beat was only tangential to me growing up for I was just a little too young to be influenced directly by the movement. The hipsters, grifters, grafters, wanderers, pyschos, holy goofs and that crowd were not around our town (by the way the just listed crowd if truth be known have had progeny who still exist on the far margins of society down where the hipsters and their ilk hold forth on high holy days and remember). Beat, hard non-commercial Beat flourished that is to say before my own growing up, coming of age time, the 1960s and hence the devotion to rock and roll rather than be-bop jazz, folk music lyrics rather than the immense output of poetry put out by the likes of mad monk  Allan Ginsberg and the crowd. But enough of this for this is about Ti Jean Kerouac and what might have been not me. Although I do wonder how Greg Green will respond to my finding out he knew I met Jack in sullen days for both of us. Larry Lawrence]

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Ti Jean wondered sitting on Pawtucketville silts listening to the rushing rock-strewn Merrimack coming by, wondered like maybe those old-time Dutch sailors sighting that green fresh breast of land that would become  Long Island as they entered the sound, another waterway a metaphor for Jack life, and found a new world unspoiled for that fifteen minutes before they laid anchor and claim on the cheap. That wonder drove Jack boy, all fourteen- year old Jack boy so not worried by red dress Paula Cole coming hither Friday night dates or that damn Maggie down by the almost Chelmsford dream side of the river, damn already the river is in play with her Irish braids and that god damn Bible between her knees to wonder if James was it MacNeil Abbott or Abbott MacNeil Whistler sat beside this same river thinking about his own Mere, his mother and how he could do justice to that forlorn Puritan face which razzled him with blacks, browns and greys, as if to mock the very idea of mother. Hell, James, he would never be called Jimmy like the other boys once he “did” his mother in those woe begotten colors decided he would use the old dame, and she was an old dame to star in his various studies of colors and only philistines would dare to call the work some mother lode draught.  

This is where the story gets interesting, although we know that Jack was not bothered just then by come hither girls in red dresses or Bible-kneed Irish girls since he had, playing hooky, crept into his holy of holy spots in the cubicle at the school library gone beyond the wonder of those muddy splat riverbanks where he first wondered the wonder akin to those Dutch sailors seeking his own fresh green breast of land, the land of the mind. Wondering how to stop wondering Jack picked up a biography of James Whistler complete with mother on the front except she was painting title called some study in black and white, something like that by one Lancelot Grey who Jack would later find out was the central figure in what he would wind up calling the pre-war art cabal that was attempting to “dress up,” read, protect American art and artists from the onslaught of European critics who basically call that art “folk art” meaning show the bastards the door and maybe get them shown in Peoria or better Grand Island but stay away from European shores.

Grey’s take on Whistler, taking the American born but life-long ex-patriate in was that he never left the American shores and stuff like that. What interested Jack though was not that art cabal stuff (art cabal a term he would not know until later when landing in New York he came face to face with the denizens of that cabal through various Student Art League girlfriends and others met in Village garrets when garrets were there and not in Soho). But that was after the war (World War II in case a younger reader has happened on this piece) when New York told cheapjack art Europe to fuck off, to step back and various abstraction movements were all the rage. Just then Grey delved into Whistler’s various non-mother pieces (than mother painting an iconic come on since back then only the art cabal knew other paintings and the publisher insisted that that painting be on the front).

The most interesting one, and one that seemed to contradict what the art cabal was doing to protect American artists, was a painting called The White Girl (now in the National Gallery but then in private hands). Jack was fascinated by the young woman portrayed who he learned from Grey had been one of Whistler’s mistresses. The title intrigued and confused him since somebody else called it that study in white gag that had handcuffed poor Mrs. Whistler when it suited her James. Jack would wonder, would have deep chaste Roman Catholic dreams (some say that would by his writings really always be his dreams, his Jesus-sweated dreams) and wonder what it was like to have been James’ girlfriend, and wondered too whether James wondered that he would paint his mistresses to help pay the rent. Jack would later laugh about how many girls he would con into paying the rent, walking the streets if necessary or going in some café back room to play the flute for the night’s booze and dope money and so he had kindred feelings for Brother James somewhat akin to the bandit prince Gregory Corso. But at fourteen in some library cubicle in Lowell mill-town hard by the Merrimack all he could think of was how long he would have to wonder about lots of things, too many things when the world was moving way to quickly but he would always say with pride that James was from Lowell and leave it at that. Even when he found out that James’ white girl was like his Mexican junkie- whore Tristessa. By then though that fresh green breast wonder had hardened into funk, dunk and drunk.

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Jack popcorn for eyeballs sitting in the last row of the orchestra section of the old Majestic Theater off of Bridge Street across from the offices of the Lowell Sun waiting as the screen heated up after some very ordinary news of the week reels and an off-color cartoon which he never did get even after watching several times over the next few Saturday matinee double-feature week. The films changed every Friday but Mr. Le Blanc cheapened up his operation by re-running those silly cartons built for ten-years olds with no brains but silly to a strapping boy of sixteen who actually took girls to the shows. (Le Blanc also sold stale popcorn with so much salt laid in it would make your eyelids curl and watered down the tonic, old-fashioned New England word for soda, so much it might as well have been water and even made boys like Jack with strong kidneys ran to restrooms frequently.) Of course, that was a totally different proposition, that messing with girls stuff that he had pretty much figured out by sixteen with  plenty of street advise some of it recklessly dangerous and no, zero, parent advise but that was when you asked a girl if she wanted to sit in the orchestra section or go up to the heavy-breathing pitch dark moaning balcony. If the former that would be a last date (one time he left the girl in the front lobby to fend her herself on the way home while he went off to Renoir’s Ice Cream Shop with Even Stephen and Dizzy Izzy). This day, this Thursday afternoon first show skipping afternoon classes was different when Jack was all business trying to figure some stuff out that was going to appear on the satin silk screen.  

Then it, no, she started. All fresh as a new born daisy fending off some sidewalk Lothario, if only in Jack’s imagination, really only some lug like a million lugs he knew in Lowell High School and who if he hadn’t been on a mission this afternoon could have stood in front of the high school at close of day and counted the number of lugs from the class of 1939 carousing out the door some he could name by name. So, no this lug was going nowhere, was getting nothing except the desert breezes from this girl. Jack swore the girl with the Bette Davis eyes after beating the clown off with a car jack sat in her dust-filled private reading spot reading some French poet from the fourteenth century. Jack pressed his popcorn eyeballs to see book jacket cover and his heart beat a mile a minute once he saw that she, Gabby let’s give her a name, was reading his hero prince bandit poet Francois Villon, like him a Breton when that meant something before the wave of diasporas which led angelized angel-headed Kerouacs to the shores of the Saint Lawrence River and downwardly mobile fates stripped the clan of their respective dignities.     

Yes, Villon the prince of thieves who Jack had discovered in that broken- down school library where he hid out when he could not deal with bullshit chemistry classes or some such subject around the time that he read that book by Lancelot Grey about that pimp daddy, holy goof (first use of the term “holy goof” came from reading Grey) James Whistler the artist who kept himself from the Thames and watery graves by selling his paintings or more usually “selling” his mistresses to make the rent money when times were tough. He still loved Whistler (although he could only mock a guy who had to practically handcuff his mother to the chair to get her to stand still for what he called a study in black and white, something like that) if only because he was Lowell, was a native son and that counted a lot for Jack then even if James was not a Breton. (Funny later he would go through seven kinds of hell with his own mother before telling her to kiss off.) But Villon was a legitimate bandit-prince who hung with the lumpen outside the guarded moats ready to pounce one minute on the next jackroll victim (some historians have speculated that Villon and his scumbags invented the jackroll, taking a bag of nails or coins if they had any wrapping them in a small cloth and under cover of darkness bopping some old lady or drunken sot for their dough). A lost art that Jack would use more than once in Times Square when some pansy hipster tried to do tricks on him and he bopped him for hot dog money at Howard Johnson’s stuff like that, yes, a lost but helpful art for those who lived outside the law, for those whose only road was the road.

And there she was the girl with the Bette Davis eyes all dewy even as a desert dust storm was brewing just outside the Gates of Eden reading Villon in French (her mother was French a catch for her woe begotten father during World War I service in France with the American Expeditionary Force who came back to Eden saw the dust and stone wood and left on the next train with some Singer sewing machine salesman with four quarters and a quart of wine). That Garden of Eden business a gag, a gag of sorts since the diner that he father owned, no, really her grandfather who was getting too old to run the place but too ornery to let his deadbeat son who couldn’t keep a French whore, Gramp’s words, in the middle of the desert from running away with the next time that came by with long pants on was just outside the main entrance to the Petrified Forest (couldn’t later a guy like Allan Ginsberg or even novice poet Dean Moriarty have a field day with that idea as the 1930s was tearing America, tearing the world apart, making the world turn in on itself). The gag was that Gramps an old Kentucky coalminer until he was thirteen and figured out that he would rather not die in Appalachia with the muskrats had headed out of the hills and hollows as fast as he could. Head out to California where he had heard had streets paved of gold and young girls ready to give whatever they had to give. But see Gramps and his forbears were sitting folk, were tied to the tired land so long that they would sit down anywhere where that didn’t have to pretend to seek prosperity. So Gramps stopped at the Petrified Forest once he ran into some Nevada Jane heading east after busting out heading west who worked at the diner and who played the flute for him until she too ran off with some calico salesman. Gramps just stayed put and married the first woman who smiled at him (Gabby’s grandma) and that ended the road west in that generation.         
      
So poor rattled and pestered Gabby was torn between sweet perfume dreams of Left Bank Paris cafes and that endless rock-hard dust. Then out of the blue some pretty hobo came walking up the road to the diner all dusty and road worn, a hobo whose name turned out to be Leslie Howard (that would be important later to Gabby if meaningless to Jack when she inherited his life insurance policy but that was later long after Jack had gathered in the wanderlust that set that first Breton to Canadian shores and that fucking raging Saint Lawrence River of no returns) Listen up, Jack did, this Leslie Howard was no stumble bum like half the hoboes, tramps, bums, and there are social distinctions among the brethren who were running around the country stopping at railroad jungle camps or sleeping under unkempt bridges and arroyos but a real live itinerant intellectual who had when he had seen the first turnings of the world inward in those times got the hell out of  Europe as fast as he could (he would be found later when Gabby looked for next of kin to see if anybody would contest the life insurance policy to have been Jewish not a good thing to be in Europe in those times to be a “rootless cosmopolitan”) This Howard, let’s call him that since it is as good as any other and who knows what he real name was if he was on the run bedazzled Gabby from minute one leaving that lug gas jockey out to dry with the trees. Knew his Villon cold, knew that he too was a bandit prince who hung outside the moats with the lumpen.

Right then Jack’s already strong flight of fantasy knew that he was kindred, here was guy who loved to read but could not settle down with at crazy-mixed up world pounding tattoos in his fevered brain. If anybody had been near Jack in that darkened orchestra section fit only for one-date girls and sullen adults they would have heard him gasp every time this Howard said anything of import to Gabby. Jack’s fevered mind started sketching things out, read like crazy, write like crazy and keep on the move, always on the move. What Jack would call later in one of his lesser but more philosophical books the quest, the grail hunt, the breaking from the holy goofs that keep you penned in and unfree, that holy goof a well-worn word in Jack talk. For now though just the germ of a plan.

They say that Bretons are not only are hearty but also headstrong and Jack sensed in Gabby just such characteristics even though she was nothing but some dirt farmer Okie, Arkie descendent. He would forever search for his Gabby but never find her, and frankly that search was just one among a number of searches later. This guy Leslie, what made him tick, why Jack was drawn to him like lemmings from the sea was more problematic. The Villon, hobo road warrior philosopher king part was straight up. He would have a million sleepless night visions of being out on some tramp road in say Winnemucca or Yuma facing no dough and no food or water and glad-tiding himself into soft spot, some soft bed if that was the way the thing played out. Pearl-diving, you know washing dishes for his meal in some such Garden of Eden diner somewhere if necessary just to stay on the road one more day. That part held romance, held him in thrall.

What Jack couldn’t figure out especially since the girl with the Bette Davis eyes was totally smitten by him and his wayward ways against the lugs, demented grandpas, jelly-fish fathers and abandoned down some Seine River mother not unlike the Merrimack always close to his dreams especially that rocky crest around the old Lowell Textile Institute why this modern day troubadour had so little regard for himself that he would let a bum like the notorious Duke Mantee, yes, that Duke who was the scourge of the West just then put two random slugs into his body. He tries, and would continue to try later to understand the idea of the retreat of the intellectuals, that the time of the caveman was making a reappearance after so much spent trying to come up from the mud and slime. Backwards. Damn, that bothered Jack, would bother him until his own dying breath when he turned on the intellectuals with a vengeance. The now dank dark movie hall left him utterly perplexed about what would happen to him when he had to face his own road west.

Outside the movie theater, actually he had been in the lobby when he spied her and then hailed her, Jack stopped that come hither Paula Cole and asked her if she would like to go to the movies that next Friday night when the films changed. When she answered yes Jack now a veteran of the ploy asked Paula -orchestra or balcony? Answer: “don’t be silly I would not have accepted if we weren’t going to the balcony.” With that he would put the fate of Howard in the back of his mind. First things first.

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Jack brought the Tokay, the cheap wine of the day that got him through the day and the only other wine beside kosher Mogen David mad monk (although just then demurely so) Allan Ginsberg, hereafter Monk, would drink to set himself up to read some sliver of a poem. This night expecting a bunch of people to of all things a North Beach (San Fran) converted garage gallery something the Monk would put an end to guys like T.S. Eliot, bum of the month Nazi-symp Ezra Pound and about fifty other guys and twenty other gals including his high school prose father. Would burn their old-fashioned words now of no account on a pile of burnt offerings, a pile of faggots (he would not learn until later that word’s common origins use to destroy brethren fellow homosexuals). Would get the world well, for a minute, in search of some fatherless compadre, in search of the father Jack claimed he had never known, and not he alone in the welter of great depressions and slogging through war. Maybe in the end they were searching for Father Death who knows. Jack passed the wine, passed all understanding before that search was consummated.    

Some guy, some guy who claims that his mother had worked at City Lights Bookstore in those days and had had an affair with the poet Phillip Larkin and had brought the dago red and him to the reading. Claimed to know Jack, or maybe it was the Monk in the old days, in the days when they raged with so many words they couldn’t keep enough Woolworth 5 &10 notebooks in flannel shirts or golf scorecard pencils ready wrote this, second hand about being present at the creation, second hand. At this far remove it is hard to tell fact from fiction, tell who is bullshitting and who has the goods especially since virtually all the background characters are gone, some long gone. Make of that what you will.   

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I have seen the best poet of the generation before mine, no, let me start over, I have seen a universal max daddy poet speaking some truths to put old Homer and freaking staid T.S. Eliot in the shade. Starting off by   declaring that he had seen that the best minds of his generation, guys like brother in soul Kerouac, be-bop Charlie Parker, Phil Larkin when he was sober, Johnny Spain when off the needle and doing cold turkey and of course the daddy them all one Carl Solomon turn to mush. Turned out in the barren wilderness, not the friendly desert-scrapes heading west on lonely Greyhound buses or Tourist Bureau hang-ups wilderness out pass Butte or Boise but what a novelist named Nelson Algren who called the shots and gave many a troubled youth the keys to the fixer man and wellness  called the neon wilderness, called that place where the bright lights of the city blinded a proper man (or woman) some junkie Frankie Machine haven with a wife he hated and a girlfriend who couldn’t stick with him when he was on the junk. That neon beast from which no one returned except for quick stays in safe haven mental asylums (called ironically funny farms but even the Monk, whose own mother had her share of sorrows in such places could find no humor in such designations).

Get this, no, let me start again against the cold nose of my sister filled heart. Saw, he the Monk okay in case I lose my train of thought passing through Salt Lake City and thoughts of Joseph Smith’s grand hustle taking a bunch of farmers from burned over lands to the searing sun of the western depot. Saw the same Negro streets Jack, and one time Jack and he when he, Jack was looking for some rough trade sailors just off the China Seas pierce earring trail saw around Blue Hill Avenue and Dudley Street blank, 125th Street blank, Dearborn Street blank, MacArthur Boulevard blank, Central Avenue blank, Cielo Street in Tijuana blank, Plaza del Mayo, Montezuma revenge Mexico blank, and wasted in the sweated fetid humid Thunderbird-lushed night dreaming of pink Cadillacs and stony-faced fixer men getting wise by the hour on Carl’s ancient fears. (And, this is funny or so the winos and every hobo, vagrant, escapee, drifter and grafter yelling out in unison thought so “what is the word-Thunderbird-what is the price forty twice.” Ready to jackroll some senior citizen lady for the price, for fucking eighty cents which any self-respecting junkie could cadge in two minutes even in Cielo Street, Tijuana and that is a hard peso to drill,-ready to commit mayhem at Park Street subway stations for their “boy,” to be tamped by girl but I will be discrete since the Feds might raid the place sometime looking for the ghost of Trigger Burke who eluded them for a very long time. (Trigger who captured Jack’s imagination and the Monk’s but here is the weird part Carl’s too who started strutting like him too after the prince of bandit-poets Corso showed him how to do that slinky swagger on the last visit before the blade at Sandhill).

Thought that those angel-headed hipsters hearing choruses of angels strumming their noiseless wings, those cold as ice in a man’s veins hep cats hanging around Times, Lafayette, Dupont, Harvard squares (you can fill in your own squares, square the Monk laughed and Jack hee-hawed) crying in pools of blood coming out of the wolves-stained sewers around the black corner would never stop bleating for their liquor. Would not stop until they got popular and headed for the sallow lights of Harvard Square where they, those angel-headed hipsters in  case you (and Carl) forgot  hustled young college students, young impressionable college students green as grass whose parents had had their best minds, those hallowed students’ mines, okay, wasted in the turbid streets of south Long Island (not the West Egg of Gatsby’s dream out of Fitzgerald’s fresh green breast of land to stir even sullen rough trade Dutch sailors looking for whips and cuts, conquering everything in sight like any other poor-boy arriviste with too much money and not enough imagination and not East Egg of the fervid elites but any-town, Levitt-town of those who would escape to Boston or Wisconsin to face the angel of death, that angel frightening even Monk when Carl was not around to anchor his brain. Up front and say no go, pass, under luminous moons which light up sparks and say to that candid world which could have given a fuck hard times please come again no more.

Here is the beauty of the green as grass hustle working fast to get enough to fix that jones. Dangle some college guy, maybe with a girl, shy, with dreams of hard-core liquor or a well-twisted joints to loosen her up and her fragile come hither virginity (reminding Jack of that Paula Coe who played the flute for him more than one time in that Majestic Theater balcony some hardcore Friday night and the Monk, searching for some blue-eyed  Adonis, settling for some pimpled has been teenager seeking his own father dreams). Lay out the story-kid your booze and something for me. Done. Later, a big bottle wrapped tight in a paper bag. Trick, a very thin brew of whiskey split and cash for him to get himself well. Oh the hipster cons which would have made even the Monk laugh.        

The Monk saw hipsters cadging wine drinks from sullen co-eds staying out too late in the Harvard Square night who turned out to be slumming from some plebian colleges across the river maybe good Irish girls from frail Catholic parishes with rosaries in their fair-skinned hands and a novena book between their knees who nevertheless has Protestant lusts, strong Protestant lusts busting down the shrines to Immaculate Conception Virgin Marys pretty painted by guys like Tintoretto and marching to the church door just behind Martin Luther and his bag of lusts and Salvation Army clothing in their pallid hearts but unrequited. Here’s how-they those sullen salty Irish girls, not all redheads but close  would arrive at the Café Lana with ten bucks and their virginity and leave with both leaving some guy with dreams of salty sucking blowjobs walking out the backdoor and doing the whack job behind the dumpster –a waste of precious fluids and according to Norman Mailer who would have known from his perch down in Provincetown when the mix of homosexuals and straight, except those lusty lonely Portuguese fisherman Marsden Hartley loved to paint (and to love)  the waste of world-historic fucks which would product the best minds of the next generation all dribbled away.

You already know about what you need to know about Protestant girls with their upfront Protestant lusts although they would not be caught dead, or alive, in Sally splendor although they certainly could play the penny whistle and damn those world historic fucks. Maybe tasty Jewish girls from the shtetl not in East or West Egg who flocked to the other side of the river and gave Irish guys who previously had dribbled their spunk behind dumpsters after losing out to ten bucks and virginity in tack tickey-tack Catholic girls who refused to give that head that would have brought some of the best minds some freaking relief (better not say fucking relief because that would be oxymoronic). Maybe some off-center sullen fair-skinned and blonded Quaker, Mennonite, Primitive Baptist or Brethren of the Common Life kind of Protestant girls, like I said off-center, who spouted something about one god and no trinities, no god and no trinities and just feel good stuff.

All three varieties and yes there were more off-centers but who even knew of Quakers, Mennonites, lusty Amish girls run away from home, Tantric card-wheelers, and fresh- faced red light district sluts who at least played the game straight-played the cash nexus for pure pleasure and maybe to even up some scores. All-Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, yeah, Quakers (fakirs, fakers and Shakers included), the sluts, Mennonites and yes those lusty red-faced Amish runaways all coming together after midnight far from the negro streets, the Monk’s beat and no anachronism like saying black or Afro-American back to those Mister James Crow days, but not far from the all night hustlers and dime store hipsters with their ten-cent cigar store rings and cheap Irish whiskeys bought on the installment plan who converged around the Hayes-Bickford just a seven league jump from the old end of the line dead of night Redline subway stop in order to keep the angel of death at arms’ length. The angel of death a tough bitch to break, and tougher to cross when they deal went down. There to listen until dawn to homosexuality- affixed hungry for the keyhole blast or the running sperm fakir poets, the Monk number one of all the number ones  and slamming singsters (to keep up with the gangster, mobster, hipster theme, okay) fresh out of cheapjack coffeehouses where three chords and two-line rhymes repeated in call and response got you all the action you wanted although maybe a little light on the breadbasket sent around to show that you were appreciated. Yeah, now that I think about the matter more closely hard times please come again no more.                    

Saw the angel of death make her appearance one night at the Café Lana and then backstopped the Club Nana to fetch one young thing who warbled like heaven’s own angel. Some Norman Mailer white hipster (read the Partisan Review essay if you don’t get this about all kinds of cultural mishmash and sexual too just ask the Monk when he was in his hungers and not worried about singing some Walt Whitman song about the rotgut of his generation) turned her on to a little sister and then some boy and she no longer warbled. No longer warbled like that angel angle heaven- shamed chorus but did sweet candy cane tricks for high-end businessmen with homely wives or fruitless ones who had given up that sort of “thing” after the third junior had been born and who were ready to make her their mistress if she would just stop singing kumbaya after every fuck like she was still a freaking warbler. A freaking virgin or something instead of “used” goods or maybe good for schoolboys whose older brothers took them to her for their first fling at going around the world, welcome to the brotherhood or maybe some old fart who just wanted to relive his dreams before the booze, the three wives and parcel of kids did him in and then the hustler sent her back to the Club Nana to “score” from the club owner who was connected with Nick the dream doper man, what did Nelson Algren and Frankie Machine call him in dead of night, yes, the fixer man, Christ who would get him- and her well –on those mean angel-abandoned death watch streets. Who knew that one night at the Hayes (everybody called it just that after they had been there one night), one after midnight night where they had that first cup of weak-kneed coffee replenished to keep a place in the scoreboarded night where hari-kara poets dreamed toke dreams, and brought paper-bag wrapped Tokay wines just like Monk’s Jack and some Mister dreamed of fresh-faced singer girls looking for kicks. So please, please, hard times come again no more.              

I have seen frosted lemon trees jammed against the ferrous night, the night of silly foolish childhood dreams and misunderstanding about the world, the world that that poet spoke of in a teenage dream of indefinite duration about who was to have and who was to have not once those minds were de-melted and made hip  to the tragedies of life, the close call with the mental house that awaits us all. Yeah Monk was right even about Carl Solomon and all his sorrows before the knife.
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What the hell did sullen Carl Solomon start before he went under the knife with his pleading for his father, a father that he had never known since he had been left back in Poland to peddle his fruits and vegetables to his brethren and his mother and the four kids headed to the Americas on some tub of a boat and never looked back. Rumors abounded that he survived because he had a gentile mistress grabbed after his wife and kids left. That at least is the story Carl told, told endlessly which would not be so bad but the Monk picked it up in his own moment of despair.

Monk searched his valium brain for his own prose-filled father but that was not nearly good enough, kept him awake at night because he had strange dreams that his father was not some fake high school teacher writing awful poems in broken down post-war America. Was afraid that his real father was William Appleton Williams who denied him three times, didn’t want to believe that his broken words would mesh so well. Had better dreams that his real father was sexy Walt Whitman (this remember in dialogue with Carl Solomon before the knife so it is not clear whether Carl remembered) whose vagabond dreams matched his and his homosexual desire beating out some Johnny Reb who could give Walt the ride he desired. Here is the trick though the Monk had sweet dreams whenever he read Leaves of Grass (usually on grass) and he passed that on to Jack in some secret moment in Denver when some screwball Adonis was looking for his father.

Now Jack, funny before Carl grabbed Monk with the father who we never knew religion, always thought he knew his father, knew the con artist, poker cheater, movie theater ticket taker great bear of a French-Canadian who came down the Jackson, Maine road with five cents Canadian in his pocket and dreams of printing up ads. But that was not the father that he knew but some skinny stiff wino pissant who he sought out in greater Denver cattle yards. Always deferred to everlasting Mere, Mere out of some fresh Breton conceit never getting some whiplash from old father time who died before his time of heartache and heartbeats. So Jack conned himself into some holy goof, his words exactly, metaphysical search going up the Bear Mountain, Jackson, Wyoming Jackson not that trail of tears from down in Maine Jackson where the red brick and mortar spinning wheels beckoned and he spent and spilled his young manhood trying to get the fuck out from under even if he couldn’t drive, made him nervous, to save his life. Funny again that fame never stopped the bleeding inside looking behind some bushes for some father death, some father time pissing against that Tokay dream he figured out back in about 1946 but could never get past. The Monk did him no service on that long trail drive from Monument Creek to Sunnyvale and then drop off and outs at Big Sur where he got sober for a week.   

Damn that stuff is contagious, will drive you crazy, when twice removed Lance, me, went looking for the father he never knew too. Looked for him behind closed doors to his heart. That distant slightly dim figure who brought home not enough pay checks. Who never talked about but never got over the Pacific war like a lot of guys who found themselves on tubs picking up stray comrades from washed-up beaches, picking up too guys who got too close to chore, got wasted in some windless fire and fell down into the green-gray-blue surf that gets us all in the end. The old man, father, never talked much, much about anything that Lance, me would understand and so Jack-like Ma, Mere, Mom, Mere whatever you want to call her ran rough-shot over childish dreams and insecurities. Here’s the worst of it though, Jack-like, he never got to say good-bye to that father he never knew and crushed his days with regret, total regret that he didn’t have the sense of a holy goof, Jack talk, to have called a truce, even an armed truce to the madness that wracked his silly excuse for a family, and now all his has is slate grey stone to place the remnants down in some unknown holy place where he can never dwell, yes, Lawrence, me, got caught in the Monk’s version of Carl’s plainsong, no, got stuck in the damn mire.          

Silly to think that the father time search would only apply to men, young men, holy goofs like Lawrence, me, when the max daddy sin of all was the way Jack, in Jack speak, abandoned his Jan, his spitting image Jan, denied like Christ was denied three times by the count. Jan who would search like some strange Kenneth Rexroth figure for the father we all knew, or thought we knew once he pointed us toward the light, once we got the beat, the second-hand beat that washed us clean in places like Big Sur and Todo el Mundo where Jan still searches in some desperate wild water surf for some broken down guy who wasted away with drink, and she with drink too. Jesus, funny he was searching for his father too out in Middle Eastern wildernesses, will it never end.     

Contagious that is what Sam Lowell said about the freaking search for that lost father world made up of pure sand and not much else. Some goof, the holy part excluded was looking for his father, his famous private detective father, a guy named Lew Archer, who back around Jack time in California ran the rack on few good cases and then rested for forty years something like that. Tried to claim that his father’s life death was due to his father’s overused whip, his sorrows that he could not go the distance with his wife, this goof’s grandmother, his code of honor that once he took a job he was in, totally in, for good or evil, and       
maybe that he drank too much Tokay, Jack-like when he wound up behind some freaking wino pissant dumpster saved but some sister of mercy who could not save him in the end. Get this though that junkie weirdo so-called grandson, some modern-day Carl Solomon without the sorrows before he went under the knife could not be searching for Lew, Lew Archer since Lew never had a son, had no children. Sorry goof,    

Out on the Jersey looking east first to see the great ocean that drove his forbears to search for fresh green breasts of land then west to seek dungeon filled fathers never known in Denver, Santa Fe, Salt Lake City Salvation Army hotels or whatever they call those blessed places of rest the whole deal was to figure out a way to look for some American cowboy past, looking for the Monk’s Adonis if he couldn’t make it with sexy Walt Whitman with the furl of whiskers. There sat Dean Moriarty, no, fuck that, one Neal Cassidy who would ride the freight trains west looking for that father the others really did think they had found. Neal’s old man was in some wino jailcell speaking in tongues to a candid world. Maybe Carl was right, Monk too we should all cry to the high heavens looking for the fathers we never knew.