Happy, Happy Birthday
Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts
A link to NPR’s
Christopher Lydon’s Open Source 2018 program
on the meaning of Karl Marx in the 21st century on the 200th
anniversary of his birth:
http://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/
By Seth Garth
Normally Frank Jackman
would be the natural person to do his take on the name, the role, the legacy of
one German revolutionary exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848 faded
away, Karl Marx, on the 200th anniversary of his birth in 1818. And Frank
at first fought me a little, said he had grabbed a bunch of Marx’s books and
pamphlets like the Communist Manifesto
and the abridged Das Capital abetted by his friend and colleague Engels’ The Peasant Wars In Germany and Scientific Socialism. No question heavy
lifting, heavy reading which our respective youths would have been read until
early in the morning page turners but now would seemingly act as a sedative, a
sleep aid, at least for me since Frank said it had made him more alert although
agreeing that the works were not “read until early in the morning page
turners.” Frank’s argument to me at least for his grabbing the assignment was
that he had of the two of us been more influenced by Marx’s works and programs and
had actually been a supporter of the old time Trotskyist organization the
Socialist Workers Party for a while back in the early 1970s after he got out of
the Vietnam blood bath American army and was ready to “storm heaven” (his
words) to right the wrongs of this wicked old world (my words grabbed via Sam
Lowell take) and as well had been doing leftwing commentary since Hector was a
pup (somebody unknown’s expression).
Frank then went chapter
and verse at me with what he remembered (both from long ago and the recent
re-readings) about how he had all his life, all his early life looking for
something, some movement to move him, to move us who grew up with him poor as
church mice, maybe poorer to a more just world. Had made me laugh, since on
some of the stuff I have been right alongside him, like when he mentioned the
old Student Union for World Goals which a bunch of us had put together in high
school. A grouping with a program that was inundated with all the
anti-communist, red scare, Cold War platitudes we could find. We basically were
a little to the left of Ike, Grandpa Ike, Dwight D. Eisenhower who was
President of the United States (POTUS in twitter-speak) in our youth filled
with bauble about the virtues of capitalism, although I think we would have
been hard pressed to make that word connection and probably said something like
prosperity which we had garnered very little of in the now fondly remembered
golden age of the 1950s-for others not us.
Then as the thaw came,
or as people, young people mostly broke the spell of the red scare Cold War
night, after we have sown our oats out in the Summer of Love, 1967 and saw some
writing on the wall that we were ‘raw meat” for the draft come college
graduation day getting hopped up about Robert Kennedy’s ill-fated, ill-starred
bid for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1968. I already
mentioned the Army experiences which did both of us in for a while but which
frankly drove Frank outside bourgeois politics (he had expected that he would
tie his wagon to Robert Kennedy and when that idea fell apart with Kennedy’s assassination
offering Hubert H. Humphrey his services against the main villain of the ear
Richard M. Nixon in the expectation that he would ride that train out of the
draft and/or begin the road to a nice sinecure via Democratic Party politics).
I am not sure if he
began serious reading on Marx in the Army or not but when he got out in 1971 he
certainly was doing the “read until the early morning” routine. I grabbed some
of his tidbits, associated with some of the radical circles in Cambridge he
started to frequent, went down the line with him in Washington on May Day, 1971
where we both got busted but soon after withdrew a bit from both him and
serious leftwing politics. I was crazy, still am, for films, for seeking some
kind of career as a film critic and so spent more of my time in the Brattle
Theater in Harvard Square than protesting on Boston Common. He can address
sometime his own withdrawal from left-wing organizational politics and moving
on to journalism, political commentary on his own dime.
That is enough of the
political justification for Frank’s fighting me on this assignment. Frank,
however, took the unusual step, for him anyway, of mentioning his being pissed
off about losing the Marx assignment and mentioned it to site manager Greg
Green. The guy who gives out the assignments and who has had more than one
person, me included, scratching their heads both in the assignments they have
gotten of late or like Frank not have gotten. Whatever Frank laid out for Greg he
had both of us come in to his office to discuss the issue. You know as much as
you need to about Frank’s “cred.”
My frame of reference and
what amounted to the winning argument was that I had been Peter Paul Markin’s
closest friend in high school. Markin, forever known as Scribe for the obvious
reason that he always carried a notebook and pen or pencil in his shirt pocket
AND always, always had two thousand facts ready to throw at anybody who would
listen, mainly girls, which drove more that one of our corner boy crowd to
threaten grievous bodily is the real primary source for whatever we knew about
Karl Marx before we went crazy later and started to seriously read the stuff. So
I knew the details of how Frank, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon and maybe
a couple of others first heard about the name and ideas of one Karl Marx and who
would later act on them a little. This is where I was a little ahead of Frank
knowing that Greg, after taking over as site manager when Allan Jackson was
purged from that position, was interested much more in “human interest” stories
than the “tiresome” (his words) esoteric left-wing jargon that he knew Frank
would meandering into, no, would get into knee deep.
(For the record some of
the other guys who hung around with Scribe and the rest of us like Ricky Rizzo
and Dave White, both who would lay their heads down in hellhole Vietnam and wound
up on the town monument and Washington black granite, Red Riley and even Frank
Jackman when he was hopped up on that Student Union thing almost lynched him
when he started talking favorably about Karl Marx and the idea of red
revolution in those dead ass red scare Cold War nights. All they wanted to hear
about was whatever intelligence Scribe had on some girl they were interested in
of which he somehow almost incongruously had plenty of information about or
what his next plan was for the “midnight creep” which I assume needs no further
explanation except he planned the capers but no way would Frankie Riley or the
rest of us let him lead the expeditions-hell we would still be in jail.)
Others, including Frank
Jackman, have now seemingly endlessly gone over the effect Scribe had on them a
little later when the turbulent 1960s we all got caught up in, blew a gasket,
in the Summer of Love, 1967 as the culmination of what he also had been talking
about for years on those lonely forlorn weekend nights when we hung around good
guy Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the growing up Acre section of North
Adamsville. What most of the guys did not know, or did not want to know, was
that a little of what Scribe was thinking at the time, was that maybe Karl Marx
might be proven to be right, might have been onto something when he spoke about
the working classes, us, getting a big jump ahead in the world once things
turned upside down. He held those views pretty closely then, especially when he
was practically red-baited into silence by those guys who were even more hung
up, as was Scribe in many ways, on the new normal American negative propaganda
about Russia, Communism, and Karl Marx. Nobody, this from later Scribe once he
flamed red, was born a radical, a revolutionary, and certainly not a Marxist
but certain conditions, among them being as poor as church mice, gave a clue to
where some people might go. The intellectuals, although Scribe did not call
them that, would come to their Marxism more through books and rational thought
than as prime victims of the usually one-sided class struggle of the rich
against the poor. That was about as far as Scribe would go, wanted to go,
because in many ways, although maybe a little less fulsomely, he wanted to go
the same bourgeois politics path as Frank in politics.
Like I say Scribe
described to some of us a glimmer, a faux Marxist primer, then in high school,
not at all thought out like it would be by him or us later in the late 1960s
and early 1970s when we got back respectively from our tours to the “real”
world from ‘Nam and knew we had been fucked over by our government. That the
“reds” in Vietnam were poor folk, peasants, with whom we had no quarrel. But
that was later.
Here is a better example
of the glimmer Scribe shined on us back in the day. I remember one night, it
had to be one high school night given the teacher and class he was describing, Scribe
had told me that he had had to stay after school one day for Mr. Donovan, the World History teacher and football coach
which tells you what he was about, when Scribe had given a surly answer about
some question Mr. Donovan had asked. That surliness coming from two sources,
one Donovan having members of the class endlessly reading aloud the freaking
book boring everybody within a mile of the room and that he really believed he
already knew more about history than Donovan and so was personally bored as
well. The question had not been about Marxism but something else and during
that afternoon detention Donovan had asked him if he was a “Bolshevik.” Scribe
recoiled in horror he said knowing that to say yes would get him in some
trouble (probably more after school time at least) and for the simple fact that
he could not say truthfully whatever teen angst and alienation he was feeling
was driven by that kind of understanding of the world-then.
What this history
teacher confrontation did do was get Scribe looking again, and this tells as
much about him as any other anecdote, at his dog-eared copy of Karl Marx’s (and
his co-thinker and financial “angel” Friedrich Engels) classic statement of his
views The Communist Manifesto to
confirm whether he was a “Marxist,” “Communist,” whatever and he came away from
that re-reading knowing that he was not one of those guys, a red. That was the
kind of guy Scribe was when he was confronted with something he didn’t
understand. The rest of us would have said “fuck it” and let it go at that or
have challenged old Donovan with a spurious “yeah, what about it.” Maybe some
silly remark like “better red than dead” or “my mommy is a commie,” expressions
making the rounds in that dead air time.
So this little sketch
really is a “human interest” story and not all that much about Marx in any
political sense and that is also why I think that Greg bought my argument over
Frank’s. Whatever Marx, Marxism, hell, just general radical non-parliamentary
socialism held for the 19th devotees (and bloodthirsty enemies too)
extending into the greater part of the 20th century fell down, went
to ground, with the demise of the Soviet Union back in 1991-92, and whatever
intellectual curiosity Marx and Marxism held fell down too so other than as an
exotic utopian scheme today there is no reason to go chapter and verse on the
details of what Marx was programmatically projecting.
To finish up on this sketch
though I should like to mention the way Scribe, which again will tell something
about the mad monk when he was in his flower, got his copy of the Manifesto back when he was fourteen or
fifteen. He had heard for some source, maybe some “beat” over in Harvard Square
when he used to go there after a particularly bad day in the mother wars, it
was a cool document or something, who knows with Scribe was kind of strange. He
couldn’t find the book in either the school or town libraries for the simple
fact that neither had the document nor did when he inquired they want to have
it in circulation. Yeah it was that kind of time. A friendly young librarian
suggested that he try the Government Printing Office which might have a copy if
somebody in Congress (like the red-baiter par excellence Senator Joseph
McCarthy) or some governmental agency had ordered it printed for whatever
reason as part of an investigation or just to put it in the record for some
reason. He got the address in Washington and the GPO sent back a brochure with
their publications for sale. And there it was. He ordered a copy and a few
weeks alter it came in the mail. Here’s the funnier part, funnier that the
government providing copies on the cheap (or maybe free I forget what he said on
that point) of such a notorious document the document had been placed on the
publication list because it was part of the record for the raucous House
Un-American Activities Committee meeting in San Francisco in 1960 when they
were practically run out of town by protesters as the Cold War began to thaw in
certain places. Of course that was a recollection by Scribe later when we were
deep into the Summer of Love out in that very town and he had asked some older
people what that protest had been all about.
Yeah, Scribe was a piece
of work and he would eventually drag some of us along with him in his good days
like the Summer of Love and later after Vietnam time running around with
radical students in Cambridge when checking out Mark and Marxism was all the
rage. Like I said old Marx has had his up and downs, has taken his beatings but
some things Scribe said he said and which we later read about like the poor
getting a better shake because they provided the value provided by their cheap
labor were spot on. Worse, in a way when I looked, re-read, for this assignment
some of the stuff it reads like it could have been written today. How about
that.
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