An Anniversary- Of
Sorts-With Anti-Fascist Activist Fritz Taylor’s Worldview In Mind
By Frank Jackman
My old late lamented
growing up friend Peter Markin (not the moderator of this site and of others as
well who also had been a growing up friend and who had taken the moniker Peter
Paul Markin in honor of our still lamented lost brother but the real mad man
Markin known to one and all in the old neighborhood as “the Scribe”) would have
said the then equivalent of WTF if he had seen this little screed about my
publicly announcing the forty-fifth anniversary of Fritz Taylor’s introduction
and adherence the Marxist worldview, the view that the centrality of the class
struggle is the prime mover, although let’s be clear given the over one century
and a half obfuscation on the matter not the sole mover, of the human
historical drama. (The ghost of the departed Markin is still so strong among
the surviving brethren of the working poor Acre section of North Adamsville the
place where Markin and I grew up that I dare not put my above-stated intention
in the headline to this piece.)
Let me be clear Pete
Markin and no other was the pivotal character in Fritz’s life who drew him to
the study of some Marxist literature and attending study group classes in
Marxist doctrine so it is not a question of the subject matter which he did,
and still would I believe, object to but his hatred for what was even then a
skyrocketing increase in the number of anniversaries of various events. Worse,
worst of all, was the commemoration of odd-ball events in say their fortieth or
sixtieth anniversary years instead of the reasonable tenth, twenty-fifth and
fiftieth which we grew up with and made a certain amount of sense. Who knows
what ballistic missiles, verbal or written, he would have launched if he could
see some of the events and some of the year designations today. You know the
thirtieth anniversary of Janis Joplin’s premier album with Big Brother and the
Holding Company or the 65th anniversary of the landing of man on the
moon. Odd years like that drove him crazy. Make him want to retch from what he
told me one night when we were in our cups.
It wasn’t like Markin had
always gone off the deep end about the commemoration of all odd-ball events. He
drew a distinction though between certain world-historic events and
run-of-the-mill stuff like an album’s anniversary and events important to the
lives of the people he was trying to reach out to think about a radical
restructuring of society. Events like the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution
(before the demise of the Soviet Union which would have shocked him to his core),
the commemoration of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti by the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts (the recent commemoration of which noted the 90th
anniversary which Markin would have been happy to have seen organized-an
earlier one he had dragged me to in high school). But the others would have him
in a rage, no doubt.
When I started out
thinking about honoring Fritz Taylor’s commitment to the Marxist doctrine, his
underlying worldview, although really to
forty-five years of left-wing political activism under that activist imperative
which is much more important than merely noting his ideological underpinnings,
important as those are, I had intended to just tell his story, how he came to
his views. That idea, once I actually started writing a first draft, soon
proved to be short-sighted. It is impossible to chart how Fritz “got religion”
without explaining how Markin came to his, for the short time that he actually
actively adhered to the doctrine before the demons in his head led him down a
different path, down a still mysterious drug-strewn death down in the dusty
back streets of Sonora, Mexico after what was apparently a busted drug deal.
Like I said before Markin, forever the Scribe, was a growing up friend so I can fill in some
of that seemingly inevitable trajectory before he ever met Fritz after they had
both gotten out of the Army and found that they had both hated with a passion
their blood on their hands involvements in the then-raging Vietnam War.
Of all the North
Adamsville corner boys (guys who due to lack of dough, serious lack of dough,
successively hung out at Harry Variety Store, Doc’s Drugstore and Tonio’s Pizza
Parlor as we grew up and took our time-honored, age-appropriate designated corner
spots) Pete was the quirkiest of us all. While the rest of us were mainly, make that solely, interested in girls,
cars, money, money for dates, so girls again, and actually the car thing played
into the girl quest as well Markin was always into some new idea or trend he
would read about. Bored us to tears reading some fucking Allen Ginsburg’s
“faggot” (term used by us at the time) poem Howl
or Jack Kerouac’s On The Road
when he was crazy for the beatniks. Later too when the whole hippie-world
turned upside down Summer of Love, 1967 he got everybody looking at different
stuff. Or fucking folk music when that was big and he would try to drag us, me,
over to Harvard Square to again be bored to tears (until we found out that some
very foxy “chicks” were into the damn thing and we faked an interest for that sole
reason. I still hate to hear folk music to this day, especially Bob Dylan).
That stuff was bad enough but then he had his freaking political causes, stuff
that made us all think he was some kind of pinko commie and which would have
gotten him more than one fucking beating if he had not been our best friend,
and a guy who also figured out a lot of very illegal ways for us to get dough
for those girl-related necessities. Quirky yeah. I remember he went to some
nuclear disarmament with the freaking Quakers when we were in the ninth grade
after he made some probably ill-advised bet with our leader, Frankie Riley, who
claimed that he would not go through with it. Later the black civil rights movement
down South which was very touchy in our lily-white neighborhood and caused some
bad blood even with his corner boys when he went off on a tangent about it.
(Yes we used the “n” word then in referring to black people, worse than that
sometimes).
Frankly though as Markin
was growing up, as he developed his style in high school he could have given a
“rat’s ass” (a term of art used in the old neighborhood genesis unknown) about
Marxism, hated, despite our pinko commie comments, Communists almost as much as
the rest of us did except he was not for jailing every last one of the them or
shipping them all to Moscow. He had dreams of being a serious politician,
serious let’s say social democratic politician on the right side of the angels
in public anyway. Not a candidate type like his hero Robert Kennedy but a guy
right beside some aspiring candidate guiding him along the way.
What changed him? What
drove him over the edge away from that dream and maybe some normal day success?
One word: Vietnam. Even that crooked path could have been different if he
wasn’t so quirky and curious. In the spring of 1967 he had caught a sense that
things were changing, that maybe that new world he was always yakking to us
about, something about a new wave coming over the land and we had better be
ready, might come to something. He made a fateful, and wrong, decision to drop
out of his sophomore year in college in Boston and head out to San Francisco to
grab onto the tailwinds of the Summer of Love. He was right at home, even got
some of us out there for a while. Of course not being a male student with a
student deferment in 1967 when the major escalations of the war in Vietnam were
still piling up requiring more troops, more “cannon fodder” he would call it
even then long before he ever though he would be caught in its web meant he was
a prime candidate for the draft. He was rather casual about the matter whenever
I mentioned it always assuming that the damn war would end before he number
came up.
Like I said wrong move.
I guess now I would say that I would have thought that certainly of all the old
crowd Pete would have been the first one to have refused, or even thought about
refusing, induction given his past history and his strong views about being in
Vietnam, a place and a people whom he said he had no cause to hate since they
had never done anything to him but maybe that was later after he got back from
that hellhole. But no when he got his draft notice and passed the physical he
said he had no strong reasons not to go unlike some of the increasing number of
students and other young men who were refusing induction (or heading to Canada
or figuring some other way to avoid military service at a time when that only
meant Vietnam was beckoning). So he went when called like every other corner
boy we knew who was eligible if they hadn’t already enlisted beforehand. I got
out of military service by having had a crippling knee injury as a kid and thereafter
had walked with a pronounced limp especially on rainy days.
That acceptance of
induction another mistake. Pete never talked about it all that much but he went
through the wringer in Vietnam. Had been an 11 Bravo Army speak for an
infantryman, a grunt, that cannon fodder always he was always yelling about.
The only place that needed 11Bravos just then, and lots of them, was in Vietnam
so it was inevitable he would wind up there. Said he did and was made to do
stuff that would forever haunt him the few times he did let on that the whole
experience had screwed up his life. (How deeply it did so to him we would not
know for several years and even then we could only surmise what demons had
driven him to dope deals and dirty back streets to an early grave down in
Mexico once we lost contact with him).
The minute he got out of
the Army Pete began a political trajectory through his associations with the
then growing Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) that would lead him to a
study of Marxism and a short whirling dervish period of left-wing activity
before he descended into hell. (I have heard from old corner boy leader Frankie
Riley, a Vietnam veteran himself that Pete had been politically active even
before he got out of the Army so let’s just say when he got back to what he
called the “real world”). Through the VVAW link he had, after a whirlwind run
around the country attending probably every anti-war demonstration that drew
more than five people, landed back in Cambridge in the early spring of 1971
where he had run into a group of radicals who were heading to Washington to try
to shut down the government (the Nixon government at that time) if it did not
end the fucking war (“fucking” my term at that point and now too when I think
about how it fucked up one of the best of our whole generation long before his
time was up). All Pete, they and their cohorts got for their efforts was
massive police and military repression, tear gas and a huge number of arrests.
The war would linger on in one form or another for the next few years (and
dominate the psyche of the best part of the generation for many years).
As a result of that Mau
Day experience Pete, and others back in Cambridge as well, took note that a few
brave but marginal students, radicals, do-gooders had no shot at effective
governmental change based on some ill-advised if heroic individual acts of
political bravery. Who or what force could do so. He, they thought through lots
of scenarios but came up empty based on who had enough power to switch things
around. I don’t remember all the details but I do remember for a time Markin
was very excited after he had found a copy of Karl Marx’s tribute and defense
of the fallen at the Paris Commune. He had read, and discarded, Marx’s Communist Manifesto as so much old time
bullshit in high school when he would rail against the commies with a lot more
knowledge than our knee-jerk 1950s red scare Cold War attitudes. Now he took
what was said there on a re-reading in a whole new light. That document helped,
he once told me, explain a little, not all, of what growing up poor had done to
him, his family, to us his friends and fellow poor proletarians (his new found
word). Naturally Markin being Markin once he got hot on the trail of an idea,
maybe anything that interested him, went into overdrive and hunkered down in
the Cambridge library and read everything he could by Marx or his co-thinker
Friedrich Engels. Classic Markin.
I have not said much
about Fritz yet who after all is the center of this anniversary business. Like
I said just after his discharge from the Army Markin went all over attending
anti-war rallies and events. One time down in Washington Pete was marching with
VVAW in a silent procession through the streets (it may have been the time a
whole slew of Vietnam veterans threw their medals back over the fence at the
Supreme Court building and if not that then around that time) when after the
event was over he introduced himself to Fritz who had been marching beside him.
Fritz had been in the Army too, had been a mortar man, 11 C, 11 Charlie I think
was the designation meaning he was just as much in the thick of things as Pete.
Fritz was from down South, down in Georgia, Fulton County, and had volunteered
like a million guys from Georgia had done, and as their grandfathers and
fathers had done without thinking a thing about it. Fritz, not nearly as well
educated as Pete, but a true son of the working class, the Southern poor
working class just as the Acre meant Northern poor working class had something
about him that was attractive to Pete. Maybe the shared Army connection, maybe
the class part or maybe because Fritz was like the corner boys of his youth a
stand-up guy. They became good friends in Washington and a couple of weeks
later Pete, back in Cambridge, invited Fritz up to stay at a commune where he had
been living with a few post-graduate student radical activist.
Fritz came up and while
it took him a while to figure out how to deal with communal life having been
pretty straight before Vietnam once he got a girlfriend (Leslie, whom he would
eventually marry and is still married to) he was as inquisitive as Pete about
what the hell they could do to stop the fucking wars (that “fucking” Fritz’s
who to this day can seldom complete a sentence without that expletive). That
Cambridge commune is where I first met Fritz and that girlfriend. Once Pete
“got religion” on the Marxist stuff Fritz got carried along. It was an
infinitely harder task for Fritz to slog through the readings, has always said
that he never did really figure out what dialectical materialism was all about
and a few other things too but he got the main drift, got that without a
revolutionary overturn of society that same old, same old would rise to the top
again. Pete and Fritz had a million conversations before Pete left for his last
hurrah in California. (Fritz wouldn’t go because Leslie was still in school and
he was even then smitten by her charms to not leave her behind). You know the
long lamented Pete Markin’s fate so you know that even the strong ideological
of Marxism then could not conquer the demons in his head (what I began calling
several years ago when I was having my own demon problems of a different sort
“putting out the fire in your head”)
Fritz though despite all
the ups and downs of leftwing political life in America and the shattering and
in some ways decisive shattering of the old Soviet Union has stayed the course.
Had no illusions about that place but also knew that a bad wind had drifted
over the planet once that experiment had run its course and created a serious
defeat for his beloved international working class. That wind still very much
in play some quarter of a century later. Said that old curmudgeon Marx had lots
of things right and still had something to say today, maybe especially today
when everybody and their sister knows that the scales are tipped against
working people almost everywhere. Told me when I showed him the second draft of
this piece that although much has been apparently mistaken in the Marxist
worldview the idea that if you don’t “turn the world upside down” (a favored
Markin expression), change what class is in charge doing the stuff to benefit
the whole world then you are stuck with what we have today or the old stuff
just rises to the top again. Get this though Fritz who knew Markin only as an
adult and with some of the shine worn off and not like us when he would charge
into a room and dazzle you with some new idea that just had to work said old
Pete Markin in his time had something to say too. Yeah, Fritz, yeah.
