Monday, May 15, 2017

Veterans On the March • Memorial Day in D.C.

Veterans On the March • Memorial Day in D.C.

Veterans On the March!
Stop Endless War • Build for Peace!
“War is a racket: A few profit, the many pay!”– Major General Smedley Butler, USMC
May 29 and 30, 2017  Washington DC
May 29, 2017:  Letters to the Vietnam Memorial Wall • Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
May 30, 2017: Lincoln Memorial • White House
Hundreds of Veterans and allies gather at the White House December, 2010 to demand PeaceHundreds of Veterans and allies gather at the White House December, 2010 to demand Peace
In response to President Trump’s outrageous budget proposal, including a $54 billion increase for the Pentagon, VFP and other veterans groups will not be silent. Planning for this was started in response to VFP’s galvanizing statement about Trump’s Military Budget and our desire and responsibility as veterans, citizens and human beings to express our strong resistance to his policies and our commitment to find a better way to peace.
The Trump administration recently fired 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria, in violation of international and U.S. law. After that, the largest non-nuclear bomb was dropped on Afghanistan, an impoverished country that has suffered enough already. Trump has been making threats towards North Korea that could initiate a nuclear war – WWIII. He says, he will not tell anyone ahead of time what he will do.
Donald Trump and his administration appear to be destroying this planet with utter disregard for our children and grandchildren.
Veterans cannot be silent. On May 29th and 30th Veterans For Peace and other veterans groups will be in Washington, DC, to make our collective veterans' voices heard loud and clear and we invite you to join us! 
On Memorial Day,  Veterans For Peace will gather for a solemn and respectful occasion to deliver letters at the Vietnam Memorial Wall and to remember all combatants and civilians who died in Vietnam and all wars. We will mourn the tragic and preventable loss of life calling for people to abolish war in the name of those who have died and for the sake of all those who live today.
On the 30th we will boldly and loudly demand an end to war, an end to the assault on our planet, an end to abuse and oppression of all people and to stand for peace and justice at home and abroad. 
Demands:
1. Dismantle the U.S. Empire at Home and Abroad!

2. Close all U.S. Bases on Foreign Soil – Bring the Troops Home!

3. Ban Nuclear Weapons! 

4. Decrease the Pentagon Budget – Money for Education, Infrastructure and Sustainable Green Energy

5. Dismantle Corporate Control of our Government 

6. Dismantle the School to Prison/Military Pipeline– Create Humane Methods of Rehabilitation
Schedule:
Monday, May 29: Meeting at 9 AM at the Bell Tower, adjacent to the Wall for a briefing by Doug Rawlings and an opportunity to read some of this year’s letters; 10:30 AM, we deliver letters to The Wall; from 11:30 to 12 we proceed ½ mile to MLK Memorial; at 12:30 we begin a public reading of MLK’s Riverside Church address, his Beyond Vietnam speech. After the MLK event we gather back at the Bell Tower to engage with the public. At 6:30 PM we meet for a social gathering at Busboys & Poets.
Tuesday: May 30: 11 AM rally at Lincoln Memorial w/hour of short, uplifting speeches, then after the rally VFP will be going to the White House fence to demand our meeting with the president. We will read the letter from VFP President Barry Ladendorf asking for a public meeting, which will have been sent previously to the White House. 
 We will have legal support and musical accompaniment.
To RSVP for the event, please fill out this form.
Share the Event on Facebook.
For more information contact Tarak Kauff, VFP National Board Member, takauff@gmail.com, 845 679-6189 or 845 706-0187
For more information on the Letters to the Wall project contact Doug Rawlings,  rawlings@maine.edu, 207 500-0193
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In Honor Of May Day 2017-From The American Left History Blog Archives Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade



In Honor Of May Day 2017-From The American Left History Blog Archives Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade: A Day When The Words Veterans and Peace Came Together –Came Together Very Nicely- The Struggle Continues –On To May Day 2012

Thanks to all those who helped organize, marched in, donated funds to, donated time to, helped spread the word about, or just gave us their good wishes in the just concluded 2ndAnnual Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade through the streets of South Boston on Sunday March 18th. Many of us have been through lots of protests and other street actions in the struggle against war, against inequality, and against injustice but our well-received march through the working-class neighborhoods of Southie ranks very high, very high indeed, in the annals of those struggles.

Of course no one event, even a parade of the army of the righteous to spread the word to the kindred, will turn the swords into plowshares, right the incredible disparity between the rich and poor, or give indignant voice to the oppressed and voiceless so the struggle continues. And continues in other forms on other days. So we throw our very pleasant memories in the back of our minds and roll up our sleeves for the next struggle. And I just happen to have an event for you to focus on- May Day 2012

May Day 2012 is a day, as we have dubbed it, when we want to show a different face of the struggle- the struggle against social and political inequality to the bosses. A day when the 99% shows the 1% that we created the wealth and we are ready to take it. It’s ours.A day when we say no work, no school, no shopping, no banking, and no chores (nobody will have a problem with that last one). More later.For now though-All Out On May Day

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From the General Strike Working Group of Occupy Boston:

Occupy May Day- A Day Without the 99%

On May 1st Occupy Boston calls on the 99% to strike, skip work, walk
out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business for a
day without the 99%.

NO WORK.

Request the day off. Call out sick. Small businesses are encouraged to
close for the day and join the rest of the 99% in the streets. If you

must work, don’t worry - there will be actions planned for all

hours of the day.

NO SCHOOL.

Walk out of class. Occupy the universities. Kick out the
administration. Participate in student strike actions or plan your
own. It’s your future. Own it.

BLOCK THE FLOW.

In the early hours on May 1st the 99% will converge on the Boston

Financial district for a day of direct action to demand an

end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The
Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of
Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and
corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.

There will be a May Day rally at Boston City Hall Plaza at noon followed by

solidarity marches and other creative actions throughout the day.


EVERYONE TO THE STREETS!

We call upon all of the 99% to join in this day of action to demand an
end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. No work. No
school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the 1% that we
have the power. Let’s show the world a day without the 99%.

 
 
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From The Archives Of The International Communist League-Syndicalism and Leninism (1970)

Markin comment:

In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.

After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.

I am continuing today  what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
Markin comment on this article:

Many anarchists and anarcho-syndicialists, especially in France and the United States (from the IWW, mostly), rallied to the cause of the Communist International in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917. I have attached a letter from Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky to a leading French anarcho- syndicalist, Pierre Monatte, who along with Alfred Rosmer brought some of their comrades to the ranks of the early French Communist Party.
****
Leon Trotsky
The First Five Years of the Communist International
Volume 1

Letter to Comrade Monatte

MY DEAR FRIEND, I take this opportunity to send my warmest regards and to express my personal views on the state of affairs in French syndicalism – views that are, I trust, in complete harmony with the guiding line of the Third International as a whole.

I shall not hide from you that our joy in following the constant successes of revolutionary syndicalism is tinged with deepest concern over the future development of ideas and relations within the French labor movement. Today the revolutionary syndicalists of all tendencies still remain an opposition and are being held together precisely by their oppositional status. Tomorrow, the instant that you conquer the General Confederation of Labor [1] – and we don’t doubt that this day is nigh – you will come up against the fundamental questions of the revolutionary struggle. And precisely here we enter the zone of our grave worries.

The official program of revolutionary syndicalism is the Charter of Amiens. [2] In order to immediately express my thought as sharply as possible, let me say flatly – every reference to the Charter of Amiens is not an answer but an evasion. To every thinking Communist it is perfectly clear that pre-war French syndicalism represented a profoundly significant and important revolutionary tendency. The Charter of Amiens was an extremely precious document of the proletarian movement. But this document is historically restricted. Since its adoption a World War has taken place, Soviet Russia has been founded, a mighty revolutionary wave has passed over all of Europe, the Third International has grown and developed. The old syndicalists and the old Social Democrats have split into two and even three hostile camps. New questions of gigantic proportions have risen before us as practical questions on the order of the day. No answer to these questions is contained in the Amiens Charter. In the columns of La Vie Ouvrieère I am able to glean no answers to the fundamental problems of the revolutionary struggle. Can it possibly be that our task today, in the year 1921, lies in returning to the positions of 1906 and in bringing about the “revival” (réconstruction) of pre-war syndicalism? Such a position greatly resembles, in principle, the position of those political “revivalists” (réconstructeurs) who are dreaming of a return to “pure” socialism, as it existed prior to its fall into sin during the war. Such a position is amorphous; it is conservative and it threatens to become reactionary.

Just how do you envisage the leadership of the syndicalist move-ment, from the moment you obtain the majority of the General Confederation of Labor? The ranks of the syndicates embrace party Communists, revolutionary syndicalists, anarchists, Socialists and broad non-party masses. Naturally, every issue involving revolutionary action must in the last analysis be brought before the entire syndicalist apparatus, embracing hundreds of thousands and millions of workers. But who will sum up the revolutionary experience, analyze it, draw all the necessary conclusions from it, formulate the specific proposals, slogans and methods of struggle, and transmit them to the broad masses? Who will lead? Are you perhaps of the opinion that this work can be carried out through the circle of La Vie Ouvrière? If such be the case, then one can state with certainty that alongside you other circles will arise to challenge your right to leadership under the banner of revolutionary syndicalism. And besides – what about the large contingent of Communists in the syndicates? What will be the relations between them and your group? The leading organs of one syndicate may be dominated by party Communists, while in the organs of another syndicate, revolutionary non-party syndicalists may predominate. The proposals and slogans of the La Vie Ouvrieère group may diverge from the proposals and slogans of the Communist organization. This danger is profoundly real, it may become fatal, and because of it our victory in the syndicalist movement may be followed within a few months by the return of Jouhaux, Dumoulin and Merrheim to power.

I am well acquainted with bias against “parties” and against “politics” prevalent among French workers who have passed through the anarchist school. I completely agree that no single sharp blow can possibly break these moods, which were wholly justified in the past but which are extremely dangerous for the future. With regard to this question I can fully understand a gradual transition from the old state of disarrangement to the complete fusion of revolutionary syndicalists and Communists within a single party. But one must clearly and firmly set himself this goal. If centrist tendencies still obtain within the party the syndicalist opposition likewise has them within it. More education and further ideological purification are necessary among both of them. At issue is not at all the question of subordinating the syndicates to the party, but the question of uniting the revolutionary Communists and revolutionary syndicalists within the framework of a single party; and of all the members of this unified party carrying on harmonious centralized activity within the syndicates, which remain throughout autonomous and independent of the party organizationally. At issue is this, that the genuine vanguard of the French proletariat be welded together for the sake of its fundamental historical task – the conquest of power – and that under this banner it carry out its line within the syndicates, these basic and decisive organizations of the working class as a whole.

There is a certain psychological obstacle blocking a man’s crossing the party’s threshold after he has spent many years in revolutionary struggle outside the party. But to yield to this is to shy away from an outward form while causing the greatest damage to the inner essence. For it is my contention that your entire past activity was nothing else but preparation for the creation of the Communist Party of the proletarian revolution. Pre-war revolutionary syndicalism was a Communist Party in embryo. To return to the embryo would be a monstrous retrogression. Conversely, active participation in the building of a genuine Communist Party means the continuation and development of the best traditions of French syndicalism.

In these years each of us has had occasion to renounce one part of his already obsolete past in order to preserve, develop and assure victory to that other part of his past which did meet the test of events. An inner revolution of this type does not come easily. But only at this price, and at this price alone, can one acquire the right to really participate in the revolution of the working class.

Dear friend! I consider that the present moment will decide for a long time to come the de«stiny of French syndicalism, and, consequently, of the French revolution. In this decision you hold an important place. You would deal a cruel blow to the cause which numbers you among its best workers, were you today, when the choice must be definitely made, to turn your back upon the Communist Party. I have no doubt that this will not happen. I warmly shake your hand and remain devotedly yours.

July 13, 1921


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Notes
1. The General Confederation of Labor (CGT) is the name of the largest trade union organization in France. In 1921 revolutionary elements actually had the majority in the French labor movement and in the CGT in particular. However, the movement was never won to the banner of Communism and therefore soon slipped back into the hands of Jouhaux and Co., where it remained up to the outbreak of the Second World War.

2. The Charter of Amiens was the programmatic resolution adopted by the French trade unions at their 1906 convention in the city of Amiens. The central point in this resolution was the affirmation of the independence of the labor movement (the trade union movement) and its non-political character.
*******
Syndicalism and Leninism
Spartacist, No. 19, November-December 1970

One surprising effect of the French May-June 1968 events has been a resurgence of anarcho-syndicalism within the U.S. left. In fact, the French events completely reaffirmed the fundamental thesis of Lenin and Trotsky: that the mass reformist (Stalinist or social-democratic) party of the working class can deflect even the strongest spontaneous impulses toward revolution, in the absence of a pre-existing revolutionary party with considerable authority in its own right. Precisely what was lacking to carry the French workers from general strike to taking power was revolutionary political organization—a vanguard party. But the New Left drew the conclusion that spontaneous localism is revolutionary and all centralized parties counter-revolutionary. The glorification of spontaneity fit in with classic New Left biases toward "doing one’s own thing," and variants of syndicalism became the form under which New Left radicals turned toward the working class.

For a syndicalist, the revolutionary process is supposed to take roughly this character: A wildcat strike creates a strong factory committee, which declares its independence from the official union and establishes e.g. the "liberated area of the Metuchen GE plant." When enough such "liberated industrial areas" exist they combine and the system is thus overthrown.

However, the existing relatively centralized union structure is not a plot by bosses and union bureaucrats, but a victory gained by long, bitter struggles. Most syndicalists look back to the thirties as the heroic period of U.S. labor, but fail to realize that the main object of the labor struggles of the thirties was the consolidation of atomized factory groups into strong national unions. The principal goal of the great 1936 GM strike was to establish a single union to bargain for the thirty-odd GM plants. Before this, all bargaining was done at the plant-wide level. Some plants were organized, others not; some had localized unions, others had unions with broader aspirations. It was easy for GM to play one plant off against another or to shift production if one plant was particularly troublesome. The auto workers instinctively recognized they would have to give up a degree of local autonomy to achieve any real bargaining power.

Even now, it is the existence of 14 different unions as well as many nonunion shops that has allowed GE to walk all over its workers for so many years. The growth of conglomerates has faced a number of unions with greatly reduced leverage.

Form and Content

The existence of strong working-class institutions under capitalism—unions or parties—necessarily creates the objective basis for privileged bureaucracy. A sure-fire cure for union bureaucratism is not to have unions at all! The corollary, of course, is that the workers are then completely at the mercy of the bosses. There is no mechanical solution to the problem of democracy. The only answer is an aroused and conscious working class which controls its own organizations, whether these be hundred-man factory committees, unions of hundreds of thousands or mass parties numbering in the millions.

Another important aspect of the syndicalist perspective is what form rank and file opposition should take: unionwide caucuses based on a comprehensive radical program, or attempts to undermine the centralized power of the bureaucracy through factory-level organizations? The goal of socialists in unions is not occasional defiance of the bureaucracy, but rather its overthrow to command the tremendous power of the organized working class for revolutionary ends. Strong factory committees and wildcats can be potent weapons in discrediting an incumbent bureaucracy and strengthening internal opposition. But such localized and episodic organizations are no substitute for all-union program-based caucuses, which alone can pose an alternative leadership to the bureaucracy as a whole.

As Marxists, we do not take a fetishistic attitude toward the existing jurisdictional union structure. A bureaucracy may be so entrenched that an opposition cannot gain the formal union leadership regardless of how much support it has. In such a case, an opposition may be forced to split from the official union. The NMU and Amalgamated Clothing Workers were created when militant oppositions split from the official unions. But such splits are justified only if the opposition has gained the unquestioned loyalty of an economically viable section of the work force, leaving the official union an empty shell, not when they mean the voluntary isolation of the most militant and conscious minority of workers, leaving their fellows still under the sway of the sellouts.

Another facet of syndicalism is the belief that the main activity of revolutionaries is to foment trouble in the shops, the more trouble the better. Its fallacy is demonstrated by recent events in Italy. The anarcho-Maoists have made deep inroads among Fiat workers, who have been systematically sabotaging production. Fiat’s giant Milan plant has been operating at 50 per cent of its normal capacity. One way Fiat has reacted is to purchase 30 per cent of Citroen, the French auto firm, and they are quite capable of closing down the Milan plant and shifting production elsewhere, out of Italy altogether, if it is more profitable. Thus militancy for its own sake simply leads to unemployment.

General Strikes and Reaction

A rational syndicalist might agree that atomized militancy can be self-defeating. He would counterpose the syndicalist panacea of a general strike. While a general strike always raises the question of embryonic dual power, it cannot overthrow capitalism in itself. The capitalist state must be smashed in its most concrete manifestation the armed forces. If the army is not defeated or won over politically, it will suppress the general strike.

One of the most important general strikes in history occurred in the 1925-27 Chinese Revolution. It was an explicitly political strike, designed to extract concessions from the imperialist powers. The strike was characterized by a division of labor whereby the Communist Party ran the strike and the national bourgeoisie commanded, the army, through Chiang Kai-shek. When the bourgeoisie reached its compromise with the imperialists, it suppressed the CP and Chiang’s army forced the strikers back to work at gunpoint. The Chinese revolutionaries learned the hard way that control of the labor movement is insufficient for revolution. (The Maoists draw the wrong conclusion—namely, that the labor movement is irrelevant as long as one has an army!) Political and military as well as economic organization is necessary. And winning over the soldiers, who are not subject to the discipline of the labor movement, requires a political party.

All general strikes create sharp political polarization, in which all sections of society come down for or against the strike. Even major industrial powers such as Japan, Italy and France contain large peasant populations which must be won over to the workers’ cause if the strike is to be successful. The demand for workers’ control of production is not sufficient; enlisting the support of the peasantry requires a program of e.g. reduced taxes and rents, changes in land tenure, easy agricultural credit, etc.—demands which can be put forward convincingly only by a revolutionary party capable of establishing a socialist government.

General strikes and serious industrial disruption create economic hardship for the entire population. It is certainly not true that all those not directly involved in a general strike will oppose it because of the hardships entailed; but such hardships must not be open-ended. Unemployed workers, welfare recipients, peasants and small shopkeepers will support a general strike if they believe it is a step toward creating a revolutionary government with a positive program to meet their needs. But if the strike appears interminable, self-centered and purposeless, these intermediate layers and backward sections of the working masses will turn to reaction.

This is demonstrated by the rise of Italian fascism. Following World War I, the Italian working class, under strong syndicalist influence, engaged in a tremendous but uncoordinated wave of industrial militancy—factory seizures, citywide general strikes. After a few years of this, demobilized soldiers and other unemployed workers, civil servants, small shopkeepers and farmers were prepared to support Mussolini’s "law and order" movement. It has been noted that fascism develops in periods when the labor movement prevents capitalism from operating smoothly but is unable to overthrow it. Syndicalism, to the extent it is successful, creates this very situation—a revolutionary situation without the strategy necessary for assuming control of the state—thus paving the way for the triumph of reaction.

The resurgence of radical syndicalism is a reaction against the economist and class-collaborationist policies of the trade union bureaucracy. But syndicalism is only economism in reverse: accepting the working class’ lack of organization, especially political organization—and refusing to recognize the dialectical character of the bureaucratized workers’ institutions—the contradiction between class-struggle and ruling-class elements which can be resolved only by principled intervention by revolutionaries to replace iron-fisted control by capitalism’s lackeys with working-class leaders armed with a real program of class struggle.
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Once Again -Down At Duke’s Place-With Duke Ellington In Mind

Once Again -Down At Duke’s Place-With Duke Ellington In Mind




From The Pen Of Bart Webber  


One night Sam Eaton was talking on his cellphone to his old friend from high school (Carver High, Class of 1967), Jack Callahan about how his grandson, Brandon, the oldest grandson of his daughter Janice from his first marriage (first of three all ending in divorce but that is merely a figure for the Census Bureau and not germane to what follows so enough) had beguiled him recently with his arcane knowledge of classical jazz (the jazz from the age of King Oliver say until the death of the big bad swings bands which died in the late 1940s for the most part giving way to cool ass be-bop and what followed).

Jack braced himself for the deluge, got very quiet and did not say word one, since lately the minute Sam mentioned, maybe even thought about mentioning the slightest thing connected with jazz he knew he was in for it, in for a harangue of unknown duration on the subject. Sam, recently more conscious that Jack, who hated jazz, hated it worse when as a child of rock and roll as Sam was, his father would endlessly play Count this, King that, Duke the other thing and not allow the family record player centered in the family living room to be sullied (his father’s word) by heathen stuff like Roll Over Beethoven or One Night With You, would go silent at the word “jazz” said not to worry he would only say a few words from his conversation with Brandon:        

No, Jack, my man, this will not be a screed about how back in the day, back in the 1950s the time of our complete absorption into rock and roll, when be-bop jazz was the cat’s meow, when cool was listening to the Monk trip up a note, consciously trip up a note to see if anybody caught it and then took that note to heaven and back, and worked it out from there or Dizzy burping then hitting the high white note all those guys were struggling against the limits of the instruments to get, high as hell on tea, you know what we called ganja, herb, stuff like that.

Frankly I was too young, you too but I knew how you felt since I couldn’t listen to rock in my house either as the 1940s Andrews Sisters/Perry Como/Frank Sinatra/Peggy Lee cabal were front and center in our living room and I was reduced to listening on my transistor radio, way too young to appreciate such work then and I only got the tail end, you know when Hollywood or the popular prints messed the whole be-bop jazz “beat” thing up and we got spoon-fed Maynard G. Krebs faux black and white television beatnik selling hair cream oil or something like that, and ten thousand guys hanging around the Village on Saturday night in full beret and whatever they could put together for a beard from the outreaches of Tenafly, New Jersey (sorry but Fort Lee was out) and another ten thousand gals, all in black from head to toe, maybe black underwear too so something to imagine at least from Norwalk, Connecticut milling around as well. Square, square cubed.


No, this will not be some screed going back further in the hard times of the Great Depression and the slogging through World War II when “it did not mean a thing, if you ain’t got that swing” when our parents, the parents of the kids who caught the end of be-bop “swang,” did dips and twirls to counts, dukes, earls, princes, marquises even leading big band splashes to wash that generation clean. Come on now that was our parents and I wasn’t even born so no way I can “screed” about that. And, no, no, big time no, this will not be about some solitary figure in some dank, dusty, smoke-filled café, the booze flowing, the dope in the back alleys inflaming the night while some guy, probably a sexy sax player, blows some eternal high white note out against some bay, maybe Frisco Bay, and I was hooked, hooked for life on the be-bop jazz scene.

No, it never even came close to starting out like that, never even dreamed such scenes. Unlike rock and roll, the classic kind that was produced in our 1950s growing up time and which we have had a life-long devotion to or folk music which I came of age, political and social age to, later in the early 1960s, jazz was a late, a very late acquisition to my understanding of the American songbook. Oh sure I would hear a phrase, a few bing, bang, bong notes blowing out the window, out the door, sitting in some bar over drinks with some hot date, maybe hear it as backdrop in some Harvard Square bookstore when I went looking for books (and, once somebody hipped me to the scene, looking for bright young women who also were in the bookstore looking for books, and bright young men were looking for them but that scene is best left for another time), or at some party when the host tired of playing old-time folk music had decided to kick out the jams and let the jazz boys wreak their havoc. But jazz was, and to a great extent still is, a side bar of my musical tastes.          

About a decade ago, a little more, I got seriously into jazz for a while. The reason: the centennial of the birth of Duke Ellington being celebrated when I was listening to some radio show which was commemorating that fact and I heard a few faint bars which required me to both turn up the volume and to listen to the rest of the one hour tribute. The show played a lot of Duke’s stuff from the early 1940s when he had Ben Webster, Harry Carney, and Johnny Hodges on board. The stuff blew me away and as is my wont when I get my enthusiasms up, when something blows me away, I grabbed everything by the Duke and his various groupings and marveled at how very good his work was, how his tonal poems reached deep, deep down and caught something in me that responded in kind. Especially when those sexy saxs, when Johnny or Cootie blew me away if they let it all hang out.

Funny though I thought at the time that I hadn’t picked up on this sound before, this reaching for the soul, for the essence of the matter, since there are very definitely elements of the blues in Brother Duke’s work. And I have been nothing but a stone blown blues freak since the early 1960s when I first heard Howlin’ Wolf hold forth practically eating that harmonica of his on Little Red Rooster and Smokestack Lightnin’. Moreover I had always been a Billie Holiday fan although I never drew the connection to the jazz in the background since it usually was muted to let her rip with that throaty sultry voice, the voice that chased the blues, my blues, away.

So, yes, count me among the guys who are searching for the guys who are searching for the great big cloud puff high white note, guys who have been searching for a long time as the notes waft out into the deep blue sea night. Check this out. Blowing that high white note out into the surly choppy Japan deep blue seas foaming and slashing out into the bay the one time I was sitting in fog-bound Frisco town, sitting around a North Beach bar, the High Hat maybe, back when Jimmy La Croix ran the place and a guy with a story, or a guy he knew could run a tab, for a while, and then settle up or let the hammer fall and you would wind up cadging swigs from flea-bitten raggedy- assed winos and sterno bums.

On Monday nights, a slow night in every venue you can name except maybe whorehouses and even then the business would  fall off only a little since guys had to see their wives or girlfriends or both sometime, Jimmy would hold what is now called an “open mic” but then, I forget, maybe talent search something like that but the same thing. The “Hat” as everybody called it was known far and wide by ex hep-cats, aging beats, and faded flower child ex-hippies who had not yet got back to the “real” world once those trends petered out but were still looking, as I was, looking for something and got a little solace from the bottle and a dark place to nurse the damn thing where you could be social or just hang out was the place around North Beach where young talent took to the boards. Played, played for the “basket” just like the folkies used to do back in the 1960s when that genre had its heyday, and probably get a few dollars from the mostly regular heavy drinker crowd that populate any gin mill on Monday, whether they have seen their loved ones or not.

Jimmy would have Max Jenny on drums and Milt Bogan on that big old bass that took up half the stage, if you remember those guys when West Coast jazz was big, to back-up the talent so this was serious stuff, at least Jimmy played it that way.

Most of the stuff early on that night was so-so some riffs stolen from more famous guys like Miles Davis, Dizzie, Coltrane, the cool ass jazz from the fifties that young bud talent imitates starting out, maybe gets stuck on those covers and wind up, addled by some sister habit, down by the trolley trains on Market Street hustling dollars from weary tourists waiting to get up the damn hill. So nothing that would keep a steady drinker, me, from steady drinking in those days when I lifted low-shelf whiskeys with abandon. Maybe half a dozen other guys spread out around bar to prove they were there strictly for the drinking and chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes to fill up Jimmy’s ashtrays and give Red the bartender something to do between pouring shots (otherwise the guys hungry for women company would be bunched near the dance floor but they must have had it bad since Monday night the serious honeys were not at the “Hat” but home getting rested up for the long week ahead of fending guys off).

Then I turned around toward the stage, turned around for no particular reason, certainly not to pay attention to the talent, when this young guy, young black guy, barely out of his teens, maybe sixteen for all I know and snuck out of the house to play, Jimmy wasn’t taking ID cards in those days and if the kid wasn’t drinking then what did it matter, to get play to reach the stars if that is what he wanted, slim a reed, dressed kind of haphazardly with a shiny suit that he probably wore to church with grandmother, string tie, clean shirt, couldn’t see his feet so can’t comment on that, maybe a little from hunger, or had the hunger eating him up. Kind of an unusual sight for ‘90s Frisco outside of the missions. But figure this, figure his eyes, eyes that I know about from my own bouts with sister, with the just forming sad sack yellow eyes of high king hell dope-dom and it all fit.

The kid was ready though to blow a big sexy tenor sax, a sax as big as he was, certainly fatter, blew the hell out of one note after another once he got his bearings, then paused, paused to suck up the universe of the smoke filled air in the place (a whiff of ganja from the back somewhere from some guy Jimmy must have known since usually dope in the place was a no-no), and went over to the river Jordan for a minute, rested, came back with a big blow that would get at least to Hawaii, rested again, maybe just a little uncertain where to go like kids always are, copy some somebody and let it go at that for the Monday crowd or blast away, but even I sensed that he had something going, so blew up a big cloud puff riff alternating with pauses hard to do, went at it again this time to the corner of paradise.

Stopped then, I thought he was done, he looked to hell like he was done, done in eyes almost closed, and then onward, a big beautiful dah, dee, dah, dee, dah, dee, blow, a “max daddy” blow then even an old chattering wino in a booth stopped to wonder at, and that big high white note went ripping down Bay Street, I swear I could see it, on into the fog-bound bay and on its way, not stopping until Edo, hell maybe back to Mother Africa where it all started.  He had it, that it means only “it” and if he never blew again he had that “it” moment. He left out the back door and I never saw him at the “Hat” again so maybe he was down on Mission or maybe he went somewhere, got some steady work. All I know was that I was there when a guy blew that high white note, yeah, that high white note. So yeah count me too among Duke’s boys, down at Duke’s place where he eternally searched for that elusive high white note.

See I didn’t take too long, right.             
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From The Massachusetts Jobs With Justice Coalition-Fight For $15 And More

From The Massachusetts Jobs With Justice Coalition-Fight For $15 And More

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A View From The International Left- Turkey Referendum Erdogan Tightens His Grip

Workers Vanguard No. 1111
5 May 2017
 
Turkey Referendum
Erdogan Tightens His Grip
The Turkish constitutional referendum of April 16 resulted in a narrow win for the authoritarian president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and has left the country sharply polarized. Less than 52 percent voted “Yes” to granting him sweeping new powers, while almost half voted “No.” The mainly Kurdish areas that are being ravaged by Erdogan’s brutal war against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) overwhelmingly voted against him. Significantly, Erdogan also lost the vote in Istanbul, where his Justice and Development Party (AKP) has won every election since it was founded in 2001. The major cities of Ankara and Izmir also voted “No,” as did the Aegean and Mediterranean coastal areas.
Amid widespread reports of electoral fraud, the result was contested. The opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) appealed to the Council of State to annul the result on the grounds that unsealed ballots were accepted as valid, but its appeal was thrown out.
President Trump congratulated Erdogan on his victory, which replaces the parliamentary system with an executive presidency; Erdogan now effectively controls parliament and the judiciary. He has taken the result as a mandate to beef up the draconian repression that he imposed following last July’s botched coup. On April 26, police launched yet another huge crackdown, arresting over 1,000 people and issuing warrants for thousands more. Erdogan also declared that Turkey will hold a referendum on bringing back the death penalty. The aggrandizement of his bonapartist rule is an ominous threat to the historically combative working class in Turkey.
The following is a translation of an article that appeared prior to the referendum in Spartakist (No. 216, Spring 2017), newspaper of the Spartakist-Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, German section of the International Communist League.
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A referendum to amend the Turkish constitution will be taking place on April 16, while the country is under a state of emergency. At issue is the proposed change from a parliamentary to a presidential system through the adoption of 18 amendments to the constitution, which was imposed by the military in 1982. These amendments would substantially reduce the rights of parliament, and aim to massively strengthen the power of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. If the referendum passes, Erdogan could stay in power until 2029, giving him considerable latitude to pursue his Islamization of the country, which particularly threatens women’s rights. The referendum is a bonapartist measure that, if passed, will be tantamount to establishing one-man rule and will strengthen the repressive power of the Turkish capitalist state. This is why we Marxists say: Vote HAYIR/NA in the referendum! (“No” in Turkish/Kurdish.)
The referendum constitutes an assault on the democratic rights of everyone, but is particularly aimed at further intensifying the brutal oppression of the Kurds. The central leadership of the pro-Kurdish HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party), which opposes an Erdogan dictatorship, was arrested in November 2016, so as to hinder their campaign against the referendum. These arrests were carried out under the state of emergency imposed following the failed coup of 15 July 2016. As a result of Erdogan’s countercoup, a blanket ban has been imposed on anti-government demonstrations and strikes. Over 150 newspapers and radio stations have been banned, 148 journalists and media workers arrested and tens of thousands of people detained. Between 2001 and 2016 (Erdogan became prime minister in 2003), the number of people imprisoned more than tripled to almost 180,000. In the next four years, 165 new jails are scheduled to be built.
Opponents of the referendum are branded by the Erdogan regime “alternatively as terrorists, putschists or traitors” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 27 February), making everyone who is not on Erdogan’s side a target, particularly the petty-bourgeois HDP, which was established by Kurds and Turkish leftists. While we defend the HDP against attacks by the Turkish state, we give it no political support. Among the supporters of “No” to the presidential system are even some supporters of Erdogan’s AKP and the ultranationalist MHP (Nationalist Action Party), to which the fascist Gray Wolves also belong. Erdogan has received the support of the MHP because it welcomes his plans to reintroduce the death penalty. On March 20, the police helped a group of fascists gain entry to the Faculty of Communication in Ankara, where they hung up the banner “Execute Öcalan. United Greater Turkey!” A number of students who wanted to oppose this action were surrounded by the cops and then beaten up by the fascists. This incident shows how dangerous things have become for leftists, anti-fascists, Kurds and workers. Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK, has been imprisoned on Imrali Island since 1999. We demand the immediate release of Öcalan!
The opposition to the referendum is diverse, with polls indicating that an Erdogan victory is by no means certain. Reasons cited for resisting amending the constitution include that it would lead to further division in Turkey, to the establishment of a dictatorship or to the abolition of Turkey’s supposedly progressive secularism. Leftist, secular and Kurdish forces have set up their own HAYIR/NA campaigns. In the first few days, over 800 opposition supporters were arrested for “support of a terrorist association” (Telepolis, 16 February). Fahrettin Yokus, the head of the white-collar workers union, was shot at by unknown persons. The office of the civil servants union was wrecked after the head of the union declared that he was intending to vote “No” (FAZ online, 28 February). To prevent opponents of the referendum from protesting, AKP supporters openly threaten them with violence, in statements like: “We will bathe in your blood” (Telepolis, 5 February). Prime Minister Binali Yildirim declared: “Anyone who opposes the change will be eliminated” (ibid.). Nevertheless, on March 8, International Women’s Day, over 10,000 mostly women demonstrators assembled in Istanbul with chants against Erdogan and with “HAYIR” signs. The celebrations for Newroz (Kurdish New Year in March) were also held despite the repression and were linked to a campaign for “NA.” In Diyarbakir, the capital of the Kurdish part of Turkey, 100,000 people took part in them. Down with the repression against the HAYIR/NA campaigns!
A further sign that, despite consolidation of his autocratic rule, Erdogan cannot maintain total control was the January 20 strike by 2,200 workers at three companies (13 General Electric plants and two Swiss firms, ABB and Schneider). The strike was organized by Birlesik Metal-Is (BMI), a member of the DISK trade-union federation. Opposing the intimidation, BMI stated: “The government and the bosses are acting hand-in-hand against our basic rights; they are trampling our rights under foot and we simply won’t take this lying down.” In spite of the official ban on strikes, the strike forced through a pay raise: a success against the bosses.
Since negotiations between Erdogan and the PKK were broken off in 2015, the military has repeatedly attacked Kurdish villages and towns in southeast Turkey with heavy artillery and paramilitary groups; hundreds of Kurdish civilians have been killed. This military offensive is an expansion of the decades-long campaign to wipe out the PKK. After more than 30 years of military occupation, the area looks like a wretched disaster zone. All Turkish military forces out of Kurdistan! It is vital for the working class of Turkey to stand for military defense of the PKK against the Turkish state and for the Kurds to have their own state. Anti-Kurdish chauvinism is essential to maintaining bourgeois rule in Turkey. Applicable here is the socialist principle enunciated by V.I. Lenin: “No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations” (“The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up,” July 1916). What is necessary is the construction of a revolutionary binational (Kurdish/Turkish) workers party that will intervene to break the workers from Turkish chauvinism and win them to the defense of the national rights of the Kurds.
The Kurdish people—whose homeland is the mountainous region that stretches across the borders of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran—constitute the largest nation in the Near East without its own state. We call for a united independent Kurdistan as part of our struggle for a Socialist Republic of United Kurdistan in a socialist federation of the Near East. We also support the immediate independence of the Kurds from individual capitalist states—for example, the right of the Kurds in Turkey to secede. But in Iraq and Syria, the Kurdish nationalist leaders, including the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is linked to the PKK, have currently subordinated the just struggle for self-determination to their alliance with U.S. imperialism in the fight against ISIS. This is a betrayal of the interests of the masses in the Near East, not least of the national aspirations of the Kurdish people themselves. The imperialists bear the central responsibility for the devastation of the entire Near East. The petty-bourgeois nationalist leadership of the PKK has a treacherous history of ingratiating itself with the imperialists and even with Erdogan himself. Kurdish militants must break with this bankrupt program and be won to a proletarian, internationalist, Trotskyist program.
EU Imperialists Rail Against Turkey
The European imperialists have seized on Erdogan’s massive wave of repression in Turkey to cynically cast themselves in the role of defenders of bourgeois freedoms and thereby justify the strengthening of their own machinery of repression. The German government has assumed a vanguard role in the oppression of the Kurds. It regularly provides weapons to the Turkish government, and it banned the PKK in 1993, with the result that Kurdish leftists are frequently arrested and prosecuted. On March 2, shortly before the Europe-wide Newroz demonstration in Frankfurt, in which 30,000 people called for “HAYIR,” all pictures of Öcalan were banned; previously, only pictures of him in military garb had been banned. The cops videoed the entire demo, and every individual carrying an Öcalan banner is threatened with legal action. Additionally, Germany’s ban on the PKK has been extended to apply to youth and women’s organizations (including the YXK student association) and to symbols of its military wing in Syria, the People’s Protection Committees (YPG). The bourgeois state bases the charges on the “thought crime” Sections 129a/b (“formation of terrorist associations”) of the legal code, which are also currently being used by a Munich court against ten leftists of the TKP/ML (Turkish Communist Party/Marxist-Leninist). Down with state repression and the proceedings against Kurdish and Turkish activists! Down with the ban on the PKK and all Kurdish associations! Down with the “thought crime” Sections 129a/b!
There are about 2.9 million Turkish citizens in the EU [European Union] who are eligible to vote in the upcoming referendum, 1.4 million of them in Germany. Erdogan ordered a few Turkish ministers to propagandize in EU countries for a “Yes” vote in the referendum. Various European governments promptly imposed bans on their speaking in public, taking the opportunity to take a swipe at Erdogan, who annoys the imperialists by not always bowing to their diktats. On March 11, the Turkish family minister, Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya, was expelled from the Netherlands and escorted to the German border by the police. In the port city of Rotterdam, Dutch cops then beat up demonstrators who were protesting in front of the Turkish consulate against the minister’s expulsion. Shortly before this, in order to maintain “law and order,” the Netherlands’ prime minister, Mark Rutte, prohibited Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu from landing. Rutte outdid the anti-Muslim racist Dutch politician Geert Wilders with this witchhunting of Turks. Rutte hoped to attract votes from Wilders’ supporters in order to be able to continue his anti-worker, pro-EU policies. This policy was promptly copied in Germany by the CDU/SPD [Christian Democratic Union/Social Democratic Party] government of the Saarland, which banned all appearances by Turkish politicians even though none were planned. There were also bans in Germany on planned events in Gaggenau, Cologne and Hamburg.
We Marxists oppose the bans that national and local governments in Europe have imposed on Turkish politicians appearing, speaking or entering the countries. We also oppose the police attacks against demonstrations called by Turkish and Kurdish residents in connection with the referendum. The bans against Turkish politicians set a dangerous precedent that can be used to wield state censorship and repression against leftists or any workers organization simply because the state disagrees with their political views. The bans are also part of a campaign to further escalate terror and repression against Muslim communities in Europe. Since 2001, with their “War on Terror,” the European capitalist rulers, from [German chancellor Angela] Merkel to [French president François] Hollande, have placed all Muslims under suspicion of being terrorists. They fuel hostility against Muslims, emboldening the fascists and other racist forces like right-populists, from Wilders and [leader of the French National Front Marine] Le Pen to the AfD [Alternative for Germany].
In Germany, while the anti-Muslim campaigns affect above all the workers who have immigrated from Turkey and Kurdistan since the 1960s, as well as their children and grandchildren, they are ultimately aimed at the working class as a whole. The Turkish/Kurdish immigrants—even more than immigrants from other countries—have been marginalized for decades as “guest workers” and have suffered racist oppression. Right up to the present, they and their children have been refused full political rights. In 1992 in Mölln and 1993 in Solingen, Nazi arson attacks inflicted murderous terror on families of Turkish and Kurdish origin. For years, the “National Socialist Underground” (NSU) was able to carry out a series of murders and terror, targeting mainly people with a Turkish background, while the police and the German state carried out investigations against the victims’ families. In fact, the periphery of the NSU Nazis was swarming with agents of the state, who are actively involved in the leadership of the Nazi terror organizations.
It is no wonder that Erdogan finds admirers among the oppressed in Germany, who suffer racist discrimination and Nazi terror. It is the task of the workers movement to provide these oppressed layers with a different perspective by fighting against all oppression and discrimination, in particular by the German state. Full citizenship rights for all who have made it here! Immigrant workers and their descendants are a strategically important component of the working class in Germany; very often they are on the front lines of strikes and they form a living bridge to workers and oppressed in Turkey, Kurdistan and the Near East. In this way, the struggle for socialist revolutions in the Near East can be linked to the struggle to bring down the German bourgeoisie through a socialist revolution.
With their strident calls for bans against Turkish politicians, the leaders of the Left Party are once again proving how much they desire to take on governmental responsibility for German imperialism. Thus, Left Party member of parliament Sevim Dagdelen called for “sanctions against dictator Erdogan” and a “decision by the federal government for an entry ban. Chancellor Merkel can’t be allowed to continue to duck the issue.” Similarly, the leader of the Left Party’s electoral list, Sahra Wagenknecht, stated on Twitter: “Federal government acts like a bunch of anarchists. We need at long last a clear line: Stop people from giving speeches for dictatorship!” and “Entry ban: Netherlands gives German government a lesson on how to show backbone toward Erdogan dictatorship.”
This statement is nothing but a dangerous whitewash of German imperialism, which persecutes Kurds and other immigrants and bans their organizations. Erdogan’s crimes pale in comparison to those of German capital, which is currently exercising its dictatorship in the form of bourgeois democracy. German imperialism dominates the EU, exploiting in particular the countries of southern and eastern Europe and driving their working classes into terrible poverty, as the case of Greece makes especially clear. We communists stand in principled opposition to the EU, which is an imperialist trading bloc to intensify the exploitation of the workers of Europe and improve competitiveness over its imperialist rivals—above all vis-à-vis the U.S. and Japan. German imperialism sends its troops into many parts of the world; the Bundeswehr [German Army] has been stationed in the Balkans since 1999 and in Afghanistan for over 15 years. The Bundeswehr also operates from the Turkish NATO base of Incirlik, helping to devastate the Near East: with reconnaissance and tanker aircraft, with personnel in NATO headquarters and aboard AWACS planes. Bundeswehr out of the Balkans, Turkey, Near East, Africa, Afghanistan! Down with German imperialism and the EU! For the Socialist United States of Europe!
The social-chauvinist arguments of the Left Party that the government should intervene against Turkey in the name of “democracy” chain the working class to its “own” bourgeoisie. It is necessary to break the workers from these workers’ misleaders with their mentality of colonial overlords and to build an authentically revolutionary, multiethnic workers party that fights irreconcilably against all forms of chauvinism. This party will have a leadership component of cadre of Turkish and Kurdish origin and will be part of a reforged Trotskyist Fourth International, which will include a binational workers party in Turkey. The Fourth International will be able to take up and win the struggle for socialist revolutions worldwide, including for a socialist federation of the Near East.
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