A View From The Left-Arkansas Legal Lynching Machine Abolish the Racist U.S. Death Penalty!

Frank Jackman comment: Usually when I post something from some other source, mostly articles and other materials that may be of interest to the radical public that I am trying to address I place the words “ A View From The Left” in the headline and let the subject of the article speak for itself, or let the writer speak for him or herself without further comment whether I agree with the gist of what is said or not. After all I can write my own piece if some pressing issue is at hand. Occasionally, and the sentiments expressed in this article is one of them, I can stand in solidarity with the remarks made. I do so here.       Workers Vanguard No. 1112

19 May 2017

Arkansas Legal Lynching Machine

Abolish the Racist U.S. Death Penalty!

In just eight days—from April 20 to 27—the state of Arkansas executed three black men, Ledell Lee, Marcel Williams and Kenneth Williams, and one white man, Jack Jones. Governor Asa Hutchinson had originally ordered eight men to die in the span of eleven days, which would have set a record pace since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. The four men who received stays of execution remain on death row. The pretext for the executions was to beat the clock on the April 30 expiration of midazolam, a component of the lethal injection cocktail for which no alternative is readily available. The real point, however, was to kick-start the machinery of death in a state that had last held an execution in 2005.

The assembly line of death in Arkansas has thrown a spotlight on the depravity of capital punishment—and the racist U.S. ruling class that wields it. Witnesses to Kenneth Williams’s execution reported that after injection he lurched forward as many as 20 times; he was observed convulsing, jerking and making sounds that were audible in an adjacent room. The scene recalled the 2014 Oklahoma execution of Clayton Lockett, who writhed in agony for over 40 minutes before succumbing.

Ledell Lee’s 1993 conviction for the murder of a white woman had all the hallmarks of a racist frame-up. From a crime scene covered in blood, the only physical evidence linking Lee to the murder was the phony “forensic” identification of three hairs that supposedly came from a black man. The trial judge and the assistant prosecutor were sleeping together. Lee’s court-appointed trial attorney presented no alibi, and the attorney at his post-conviction hearing was so drunk, he was taken away for drug testing. From death row Lee told a BBC journalist: “My dying words will always be as it has been ‘I am an innocent man’.” The Innocence Project and the ACLU fought to get DNA testing of the crime scene’s physical evidence. The state refused. Ledell Lee is no more.

Joining an April 14 protest outside the Arkansas Capitol was Damien Echols of the West Memphis Three, who served his own time on Arkansas’s death row. Targeted in a “satanic abuse” witchhunt, Echols and his friends were falsely convicted for the 1993 murder of three eight-year-old boys. Echols won his release in 2011 following a huge campaign in his defense, including DNA evidence that confirmed his innocence. On the day of Lee’s execution Echols pointed out: “Local politicians maintain they have never made a mistake, that the system is infallible, and that they have never sentenced an innocent man to die. I know this is false, because for 18 years I sat on Arkansas’ death row and waited on the state to murder me for something I didn’t do.”

As Marxists, we oppose the death penalty on principle—for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not accord the state the right to determine who lives and who dies. A barbaric legacy of medieval torture, its longevity in the United States is rooted in the origins of American capitalism, which was built on the hideously brutalized labor of black slaves. More than 40 percent of those on death row are black (and another 13 percent Latino). As opposed to the liberals, we do not seek to advise the bourgeoisie on the more “humane” administration of its decrepit rule. Whether it is the death penalty, life in prison without parole or imprisonment in general, we oppose the entire machinery of violence that is the capitalist state.

Nearly 250,000 signed a petition urging Arkansas governor Hutchinson to stay Kenneth Williams’s execution. Though a majority of the public still favor the death penalty, support has diminished significantly over the past two decades—a product of the growing number of exonerations of innocent men and women, often the result of DNA testing of evidence. Finding jurors more reluctant to impose capital punishment and frustrated at what they view as the slow pace of executions, prosecutors, lawmakers and judges have calculated life without parole to be cheaper than the millions of dollars consumed by capital prosecutions and years of appeals. Today, the Trump administration, as part of a broader enhancement of the repressive powers of the state, is seeking to reverse this trend.

Donald Trump rode to the presidency on a “law and order” platform targeting black people and immigrants. An ardent proponent of the death penalty, Trump has called for the execution of “pedophiles.” His openly racist attorney general, Jefferson Sessions, has called for lifting formal restraints on the cops, re-igniting the “war on drugs,” which promises to throw more black and Latino youth into America’s dungeons, and ordered federal prosecutors to seek the maximum sentences for those facing trial.

The first act of Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, was to cast the decisive vote against a stay of execution for the men facing execution in Arkansas. Meanwhile, a Republican state senator in Arkansas is calling for the impeachment of a black judge, Wendell Griffen, who issued a temporary restraining order to block the April executions and then took part in an anti-death-penalty vigil outside the governor’s mansion on Good Friday. Similarly in Florida, Governor Rick Scott promptly removed all death penalty cases from Aramis Ayala, a black female state’s attorney for the Orlando area, who announced on March 16 that she would not seek the death penalty, including for a man accused of killing a policewoman. After announcing her opposition to the death penalty, Ayala received a noose in the mail.

For its part, the capitalist Democratic Party is no less committed to the death penalty than the brazenly racist Republicans. Under the Obama administration, the number of federal prisoners on death row increased, while the cops wantonly carried out summary executions of black people on the streets.

In Arkansas itself, there were no executions between 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment, and 1990, when legal lynching was reintroduced to the state by William Jefferson Clinton. Since then, 30 men and one woman have been executed in the state. During his run for president in 1992, Clinton left the campaign trail to personally preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man so brain-damaged from a gunshot to the head that he wanted to save the pecan pie from his last meal for later. Clinton’s “dog whistle” to racist white voters propelled him into the White House, where he ended “welfare as we know it” and presided over the gutting of affirmative action in education and the mass incarceration of black and Latino youth. As president, he accelerated the racist death penalty with his 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which gutted habeas corpus appeals for death row inmates—a model for state laws across the country intended to streamline the road from courthouse to death house.

A Legacy of Slavery

The death penalty stands at the pinnacle of the state’s arsenal of repression—an apparatus consisting of the army, cops, courts and prisons that protects the class rule, property and profits of the capitalist class. While the face of death row is now primarily black and Latino, fighters for labor’s cause have also been targeted for death by the capitalist state: the Haymarket anarchists, labor organizers who fought for the eight-hour day and were put to death in 1877; IWW organizer Joe Hill, executed in 1915; anarchist workers Sacco and Vanzetti, who died in the electric chair in 1927.

While nearly every other advanced industrialized capitalist country has abolished capital punishment (with the notable exception of Japan), its persistence in the U.S. is a legacy of black chattel slavery and the continued oppression of black people. The 20 executions carried out last year, and the ten thus far this year, took place in just seven states. All of them were in the South and most in the former Confederacy, where slaves could be killed with impunity for “crimes” ranging from insolence toward whites to rebellion against the slave masters.

It took a bloody Civil War to smash slavery. But the promise of black freedom was betrayed when the Northern capitalists ended the period of Radical Reconstruction by withdrawing federal troops, leaving black people impoverished and largely defenseless. With the Ku Klux Klan and other race-terrorist outfits as the spearhead, the white propertied classes subjected black people to legally enforced racial segregation, stripped them of all democratic rights and held them down through terror, especially lynching. The black population was consolidated anew—and remains to this day—as a specially oppressed race-color caste.

Capital punishment in America is a direct descendent of and replacement for the lynch rope. In the 1890s, black people were lynched at a rate of one every other day; in the 1930s, executions took place at the rate of one every other day. A 2015 study by the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative noted, “By 1915, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings in the former slave states for the first time.” In the period between 1910 and 1950, black people made up 75 percent of those executed across the country.

In 1967, amid the mass struggles of the civil rights movement, a de facto moratorium on capital punishment was temporarily imposed. In 1972 the Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional as practiced and ordered states to rewrite their laws. A mere four years later, the Court gave the green light for the killing machines to resume their grisly work. Eighty-one percent of the 1,452 executions in the last 40 years have been in the South.

The racist application of the death penalty was sanctified by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1987 case of Warren McCleskey, a black prisoner executed in Georgia in 1991. McCleskey’s attorneys presented an authoritative study detailing that black people in Georgia convicted of killing whites were sentenced to death 22 times more frequently than those convicted of killing blacks. In rejecting McCleskey’s appeal, the Supreme Court explicitly acknowledged that to accept this premise would throw “into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system.” In its callous pronouncement, the Court expressed a basic truth: McCleskey was a victim of the racism that pervades the criminal justice system and the entire American capitalist order.

For a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!

Little expresses the cruelty of capital punishment better in the U.S. than the legislative and judicial contortions to give state murder a humane gloss. The adoption of lethal injection, beginning in the early 1980s, was promoted as a supposedly more humane way of killing prisoners than electrocution. In fact, lethal injection was implemented by Nazi Germany as part of its Aktion T4 “euthanasia” program to dispose of lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”).

In 2007, the Supreme Court prohibited the execution of a psychotic person unless the prisoner was lucid enough to have a “rational understanding” of the punishment he was about to receive. This is what the courts refer to as “evolving standards of decency.” When capital punishment was reintroduced in the U.S. amid anti-crime hysteria, we noted in “Abolish the Death Penalty!” (WV No. 117, 9 July 1976): “The Marxist attitude toward crime and punishment is that we are against it.... Socialists do not proceed from the standpoint of punishing the offender. Such a vindictive penal attitude is fundamentally a religious rather than a materialist conception of social relations.” Indeed, a humane and rational society may find a need to isolate certain dangerous individuals. This would be done without stigma or cruelty, and with education, medical care, rehabilitation and the goal of reintegration as a productive member of society. This was the approach of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky that led the October 1917 Russian socialist revolution.

As Marxists, we fight for the abolition of the death penalty. But we also understand that ending capital punishment will not fundamentally change the violently racist and oppressive nature of capitalist class rule. Our aim is to complete the unfinished tasks of the Civil War by fighting for black liberation through socialist revolution. What is necessary is the forging of a class-struggle workers party with a significant black leadership component. Such a party will be built in opposition to both parties of capital and will be dedicated to mobilizing the social power of labor in defense of the interests of all working people and the oppressed. When those who labor rule, the entire apparatus of capitalist state repression will be smashed as part of sweeping away this barbaric system and opening the door to an egalitarian socialist future.

He Gave It All Away-With Tom Paxton’s Song “She Is My Reason To Be” In Mind

He Gave It All Away-With Tom Paxton’s Song “She Is My Reason To Be” In Mind 

By Freeman Steel

He had it all. Jeffrey Davis had it all although until he lost it, until he gave it away, he did not realize that he had had it all. By the way for the curious who thing that they recognize the named party to this piece Jeffrey Davis is not the real name of our protagonist but like the Jeffrey Davis that you do think you know from his various screen exploits our Jeffrey Davis has his own similar reasons for using an alias here. Part of the reason is that he although not connected in any way with the screen, with movies or television is well-known in the literary field for his work and works of criticism. Part of the reason to be completely candid is that he was not sure that the statute of limitations might not have run out of various small crimes and legal evasions in his past so that publishing his real name might not bring to notice in the circles that he formerly ran in to haul his ass into court, especially the ex-wives he left high and dry. And part of the reason was that he just plain asked me as a long-time friend (and one time victim of his youthful cons) to not use his name as a test of my loyalty after all these years if I wanted the story. I did and so Jeffrey Davis it is.

But enough of subterfuges and diversions around identity confidentiality and on to the reason why our boy, my old corner boy from, well, I had better not say from when, what times or where since his beginnings are well known to part of the public and that would defeat his purpose in forcing me at virtual reality gunpoint to guard like a sacred temple his real name, had lost what he had, had given it all away. Jeffrey Davis’ wife, Lorraine Daley not her real name either since if you knew that name you, you the literary sort would figure out who that old corner boy from wherever he was from back in the day was and I would be out a “think piece” story about the pitfalls of statutory neglect (not a crime, a legal crime anyway, and not the reason that Jeffrey was worried about statute of limitation run outs), had recently left Jeffrey high and dry. Had left him for her own reasons mostly according to Jeffrey’s frail understandings in the matter to “find” herself whatever that might have meant to her.

Left in the middle of the night one night a few months back bag and baggage as they use to say around the old neighborhood when some married partner high-tailed it out of town with no explanation (in those unenlightened days either male leaving female or female leaving male but not one leaving one of the same gender just so you know we are talking about it has been a while back since that phrase had fresh currency). NO public explanation but it did not take much to figure out that some stay married forever woman had had enough of the abuse, physical and mental, from some bastard of a drunken husband (and father which is how we began to figure such abnormal leavings, abnormal for the old neighborhood), or that some husband had done the high-tailing with some barroom floozy. In any case Lorraine left and left no forwarding address-none. Had discontinued her previous cellphone and presumably gotten a new one although Jeffrey speculated that in the process of “finding” herself Lorraine may have decided to forgo the modern conveniences if she had wound up in some ashram as she had talked about, had threatened to do in previous versions of the downward slide of their relationship.                  

Despite the several month time lapse Jeff had not really reconciled himself as to what had caused him to forget that he had had it all with Lorraine, had given it all away. Then one night he called me on his cellphone, called me Sid Lawrence if I have not introduced myself before and looking over the previous paragraphs it appears that I have not although the important information, Jeff and my connection for the old neighborhood I did give you and wanted me to come over to his house in, well it is a big city so I can say it and he will proof this piece anyway, Los Angeles, over in the hills and canyons and sit with him while he tried to tell me how he had by his own freaking hand, his term, lost it all. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to hear what he had to say but in the interest of old corner boy friendship I agreed.            

We met at his well-appointed bungalow a few nights later and after a couple of stiff belts of well-preserved scotch he sat me down in one of his comfortable (and expensive) easy chairs and sat himself down on his long couch to speak about what ailed him about what was on his mind. Jeff whatever his literary skills, whatever line of pure, unmitigated bullshit he could throw at male or female, but mostly female and whatever the gods had granted him in the wisdom department was not a reflective man, did not dwell on the past, conveniently forgot the past (as in the big time con for several thousand hard-luck earned dollars he ran by me back in the days when for what he called “literary” purposes he ran tens of thousands of somebody else’s dollars up his snowman nose) and lived in the moment. I could tell though by his demeanor (and his willingness to sit me down after only two stiff scotches) that he had been thinking about some past stuff, about his character which was so explosive, so unstable at times that giving it all away in the past was coming back to haunt his dreams-or his desires.

When he began talking about Annie Dubois, his first real love, his, well, I had better not mentioned marriages and leave everything as affairs so the smart reader will not figure out who Jeff really is and we would have wasted good time and cyberspace creating a ruse, I knew he been in a sullen introspective mood. That sullen part no literary device on my part Jeff really did get sullen which showed up remarkably clearly on his face when he had to think through some ramification of some off-the-wall thing he had done. He just hid that trait these days better in public than when I first noticed his reaction back in sophomore year in high school. 

What I know is that he had not mentioned her name in front of me for years, hell, decades so I knew that sullen look was real. I should mentioned here before I tell you how Jeff related his feelings about how he had loved and lost that young woman, had given it all away, that I was half, maybe more, in love with her myself, had seen her first at a college mixer but she after looking me over on a few dates had decided that my roommate Jeff was more to her liking (they called them the now rightly taboo “smokers” in those days for some unknown to me reason but probably because since everybody was hopped up to find some companion the air was filled with anxious smoke, anxious Marlboro, Salem, Newport, Winston smoke). So I was not disappointed those many years when he did not mention her name. That night my heart raced at the mention of her name just like it had when I was some smitten schoolboy. Damn, Jeff.                        

I never, because I did not want to know and you can understand why now, knew the details of the break-up between Jeff and Annie. Painfully I listened as Jeff went through the litany. He and Annie stuck like glue together all through college. They essentially lived together for much of that time after freshman year in an apartment in Cambridge (not the real location but close-what I do for Jeff in the interest of a story) during the school year and at various seaside resorts in the summer. A classic 1960s romance with the sword of Damocles hanging over it. That sword –the raging crazy and unjust Vietnam War that we were all very aware of, we males anyway, since its’ seemingly endless travails put despite huge and growing protests and calls from even many governmental quarters to stop the damn thing placed us all at risk of being drafted. Eventually as the reader can probably figure out by now Jeff’s number came up with no further student exemption and no serious reason not to accept induction he allowed himself to be drafted. That “allowed” his term later for what had happened to him. (Although he and Annie were prominent anti-war rally attendees he did not consider himself under the rules for such status and under his Catholic upbringing a conscientious objector and under no circumstances was he going to jail or to Canada the other options that faced almost every young male then. I was 4-F, unfit for military duty, because of a crippling knee accident as a kid and the Army may overlook lots of disabilities but they want their charges to be able to march- and march great distances- as necessary)                

Once he got his draft notice Jeff began to panic. Started worrying about things like never having been married if he was killed in Vietnam. Not having any family to mourn him (he had been estranged from his parents for many years, had lived with his grandmother who just before senior year had passed away). Stuff like that that if the times were different he would have not given a fuck about, my term. So he and Annie tied the knot, got married. A bad move, a “war-time marriage” bad move that they could have seen coming if they had watched just a few old time movies like I did although even that might not have helped.    

He eventually like some horrible nightmare coming to pass as things developed against him was trained as an infantryman, the only thing in the late 1960s the Army cared about training since the attrition rate with one year deployments in Vietnam was eating up personnel at a fast clip.  And at just that time the only place in the great wide world that a U.S. infantryman was heading for was that hell hole Vietnam. So after his training and month’s leave Jeff had orders issued to him report to Fort Lewis in the state of Washington for transfer to Vietnam. He panicked, or maybe if not panicked then reverted back to his corner boy ways-or part of the corner boy ethos-lie like a bastard and hope things worked out    

After his leave was up he suddenly told Annie that he had through political connections had had his orders changed and he was to report to Fort Dix in New Jersey where he was to be discharged under some administrative regulation so that he could go work on the staff of a Congressman in Washington, D.C. Annie was elated (and relieved) by the news and ready to run to D.C. with him for their new future. The whole scenario seemed very reasonable since Jeff had worked like seven dervishes for the late Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign and even as he was telling me this over forty years later I could see where if he had told me the same story then I would have bought it hook, line and sinker.    

The problem though, and I would have been harassed like crazy for believing one word of the story back in corner boy days when he (and we) thought nothing of lying about everything from having sex with hot girls to how much we paid for a shirt (usually nothing since we stole stuff like that), it was all bullshit. He had just unilaterally taken himself AWOL for that whole time, the whole few months. The way the whole thing exploded was that the FBI had come to Annie’s parents’ house (he had used their address with their permission on his Army information file) looking for him, AWOL him. He did turn himself in and faced the music. That however was the last straw for Annie and her parents. Especially Annie since as it turned out he had done a number of unsavory or illegal things unknown then to me during their courtship. She left him to go back to her parents’ home. Eventually Annie got a civil divorce and as a Catholic member of a church who at the time, maybe now too, had very strict rules about remarriage after a divorce finally got a church annulment from Jeff. As for Jeff he on his return to the Army did the honorable thing and refused to go to Vietnam and wound up in the stockade for his efforts. But the details of that story are for his next serious giving it all away and besides this is about his first serious love life, his giving it all away when the deal went down. Typical Jeff though a heel one day a hero the next.          

 As Jeff started to explain why he had never forgotten about Annie I urged him to change the subject and something in my tone told him that I meant it, meant that I too had not forgotten Annie and what she had meant to me back then. So he went on about his thunder-struck whirlwind relationship with Josie, Josie Stein, a woman who I had never met because I had stayed on the West Coast while Jeff after a wild man run with me and a few others from the old neighborhood at various times there returned to the East. Josie would be the first, and most serious, of a string of young Jewish women that would checkerboard through his later relationships. Fine women who he never fully understood either. This meeting up with Josie had come about because like half of the things that Jeff did in his life he was on a vengeance roll to obliterate all the stupid things he had done by letting himself be inducted in the Army.

As I mentioned before after blowing up the world, the Annie world, with his fears Jeff when he went back into the Army made up his mind not to go to Vietnam, not to be complicit. He paid the price with two special court-martials for disobeying orders and did altogether something over a year in an Army stockade (partly broken up by what amounted to house arrest in between times). He wound up though getting out of the Army with an honorable discharge to boot as a conscientious objector through a writ of habeas corpus which his civilian lawyer had managed to convince a federal court judge was due him. As part of his struggle, his righteous struggle okay, a number of anti-war activists and Quaker-types came to his defense, publicized what he was doing and held vigils and other events in and around the Army base where he was being held. This was a time when some elements of the anti-war movement began, after the war was dragging out to what seemed like eternity, to pay attention to the soldiers, the “grunts” who were carrying out the war on the ground. So Jeff became for a while before he and I left for California and some mad but harmless dope-enhanced adventures up and down the Pacific Coast Highway something of a poster child for the local anti-war G.I. resistance. Some of that reputation would stick for a while as the war finally wound down.                

Josie had been born in Manhattan but had gone in order to get away from the city, her parents, her Jewish roots you name the reason to the University of Wisconsin which the way Jeff told it was a magnet for New York City and Long Island Jewish kids looking to break out back then, maybe now too. While there she had become radicalized, had become somewhat prominent in the campus anti-war, anti-imperialist and the beginnings of the women’s liberation movement. After graduating from Wisconsin she had decided to go to graduate school in Boston (at BU for the School of Social Work). While in Boston she again took up her political causes in the red-hot milieu there. Jeff had met her a couple of months after he had returned East at an anti-war conference, no, I have that wrong, at a meeting to discuss having another in the long line of anti-war conferences. This one to take place in a rural conference center which had been converted from being a farmhouse about fifty miles from Boston and had donated by some movement “angels” for such purposes. Such things happened with some frequency then.

When Jeff was introduced to speak about his G.I resistance experiences he spied Josie in the audience. During a break he, she, maybe both at the same time Jeff had forgotten that detail took dead aim at each other (that part he remembered) although nothing occurred that night. Their big moment came when both had showed up at the rural site for the conference and they were almost inseparable for the rest of the weekend. So started the torrid off and on again five year love affair between Jeff and Josie. According to Jeff they had their ups and downs, mostly toward the end downs over Josie’s increasingly incessant desire to settle down, to have a family, to be “at peace” with herself as the turbulent ‘60s shuttered down around them. Jeff in an uncharacteristic denial of some kind of realty thought that the whole experiment would go on forever and he could ride that wave into old age.

Funny about that, funny that he would still remember that he had felt that way those many years ago since I remember that we had both distinctly understood that after May Day, 1971 when we foolhardily thought we could close down the U.S. government if they would not close down the war and had been militarily defeated, had taken tens of thousands of arrests, we had reached an ebb tide of the movement, had passed the high water mark.               

That however was not what laid the relationship between Jeff and Josie low but yet another of the contradictions of the angel-devil Jeffrey Davis. Jeff, and I could see where this came from since I had thoughts along those lines a little myself, had a hard-edged chip on his shoulder, thought that because he (and I) had come up “from hunger,”  from utter poverty, from the old projects ethos that the world owed him a living, or something like that. I got over it by high school, maybe a little later but Jeff took much longer, maybe still hasn’t gotten over it even now but if you want to understand why he periodically would give it all away you have to know that hard sad fact. The particulars this time were that he had gotten seriously into dope, first speed and mescaline and later as it became more popular and more available cocaine. Now we all did our fair share of dope during the 1960s, usually marijuana and other light-headed drugs like hashish and peyote buttons. This cocaine thing though was something else, had Jeff by the balls. Had laid him low. This is where all his past kind of came up and bit him. He couldn’t or wouldn’t stop. Kept it from Josie mostly although at the end she asked him point blank if he was on heroin or something. Of course a young guy with no dough, or not much, not working much with a habit that called out to him needed dough. So he ran though everybody, everybody including leaving me high and dry out on the Coast broke as well, who he knew for dough using every lame excuse in the book to get the dough-and of course would pay it back just as soon as he could.

He didn’t hit Josie until the end, or near the end. That was when he was seeing some hopped-up Judy on the side who kept him company in his wanting habits. Once he started asking Josie for money for this and that after a while she started getting wise, found out about the Judy from some friend and that was that. She broke off with him in a minute once she knew the score (prodded he said by her parents who were not happy that she was serious about a non-Jewish guy). She got an unlisted number, moved from their sometimes shared apartment which she paid for, or rather her parents paid for. The end. Gave it all away for a razor, mirror and a rolled up dollar line.                     

Which brings us back to Lorraine and Jeff’s newly discovered troubled mind and why he gave it all away once again when she left to find herself.  Or whatever had driven her away from him. After a number of years out in the West Coast trying to “find” myself I finally headed back to the East, back to Boston via Riverdale after my last stormy marriage that ended not well. Not well enough that despite being broken as a smashed soda bottle, splintered if you like that better, I desperately hitchhiked across the country to get away from that last horrible scene (which was partly, a big partly, due to my own “from hunger” thinking that the world owed me a living from getting deeply in debt to the gambling gods). But enough of that this is Jeff’s story and my travails can wait another day. I just wanted to point that out since this return to the East meant that I was back in touch after several year’s absence with Jeff which was deep in the throes of his stormy relationship with Lorraine. So unlike Josie whom I had to take Jeff’s word on I knew Lorraine although unlike Annie of blessed memory I had no half in love thoughts about her.        

Jeff quickly went through how he had met Lorraine since I knew most of the details of the story. He had been half in and half out of a bunch of relationships which had not worked out for several Jeff reasons when one night he happened to be in a bar in Harvard Square, a country bar if you can believe that, when there had been outlaw country music minute around the East after people tired once again of the way rock was heading. That “if you can believe that” reflecting the hard fact that Jeff, whose father hailed from the South, having been inundated with that stuff around the house hated that music with a passion growing up. One night by accident he had heard the late Townes Van Zandt at a local club and something in his mournful lyrics and presence “spoke” to Jeff. So for a while he was hopped up on the outlaws, took in the scene. You know it had to be some kind of fad if in high Brahmin Harvard Square a couple of country music bars had sprung up and so he headed to one of them, Jackie Speed’s, it is no longer there, to hear some local country band which was making some noise about breaking out and heading to the bright lights of Nashville and stardom.  He sat at the bar as was his habit when he was “single” in order to survey the scene and maybe an hour in and a couple of Anchor Steam beers put away, a beer we had both developed a habit for in Frisco town, he spied Lorraine all in white sitting at a far corner table with a couple of girlfriends. When one of those girls came pass the bar he mentioned to her that he thought her friend in white was cute, pretty, something like that and to tell her his message. And she was. A delicate flower, thin, longest black hair and a nice smile that he could see even across the room. His type no question. That girlfriend not knowing what else to say told him to go over and tell her himself. For some reason Jeff usually only a little shy about meeting a young women for the first time definitely did not like to approach a table full of women to make his play. His play was one on one, in a barroom scene maybe sitting on a stool at the bar. While they took peep-a-boo meaningful glances at each other nothing happened that night.                 

A few weeks later Jeff was sitting at that same bar one night getting ready to listen to what somebody had told him previously was the “next best thing” band coming along the pipeline to break-out Nashville this young woman who he had not recognized came and sat down at the stool next to his and ordered a drink, an exotic one if he remembered correctly. She was thin, pretty, had longish black hair and a nice smile. When it came time for her to order another one Jeff offered to buy her a drink. She accepted and that kind of broke the ice as they found that they had several interests in common around art, literature and folk music which was in a serious hiatus then and the reason that she, Lorraine, was taking in the insurgent country scene that was beginning to take root around town. She had been brought up in the country, on a farm in upstate New York so she had heard country music, a different old-timey Grand Old Opry kind of music, and also hated it growing up. Toward the end of evening as they were chatting like two jaybirds Lorraine asked Jeff if had ever seen her before. He said no he did not think so. Lorraine then reminded him of the night several weeks before when they had done their peek-a-boos. She also told him that she had looked for him a couple of times later when she had been at the bar. Funny Jeff said he had done the same. Fate and an exchange of telephones numbers got them on the start of their torrid romance.       

For a while, a fairly long while by Jeff’s standards things went along pretty well. They had plenty in common not only in the like to do things department but a commonality in the ways they grew up, the hard family lives they had faced as kids. Especially around holidays when under normal circumstances there was to be a shared joy they shared a “get through the day” kinship. Like a lot of Jeff things though known to me or not something in his inner life, something in his vacant soul, his term, would not leave him alone. Would not let him break from his youthful defensiveness inherited from years of mother harassment and ill-will when dealing with Lorraine. In the end, or rather toward the end, the last few years anyway for a whole assortment of reasons from health to intimations of immortality to use the phrase from the poet’s brain he shut down, became unresponsive to Lorraine’s needs. They lived together but were in his words two ships passing in the night (and hers as well as they tried to figure out what had gone wrong before she had had to flee for her own sanity). Both tried to do the right thing, sought various forms of help but in the end she had to flee, had to find herself and what she wanted to be in this wicked old world. Jeff didn’t like the idea, actually hated it but he grudgingly respected her for her bravery in striking out on her own. Had to admit that rather than his lying, cheating, stealing destruction of his companionships he could be accused of statutory neglect-a more serious social crime, much more serious.       

One night many weeks later after I had written up this piece from the notes I had taken over the course of time we were sitting in Jimmy’s Grille, symbolically enough only a couple of blocks from where Jeff and Lorraine had met at the now defunct Jackie Speed’s, when he was feeling kind of melancholy since her birthday was approaching, something they both made a big deal over he mentioned a song he had heard recently. A song by the old-time folksinger Tom Paxton whom he had liked to hear in the old folk minute days and whom the local college folk station was playing to honor his birthday (forget his age), She Is My Reason To Be. Yeah, too late Jeff figured that hard truth out. But maybe he should have also checked out Bob Dylan’s I Threw It All Away because once again he had thrown it all away.  

The Magnificent Seven- Potshot-A Spenser Crime Novel by Robert B. Parker-A Review

The Magnificent Seven- Potshot-A Spenser Crime Novel by Robert B. Parker-A Review 

Book Review

By Sam Lowell

Potshot, Robert B. Parker, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 2001 

Of late I have been on something of a Spenser crime detection novel run, you know those sagas of the Boston-based P.I. with the big burly  physique and the no nonsense grit and determination to see a case through to the end, the bitter end if necessary, written by the late Robert B. Parker. I started out several reviews of those books by explaining that most of the year when I review books I review high-toned literary masterpieces or squirrelly little historical books fit for the academy. I also said that come summer time you never know will turn up on your summer reading list and why. So blame this run on the summer heat if you must.  I confessed that like any other heated, roasted urban dweller I was looking for a little light reading to while away the summer doldrums. Then I went into genesis about how I wound up running the rack, or part of the rack, after all there were some forty Spenser books in the series before Parker passed away in 2010.  I will get to the review of his 2001 effort Potshot in a minute after I explain how I came to read  for crying out loud yet another Parker crime novel.

See, as I have mentioned elsewhere of late in reviewing some of the other Parker-etched books every year when the doldrums come I automatically reach for a little classic crime detection from the max daddy masters of the genre Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett from my library to see the real deal, to see how the masters worked their magic, in order to spruce up (and parse, if possible) my own writing. This past summer when I did so I noticed a book Poodle Spring by Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker. This final Philip Marlowe series book was never finished by Chandler before he died in 1959. Parker finished it up in 1989.

Robert B. Parker, of course, had been a name known to me as the crime novel writer of the Spenser series of which I had read several of the earlier ones before moving on to others interests. That loss of interest centered on the increasingly formulistic way Parker packaged the Spenser character with his chalk board scratching to my mind repetition of his eating habits, his culinary likes and dislikes, his off-hand racial solidarity banter with his black compadre Hawk, his continually touting Spenser’s physical and mental “street cred” toughness and his so-called monogamous and almost teenage-like love affair with his flame, Susan. They collectively did not grow as characters but became stick figures serving increasingly less interesting plots.

Checking up on what Parker had subsequently written in the series to see if I had been rash in my judgment I noticed and grabbed another Chandler-Parker collaboration or sorts reviewed in this space previously  Perchance To Dream: Robert B. Parker’s Sequel To Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Since I was on a roll, was being guided by the ghost of Raymond Chandler maybe, I decided to check out Spenser again. And because we still had several weeks left of summer and crime novels have the virtue of not only being easy on the brain in the summer heat but quick reads I figured to play out my hand a little and read a few other Parker works. Now we are all caught up on genesis.

As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I Continues -The Anti-War Resistance Builds –The Russian Revolution Breaks The Logjam

As The 100^th Anniversary Of World War I Continues -The Anti-War Resistance Builds –The Russian Revolution Breaks The Logjam    

The events leading up to World War I (known as the Great War before the world got clogged up with expansive wars in need of other numbers and names and reflecting too in that period before World War II a certain sense of “pride” in having participated in such an epic adventure even if it did mow down the flower of European and in some cases colonial youth from all classes) from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources had all the earmarks of a bloodbath early on once the industrial-sized carnage set in with the stalemated fronts (as foretold by the blood-letting in the American Civil War and the various “small” wars in Asia, Africa, and, uh, Europe in the mid to late 19^th century once war production on a mass scale followed in the train of other less lethal forms of  industrial production).

Also trampled underfoot in the opposing trenches, or rather thrown in the nearest trash bin of the their respective parliamentary buildings were the supposedly eternal pledges against war in defense of one’s own capitalist-imperialist  nation-state against the working masses and their allies of other countries by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations (Anarchists, Syndicalists and their various off-shoots)representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those imperialist capitalist powers and their hangers-on in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. All those beautifully written statements and resolutions that clogged up the international conferences with feelings of solidarity were some much ill-fated wind once bullet one came out of gun one.

Other than isolated groups and individuals, mostly like Lenin and Trotsky in exile or jail, and mostly in the weaker lesser capitalistically developed countries of Europe the blood lust got the better of most of the working class and its allies as young men rushed to the recruiting stations to “do their duty” and prove their manhood. (When the first international conference of anti-war socialists occurred in Switzerland in 1915, the famous Zimmerwald conference, one wag pointed out that they could all fit in one tram [bus].) Almost all parties assuming that the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everyone could go back to the eternal expressions of international working-class solidarity after the smoke had settled (and the simple white-crossed graves dug in the vast bone-crushed cemeteries that marked the nearby battle fields too numerous to mention). You see, and the logic is beautiful on this one, that big mail-drop of a Socialist International, was built for peace-time but once the cannons roared then the “big tent” needed to be folded for the duration. Jesus.  

Decisive as well as we head down the slope to the first months of the second year of the war although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in the hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business, that nom de guerre not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International under the sway of the powerful German party although not for long because “Long Live The Communist International,”  a new revolutionary international, would become the slogan and later order of the day in the not distant future), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experiences in Russia and Europe in the 19^th century (including forbears Marx and Engels), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the monopolizing tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of “progressive” capitalism (in the Marxist sense of the term progressive in a historical materialist sense that capitalism was progressive against feudalism and other older economic models which turned into its opposite at this dividing point in history), and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as 1914 turned to 1915 in the sinkhole trenches of Europe that are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.  

Lenin also has a "peace" plan, a peace plan of sorts, a way out of the stinking trench warfare stalemate eating up the youth of the Eurasian landmass. Do what should have been done from the beginning, do what all the proclamations from all the beautifully-worded socialist manifestos called on the international working-class to do. Not a simple task by any means especially in that first year when almost everybody on all sides thought a little blood-letting would be good for the soul, the individual national soul, and in any case the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everybody could start producing those beautifully worded-manifestos against war again. (That by Christmas peace “scare” turned out to be a minute “truce” from below by English and German soldiers hungry for the old certainties banning the barbed wire and stinking trenches for a short reprieve in the trench fronts in France and played soccer before returning to drawn guns-a story made into song and which is today used as an example of what the lower ranks could do-if they would only turn the guns around. Damn those English and German soldiers never did turn the damn things around until too late and with not enough resolve and the whole world has suffered from that lack of resolve ever since.)

Lenin’s hard-headed proposition: turn the bloody world war among nations into a class war to drive out the war-mongers and bring some peace to the blood-soaked lands. But that advanced thinking is merely the wave of the future as the rat and rain-infested sinkhole trenches of Europe were already churning away in the first year as a death trap for the flower of the European youth.   

The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way as did the various German-induced wars attempting to create one nation-state out of various satraps almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and range and the increased rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last wars. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.

The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began the damn thing among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s  prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time as being on “the planet without a passport” was then as now, dangerous to the lives of left-wing revolutionaries and not just them), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America “Big Bill” Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war), many of his IWW (Industrial Workers Of the World) comrades and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “Club Fed” for speaking the truth about American war aims in a famous Cleveland speech and, fittingly, ran for president in 1920 out of his Atlanta Penitentiary jail cell),  were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well when the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. Even my old anti-war amigo from my hometown who after I got out of the American Army during the Vietnam War marched with me in countless rallies and parades trying to stop the madness got caught in the bogus information madness and supported Bush’s “paper war” although not paper for the benighted Iraqi masses ever since (and plenty of other “wise” heads from our generation of ’68 made that sea-change turn with him).

At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. “Be ready to fight” the operative words.

So imagine in the hot summer of 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.                  

Over the next period as we continue the long night of the 100^th anniversary of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before the first frenzied shots were fired, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in places like Russia, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the hodge-podge colonies all over the world map, in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.     

V. I.   Lenin

To the Soldiers and Sailors

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Written: Written between April 11 and 14 (24 and 27), 1917
Published: First published in 1925 in Lenin Miscellany IV. Published according to the manuscript.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1964, Moscow, Volume 24, pages 124-126.
Translated: Isaacs Bernard
Transcription\Markup: Unknown
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 1999 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. • README

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Comrades, soldiers! Comrades, sailors!
The capitalist newspapers, from Rech down to Russkaya Volya, are carrying on a most shameless campaign of lies and slander concerning the passage through Germany of myself and thirty other emigrants.
The capitalist newspapers shamelessly lie when they assort or insinuate that we enjoyed certain inadmissible or unusual favours from the German Government, a government which we consider just as predatory, just as criminal, as all the other capitalist governments who are carrying on the present war.
Rich men having “connections” with high-ranking officials of the tsarist monarchy, men like the liberal professor Kovalevsky, friend of Milyukov and Co., have been constantly negotiating with the German Government through the agency of the tsarist Russian Government with a view to arranging for an exchange of Russians captured by the Germans, and Germans captured by the Russians.
Why then should emigrants, who have been compelled to live abroad because of their struggle against the tsar, not have the right to arrange for an exchange of Russians for Germans without the government’s aid?
Why has the government of Milyukov and Co. not admitted into Russia Fritz Platten, the Swiss socialist, who travelled with us and who had negotiated the agreement with the German Government concerning the exchange?
The government lies when it spreads rumours that Platten is a friend of the Germans. This is sheer slander. Platten is the friend of the workers and the enemy of the capitalists of all countries.

The capitalists lie when they circulate rumours that we are for a separate peace with the Germans, that we conferred or wanted to confer in Stockholm with those German socialists who sided with their own government.
This is a libellous lie. We did not participate and shall not participate in any conferences with such socialists. We look upon the socialists of all countries who are helping their own respective capitalists to carry on this criminal war as traitors to the cause of socialism.
Only those socialists are our friends who, like Karl Liebknecht, condemned to hard labor by the predatory German Government, rise against their own capitalists.
We do not want a separate peace with Germany, we want peace for all nations, we want the victory of the workers of all countries over the capitalists of all countries.
The Russian capitalists are lying about us and slandering us, just as the German capitalists are slandering Liebknecht. The capitalists lie when they say that we want discord and enmity between the workers and the soldiers.
It is not true! We want the workers and the soldiers to unite. We want to make it clear to the members of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies that it is these Soviets that must wield full state power.
The capitalists are slandering us. They have sunk so low in their shamelessness that not a single bourgeois newspaper has reprinted from Izvestia our report concerning our journey and the decision of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. [See: How we Arrived]
Every worker and every soldier knows his Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. It was to the Executive Committee of this Soviet that we made our report the day after our arrival. The report appeared in Investia.^[1] Why is it that not a single capitalist paper has reprinted this report?
Because these papers are spreading lies and slander and are afraid that our report to the Executive Committee will expose the deceivers.
Why is it that not a single paper has reprinted the decision of the Executive Committee concerning our report, a decision which was published in the same issue of Izvestia?

Because this decision nails the lies of the capitalists and their newspapers, in that it demands that the government take steps for the return of the emigrants.
Izvestia has published a protest against Trotsky’s arrest by the English; it has published a letter by Zurabov exposing Milyukov’s lies; it has also published a telegram from Martov on the same subject.
Soldiers and sailors! Do not believe the lies and slander of the capitalists! Expose the deceivers, who are trying to suppress the truth published in Izvestia!

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Notes

[1] [PLACEHOLDER.] —Ed.

When Studs Terkel Spoke Truth To Power In A Sullen World -A Tribute From NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s “Open Source”-"Working"-Retired Stage- The Studs Terkel Interview Series

When Studs Terkel Spoke Truth To Power In A Sullen World -A Tribute From NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s “Open Source”

Link to Christopher Lydon's Open Source program on the late "people's  journalist" Studs Terkel

http://radioopensource.org/sound-of-studs-terkel/ 

By Si Lannon

It was probably Studs Terkel via a series of book reviews of his interviews trying to get a feel for the soul of the American from Sam Lowell that I first heard the expression “speaking truth to power.” Spoke that message to a sullen world then. Unfortunately since that time the world had not gotten less sullen. Nor has the need to speak truth to power dissipated since Studs passed from this mortal coil of a world that he did so much to give ear and eye to. The problem, the real problem is that we in America no longer produce that pied piper, that guy who will tell the tale the way it has to be told. Something about those gals and guys who waded through the Great Depression, saw firsthand in the closed South Side Chicago factories that something was desperately wrong with the way society operated and slogged through World War II and didn’t go face down in the post-war dead ass could war night spoke of grit and of a feeling that the gritty would not let you down when the deal went down. When Mister (Peabody, James Crow, Robber Baron you name it) called the bluff and you stood there naked and raw.        

Fellow Chicagoan writer Nelson Algren (he of The Man With The Golden Arm and Walk On The Wild Side) put the kind of gals and guys Studs looked around for in gritty urban sinkhole lyrical form but Studs is the guy who found the gritty unwashed masses to sing of. (It is not surprising that when Algren went into decline, wrote less lucid prose Stud grabbed him by the lapels and did a big time boost on one of his endless radio talks to let a candid world know that they missing a guy who know how to give voice to the voiceless, the people with small voices who are still getting the raw end of the deal, getting fucked over if you really want to nitty-gritty truth to power). So check this show out to see what it was like when writers and journalists went down in the mud to get to the spine of society.     

Click On Title To Link To Studs Terkel’s Web Page.

BOOK REVIEW

Coming Of Age, Studs Terkel, The New Press, New York, 1995

As I have done on other occasion when I am reviewing more than one work by an author I am using some of the same comments here, where they are pertinent, as I did in earlier reviews. In this series the first Studs Terkel book reviewed was that of his “The Good War”: an Oral History of World War II.

Strangely, as I found out about the recent death of long time pro-working class journalist and general truth-teller "Studs" Terkel I was just beginning to read his "The Good War", about the lives and experiences of, mainly, ordinary people during World War II in America and elsewhere, for review in this space. As with other authors once I get started I tend to like to review several works that are relevant to see where their work goes. In the present case the review of "Coming Of Age" serves a dual purpose- to reflect on the working lives of working people (mainly) after they have made their mark and moved out of the work force and as a reflection of one of Studs’ preoccupations- the fate of his generation- the so-called “greatest generation”.

Probably Terkel’s most famous oral history is his “Working” which chronicles the thoughts of working people and others, circa 1980, about their lives their aspirations and their inspirations. That book was weighted a bit toward the experiences of those who came of age in the Great Depression of the 1930’s , fought World War II and gained a measure of security in the dizziness of the post World War II Cold War. His “The Good War”, of necessity, takes dead aim at that population. Here we have those same recollections (in some case literally as previous interviewees get to have their say once again), circa 1995, from the perspective of “retirement”. Some of the material is interesting but, frankly, as I know from personal experience running through a litany of life’s physical, mental and social ailments gets a little thin on the ground after a while.

Moreover, while I found "Working" to be very interesting as a sociological study and as a means of giving voice to the preoccupations of “working stiffs” this present volume “does not speak to me”. As a member of the generation after the above-mentioned one, "the Generation of ’68", my preoccupations are not the same and so those experiences expressed here of retirement and the “great awakening” do not feel right. In short, this book turns solely as a last homage by Studs to the so-called “greatest generation”, his generation. While I am painfully aware of the shortcomings of my own "Generation of ’68" as a catalyst for social change I have long argued that the World War II generation, my parents’ generation, sold its heritage out for a mess of pottage. So that feeling has to be factored in here, as well.

Studs personal fate as a victim of the “red scare” in the 1950’s is only the most vivid example at hand for my belief that his generation sold out for a security blanket- and not a very good one. The virtual “civil war” between the generations during most of the Vietnam period of the 1960's and beyond (remember those Reagan Democrats of the 1980’s were, for the most part, those self-same ‘greatest generation’ types) graphically speaks to that difference in values. Nevertheless read Studs’ take on his generation's swansong here and read all of Studs’ oral histories, good, bad or indifference to get a snapshot of what America, and Americans liked, disliked or didn’t know a thing about in the 20th century. Kudos, Brother Terkel.

Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx-From The Archives- The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx

Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx-From The Archives- The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx

Workers Vanguard No. 1134	18 May 2018

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx

(Quote of the Week)

May 5 marked the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth. The excerpts below are taken from the beginning and conclusion of the Communist Manifesto, a seminal work that Marx co-wrote with his lifelong comrade, Friedrich Engels.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes....

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat....

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers....

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)