Click on title to link to "Women and Revolution" article ("Spartacist", Spring 2006) on "The Russian Revolution And The Emancipation Of Women".
March is Women's History Month
The following article was originally published in Women and Revolution, Summer 1974 and may be of more than historical interest to the radical public.
Women, Culture and Class Society, Helen Cantor
At first glance, it would appear that the problems of culture and women's contributions to it are somewhat removed from the immediate tasks of building a revolutionary party of the proletariat, and in a sense, these questions are. The struggle for women's creative and full participation in all aspects of society seems of concern only to the educated women of the middle class. Of what concern is this struggle to revolutionists?
The problem of culture and gaining access to it is a fundamental one for the proletariat. As Trotsky wrote: "The proletariat is forced to take power before it has appropriated the fundamental elements of bourgeois culture; it is forced to overthrow bourgeois society by revolutionary violence for the very reason that society does not allow it access to culture" (Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution).
Ever since the beginning of human development the iron necessity to survive has usually necessitated a division between hunting and child-rearing tasks. While this original division did not result in women's present oppression, the development of civilization, i.e., class society, did, by excluding women from many areas of social labor. Women have historically been kept pregnant most of their lives and, under advanced capitalism, isolated in individual households and thus impeded from attaining full expression of their creativity and social productivity. It is only comparatively recently (in the last 200 years) with the development of capitalism, that significant numbers of women (and at first only those of the upper classes) even learned to read or were allowed to attend school.
As Marxists, we are interested in human culture— our fundamental aim is to create a society in which all humanity, unimpeded by material scarcity, can develop its creative abilities freely and to the utmost.
There is a great deal of vulgar materialism and ignorance on the left regarding the relation of culture to the proletariat, due in part to the atrocities of "socialist realism" perpetrated by the Stalinists, including the Maoist variety. "Workerist" philistines glorify the lack of culture in the working class, justifying this by defining all standards of culture as inherently bourgeois. These currents are reflected within women's organizations, too, as shown recently by attempts to create a "women's culture" in opposition to "male-dominated" culture.
"Cultural feminism" has become a trend in what is left of the now largely dissipated outburst of feminist activity of the late 1960's. The women's movement left few organizations in its wake other than a string of women's studies departments on campuses across the country, and small clumps of women's schools or centers (like the Chicago Women's Liberation Union school), most of whose activities center around do-it-yourself gynecology, Volkswagen repair or some variant of "women's culture," such as women's rock and roll bands, poetry readings, paintings or displays of women's crafts. This strain of "cultural feminism" is also evident in recent publications of anthologies of women poets, journals (like Aphra or The Amazon Quarterly devoted to lesbian culture, or The Feminist Art Journal) and endless articles in almost all women's papers (and some liberal papers, like the
Village Voice and the New York Review of Books) on women artists, poets, etc.
The worldview of these cultural feminists is often shared by more political "socialist feminists" and even by many of the ex-New Left Maoists, and is tailed uncritically by groups like the SWP in precisely the same way that they tail black nationalism. To this worldview we counterpose a Marxist materialist understanding of the basis of woman's oppression and of culture in general. In order to seek to create a truly human culture, as Marx said, we must create the conditions in which humanity can, for the first time, make its own history.
Some Currents of Feminism Today
The "cultural feminists" propound several somewhat contradictory theories. First, there are the liberal academics, who argue that there really are great women artists, scientists, leaders, and so on, but that' they have been left out of history, so we don't know about them. This is the "herstory" liner-"write women back into history." As if wiping out centuries of oppression were merely a matter of altering a few textbooks.' "Teach the real contributions women have made in the past," they demand. This argument in effect denies the reality of women's oppression, because it denies that that oppression had any particular effect on women.
Another variant on the "herstory" concept is that the reason nobody noticed all this womanly creative activity was because all culture is male culture and thus the female aspects of creativity were ignored or neglected—like making quilts or weaving, for example (off our backs has had several culture pull-outs on quilt-making). Women's art must be judged by different standards than that of men, advocates of this position say. Women's crafts were not seen as great art simply because women did them—presumably if men had made the quilts they would be displayed in the museums along with the Rembrandts and Greek sculptures.
More radical feminists call for the creation of an entirely separate "women's culture" because, given male dominance, it is supposedly impossible for women to create anything except by withdrawing, creating "their own space." This position asserts that women are inherently different from men, that their sexual identity is the most important thing about them and will inevitably (or should inevitably) determine their social behavior, ideas, creative expression and so on. This argument is quite close to that of the fake anthropologists like Lionel Tiger, who argues in Men in Groups that because of the original biological functions of men as hunters and women as child-raisers,-they have inherent and instinctual responses to life, see the world differently, and are thus naturally assigned to their present social roles (women aren't good at politics, men are more aggressive).
Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sex, goes somewhat further than the need for a separate women's culture. For her, culture, in the sense of aesthetics and art, is the expression of women's sexual nature. She writes:
"We have noted how those few women directly creating culture have gravitated to disciplines within the Aesthetic Mode. There is a good reason for this: the aesthetic response corresponds with 'female' behavior. The same terminology can be applied to either: subjective, intuitive, introverted, wishful, dreamy or fantastic, concerned with the subconscious.... Correspondingly, the technological response is the masculine response: objective, logical, extroverted, realistic, concerned with the conscious mind...."
—Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex
For Firestone, the sexual division of humanity is the basis from which class divisions grew and from which the division between science and art (objective vs. subjective) developed as well. This division seems. particularly artificial and false, however, when it is noted that men have had less trouble in assuming the "feminine aesthetic" mode—most of the great novelists, poets, artists, etc., have after all been men. Why cannot women therefore equally easily assume the "masculine technological" model?
The most developed expression of "women's culture" (at least in the visual arts) is probably the male-exclusionist Womanhouse arts center created by Judy Chicago in California. Judy Chicago, an artist, has developed the theory that women's art has historically shown a preoccupation with womb-like shapes; 'holes, rounded organic forms (for example Georgia O'Keefe's enlarged flower parts)—the "dark inner space" of woman. Off our backs reviewed a women's art show in New York last November in an article called "another cuntree [sic]—at last a mainstream women's art movement," which enthused over the proliferation of gigantic female organs, erotic art, fruit-flower fertility themes, etc., and projected from these the creation of "a mainstream female art movement," whose emphasis was on woman's sexuality. This vision of the liberated creative woman as a flower/fruit/fecund moon-goddess/earth mother would be funny (in an intimidating kind of way), were it not the very same image of woman that has arisen as a result of her oppression and been used to "keep her in her place," creating with her womb, not her mind—the intuitive, irrational instinctive mother to be kept out of the 'light of day" of men's politics, creativity, social labor.
"Her story"
Obviously, these two beliefs—that women have made contributions but been unrecognized and that women are fundamentally different from men—are somewhat contradictory. The first asserts that women can entirely transcend their oppression in class society and rise above its effects to create an art which is "just as good" as "men's" art, the other that women are deep down different from men and therefore must reject all previous human achievement as "male culture" and create their own exclusionary culture and society. We deny both these assertions.
The "herstory" question is dealt with in an interesting and thoughtful article by Linda Nochlin (an art historian) called "Why Are There No Great Women Artists?" (reprinted in Art News, January 1971). This article has created much controversy within the women's movement, not only because of its position on women, but also for its analysis of what art is.
Of course, one's immediate response to the question is a sharp reaction against the natural male chauvinist answer, "Women aren't great artists because they are incapable of it—all they can do is -make babies." But to say that women are potentially equally capable of true creativity is not the same thing as attempting to prove that they are in fact creative, as Nochlin points out. The truth is that women have not participated fully in the creation and development of human culture, because they have been excluded from social production and kept isolated in private occupations of child-rearing and housekeeping, tasks which were historically necessary and from which women could not escape until the development of modern capitalism which provided the technology and productive resources such that this primitive division of. labor was no longer necessary.
There have been exceptions to this general truth, of course, but they are almost exclusively from the middle and upper classes. To the extent that a few women have been able to be creative, it has been primarily in the arts, in writing novels, poetry and in painting, for instance. One could ask, "Why have there been no great women architects, bridge-builders, scientists, generals?" equally validly. The reason women have contributed in the arts is not due to some "feminine aesthetic" but because these occupations, being essentially individual and private, were more accessible.
But even within the arts, women have not been able to contribute as much as men. Why? As Nochlin puts it:
"... [conditions in the arts are] stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all who do not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle-class or above, males. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education...."
The production of great art, as Nochlin points out, is not "the direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience. the language of art is neither a sob story or a hoarse, confidential whisper "but has rather involved a self-consistent language of form, teaching, building on the experience of past generations of artists, long apprenticeships and intense and lengthy periods of personal experimentation. Women have in most cases been denied access to these artistic necessities. For example, prior to the twentieth century, women were unable to study the live nude, which was absolutely necessary to an artist's education, and were then accused of being incapable of understanding the male form. Upper-class "ladies" were at most encouraged to paint flowers on velvet or China, and were then accused of being unable to develop large, heroic sculptural forms. Almost all women artists up to the end of the 19th century were either the daughters of artist fathers or fathers sympathetic to their intellectual development; or else were associated with a more dominant male artistic personality (for example, Rosa Bonheur, Victorian painter of animals; Maria Robusti, daughter of Tintoretto, Lavinia Fontana, Renaissance painter; Mary Cassatt, associated with Degas).
To face clearly the fact that only a tiny percentage of privileged women, in exceptional circumstances, have succeeded in becoming successful artists or scientists or whatever they wish is not to despair. Instead of denying the reality of women's oppression, we recognize how this oppression came about and we see a road to end it in the real world through action, instead of retreating to wishful dreaming and academic pursuit of the alleged unappreciated great women geniuses of the past.
Women's Studies and Idealism
The current proliferation of women's studies departments and women's schools implies an underlying philosophy of idealism, which ignores both the actuality and historic necessity of women's oppression and therefore refuses to understand how this oppression must be finally overcome.
Marx asserted that inequality and oppression are historically necessary and can be overcome only through the total development of society, centering on the raising of the productive forces. In Theories of Surplus Value he writes, "... at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even 'classes...." and in The German Ideology he insists that "in general people cannot ‘be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. 'Liberation' is an historical and not a mental act...."
But for the women's studies departments, liberation is "a mental act." This belief is characteristic of educated petty-bourgeois academics seeking" to rise above the. uncomfortable harsh realities of class society because they are caught in the middle. On the one hand, they sympathize with the sad plight of the poor, yet still admire the resourcefulness and cunning (and presumably superior intelligence) of the capitalist and hope that maybe they too will be like him someday. Knowledge is power for these dreamers, because to them it seems that ideas rule the world and that if women can only learn the truth about themselves, this will somehow automatically free them.
"Women's Culture"
Those who advocate the creation (or announce the existence) of a separate women's culture also share this idealism, in that they believe it is possible to withdraw from an oppressive society and thus escape its effects. They are either extremely naive, cynically selfish or simply opportunist in advocating this for the mass of women, because it is possible for only a few privileged women with a sufficient financial base to create a relatively pleasant and isolated personal milieu, in which they can concentrate on discovering what their "true sexual essence" may be.
What the "true nature" of men and women is-whether or not men and women have different social needs and expectations because of their biological differences-r-is a question which cannot be answered objectively under the hideously deforming pressures o»f class society.
Attempts to create a separate women's culture therefore tend to end up imitating or using the most extreme caricatures of womanhood—like the fruit/ flower/moon goddess. The attempt to discover a separate "woman's aesthetic" in art of the past, too, is rather difficult. It is obvious that the work of artists within a particular period or school (Baroque, Rococo, Impressionism, German Expressionism, Cubism, etc.)
resembles that of others in the same school far more that the work of individual men and women within each particular school differs.
Stalinism and Art
It's not accidental that some of the proponents of a women's culture reprint Stalinist works or admire Mao's "proletarian" art theories (see for example the paper Women and Art, Summer/Fall, 1972, and its supplement on "Art and Society" devoted entirely to works by Stalinist art historians). The caricatures of "womanhood" (either the eternally strong or eternally suffering woman) are necessary to their art in the same way that caricatures of the proletariat and bourgeoisie are necessary for Stalinist propaganda. They need very obvious symbols to mark their work as clearly identifying itself with a particular viewpoint, and also, in their condescending opinion, in order to be immediately understood by the masses. This "socialist" ^art which requires "realism" as its medium drags all art down to the- level of crude propaganda and clichés of brawny-armed workers, factory chimneys, red flags, etc. Likewise, the cultural feminists need to show "female" symbolism—and in this society no other symbols are available which would be immediately understood by "the masses" except sexual imagery, traditional images of womanhood, round, organic, "warm-tender" qualities, etc.
Many feminist artists are quite hostile to abstract art because it doesn't fit their concept of art as propaganda. It's not immediately obvious what the ideological viewpoint is, or even in fact whether a man or woman painted it.' Thus such work must be under constant suspicion as not being "correct." This vulgarity has nothing in common with what art is, which is not propaganda (not the "hoarse whispered confession" or "sob story"), but rather an attempt to extend consciousness, to break new ground, and is therefore often difficult to understand at first.
Women artists have begged to be judged by the same standards as men, for there is one standard in art. Different standards in this case, as in all other areas, only mean disguised contempt. As Virginia Woolf wrote, "It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance, to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman" (A Room of One's Own). The question of standards in art is important. As Trotsky said, "proletarian art must not be second-class art" (Literature and Revolution)—the proletarian revolution will lay the basis for creating a culture which must build on (and will eventually supersede the best of all past cultures.
Male Chauvinism
But isn't the concept of culture being used in too broad a sense? What about male chauvinism? Isn't there, after all, such a thing as "bourgeois culture" which can poison the minds of the workers? The uprooting of bourgeois ideology requires not a purge of bourgeois art, a la the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," but the elimination of the material conditions (the repressive nuclear family, social inequality, unequal access to education and jobs, absorption in child-raising and housework, etc.) which have given rise to male-chauvinist ideology. If these conditions are changed, reflections of this change will ultimately appear in literature and art. That is the only way to thoroughly and forever abolish false conceptions of reality. As Orwell said about Salvador Dali (and he loathed Dali, believing him to be a truly sick individual who spread fantasies of necrophilia), it is a dubious policy to ban much of anything, particularly in the fields of art or science. Lenin continually warned comrades not to become too self-assured, too self-righteous, because Marxism is a science of economic and political life which applies only indirectly to other disciplines. Essentially Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky all insisted on the autonomy of art.
Of course there is a dominant "bourgeois culture." But it is based on the entire accumulated experiences of all human societies since the beginning of man. Thus it would be more accurate to speak of "human culture in a bourgeois epoch," for it is this entire range of human culture which the bourgeoisie has taken as its exclusive possession and which the proletariat must conquer. Socialist society must and will base itself upon this entire accumulated experience.
Socialist Humanity
Since the beginning of class society the social roles of men and women have never been equal—that is the goal of communist society. Until such a society is achieved, it is almost impossible to untangle the results of social training and education, which reflect the inequalities of class society, from what may possibly be real differences among peoples, sexes, etc. We are justly suspicious of the uses to which research in "social sciences" is put in capitalist society. As Trotsky said in a speech to a scientific gathering in Russia in 1925:
". .the greater the trust of socialism devoted to direct study of nature, the greater is its initial distrust in approaching those sciences and pseudo-sciences which are linked closely to the structure of human society, its economic institutions, its state, laws, ethics, etc."
—"Dialectical Materialism and Science” in Problems of Everyday Life
Much of these "pseudo-sciences" end up simply justifying the status quo, i.e., capitalism with its attendant evils, because they begin with the assumption of some kind of "eternal human nature" which produces society, and thus that's the way it has to be, forever and ever." Further, all past alleged differences between races and sexes have at one time or another been used by reactionaries as an ideological excuse for the purpose of justifying the oppression of (or even seeking to destroy) the supposedly "inferior" grouping.
But suppose some real aptitudinal differences do exist between men and women and could be proven? Our response would be "so what?" A free society must require absolute equality of opportunity and access to all areas of human life and culture. A proletarian state developing toward communism (the classless society) will have no reason to fear investigation and exploration of all potential differences, because our society will be based upon the absolute equality and freedom of all humanity, regardless of any such differences.
As Isaac Deutscher said at a Socialist Scholars Conference on the subject of "socialist man":
"We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man's making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex, and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labor movement have taken on.
"Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these. And if his nature remains aggressive, his society will give him immeasurably greater and more varied opportunities than bourgeois man has for sublimating his instinctual drives and turning them to creative uses.... The average member of socialist society may yet rise, as Trotsky anticipated, to the stature of Aristotle, Goethe, Marx.... And we assume that 'above these heights new peaks will rise.' We do not see in socialist man evolution's last and perfect product, or the end of history, but in a sense only the beginning of history." •
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Women's History Month-The Pankhursts-Suffrage and Socialism
March Is Women's History Month
The following is an article originally from Women and Revolution, Summer 1976 that may be of interest to the radical public. I have addressed the subject of the Pankhursts elsewhere in this space so google for my take on this fascinating and contradictory family.
The Pankhurst-Suffrage and Socialism
In 1894 Emmeline Pankhurst and her husband, Dr. Richard Marsden Pankhurst, who had been moving in the direction of socialism for some time, joined the tiny, newly formed Independent Labour Party (ILP) of Britain. Mrs. Pankhurst was initially too shy to speak in public, but, encouraged by her husband—a longtime radical who had founded the Women's Suffrage Society of Manchester when Emmeline was only a child of seven—she eventually began giving talks at socialist meetings. After his death in 1898 she continued to be an active member of the party and served as an ILP member of the Manchester School Board.
It was not until 1903 that a small group of ILP women met in Mrs. Pankhurst's home and formed the male-exclusionist Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and not until 1907 that the WSPU initiated an independent election campaign, with Mrs. Pankhurst declaring that although she had, been "loyal to Socialism on every point," she would surrender her ILP card if forced to choose.
Sheila Rowbotham, a supporter of the British International Socialists, has concluded from this early history of Emmeline Pankhurst and the WSPU—a history which has recently been much popularized by the book and television series Shoulder to Shoulder— that "there was a close connection between feminism and socialism in the early years of this century and the divorce between the two was long, painful and protracted."
Nothing could be further from the truth. The counterposed ideologies of feminism and socialism came into conflict in England, as elsewhere, very early (see "Feminism vs. Marxism: Origins of the Conflict," Women and Revolution No. 5, Spring 1974). Only the relative social quiescence of turn-of-the-century England obscured for a brief time the contradiction between revolutionary socialism and reformist feminism and permitted the rise of the "socialist-feminist" illusion. But with the impending war and the sharpening of class antagonisms, women found that they were, indeed, forced to choose. As one "socialist-feminist" of the period, who had labored in vain to link the autonomous feminist movement to the socialist movement, complained: "...the women's party...is branded by many as a middle class affair, possessing no fundamental connection with the Labour movement...."
By the outbreak of World War I, when the WSPU, in a paroxysm of chauvinist exuberance, changed the name of its newspaper from the Suffragette to Britannia, while at the same time the East London Federation of Suffragettes, headed by Mrs. Pankhurst's left-leaning daughter Sylvia, changed the name of its newspaper from The Women's Dreadnought to The Workers' Dreadnought, the implications of the choice had become inescapably clear. And when, a few years later, Mrs. Pankhurst journeyed to Russia in a last-ditch effort to save the crumbling Kerensky government from the Bolsheviks, while Sylvia made the same trip shortly thereafter in order to meet with the victorious Lenin and hammer out a revolutionary strategy for England, the consequences of this choice were carried to their logical conclusion.
The story of Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters is the history of "socialist-feminism" split asunder in the face of social crises. Those who subscribe to this illusion in our own time would do well to study this history with great care. Contemporary socialists and feminists are already driven apart by the necessity of choosing between solidarity with women of all classes or solidarity with workers of both sexes; between "affirmative action" for women or defense of the hard-won union seniority system; between the autonomous organization of women or the leading participation of women as cadres of the vanguard party. The sharpening of the class struggle will demolish any remaining ambiguities and will expose the "socialist-feminist" fraud for what is is—an excuse for reformists to capitulate to backward social consciousness.
The Fork in the Road
Dr. Pankhurst had often said to his children, Christabel, Sylvia, Adela and Harry: "My children are the four pillars of my house!" Harry, frail from birth, died in 1910 at the age of 20, leaving only three, but it was not until 1914 that it became clear that the house could not stand at all.
The younger daughters, Sylvia and Adela (Adela emigrated to Australia in 1912), had always found it difficult to separate the fight for women's emancipation from the broader radical struggle of which their parents had been a part.
In 1912, despite the disapproval of her mother and her older sister Christabel, who were at the height of their power and notoriety as leaders of the militant suffrage movement, Sylvia took the struggle for' women's liberation to the poor East End section of London.
Although her East London Federation was still formally affiliated with the WSPU, it displayed an increasing sympathy toward the working-class movement, a sympathy which was openly confirmed when Sylvia appeared on a speakers' platform with ILP representative George Lansbury and Irish Marxist James Connolly, demanding the release from prison of Irish labor leader James Larkin. The Daily Herald commented;
"One great result of the militant Suffrage Movement has been to convince many people that the vote is not the best way of getting what one wants...every day the industrial rebels and the Suffrage rebels march nearer together."
The Daily Herald was wrong. Far from indicating closer collaboration between worker militants and feminists, Sylvia's Albert Hall appearance was the last straw which severed forever the links between the East London Federation and the WSPU.
Summoned to WSPU headquarters-in-exile in Paris, Sylvia was informed that the East London Federation must become a separate organization at once. The WSPU, Christabel explained, did not want to be mixed up with Lansbury, who was campaigning to extend suffrage not only to female "householders," as the WSPU was, but to all men and women. Furthermore, she said, "You have a democratic constitution for your Federation; we do not agree with that." (The WSPU was administered autocratically by Mrs. Pankhurst and her elder daughter, the members having no vote.) And finally, she said, campaigning among working women was a waste of time, since they were the least powerful of their sex. The WSPU had adopted a conscious policy since 1907 of recruiting upper-class women.
Although all parties to the split declared publicly that the new development was an "extension" of the women's movement, the Daily Sketch (7 February 1914)
raised the question:
"What are the views of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst which are 'not those of Miss Christabel Pankhurst'?"
and observed:
"It is said that Miss Sylvia Pankhurst has for a long time adopted a militant policy of her own without consulting headquarters. One point of difference is that Miss Christabel Pankhurst has issued instructions that the W.S.P.U. was to be kept independent of all political parties, while the movement led by her sister has assumed strongly Socialist sympathies. Most of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst's supporters are avowed Socialists, and Miss Pankhurst has been working in close alliance with Mr. George Lansbury and other leaders of Labour in Bow and Bromley and adjoining constituencies. "Miss Sylvia Pankhurst also established her 'People's Army' for repelling police brutality, a departure from the Union policy. A third point is that the 'Army' is open to both men and women, while the W.S.P.U. excludes men."
—quoted in Midge Mackenzie (ed.). Shoulder to Shoulder
War
Upon the outbreak of World War I, Mrs. Pankhurst immediately suspended all activities of the WSPU and called upon its members to serve "their" country in any
capacity they could. (Their "sister" feminists in other belligerent countries were receiving the same advice.) Despite its well-known history of militancy and anti-government terrorism, the WSPU, like all reformist organizations, was interested not in destroying the existing order but only in achieving a more privileged position within it. There was no sense in continuing to fight for the vote, said Mrs. Pankhurst, when there might no longer be a country to vote in.
In 1915, at the request of Lloyd George, then minister of munitions, and with a government grant of £3,000, the WSPU organized a huge and highly successful "Women's Right to Serve" demonstration in London for the purpose of overcoming the resistance of trade-union leaders to the mass influx of women into industry at lower wages than men. Throughout the war the feminist leaders continued to serve their government by carrying on a vigorous, often racist, pro-war campaign. Hun-hatred was whipped up in the pages of Britannia—now bearing the dedication "For King, For Country, For Freedom"—which ran detailed atrocity stories and scurrilous attacks on anyone in favor of peace and on the Foreign Office, which, according to Christabel, was riddled with pro-Germans. Suffragettes took to the streets not to fight for the vote but to bestow "white feathers of cowardice" on able-bodied men who were not in uniform.
In 1915, with the financial backing of several prominent industrialists, the WSPU initiated an "industrial peace" campaign. With the blessings of the government, veterans of the suffrage movement, including Mrs. Pankhurst, Christabel and other feminist luminaries such as Flora Drummond and Annie Kenney, toured the areas of the greatest industrial unrest—the north of England and the mining districts of south Wales, in particular—denouncing "Bolshevik" shop stewards for fomenting class war. They appealed to women workers and to the wives of workers, on the grounds that they were more practical and less vulnerable to foreign ideas than men were, to see to it that the men were not led astray by the dangerous ideas of socialists.
Sylvia, meanwhile, was becoming more radical. She had continued, although with Waning enthusiasm, to agitate for universal adult suffrage. In fact, many ex-WSPUers who were disappointed with the WSPU's abandonment of the struggle for suffrage, as well as those with socialist or pacifist sympathies, switched their allegiance to the East London Federation at this time. But as Sylvia's political consciousness developed, the suffrage issue seemed less all-consuming than it once had, and The Workers' Dreadnought began to concern itself with a much wider range of social problems—the inadequacy of government allowances to servicemen's wives, the plight of old-age pensioners, the wages and conditions of women workers, the starvation of the poor.
Sylvia not only denounced these evils and led deputations to government ministries to protest them, but, with the help of a handful of volunteers, pioneered
a number of neighborhood social services—maternity and infant clinics which provided free medical care and free milk, a day care center for working mothers, a toy
factory to provide jobs for those who objected to 'manufacturing weaponry and a Cost Price restaurant which provided cheap meals to the poor and free meals to the destitute.
At the same time/in the press and on the street, she relentlessly attacked the inter-imperialist war, demanded peace and openly denounced her mother's "bloodthirstiness." After one such anti-war demonstration on 8 April 1916, Mrs. Pankhurst, then touring the United States on behalf of the war effort, sent the WSPU a terse cable saying: "Strongly repudiate and condemn Sylvia's foolish and unpatriotic conduct. Regret I cannot prevent use of name. Make this public."
Revolution in Russia
The February revolution in Russia aroused deep concern in England that Russia might withdraw her troops from the war. On June 1, Mrs. Pankhurst requested the permission of Lloyd George, now prime minister, to visit Russia "to explain to the Russian people the opinions as to the war and the conditions of peace held by us as patriotic British women, loyal to the national and Allied cause." Permission was granted.
She met with Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government, and advised him to take a firm line with the Bolsheviks. She reviewed the Women's Battalion of Death and pronounced it "the greatest thing in history since Joan of Arc." Created by Kerensky in a final, desperate attempt to provoke an outburst of patriotism and shame men into fighting, the battalion was to be the last defender of the Winter Palace against the Bolsheviks in October. She also intended to hold a series of mass outdoor meetings to inspire women and persuade them to fight to keep their wavering men in the war, but the government permitted her only to address small gatherings of upper-class women in private homes and to give press interviews. To one journalist from the newspaper Novoe Vremia she complained:
"".. From the very beginning of my public life I was in the ranks of Socialists, together with my husband. But I soon found how narrow were the interests with which I was concerned. I thus devoted myself to the cause of women. I consider that as a revolutionist, who has been sixteen times in prison, I deserve the sympathy of those people who have been at the head of the revolution in Russia." —quoted, Ibid.
She did, in fact, have the sympathy of many government officials. Statesmen and ambassadors called on her, prominent families welcomed her and the bourgeois press devoted considerable space to her visit. "Her patriotism," rhapsodized one journalist, "is impersonal and nationalistic, able to lift the soul to the highest summits of morality. She is a new woman."
At the series of meetings arranged for her, she spoke to the ladies of Petrograd about the Women's Battalion of Death. If these women were willing to risk their lives on the battlefield, she said, then the women remaining at home should be willing to risk their lives on the streets. Whenever a Bolshevik orator called for a separate peace or the cessation of fighting, an educated woman ought to oppose such sentiments. Furthermore, women ought to storm the Soviets all over Russia and force the men to support Kerensky and the Provisional Government in rallying the army to defeat the Germans (this despite her privately expressed opinion that Kerensky was a weakling and that only General Kornilov could save the situation).
She was in Moscow when the Bolsheviks took power, an event which she characterized as the disastrous madness of the illiterate masses deluded by the "machinations of German agents." Realizing that there was no further hope of Russia's assistance in the war, she returned to England where she demanded armed intervention into Russia to help "loyal" (to capitalism) elements there to restore order and resurrect the war effort. In 1918 and 1919, again with the backing of the British government, she toured the United States and Canada, then at the height of a hysterical red scare, lecturing on the evils of Bolshevism, which, she argued, was closely related to venereal disease, both being the results of a mistaken and promiscuous flouting of traditional decencies.
If Mrs. Pankhurst viewed Bolshevism as a debilitating disease, Sylvia saw it now as a "pure white flame," burning the old regime to the ground and clearing the way for a new society.
Since 1917, Sylvia had been admonishing the East End poor to follow the example of their Russian brothers— to rise up and smash the government, form themselves into Soviets and prepare for the real struggle which was just beginning. Invited to address the Irish Women's Franchise League in London, she startled her audience by advising them to forget about tinkering with parliamentary reforms and to propagandize instead for the seizure of farms and factories and for the establishment of workers Soviets. Although Irish nationalism like the suffrage movement might appear revolutionary, she warned, it was, in fact, riddled with reaction.
The stated aim of her East London Federation of Suffragettes—now renamed the Workers' Socialist Federation (WSF)—was international working-class revolution. "I am proud," she declared, "to call myself a Bolshevist."
Although sometimes pelted with garbage by hostile East Enders, she found a ready audience among the miners in south Wales, the midlands and the north of England and among the dockers and factory workers of "red" Clydeside.
In July 1919 Sylvia set out her political views in a long letter to Lenin: The Labour Party, which was full of Christian Socialists like Lansbury and pathetic office-seekers like Ramsey McDonald, had proven itself untrustworthy. There was no point in looking to Parliament even for significant reforms; the working class must form its own instruments of government. Only her own Workers' Socialist Federation, the Shop Stewards' Movement and the South Wales Socialist Society, she wrote, could be counted on not to compromise.
Lenin's reply, although tactfully phrased, was critical. While the Shop Stewards' Movement, which had direct contact with the workers and could stimulate and 'exploit strike actions, seemed promising, he was afraid that the other groups, including the WSF, were too small, too intellectual and too bourgeois. To undermine socialist solidarity and obstruct the formation of a unified Communist Party over the issue of whether or not to affiliate with the Labour Party and participate in
Parliament would be a mistake and a sign of political immaturity. "We Russians," he concluded, "who have lived through two great revolutions, know the importance of carrying on Soviet propaganda from inside the bourgeois parliaments."
Sylvia was not persuaded. She not only refused to take part in a communist unity conference scheduled for July 1920 but announced in The Workers Dreadnought one month beforehand that the WSF had changed its name to The Communist Party (British Section of the Third International), an act which was openly rebuked by Lenin.
Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, which appeared shortly thereafter, was an extension of Lenin's argument with Sylvia, although the "parliamentarian controversy" to which it addressed itself had important implications for the future of communism in Germany and Italy as well as Britain. Good intentions, he asserted, were not sufficient; politics was an art that had to be learned. British communists, he maintained, should apply for affiliation with the Labour Party. "Comrades Sylvia Pankhurst and William Gallacher [a Scottish shop steward] are mistaken if they think that this is the betrayal of communism, the abandonment of the struggle against social traitors. On the contrary, the communist revolution stands to gain a great deal by it."
Knowing that Lenin's position was certain to be discussed at the Second Congress of the Third International scheduled to begin in Moscow on July 15, Sylvia was determined to attend and argue her case. Denied visas by the embassies of the countries through which she had to travel, she crossed the Arctic Sea in a small fishing boat and arrived in Moscow only a few days before the conference was to end. Sylvia's biographer David Mitchell describes the confrontation:
"Lenin sent for her almost immediately to take part in the Commission on English Affairs then sitting in the Kremlin.... Lenin's charm worked powerfully upon her. He greeted her eagerly, and seemed 'more vividly vital and energetic, more wholly alive, than other people.'... The picture of an arrogant, bureaucratic bully which she had formed vanished in the presence of the original. The pathos and courage of the revolution, too, was pressing upon her, changing her perspective. Trotsky had just returned from the still active Polish front. The White invaders were still on Russian soil. Sylvia understood the need for discipline.... The great clash did not take place. For the moment, Sylvia was utterly disarmed. "Lenin gave her the place of honour on his right at the committee table. She and Gallacher restated their objections to his thesis. Lenin bantered them. Why so heated? It was only a question of tactics, of the most expedient way to put principles into practice.... If the decision to affiliate to the Labour Party and infiltrate Parliament proved wrong, it could always be changed. Left wingers like Sylvia would be needed to keen a close watch on the 'tacticians' and see that first principles were not swamped in a sea of expediency. "Sylvia could not quarrel with this. Lenin was able to announce to the conference, assembled in the Throne Room, that agreement was now complete: even the British, even Sylvia, had seen reason. Delegates sprang to their feet singing the Internationale, seized Lenin and hoisted him on their shoulders. 'He looked/ wrote Sylvia, 'like a happy father among his sons.'"
—David Mitchell, The Fighting Pankhursts
But unity did not last. In a Dreadnought editorial in August 1921 Sylvia again attacked the Communist Party of Great Britain for reformism and opportunism and ridiculed Zinoviev's optimistic estimate of the effectiveness of communist nuclei in the trade unions. "Let us hear from you, O communist nuclei," she taunted. Shortly afterward she received a letter from the party executive committee demanding that she cease using the Dreadnought to subvert party unity. She responded that controversies within the international communist movement were signs of healthy development and that by studying and participating in them members would grow in knowledge and political experience. But the Workers Dreadnought was not an internal bulletin, and the public airing of all controversies taking place within the fledgling Third International served only to increase its vulnerability.
Unable to come to terms with this elementary requirement of democratic centralism, Sylvia was expelled. Her failure to grasp the necessity for party discipline was, in reality, part of a larger failure to understand the essential role of the vanguard party, stemming from a deep-seated social-workerist fantasy that with sufficient energy, courage and sacrifice she could substitute herself for the party. "I do not regret my expulsion," she wrote."... I desire freedom to work for communism with the best that is in me. The party could not chain me."
King, Christ or Communism?
The Dreadnought ceased publication in 1924, and Sylvia and her companion, Silvio Corio, retired for a time to suburban Woodford Green where she wrote books and articles while earning her living as proprietor of a small cafe. But three years later, after Christabel had abandoned politics entirely to await the second coming of Christ and Mrs. Pankhurst, following a successful career as a paid anti-communist agitator, announced her intention to run for Parliament as a Tory, Sylvia was still able to say (in a letter to the editor of the socialist periodical Forward, January 1927):
"... For my part I rejoice in having enlisted for life in the socialist movement, in which the work of Owen, Marx, Kropotkin, William Morris and Keir Hardie, and such pioneering efforts as those of my father, Richard Marsden Pankhurst,...are an enduring memory.... I feel it is incumbent upon me, in view of this defection, to reaffirm my faith in the cause of social and international fraternity...."
Mrs. Pankhurst's "conversion" to Toryism was the subject of much controversy, but she saw no inconsistency whatever between conservatism and feminism. The general strike of 1926, she told reporters, had convinced her that anyone who had the true interests of women at heart must stand firmly behind Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government. The class war, "that foreign importation," must be replaced, she said, by unity and cooperation between labor and management; and women, in defense of the institutions in which they were now included and in defense of their families, would see to it that the Labour Party was never allowed to form another government. Speaking at the Ladies' Carlton Club, she proclaimed:
"I joined the Conservative Party because I believe that today there are only two parties—the Constitutional Party, represented by Mr. Baldwin and the Conservatives, and the Revolutionary Party. If you can only convince the ordinary woman that her home is threatened, her religion is threatened, and even her security in marriage is threatened, then we shall have her support...." —Mitchell, op. cit.
Indeed, in the absence of a revolutionary leadership struggling for women's freedom through proletarian revolution, women's atomization in the home and isolation from the productive process make women a backward section of the working masses. History offers numerous examples of the mobilization of women by the forces of reaction through the manipulation of their fears concerning the welfare of their homes and families. Mrs. Pankhurst's own "industrial peace" campaign had been a case in point.
Pillars of the British Empire
Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw, annoyed by Sylvia's incessant attacks on the Labour Party, had once advised her to stick to her welfare projects and forget politics, since she "could not even convert her mother and Christabel." Now these notorious "militants" (Mrs. Pankhurst had been fond of introducing herself to American audiences as "what you would call a 'hooligan'") had been "converted" into pillars of the British Empire.
Sylvia, it is true, went through a number of political transformations, as well, and ended her days as an esteemed supporter of the "Lion of Judah," Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, but these changes necessitated her breaking with Lenin, with the Communist International and with the ideology of international proletarian revolution, whereas her mother and elder sister were able to embrace king and Christ, respectively, without breaking from a single feminist position!
Feminism leads at best to some broader variant of reformism. In the case of the two best-known feminists in British history, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, it led in a logical and traceable line directly to right-wing imperialism and the church. •
The following is an article originally from Women and Revolution, Summer 1976 that may be of interest to the radical public. I have addressed the subject of the Pankhursts elsewhere in this space so google for my take on this fascinating and contradictory family.
The Pankhurst-Suffrage and Socialism
In 1894 Emmeline Pankhurst and her husband, Dr. Richard Marsden Pankhurst, who had been moving in the direction of socialism for some time, joined the tiny, newly formed Independent Labour Party (ILP) of Britain. Mrs. Pankhurst was initially too shy to speak in public, but, encouraged by her husband—a longtime radical who had founded the Women's Suffrage Society of Manchester when Emmeline was only a child of seven—she eventually began giving talks at socialist meetings. After his death in 1898 she continued to be an active member of the party and served as an ILP member of the Manchester School Board.
It was not until 1903 that a small group of ILP women met in Mrs. Pankhurst's home and formed the male-exclusionist Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and not until 1907 that the WSPU initiated an independent election campaign, with Mrs. Pankhurst declaring that although she had, been "loyal to Socialism on every point," she would surrender her ILP card if forced to choose.
Sheila Rowbotham, a supporter of the British International Socialists, has concluded from this early history of Emmeline Pankhurst and the WSPU—a history which has recently been much popularized by the book and television series Shoulder to Shoulder— that "there was a close connection between feminism and socialism in the early years of this century and the divorce between the two was long, painful and protracted."
Nothing could be further from the truth. The counterposed ideologies of feminism and socialism came into conflict in England, as elsewhere, very early (see "Feminism vs. Marxism: Origins of the Conflict," Women and Revolution No. 5, Spring 1974). Only the relative social quiescence of turn-of-the-century England obscured for a brief time the contradiction between revolutionary socialism and reformist feminism and permitted the rise of the "socialist-feminist" illusion. But with the impending war and the sharpening of class antagonisms, women found that they were, indeed, forced to choose. As one "socialist-feminist" of the period, who had labored in vain to link the autonomous feminist movement to the socialist movement, complained: "...the women's party...is branded by many as a middle class affair, possessing no fundamental connection with the Labour movement...."
By the outbreak of World War I, when the WSPU, in a paroxysm of chauvinist exuberance, changed the name of its newspaper from the Suffragette to Britannia, while at the same time the East London Federation of Suffragettes, headed by Mrs. Pankhurst's left-leaning daughter Sylvia, changed the name of its newspaper from The Women's Dreadnought to The Workers' Dreadnought, the implications of the choice had become inescapably clear. And when, a few years later, Mrs. Pankhurst journeyed to Russia in a last-ditch effort to save the crumbling Kerensky government from the Bolsheviks, while Sylvia made the same trip shortly thereafter in order to meet with the victorious Lenin and hammer out a revolutionary strategy for England, the consequences of this choice were carried to their logical conclusion.
The story of Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters is the history of "socialist-feminism" split asunder in the face of social crises. Those who subscribe to this illusion in our own time would do well to study this history with great care. Contemporary socialists and feminists are already driven apart by the necessity of choosing between solidarity with women of all classes or solidarity with workers of both sexes; between "affirmative action" for women or defense of the hard-won union seniority system; between the autonomous organization of women or the leading participation of women as cadres of the vanguard party. The sharpening of the class struggle will demolish any remaining ambiguities and will expose the "socialist-feminist" fraud for what is is—an excuse for reformists to capitulate to backward social consciousness.
The Fork in the Road
Dr. Pankhurst had often said to his children, Christabel, Sylvia, Adela and Harry: "My children are the four pillars of my house!" Harry, frail from birth, died in 1910 at the age of 20, leaving only three, but it was not until 1914 that it became clear that the house could not stand at all.
The younger daughters, Sylvia and Adela (Adela emigrated to Australia in 1912), had always found it difficult to separate the fight for women's emancipation from the broader radical struggle of which their parents had been a part.
In 1912, despite the disapproval of her mother and her older sister Christabel, who were at the height of their power and notoriety as leaders of the militant suffrage movement, Sylvia took the struggle for' women's liberation to the poor East End section of London.
Although her East London Federation was still formally affiliated with the WSPU, it displayed an increasing sympathy toward the working-class movement, a sympathy which was openly confirmed when Sylvia appeared on a speakers' platform with ILP representative George Lansbury and Irish Marxist James Connolly, demanding the release from prison of Irish labor leader James Larkin. The Daily Herald commented;
"One great result of the militant Suffrage Movement has been to convince many people that the vote is not the best way of getting what one wants...every day the industrial rebels and the Suffrage rebels march nearer together."
The Daily Herald was wrong. Far from indicating closer collaboration between worker militants and feminists, Sylvia's Albert Hall appearance was the last straw which severed forever the links between the East London Federation and the WSPU.
Summoned to WSPU headquarters-in-exile in Paris, Sylvia was informed that the East London Federation must become a separate organization at once. The WSPU, Christabel explained, did not want to be mixed up with Lansbury, who was campaigning to extend suffrage not only to female "householders," as the WSPU was, but to all men and women. Furthermore, she said, "You have a democratic constitution for your Federation; we do not agree with that." (The WSPU was administered autocratically by Mrs. Pankhurst and her elder daughter, the members having no vote.) And finally, she said, campaigning among working women was a waste of time, since they were the least powerful of their sex. The WSPU had adopted a conscious policy since 1907 of recruiting upper-class women.
Although all parties to the split declared publicly that the new development was an "extension" of the women's movement, the Daily Sketch (7 February 1914)
raised the question:
"What are the views of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst which are 'not those of Miss Christabel Pankhurst'?"
and observed:
"It is said that Miss Sylvia Pankhurst has for a long time adopted a militant policy of her own without consulting headquarters. One point of difference is that Miss Christabel Pankhurst has issued instructions that the W.S.P.U. was to be kept independent of all political parties, while the movement led by her sister has assumed strongly Socialist sympathies. Most of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst's supporters are avowed Socialists, and Miss Pankhurst has been working in close alliance with Mr. George Lansbury and other leaders of Labour in Bow and Bromley and adjoining constituencies. "Miss Sylvia Pankhurst also established her 'People's Army' for repelling police brutality, a departure from the Union policy. A third point is that the 'Army' is open to both men and women, while the W.S.P.U. excludes men."
—quoted in Midge Mackenzie (ed.). Shoulder to Shoulder
War
Upon the outbreak of World War I, Mrs. Pankhurst immediately suspended all activities of the WSPU and called upon its members to serve "their" country in any
capacity they could. (Their "sister" feminists in other belligerent countries were receiving the same advice.) Despite its well-known history of militancy and anti-government terrorism, the WSPU, like all reformist organizations, was interested not in destroying the existing order but only in achieving a more privileged position within it. There was no sense in continuing to fight for the vote, said Mrs. Pankhurst, when there might no longer be a country to vote in.
In 1915, at the request of Lloyd George, then minister of munitions, and with a government grant of £3,000, the WSPU organized a huge and highly successful "Women's Right to Serve" demonstration in London for the purpose of overcoming the resistance of trade-union leaders to the mass influx of women into industry at lower wages than men. Throughout the war the feminist leaders continued to serve their government by carrying on a vigorous, often racist, pro-war campaign. Hun-hatred was whipped up in the pages of Britannia—now bearing the dedication "For King, For Country, For Freedom"—which ran detailed atrocity stories and scurrilous attacks on anyone in favor of peace and on the Foreign Office, which, according to Christabel, was riddled with pro-Germans. Suffragettes took to the streets not to fight for the vote but to bestow "white feathers of cowardice" on able-bodied men who were not in uniform.
In 1915, with the financial backing of several prominent industrialists, the WSPU initiated an "industrial peace" campaign. With the blessings of the government, veterans of the suffrage movement, including Mrs. Pankhurst, Christabel and other feminist luminaries such as Flora Drummond and Annie Kenney, toured the areas of the greatest industrial unrest—the north of England and the mining districts of south Wales, in particular—denouncing "Bolshevik" shop stewards for fomenting class war. They appealed to women workers and to the wives of workers, on the grounds that they were more practical and less vulnerable to foreign ideas than men were, to see to it that the men were not led astray by the dangerous ideas of socialists.
Sylvia, meanwhile, was becoming more radical. She had continued, although with Waning enthusiasm, to agitate for universal adult suffrage. In fact, many ex-WSPUers who were disappointed with the WSPU's abandonment of the struggle for suffrage, as well as those with socialist or pacifist sympathies, switched their allegiance to the East London Federation at this time. But as Sylvia's political consciousness developed, the suffrage issue seemed less all-consuming than it once had, and The Workers' Dreadnought began to concern itself with a much wider range of social problems—the inadequacy of government allowances to servicemen's wives, the plight of old-age pensioners, the wages and conditions of women workers, the starvation of the poor.
Sylvia not only denounced these evils and led deputations to government ministries to protest them, but, with the help of a handful of volunteers, pioneered
a number of neighborhood social services—maternity and infant clinics which provided free medical care and free milk, a day care center for working mothers, a toy
factory to provide jobs for those who objected to 'manufacturing weaponry and a Cost Price restaurant which provided cheap meals to the poor and free meals to the destitute.
At the same time/in the press and on the street, she relentlessly attacked the inter-imperialist war, demanded peace and openly denounced her mother's "bloodthirstiness." After one such anti-war demonstration on 8 April 1916, Mrs. Pankhurst, then touring the United States on behalf of the war effort, sent the WSPU a terse cable saying: "Strongly repudiate and condemn Sylvia's foolish and unpatriotic conduct. Regret I cannot prevent use of name. Make this public."
Revolution in Russia
The February revolution in Russia aroused deep concern in England that Russia might withdraw her troops from the war. On June 1, Mrs. Pankhurst requested the permission of Lloyd George, now prime minister, to visit Russia "to explain to the Russian people the opinions as to the war and the conditions of peace held by us as patriotic British women, loyal to the national and Allied cause." Permission was granted.
She met with Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government, and advised him to take a firm line with the Bolsheviks. She reviewed the Women's Battalion of Death and pronounced it "the greatest thing in history since Joan of Arc." Created by Kerensky in a final, desperate attempt to provoke an outburst of patriotism and shame men into fighting, the battalion was to be the last defender of the Winter Palace against the Bolsheviks in October. She also intended to hold a series of mass outdoor meetings to inspire women and persuade them to fight to keep their wavering men in the war, but the government permitted her only to address small gatherings of upper-class women in private homes and to give press interviews. To one journalist from the newspaper Novoe Vremia she complained:
"".. From the very beginning of my public life I was in the ranks of Socialists, together with my husband. But I soon found how narrow were the interests with which I was concerned. I thus devoted myself to the cause of women. I consider that as a revolutionist, who has been sixteen times in prison, I deserve the sympathy of those people who have been at the head of the revolution in Russia." —quoted, Ibid.
She did, in fact, have the sympathy of many government officials. Statesmen and ambassadors called on her, prominent families welcomed her and the bourgeois press devoted considerable space to her visit. "Her patriotism," rhapsodized one journalist, "is impersonal and nationalistic, able to lift the soul to the highest summits of morality. She is a new woman."
At the series of meetings arranged for her, she spoke to the ladies of Petrograd about the Women's Battalion of Death. If these women were willing to risk their lives on the battlefield, she said, then the women remaining at home should be willing to risk their lives on the streets. Whenever a Bolshevik orator called for a separate peace or the cessation of fighting, an educated woman ought to oppose such sentiments. Furthermore, women ought to storm the Soviets all over Russia and force the men to support Kerensky and the Provisional Government in rallying the army to defeat the Germans (this despite her privately expressed opinion that Kerensky was a weakling and that only General Kornilov could save the situation).
She was in Moscow when the Bolsheviks took power, an event which she characterized as the disastrous madness of the illiterate masses deluded by the "machinations of German agents." Realizing that there was no further hope of Russia's assistance in the war, she returned to England where she demanded armed intervention into Russia to help "loyal" (to capitalism) elements there to restore order and resurrect the war effort. In 1918 and 1919, again with the backing of the British government, she toured the United States and Canada, then at the height of a hysterical red scare, lecturing on the evils of Bolshevism, which, she argued, was closely related to venereal disease, both being the results of a mistaken and promiscuous flouting of traditional decencies.
If Mrs. Pankhurst viewed Bolshevism as a debilitating disease, Sylvia saw it now as a "pure white flame," burning the old regime to the ground and clearing the way for a new society.
Since 1917, Sylvia had been admonishing the East End poor to follow the example of their Russian brothers— to rise up and smash the government, form themselves into Soviets and prepare for the real struggle which was just beginning. Invited to address the Irish Women's Franchise League in London, she startled her audience by advising them to forget about tinkering with parliamentary reforms and to propagandize instead for the seizure of farms and factories and for the establishment of workers Soviets. Although Irish nationalism like the suffrage movement might appear revolutionary, she warned, it was, in fact, riddled with reaction.
The stated aim of her East London Federation of Suffragettes—now renamed the Workers' Socialist Federation (WSF)—was international working-class revolution. "I am proud," she declared, "to call myself a Bolshevist."
Although sometimes pelted with garbage by hostile East Enders, she found a ready audience among the miners in south Wales, the midlands and the north of England and among the dockers and factory workers of "red" Clydeside.
In July 1919 Sylvia set out her political views in a long letter to Lenin: The Labour Party, which was full of Christian Socialists like Lansbury and pathetic office-seekers like Ramsey McDonald, had proven itself untrustworthy. There was no point in looking to Parliament even for significant reforms; the working class must form its own instruments of government. Only her own Workers' Socialist Federation, the Shop Stewards' Movement and the South Wales Socialist Society, she wrote, could be counted on not to compromise.
Lenin's reply, although tactfully phrased, was critical. While the Shop Stewards' Movement, which had direct contact with the workers and could stimulate and 'exploit strike actions, seemed promising, he was afraid that the other groups, including the WSF, were too small, too intellectual and too bourgeois. To undermine socialist solidarity and obstruct the formation of a unified Communist Party over the issue of whether or not to affiliate with the Labour Party and participate in
Parliament would be a mistake and a sign of political immaturity. "We Russians," he concluded, "who have lived through two great revolutions, know the importance of carrying on Soviet propaganda from inside the bourgeois parliaments."
Sylvia was not persuaded. She not only refused to take part in a communist unity conference scheduled for July 1920 but announced in The Workers Dreadnought one month beforehand that the WSF had changed its name to The Communist Party (British Section of the Third International), an act which was openly rebuked by Lenin.
Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, which appeared shortly thereafter, was an extension of Lenin's argument with Sylvia, although the "parliamentarian controversy" to which it addressed itself had important implications for the future of communism in Germany and Italy as well as Britain. Good intentions, he asserted, were not sufficient; politics was an art that had to be learned. British communists, he maintained, should apply for affiliation with the Labour Party. "Comrades Sylvia Pankhurst and William Gallacher [a Scottish shop steward] are mistaken if they think that this is the betrayal of communism, the abandonment of the struggle against social traitors. On the contrary, the communist revolution stands to gain a great deal by it."
Knowing that Lenin's position was certain to be discussed at the Second Congress of the Third International scheduled to begin in Moscow on July 15, Sylvia was determined to attend and argue her case. Denied visas by the embassies of the countries through which she had to travel, she crossed the Arctic Sea in a small fishing boat and arrived in Moscow only a few days before the conference was to end. Sylvia's biographer David Mitchell describes the confrontation:
"Lenin sent for her almost immediately to take part in the Commission on English Affairs then sitting in the Kremlin.... Lenin's charm worked powerfully upon her. He greeted her eagerly, and seemed 'more vividly vital and energetic, more wholly alive, than other people.'... The picture of an arrogant, bureaucratic bully which she had formed vanished in the presence of the original. The pathos and courage of the revolution, too, was pressing upon her, changing her perspective. Trotsky had just returned from the still active Polish front. The White invaders were still on Russian soil. Sylvia understood the need for discipline.... The great clash did not take place. For the moment, Sylvia was utterly disarmed. "Lenin gave her the place of honour on his right at the committee table. She and Gallacher restated their objections to his thesis. Lenin bantered them. Why so heated? It was only a question of tactics, of the most expedient way to put principles into practice.... If the decision to affiliate to the Labour Party and infiltrate Parliament proved wrong, it could always be changed. Left wingers like Sylvia would be needed to keen a close watch on the 'tacticians' and see that first principles were not swamped in a sea of expediency. "Sylvia could not quarrel with this. Lenin was able to announce to the conference, assembled in the Throne Room, that agreement was now complete: even the British, even Sylvia, had seen reason. Delegates sprang to their feet singing the Internationale, seized Lenin and hoisted him on their shoulders. 'He looked/ wrote Sylvia, 'like a happy father among his sons.'"
—David Mitchell, The Fighting Pankhursts
But unity did not last. In a Dreadnought editorial in August 1921 Sylvia again attacked the Communist Party of Great Britain for reformism and opportunism and ridiculed Zinoviev's optimistic estimate of the effectiveness of communist nuclei in the trade unions. "Let us hear from you, O communist nuclei," she taunted. Shortly afterward she received a letter from the party executive committee demanding that she cease using the Dreadnought to subvert party unity. She responded that controversies within the international communist movement were signs of healthy development and that by studying and participating in them members would grow in knowledge and political experience. But the Workers Dreadnought was not an internal bulletin, and the public airing of all controversies taking place within the fledgling Third International served only to increase its vulnerability.
Unable to come to terms with this elementary requirement of democratic centralism, Sylvia was expelled. Her failure to grasp the necessity for party discipline was, in reality, part of a larger failure to understand the essential role of the vanguard party, stemming from a deep-seated social-workerist fantasy that with sufficient energy, courage and sacrifice she could substitute herself for the party. "I do not regret my expulsion," she wrote."... I desire freedom to work for communism with the best that is in me. The party could not chain me."
King, Christ or Communism?
The Dreadnought ceased publication in 1924, and Sylvia and her companion, Silvio Corio, retired for a time to suburban Woodford Green where she wrote books and articles while earning her living as proprietor of a small cafe. But three years later, after Christabel had abandoned politics entirely to await the second coming of Christ and Mrs. Pankhurst, following a successful career as a paid anti-communist agitator, announced her intention to run for Parliament as a Tory, Sylvia was still able to say (in a letter to the editor of the socialist periodical Forward, January 1927):
"... For my part I rejoice in having enlisted for life in the socialist movement, in which the work of Owen, Marx, Kropotkin, William Morris and Keir Hardie, and such pioneering efforts as those of my father, Richard Marsden Pankhurst,...are an enduring memory.... I feel it is incumbent upon me, in view of this defection, to reaffirm my faith in the cause of social and international fraternity...."
Mrs. Pankhurst's "conversion" to Toryism was the subject of much controversy, but she saw no inconsistency whatever between conservatism and feminism. The general strike of 1926, she told reporters, had convinced her that anyone who had the true interests of women at heart must stand firmly behind Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government. The class war, "that foreign importation," must be replaced, she said, by unity and cooperation between labor and management; and women, in defense of the institutions in which they were now included and in defense of their families, would see to it that the Labour Party was never allowed to form another government. Speaking at the Ladies' Carlton Club, she proclaimed:
"I joined the Conservative Party because I believe that today there are only two parties—the Constitutional Party, represented by Mr. Baldwin and the Conservatives, and the Revolutionary Party. If you can only convince the ordinary woman that her home is threatened, her religion is threatened, and even her security in marriage is threatened, then we shall have her support...." —Mitchell, op. cit.
Indeed, in the absence of a revolutionary leadership struggling for women's freedom through proletarian revolution, women's atomization in the home and isolation from the productive process make women a backward section of the working masses. History offers numerous examples of the mobilization of women by the forces of reaction through the manipulation of their fears concerning the welfare of their homes and families. Mrs. Pankhurst's own "industrial peace" campaign had been a case in point.
Pillars of the British Empire
Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw, annoyed by Sylvia's incessant attacks on the Labour Party, had once advised her to stick to her welfare projects and forget politics, since she "could not even convert her mother and Christabel." Now these notorious "militants" (Mrs. Pankhurst had been fond of introducing herself to American audiences as "what you would call a 'hooligan'") had been "converted" into pillars of the British Empire.
Sylvia, it is true, went through a number of political transformations, as well, and ended her days as an esteemed supporter of the "Lion of Judah," Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, but these changes necessitated her breaking with Lenin, with the Communist International and with the ideology of international proletarian revolution, whereas her mother and elder sister were able to embrace king and Christ, respectively, without breaking from a single feminist position!
Feminism leads at best to some broader variant of reformism. In the case of the two best-known feminists in British history, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, it led in a logical and traceable line directly to right-wing imperialism and the church. •
Monday, March 03, 2008
Women's History Month-Witchcraft and Statecraft
March is Women's History Month
The following is an article from the journal Women and Revolution, Autumn 1974. This is a subject that has always interested me as a part of the question of the transformation from feudalism to early capitalism. Obviously the subject has received more updated coverage but the political points in the article are relevant to any such study. Also check the bibliography for a decent start to any scholarly interest on the subject.
Witchcraft and Statecraft: A Materialist Analysis of the European Witch Persecutions by D.L.Reissner, Women and Revolution, Autumn 1974
Several years have elapsed since the heyday of feminist organizations with names like W.I.T.C.H. (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and Red Witch, but many feminists have continued to identify themselves with witches, as is attested to by several recently published articles, including "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers" by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English and "What Were Those Witches Really Brewing?", by Andrea Dworkin which appeared in the April issue of Ms. This identification rests apparently on the feminists' view of witches as early prototypes of the liberated woman, although a little research of witch practices could seriously weaken this assumption. For example, each coven (local organization) of twelve witches was presided over by a man who played the role of the Devil, and it was standard practice at sabbats (witches' meetings) that each witch showed her respect to him by kissing his posterior and penis; this was known as the "kiss of shame." Furthermore, no sabbat was complete until the "Devil" had engaged in sexual intercourse with all 12 witches.
It is not surprising that the history of European witchcraft and witch persecutions (the New England witch trials, which occurred on a relatively small scale and in a different social context at the very end of the European witch craze, must be considered separately) should evoke great interest among people concerned with women's liberation, because it is a segment of the history of the oppression of women which is virtually unparalleled in its scope, duration and intensity. As Marxists, however, we approach this history in a way which is different both from the approach of feminists and from that of most other bourgeois historians whose analyses tend to be psychological, anthropological or merely romantic.
The European witch craze must be viewed as one component in the complex economic, social and political dynamic which transformed European civilization in the period between the 13th and 17th centuries and which included the rise of capitalism and the emergence of Protestantism. Of particular significance to an understanding of the witch craze was the consolidation of modern territorial nation-states during this period, for, as this article will seek to show, the witch craze was in the first instance an attempt to deal with the problem of socially inassimilable peoples in the face of this national consolidation.
Witches Have Not Always Been Persecuted
Ever since the 18th century there has been a tendency to regard European history from the Renaissance onward as inevitably progressive. Yet the same era which witnessed the flowering of Renaissance culture also produced the witch craze—a mania of terror and repression unknown in the so-called "Dark" Ages. Estimates vary, but the most conservative concede that at least 30,000 persons lost their lives as witches during this time—85 percent of them women.
Now that belief in the efficacy of witchcraft has become less, fashionable in this part of the world, there is a tendency to dismiss it as nothing more than a delusion of a few unbalanced minds, but witch practices have existed since ancient times and among all peoples. In fact, one of the most striking aspects of witchcraft is the uniformity of its practice in widely separated countries and civilizations. In India, just as in England, the cat is believed to be the witch's familiar, and in ancient Italy the evil eye was dreaded as it is in many parts of Africa today and was guarded against by the same symbol.
When religions establish themselves in new territories, the god or gods of the old religion become the devils (the word "devil," derived from the same root
as "divine," means "little god") of the new. Then fortune-telling, the special province of the witch or wise woman, which had been called prophecy when it
had been done in the name of the established religion, is designated as witchcraft. And so it was when Christianity superseded the older totemic cults of
Western Europe—cults which had honored female sexuality as the embodiment of the regenerative power of nature.
While the Church was formally opposed to these relics of paganism which continued to exist alongside Christianity, it found it politic, given their broad popular appeal, to accommodate itself to them in practice or even to co-opt them. In fact when in 1257 the Dominican Order, which had been established to combat the Albigensian and Vaudois heresies, uncovered witch practices in Southern France and requested that Pope Alexander DC grant it jurisdiction over witches as well as heretics, he refused. Not for another 200 years were the Dominicans to have their way unobstructed by the Catholic Church.
The Church based its position on the Canon Episcopi, a document dating back to the ninth century at least, which attempted to minimize the importance of witch practices not through persecution—Charlemagne had declared the burning of witches a capital crime as early as 785 AJD.—but through denying the very existence of witches and ridiculing belief in them:
"Some -wicked women, reverting to Satan, and seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess that they ride at night with Diana on certain beasts, with an innumerable company of women, passing over immense distances, obeying her command as their mistress, and evoked by her on ‘certain nights.... Therefore priests everywhere should preach that they know this to be false, and that such phantasms are sent by the Evil Spirit, who deludes them in dreams. Who is there who is not led out of himself in dreams, seeing much in sleeping that he never saw in waking? And who is such a fool that he believes that to happen in the body which is done only in the spirit?"
As late as the 12th century, John of Salisbury continued to dismiss the idea of the witches' sabbat as a fabulous dream. Yet this skeptical toleration was soon to give way to the hysteria of the witch craze, and woe to the occasional skeptic then, for he too would rapidly fall under suspicion.
The horror of the persecutions—the carefully refined tortures, the sexual degradation, the unspeakable anguish which wrung from the victims accusations against their friends, spouses and children—these are well documented and need not be elaborated here. Suffice it to say that at the height of the witch craze the intensity of the persecutions was such that in at least two villages in Germany only one woman was left alive.
Pessimism 0f Protestantism?
Given the fact that witchcraft had existed more or less undisturbed since ancient times, an analysis of the witch persecutions turns upon the answer to the question of why they erupted at the particular moment which they did.
The historical context in which the craze reached its height was one of unprecedented social upheaval. This was the period of the Hundred Years' War, the
rise of capitalism, the consolidation of nation-states, the Black Death, the discovery of the' New World, the Protestant Reformation and a series of religious,
wars so devastating that some historians contend that the European economy has not yet recovered from them. Such periods of social disturbance always give
rise to increased superstitions and unorthodox beliefs, and several students of the witch craze, including Jules Michelet and Julio Caro Baroja, claim that it grew out of the catastrophes of the 14th century and the widespread pessimism which these
catastrophes engendered.
Michelet points, out that while witchcraft had been practiced for hundreds of years, certain of its aspects, including the pact with the devil, did not appear before the 14th century. The reason for this, he argues, is that before this times people had not been sufficiently desperate to conceive of such a thing, but with the coming of an age in which the peasant was for the first time' required to pay quit-rents (rents paid in lieu of obligatory feudal services) and taxes in money, the concept of a pact with the devil became extremely attractive. Says Michelet:
"The pact required an age in which Hell itself appeared as a shelter, an asylum, a relief, as contrasted with the Hell of this world."
But while belief in witchcraft within primitive and modern societies 'alike increases as a result of social catastrophe and pessimism, this is clearly inadequate as the sole explanation for 400 years of terror. As the historian H.R. Trevor-Roper points out, the craze gathered force before either the Black Death or the Hundred Years' War had begun and-continued for two centuries after they were over—centuries marked by general recovery and expansion.
Another explanation often put forward for the outbreak of witch persecutions in this period is that they were a peculiarly Protestant phenomenon and arose therefore as a result of the Protestant Reformation.
It is true that both Luther and Calvin professed belief in witches and declared that they should be burned, and it is also true that the pattern of the witch persecutions coincided closely with the course of the religious wars, both on the Continent and in Britain, but there is no more basis for linking the craze with Protestantism than with Catholicism. It was in fact a product of the conflict between them. The Protestants carried the witch craze to the countries which they conquered for the Reformation while the Catholic Jesuits introduced it equally into the countries which they reconquered for Rome, including Bavaria, the Rhineland, Flanders and Poland. Toulouse, the capital of the witch burners, was a great center of Catholic orthodoxy. It is also noteworthy that it was the Protestant rather than the Catholic countries which took the lead in bringing the witch craze to a halt. By 1700 England and Holland had long since abandoned the persecution of witches on a large scale while the Catholic prince-bishops of Germany were still 'burning them by the score.
Since Protestants supposedly rejected all doctrine which the corrupt papacy had added to the Bible and the writings of the early Church Fathers, they should have logically rejected the dendrology of the Inquisition as well. In fact, this point was raised repeatedly by isolated Protestant critics, but without effect. Although they frequently burned Catholics as witches, the Protestant witch hunters continued to refer approvingly to the Dominican handbook of the witch craze, the Malleus Malificarum, Catholic inquisitors returned the compliment by citing Protestant authorities on the subject such as Erastus and Daneau. In other words, although the witch persecutions waxed and waned in direct proportion to the degree of religious conflict in each area, they were not fundamentally the product of doctrinal differences, but rather, as Trevor-Roper convincingly argues, of social differences and specifically of the demand for social assimilation which became acute in this period.
In those instances where there wars no such demand, there were no witch persecutions. For example, at the height of the witch craze, the Swedish Lutherans discovered that the Lapps in the territory they governed were imbued with witch beliefs. The Lutheran Church took no action in this case. Since there was no desire to socially integrate the Lapp dissenters, there was likewise no compulsion to persecute them for their witch practices.
The link between the witch persecutions and the question of social assimilation is apparent from the very beginning. When the Dominicans made their discovery of witchcraft in 1257 in" the "dark corners" of Europe, i.e., the Alps and the Pyrenees, they were disturbed not by the old rural superstitions per se, which were considered harmless enough, but by the fact that they were practiced by the people of a mountain civilization which appeared quite alien to the civilization of the plains—socially, culturally, economically and probably racially. These were the people who had retreated to the hinterlands of Europe at an early period. Feudalism had never penetrated this area in more than a superficial way, and neither had Christianity. Unlike the civilization of the plains, which was based on the cultivation of the land and the institution of the manor, the civilization of the mountains was pastoral and individualistic. The discovery of Witchcraft among these people must have come as no surprise to the Dominicans, yet the same practices which had been tolerated in the feudal towns and villages appeared far more ominous when viewed across an unbridgeable social chasm. The Dominicans reacted in a novel and unexpected way: they attempted to persecute the witches as heretics.
As we have seen, the papacy refused to support such persecutions at this time, but as the demand for social homogeneity became more urgent, the Dominican crusade became the wave of the future.
Witchcraft and Statecraft
The medieval concept of society had been based on an ideal of universality embodied in the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. Despite this ideal, however, medieval political, judicial and economic institutions, operating within the confines of an agrarian economy, were almost invariably local. During the 12th and 13th centuries, however, the economic conditions which had made such local autonomy inevitable began to disappear. The revival of commerce and the growth of cities increased the circulation of money and the expansion of trade to the point at which local autonomy became financially impractical. During the 14th and 15th centuries, the feudal suzerainties of local lords were gradually transformed into absolute monarchies. Behind this enormous change lay the power of; a new social class—the growing class of capitalist entrepreneurs whose business needs had outgrown feudal social institutions and who now demanded the larger sphere of operation which only a territorial state could provide.
The welding of a nation-state—the creation of a "people" with a sense of common identity—demanded social homogeneity, including religious homogeneity. To be Spanish meant to be Catholic; to be English, Anglican. Moreover, religious homogeneity was important to emerging rulers not only because it enabled them to bind their subjects more closely and to disguise territorial aggression as holy war, but also because it enabled them to control their subjects much more effectively. The established church was in each locality an arm of the state apparatus. To the extent that there were citizens beyond its reach, they represented a threat to the newly established order.
Thus the period of the witch craze is also the period in which the Jews and Moors were expelled from Spain, the Protestants were expelled from France, the Puritans were hounded out of England and the Inquisition was at the height of its power. The conjuncture of these persecutions is hardly coincidental. They are all, at least in part, attempts to deal with the problem of socially inassimilable peoples during the ‘period of the consolidation of European nation-states. The witch craze cannot be understood apart from this larger social movement of which it was an aspect. This understanding, incidentally, was not lost on the authorities of the time, who not infrequently launched campaigns of persecution against all the stereotypes of unassimilability in their particular areas; for instance, Protestants, Jews and witches in Trier.
"Most Women are Witches"
The one aspect of the witch persecutions which did distinguish them from all other persecutions of the period was that their victims were overwhelmingly women, particularly older women between 50 and 70 years of age and very often women who were unusually independent in one way or another—widows, spinsters, midwives. Not that men were exempt from persecution, but as Jacob Sprenger, co-author of the Malleus Malificahan, wrote: "We should speak of the Heresy of the Sorceresses, not of the Sorcerers, for the latter are of small account."
The Judaeo-Christian tradition had long rationalized the social oppression of women by designating them as weak and sinful and easily tempted by the devil. The Jewish Talmud makes this clear by its statement, "Women are naturally inclined to witchcraft," and "The more women there are, the more witchcraft there will be," and again, "Most women are witches."
Christianity postulated that men were protected from becoming witches not only by virtue of their superior intellect and faith, but also because Jesus Christ had died, as it said in the Malleus, "to preserve1 the male sex from so great a crime."
Women were regarded as particularly prone to diabolical temptation not merely because they were deemed intellectually and spiritually inferior to men, but also and especially because they were believed to be sexually insatiable. La the Malleus it is woman's carnality which is offered as the ultimate proof of her predisposition to witchcraft: "All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable."
It was only this view of women which made the endless confessions of seduction by the devil plausible, for they corroborated the popular conception of the nature of female sexuality.
But this long-standing attitude does not in itself explain the outbreak of bitter misogynism which has been observed in this period. Recently published demographic findings, as historian Erik Midlefort has noted, suggest the basis for a more substantial explanation.
The European Marriage Pattern
Demographer John Hajnal has demonstrated that one of the most profound changes that Europe has ever experienced dates roughly from the 15th or 16th centuries. This is the appearance of the "European marriage pattern"—a pattern characterized by relatively late marriage and by large proportions of people who never marry. The percentage of these single people rose in this period from about five percent of the population to 15 or 20 percent.
It was this shift toward later marriage which laid the basis for the nuclear family, since in societies where there is little control over conception the age of partners at marriage is one of the most important variables bearing upon the reproduction rate. It also facilitated the Industrial Revolution by raising the average income and making it possible for savings to be devoted to improving capital assets rather than supporting population growth. Of immediate importance was the fact that for the first time in European history there was a very large percentage of unmarried women, whose ranks were further augmented by widows created by the frequent wars, plagues and emigration. (With regard to the plague, it is noteworthy that in some areas it was fatal for up to ten times as many men as women in the population, possibly because women were more bound to the home and thus less exposed to contagion.) At the same time convents, once the sole refuge of spinsters, were being dismantled in Protestant countries, and even in Catholic countries they were on the. decline.
In a society which was totally patriarchal and family-centered and which provided no social role for women outside the family, the growing numbers of single women were regarded as at least peculiar and possibly seditious, especially after the death of
their fathers removed them from patriarchal control entirely. And in fact widows and spinsters were accused of witchcraft in numbers far out of proportion to their representation in society. Of course, the fact that these women were unprotected made them more vulnerable to attack, but the essential point to be made is that it was the unprecedented existence of large numbers of women outside the protection of the family which brought them under suspicion in the first place. Aside from spinsters and widows, the women who came under attack for witchcraft most often were lay medical practitioners of one sort or another, particularly midwives. As the Malleus says:
"... as penitent witches have often told to us and to others, saying: No one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than midwives. For when they do not kill children, as if for some other purpose they take them out of the room and, raising them up in the air, offer them to devils."
Country medicine, the medicine of the poor, was often, although by no means exclusively, practiced by women, and witches were often "accused" of having the power to heal. In fact, they-did develop herbal remedies, some of which are still in use. It has also been discovered that the ointment with which they anointed themselves before "flying" to the sabbats contained hallucinogenic properties such that the feeling of "flying might indeed ensue.
Feminists Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have made the interesting point that the rising European medical profession played an active role in suppressing all lay competition during this period, including the medicine of the "white" (good) witches, although to consider this the fundamental basis of the European witch craze is superficial, and to assert, as they do, that male and female healers were on opposite sides of a class struggle because women served the "people" while men served the ruling class is crude and inaccurate.
The Witch Craze Burns Out
In his Dictionnalre Philosophise written in 1764, Voltaire quipped:
"It is a great pity that there are no longer any persons possessed by the Devil, or magicians, or astrologers, or genii. One cannot conceive how useful all these
mysteries were a hundred years ago. In those days, the nobility lived in castles. The winter evenings were long and everyone would have died of boredom if these
noble entertainments had not been available.... Every village had its own sorcerer and witch; every prince his astrologer; all the ladies had their fortunes told;
those possessed by the Devil wandered all over the place; everyone wanted to know who had seen the Devil or who was going to see him; and all this provided an
endless topic of conversation which kept everyone in suspense. Nowadays we play insipid card games and have lost a lot by losing our illusions."
Voltaire could afford to joke for he had the good fortune to live at a time, when such jokes no longer led inescapably to the Inquisition and the stake. The
witch craze, along with other mass-forms of fanatical religious persecution, began to dissolve in both Protestant and Catholic countries in Western Europe in the mid-17th century. By this time, the wars of religion were coming to an end, territorial nation-states were more securely consolidated and the "alien" social groups within them had been for the most part either assimilated, exterminated or expelled.
Furthermore, witch beliefs seemed far less credible, among certain groups at least, during the age of science and skepticism which the commercial revolution had ushered in. The assumption that a neighbor's malice could cause physical harm had seemed more likely in a subsistence-level village where social cooperation was a vital necessity than it did in the 17th century when increased economic individualism and greater social mobility were severing the older collective ties.
Although occasional witch persecutions continued until the 1850's, and although witchcraft long remained a criminal offense in many countries, including England where it was not removed from the statute books until 22 June 1951, by the beginning of the 18th century the witch craze was unmistakably dead. It would be some time, however, before cosmopolitan wits such as Voltaire began to consider the subject amusing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buroja, Julio Caro. The World of the Witches. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961.
Briggs, K.M. Pale Hecate's Team. New York: The Humanities Press, 1962.
Dworkin, Andrea, "What Were Those Witches Really Brewing?", Ms., April' 1974.
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers-. Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1973.
Hajnal, John. "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective," Population in History (ed. D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley). Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1965, pp. 101-143.
Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
Maple, Eric. The Dark World of Witches, New York: Pegasus, 1962.
Michelet, Jules. Satanism and Witchcraft: A Study in Medieval Superstition. New York: The Citadel Press, c. 1939.
Midelfort, H.C. Erik. Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972.
Rosen, Barbara (ed.). Witchcraft. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1969.
Sergeant, Philip W. Witches and Warlocks. New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1972.
Seth, Ronald. Witches and Their Craft. London: Odhama Books, 1967.
Spengler, Joseph J. "Demographic Factors and Early Modern Economic Development," Daedalus, 97 (1968): pp. 433-46.
Summers, Montague. The History of Witchcraft. New Hyde Park: University Books, 1956. Forword by-Felix Morrow.
Summers, Rev. Montague (ed.). Malleus Maleficarum. New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc. 1928.
Trevor-Roper, H.R. The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1956.
Van de Walle, Etienne. "Marriage and Marital Fertility," Daedalus, 97 (1968): pp. 486-501.
Wrigley, E.A. "Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England," Economic History Review, 19 (1966): pp. 82-100.
The following is an article from the journal Women and Revolution, Autumn 1974. This is a subject that has always interested me as a part of the question of the transformation from feudalism to early capitalism. Obviously the subject has received more updated coverage but the political points in the article are relevant to any such study. Also check the bibliography for a decent start to any scholarly interest on the subject.
Witchcraft and Statecraft: A Materialist Analysis of the European Witch Persecutions by D.L.Reissner, Women and Revolution, Autumn 1974
Several years have elapsed since the heyday of feminist organizations with names like W.I.T.C.H. (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and Red Witch, but many feminists have continued to identify themselves with witches, as is attested to by several recently published articles, including "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers" by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English and "What Were Those Witches Really Brewing?", by Andrea Dworkin which appeared in the April issue of Ms. This identification rests apparently on the feminists' view of witches as early prototypes of the liberated woman, although a little research of witch practices could seriously weaken this assumption. For example, each coven (local organization) of twelve witches was presided over by a man who played the role of the Devil, and it was standard practice at sabbats (witches' meetings) that each witch showed her respect to him by kissing his posterior and penis; this was known as the "kiss of shame." Furthermore, no sabbat was complete until the "Devil" had engaged in sexual intercourse with all 12 witches.
It is not surprising that the history of European witchcraft and witch persecutions (the New England witch trials, which occurred on a relatively small scale and in a different social context at the very end of the European witch craze, must be considered separately) should evoke great interest among people concerned with women's liberation, because it is a segment of the history of the oppression of women which is virtually unparalleled in its scope, duration and intensity. As Marxists, however, we approach this history in a way which is different both from the approach of feminists and from that of most other bourgeois historians whose analyses tend to be psychological, anthropological or merely romantic.
The European witch craze must be viewed as one component in the complex economic, social and political dynamic which transformed European civilization in the period between the 13th and 17th centuries and which included the rise of capitalism and the emergence of Protestantism. Of particular significance to an understanding of the witch craze was the consolidation of modern territorial nation-states during this period, for, as this article will seek to show, the witch craze was in the first instance an attempt to deal with the problem of socially inassimilable peoples in the face of this national consolidation.
Witches Have Not Always Been Persecuted
Ever since the 18th century there has been a tendency to regard European history from the Renaissance onward as inevitably progressive. Yet the same era which witnessed the flowering of Renaissance culture also produced the witch craze—a mania of terror and repression unknown in the so-called "Dark" Ages. Estimates vary, but the most conservative concede that at least 30,000 persons lost their lives as witches during this time—85 percent of them women.
Now that belief in the efficacy of witchcraft has become less, fashionable in this part of the world, there is a tendency to dismiss it as nothing more than a delusion of a few unbalanced minds, but witch practices have existed since ancient times and among all peoples. In fact, one of the most striking aspects of witchcraft is the uniformity of its practice in widely separated countries and civilizations. In India, just as in England, the cat is believed to be the witch's familiar, and in ancient Italy the evil eye was dreaded as it is in many parts of Africa today and was guarded against by the same symbol.
When religions establish themselves in new territories, the god or gods of the old religion become the devils (the word "devil," derived from the same root
as "divine," means "little god") of the new. Then fortune-telling, the special province of the witch or wise woman, which had been called prophecy when it
had been done in the name of the established religion, is designated as witchcraft. And so it was when Christianity superseded the older totemic cults of
Western Europe—cults which had honored female sexuality as the embodiment of the regenerative power of nature.
While the Church was formally opposed to these relics of paganism which continued to exist alongside Christianity, it found it politic, given their broad popular appeal, to accommodate itself to them in practice or even to co-opt them. In fact when in 1257 the Dominican Order, which had been established to combat the Albigensian and Vaudois heresies, uncovered witch practices in Southern France and requested that Pope Alexander DC grant it jurisdiction over witches as well as heretics, he refused. Not for another 200 years were the Dominicans to have their way unobstructed by the Catholic Church.
The Church based its position on the Canon Episcopi, a document dating back to the ninth century at least, which attempted to minimize the importance of witch practices not through persecution—Charlemagne had declared the burning of witches a capital crime as early as 785 AJD.—but through denying the very existence of witches and ridiculing belief in them:
"Some -wicked women, reverting to Satan, and seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess that they ride at night with Diana on certain beasts, with an innumerable company of women, passing over immense distances, obeying her command as their mistress, and evoked by her on ‘certain nights.... Therefore priests everywhere should preach that they know this to be false, and that such phantasms are sent by the Evil Spirit, who deludes them in dreams. Who is there who is not led out of himself in dreams, seeing much in sleeping that he never saw in waking? And who is such a fool that he believes that to happen in the body which is done only in the spirit?"
As late as the 12th century, John of Salisbury continued to dismiss the idea of the witches' sabbat as a fabulous dream. Yet this skeptical toleration was soon to give way to the hysteria of the witch craze, and woe to the occasional skeptic then, for he too would rapidly fall under suspicion.
The horror of the persecutions—the carefully refined tortures, the sexual degradation, the unspeakable anguish which wrung from the victims accusations against their friends, spouses and children—these are well documented and need not be elaborated here. Suffice it to say that at the height of the witch craze the intensity of the persecutions was such that in at least two villages in Germany only one woman was left alive.
Pessimism 0f Protestantism?
Given the fact that witchcraft had existed more or less undisturbed since ancient times, an analysis of the witch persecutions turns upon the answer to the question of why they erupted at the particular moment which they did.
The historical context in which the craze reached its height was one of unprecedented social upheaval. This was the period of the Hundred Years' War, the
rise of capitalism, the consolidation of nation-states, the Black Death, the discovery of the' New World, the Protestant Reformation and a series of religious,
wars so devastating that some historians contend that the European economy has not yet recovered from them. Such periods of social disturbance always give
rise to increased superstitions and unorthodox beliefs, and several students of the witch craze, including Jules Michelet and Julio Caro Baroja, claim that it grew out of the catastrophes of the 14th century and the widespread pessimism which these
catastrophes engendered.
Michelet points, out that while witchcraft had been practiced for hundreds of years, certain of its aspects, including the pact with the devil, did not appear before the 14th century. The reason for this, he argues, is that before this times people had not been sufficiently desperate to conceive of such a thing, but with the coming of an age in which the peasant was for the first time' required to pay quit-rents (rents paid in lieu of obligatory feudal services) and taxes in money, the concept of a pact with the devil became extremely attractive. Says Michelet:
"The pact required an age in which Hell itself appeared as a shelter, an asylum, a relief, as contrasted with the Hell of this world."
But while belief in witchcraft within primitive and modern societies 'alike increases as a result of social catastrophe and pessimism, this is clearly inadequate as the sole explanation for 400 years of terror. As the historian H.R. Trevor-Roper points out, the craze gathered force before either the Black Death or the Hundred Years' War had begun and-continued for two centuries after they were over—centuries marked by general recovery and expansion.
Another explanation often put forward for the outbreak of witch persecutions in this period is that they were a peculiarly Protestant phenomenon and arose therefore as a result of the Protestant Reformation.
It is true that both Luther and Calvin professed belief in witches and declared that they should be burned, and it is also true that the pattern of the witch persecutions coincided closely with the course of the religious wars, both on the Continent and in Britain, but there is no more basis for linking the craze with Protestantism than with Catholicism. It was in fact a product of the conflict between them. The Protestants carried the witch craze to the countries which they conquered for the Reformation while the Catholic Jesuits introduced it equally into the countries which they reconquered for Rome, including Bavaria, the Rhineland, Flanders and Poland. Toulouse, the capital of the witch burners, was a great center of Catholic orthodoxy. It is also noteworthy that it was the Protestant rather than the Catholic countries which took the lead in bringing the witch craze to a halt. By 1700 England and Holland had long since abandoned the persecution of witches on a large scale while the Catholic prince-bishops of Germany were still 'burning them by the score.
Since Protestants supposedly rejected all doctrine which the corrupt papacy had added to the Bible and the writings of the early Church Fathers, they should have logically rejected the dendrology of the Inquisition as well. In fact, this point was raised repeatedly by isolated Protestant critics, but without effect. Although they frequently burned Catholics as witches, the Protestant witch hunters continued to refer approvingly to the Dominican handbook of the witch craze, the Malleus Malificarum, Catholic inquisitors returned the compliment by citing Protestant authorities on the subject such as Erastus and Daneau. In other words, although the witch persecutions waxed and waned in direct proportion to the degree of religious conflict in each area, they were not fundamentally the product of doctrinal differences, but rather, as Trevor-Roper convincingly argues, of social differences and specifically of the demand for social assimilation which became acute in this period.
In those instances where there wars no such demand, there were no witch persecutions. For example, at the height of the witch craze, the Swedish Lutherans discovered that the Lapps in the territory they governed were imbued with witch beliefs. The Lutheran Church took no action in this case. Since there was no desire to socially integrate the Lapp dissenters, there was likewise no compulsion to persecute them for their witch practices.
The link between the witch persecutions and the question of social assimilation is apparent from the very beginning. When the Dominicans made their discovery of witchcraft in 1257 in" the "dark corners" of Europe, i.e., the Alps and the Pyrenees, they were disturbed not by the old rural superstitions per se, which were considered harmless enough, but by the fact that they were practiced by the people of a mountain civilization which appeared quite alien to the civilization of the plains—socially, culturally, economically and probably racially. These were the people who had retreated to the hinterlands of Europe at an early period. Feudalism had never penetrated this area in more than a superficial way, and neither had Christianity. Unlike the civilization of the plains, which was based on the cultivation of the land and the institution of the manor, the civilization of the mountains was pastoral and individualistic. The discovery of Witchcraft among these people must have come as no surprise to the Dominicans, yet the same practices which had been tolerated in the feudal towns and villages appeared far more ominous when viewed across an unbridgeable social chasm. The Dominicans reacted in a novel and unexpected way: they attempted to persecute the witches as heretics.
As we have seen, the papacy refused to support such persecutions at this time, but as the demand for social homogeneity became more urgent, the Dominican crusade became the wave of the future.
Witchcraft and Statecraft
The medieval concept of society had been based on an ideal of universality embodied in the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. Despite this ideal, however, medieval political, judicial and economic institutions, operating within the confines of an agrarian economy, were almost invariably local. During the 12th and 13th centuries, however, the economic conditions which had made such local autonomy inevitable began to disappear. The revival of commerce and the growth of cities increased the circulation of money and the expansion of trade to the point at which local autonomy became financially impractical. During the 14th and 15th centuries, the feudal suzerainties of local lords were gradually transformed into absolute monarchies. Behind this enormous change lay the power of; a new social class—the growing class of capitalist entrepreneurs whose business needs had outgrown feudal social institutions and who now demanded the larger sphere of operation which only a territorial state could provide.
The welding of a nation-state—the creation of a "people" with a sense of common identity—demanded social homogeneity, including religious homogeneity. To be Spanish meant to be Catholic; to be English, Anglican. Moreover, religious homogeneity was important to emerging rulers not only because it enabled them to bind their subjects more closely and to disguise territorial aggression as holy war, but also because it enabled them to control their subjects much more effectively. The established church was in each locality an arm of the state apparatus. To the extent that there were citizens beyond its reach, they represented a threat to the newly established order.
Thus the period of the witch craze is also the period in which the Jews and Moors were expelled from Spain, the Protestants were expelled from France, the Puritans were hounded out of England and the Inquisition was at the height of its power. The conjuncture of these persecutions is hardly coincidental. They are all, at least in part, attempts to deal with the problem of socially inassimilable peoples during the ‘period of the consolidation of European nation-states. The witch craze cannot be understood apart from this larger social movement of which it was an aspect. This understanding, incidentally, was not lost on the authorities of the time, who not infrequently launched campaigns of persecution against all the stereotypes of unassimilability in their particular areas; for instance, Protestants, Jews and witches in Trier.
"Most Women are Witches"
The one aspect of the witch persecutions which did distinguish them from all other persecutions of the period was that their victims were overwhelmingly women, particularly older women between 50 and 70 years of age and very often women who were unusually independent in one way or another—widows, spinsters, midwives. Not that men were exempt from persecution, but as Jacob Sprenger, co-author of the Malleus Malificahan, wrote: "We should speak of the Heresy of the Sorceresses, not of the Sorcerers, for the latter are of small account."
The Judaeo-Christian tradition had long rationalized the social oppression of women by designating them as weak and sinful and easily tempted by the devil. The Jewish Talmud makes this clear by its statement, "Women are naturally inclined to witchcraft," and "The more women there are, the more witchcraft there will be," and again, "Most women are witches."
Christianity postulated that men were protected from becoming witches not only by virtue of their superior intellect and faith, but also because Jesus Christ had died, as it said in the Malleus, "to preserve1 the male sex from so great a crime."
Women were regarded as particularly prone to diabolical temptation not merely because they were deemed intellectually and spiritually inferior to men, but also and especially because they were believed to be sexually insatiable. La the Malleus it is woman's carnality which is offered as the ultimate proof of her predisposition to witchcraft: "All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable."
It was only this view of women which made the endless confessions of seduction by the devil plausible, for they corroborated the popular conception of the nature of female sexuality.
But this long-standing attitude does not in itself explain the outbreak of bitter misogynism which has been observed in this period. Recently published demographic findings, as historian Erik Midlefort has noted, suggest the basis for a more substantial explanation.
The European Marriage Pattern
Demographer John Hajnal has demonstrated that one of the most profound changes that Europe has ever experienced dates roughly from the 15th or 16th centuries. This is the appearance of the "European marriage pattern"—a pattern characterized by relatively late marriage and by large proportions of people who never marry. The percentage of these single people rose in this period from about five percent of the population to 15 or 20 percent.
It was this shift toward later marriage which laid the basis for the nuclear family, since in societies where there is little control over conception the age of partners at marriage is one of the most important variables bearing upon the reproduction rate. It also facilitated the Industrial Revolution by raising the average income and making it possible for savings to be devoted to improving capital assets rather than supporting population growth. Of immediate importance was the fact that for the first time in European history there was a very large percentage of unmarried women, whose ranks were further augmented by widows created by the frequent wars, plagues and emigration. (With regard to the plague, it is noteworthy that in some areas it was fatal for up to ten times as many men as women in the population, possibly because women were more bound to the home and thus less exposed to contagion.) At the same time convents, once the sole refuge of spinsters, were being dismantled in Protestant countries, and even in Catholic countries they were on the. decline.
In a society which was totally patriarchal and family-centered and which provided no social role for women outside the family, the growing numbers of single women were regarded as at least peculiar and possibly seditious, especially after the death of
their fathers removed them from patriarchal control entirely. And in fact widows and spinsters were accused of witchcraft in numbers far out of proportion to their representation in society. Of course, the fact that these women were unprotected made them more vulnerable to attack, but the essential point to be made is that it was the unprecedented existence of large numbers of women outside the protection of the family which brought them under suspicion in the first place. Aside from spinsters and widows, the women who came under attack for witchcraft most often were lay medical practitioners of one sort or another, particularly midwives. As the Malleus says:
"... as penitent witches have often told to us and to others, saying: No one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than midwives. For when they do not kill children, as if for some other purpose they take them out of the room and, raising them up in the air, offer them to devils."
Country medicine, the medicine of the poor, was often, although by no means exclusively, practiced by women, and witches were often "accused" of having the power to heal. In fact, they-did develop herbal remedies, some of which are still in use. It has also been discovered that the ointment with which they anointed themselves before "flying" to the sabbats contained hallucinogenic properties such that the feeling of "flying might indeed ensue.
Feminists Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have made the interesting point that the rising European medical profession played an active role in suppressing all lay competition during this period, including the medicine of the "white" (good) witches, although to consider this the fundamental basis of the European witch craze is superficial, and to assert, as they do, that male and female healers were on opposite sides of a class struggle because women served the "people" while men served the ruling class is crude and inaccurate.
The Witch Craze Burns Out
In his Dictionnalre Philosophise written in 1764, Voltaire quipped:
"It is a great pity that there are no longer any persons possessed by the Devil, or magicians, or astrologers, or genii. One cannot conceive how useful all these
mysteries were a hundred years ago. In those days, the nobility lived in castles. The winter evenings were long and everyone would have died of boredom if these
noble entertainments had not been available.... Every village had its own sorcerer and witch; every prince his astrologer; all the ladies had their fortunes told;
those possessed by the Devil wandered all over the place; everyone wanted to know who had seen the Devil or who was going to see him; and all this provided an
endless topic of conversation which kept everyone in suspense. Nowadays we play insipid card games and have lost a lot by losing our illusions."
Voltaire could afford to joke for he had the good fortune to live at a time, when such jokes no longer led inescapably to the Inquisition and the stake. The
witch craze, along with other mass-forms of fanatical religious persecution, began to dissolve in both Protestant and Catholic countries in Western Europe in the mid-17th century. By this time, the wars of religion were coming to an end, territorial nation-states were more securely consolidated and the "alien" social groups within them had been for the most part either assimilated, exterminated or expelled.
Furthermore, witch beliefs seemed far less credible, among certain groups at least, during the age of science and skepticism which the commercial revolution had ushered in. The assumption that a neighbor's malice could cause physical harm had seemed more likely in a subsistence-level village where social cooperation was a vital necessity than it did in the 17th century when increased economic individualism and greater social mobility were severing the older collective ties.
Although occasional witch persecutions continued until the 1850's, and although witchcraft long remained a criminal offense in many countries, including England where it was not removed from the statute books until 22 June 1951, by the beginning of the 18th century the witch craze was unmistakably dead. It would be some time, however, before cosmopolitan wits such as Voltaire began to consider the subject amusing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buroja, Julio Caro. The World of the Witches. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961.
Briggs, K.M. Pale Hecate's Team. New York: The Humanities Press, 1962.
Dworkin, Andrea, "What Were Those Witches Really Brewing?", Ms., April' 1974.
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers-. Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1973.
Hajnal, John. "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective," Population in History (ed. D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley). Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1965, pp. 101-143.
Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
Maple, Eric. The Dark World of Witches, New York: Pegasus, 1962.
Michelet, Jules. Satanism and Witchcraft: A Study in Medieval Superstition. New York: The Citadel Press, c. 1939.
Midelfort, H.C. Erik. Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972.
Rosen, Barbara (ed.). Witchcraft. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1969.
Sergeant, Philip W. Witches and Warlocks. New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1972.
Seth, Ronald. Witches and Their Craft. London: Odhama Books, 1967.
Spengler, Joseph J. "Demographic Factors and Early Modern Economic Development," Daedalus, 97 (1968): pp. 433-46.
Summers, Montague. The History of Witchcraft. New Hyde Park: University Books, 1956. Forword by-Felix Morrow.
Summers, Rev. Montague (ed.). Malleus Maleficarum. New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc. 1928.
Trevor-Roper, H.R. The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1956.
Van de Walle, Etienne. "Marriage and Marital Fertility," Daedalus, 97 (1968): pp. 486-501.
Wrigley, E.A. "Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England," Economic History Review, 19 (1966): pp. 82-100.
Sunday, March 02, 2008
*On Class Struggle Defense- From the Partisan Defense Committee- A Guest Commentary
Click on the title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site
Here is an article passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee concerning class struggle labor defense in the Mumia Abu-Jamal case that should be of interest to the radical public. Pay attention to some of the comments by Attorney Wolkenstein as to the inner workings of a labor defense case.
NYC Holiday Appeal Speech
Class-Struggle Defense and the Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
We print below a speech, edited for publication, by Partisan Defense Committee counsel Rachel Wolkenstein given at the New York City Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners on 16 December 2007. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League.
When we took up Mumia's case in 1987, he was not America's foremost political prisoner. In fact, hardly anybody knew who he was. We were introduced to Mumia by the MOVE prisoners whom we had begun defending after the government bombing of the MOVE commune in Philly in 1985, This was also around the time when we, starting in 1986, began our program of sending monthly stipends to class-war prisoners. But, quite frankly, it's the work begun by the PDC—and taken up by many, many other organizations—that has made Mumia the man who represents what the death penalty is all about, who is the foremost class-war prisoner in the U.S., and who has come to represent the fight for black liberation in this country and the fight against the death penalty internationally.
Maureen Faulkner, widow of Police Office Daniel Faulkner, and a man by the name of Michael Smerconish have just published a book called Murdered by Mumia. It came out on December 6. Interestingly enough, Smerconish's foreword is dated December 9, after the publication of the book, to coincide with the 26th anniversary of the date of Faulkner's killing and the beginning of the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal. This book, which came on the eve of an anticipated decision by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, is a total rehash of the police and prosecution lies to falsely convict Mumia for the killing of Faulkner on December 9, 1981. It is an orchestrated attack written with support from arch-reactionaries. Smerconish, a man who considers that Abu Ghraib was not a question of torture, worked with Frank Rizzo, the notorious, racist, brutal police commissioner and then mayor of Philadelphia.
Murdered by Mumia was written with the support of other people who are known in the far-right wing. This book is not just a right-wing tract that can be dismissed as such. It is a call for Mumia's execution. It is also an assault on those bourgeois liberals who from time to time have wavered on the question of Mumia's innocence and instead have called for having him spend the rest of his life in prison, for burying him alive. It makes clear that there are only two sides in Mumia's case. On one side is the struggle to fight for his freedom, based upon his innocence and the fact that he is a victim of a racist and political frame-up. On the other side, there are the forces of racist law and terror, led by the Fraternal Order of Police, who demand his execution.
I am not going to go through all the prosecution's lies, which are virtually endless. We have written about them in our PDC pamphlets, including the pamphlet, The Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal—Mumia Is Innocent! (July 2006). Smerconish and Faulkner repeat over and over that Billy Cook (Mumia's brother) and Mumia have never stated what they saw happen the night Faulkner was killed. They act as if the declarations Mumia and Cook wrote and submitted in 2001, along with the submission of the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, killed Faulkner, as well as other evidence, simply do not exist. In fact, the declarations and Beverly's affidavit are on the original Daniel Faulkner Web site! Faulkner and Co. make no bones about the political nature of Mumia's frame-up. They reiterate the prosecution's line that Mumia's Black Panther Party membership proves that he'd been planning to kill cops for years. They write that D.A. Joseph McGill "successfully established that Abu-Jamal had an anti-police, anti-establishment, anti-government philosophy that accounted for his desire to murder Danny."
When we first took up Mumia's case, it was primarily on the question of freedom of speech. Here is a man, Mumia, the only man in recent decades who, as far as we know, was sentenced to death because of his exercise of his First Amendment rights: Mumia was a member of the Black Panthers in his youth, and 12 years before the killing of Faulkner, he was interviewed after the police killing of the Chicago Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. He said in the interview that the government was trying to get the Panthers, that the Panthers should face reality. He called for "all power to the people" and noted that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." And for that Mumia was sentenced to death, because that was considered to be the proof that he had always intended to kill cops!
In the book, Maureen Faulkner also paints a vicious, lying portrait of the MOVE organization, of which Mumia is a supporter. His support of MOVE is also part of the reason why he was framed up in 1981. You all saw the PDC video, From Death Row, This Is Mumia Abu-Jamal, and you saw the bombing of the MOVE commune in 1985. You heard Mumia speak about how this was done under black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode, with the ATF and the FBI assisting and providing the bomb. Faulkner claims that MOVE "was responsible" for the bombing—that is, the killing of eleven MOVE members, including five children and the incineration of the entire neighborhood. She doesn't describe the circumstances of the bombing.
Faulkner uses thinly veiled racist terms to describe Mumia's writings, his supporters and the MOVE organization—code language for pure out-and-out racism. She also has a whole chapter on one of her major supporters, a guy by the name of Joey Vento who runs a well-known cheesesteak place in Philadelphia. Vento is known for having a sign in his window saying, "This is America. When ordering please speak English." Faulkner hails this, which tells you who this book is addressed to.
The determination of the bourgeoisie to kill Mumia or imprison him for life is no less than the determination the bourgeoisie showed for killing the two anarchist martyrs, Sacco and Vanzetti, who were executed in 1927; or for killing the Rosenbergs, Communist Party supporters executed in 1953 on charges of giving "secrets" on the bomb to the Soviets. Political repression is part and parcel of the workings of the capitalist injustice system, and it is supported by both parties of American capitalism, Democrats as well as Republicans, And it is intended to intimidate, silence and punish those who raise their voices in opposition.
Mumia Abu-Jamal Is an Innocent Man!
The PDC video most of you saw tonight was made some 17 years ago. But the man that you heard speak there is the same man who is in prison today. He has not changed his political views one iota. He said then that he was fighting to create revolution in America, "revolution means change, it means total change." Mumia has not been intimidated into silence since then. He continues to be the voice of the voiceless, denouncing the imperial and colonial slaughter and destruction in Iraq, denouncing the U.S. rulers' disdain for the black and the poor left to die in the face of Hurricane Katrina, defending immigrants, defending workers on strike. Now, Mumia is no Marxist revolutionary. He is not a supporter of the Spartacist League, But to the capitalist rulers, Mumia represents the spectre of black revolt, of defiant opposition to their system of racist oppression. For them, Mumia is a dead man on leave.
The fight to free Mumia also involves a political struggle within the movement of those who say that they are fighting to defend Mumia. Why is that? Because the social power to free Mumia is embodied in the international working class, but there are obstacles to unleashing that power. The so-called left serves to tie working people to the view that the bourgeoisie can somehow be reformed, that capitalism can be reformed. And so we have yet another struggle with two opposing sides. On one side are those bourgeois liberals, trade-union misleaders, so-called leftists that are sowing illusions in the "fairness" of capitalist justice. On the other side, there is the PDC and its supporters and cothinkers, and our line of class-struggle defense, which means having no illusions in capitalist "justice" and putting all faith in the power of the masses.
Today's world is profoundly shaped by the impact of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state in 1991-92 following the decades of Stalinist rule there. And as the bourgeois rulers proclaim the lie that we're in the period of the "death of communism," the bulk of the left, which in the main joined in the imperialist anti-Soviet campaign, places its political activity solidly within the framework of the "democratic" capitalist order. In the 1960s and 1970s, nobody talked about a new trial for Huey Newton, or a new trial for Angela Davis, or more recently a new trial for Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt). The fact that the reformist left subordinates the fight for Mumia's freedom to the call for a new trial is not an accident: it is a direct reflection of the post-Soviet period we are in and what we call the retrogression of consciousness.
The reformist left ties people—who, through Mumia's case, could otherwise be won to the understanding of the nature of the capitalist state and what the necessary fight is—to a false view that somehow the justice system under capitalism can be made to be just. The marry liberals and reformists who call for a new trial for Mumia also fling mud on the Beverly confession. Here's a man who confessed to shooting Faulkner, and instead of people saying, "Hey this is great, we got somebody who confessed," and looking at the mountains of evidence supporting his confession and explaining all the crazy nonsensical things in the prosecution's case—the reformists and liberals say it is a terrible thing. They even cast doubt on Mumia's own statement—the statement that he presented in state and federal court—declaring, "I had nothing to do with the killing of Officer Faulkner. I am innocent." Do you ever hear anyone besides us say that Mumia has declared his innocence and explained what he saw happen that night? No. Instead you have people who are heralded on platforms by most of the rest of the left, people like David Lindorffand others who say something like: I sort of defend Mumia, but you know it's possible, even likely, that he really did shoot the cop. And that passes for people who say that they are defenders of Mumia.
Now why does that happen? Again, it goes back to the political period we are in, and the necessary fights we have to wage. It goes back to the whole question of what the Beverly evidence represents. What does it mean to understand that in this case there was collusion between the cops and the mob and the D.A. and the judges to see Mumia convicted of murder, to see him executed? It means that there is not just one rogue cop, or one racist judge—though Sabo is definitely a racist judge—or one D.A. who is "overzealous." It is an indictment of the entire bourgeois legal system, which is class-biased and race-biased.
And what liberals want to do—and what the so-called left agrees with—is to attempt to clean up the "justice" system's bad image. They say that it was only one bad cop, and only Judge Sabo who is the racist, that the rest of them aren't that bad, that federal court judge Yohn is really an honorable man, that the Third Circuit is the most liberal in the country—though, of course, it's where reactionary Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito comes from. They say this even though Marjorie Rendell, the wife of Democratic Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, the former D.A. who prosecuted Mumia, sits on that court. What does all that amount to except trying to refurbish the credentials of the "justice" system?
For Class-Struggle Defense!
As Marxists—and the PDC has a Marxist worldview—we understand that the cops, the courts, the prisons, the armed forces, are the core components of the capitalist state, the machinery of organized violence that protects the rule and profits of the exploiting class. We believe that the justice system, at every single level in Mumia's case and in other cases, has declared that Mumia has no rights that it is bound to respect. This is like what was done by the Supreme Court before the Civil War in the infamous Dred Scott decision, which upheld slavery and declared that black people have no rights that whites are bound to respect.
A "new trial" is a code word for a program of reliance on the capitalist class and on some sort of benevolent Democratic Party politician, on some good judge; a code word for sowing illusions that fighters for the oppressed can obtain justice from the capitalist courts. This has retarded the political understanding of those who joined the struggle for Mumia and has ultimately served to demobilize the movement for Mumia's freedom. It is no accident that in the lead-up to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals hearing this past May, there were very few protests and events organized on Mumia's behalf. The events called by the PDC and its cothinkers internationally numbered a modest few hundred here or there. But those were the largest events that there were. What does that tell you about the demobilization of a movement that once numbered in the millions?
I want to make a point: I'm a lawyer, and the work that I personally did and Jonathan Piper, another lawyer associated with the PDC, has done in Mumia's case when we were on the legal team from 1995 to 1999 represents hundreds and hundreds of hours of legal work. I'm not saying that it wasn't good work to do. But the purpose of this legal work was not only to have a fight in court, but to provide key evidence for a movement that would take this evidence and fight in the streets, mobilizing the working class in the fight for Mumia's freedom. The organized working class has the power to actually scare the hell out of the bourgeoisie and to let them know that if something bad happens to Mumia, there will be a social explosion. This perspective is part of understanding that the fight for Mumia is part of the fight for black liberation, for that of all working people and the oppressed, which requires socialist revolution.
I also want to make the point that if bourgeois law were followed, Mumia's conviction should be thrown out, dismissed, no new trial, no nothing. This is because there is constitutional law stipulating that if the police and the prosecution withhold evidence from the defense, if they suppress evidence of Mumia's innocence, if they frame people up, it is a violation of due process for which the charges can be dismissed. So all the talk about needing a new trial to free Mumia is a lot of legal bunk. It's a way to give support to those who want to destroy a movement that could be based on the fact that Mumia is an innocent man who must be freed. The legal papers we filed called for dismissal of the charges. The call for a new trial does not even have legal credibility; it expresses the politics of sellout, a betrayal of everything that Mumia represents.
I would just like to note that when a death warrant was signed in 1995, there were protests around the world for Mumia's cause, including protests based on trade unions representing millions of workers from South Africa and Europe to the U.S. The mobilizations were built on the fact that Mumia's frame-up conviction was political and racist, and that the death sentence was the call for racist legal lynching. And the very particulars of Mumia's case provide powerful lessons, that Mumia's freedom can be wrested from the state only by the independent action of the working class acting with consciousness of its social power to withhold its labor, to shut down industry, communications and transportation. Mumia's case has the power to deepen workers' militancy, class solidarity and the recognition that the fight for black rights, for immigrant rights and to end exploitation and oppression is one fight.
What we need is class-struggle defense. We need united-front defense for Mumia based on a class-struggle program. This means, as an initial basis, that we agree that Mumia is an innocent man. Free him now! Abolish the racist death penalty! We are prepared to work with any organization that supports those slogans, understanding that we will continue to criticize other forces in this united front on other political issues. And there are a number of different political issues here. As I said, Mumia is not a Marxist.
Finally, I want to say this: the labor movement, the revolutionary movement internationally, has had its share of martyrs. We don't want more martyrs. We don't want Mumia to be a martyr. And he must not become a martyr to the racist viciousness of American capital. The power to free Mumia exists in the international working class and our task is to rekindle and build a mass international mobilization based on the social power of the working class and its many allies to fight for Mumia's freedom. Free Mumia now!
Here is an article passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee concerning class struggle labor defense in the Mumia Abu-Jamal case that should be of interest to the radical public. Pay attention to some of the comments by Attorney Wolkenstein as to the inner workings of a labor defense case.
NYC Holiday Appeal Speech
Class-Struggle Defense and the Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
We print below a speech, edited for publication, by Partisan Defense Committee counsel Rachel Wolkenstein given at the New York City Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners on 16 December 2007. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League.
When we took up Mumia's case in 1987, he was not America's foremost political prisoner. In fact, hardly anybody knew who he was. We were introduced to Mumia by the MOVE prisoners whom we had begun defending after the government bombing of the MOVE commune in Philly in 1985, This was also around the time when we, starting in 1986, began our program of sending monthly stipends to class-war prisoners. But, quite frankly, it's the work begun by the PDC—and taken up by many, many other organizations—that has made Mumia the man who represents what the death penalty is all about, who is the foremost class-war prisoner in the U.S., and who has come to represent the fight for black liberation in this country and the fight against the death penalty internationally.
Maureen Faulkner, widow of Police Office Daniel Faulkner, and a man by the name of Michael Smerconish have just published a book called Murdered by Mumia. It came out on December 6. Interestingly enough, Smerconish's foreword is dated December 9, after the publication of the book, to coincide with the 26th anniversary of the date of Faulkner's killing and the beginning of the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal. This book, which came on the eve of an anticipated decision by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, is a total rehash of the police and prosecution lies to falsely convict Mumia for the killing of Faulkner on December 9, 1981. It is an orchestrated attack written with support from arch-reactionaries. Smerconish, a man who considers that Abu Ghraib was not a question of torture, worked with Frank Rizzo, the notorious, racist, brutal police commissioner and then mayor of Philadelphia.
Murdered by Mumia was written with the support of other people who are known in the far-right wing. This book is not just a right-wing tract that can be dismissed as such. It is a call for Mumia's execution. It is also an assault on those bourgeois liberals who from time to time have wavered on the question of Mumia's innocence and instead have called for having him spend the rest of his life in prison, for burying him alive. It makes clear that there are only two sides in Mumia's case. On one side is the struggle to fight for his freedom, based upon his innocence and the fact that he is a victim of a racist and political frame-up. On the other side, there are the forces of racist law and terror, led by the Fraternal Order of Police, who demand his execution.
I am not going to go through all the prosecution's lies, which are virtually endless. We have written about them in our PDC pamphlets, including the pamphlet, The Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal—Mumia Is Innocent! (July 2006). Smerconish and Faulkner repeat over and over that Billy Cook (Mumia's brother) and Mumia have never stated what they saw happen the night Faulkner was killed. They act as if the declarations Mumia and Cook wrote and submitted in 2001, along with the submission of the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, killed Faulkner, as well as other evidence, simply do not exist. In fact, the declarations and Beverly's affidavit are on the original Daniel Faulkner Web site! Faulkner and Co. make no bones about the political nature of Mumia's frame-up. They reiterate the prosecution's line that Mumia's Black Panther Party membership proves that he'd been planning to kill cops for years. They write that D.A. Joseph McGill "successfully established that Abu-Jamal had an anti-police, anti-establishment, anti-government philosophy that accounted for his desire to murder Danny."
When we first took up Mumia's case, it was primarily on the question of freedom of speech. Here is a man, Mumia, the only man in recent decades who, as far as we know, was sentenced to death because of his exercise of his First Amendment rights: Mumia was a member of the Black Panthers in his youth, and 12 years before the killing of Faulkner, he was interviewed after the police killing of the Chicago Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. He said in the interview that the government was trying to get the Panthers, that the Panthers should face reality. He called for "all power to the people" and noted that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." And for that Mumia was sentenced to death, because that was considered to be the proof that he had always intended to kill cops!
In the book, Maureen Faulkner also paints a vicious, lying portrait of the MOVE organization, of which Mumia is a supporter. His support of MOVE is also part of the reason why he was framed up in 1981. You all saw the PDC video, From Death Row, This Is Mumia Abu-Jamal, and you saw the bombing of the MOVE commune in 1985. You heard Mumia speak about how this was done under black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode, with the ATF and the FBI assisting and providing the bomb. Faulkner claims that MOVE "was responsible" for the bombing—that is, the killing of eleven MOVE members, including five children and the incineration of the entire neighborhood. She doesn't describe the circumstances of the bombing.
Faulkner uses thinly veiled racist terms to describe Mumia's writings, his supporters and the MOVE organization—code language for pure out-and-out racism. She also has a whole chapter on one of her major supporters, a guy by the name of Joey Vento who runs a well-known cheesesteak place in Philadelphia. Vento is known for having a sign in his window saying, "This is America. When ordering please speak English." Faulkner hails this, which tells you who this book is addressed to.
The determination of the bourgeoisie to kill Mumia or imprison him for life is no less than the determination the bourgeoisie showed for killing the two anarchist martyrs, Sacco and Vanzetti, who were executed in 1927; or for killing the Rosenbergs, Communist Party supporters executed in 1953 on charges of giving "secrets" on the bomb to the Soviets. Political repression is part and parcel of the workings of the capitalist injustice system, and it is supported by both parties of American capitalism, Democrats as well as Republicans, And it is intended to intimidate, silence and punish those who raise their voices in opposition.
Mumia Abu-Jamal Is an Innocent Man!
The PDC video most of you saw tonight was made some 17 years ago. But the man that you heard speak there is the same man who is in prison today. He has not changed his political views one iota. He said then that he was fighting to create revolution in America, "revolution means change, it means total change." Mumia has not been intimidated into silence since then. He continues to be the voice of the voiceless, denouncing the imperial and colonial slaughter and destruction in Iraq, denouncing the U.S. rulers' disdain for the black and the poor left to die in the face of Hurricane Katrina, defending immigrants, defending workers on strike. Now, Mumia is no Marxist revolutionary. He is not a supporter of the Spartacist League, But to the capitalist rulers, Mumia represents the spectre of black revolt, of defiant opposition to their system of racist oppression. For them, Mumia is a dead man on leave.
The fight to free Mumia also involves a political struggle within the movement of those who say that they are fighting to defend Mumia. Why is that? Because the social power to free Mumia is embodied in the international working class, but there are obstacles to unleashing that power. The so-called left serves to tie working people to the view that the bourgeoisie can somehow be reformed, that capitalism can be reformed. And so we have yet another struggle with two opposing sides. On one side are those bourgeois liberals, trade-union misleaders, so-called leftists that are sowing illusions in the "fairness" of capitalist justice. On the other side, there is the PDC and its supporters and cothinkers, and our line of class-struggle defense, which means having no illusions in capitalist "justice" and putting all faith in the power of the masses.
Today's world is profoundly shaped by the impact of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state in 1991-92 following the decades of Stalinist rule there. And as the bourgeois rulers proclaim the lie that we're in the period of the "death of communism," the bulk of the left, which in the main joined in the imperialist anti-Soviet campaign, places its political activity solidly within the framework of the "democratic" capitalist order. In the 1960s and 1970s, nobody talked about a new trial for Huey Newton, or a new trial for Angela Davis, or more recently a new trial for Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt). The fact that the reformist left subordinates the fight for Mumia's freedom to the call for a new trial is not an accident: it is a direct reflection of the post-Soviet period we are in and what we call the retrogression of consciousness.
The reformist left ties people—who, through Mumia's case, could otherwise be won to the understanding of the nature of the capitalist state and what the necessary fight is—to a false view that somehow the justice system under capitalism can be made to be just. The marry liberals and reformists who call for a new trial for Mumia also fling mud on the Beverly confession. Here's a man who confessed to shooting Faulkner, and instead of people saying, "Hey this is great, we got somebody who confessed," and looking at the mountains of evidence supporting his confession and explaining all the crazy nonsensical things in the prosecution's case—the reformists and liberals say it is a terrible thing. They even cast doubt on Mumia's own statement—the statement that he presented in state and federal court—declaring, "I had nothing to do with the killing of Officer Faulkner. I am innocent." Do you ever hear anyone besides us say that Mumia has declared his innocence and explained what he saw happen that night? No. Instead you have people who are heralded on platforms by most of the rest of the left, people like David Lindorffand others who say something like: I sort of defend Mumia, but you know it's possible, even likely, that he really did shoot the cop. And that passes for people who say that they are defenders of Mumia.
Now why does that happen? Again, it goes back to the political period we are in, and the necessary fights we have to wage. It goes back to the whole question of what the Beverly evidence represents. What does it mean to understand that in this case there was collusion between the cops and the mob and the D.A. and the judges to see Mumia convicted of murder, to see him executed? It means that there is not just one rogue cop, or one racist judge—though Sabo is definitely a racist judge—or one D.A. who is "overzealous." It is an indictment of the entire bourgeois legal system, which is class-biased and race-biased.
And what liberals want to do—and what the so-called left agrees with—is to attempt to clean up the "justice" system's bad image. They say that it was only one bad cop, and only Judge Sabo who is the racist, that the rest of them aren't that bad, that federal court judge Yohn is really an honorable man, that the Third Circuit is the most liberal in the country—though, of course, it's where reactionary Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito comes from. They say this even though Marjorie Rendell, the wife of Democratic Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, the former D.A. who prosecuted Mumia, sits on that court. What does all that amount to except trying to refurbish the credentials of the "justice" system?
For Class-Struggle Defense!
As Marxists—and the PDC has a Marxist worldview—we understand that the cops, the courts, the prisons, the armed forces, are the core components of the capitalist state, the machinery of organized violence that protects the rule and profits of the exploiting class. We believe that the justice system, at every single level in Mumia's case and in other cases, has declared that Mumia has no rights that it is bound to respect. This is like what was done by the Supreme Court before the Civil War in the infamous Dred Scott decision, which upheld slavery and declared that black people have no rights that whites are bound to respect.
A "new trial" is a code word for a program of reliance on the capitalist class and on some sort of benevolent Democratic Party politician, on some good judge; a code word for sowing illusions that fighters for the oppressed can obtain justice from the capitalist courts. This has retarded the political understanding of those who joined the struggle for Mumia and has ultimately served to demobilize the movement for Mumia's freedom. It is no accident that in the lead-up to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals hearing this past May, there were very few protests and events organized on Mumia's behalf. The events called by the PDC and its cothinkers internationally numbered a modest few hundred here or there. But those were the largest events that there were. What does that tell you about the demobilization of a movement that once numbered in the millions?
I want to make a point: I'm a lawyer, and the work that I personally did and Jonathan Piper, another lawyer associated with the PDC, has done in Mumia's case when we were on the legal team from 1995 to 1999 represents hundreds and hundreds of hours of legal work. I'm not saying that it wasn't good work to do. But the purpose of this legal work was not only to have a fight in court, but to provide key evidence for a movement that would take this evidence and fight in the streets, mobilizing the working class in the fight for Mumia's freedom. The organized working class has the power to actually scare the hell out of the bourgeoisie and to let them know that if something bad happens to Mumia, there will be a social explosion. This perspective is part of understanding that the fight for Mumia is part of the fight for black liberation, for that of all working people and the oppressed, which requires socialist revolution.
I also want to make the point that if bourgeois law were followed, Mumia's conviction should be thrown out, dismissed, no new trial, no nothing. This is because there is constitutional law stipulating that if the police and the prosecution withhold evidence from the defense, if they suppress evidence of Mumia's innocence, if they frame people up, it is a violation of due process for which the charges can be dismissed. So all the talk about needing a new trial to free Mumia is a lot of legal bunk. It's a way to give support to those who want to destroy a movement that could be based on the fact that Mumia is an innocent man who must be freed. The legal papers we filed called for dismissal of the charges. The call for a new trial does not even have legal credibility; it expresses the politics of sellout, a betrayal of everything that Mumia represents.
I would just like to note that when a death warrant was signed in 1995, there were protests around the world for Mumia's cause, including protests based on trade unions representing millions of workers from South Africa and Europe to the U.S. The mobilizations were built on the fact that Mumia's frame-up conviction was political and racist, and that the death sentence was the call for racist legal lynching. And the very particulars of Mumia's case provide powerful lessons, that Mumia's freedom can be wrested from the state only by the independent action of the working class acting with consciousness of its social power to withhold its labor, to shut down industry, communications and transportation. Mumia's case has the power to deepen workers' militancy, class solidarity and the recognition that the fight for black rights, for immigrant rights and to end exploitation and oppression is one fight.
What we need is class-struggle defense. We need united-front defense for Mumia based on a class-struggle program. This means, as an initial basis, that we agree that Mumia is an innocent man. Free him now! Abolish the racist death penalty! We are prepared to work with any organization that supports those slogans, understanding that we will continue to criticize other forces in this united front on other political issues. And there are a number of different political issues here. As I said, Mumia is not a Marxist.
Finally, I want to say this: the labor movement, the revolutionary movement internationally, has had its share of martyrs. We don't want more martyrs. We don't want Mumia to be a martyr. And he must not become a martyr to the racist viciousness of American capital. The power to free Mumia exists in the international working class and our task is to rekindle and build a mass international mobilization based on the social power of the working class and its many allies to fight for Mumia's freedom. Free Mumia now!
Saturday, March 01, 2008
*A Country Torch Singer Is In The Room- The Music Of Patsy Cline
DVD/REVIEW
Patsy Cline Tribute, 2000
For those of us of a certain age (growing up in the early 1960’s) the timeless voice of Patsy Cline, whether we were aware of it or not, formed the backdrop to many a school dance or other romantic endeavor. I was not a fan of Cline’s, at least not consciously, growing up but have come to appreciate her talent and her amazing voice. In another review in this space I have called her the ‘country torch singer’ par excellence. And she does not fail here. At least musically. However, cinematically is another question. While it was interesting (and a little disconcerting) to see the old black and white television clips from the 1950's I do not believe that this compilation does justice to her work. Patsy, like many another torch singer like Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday, needs to grow on you. The best way to do that is grab a Greatest Hits album and sit back. You won’t want to turn the damn thing off. As for this film, if you have time watch it as an appetizer.
"Crazy"
Written by willie nelson
(as performed by willie nelson)
Also performed by patsy cline and ray price*
Crazy
Crazy for feeling so lonely
Im crazy
Crazy for feeling so blue
I knew
Youd love me as long as you wanted
And then someday
Youd leave me for somebody new
Worry
Why do I let myself worry
Wondrin
What in the world did I do
Crazy
For thinking that my love could hold you
Im crazy for tryin
Crazy for cryin
And Im crazy
For lovin you
(repeat last verse)
Patsy Cline, She's Got You Lyrics
Artist: Cline Patsy
Song: She's Got You
“She's Got You”
I've got your picture that you gave to me
And it's signed "with love," just like it used to be
The only thing different, the only thing new
I've got your picture, she's got you
I've got the records that we used to share
And they still sound the same as when you were here
The only thing different, the only thing new,
I've got the records, she's got you
I've got your memory, or has it got me?
I really don't know, but I know it won't let me be
I've got your class ring; that proved you cared
And it still looks the same as when you gave it dear
The only thing different, the only thing new
I've got these little things, she's got you
Patsy Cline, Why Can't He Be You Lyrics
Artist: Cline Patsy
Song: Why Can't He Be You
“Why Can't He Be You”
He takes me to the places you and I used to go
He tells me over and over that he loves me so
He gives me love that I never got from you
He loves me too, his love is true
Why can't he be you
He never fails to call and tell me I'm on his mind
And I'm lucky to have such a guy; I hear it all the time
And he does all the things that you would never do
He loves me, too, his love is true
Why can't he be you
He's not the one who dominates my mind and soul
And I should love him so, 'cause he loves me, I know
But his kisses leave me cold
He sends me flowers, calls on the hour, just to prove his love
And my friends say when he's around, I'm all he speaks of
And he does all the things that you would never do
He loves me too, his love is true
Why can't he be you
Patsy Cline, Sweet Dreams Lyrics
Artist: Cline Patsy
Song: Sweet Dreams
“Sweet Dreams”
Sweet dreams of you
Every night I go through
Why can't I forget you and start my life anew
Instead of having sweet dreams about you
You don't love me, it's plain
I should know I'll never wear your ring
I should hate you the whole night through
Instead of having sweet dreams about you
Sweet dreams of you
Things I know can't come true
Why can't I forget the past, start loving someone new
Instead of having sweet dreams about you
Patsy Cline Tribute, 2000
For those of us of a certain age (growing up in the early 1960’s) the timeless voice of Patsy Cline, whether we were aware of it or not, formed the backdrop to many a school dance or other romantic endeavor. I was not a fan of Cline’s, at least not consciously, growing up but have come to appreciate her talent and her amazing voice. In another review in this space I have called her the ‘country torch singer’ par excellence. And she does not fail here. At least musically. However, cinematically is another question. While it was interesting (and a little disconcerting) to see the old black and white television clips from the 1950's I do not believe that this compilation does justice to her work. Patsy, like many another torch singer like Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday, needs to grow on you. The best way to do that is grab a Greatest Hits album and sit back. You won’t want to turn the damn thing off. As for this film, if you have time watch it as an appetizer.
"Crazy"
Written by willie nelson
(as performed by willie nelson)
Also performed by patsy cline and ray price*
Crazy
Crazy for feeling so lonely
Im crazy
Crazy for feeling so blue
I knew
Youd love me as long as you wanted
And then someday
Youd leave me for somebody new
Worry
Why do I let myself worry
Wondrin
What in the world did I do
Crazy
For thinking that my love could hold you
Im crazy for tryin
Crazy for cryin
And Im crazy
For lovin you
(repeat last verse)
Patsy Cline, She's Got You Lyrics
Artist: Cline Patsy
Song: She's Got You
“She's Got You”
I've got your picture that you gave to me
And it's signed "with love," just like it used to be
The only thing different, the only thing new
I've got your picture, she's got you
I've got the records that we used to share
And they still sound the same as when you were here
The only thing different, the only thing new,
I've got the records, she's got you
I've got your memory, or has it got me?
I really don't know, but I know it won't let me be
I've got your class ring; that proved you cared
And it still looks the same as when you gave it dear
The only thing different, the only thing new
I've got these little things, she's got you
Patsy Cline, Why Can't He Be You Lyrics
Artist: Cline Patsy
Song: Why Can't He Be You
“Why Can't He Be You”
He takes me to the places you and I used to go
He tells me over and over that he loves me so
He gives me love that I never got from you
He loves me too, his love is true
Why can't he be you
He never fails to call and tell me I'm on his mind
And I'm lucky to have such a guy; I hear it all the time
And he does all the things that you would never do
He loves me, too, his love is true
Why can't he be you
He's not the one who dominates my mind and soul
And I should love him so, 'cause he loves me, I know
But his kisses leave me cold
He sends me flowers, calls on the hour, just to prove his love
And my friends say when he's around, I'm all he speaks of
And he does all the things that you would never do
He loves me too, his love is true
Why can't he be you
Patsy Cline, Sweet Dreams Lyrics
Artist: Cline Patsy
Song: Sweet Dreams
“Sweet Dreams”
Sweet dreams of you
Every night I go through
Why can't I forget you and start my life anew
Instead of having sweet dreams about you
You don't love me, it's plain
I should know I'll never wear your ring
I should hate you the whole night through
Instead of having sweet dreams about you
Sweet dreams of you
Things I know can't come true
Why can't I forget the past, start loving someone new
Instead of having sweet dreams about you
The "First Wave" Folk Revival- In Honor Of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly
DVD/CD REVIEWS
A Shared Vision:Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly Tribute, 1988
If any of the older generation needs an introduction to Woody Guthrie or Leadbelly then I ask what planet have you been on. Woody’s "This Land Is Your Land" is practically a national anthem (and is just that in some quarters). And Leadbelly’s "Goodnight, Irene" is in that same category. So to have the two highlighted on one program, as they had been in life on a number of occasions, is a treat. This tribute has the further virtue of highlighting both original performances by them and tribute performances by some of these who have been influenced by their work, individually or collectively.
Anytime you get Taj Mahal, Little Richard, Sweet Honey in the Rock (a real treat as I was not familiar with their work), Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen and a host of others under one cinematic roof you are bound to have a good performance. And added attraction was the appearance of Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son and a folk legend in his own right, commenting on his father’s work. And, of course, an all too brief recorded performance by Bob Dylan, a man who probably did more to revive Woody’s work in the 1960’s than any other. For my money though, John Mellencamp and his ensemble band (including washboard player) stole the show at the end with their rendition of the afore-mentioned "This Land Is Your Land". Watch it.
The First Folk Wave- Woody Guthrie And Lead Belly
Folkways: The Original Vision-Songs Of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Smithsonian/Folkways, 2005
If any of the older generation, the “Generation of ‘68” needs an introduction to Woody Guthrie or Lead Belly then I ask what planet have you been on. Woody’s “This Land Is Your Land” is practically a national anthem (and in some quarters is just that). And Leadbelly’s “Goodnight, Irene” is in that same category. So to have the two highlighted on one program, as they had been in life on a number of occasions is a treat. This tribute has the further virtue of highlighting original performances by them unlike a documentary and CD “A Shared Vision” reviewed earlier in this space that was composed of tribute performances by some of those who, like John Mellencamp, have been influenced by their work, individually or collectively.
As always with a Smithsonian/Folkways production the CD includes a booklet of copious liner notes that detail, for the folk historian or the novice alike, the history of each song and its genesis. I am always surprised by the insightful detail provided and as much as I know about this milieu always find something new in them. Moreover, the information here provided inevitably details the rather mundane genesis of some very famous songs. Here, for example, “Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie” is just what it says back in Lead Belly’s old family farm hand days.
I do not believe that I need to detail the work of these two artists but will finish with a note of what you should make sure to hear. “Goodnight, Irene” and “This Land Is Your Land”, of course. “Rock Island Line” has aged well, as has “Do-Re-Mi”. A Woody ‘talking blues’, “Talking Hard Work”, will strike your funny bone. Lead Belly’s “Midnight Special” is fine. All of this is rounded out by a Woody/Lead Belly duet on “We Shall Be Free” that has subsequently been covered by many folkies, young and old.
A Shared Vision:Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly Tribute, 1988
If any of the older generation needs an introduction to Woody Guthrie or Leadbelly then I ask what planet have you been on. Woody’s "This Land Is Your Land" is practically a national anthem (and is just that in some quarters). And Leadbelly’s "Goodnight, Irene" is in that same category. So to have the two highlighted on one program, as they had been in life on a number of occasions, is a treat. This tribute has the further virtue of highlighting both original performances by them and tribute performances by some of these who have been influenced by their work, individually or collectively.
Anytime you get Taj Mahal, Little Richard, Sweet Honey in the Rock (a real treat as I was not familiar with their work), Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen and a host of others under one cinematic roof you are bound to have a good performance. And added attraction was the appearance of Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son and a folk legend in his own right, commenting on his father’s work. And, of course, an all too brief recorded performance by Bob Dylan, a man who probably did more to revive Woody’s work in the 1960’s than any other. For my money though, John Mellencamp and his ensemble band (including washboard player) stole the show at the end with their rendition of the afore-mentioned "This Land Is Your Land". Watch it.
The First Folk Wave- Woody Guthrie And Lead Belly
Folkways: The Original Vision-Songs Of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Smithsonian/Folkways, 2005
If any of the older generation, the “Generation of ‘68” needs an introduction to Woody Guthrie or Lead Belly then I ask what planet have you been on. Woody’s “This Land Is Your Land” is practically a national anthem (and in some quarters is just that). And Leadbelly’s “Goodnight, Irene” is in that same category. So to have the two highlighted on one program, as they had been in life on a number of occasions is a treat. This tribute has the further virtue of highlighting original performances by them unlike a documentary and CD “A Shared Vision” reviewed earlier in this space that was composed of tribute performances by some of those who, like John Mellencamp, have been influenced by their work, individually or collectively.
As always with a Smithsonian/Folkways production the CD includes a booklet of copious liner notes that detail, for the folk historian or the novice alike, the history of each song and its genesis. I am always surprised by the insightful detail provided and as much as I know about this milieu always find something new in them. Moreover, the information here provided inevitably details the rather mundane genesis of some very famous songs. Here, for example, “Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie” is just what it says back in Lead Belly’s old family farm hand days.
I do not believe that I need to detail the work of these two artists but will finish with a note of what you should make sure to hear. “Goodnight, Irene” and “This Land Is Your Land”, of course. “Rock Island Line” has aged well, as has “Do-Re-Mi”. A Woody ‘talking blues’, “Talking Hard Work”, will strike your funny bone. Lead Belly’s “Midnight Special” is fine. All of this is rounded out by a Woody/Lead Belly duet on “We Shall Be Free” that has subsequently been covered by many folkies, young and old.
"Woman's Sphere" in the Rise of American Capitalism
Book Review
March is Women’s History Month
The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835, Nancy F. Cott, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1977
As I noted previously in a review of Paul E. Johnson’s A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, an account of the rise of the industrial capitalists of Rochester, New York in the 1830's, in any truly socialist understanding of history the role of the class struggle plays a central role. However, the uneven development of society throughout history has created other forms of oppression that need to be address. In America the question of the special oppression of blacks as a race clearly fits that demand. And everywhere the woman question cries out for solution.
Any thoughtful socialist wants to, in fact needs to, know how the various classes in society were formed, and transformed, over time. I have mentioned previously that a lot of useful work in this area has been done by socialist scholars. One thinks of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, for example. One needs to have a sense about the evolution of the forms of woman’s oppression, as well. One does not, however, need to be a socialist to do such research in order to provide us with plenty of ammunition in our fight for a better world. One of the great developments of the past thirty or forty years is the dramatic increase in research, led by the feminist resurgence, on woman’s history. The book under review here Nancy Cott’s study of the role of women in early capitalist America, The Bonds of Womanhood, is an early such addition.
I have mentioned in other reviews of this period in American history that the changes from an agrarian/mercantile society as found at the time of the American Revolution to the contours of an industrial society in the Age of Jackson were dramatic and longstanding. This was also the case with the role of women. Women, due to their biological function, have always been central to the cohesion of the family throughout class history. The form that has taken however has varied with changes in the economic superstructure. Thus such occurrences, due to the nature of industrial development, as the decrease in extended families, the dividing of work from the home, the putting out system, the dominance of the male as ‘breadwinner’ and the domestication of women as center of family life had profound changes in the way the family related to the world, the way children were socialized and the way woman subordinated their desires and creativity to the tasks at hand. Sound familiar?
Professor Cott makes her case for this observable change by looking at changes of various types of New England families from self-sufficient farmers to producers for the market, etc. She also relies heavily, as all historians of necessity must, on the record left behind by women mainly through their diaries. There are certain methodological problems inherent in that approach and a tendency to generalize off of the relatively small numbers for whom a record survives but nevertheless her early work is the starting place for a better understanding of the crisis in the family that occurred with the rise of capitalism in America.
I would note as a sidelight that her digging up various self-help manuals of the time for child-rearing and other domestic responsibilities was quite interesting. Dr. Spock, in the last generation, and today Oprah and Doctor Phil and their ilk thus come from a long pedigree of those who had something to say about the correct raising of YOUR children. Read on.
March is Women’s History Month
The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835, Nancy F. Cott, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1977
As I noted previously in a review of Paul E. Johnson’s A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, an account of the rise of the industrial capitalists of Rochester, New York in the 1830's, in any truly socialist understanding of history the role of the class struggle plays a central role. However, the uneven development of society throughout history has created other forms of oppression that need to be address. In America the question of the special oppression of blacks as a race clearly fits that demand. And everywhere the woman question cries out for solution.
Any thoughtful socialist wants to, in fact needs to, know how the various classes in society were formed, and transformed, over time. I have mentioned previously that a lot of useful work in this area has been done by socialist scholars. One thinks of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, for example. One needs to have a sense about the evolution of the forms of woman’s oppression, as well. One does not, however, need to be a socialist to do such research in order to provide us with plenty of ammunition in our fight for a better world. One of the great developments of the past thirty or forty years is the dramatic increase in research, led by the feminist resurgence, on woman’s history. The book under review here Nancy Cott’s study of the role of women in early capitalist America, The Bonds of Womanhood, is an early such addition.
I have mentioned in other reviews of this period in American history that the changes from an agrarian/mercantile society as found at the time of the American Revolution to the contours of an industrial society in the Age of Jackson were dramatic and longstanding. This was also the case with the role of women. Women, due to their biological function, have always been central to the cohesion of the family throughout class history. The form that has taken however has varied with changes in the economic superstructure. Thus such occurrences, due to the nature of industrial development, as the decrease in extended families, the dividing of work from the home, the putting out system, the dominance of the male as ‘breadwinner’ and the domestication of women as center of family life had profound changes in the way the family related to the world, the way children were socialized and the way woman subordinated their desires and creativity to the tasks at hand. Sound familiar?
Professor Cott makes her case for this observable change by looking at changes of various types of New England families from self-sufficient farmers to producers for the market, etc. She also relies heavily, as all historians of necessity must, on the record left behind by women mainly through their diaries. There are certain methodological problems inherent in that approach and a tendency to generalize off of the relatively small numbers for whom a record survives but nevertheless her early work is the starting place for a better understanding of the crisis in the family that occurred with the rise of capitalism in America.
I would note as a sidelight that her digging up various self-help manuals of the time for child-rearing and other domestic responsibilities was quite interesting. Dr. Spock, in the last generation, and today Oprah and Doctor Phil and their ilk thus come from a long pedigree of those who had something to say about the correct raising of YOUR children. Read on.
Bruce Springsteen Comes Back Home- The Pete Seeger Sessions
DVD REVIEWS
Bruce Springsteen: The Pete Seeger Sessions, 2006
Frankly, I had never been a strong fan of Bruce Springsteen’s during his more raucous Rock & Roll career. I like Rock & Roll very much but most of his work seemed, to my ear, a little off kilter. However, with an acoustic recording in 2005 (and an earlier one from from 1996 that I will review separately) and now an American tradition folk recording of some works made famous by the legendary folksinger and ardent folk traditionalist Pete Seeger Springsteen has come back home. This session produced interesting versions of some common American songs like "Eire Canal", "John Henry", Mary Don't You Weep" and "Shenendoah" that are done with so much retexturing (Springsteen’s term) that Bruce has now created a niche for himself in the folk pantheon. Who would have thought?
This is a short documentary about the making of the sessions album but it gives real insight into the way Springsteen ‘feels’ the song, gears up, and then goes out and performs it in that gravelly voice that I like in male singers. For my money his version of "Shenandoah" is one of the most hauntingly moving I have ever heard (partially as a result of great back up on instruments and vocals, including a strong performance by Bruce's wife Patty). And I do not usually even like the song. All this, plus his gang of musicians were obviously having a good time. And it shows from start to finish. I am going out to buy the album, pronto. (There are some DVD/CD reverse side combinations available on this one).
Note: The reference to Bruce coming home is from the DVD. One of the back up musicians' father was a well-known folkie in the 1960's who taught Bruce his acoustic guitar back then. What goes around comes around.
Bruce Springsteen: The Pete Seeger Sessions, 2006
Frankly, I had never been a strong fan of Bruce Springsteen’s during his more raucous Rock & Roll career. I like Rock & Roll very much but most of his work seemed, to my ear, a little off kilter. However, with an acoustic recording in 2005 (and an earlier one from from 1996 that I will review separately) and now an American tradition folk recording of some works made famous by the legendary folksinger and ardent folk traditionalist Pete Seeger Springsteen has come back home. This session produced interesting versions of some common American songs like "Eire Canal", "John Henry", Mary Don't You Weep" and "Shenendoah" that are done with so much retexturing (Springsteen’s term) that Bruce has now created a niche for himself in the folk pantheon. Who would have thought?
This is a short documentary about the making of the sessions album but it gives real insight into the way Springsteen ‘feels’ the song, gears up, and then goes out and performs it in that gravelly voice that I like in male singers. For my money his version of "Shenandoah" is one of the most hauntingly moving I have ever heard (partially as a result of great back up on instruments and vocals, including a strong performance by Bruce's wife Patty). And I do not usually even like the song. All this, plus his gang of musicians were obviously having a good time. And it shows from start to finish. I am going out to buy the album, pronto. (There are some DVD/CD reverse side combinations available on this one).
Note: The reference to Bruce coming home is from the DVD. One of the back up musicians' father was a well-known folkie in the 1960's who taught Bruce his acoustic guitar back then. What goes around comes around.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Cowboy Angel Meets Pack Rat-Cadillac Jack Rides Again
Book Review
Cadillac Jack, Larry McMurtry,Touchstone Books, New York, 1982
With the exception of reviews of both the book and movie versions of The Last Picture Show in this space the usual reference I make to Larry McMurtry concerns his thoughtful reviews of the history of the Old West in the New York Review of Books (most recently on General Custer, March 6, 2008). Despite that merely nodding acquaintance I know three things about Mr. McMurtry from those articles. McMurtry loves books, I mean he really loves them. I understand that he is the consummate bookseller/pack rat. He loves, as mentioned above, the Old West; a place where he grew up (deep in the heart of Texas) and from the themes of his books formed a huge imprint on his character. And he loves to talk about swap meets and the vagaries of pack ratdom. That last point is important here because this seemingly bedraggled, scorned and misunderstood profession is central to the story that he tells here.
The plot line is pretty straightforward. Cadillac Jack is an ex-professional cowboy turned (to be kind) second-hand entrepreneur riding far and wide throughout the country in search of El Dorado- that elusive million-dollar treasure to be found at a flea market stall. At least that is his cover for this story. But we know from McMurtry’s coming of age book The Last Picture Show that this is really about a man in search of himself and where he stands in the world. Especially with women. In other words the real eternal quest.
The major action of the story is centered in the secondary power lanes of Washington, D.C. Now we all know what one can expect will happen to an old cowboy when he gets messed up with that crowd. They make bull riding or auction cruising seem like a day in the park. But, Cadillac could handle that all and have time for lunch if he could solve what ails him and that is the above-mentioned woman question (surprise, surprise) although he seems to have had more than his fair share of interesting experiences with them. What ties the whole story together, as in my limited experience with McMurtry’s s work he seems always able to do, are the doings (and undoings) of a strong secondary set of characters (some displaced Texans, some not) who are either buying or selling something, not always legally. Needless to say I need to investigate Mr. McMurtry’s work further. But, dear reader, this is not a bad place to start.
Cadillac Jack, Larry McMurtry,Touchstone Books, New York, 1982
With the exception of reviews of both the book and movie versions of The Last Picture Show in this space the usual reference I make to Larry McMurtry concerns his thoughtful reviews of the history of the Old West in the New York Review of Books (most recently on General Custer, March 6, 2008). Despite that merely nodding acquaintance I know three things about Mr. McMurtry from those articles. McMurtry loves books, I mean he really loves them. I understand that he is the consummate bookseller/pack rat. He loves, as mentioned above, the Old West; a place where he grew up (deep in the heart of Texas) and from the themes of his books formed a huge imprint on his character. And he loves to talk about swap meets and the vagaries of pack ratdom. That last point is important here because this seemingly bedraggled, scorned and misunderstood profession is central to the story that he tells here.
The plot line is pretty straightforward. Cadillac Jack is an ex-professional cowboy turned (to be kind) second-hand entrepreneur riding far and wide throughout the country in search of El Dorado- that elusive million-dollar treasure to be found at a flea market stall. At least that is his cover for this story. But we know from McMurtry’s coming of age book The Last Picture Show that this is really about a man in search of himself and where he stands in the world. Especially with women. In other words the real eternal quest.
The major action of the story is centered in the secondary power lanes of Washington, D.C. Now we all know what one can expect will happen to an old cowboy when he gets messed up with that crowd. They make bull riding or auction cruising seem like a day in the park. But, Cadillac could handle that all and have time for lunch if he could solve what ails him and that is the above-mentioned woman question (surprise, surprise) although he seems to have had more than his fair share of interesting experiences with them. What ties the whole story together, as in my limited experience with McMurtry’s s work he seems always able to do, are the doings (and undoings) of a strong secondary set of characters (some displaced Texans, some not) who are either buying or selling something, not always legally. Needless to say I need to investigate Mr. McMurtry’s work further. But, dear reader, this is not a bad place to start.
The Heyday of Mountain Music- The Carter Family
DVD REVIEW
The Carter Family, PBS, 2005
I have reviewed the various CD’d put out by the Carter Family, that is work of the original grouping of A.P., Sara and Maybelle, elsewhere in this space. Many of the thoughts expressed there apply here, as well. The recent, now somewhat eclipsed, interest in the mountain music of the 1920’s and 30’s highlighted in such films as The Song Catcher and Brother, Where Art Thou, of necessity, had to create a renewed interest in the Carter Family. Why? Not taking the influence of that family’s musical shaping of mountain music is like neglecting the influence of Bob Dylan on the folk music revival of the 1960’s. I suppose it can be done but a big hole is left in the landscape.
What this PBS production has done, and done well, is put the music of the Carters in perspective as it relates to their time, their religious sentiments and their roots in the seemingly simple mountain lifestyle. Is there any simpler harmony than Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Nevertheless, these gentle mountain folk were as driven to success, especially A.P, as any urbanite of the time. Moreover, they seem, and here again A.P. is the example, to have had as many interpersonal problems (in short, marital difficulties) as us city folk.
I have mentioned elsewhere, and it bears repeating here, that this fundamentalist religious sentiment expressed throughout their work does not have that same razor-edged feel that we find with today’s evangelicals. This is a very personal kind of religious expression. These people took their beating during the Scopes Trial era and turned inward. Fair enough. That they also produced some very simple and interesting music is the product of that withdrawal. Listen.
The Carter Family, PBS, 2005
I have reviewed the various CD’d put out by the Carter Family, that is work of the original grouping of A.P., Sara and Maybelle, elsewhere in this space. Many of the thoughts expressed there apply here, as well. The recent, now somewhat eclipsed, interest in the mountain music of the 1920’s and 30’s highlighted in such films as The Song Catcher and Brother, Where Art Thou, of necessity, had to create a renewed interest in the Carter Family. Why? Not taking the influence of that family’s musical shaping of mountain music is like neglecting the influence of Bob Dylan on the folk music revival of the 1960’s. I suppose it can be done but a big hole is left in the landscape.
What this PBS production has done, and done well, is put the music of the Carters in perspective as it relates to their time, their religious sentiments and their roots in the seemingly simple mountain lifestyle. Is there any simpler harmony than Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Nevertheless, these gentle mountain folk were as driven to success, especially A.P, as any urbanite of the time. Moreover, they seem, and here again A.P. is the example, to have had as many interpersonal problems (in short, marital difficulties) as us city folk.
I have mentioned elsewhere, and it bears repeating here, that this fundamentalist religious sentiment expressed throughout their work does not have that same razor-edged feel that we find with today’s evangelicals. This is a very personal kind of religious expression. These people took their beating during the Scopes Trial era and turned inward. Fair enough. That they also produced some very simple and interesting music is the product of that withdrawal. Listen.
The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, Part III
DVD REVIEW
California Split, Directed by Robert Altman, Starring Elliott Gould, George Segal 1972
Okay, to keep things straight Dashiell Hammet’s Maltese Falcon was Part I, John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre was Part II, and here with Robert Altman's California Split we have Part III of the age old dream of humankind to get rich without having to work, or do much of it. Or is there something else that also holds life (and these films together)? The business at hand in each case is the quest- for the damn bird in Maltese, the damn pot of gold in Treasure or the damn gambling jackpot for our two friends here. The end of this film, fittingly in its own way, tells it all.
After finishing up on a winning streak to end all winning streaks our duo when it is time to divvy up the cash finds there is no closure. That is the message; still it is nice to think of getting the payoff without having to work for it. After all, humankind has spend many millennia organizing itself and creating labor –saving devices for just such a condition. Except someone forgot to tell the few greed heads that this social product should be for the benefit of every one.
The early to mid 1970’s was the heyday of the male ‘buddy’ film out of Hollywood. The films of Robert Redford done with Paul Newman like The Sting and Butch Cassidy come to mind. Here Elliot Gould (as Charley) and George Segal (as Bill) two compulsive gamblers who will bet on anything at any time make a run for the roses in Reno. Along the way they get beat up, taken, and every other imaginable scenario before they get their stake for the run. Today such a scenario would include some time in a twelve step program but that is neither here nor there.
These two certainly have some chemistry working off each other roles. Segal is the moody, enigmatic one; Gould is the classic hustler of the literary imagination. He would find congenial company in a Damon Runyon story. I might add that the so-called romance of gambling for a livelihood certainly gets a workout here. My experience at race tracks and betting parlors has not included these wholesome types. Usually, one is either desperately waiting to get the next bet down or the next stake. Not pretty in either case. But enough, see this movie.
California Split, Directed by Robert Altman, Starring Elliott Gould, George Segal 1972
Okay, to keep things straight Dashiell Hammet’s Maltese Falcon was Part I, John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre was Part II, and here with Robert Altman's California Split we have Part III of the age old dream of humankind to get rich without having to work, or do much of it. Or is there something else that also holds life (and these films together)? The business at hand in each case is the quest- for the damn bird in Maltese, the damn pot of gold in Treasure or the damn gambling jackpot for our two friends here. The end of this film, fittingly in its own way, tells it all.
After finishing up on a winning streak to end all winning streaks our duo when it is time to divvy up the cash finds there is no closure. That is the message; still it is nice to think of getting the payoff without having to work for it. After all, humankind has spend many millennia organizing itself and creating labor –saving devices for just such a condition. Except someone forgot to tell the few greed heads that this social product should be for the benefit of every one.
The early to mid 1970’s was the heyday of the male ‘buddy’ film out of Hollywood. The films of Robert Redford done with Paul Newman like The Sting and Butch Cassidy come to mind. Here Elliot Gould (as Charley) and George Segal (as Bill) two compulsive gamblers who will bet on anything at any time make a run for the roses in Reno. Along the way they get beat up, taken, and every other imaginable scenario before they get their stake for the run. Today such a scenario would include some time in a twelve step program but that is neither here nor there.
These two certainly have some chemistry working off each other roles. Segal is the moody, enigmatic one; Gould is the classic hustler of the literary imagination. He would find congenial company in a Damon Runyon story. I might add that the so-called romance of gambling for a livelihood certainly gets a workout here. My experience at race tracks and betting parlors has not included these wholesome types. Usually, one is either desperately waiting to get the next bet down or the next stake. Not pretty in either case. But enough, see this movie.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
*A Short Note of Cuban Developments
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the Cuban Revolution. This link is placed here with the understanding that although for my generation, the generation of '68, defense of the Cuban revolution was a touchstone issue that may not apply to later activists who came to political life under others impetuses. I also do not vouch for the accuracy of all the information in the Wikipedia entry.
Commentary
Defend the Cuban Revolution! U.S. End the Embargoes!
Recently I have been asked by a political colleague, in person not by e-mail or blog comment if one can believe such a phenomena in the digital age, what I made of the situation in Cuba. She had noticed last week, the week of February 18, 2007, that I had not commented on Fidel’s stepping down from most of his political offices, including the presidency. Well, the short answer is that I am waiting for the dust to settle a little before I comment fully on such an event. Moreover, I feel under no compulsion to run out and yell in the streets every time that there is a Stalinist musical chairs change up in the world (although granted, there are fewer occasions for that now).
Apparently, the ‘exiles’ are not dancing in the streets of Little Havana, oops, I mean Miami so that tells one in a very empirical way what this latest turnover is about from that quarter. The changeover from Fidel to Raul Castro, and the apparent ‘revolutionary’ hard line, is on the order of a mini-turn for them, and all of one piece. Strangely, that is the general take on the situation for anti-Stalinist leftists, as well.
The fundamental problem from our leftist perspective in Cuba is, as Leon Trotsky posited long ago, one cannot fully develop a socialist society in isolation- in short, 'socialism in one country' does not work. That is even truer in a small island country that now has no lifeline from other non-capitalist countries, like the ex-Soviet Union. Thus, in the long haul the Cuban situation is dictated by the prospects, or lack of them, for international socialism. But, in the short haul, and this is really my message today, we must gear up to defend the Cuban Revolution, as we have since 1959, tooth and nail, against the imperialists at the door and their agents in Cuba, regardless of which Castro is in charge. More on these developments as we get closer to celebrating the Moncada anniversary in July. Defend the Cuban Revolution!
Commentary
Defend the Cuban Revolution! U.S. End the Embargoes!
Recently I have been asked by a political colleague, in person not by e-mail or blog comment if one can believe such a phenomena in the digital age, what I made of the situation in Cuba. She had noticed last week, the week of February 18, 2007, that I had not commented on Fidel’s stepping down from most of his political offices, including the presidency. Well, the short answer is that I am waiting for the dust to settle a little before I comment fully on such an event. Moreover, I feel under no compulsion to run out and yell in the streets every time that there is a Stalinist musical chairs change up in the world (although granted, there are fewer occasions for that now).
Apparently, the ‘exiles’ are not dancing in the streets of Little Havana, oops, I mean Miami so that tells one in a very empirical way what this latest turnover is about from that quarter. The changeover from Fidel to Raul Castro, and the apparent ‘revolutionary’ hard line, is on the order of a mini-turn for them, and all of one piece. Strangely, that is the general take on the situation for anti-Stalinist leftists, as well.
The fundamental problem from our leftist perspective in Cuba is, as Leon Trotsky posited long ago, one cannot fully develop a socialist society in isolation- in short, 'socialism in one country' does not work. That is even truer in a small island country that now has no lifeline from other non-capitalist countries, like the ex-Soviet Union. Thus, in the long haul the Cuban situation is dictated by the prospects, or lack of them, for international socialism. But, in the short haul, and this is really my message today, we must gear up to defend the Cuban Revolution, as we have since 1959, tooth and nail, against the imperialists at the door and their agents in Cuba, regardless of which Castro is in charge. More on these developments as we get closer to celebrating the Moncada anniversary in July. Defend the Cuban Revolution!
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