In Honor Of The 65th Anniversary Year Of The Chinese Revolution of 1949- From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-Problems Of The Chinese Revolution (1927) – Comrade Lui’s Problem  

 

Click on link below to read on-line all of Leon Trotsky's book, Problems Of The Chinese Revolution

 

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/pcr/index.htm

 

Markin comment (repost from 2012 just change the year date as noted in the title above):

 

On a day when we are honoring the 63rd anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in this entry and the comment below take on added meaning. In the old days, in the early 1970s to put a time frame on the period I am talking about, in the days when I had broken from many of my previously held left social-democratic political views and had begun to embrace Marxism with a distinct tilt toward Trotskyism, I ran into an old revolutionary in Boston who had been deeply involved (although I did not learn the extend of that involvement until later) in the pre-World War II socialist struggles in Eastern Europe. The details of that involvement will not detain us here long now although I should point out that he, Ludwig, to use his old time party name which he insisted that I call him for memory’s sake (I never did get his real first name although after he died somebody mentioned the name Peter), had started his political career right around World War I in Poland at the time of  great revolutionary ferment in Europe after the rise of the Bolshevik Revolution in the wake of the slaughter in World War I. He was just a kid, had been drafted into something that sounded to be like the National Guard here, the Polish Home Guard. Did his time when the Armistice finally descended on Europe and then having had a bell-full of the old ways (his words) searched around like a lot of young alienated people then and gravitated toward Marxism.   

 

In those days before they were murdered by the reaction in Germany where they had been exiled (abetted by the old time German Social-Democratic leadership) in the aftermath of the Spartacist uprising that party was run by Rosa Luxemburg and her paramour (okay, okay political co-thinker) Leo Jogiches. There was an old saying in the Communist movement of the 1920s and 1930s (before Stalin in the late 1930s virtually liquated the whole operation to placate his temporary partner, Hitler, in his/their designs on Poland) that the German party might have been the biggest (after the Soviet Union’s) in the Communist International but the Polish party was the best. So Ludwig came to his credentials with an impressive pedigree. Naturally he was a stalwart Communist rank and filer under the Pilsudski dictatorship from the mid-1920s forward, was torn apart by the failure of the German Communist Party to stop Hitler in his tracks when there was still time to do so in the early 1930s, and drifted (after flirting with the exiled Bukarinites, the rights in the Russian party and CI) toward the small but energetic Trotskyist group in the mid-1930s when to do meant to be hounded like a dog by both the Stalinist and Hitler-ite police apparatuses. So when you saw a guy like Ludwig, whether you agreed with his politics or not, you knew you were in the presence of a real revolutionary and not some armchair dilettante. (many times I did not agree with him, especially all that stuff about the Trotskyist version of the theory of Permanent Revolution, having adamantly defended what the Vietnamese Stalinists had done there in their national revolution. Yeah, I learned but it took a while and it took the disaster in Chile and a couple of other places to wise up to “what was what” in 20^th century revolutions).

 

So you, young and wet behind the ears with very slim revolutionary credentials if rather more élan, you listened and thought through many of his comments. The one I think is germane today and which continues to drive me some forty years later was the importance of the defense of revolutionary gains not matter how small has stuck with me until this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article from the pen of Leon Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution (in his case that of the second revolution in the mid-1920s) and the later gains of that third revolution (1949) however currently attenuated.

 

This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had barely escaped ahead of Hitler’s police that pre-war scene in fascist-wracked Europe and found himself toward the end of the 1930s in New York working with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the period when that organization was going through intense turmoil over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. In the history of American (and international) Trotskyism this is the famous Max Shachtman-James Burnham led opposition that declared, under one capitalist reversion theory or another, that the previously defendable Soviet Union had changed dramatically enough in the course of a few months to be no longer worth defending by revolutionaries.

 

What struck Ludwig from the start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth of that day (so we of the generation of ’68 had forbears whether we acknowledged them or not), on the question of that defense and consequently about the role that workers states, healthy, deformed or degenerated, as we use the terms of art in our movement, as part of the greater revolutionary strategy. Needless to say most of those who abandoned defense of the Soviet Union when there was even a smidgeon of a reason to defend then (and when the issue came to life as a political reality when Hitler marched his troops east) left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism. (The confessional literature of American ex-Stalinists, Trotskyists, and even-left Social Democrats from the 1950s especially is replete with “errand child gone wrong but now wiser” language most of it barely readable for any useful political purpose, or polemic).

 

That said, the current question of defense of the Chinese Revolution hinges on those same premises that animated that old Socialist Workers Party dispute. And strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely) on the question of whether China is now irrevocably on the capitalist road, or is capitalist already (despite some very un-capitalistic economic developments over the past few years), I find that many of those who oppose that position that China is today still hanging by a thread as a workers’ state (deformed in our language, deformed from its inception since the Chinese working-class decimated and cowered by the reaction in the second revolution in the 1920s played no significant independent role in the third revolution) have that same cavalier attitude the old comrade warned me against back when I was first starting out. There may come a time when we, as we had to with the Soviet Union and other workers states of East Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, say that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day.

 

In the meantime study the issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution as tenaciously as in his time old Ludwig defended the gains of the Soviet Union in the interests of the world’s working classes and oppressed.

*******

Comrade Liu’s Problem

 

(Nobody in the Chinese Communist Party, the party that he was finally to come to see represented his political perspectives ever knew him as anybody other than Comrade Lui and so we will stick with that name, although later investigation found that he was the first son of a rich Shang-hai merchant family whose name was Ki Zhou but Comrade Lui will do for our purposes here.)

 

(I will use the old time Chinese language usages here in the interest of some kind of historical accuracy although everybody by now should be aware that for the past several decades there have been almost universal spelling and phonetic changes when Chinese turns to English.) 

 

In the fall of 1918, the year Comrade Liu entered Peking University held many portents for the brash young man who refused to discuss his family origins other than that he had come like virtually every young student in the post- revolutionary period (the first revolution of 1911-12 which dispose of the dynasty like some much dirty linen and with about as much effort as throwing such material in the laundry) from some wealth and that he was seriously attracted to the anarchists and bookish intellectuals who held sway there in the wake of World War I.

Like many of the young of most modern generations who  came up in some measure of privilege, came up in Comrade Lui’s case in the stifling atmosphere of old China the breath of fresh air provided by the university was both exhilarating and filled with many doubts about the old ways, about the way that he grew up. And so like more than a few young first generation intellectuals he gravitated to those ideas which were farthest away from his home life, from his strident worker bee youth studying to make university life. That over he breathed in the new ideas, and no ideas hit newly liberated students harder than the ideas of anarchism, at least as understood by those so liberated.

Comrade Liu like many others was first influenced by that old Russian dog, Prince Kropotkin, and his eclectic communal ideas, his idea of oneness of the whole universe which had a certain Zen-like attraction to those born into the stratified old Chinese ways (including, as has been noted, the tremendous efforts to make sure the first son succeeded at the expense of younger brothers. Daughters did not even enter the picture), and his basically moralistic way to transform society. That held many attentions for a while but if anything universal came out the First World War it was that  the younger generations were looking to break-out of the old ways and so they were looking for more activist ways to change society. Comrade Liu with others formed a semi-secret group of like-minded individuals bent on action to make a new anarchist-derived world. They called themselves the Black Flag Front. That is the state of affairs as the May Fourth Movement hit all Chinese students, from anarchists to extreme nationalists, like a storm.  

Comrade Liu and his comrades in the Black Flag Front while then not in the leadership of the student movement having just started to finish their first year’s studies participated fully when that big day came. This was the action they were looking for, the chance to create that more equalitarian society they were discussing in their rooms. Here is a little of what the movement itself was attempting to do which forms the background for most of what Comrade did until that time in the mid-1920s when he moved away from the Black Flag Front and began to toy a little with Communism.   

On the morning of May 4, 1919, student representatives from thirteen different local universities met in Beijing and drafted five resolutions:

1.    to oppose the granting of Shandong to the Japanese under former German concessions.

2.    to draw awareness of China's precarious position to the masses in China.

3.    to recommend a large-scale gathering in Beijing.

4.    to promote the creation of a Beijing student union.

5.    to hold a demonstration that afternoon in protest to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

On the afternoon of May 4 over 3,000 students of Peking University and other schools marched from many points to gather in front of Tiananmen. They shouted such slogans as "Struggle for the sovereignty externally, get rid of the national traitors at home", "Do away with the 'Twenty-One Demands'", and "Don't sign the Versailles Treaty". They voiced their anger at the Allied betrayal of China, denounced the government's spineless inability to protect Chinese interests, and called for a boycott of Japanese products. Demonstrators insisted on the resignation of three Chinese officials they accused of being collaborators with the Japanese. After burning the residence of one of these officials and beating his servants, student protesters were arrested, jailed, and severely beaten.^[4]

The next day, students in Beijing as a whole went on strike and in the larger cities across China, students, patriotic merchants, and workers joined protests. The demonstrators skillfully appealed to the newspapers and sent representatives to carry the word across the country. From early June, workers and businessmen in Shanghai also went on strike as the center of the movement shifted from Beijing to Shanghai. Chancellors from thirteen universities arranged for the release of student prisoners, and Peking University's Cai Yuanpei resigned in protest. Newspapers, magazines, citizen societies, and chambers of commerce offered support for the students. Merchants threatened to withhold tax payments if China's government remained obstinate.^[5] In Shanghai, a general strike of merchants and workers nearly devastated the entire Chinese economy.^[4] Under intense public pressure, the Beiyang government released the arrested students and dismissed Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang and Lu Zongyu. Chinese representatives in Paris refused to sign on the peace treaty: the May Fourth Movement won an initial victory which was primarily symbolic: Japan for the moment retained control of the Shandong Peninsula and the islands in the Pacific. Even the partial success of the movement exhibited the ability of China's social classes across the country to successfully collaborate given proper motivation and leadership.

Certainly the efforts here by the students and the actions of the members of Black Flag did not point directly to a new society but the thrill of political activity, mixing with other groups and programs and also recruiting a small number of the most militant students (especially from those arrested and jailed by the government) gave rise to great expectations of things to come. It was during this period that Comrade Liu decided to devote his life to the struggle, a decision that he held to until the end of his life. 

 

One of the great mistakes students have made once they have led a movement, a radical or revolutionary movement in the struggle for power is that they fail to see the ebbs and flows of all social movements thinking that there is only one direction once the masses are in motion. The Chinese students and the now Comrade Liu-led Black Flag in particular composed mainly of students (although recruitment had brought a smattering of professionals and young workers from the textile mills in Shanghai just of the farms) fell prey to just that phenomenon. (They will not be alone in that failure as the French students in May 1968 and American students throughout the 1960s attest to.) So some formerly very militant young anarchists ready to man the barricades in a flash dropped away from the Front, got professional careers going , started families and the million and one other things people do when there is an ebb tide. This is the period when Comrade Liu, determined as ever, came to the fore, came to be recognized as the leader (although being anarchists they shied away from any official designation). And this is the period when Comrade Lui learned about the necessity of patience waiting for another opportunity to present itself that everybody knew was coming just as one could see the signs in Russia well before 1917 bring the masses into the struggle, to build those communes and local collectives that would create the new society.

 

The early years of the 1920s were not a good time to be an anarchist (or for that matter a dissident communist) once the Nationalist reaction under Chiang-kai-shek and the various warlords who effectively ruled vast swaths of China after the central government half-heartedly granted some of the demands of the initially student-led May Fourth Movement and sucked all the political air out any dissenting politics. Those were also the years that the fledgling Chinese Communist Party, under orders from the Communist International then led by the deceased Lenin’s old right-hand man, Zinoviev (and with the emerging leader Joseph Stalin’s blessing) to work within the Chiang operation, the Kuomintang. So the political space for some kind of radical commune short of taking power seemed less than fruitful since Comrade Lui, who had gone to school with some of the leading Nationalist cadre who emerged after 1919 and especially with the death of Sun-Yat-sen in leading positions in the national government refused to support that government despite various entreaties by his former schoolmates (always taking into consideration that the national government in many places was non-existent at various times and for many reasons including vast corruption at the center.

 

At that time the semi-secret Black Flag under a political program worked out by Comrade Liu and his closest associates. As the decade progressed toward the decisive struggles around the second revolution from 1925 on those associates tended to increasingly be first generation departed from the villages turned to factory workers. A few with some education and the few students left who had gone to study in Paris looked to the various strands of syndicalism that made  more sense to them that the old time Kropotkin moral commune. And as the ideas of factory-centered communes took hold of the organization a collective decision (urged on by Comrade Liu and his friend, Lu Chen, was made in late 1923 to move the main Black Flag operation out of Peking to Shanghai where the foreign settlements and their Chinese lackeys were building upon the factories created by the needs at home while the war in Europe had been going on where the imperialists were busy eating up their resources on the bloody battlefield and said the hell with the colonials and other lesser markets.



Shanghai with its vast factories and up-from-hunger working class treated like their coolie forbears before them by foreign nationals and home-grown capitalists alike was a prime recruiting ground for the Black Flag with its newfound syndicalist orientation (the Communist Party was also gaining recruits and supporters as well among that same population). Shanghai was also the place where Comrade Lui learned his trade as a revolutionary cadre leader in integrating the raw recruits into the organization. It was his idea to set up reading circles where literary was taught and the classics of anarchism explained in simple terms. It was also his idea to set up some underground operations since he could read the signs that the big struggle ahead would require such an operation just like in Russia before 1917.This was also the time when Comrade Lui would start to mix it up politically with his arch political opponents, the Communists, who were gaining strength in the factories and it appeared in the government as well. (They, Comrade Lui and his associates, would laugh among themselves that the level of influence that the Communist Party had on Sun Yat-sen and after his death Chiang was directly proportional to the arms and other aid coming into KMT headquarters. Later when those guns were turned around the matter was no longer laughable and required a different appreciation of the situation).

 

On a personal note this period is also where Comrade Lui met his future wife, Li San, Li San who would stick by him through the rest of his life. They had met at a reading circle after Li had heard rumors about the Black Flag having moved its main operation to Shanghai. As noted previously this reading circle was the main way to organize young recruits under the increasingly hard conditions of the Nationalist government. The circle that Li would eventually join however was not a workers’ circle since she was a daughter of a Shanghai merchant family although not known to Comrade Liu previously and had been educated in Paris. The decision was made in order to not intimidate the raw young workers and to give them space to be heard and work toward leadership to keep the worker circles separate from the young professionals and academics until the training period was over. Li had been somewhat “liberated” for the times (she wore Western clothing, spoke English and French well, lived a half-Bohemian existence with a few other such women and men in a large house just outside the settlement area) and so she was intrigued by what the reading circle provided after she had dismissed out of hand the Communists (feeling as she confided to Comrade Lui that having come from a merchant family that the Communists would do like that had done to such families in Russia in the aftermath of the revolution. Her family, or what was left of it, fled to Taiwan in 1949.) 

 

After a formal old time courtship (to appease her family, his he had lost track of when he went underground although the family name was still on placard of the rice company doing business at the family’s old location according to a source that he sent to find out about the matter.  And so this is what the personal and political situation of Comrade Liu looked like when the great Shanghai uprising blew the final bit of old China away (although that process would take another twenty plus years).



The second revolution began in in 1925 and so we should take note of what that meant for Comrade Liu and his Black Flag comrades because although the revolutionary possibilities would find their greatest expression in Shanghai before the KMT machine guns started blazing away the initial impetus came from Canton:

 

“The Revolution Begins

The event that really sparked off the enormous movement of the working class was the shooting down of a demonstration of students and workers by British and French machine gunners on June 23, 1925. This provocation triggered off an explosion that had been gathering in the previous period. The workers of Canton and Hong Kong came out in a huge strike which lasted for about 16 months, and a paralyzed imperialism throughout the whole of China. This movement – a strike and the boycott of French goods, and of British goods in particular – was so complete that 100,000 Chinese workers moved from Hong Kong to Canton, where the workers were the real power. They cleared out the opium dens, closed down gambling joints, improvised an embryonic soviet in Canton. (As things were fluid in the first days of the uprising the few Black Flag adherents in Canton were advised to enter the soviet and spread the anarchist word while doing the practical work noted just above.)  

The anarchist movement had never been strong in China (nor, for that matter the ideas of the post-World War I Social Democracy). So unique opportunity existed for the Communist Party. The independent movement of the working class began to change the relationship of forces in China in favor of the working class. But, the Communist Party deliberately subordinated themselves to the Kuomintang and to Chiang Kai-shek. The counterrevolution more and more gained ground using the gangsters of Canton and Hong Kong to crush the labor movement. At this stage the slogan of the Communist Party in China, and of the Communist International under the direction of Stalin and Bukharin was ‘full support to the revolutionary Kuomintang’. The Kuomintang was accepted as a sympathetic section of the Communist International in 1926.

The Shanghai working class was also looking expectantly towards the movement in Canton. Tragically, that did not happen, because the Chinese Communist Party subordinated itself to the Kuomintang while Chiang Kai-shek gathered the reins of power in his hands. After 1923, Trotsky opposed the entry of the Communist Party into the Kuomintang. He stood for the complete independence of the Communist Party from the Kuomintang. This position would become important later when Comrade Liu was analyzing what had gone wrong in the second revolution. Trotsky was not opposed to a limited bloc on specific anti-imperialist action. But, Trotsky argued, the Communist Party should not have subordinated itself to the Kuomintang.

 

One of the most important developments in the Chinese revolution was undoubtedly the heroic and enormous movements of the proletariat in Shanghai in 1927. The northern expedition reached the gates of that city by January or February. When the first detachments of the Kuomintang were 25 miles from Shanghai, the trade unions there, particularly the General Labor Union, called for the workers to come out in a general strike. (Black Flag trade union militants, especially in the Delwar Textile Mills, were central to bring out the workers in the whole industry.)  

On February 19 approximately 350,000 workers answered the call for a general strike. Then, however, the detachments of the northern warlords went out into the city, joined by the imperialists from the foreign concessions of Shanghai, and shot down demonstrating workers. A worker found reading a leaflet was immediately beheaded and his head put on a stake and paraded through the city in order to terrorize the Shanghai working class. A reign of terror ensued in the following week. Yet the Kuomintang armies refused to go into the city. Instead they waited for the Chinese capitalists to crush the workers. There was a pause, then on March 21 at least 500 workers were executed.

The Shanghai working class rose in a magnificent movement on March 21, 1927, when about 800,000 workers came out onto the streets. They improvised an army of 5,000 workers. Armed with a few pistols, mostly with bare hands, they marched against the barracks and against the troops of the northern warlords and smashed them. The First Division of the Kuomintang – seasoned troops largely influenced by the Communist Party – decided that they would delay no longer and marched into Shanghai in defiance of Chiang Kai-shek’s orders. The leader of the First Division was a general who looked towards the Communist Party. The whole of Shanghai was in the hands of the working class within two or three days. Secretly, on the outskirts of Shanghai, Chiang Kai-shek met with gangsters and representatives of the imperialist powers. Together they discussed a program of repression to crush the workers’ movement in the city.

Despite the experience of Canton 12 months before, the Communist Party again reinforced the illusions of the Shanghai workers in the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek, with calls of ‘Long live the heroic general! Long live the Kuomintang army!’ Had the Communist Party based themselves on an independent movement of the working class, they could have taken power. The police had been smashed, and the policing of Shanghai was under workers’ control. The trade unions in effect controlled Shanghai and the working class was in the majority, yet the trade unions and Communist Party formed a coalition with the capitalist party – the Kuomintang. Of the 19 representatives in the government, the Communist Party had only 5.

The blow was struck on April 12, 1927. The Kuomintang troops used all the dirty tricks of the capitalists. When they attacked one workers’ headquarters in Shanghai, these Green gangsters dressed up in workers’ blue denim overalls. Kuomintang troops came along to ‘mediate’. Once inside the headquarters, the troops lined up the workers against the wall and shot them. The workers were taken unawares because they had been told that the Kuomintang troops were on their side.

In the days preceding the coup of April 12, the General Labor Union had actually warned that a coup was being prepared and that a general strike should be organized. Never once was the fountainhead of the counterrevolution – Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang leaders – mentioned by the Communist Party or the workers’ leaders of Shanghai.

The Shanghai working class was crushed in blood. An estimated 35,000 workers, many of them Communist Party members, were killed in Shanghai alone between April 12 and the end of 1927.

The defeat of the Shanghai working class in 1927 meant the crushing of the Chinese working class for a whole historical era, but it was not the end of the matter. There were the beginnings of movements in Hunan and Hupei, the other two important provinces of China where the peasantry, and the working class, had begun to move into action.

 

UJP to march in HONK! Parade with Drone replica.

When: Sunday, October 12, 2014, 12:00 pm to 6:30 pm

Where: Davis Square • Elm Street • Somerville

The Somerville-based HONK! Parade of Activist Street Bands will take place on Sunday, October 12 at noon, and once again UJP's Eastern Massachusetts Anti-Drones Network (EMAD) will march carrying signs and its eye-catching Drone replica. The group's message is encapsulated in the banner it will carry: "No Killer Drones! No Spy Drones!" The U.S. Government must stop surveilling its citizens and killing people from other countries with drones.

 

The HONK! Parade is the culmination of the annual weekend-long HONK! Festival. Dozens of bands, community, artist and activist groups, including Veterans For Peace, will march from Davis Square down Elm Street, Beech Street and Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Square, where they'll join forces with the Octoberfest celebration. Thousands of people view the parade, and last year, EMAD's Drone replica and anti-drones message were well-received. This year, EMAD's participation coincides with the first Global Action Day Against the Use of Drones for Surveillance & Killing, called by the KnowDrones.com network.

 

We welcome marchers to join our contingent.  Join us at the Parade gathering place in Davis Square at 11:30 am.

 

To join or support the Eastern Massachusetts Anti-Drones Network, email info@justicewithpeace.org or call 617-383-4857

 

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poet’s Corner  

O THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA


Brothers in blood! They who this wrong began
  To wreck our commonwealth, will rue the day
  When first they challenged freemen to the fray,
And with the Briton dared the American.
Now are we pledged to win the Rights of man;
  Labour and Justice now shall have their way,
  And in a League of Peace--God grant we may--
Transform the earth, not patch up the old plan.

Sure is our hope since he who led your nation
  Spake for mankind, and ye arose in awe
Of that high call to work the world's salvation;
    Clearing your minds of all estranging blindness
  In the vision of Beauty and the Spirit's law,
    Freedom and Honour and sweet Lovingkindness.

_Robert Bridges_

_April 30, 1917_

A Voice From The Left-The Latest From The Steve Lendman Blog

 A link below to link to the Steve Lendman Blog

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

This blog and blogger were down for most of the summer of 2014 so that it is good that the blog and blogger are back. To your health, Brother Lendman.

Over the years that I have been presenting political material in this space I have had occasion to re-post items from some sites which I find interesting, interesting for a host of political reasons, although I am not necessarily in agreement with what has been published. Two such sites have stood out, The Rag Blog, which I like to re-post items from because it has articles by many of my fellow Generation of ’68 residual radicals and ex-radicals who still care to put pen to paper and the blog cited here, the Steve Lendman Blog.  The reason for re-postings from this latter site is slightly different since the site represents a modern day left- liberal political slant. That is the element, the pool if you will, that we radicals have to draw from, have to move left, if we are to grow. So it is important to have the pulse of what issues motivate that milieu and I believe that this blog is a lightning rod for those political tendencies. 

I would also add that the blog is a fountain of rational, reasonable and unrepentant anti-Zionism which became apparent once again this summer of 2014 when defense of the Palestinian people in Gaza was the pressing political issue and we were being stonewalled and lied to by the bourgeois media in service of American and Israeli interests. This blog was like a breath of fresh air.

A Jackman disclaimer:

I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after about fifty other theories did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes us different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. 

Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on. 

***********

In Honor Of The 65th Anniversary Year Of The Chinese Revolution of 1949- From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-Problems Of The Chinese Revolution (1927) – Comrade Lui’s Problem  

 

Click on link below to read on-line all of Leon Trotsky's book, Problems Of The Chinese Revolution

 

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/pcr/index.htm

 

Markin comment (repost from 2012 just change the year date as noted in the title above):

 

On a day when we are honoring the 63rd anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in this entry and the comment below take on added meaning. In the old days, in the early 1970s to put a time frame on the period I am talking about, in the days when I had broken from many of my previously held left social-democratic political views and had begun to embrace Marxism with a distinct tilt toward Trotskyism, I ran into an old revolutionary in Boston who had been deeply involved (although I did not learn the extend of that involvement until later) in the pre-World War II socialist struggles in Eastern Europe. The details of that involvement will not detain us here long now although I should point out that he, Ludwig, to use his old time party name which he insisted that I call him for memory’s sake (I never did get his real first name although after he died somebody mentioned the name Peter), had started his political career right around World War I in Poland at the time of  great revolutionary ferment in Europe after the rise of the Bolshevik Revolution in the wake of the slaughter in World War I. He was just a kid, had been drafted into something that sounded to be like the National Guard here, the Polish Home Guard. Did his time when the Armistice finally descended on Europe and then having had a bell-full of the old ways (his words) searched around like a lot of young alienated people then and gravitated toward Marxism.   

 

In those days before they were murdered by the reaction in Germany where they had been exiled (abetted by the old time German Social-Democratic leadership) in the aftermath of the Spartacist uprising that party was run by Rosa Luxemburg and her paramour (okay, okay political co-thinker) Leo Jogiches. There was an old saying in the Communist movement of the 1920s and 1930s (before Stalin in the late 1930s virtually liquated the whole operation to placate his temporary partner, Hitler, in his/their designs on Poland) that the German party might have been the biggest (after the Soviet Union’s) in the Communist International but the Polish party was the best. So Ludwig came to his credentials with an impressive pedigree. Naturally he was a stalwart Communist rank and filer under the Pilsudski dictatorship from the mid-1920s forward, was torn apart by the failure of the German Communist Party to stop Hitler in his tracks when there was still time to do so in the early 1930s, and drifted (after flirting with the exiled Bukarinites, the rights in the Russian party and CI) toward the small but energetic Trotskyist group in the mid-1930s when to do meant to be hounded like a dog by both the Stalinist and Hitler-ite police apparatuses. So when you saw a guy like Ludwig, whether you agreed with his politics or not, you knew you were in the presence of a real revolutionary and not some armchair dilettante. (many times I did not agree with him, especially all that stuff about the Trotskyist version of the theory of Permanent Revolution, having adamantly defended what the Vietnamese Stalinists had done there in their national revolution. Yeah, I learned but it took a while and it took the disaster in Chile and a couple of other places to wise up to “what was what” in 20^th century revolutions).

 

So you, young and wet behind the ears with very slim revolutionary credentials if rather more élan, you listened and thought through many of his comments. The one I think is germane today and which continues to drive me some forty years later was the importance of the defense of revolutionary gains not matter how small has stuck with me until this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article from the pen of Leon Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution (in his case that of the second revolution in the mid-1920s) and the later gains of that third revolution (1949) however currently attenuated.

 

This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had barely escaped ahead of Hitler’s police that pre-war scene in fascist-wracked Europe and found himself toward the end of the 1930s in New York working with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the period when that organization was going through intense turmoil over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. In the history of American (and international) Trotskyism this is the famous Max Shachtman-James Burnham led opposition that declared, under one capitalist reversion theory or another, that the previously defendable Soviet Union had changed dramatically enough in the course of a few months to be no longer worth defending by revolutionaries.

 

What struck Ludwig from the start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth of that day (so we of the generation of ’68 had forbears whether we acknowledged them or not), on the question of that defense and consequently about the role that workers states, healthy, deformed or degenerated, as we use the terms of art in our movement, as part of the greater revolutionary strategy. Needless to say most of those who abandoned defense of the Soviet Union when there was even a smidgeon of a reason to defend then (and when the issue came to life as a political reality when Hitler marched his troops east) left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism. (The confessional literature of American ex-Stalinists, Trotskyists, and even-left Social Democrats from the 1950s especially is replete with “errand child gone wrong but now wiser” language most of it barely readable for any useful political purpose, or polemic).

 

That said, the current question of defense of the Chinese Revolution hinges on those same premises that animated that old Socialist Workers Party dispute. And strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely) on the question of whether China is now irrevocably on the capitalist road, or is capitalist already (despite some very un-capitalistic economic developments over the past few years), I find that many of those who oppose that position that China is today still hanging by a thread as a workers’ state (deformed in our language, deformed from its inception since the Chinese working-class decimated and cowered by the reaction in the second revolution in the 1920s played no significant independent role in the third revolution) have that same cavalier attitude the old comrade warned me against back when I was first starting out. There may come a time when we, as we had to with the Soviet Union and other workers states of East Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, say that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day.

 

In the meantime study the issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution as tenaciously as in his time old Ludwig defended the gains of the Soviet Union in the interests of the world’s working classes and oppressed.

*******

Comrade Liu’s Problem

 

(Nobody in the Chinese Communist Party, the party that he was finally to come to see represented his political perspectives ever knew him as anybody other than Comrade Lui and so we will stick with that name, although later investigation found that he was the first son of a rich Shang-hai merchant family whose name was Ki Zhou but Comrade Lui will do for our purposes here.)

 

(I will use the old time Chinese language usages here in the interest of some kind of historical accuracy although everybody by now should be aware that for the past several decades there have been almost universal spelling and phonetic changes when Chinese turns to English.) 

 

In the fall of 1918, the year Comrade Liu entered Peking University held many portents for the brash young man who refused to discuss his family origins other than that he had come like virtually every young student in the post- revolutionary period (the first revolution of 1911-12 which dispose of the dynasty like some much dirty linen and with about as much effort as throwing such material in the laundry) from some wealth and that he was seriously attracted to the anarchists and bookish intellectuals who held sway there in the wake of World War I.

Like many of the young of most modern generations who  came up in some measure of privilege, came up in Comrade Lui’s case in the stifling atmosphere of old China the breath of fresh air provided by the university was both exhilarating and filled with many doubts about the old ways, about the way that he grew up. And so like more than a few young first generation intellectuals he gravitated to those ideas which were farthest away from his home life, from his strident worker bee youth studying to make university life. That over he breathed in the new ideas, and no ideas hit newly liberated students harder than the ideas of anarchism, at least as understood by those so liberated.

Comrade Liu like many others was first influenced by that old Russian dog, Prince Kropotkin, and his eclectic communal ideas, his idea of oneness of the whole universe which had a certain Zen-like attraction to those born into the stratified old Chinese ways (including, as has been noted, the tremendous efforts to make sure the first son succeeded at the expense of younger brothers. Daughters did not even enter the picture), and his basically moralistic way to transform society. That held many attentions for a while but if anything universal came out the First World War it was that  the younger generations were looking to break-out of the old ways and so they were looking for more activist ways to change society. Comrade Liu with others formed a semi-secret group of like-minded individuals bent on action to make a new anarchist-derived world. They called themselves the Black Flag Front. That is the state of affairs as the May Fourth Movement hit all Chinese students, from anarchists to extreme nationalists, like a storm.  

Comrade Liu and his comrades in the Black Flag Front while then not in the leadership of the student movement having just started to finish their first year’s studies participated fully when that big day came. This was the action they were looking for, the chance to create that more equalitarian society they were discussing in their rooms. Here is a little of what the movement itself was attempting to do which forms the background for most of what Comrade did until that time in the mid-1920s when he moved away from the Black Flag Front and began to toy a little with Communism.   

On the morning of May 4, 1919, student representatives from thirteen different local universities met in Beijing and drafted five resolutions:

1.    to oppose the granting of Shandong to the Japanese under former German concessions.

2.    to draw awareness of China's precarious position to the masses in China.

3.    to recommend a large-scale gathering in Beijing.

4.    to promote the creation of a Beijing student union.

5.    to hold a demonstration that afternoon in protest to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

On the afternoon of May 4 over 3,000 students of Peking University and other schools marched from many points to gather in front of Tiananmen. They shouted such slogans as "Struggle for the sovereignty externally, get rid of the national traitors at home", "Do away with the 'Twenty-One Demands'", and "Don't sign the Versailles Treaty". They voiced their anger at the Allied betrayal of China, denounced the government's spineless inability to protect Chinese interests, and called for a boycott of Japanese products. Demonstrators insisted on the resignation of three Chinese officials they accused of being collaborators with the Japanese. After burning the residence of one of these officials and beating his servants, student protesters were arrested, jailed, and severely beaten.^[4]

The next day, students in Beijing as a whole went on strike and in the larger cities across China, students, patriotic merchants, and workers joined protests. The demonstrators skillfully appealed to the newspapers and sent representatives to carry the word across the country. From early June, workers and businessmen in Shanghai also went on strike as the center of the movement shifted from Beijing to Shanghai. Chancellors from thirteen universities arranged for the release of student prisoners, and Peking University's Cai Yuanpei resigned in protest. Newspapers, magazines, citizen societies, and chambers of commerce offered support for the students. Merchants threatened to withhold tax payments if China's government remained obstinate.^[5] In Shanghai, a general strike of merchants and workers nearly devastated the entire Chinese economy.^[4] Under intense public pressure, the Beiyang government released the arrested students and dismissed Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang and Lu Zongyu. Chinese representatives in Paris refused to sign on the peace treaty: the May Fourth Movement won an initial victory which was primarily symbolic: Japan for the moment retained control of the Shandong Peninsula and the islands in the Pacific. Even the partial success of the movement exhibited the ability of China's social classes across the country to successfully collaborate given proper motivation and leadership.

Certainly the efforts here by the students and the actions of the members of Black Flag did not point directly to a new society but the thrill of political activity, mixing with other groups and programs and also recruiting a small number of the most militant students (especially from those arrested and jailed by the government) gave rise to great expectations of things to come. It was during this period that Comrade Liu decided to devote his life to the struggle, a decision that he held to until the end of his life. 

 

One of the great mistakes students have made once they have led a movement, a radical or revolutionary movement in the struggle for power is that they fail to see the ebbs and flows of all social movements thinking that there is only one direction once the masses are in motion. The Chinese students and the now Comrade Liu-led Black Flag in particular composed mainly of students (although recruitment had brought a smattering of professionals and young workers from the textile mills in Shanghai just of the farms) fell prey to just that phenomenon. (They will not be alone in that failure as the French students in May 1968 and American students throughout the 1960s attest to.) So some formerly very militant young anarchists ready to man the barricades in a flash dropped away from the Front, got professional careers going , started families and the million and one other things people do when there is an ebb tide. This is the period when Comrade Liu, determined as ever, came to the fore, came to be recognized as the leader (although being anarchists they shied away from any official designation). And this is the period when Comrade Lui learned about the necessity of patience waiting for another opportunity to present itself that everybody knew was coming just as one could see the signs in Russia well before 1917 bring the masses into the struggle, to build those communes and local collectives that would create the new society.

 

The early years of the 1920s were not a good time to be an anarchist (or for that matter a dissident communist) once the Nationalist reaction under Chiang-kai-shek and the various warlords who effectively ruled vast swaths of China after the central government half-heartedly granted some of the demands of the initially student-led May Fourth Movement and sucked all the political air out any dissenting politics. Those were also the years that the fledgling Chinese Communist Party, under orders from the Communist International then led by the deceased Lenin’s old right-hand man, Zinoviev (and with the emerging leader Joseph Stalin’s blessing) to work within the Chiang operation, the Kuomintang. So the political space for some kind of radical commune short of taking power seemed less than fruitful since Comrade Lui, who had gone to school with some of the leading Nationalist cadre who emerged after 1919 and especially with the death of Sun-Yat-sen in leading positions in the national government refused to support that government despite various entreaties by his former schoolmates (always taking into consideration that the national government in many places was non-existent at various times and for many reasons including vast corruption at the center.

 

At that time the semi-secret Black Flag under a political program worked out by Comrade Liu and his closest associates. As the decade progressed toward the decisive struggles around the second revolution from 1925 on those associates tended to increasingly be first generation departed from the villages turned to factory workers. A few with some education and the few students left who had gone to study in Paris looked to the various strands of syndicalism that made  more sense to them that the old time Kropotkin moral commune. And as the ideas of factory-centered communes took hold of the organization a collective decision (urged on by Comrade Liu and his friend, Lu Chen, was made in late 1923 to move the main Black Flag operation out of Peking to Shanghai where the foreign settlements and their Chinese lackeys were building upon the factories created by the needs at home while the war in Europe had been going on where the imperialists were busy eating up their resources on the bloody battlefield and said the hell with the colonials and other lesser markets.



Shanghai with its vast factories and up-from-hunger working class treated like their coolie forbears before them by foreign nationals and home-grown capitalists alike was a prime recruiting ground for the Black Flag with its newfound syndicalist orientation (the Communist Party was also gaining recruits and supporters as well among that same population). Shanghai was also the place where Comrade Lui learned his trade as a revolutionary cadre leader in integrating the raw recruits into the organization. It was his idea to set up reading circles where literary was taught and the classics of anarchism explained in simple terms. It was also his idea to set up some underground operations since he could read the signs that the big struggle ahead would require such an operation just like in Russia before 1917.This was also the time when Comrade Lui would start to mix it up politically with his arch political opponents, the Communists, who were gaining strength in the factories and it appeared in the government as well. (They, Comrade Lui and his associates, would laugh among themselves that the level of influence that the Communist Party had on Sun Yat-sen and after his death Chiang was directly proportional to the arms and other aid coming into KMT headquarters. Later when those guns were turned around the matter was no longer laughable and required a different appreciation of the situation).

 

On a personal note this period is also where Comrade Lui met his future wife, Li San, Li San who would stick by him through the rest of his life. They had met at a reading circle after Li had heard rumors about the Black Flag having moved its main operation to Shanghai. As noted previously this reading circle was the main way to organize young recruits under the increasingly hard conditions of the Nationalist government. The circle that Li would eventually join however was not a workers’ circle since she was a daughter of a Shanghai merchant family although not known to Comrade Liu previously and had been educated in Paris. The decision was made in order to not intimidate the raw young workers and to give them space to be heard and work toward leadership to keep the worker circles separate from the young professionals and academics until the training period was over. Li had been somewhat “liberated” for the times (she wore Western clothing, spoke English and French well, lived a half-Bohemian existence with a few other such women and men in a large house just outside the settlement area) and so she was intrigued by what the reading circle provided after she had dismissed out of hand the Communists (feeling as she confided to Comrade Lui that having come from a merchant family that the Communists would do like that had done to such families in Russia in the aftermath of the revolution. Her family, or what was left of it, fled to Taiwan in 1949.) 

 

After a formal old time courtship (to appease her family, his he had lost track of when he went underground although the family name was still on placard of the rice company doing business at the family’s old location according to a source that he sent to find out about the matter.  And so this is what the personal and political situation of Comrade Liu looked like when the great Shanghai uprising blew the final bit of old China away (although that process would take another twenty plus years).

***Channeling John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Recently my old friend from high school days Josh Breslin (full name Joshua Lawrence Breslin but nobody ever called him anything but Josh except his mother, what do you expect, and some old time WASP girlfriend who tried like hell to make him, him of “the projects” born, more presentable to her leafy suburbs parents), told me about a trip that he and his longtime companion Laura took to ocean spray Big Sur out in California. He had not been on there in that part of California for many years (and neither have I although I have been to California many times since then but with not enough time to get there and chill out for a few days) but he had earlier in the year been under the spell of old “beat” king of the west coast ocean night, Jack Kerouac, after re-reading his Big Sur, a book about his unsuccessful attempts to dry out in Big Sur after the notoriety of his classic On The Road literally drove him to drink (or drink more is a better way to put it). That spell got an added boost by viewing a film based on Kerouac’s work, Big Sur, after reading the book. While the film was not nearly as evocative as the book it did provide vivid shots of Jack and company on one of the Big Sur beaches and that enflamed Josh. And so they went, went to retrace the meaning that Big Sur had had in his youth in the long gone days when he had his wanting habits on.    

See, like I said, Josh and I go back to North Adamsville High days here in Massachusetts, but more importantly later on the American West hitchhike highway where in the summer of love 1960s we were searching for, well, searching for something that we did not find then at least. But the time he told me of his journey when we met over at Jimmy’s Grille in Boston we both agreed that the search was the important thing and we had no regrets about trekking out to the coast many times looking for Eden, “looking for the garden” as we used to call it. We also agreed that we both were still looking, still had those ancient wanting habits on, and that we probably would until the end. Josh noted that strangely as he told of his time out there that while he was thrilled to “channel” the ghost of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allan Ginsberg and the rest of the “beat” gang who held forth on that sacred Big Sur beach in the time before we even had any real idea that we too wanted to be rebels against out part of society he was almost more taken by Cannery Row in Monterey, the ancient site of John Steinbeck’s classic Cannery Row although only small fragments of that area exist unsullied by a tourist hungry theme park. He and Laura had stayed in Monterey so he was able to get a better grasp of that ancient ground that he had not investigated much before. He had been there last before the theme park exploded when that ocean front was run down with closed canning factories and derelict housing.         

******

Josh Breslin was no question the illegitimate son of the kindred that John Steinbeck wrote about in his book Cannery Row and maybe if you dug down deep enough, grabbed some genealogy chart, went back enough generations, kindred of those Okie/Arkies he wrote about in The Grapes Of Wrath that migrated west in the dustbowl 1930s and landed in sunny Southern California and whose progeny would go on to fill up the surfer boy, hot rod Lincoln, biker angels, casting couch starlet blanks in the blue-pink western sky night. But maybe we should not press the relationship too stronger since his people on his mother’s side were hearty French-Canadians from up in upper Saint Lawrence River Quebec and his father from hillbilly mountain, coal mountain Kentucky and those brethren thrown out of Europe for every possible reason stayed put in the hills and hollows and did not have the energy to move west. Josh, ocean grown himself, felt the kinship that one feels for those who society threw on the scape heap with the decline of the fishing industry out there and the decline of shipbuilding in his old hometown of North Adamsville which left his father, and his family, on the same scape heap in the “golden age of America” 1950s.         

Illegitimate by the way not by some fallen birth, although I insist that he was born under some ill-meant star, but because these days Josh no longer, like in the old days travels west, travels to California using just his thumb, maybe if he had a little dough taking the bus some of the way, and one time going east to west hopping on the old freight trains, a nasty way to travel and he told me once that after that experience he would no longer berate tramps, bums, and hoboes for enduring such a method of getting west. But enough of “old days” transportation for Josh now flies to California when he feels that periodic urge to head west. Flies and has always marveled (and was thankful that he now had the wherewithal) that he could start out on the East Coast Atlantic Ocean, usually Boston, and be on the West Coast Pacific Ocean a few hours later a trip that used to take anywhere from about five days (if he grabbed a fast run to the coast trucker looking for company, even hippie boy company) to a couple of weeks if he got unlucky and was left in some place like Winnemucca in Nevada where he had to sleep on the side of the road when it got too dark while waiting for a ride after being left there by a Native American trucker who lived up in the mountains near there.   

This last trip west had been spurred by a recent re-reading of Jack Kerouac’s trying to dry out from a drunk book Big Sur so Josh had that destination on his mind when the urge hit him again. Of course along with the “don’t thumb anymore” days he no longer sleeps on the side of the road in some urine smelling, sweat-smelling paper strewn bus station, or in some make-do lean-to tent but now seeks refuge in hotels and motels which he also does not mind doing. The problem was that he could find no place listed in Big Sur for he and his lady friend, Laura, to stay so they had to stay in Monterey which led to that earlier illegitimate son reference because the last time he had been in that town he had slept on the beach, slept on the beach to the sound of the sea lions barking or whatever they call the sound sea lions make. Slept near the wharf where iterant fisherman brought their goods to market from the troublesome seas (and explained why the lazy seals like lazy humankind hovered near that landing area not having to work too hard for a hand-out meal). Slept the ragged sleep of the tramps, bums, and hoboes, feeding off their ragged stews, and drinking their rotgut Ripple. And feeling at home even though out in the “jungle,” especially for the young iterant, you were as likely to face a knife from some half-crazed rummy as a friendly “hello brother” road man.   

But means of travel and methods of accommodation, hell, the eating habits of sea lions, were not what was bothering Josh but rather that almost never-ending sense he always had that he shared plenty with the ghost of those old time denizens of the cannery rows of the world, the skid rows. So all thoughts of flights, of rental car drives, and hotels drifted from his horizon as he got off of Exit 402B on the Pacific Coast Highway and headed to downtown Monterey. He needed to stop at the CVS on Lighthouse Road in what passes for Main Street in the town for a few provisions and while there he noticed that the street had not changed that much since the last time he had seen it maybe twenty years before. Downtown Monterey is really just an adjunct to the Cannery Row dress-up theme park which attracts the tourists and still has that hard-scramble feel of having missed something. Josh knew he was home, was among kindred he though when a relic from the 1960s, a guy, who knows a rummy or a dope-head it was hard to tell, with a ZZ Top beard (long in other words), a tie-dye tee shirt and a Hawaiian hat came up to his as he was leaving the CVS and asked him for a cigarette. Since Josh no longer smoked he had to say no but gave the guy a buck toward his efforts.

As the relic passed on Josh thought in a flash about all the corner boys from his youth (behind the elementary school, Doc’s Drugstore in junior high, Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in high school where we hung together having met in class and he introduced me to Frankie Riley the king of the corner boy night) a goodly number of them who slipped through the cracks and wound up on some skid row somewhere, or like his best friend Peter Markin from elementary school face down in some dusty Mexican town, Sonora, with two bullets in his heart after a drug deal went awry). Thought about the “brothers under the bridge,” guys who did not make it back to the “real world” from Vietnam days who set up an alternative world in the arroyos, along the riverbanks, along the railroad trestles of Southern California, and guys, tramps, bums, and hoboes whom he wandered with when he had his own addictions to fight, his own lost “real world.” That got him thinking that he should take a walk along the street, see whether any more ghosts showed up. He would not go to the Cannery Row façade since after reading brochures and seeing how everything pointed to that destination that was strictly for touristas but walk Lighthouse after leaving Laura at the motel to freshen up.           

And he was not mistaken. In a few blocks, maybe ten, he passed the usual Goodwill, Salvation Army (the Sallies had saved his skin more than one time with a hot meal, some clothes, a bunk bed for a few days at a time all for the price of having to listen to their version of the “good book” a small price to pay then for what ailed him, what addiction he was trying to go “cold turkey” on and he had always afterward put a few bucks in their buckets at Christmas time), and assorted used clothing stores (back in the day in places like Harvard Square, Telegraph in Berkeley, Soho in New York City, such stores along with the ubiquitous Army and Navy outlets were prized places to “re-invent” yourself as a dreamlike fantasy soldier, a swarthy pirate,  a Victorian gentleman or lady, a prairie pioneer complete with gingham dress  or buckskin jacket, some 1930s movie actress but now such places are for those a step below Wal-mart in the bustling world), run down cafes (dark lights to hide the dirt, rough food, poor service  unlike even the most poorly run Hayes-Bickford where the food was rough, aged before your, eyes and the coffee unspeakable but the company was worth the price of admission), the barely surviving pizza parlors (one on every corner it seemed run by the someone in the latest wave of immigrants hungry to make it in America and willing to work long hours but coming up short on the art of pizza-making unlike back in North Adamsville corner boy night when Tonio twirled the dough and made your senses come alive with the smell of freshly baked doughs), the ubiquitous tattoo parlors (despite the current craze for identity tattoos some of them quite elaborate and comment-worthy for everybody from high-end  celebrities to low-end hoodlum bikers these places still looked like you had better check with your doctor after leaving), the used book and record stores all looking like they were ready to close their doors forever with the next ill economic wind that came through the town (those old used books with their musty smells and broken bindings hiding many treasures which may not survive the digital age  and the records scratched and wobbly but again holding many treasures). Even what passed for one of the “upscale” places, a 1950s and 1960s retro-hamburger place where he stopped for a light lunch was barely making it although the food, the service, the posters of the usual suspects James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Elvis and the like, and the be-bop music spinning some stuff from early Motown to doo wop to Beatles from that period told him that in another locale like Harvard Square or maybe in Frisco they would be standing in line out around the block to get in. Such is the fate of cannery row towns when the main industry goes south and all that is left is the relics, buildings and people.        

A Cannery row flashback as Josh turned around after a few blocks to head back to the motel to do his own freshening up as the ghosts of the past passed by in his head; tramps, bums, and hoboes met on Monterey pebbled beaches (and remembrances of some old time hobo, Lightning Shorty, telling him and all who would listen the differences between those three categories of wayfarers, taking the gaff from a couple of guys whom he called bums who stood just below his royal hobo status and a guy who was later was found on the beach newspapers for a pillow dead as a doornail, heart attack at forty-three when he looked about eighty to youthful eyes), sweet sand interrupted by belches and sea lion barks (we agreed “or whatever they call that sound” and that the buggers were lazy just waiting on the rocks for the trawlers to come in and throw their refuge into the sea), smoke fire at night to ward off the chill burning down to embers as dawn came up, maybe make an olio mishmash from the meat and vegetable leavings found behind  some grocery store (no food pantries or heroic soup line kitchens then by kindly church people, not that he remembered anyway), drinking Ripple wine (or worse –“what’s the word, Thunderbird, what’s the price, forty twice”), smoking old Bull Durham rolled [really nasty smoke and what the hell Josh had never learned how to roll right, always left too much paper unrolled or did not twist the ends right, same with mary jane rolls despite his many experiences]. Where had that brethren gone, gone with the tide maybe, gone after catching some westbound freight (going to be with Father Death for those who are clueless about what that expression means), or some Southern Pacific trestle for a new home. Adios, pals.

Next night, a Friday night, a trip, a Laura-urged trip, to Cannery Row proper and bang, bang, kindred, maybe the long lost progeny of those long gone brethren. Most of the wayfarers had kids strewn across the land mainly still in California from what they said although how they would know is anybody’s guess. When the brethren high-tailed it they were moving fast, moving away from anchored life, from bills and mortgages, from the damn nagging wife and whining children. Some men are not built for such things, not built for much but that wandering gene deeply embedded in their DNA, a gene that could have been easily passed on to that night’s refugees. All the father-less children looking for their moment in the sun, for somebody to look their way and show the world that they had made it without the wandering old men.

Josh generation kindred seeking momentary immortality cruising Cannery Row in hopped-up (and loud hopped up to boot) canary yellow Camaros, two-toned ’57 Chevys, chrome-infested Harleys, sporty Triumphs, sportier MGs, sleek Plymouths when such cars were sleek also two-toned, Mustangs invoking memories of other Sallys, Sallys to ride in the freshen air beach summer nights, Jags that looked like Jags and not like one of twelve other cars, hell, the works showing off their sense of the past, their mechanical abilities, their desire, and their showmanship.

Funny Josh mentioned to Laura California back a generation before ours, ours the generation of ‘ 68 for those asking, the generation that came of age after the blight of the Great Depression and surviving a slogging war looking for kicks, looking for something other than “from hunger” took to the great blue-pink American West night and in little back lot garages or in some permissive father’s garage put together the “hot rod” to seek kingdoms in the drive-in movies, drive-in restaurant, drive-in everything if you had that “boss” car that would get you noticed. Here the now long-toothed progeny, those who could not shake their youthful fantasies and why not, were hovering the air of the night remembering back to those ancient times when such horsepower meant you were king (or now queen too) of the road, the great edge city highway looking for the heart of Saturday night. Old Tom Wolfe, the guy who explored the western wild boy hot-rod valley boy scene (and the surfer scene Pacific coast scene too), would have surely gotten a  chuckle out seeing blonde- wigged grandmothers, grizzly-bearded old pappies, handkerchief-hatted  bikers, riding in tandem reviving ancient thoughts (and gathering many flash photos from convenient tourista cellphone cameras). Josh knew he did.      

But enough on to Big Sur, on to Jack’s sea, Jack’s great big walloping zen-om-splish-splash wash, splash again great big white crested sand blasting away rock from eternity, Jack’s love sea  (although Jack could have been a proper Cannery Row denizen as well, an East Coast mill town boy who would have no trouble with cannery kin). Each wave tearing into the hard granite like- stone (stone etched in old eastern towns, towns like Josh grow up North Adamsville, not far from Jack’s river of life, Merrimac river of life and maybe haunted in the back of his mind that those torrents washing over his mill town river land and those torrents washing the craggy stone clean were kindred and speak, speak mighty torrent), endlessly searching for that soft spot, that place where the stone like some ancient New England grist mill mashes the rock to the shore, makes the rock humble before the great waves. And too before those rocks crumble, turn to sand in ten thousand, hell, a million washings, turned to pebbles, turned to human size rocks, rocks, piles of rocks, piles of rocks spaced apart almost like some human cemetery, piled so that some cranky anthropologist in ten thousand years will remark, remark to a candid world, if candor still holds some virtue, that weren’t those “primitives” crazy to worship the sea gods, that like old Pharaoh they craved that kind of immortality. And the wind provided the protection so that some future vandals would not scourge the grains of sand when they desired to pay homage to their own sense of immortality. Who needs to say more.     

And then back to Cannery Row. Sitting where some old sardine factory stood unused and unloved after many years of service (including a copper-plated turned green searing memorial to deep-sea divers lost in the struggle against the sea, the struggle to bring the strange sardines in for canning), broken and torn down after years of bringing the fish in Josh looked up and saw a sculpture, a sculpture centered on the novelist John Steinbeck. Steinbeck who in his time made infamous Cannery Row famous (although the numbers who would be able to identify his name with the place or the great everyman and everywoman Joad Okie California migration classic that he wrote, The Grapes of Wrath, is probably a couple of generations later fairly slim except for English majors and an off-hand skid row aficionado like Josh who spent time there before he got some of his addictions under control and abandoned the places where skid row and its inhabitants survived) and his friend, a marine biologist, immortalized in Cannery Row, a handful of skid row bums made so after the sardine industry went south, and they, unskilled in their time for other gainful employment went on the bum, made themselves local characters by the time Josh met them along the beachfronts and along the flop house and charity soup line circuit. He told me he would tell me about that later, some other time.

What Josh did tell me about that night was about “Madame” Flora (and she was no British noble figure so you know what kind of Madame she was) who ran the best, the fairest, and the easiest to enter if you had the money whorehouse on that section of the coast back in the day. Right across from the Monterey Police Station so you knew Madame was a sport and “connected.”  As Josh remembered Madame and her sweet place he had to also remember Thea, or at least that is what she called herself when he knew her, Madame’s best girl.

Thea had been caught up in the whole West Coast hippie thing (she had been in Frisco when the summer of love exploded in 1967 a couple of years before we got there), had later developed a serious cocaine habit (after going through the alphabet of lesser drugs, legal and illegal mostly illegal) and had taken to “muling” like a lot of snow freaks to feed the habit, got burned when her man decided that he was smarter that the damn Mexican braceros he was working for as a distributor and found himself face down in a back alley of Tia Juana with his face blown off when he thought ripping off a brick was an easy road to independence, and she needed to make her own way. (Josh cringed when he related that part of the story since he knew I knew about Peter Markin and what had happened to him down in Sonora.) Her own way then being given a room at Madame’s who saw in Thea’s airy funny ways and still good looks a cash cow (good looks especially in dark rooms with guys with serious dough and serious and unusual wanting habits which Thea had the book on, the Kama Sutra book). Josh said that in those days, the days of his struggling with his addictions, well after the days when we were carefree in California and thought the new world we were exploring would last forever rather than the ebb where we caught the tide going as we headed west Thea reminded him of Butterfly Swirl. That name, the moniker of a hippie princess from Carlsbad down in Southern California, who we met (and fought over) in Frisco brought instant recognition. She after spending some time with Josh eventually went with me and we lived in Oakland for a while before she headed back south to her surfer boyfriend when it turned out that the hippie princess life was not for her. Butterfly Swirl was this vision out of some Botticelli painting all ethereal, all wispy and virginal although she knew how to make a man’s toes curl. No question Josh would be drawn to such a woman even if she was a faded version of some youthful lust.      

Thea proved to be resourceful at what she did, and so she had worked her way up to Madame’s best girl when Josh ran into her in Carmel a short time after his own struggle with a snow addiction had finally been conquered where she had stopped in order to buy some jewelry and he had spotted her on the street looking lost (directions lost) and they struck up a conversation winding up sitting in a café drinking coffee and wine for a while. Once she told Josh her profession, which she was up front and not bashful about describing, after they had talked for a while he told her as they parted that he might come to see her at Madame’s sometime. She smiled.  And he did. And Thea, a child of the 1960s and of some sense of sexual adventure, some sense that there was more than the missionary position to the sex act took him around the world. He would run into her every once in a while and they would go out for a few drinks. But Josh always paid the freight when he saw her at Madame’s for his occasional trips around the world. Josh, a bit melancholy when describing her talents, said she was something, not a hooker with a heart of gold but a smart intelligent women who took what she could do best and rode with it. Then one night Josh went to Madame’s and she was gone, had left with some guy in a three-piece suit who Madame said had promised Thea the world.  Adios Thea, adios pal.