As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I Enters Its Second Year-The Anti-War Resistance Begins- Rosa Luxemburg

As The 100^th Anniversary Of World War I Enters Its Second Year-The Anti-War Resistance Begins-   

The events leading up to World War I (known as the Great War before the world got clogged up with expansive wars in need of other numbers and names and reflecting too in that period before World War II a certain sense of “pride” in having participated in such an epic adventure even if it did mow down the flower of European youth from all classes) from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources had all the earmarks of a bloodbath early on once the industrial-sized carnage set in with the stalemated fronts (as foretold by the blood-letting in the American Civil War and the various “small” wars in Asia, Africa, and, uh, Europe in the mid to late 19^th century once war production on a mass scale followed in the train of other industrial production). Also trampled underfoot in the opposing trenches, or rather thrown in the nearest trash bin of the their respective parliamentary buildings were the supposedly eternal pledges against war in defense of one’s own capitalist-imperialist  nation-state against the working masses and their allies of other countries by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations (Anarchists, Syndicalists and their various off-shoots)representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those imperialist capitalist powers and their hangers-on in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. All those beautifully written statements and resolutions that clogged up the international conferences with feelings of solidarity were some much ill-fated wind once bullet one came out of gun one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s  prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time as being on “the planet without a passport” was then as now, dangerous to the lives of left-wing revolutionaries), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America “Big Bill” Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war), many of his IWW (Industrial Workers Of the World) comrades and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “Club Fed” for speaking the truth about American war aims in a famous Cleveland speech and, fittingly, ran for president in 1920 out of his Atlanta Penitentiary jail cell),  were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

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

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

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

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

Rosa Luxemburg

Either Or

(April 1916)

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First Published: April, 1916: Banned in Germany.
Source: Rosa Luxemburg: Selected political writings, edited and introduced by Robert Looker.
Translated: (from the German) W.D. Graf.
Transcription/Markup: Ted Crawford/Brian Baggins with special thanks to Robert Looker for help with permissions.
Copyright: Random House, 1972, ISBN/ISSN: 0224005960. Printed with the permission of Random House. Luxemburg Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2004.

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I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Revelation, III 15:16

Comrades! You are all aware of the division that exists in the bosom of the intra-party opposition. Many of you who are not in agreement with the present state of the official party or with its policy of operating through official channels will at first be extremely distressed at this division. ‘Quarrelling again already!’ many will cry indignantly. Is it not then necessary that at least all those who are making a front against the parliamentary majority stand together firmly and act in unison? Does it not weaken the opposition and add grist to the mill of the majority’s policy when those who are pursuing the same ends – i.e. to bring the party back to the path of a proletarian class policy based on principle – quibble and quarrel with each other?’

Certainly, Comrades! If it were only a question of personal disputes, of trifling matters, of some kind of minor disputatiousness, of an oversight or of so-called ‘speaking out of turn’ on the part of a few individuals, then every serious person must call it an outrage, indeed a crime, if such petty matters were to cause a split in the opposition.
But this is not so, Comrades! What has caused this division is fundamental questions of policy, the whole conception of the ways and means that are supposed to lead us from out of the party’s present desperate situation into more worthy circumstances.
Let us consider what is at stake! On August 4th, 1914, official German Social Democracy, and with it the Inter-national, collapsed miserably. Everything that, during the preceding fifty years, we had preached to the people, that we had declared to be our sacred principles, that we had proclaimed countless times in speeches, in brochures, in newspapers, in leaflets – all at once all that proved to be empty clap-trap. Suddenly, as though by evil magic, the party of the proletarian international class struggle has become a national liberal party. Our organizational strength, of which we were so proud, has proved to be completely impotent, and where we were once respected and feared mortal enemies of bourgeois society, we have now become the irresolute and justly despised tools of our mortal enemy, the imperialist bourgeoisie. In other countries, socialism has fallen more or less deeply and the proud old cry, ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite! ‘ has been transformed on the battlefields into the command, ‘Proletarians of all countries, cut each other’s throats!’
Never in world history has a political party gone so miserably bankrupt, never has an exalted ideal been so disgracefully betrayed and dragged through the mud!
Thousands and thousands of proletarians could cry bloody tears of shame and anger because all that was so dear and holy to them has now become the object of the whole world’s ridicule and scorn. Thousands upon thousands are burning with the desire to wipe out the stains, to remove the disgrace of the party, so that they can again call themselves Social Democrats with their heads held high and without shame.
But each comrade must keep one thing in mind: such a sharp reverse can be overcome only by a determined, clear and ruthless policy, Half measures, vacillation, timid see-saw policies can never help us. Now each of us must say to himself: either-or. Either we are national liberal sheep in the coat of the socialist lion, in which case we avoid any playing at opposition; or we are fighters of the proletarian International in the full meaning of the term, in which case we must set ourselves to the work of opposition, in which case the banner of the class struggle and inter-nationalism must be unfurled openly and at all costs. Party Comrades, look at the so-called opposition until now as represented by Ledebour, Haase, and their friends. Having obediently tolerated the granting of war credits in the Reichstag on four consecutive occasions, thus sharing in the guilt for the betrayal of socialism, they finally plucked up the courage to vote against these credits in the plenary session of December 21st, 1915. At last! the workers said to themselves. Finally a public renunciation of the policy of nationalistic humbug. At last at least twenty men in parliament who cherish socialism! Their delusion, however, was short-lived, and only those who regard events quite superficially, without investigating matters more thoroughly, could express unqualified joy at this ‘act of courage’. Accompanying their refusal of the credits, Geyer and his comrades in the Reichstag offered an explanation which destroyed all the good they had done with their negative vote. Why did they vote against the credits this time? According to their explanation because, ‘Our frontiers are secure.’ What these worthy people hoped to accomplish with these words, to whom they were addressing them, is their own affair. To the outsider who is not initiated into that grand diplomacy of the backrooms, which might have suggested an answer, the issue is simple: the twenty voted against the credits ostensibly because the German frontiers were secure. That is to say, not because we oppose militarism and the war in principle, not because this war is an imperialist crime against all peoples, but because Hindenburg, Mackensen and Kluck have already wiped out enough Russians, Frenchmen and Belgians and have gained a firm footing in their countries – this is why a German Social Democrat can indulge in the luxury of voting against war expenditures! In doing this, however, Geyer and his comrades are basically in line with the majority policy. This means that they support the brazen humbug which makes this war out to have been a defensive war from the outset, aimed at protecting our frontiers, What distinguishes Geyer and comrades from the majority, then, is not that they hold a different view, based on principle, of the whole position towards the war, but merely that they assess the military situation differently. According to Scheidemann, David and Heine, the German frontiers are not yet secure; according to Haase, Ledebour and Geyer, they are already secure. However, every intelligent man must admit that, if one goes into the precise assessment of the military situation, the standpoint of the Scheidemann-David-Heine group is more consistent than that of Ledebour and Haase. For who would guarantee that the fortunes of war shall continue to smile upon German militarism? Which intelligent general would want to swear today that the worm cannot turn, that, for example, the Russians could not march into East Prussia again? And if this were to happen, what then? Then the Ledebour-Geyer-Haase group, in consequence of its own explanation, must once again vote for war credits in the Reichstag! These are not tactics based on principle, but a policy of speculation tailored to the momentary situation in the theatre of war, the famous case-by-case policy, the old opportunistic see-saw upon which the party performed magnificently on August 4th, 1914.
Yet there is another, serious side to the matter. If today the German Social Democrats, according to the Ledebour-Haase explanation, may vote against war credits because the German frontiers are secure, what is the situation of the French, Belgian, Russian and Serbian comrades in whose countries the enemy is standing? The simplest worker can readily understand that the principle contained in their explanation presents the comrades in the other countries with the most wonderful pretext for justifying their nationalistic policies. Indeed, some French comrades have already taken it over from the nationalist majority as the best reinforcement of their own attitude. So once again we find that the International is divided, and the socialists of the various countries are following not a common policy against the war and the ruling classes, but are fighting against each other, just as the high command of imperialism has ordered. Here, then, we are returning precisely to the basis of the majority policy that has destroyed us and the International.
And now we ask, Comrades, if one regards events seriously and critically, was the vote cast by Ledebour, Haase and comrades on December 21st a step forward? Was it the act of deliverance which we were all awaiting with anguished hearts, for which the masses were languishing? No and no again! That vote, given that explanation, was a step forward and a step backward; it was another sweet delusion that things would turn out for the better, but the disillusionment behind it was inevitably all the more bitter.
And disillusionment followed hard on the heels of the deception. It is obvious that the vote against war credits, even if it were not botched completely by the pathetic explanation, did not exhaust all the opposition’s policies. It could have been merely the first step on a new road, a first perceptible signal which would have to be followed all along the line by a vigorous and consistent action in the spirit of the class struggle. What have we witnessed instead? Ledebour, Haase and comrades have since then rested on the laurels of their refusal of credits – they are leading an unreal existence.
Let us take just a few examples. In the great ‘Baralong Affair’, the Social-Democratic parliamentary party, as a result of Noske’s speech and his howls for bloody retaliatory measures against the English, has piled such unprecedented humiliation upon itself that even respectable bourgeois liberals – if such a human species still existed on German soil – would have to be embarrassed at its actions. After August 4th, after all that followed upon it, it seemed that our party had been dragged down as far as it could go. But the social imperialists, so ready to ‘change their views’, continue to present us with new surprises. Their political and moral corruption, it seems, cannot be measured against conventional standards at all. When in the ‘Baralong Affair’ they stirred up the people’s bestial warring instincts, they outdid even the conservatives and put them to shame. And following this unprecedented event, what did a man of the opposition, Comrade Ledebour, do? Instead of charging into the fray and denouncing Noske, instead of refuting any association with Noske and his peers, Ledebour himself chimed in with this howl, accepted in principle the retaliatory policy of Noske and comrades, and was only able to bring himself to appeal for moderation in the application of this beastly principle.
According to the stenographic report, Ledebour’s incredible words of January 15th read as follows: ‘Gentlemen, my judgement of the Baralong Case, of the outrage committed by English sailors against brave German soldiers on the high seas, is at one with that of all the preceding speakers. I shall not attempt to add to their statements in any way.’
And those ‘preceding speakers’ were: Noske of the social imperialists, Spahn of the Centre Party, Fischbeck of the radicals, Knutenoertel of the conservatives! Ledebour’s judgement of the affair was ‘at one’ with theirs.
This again lends support in principle to the majority policy of the socialist turncoats and is another lapse into a united inter-party truce with the bourgeois parties – and this three weeks after the banner of the class struggle had ostensibly been raised.
Let us take another example. In the system of so-called ‘questions in the House’, the Reichstag deputies have been handed an invaluable weapon which enables them to offer constant resistance to the government and the bourgeois majority in this lamentable assembly of yes-men and obedient Mamelukes of the military dictatorship, to harass the imperialist phalanx, to arouse constantly the masses of the people. In the hands of twenty resolute representatives of the people, the system of questions in the House could become a real rhino-whip with which to flay unmercifully the backs of the imperialist rabble. Instead of this, what do we see? It does not even occur to Ledehour, Haase and comrades to avail themselves of this important method of struggle. Not once have they attempted to apply it. They are happy to leave it to Karl Liebknecht to parry and thrust alone in all directions against the yelping dog pack surrounding him; for their own part, however, they are apparently afraid of sticking their necks out, for they simply do not dare to kick against the pricks and to get out from under the thumb of the parliamentary party majority.
And this is not all! When the imperialist Reichstag majority, including the majority of the Social-Democratic parliamentary party, made a move to destroy the weapon of the system of questions in the House by subjecting it to the arbitrary censorship of the Reichstag President, Ledebour, Haase and comrades did not lift a finger. These alleged leaders of the opposition supported a violent blow against a democratic right of the people’s representatives, against an important method of arousing the masses. They had a hand in this new betrayal by the parliamentary party majority.
And what was the situation on January 17th, when the Reichstag debated military questions, when an excellent opportunity arose of criticizing mercilessly all the doings of the dictatorship of the sabre and the bestialities of the war, of elucidating the overall situation and of bringing up all the main problems of the global crisis? Again Ledebour, Haase and comrades failed completely. A bare four weeks after their ostensible declaration of battle and transfer of allegiance on December 21st, there followed a miserable fiasco. A petty and circumloquacious discussion of inessential trifles – which had been common in the bleak everyday practice of the parliamentary tread-mill in peace-time – was all that these leaders of the opposition could bring themselves to do on the military question.
This, Comrades, is the so-called opposition as understood by Ledebour, Haase and their friends. Not a trace of consistency, of energy, of pluck, of keenness of principle; nothing but indecision, weakness and illusion. But we have truly had enough of indecision, weakness and illusion, and we know what effects they have had on us.
No one would call into question the good will of a Ledebour, a Haase, an Adolf Hoffmann. The road to Hell, however, is paved with good intentions. What we need now is the strength, consistency and keenness with which our enemies, the ruling classes, are muzzling us and forcing us under the bloody yoke of imperialism. Real men, undaunted and rugged fighters, are what we need, not see-saw politicians, not weaklings, not timid stock-takers.
And that the so-called opposition does not meet these requirements is best demonstrated by the leaflet that Comrades Ledebour and Adolf Hoffmann have just published.
This leaflet criticizes harshly and disparagingly the guiding principles which a number of comrades from various places in Germany have accepted as the central principle of their view and of their tasks at the present historical moment. We shall quote them in their entirety at the conclusion of this article so that every comrade can judge them for himself. These guiding principles are nothing less than an open, honest and candid formulation of the facts and events that the world war created in the labour movement, and they are, moreover, the consistent and resolute application of our old party principles to the present situation and to the tasks facing us all if we finally decide to put international socialism into practice.
And now Ledebour and Hoffmann are using their peremptory veto to stifle this very tendency! It is impertinent, they say, to make the Socialist International the governing centre of the whole labour movement; it is impertinent to restrict the national centres’ powers of free decision vis-à-vis the war; it is impertinent and impracticable to place the International above the officials of German Social Democracy and of other socialist parties. The International should remain only a loose federative association of national labour parties completely free in their tactics both in war and in peace, just as it was before the outbreak of the world war.
Comrades! Here is the virtual nodal point of the whole situation; it includes the vital question of the labour movement. Our party failed on August 4th, in the same way that the socialist parties of other countries failed, just because the International turned out to be an empty phrase, because the resolutions of the International congresses proved to be empty, powerless words. If we wish to do away with this disgraceful condition, if we wish to prevent a future repetition of the bankruptcy of August 4th, 1914, then there is only one road and one salvation for us: to change international solidarity from a beautiful-sounding phrase into a real, deadly serious and sacred maxim, to fashion the Socialist International from a lifeless dummy into an actual power, and to enlarge it into an impregnable dam against which the heavy waves of capitalist imperialism will break from now on. If we wish to work our way up out of the abyss of humiliation into which we have fallen, then we must teach every German and French and other class-conscious proletarian to believe that:
The fraternization of the workers of the world is for me the highest and most sacred thing on earth; it is my guiding star, my ideal, my fatherland. I would rather forfeit my life than be unfaithful to this ideal!
And now Comrades Ledebour and Hoffmann would hear nothing of all this. After the war they would simply restore the old wretchedness. Then as now, each national party will have a free hand to treat the resolutions of the International as abominably as they please; again every few years we will witness splendid congresses, beautiful speeches, flaming enthusiasm, resounding manifestos and bold resolutions, but when the time comes to act, the International will again be completely impotent. Like a ghost in the night confronted with bloody reality, it will fade away before the mendacious phrase, ‘defence of the fatherland’! Ledebour and comrades have thus learnt nothing from this terrible war! Comrades, there is no worse indictment of a politician, of a fighter, than that he does not know how to learn from the hard school of history. No one who has to make decisions amidst the urgency and tumult of the historical world struggle is immune from error. But not to understand the mistakes made, not to be able to learn from them, to emerge again and again unenlightened from all humiliations – this is bordering on the criminal. Comrades, if not even this ocean of blood through which we are wading, if not even this terrible collapse of the International is able to lead us to a better understanding and on to a firm path, then we can truly let them bury us. Then let us have an end to the phrases about internationalism, to the same old lie, to the deception of the masses who will justly rebuff us if, when this war is over, we, as the old, incorrigible phrase-mongers, propagate the idea of the fraternization of peoples without ever desiring to put it into practice.
Here again, Comrades, it is a question of either-or! Either we nakedly and shamelessly betray the International as Heine, David, Scheidemann, et al. have done; or we take the International in deadly seriousness and attempt to extend it into a firm stronghold, a bulwark, of the international socialist proletariat and of world peace. Today there is no longer room for any middle way, for vacillation and indecision.
And for this reason it would be impossible for real oppositional elements to act jointly with people who share the standpoint of Comrades Ledebour and Hoffmann.
Comrades! Do not let yourselves be taken in by the old catch-phrase that in unity there is strength. Now even Scheidemann and Ebert of the Party Executive are trying to peddle that one. Yes indeed there is strength in unity, but in a unity of firm, inner conviction, not of an external, mechanistic coupling of elements which are inwardly gravitating away from each other. Strength lies not in numbers, but in the spirit, in the clarity, in the energy that inspires us. How strong we fancied ourselves to be, how we boasted of our four million supporters before the war, and how our strength, like a house of cards, collapsed at the first test. Here too it is important to learn from our disappointed hopes and not to lapse into the old mistakes! If we wish to make an energetic front against the dominant course charted by the party officials, against the parliamentary party majority, then a clear, consistent and energetic policy is necessary. We must look neither to the left nor the right, but rally under a visible banner such as the guiding principles which Ledebour and comrades have just rejected. Away with all indecision and vacillation! Keep the goal firmly in sight and take up the class struggle ruthlessly all along the line in the spirit of the International! This is our task. This is the terrain upon which we will rally together. All who seriously and honestly desire a resurrection of socialism will come with us, if not today, then tomorrow.
Rally everywhere, Comrades, behind the guiding principles that point out our road onward, and use all your strength to transform your thoughts into deeds! Throughout this country, in all countries, the mass of the proletariat, bled white and enslaved, is waiting for a resolute proletarian policy which alone can bring it deliverance from the Hell of existing conditions. Our task, our duty, is to hasten the hour of this deliverance by exerting ourselves to the utmost in ruthlessly carrying on the class struggle!
Therefore, long live the class struggle! Long live the International!

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A large number of comrades from all parts of Germany have adopted the following guiding principles which represent an application of the Erfurt Programme to the contemporary problems of international socialism.

1. The world war has decimated the results of forty years’ work of European socialism by: devaluing the significance of the revolutionary working class as a factor of political power, destroying the prestige of socialism, breaking up the proletarian International, leading its sections into a fratricidal war against each other and chaining the desires and hopes of the masses in the most important capitalist countries to the course of imperialism.
2. By consenting to war credits and the proclaimed Burgfriede [domestic truce], the official leaders of the socialist parties in Germany, France and England (with the exception of the Independent Labour Party) have bolstered imperialism’s power, leave induced the masses to bear patiently the misery and horrors of the war and have thus contributed to the unbridled release of imperialistic frenzies, to the prolongation of the slaughter and to the increase in the number of its victims. They therefore share in the responsibility for the war and its consequences.
3. These tactics employed by the official socialist party leaders of the belligerent countries, above all of Germany, until then the leading country in the International, signify a betrayal of the most elementary principles of international socialism, of the vital interests of the working class, of all the peoples’ democratic interests. Because of them, socialist policies in those countries in which the party leaders remained faithful to their duties, namely, Russia, Serbia, Italy and – with one exception – Bulgaria, are also condemned to impotence.
4. When the official Social-Democratic parties of the leading countries abandoned the class struggle during the war and deferred it until after the war, they granted the ruling classes in all countries a respite which enabled them to strengthen immensely their economic, political and moral positions at the expense of the proletariat.
5. The world war serves neither the needs of national defence nor any of the economic or political interests of the masses. It is solely the result of imperialist rivalries between the capitalist classes of various countries for world domination and for a monopoly to impoverish and oppress the territories not yet ruled by capitalism. In this era of unfettered imperialism, there can no longer be national wars. National interests serve only as a method of deceiving the working masses in order to make them useful to their mortal enemy, imperialism.
6. For no oppressed nation can freedom and independence blossom forth from the politics of the imperialist states and from the imperialist war. The small nations, whose ruling classes are appendages and accessories of their class comrades in the large nations, are only pawns in the imperialist game played by the great powers. They too, like the working masses, are being misused as tools during the war, and will be sacrificed to capitalist interests after the war.
7. Under these circumstances, every defeat and every victory in the present world war signifies a defeat for socialism and democracy. However the war may end – unless by the revolutionary intervention of the inter-national proletariat – militarism, international divisions and global economic rivalries will be strengthened. The war is increasing capitalist exploitation and political re-action within each country, weakening the control of public opinion and debasing parliament into an increasingly obedient instrument of militarism. In this way the present world war is simultaneously developing all the pre-conditions for new wars.
8. World peace cannot be secured by such utopian or basically reactionary plans as international courts of arbitration composed of capitalist diplomats, diplomatic agreements concerning ‘disarmament’, ‘freedom of the seas’, ‘repeal of the laws of piracy’, ‘European federations’, ‘middle-European customs unions’, ‘national buffer states’, and the like. Imperialism, militarism and wars will not be abolished or damned so long as the rule of the capitalist classes continues uncontested. The only method of successfully resisting them, the only guarantee of world peace, is the international proletariat’s capacity for political action and its revolutionary will to throw its power behind the struggle.
9. Imperialism, as the final phase and highest stage of development of the political world domination of capitalism, is the common mortal enemy of the proletariat of all countries. But imperialism shares with the earlier phases of capitalism the fate of strengthening the power of its mortal enemy in proportion as it continues to develop. Imperialism hastens the concentration of capital, the attrition of the middle classes, the growth of the proletariat; it arouses the growing resistance of the masses and thus leads to the intensification of class conflicts. In war, as in peace, the front line of the proletarian class struggle must be concentrated against imperialism. For the international proletariat the struggle against imperialism is at the same time the struggle for political power in the State, the decisive conflict between socialism and capitalism. The ultimate goal of socialism will be realized by the international proletariat only if the latter, summoning up all its strength and readiness for sacrifice, forms a front against imperialism all along the line and raises the demand of ‘war on war!’ to the guiding principle of its practical policies.
10. For this purpose, the main task of socialism today is aimed at combining the proletariat of all countries into a living revolutionary power, forging it into the decisive factor of political life – for which it is historically qualified – by means of a strong international organization holding uniform tactics and having a capacity for political action both in war and in peace.
11. The Second International was destroyed by the war. Its inadequacy was proved by its inability to construct a real dam against the process of fragmentation into national groups in the war or to execute joint tactics and actions by the proletariat in all countries.
12. In view of the betrayal by the official representatives of the belligerent countries’ socialist parties of the aims and interests of the working class, in view of their rejection of the proletarian International in favour of the policies of bourgeois imperialism, it is a vital necessity for socialism to create a new workers’ International to take over the leadership and unification of the revolutionary class struggle against imperialism in all countries.

The new International, if it is to fulfil its historical task, must rest upon the following basic principles:

1. The class struggle within each bourgeois state against the ruling classes, and the international solidarity of the proletariat of all countries shall be two inseparable maxims of the working class in its universal historical struggle for liberation. There can be no socialism outside the international solidarity of the proletariat and there can be no socialism without the class struggle. The socialist proletariat cannot renounce the class struggle and international solidarity, either in war or in peace, without committing suicide.
2. The class action of the proletariat of all countries, both in war and in peace, must be aimed at the main goal of combatting imperialism and preventing wars. The parliamentary action, the trade-union action and all activities of the labour movement must be subordinate to the end of setting the proletariat of each country as strongly as possible against the national bourgeoisie, of emphasizing at every step the conflict between the two, and at the sane time of bringing into the foreground and affirming the international solidarity of the proletariat of all countries.
3. The class organization of the proletariat shall be centred around the International. In peace-time the inter-national shall decide on the tactics to be employed by the national sections on questions of militarism, colonial policy, trade policy, May Day celebrations and on the tactics to be adhered to in war-time.
4. The duty to execute the resolutions of the International shall take precedence over all other organizational duties. National sections that contravene its resolutions shall forfeit their membership in the International.
5. In the struggles against imperialism and war, the decisive power can be employed only by the compact masses of the proletariat of all countries. The tactics of the national sections shall thus be directed primarily the broad masses’ capacity for political action and resolute initiative, securing the international co-ordination of mass actions, and building the political and trade-union organizations in such a way that their mediation at all times guarantees the speedy and energetic co-operation of all sections and that the will of the International is translated into actions by the broadest working masses.
6. The immediate task of socialism shall be the intellectual liberation of the proletariat from the guardianship of the bourgeoisie as manifest in the influence of nationalistic ideology. The national sections must gear their agitation in parliament and in the press towards the denunciation of the second-hand phraseology of nationalism as an instrument of bourgeois rule. The only defence of all true national freedom is today the revolutionary class struggle against imperialism. The fatherland of the proletariat, the defence of which must take precedence over all else, is the socialist International.

---

Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive

I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With The Late Odetta In Mind

I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind

 

 

 

They say that the blues, you know, the quintessential black musical contribution to the American songbook along with first cousin jazz that breaks you out of your depression about whatever ails you or the world, was formed down in the Mississippi muds, down in some sweat-drenched bayou, down in some woody hollow all near Mister’s plantation, mill, or store. Well they might be right in a way about how it all started in America as a coded response to Mister’s, Master’s, Captain’s wicked perverse ways back in slavery times, later back in Mister James Crow times (now too but in a different code, but the same old Mister do this and not that, do that but not this just like when old James ran the code). I do believe however they are off by several maybe more generations and off by a few thousand miles from its origins in hell-bent Africa, hell-bent when Mister’s forbears took what he thought was the measure of some poor grimy “natives” and shipped them in death slave boats and brought them to the Mississippi muds, bayous and hollows (those who survived the horrendous middle passage without being swallowed up by the unfriendly. Took peoples, proud Nubians who had created very sharp civilizations when Mister’s forbears were wondering what the hell a spoon was for when placed in their dirty clenched fingers, still wondered later how the heck to use the damn thing, and why and uprooted them whole.          

Uprooted you hear but somehow that beat, that tah, tat, tah, tah, tat, tah played on some stretched string tightened against some cabin post by young black boys kept Africa home alive. Kept it alive while women, mothers, grandmothers and once in a while despite the hard conditions some great-grandmother who nursed and taught the little ones the old home beat, made them keep the thing alive. Kept alive too Mister’s forced on them religion strange as it was, kept the low branch spirituals that mixed with blues alive in plain wood churches but kept it alive. So a few generations back black men took all that sweat, anger, angst, humiliation, and among themselves “spoke” blues on juke joint no electricity Saturday nights and sang high collar blues come Sunday morning plain wood church time.  Son House, Charley Patton, Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt and a lot of guys who went to their graves undiscovered in the sweat sultry Delta night carried on, and some sisters too, some younger sisters who heard the beat and heard the high collar Sunday spirituals. Some sisters like Odetta, big-voiced, who made lots of funny duck searching for roots white college students mainly marvel that they had heard some ancient Nubian Queen, some deep-voiced Mother Africa calling them back to the cradle of civilization.           

 

Outrage- Hugo Pinell- The Last Of The San Quentin Six And George Jackson's Comrade Murdered In Jail

Outrage- Hugo Pinell- The Last Of The San Quentin Six And George Jackson's Comrade Murdered In Jail 

On The 40th Anniversary Of Bruce Springsteen’s First Album Born To Run- And More

On The 40^th Anniversary Of Bruce Springsteen’s First Album Born To Run- And More

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 I got my “religion” on Bruce Springsteen ass-backward (something unkind souls of my acquaintance would say was a more generalized condition), meaning, my meaning anyway, was that I was not an E Street Irregular back in the day, the day we are commemorating with this post, the day when Bruce Springsteen sprung his Jersey boy of a different kind magic on the rock and roll scene with the issuance of the album Born To Run to a candid world. You see I was in a monastery then, or might as well have been, and did not get the news of the new dispensation, that there was a new “max daddy” rock and roll star out in the firmament and so I let that past.

Here comes that ass-backward part though. See I really was “unavailable” in that 1975 year since I was one among some guys, some Vietnam veterans who were living under bridges, along the riverbanks, along the railroad tracks of the East Coast from about Boston in summer (and the area which I could from) to D.C. maybe a little further south as the weather got colder trying to cope as best we could with the “real” world. The post ‘Nam “real” world that just couldn’t seem to be the same as before we left whatever we left of ourselves in burning, shooting, napalming, molesting a whole race of very busy people with whom we had not quarrel, no quarrel at all. So not doing a very good job of it mostly not succeeding against the drugs (my personal problem from cocaine to meth and back depending on when you ran into me, if you dared), the liquors (my boy Sean whom I couldn’t save one night when the DTs got to him so bad he went down the Hudson River from the nearest bridge he was so lost), the petty robberies (Jesus, holding up White Hen convenient stores with hands so shaky I could barely keep the gun from jumping out of them ), and the fight to stay away from the labor market (work the curse of the lost boys, the boys who wanted no connection  with Social Security numbers, VA forms, forwarding,  addresses, hell even General Post Office boxes just in case some dunning repo man, or some angry wife was looking for support, support none of us could give for crying out loud why do you think we worked the stinking rivers, the smoke streams trains, faced the rats under the bridges).

Yeah, tough times, tough times indeed, and a lot of guys had a close call, including me, and a lot of guys like now with our brethren Afghan and Iraq soldier brothers and sisters didn’t make it, guys like Sean who if you looked at him you could not believe how gone he really was with that baby-face of his I still see now) didn’t make it but are not on the walls in black marble down in D.C.-although maybe they should be. Of course Brother Springsteen immortalized the Brothers Under The Bridge living out in Southern California along the arroyos, riverbanks, and railroad tracks of the West in a song which I heard some guys playing one night when I was at a VA hospital trying to get well for about the fifteenth time (meth again, damn I can still feel the rushes when I say the word) and that was that. The next step was easy because ever since I was kid once I grabbed onto something that moved me some song, some novel, some film I checked out everything by the songwriter, author, director I could get my hands on.          

Once I did grab a serious chunk of Springsteen’s work, grabbed some things from the local library since my ready cash supply was low I admit I got embarrassed. Admitted to myself that I sure was a long gone daddy back in 1975 and few years thereafter. How could I not have gravitated earlier to a guy who was singing the high hymnal songs of the holy goof corner boys who I grew up with, the guys out in the streets making all that noise (and where are they now, Frankie, Markin, Jack, Jimmy, Tiny, Dread, and a few other who faded in and out over the high school years). Singing about getting out on that Jack Keroauc-drenched hitchhike highway that I dreamed of from my youth, of hitting the open road and searching for the great American West blue-pink night that before ‘Nam every one of my corner boys dreamed of and Sam, Sam Lowell even did, of hitting the thunder road in some crash out Chevy looking for Mary or whatever that dish’s name was, looking for that desperate girl beside him when he took that big shift down in the midnight “chicken run,” in taking that girl down to the Jersey shore everything is alright going hard into the sweated carnival night. Later getting all retro-folkie, paying his Woody and Pete dues looking for the wide Missouri, looking for the heart of Saturday night with some Rosalita too (and me with three busted marriages to show for those dreams), and looking, I swear that he must have known my story for my own ghost of Tom Joad coming home bleeding, bleeding a little banged up, out of the John Steinbeck Okie night, coming home from Thunder Road maybe dancing in the streets if the mood took him to that place that you could see in his eyes when he got going, coming home from down in Jungle-land the place of crashed dreams out along the Southern Pacific road around Gallup, New Mexico  dreaming of his own Phoebe Snow. Yeah, thanks Bruce, thanks from a brother under the bridge.          

The Latest From The “Veterans For Peace” Facebook Page-Gear Up For The Fall 2015 Anti-War Season

The Latest From The “Veterans For Peace” Facebook Page-Gear Up For The Fall 2015 Anti-War Season-All U.S. Troops Out Of Afghanistan Now!-Not Another War In Iraq! Stop The Bombing Raids-Hands Off Ukraine! Hands Off The World!

 

Click below to link to the Veterans For Peace Facebook page for the latest news on what anti-war front the organization is working on.http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Veterans-For-Peace/49422026153
Late one night in 2014 Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had been sitting at a bar in Boston, Jack Higgin’s Grille, down a few streets from the financial district toward Quincy Market talking about various experiences, political experiences in their lives as they were wont to do these days since they were both mostly retired. Ralph having turned over the day to day operation of his specialty electronics shop in Troy, New York to his youngest son as he in his turn had taken over from his father Ralph, Sr. when he had retired in 1991 (the eldest son, Ralph III, had opted for a career as a software engineer for General Electric still a force in the local economy although not nearly as powerful as when Ralph was young and it had been the largest private employer in the Tri-City area) and Sam had sold off his small print shop business in Carver down about thirty miles south of Boston to a large copying company when he had finally seen a few years before the writing on the wall that the day of the small specialty print shop specializing in silk-screening and other odd job methods of reproduction was done for in the computerized color world.

So they had time for remembrances back to the days in the early 1970s when they had first met and had caught the tail-end of the big splash 1960s political and social explosion that stirred significant elements of their generation, “the generation of ’68” so-called by Sam’s friend from New York City Fritz Jasper although neither of them had been involved in any of the cataclysmic events that had occurred in America (and the world) that year. Sam had that year fitfully been trying to start his own small printing business after working for a few years for Mr. Snyder the premier printer in town and he was knee-deep in trying to mop up on the silk-screen craze for posters and tee shirts and had even hired his old friend from high school Jack Callahan who had gone to the Massachusetts School of Art as his chief silk-screen designer, and later when he moved off the dime politically his acting manager as well. Ralph’s excuse was simpler, simplicity itself for he was knee-deep in the big muddy in the Central Highlands of Vietnam trying to keep body and soul together against that damn Charlie who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Occasionally over the years Ralph would come to Boston on trips at Sam’s invitation and they almost always would go have a few at Jack Higgin’s during his stay talking mainly family matters before Ralph would head back to Troy and his family but more frequently of late they would go back over the ground of their youth, would go over more that ground more than one time to see if something they could have done, or something they did not do, would have made a difference when the “counter-revolution,” when the conservative push-back reared its head, when the cultural wars began in earnest with the ebbing of that big good night 1960s explosion. Sam would return the favor by going out to Albany, or more frequently to Saratoga Springs where he, they could see who from the old days, Utah Phillips before he passed away, Rosalie Sorrels before she left the road, Ronnie Gilbert and Pete Seeger before they passed but you get the picture, the old folk minute of the early 1960s that Sam had been very interested in when he started to hang around Cambridge later in that decade, were still alive enough to be playing at the famous coffeehouse still going from the 1960s, the Café Lena, although minus founder Lena for quite a while now. Sam had never lost the bug, never lost that longing for the lost folk minute that in his mind connected in with him hanging around the Hayes-Bickford in Harvard Square on lonesome weekends nights seeing what was to be seen. Sam had dragged Ralph, who despite living on about less than an hour away had never heard of the Café Lena since he had been tuned to the AM stations playing the awful stuff that got air time after the classic period of rock went into decline and before rock became acid-tinged, along with him and he had developed a pretty fair appreciation for the music as well.         

The conversation that night in 2014 got going after the usual few whiskey and sodas used to fortify them for the night talkfest had begun to take effect had been pushed in the direction of what ever happened to that socialist vision that had driven some of their early radical political work together (in the old days both of them in these midnight gabfest would have fortified themselves with in succession grass, cocaine, speed and watch the sun come up and still be talking. These days about midnight would be the end point, maybe earlier.). The specific reason for that question coming up that night had been that Sam had asked Ralph a few weeks before to write up a little remembrance of when he had first heard the socialist-anarchist-communist-radical labor militant   international working class anthem, the Internationale, for Fritz Jasper’s blog, American Protest Music.

Sam had noted that Ralph had with a certain sorrow stated that he no longer had occasion to sing the song. Moreover one of the reasons for that absence was that  despite his and Sam’s continued “good old cause” left-wing political activism socialism as a solution to humankind’s impasses was deeply out of favor (that activism as Ralph mentioned to Sam on more than one occasion these days considerably shortened from the old frenzied 24/7 desperate struggles around trying unsuccessfully end the Vietnam War from the American side by getting the government to stop the damn thing although the Vietnamese liberation forces in the end and at great cost had had no trouble doing so).

People, intellectuals and working stiffs alike, no longer for the most part had that socialist vision goal that had driven several generations, or the best parts of those generations, since the mid-19^th century to put their efforts into, did not have that goal on their radar, didn’t see a way out of the malaise through that route. Had moreover backed off considerably from that prospective since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites in the early 1990s if not before despite the obvious failure of capitalism to any longer put a dent in the vast inequalities and injustices, their suffered inequalities and injustices, in the world. Sam had had to agree to that sad statement, had had to agree that they, in effect, too had abandoned that goal in their own lives for all practical purposes even though they had been driven by that vision for a while once they got “religion” in the old days in the early 1970s, once they saw that the anti-war struggle that animated their first efforts was not going to get the war-makers to stop making war.

Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was growing older and more reflective, maybe it was that Ralph’s comments had stirred up some sense of guilt for losing the hard edge of their youthful dreams but that night Sam wanted to press the issue of what that socialist prospective meant, what they thought it was all about (both agreed in passing, almost as an afterthought that what had happened, what passed for socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was NOT what they were dreaming of although they gave third world liberation struggles against imperialism like in Vietnam dependent on Soviet aid plenty of wiggle room to make mistakes and still retain their support).        

Both men during the course of their conversation commented on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s, of the war and later a bunch of social issue questions, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation question at home they would not even be having the conversation they were having (both also chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the  black, gay, woman question since lately they had noticed that younger activists no longer spoke in such terms but used more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,”  “gender” terms reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time, since the ebb flow of the 1960s). 

No, nothing in the sweet young lives of Samuel Eaton to the Carver cranberry bog capital of world in Carver (then) working-class born (his father a “bogger” himself when they needed extra help) and Ralph Morris, Junior to the Troy General Electric plants-dominated working- class born would have in say 1967, maybe later, projected that almost fifty years later they would be fitfully and regretfully speaking about the their visions of socialism and it demise as a world driving force for social change. 

Ralph and Sam had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some of those prejudices more widespread among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” “the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head,” anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (Ralph had stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people, sometimes to their faces and Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (Ralph and his boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where those creeps spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of them had made a fake pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity woman, servile, domestic child-producing women like their good old mothers and sisters and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot their whistles, attitudes which they had only gotten beaten out of them when they ran into their respective future wives who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell they were not especially political, but rather artistic.  Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly they had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks in their eyes for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around Ralph’s hometown way).      

See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first which had to do a lot with ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Ralph’s term). Certainly not creeping around the fringes of socialism before the 1960s ebbed and they had to look to the long haul to pursue their political dreams. Ralph’s story was a little bit amazing that way, see, he had served in the military, served in the Army, in Vietnam, had been drafted in early 1967 while he was working in his father’s electrical shop and to avoid being “cannon fodder” as anybody could see what was happening to every “drafted as infantry guy” he had enlisted (three years against the draft’s two) with the expectation of getting something in the electrical field as a job, something useful. But in 1967, 1968 what Uncle needed, desperately needed as General Westmoreland called for more troops, was more “grunts” to flush out Charlie and so Ralph wound up with a unit in the Central Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every commie he could get his hands on just like the General wanted. He had extended his tour to eighteen months to get out a little early from his enlistment not so much that he was gung-ho but because he had become fed up with what the war had done to him, what he had had to do to survive, what his buddies had had to do to survive and what the American government had turned them all into, nothing but animals, nothing more, as he told everybody who would listen. When he was discharged in late 1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the main anti-war veterans group at the time. Such a move by Ralph and thousands of other soldiers who had served in ‘Nam a real indication even today of how unpopular that war was when the guys who had fought the damn thing arms in hand, mostly guys then, rose up against the slaughter, taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York City mainly.

Here is the way Ralph told Sam in 1971 about how he came in contact with VVAW while they had plenty of time to talk when they were being detained in RFK Stadium after being arrested in a May Day demonstration. One day in 1970 Ralph was taking a high compression motor to Albany to a customer and had parked the shop truck on Van Dyke Street near Russell Sage College. Coming down the line, silent, silent as the grave he thought later, were a ragtag bunch of guys in mismatched (on purpose he found out later) military uniforms carrying individual signs but with a big banner in front calling for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and signing the banner with the name of the organization-Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). That was all, and all that was needed. Nobody on those still patriotic, mostly government worker, streets called them commies or anything like that but you could tell some guys in white collars who never came close to a gun, except maybe to kill animals or something defenseless really wanted to. One veteran as they came nearer to Ralph shouted out for any veterans to join them, to tell the world what they knew first-hand about what was going on in Vietnam. Yeah, that shout-out was all Ralph needed he said, all he needed to join his “band of brothers.”                               

Sam as he recalled how he and Ralph had met in Washington had remembered that Ralph had first noticed that he was wearing a VVAW supporter button and Ralph had asked if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965. (He had gone to work in Mister Snyder’s print shop where he had learned enough about the printing business to later open his own shop which he kept afloat somehow during the late 1960s with Jack Callahan’s help and which became his career after he settled down when the 1960s ebbed and people started heading back to “normal.”) He then told Ralph the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not involved in the war effort had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central Highlands and that had made him question what was going on. Jeff, like them had been as red, white and blue as any guy, had written him when he was in Vietnam that he thought that the place, the situation that he found himself in was more than he bargained for, and that if he didn’t make it back for Sam to tell people, everybody he could what was really going on. Then with just a few months to go Jeff was blown away near some village that Sam could not spell or pronounce correctly even all these many years later. Jeff had not only been Sam’s best friend but was as straight a guy as you could meet, and had gotten Sam out of more than a few scrapes, a few illegal scrapes that could have got him before some judge. So that was how Sam got “religion,” not through some intellectual or rational argument about the theories of war, just wars or “your country right or wrong wars,” but because his friend had been blown away, blown away for no good reason as far as that went.  

At first Sam had worked with Quakers and other pacifist types because he knew they were in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out more and more trying to connect with the happenings that were splitting his generation to hell and back. They got him doing acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, including the Carver Draft Board on Allan Road the place where Jeff had been drafted from (and which created no little turmoil and threats among the Eaton’s neighbors who were still plenty patriotic at that point, his mother and sisters took some of the fire as well), military bases and recruiting stations to try to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining up in the slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge meetings where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that might stop the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming the government was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of those “gentile little old ladies in tennis sneakers.”

1971 though, May Day 1971 to be exact is, where these two stories, two very different stories with the same theme joined together. Sam at that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about changing the “whole freaking world.” Sam had gone down to Washington with a group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the war under the slogan-“if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government.” Ralph had come down with a contingent of ex-veterans and supporters from Albany for that same purpose. Sam and Ralph had as a result met on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main holding area for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the week)

So May Day was a watershed for both men, both men having before May Day sensed that more drastic action was necessary to “tame the American imperial monster” (Sam’s term picked up from The Real Paper, an alternative newspaper he had picked up at a street newsstand in Cambridge) and had come away from that experience, that disaster, with the understanding that even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had previously expected. Ralph, in particular, had been carried away with the notion that what he and his fellow veterans who were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day, treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.

Ralph told Sam while in captivity that he still worked in his father’s shop for a while but their relationship was icy (and would be for a long time after that although in 1991 when Ralph, Senior retired Ralph took over the business). He would take part in whatever actions he could around the area (and down in New York City a couple of times when they called for re-enforcements to make a big splash).

Ralph has like he said joined with a group of VVAW-ers and supporters for an action down in Washington, D.C. The idea, which would sound kind of strange today in a different time when there is very little overt anti-war activity against the current crop of endless wars but also shows how desperate they were to end that damn war, was to on May Day shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. Their task, as part of the bigger scheme, since they were to form up as a total veterans and supporters contingent was to symbolically shut down the Pentagon. Wild right, but see the figuring was that they, the government, would not dare to arrest vets and they figured (“they” meaning all those who planned the events and went along with the plan) the government would treat it somewhat like the big civilian action at the Pentagon in 1967 which Norman Mailer won a literary prize writing a book about, Armies of the Night. Silly them. 

They after the fall-out from that event were thus searching for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those few days of detention in D.C. that they had jointly suffered not only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation between them over the next several years about how to bring about the greater social change they sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that. (The story in short of how they got out of RFK after a few days was pretty straight forward. Since law enforcement was so strapped that week somebody had noticed and passed the word along that some of the side exits in the stadium were not guarded and so they had just walked out and got out of town fast, very fast, hitchhiking back north to Carver, and Ralph later to Troy). Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that were sprouting up then peopled by others who had the same kind of questions which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed. 

Old time high school thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed his mind when Ralph thought of Marx, Lenin (he, they, were not familiar with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes. Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s in Cambridge before heading home to the commune where Sam was staying.

Ralph had gone out of his way to note in that blog entry for Fritz that before he got “religion” on the anti-war and later social justice issues he held as many anti-communist prejudices as anybody else in Troy, New York where he hailed from, not excluding his rabidly right-wing father who never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had lost the war in Vietnam. Ralph had realized that all the propaganda he had been fed was like the wind and his realization of that had made him  a very angry young man when he got out of the Army in late 1969. He tried to talk to his father about it but Ralph, Senior was hung up in a combination “good war, World War II, his war where America saved international civilization from the Nazis and Nips (his father’s term since he fought in the Pacific with the Marines) and “my country, right or wrong.” All Ralph, Senior really wanted Ralph to do was get back to the shop and help him fill those goddam GE defense contract orders. And he did it, for a while.

Ralph had also expressed his feelings of trepidation when after a lot of things went south on the social justice front with damn little to show for all the arrests, deaths, and social cataclysm he and Sam had gotten into a study group in Cambridge run by a “Red October Collective” which focused on studying “Che” Guevara and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an introduction to the Marxist classics. Sam who was living in that commune in Cambridge at the time, the summer of 1972, had invited Ralph to come over from Troy to spent the summer in the study group trying to find out what had gone wrong (and what they had gotten right too, as Sam told him not to forget), why they were spinning their wheels trying to change the world for the better just then and to think about new strategies and tactics for the next big break-out of social activism. At the end of each meeting they would sing the Internationale before the group broke up. At first Ralph had a hard time with the idea of singing a “commie” song (he didn’t put it that way but he might as well have according to Sam) unlike something like John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, songs like that. As he, they got immersed in the group Ralph lightened up and would sing along if not with gusto then without a snicker.

That same apprehensive attitude had prevailed when after about three meetings they began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called classic Marxism, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

At the beginning some of Ralph’s old habits kind of held him back, you know the anti-red stuff, Cold War enemy stuff, just like at first he had had trouble despite all he knew about calling for victory to the Viet Cong (who in-country they called “Charlie” in derision although after  Tet 1968 with much more respect when Charlie came at them and kept coming despite high losses). But Ralph got over it, got in the swing. 

The Marxism did not come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had built from nothing after Mister Snyder moved his operation to Quincy to be nearer his main client, State Street Bank and Trust (although for long periods his old Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind Marxism, that impossible to read Das Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and political prisoner defense work. Those were really the earnest “socialist years” although if you had asked them for a model of what their socialism looked like they probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed fresher than the stodgy old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats.

After that time while they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody, some group needed bodies for a rally, demonstration, some street action they would be there in their respective hometowns that they both eventually filtered back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read a home but that flame that had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke. Sam thought one time that maybe those earnest kids with their wafer-thin newspapers will study the classics and make more sense out of them than Sam and Ralph could. As for Sam and Ralph they would now just keep showing up to support the “good old cause.”              

And a lot of that good old cause for Ralph since about 2010 had been through working with a later manifestation of VVAW – Veterans for Peace (VFP) which as Ralph will describe below is what has enhanced his political profile. Sam had also joined the group after Ralph beat him down about it. (VFP has a category of supporters called associates who have all the rights of membership except a decisive vote on the issues before the body when their votes would determine the outcome. Here is how Ralph “connected” with VFP in Boston of all places on one of his trips to see Sam:   


Back on Veterans Day 2010 I happened to be at the Boston Common heading toward Jack Higgin’s Grille, the one on Charles Street not the one near Quincy Market, to meet Sam in a location just off the downtown section when I came across some white flags, maybe twenty, waving in the distance over near when Charles Street intersects Beacon Street (the main street of the famous Beacon Hill section of Boston). Since I was heading that way I decided to check out what those flags were all about. Upon investigation I found that the white flags also contained in black outline a peace dove symbol and the words Veterans for Peace. Yah, sign me up, my kind of guys and gals. So, to make a long story short,  I marched with the contingent that year in their spot behind, and not part of, the official parade sponsored by the city (the reason for that separation will be described in more detail below) and have marched each year since, including this year. [2014] Previously in promoting and commemorating this peace event I have recycled my sketch from 2010 out of laziness, hubris, or the basic sameness of the yearly event. I have updated that sketch a bit here to reflect on this year’s event.  
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Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, and socialist causes in my long political life. Some large, many small but both necessary. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have, like I have, “switched” over to the other side, have gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace and what to do about it, have exposed the better angels of their nature after the long hard thrust of war and preparations for war have lost their allure, and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system in America has embarked upon.

From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days (the days when even guys like the present Secretary of State John Forbes Kerry had to march in the streets to allay their angers and hurts) I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them out of the barracks, off the bases, and into the streets as happened a little as the Vietnam War moved relentlessly onward) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, don’t do a bookish analysis, complete with footnotes, of the imperial system and their cog part in it, but they are kindred spirits.

Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (the infamous “battle of the barstool,” no, battles) and donning the old overstuffed moth-eaten uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened in 2010 (and this year) as well. What also happened in Boston this year as in 2010 (and other years but I had not been involved in prior marches) was that the Smedley Butler Brigade of Veterans for Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their Armistice Day (“Veterans Day”) program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one, one o’clock in the afternoon in downtown Boston near the Common.

Prior to 2010 there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events so all I know is that there were some heated disputes) You know the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long as there have been ex-soldiers (and others), maybe before, who have differed from the bourgeois parties’ pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set in 2010 and this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated that year, if you can believe this, from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. This year by a phalanx of Boston Police motorcycle cops. Nice, right? Something of the old "I’ll take my ball and bat and go home" by the "officials" was in the air on that one on every occasion.

In the event this year’s march went off as usual for both parties, as we waited behind the motorcycle cordon for the “officials” to pass by. While waiting I noticed that while the anti-war contingent was about the same size as it has been for the past few years that I have participated, filled out with other peace activists from Quakers and shakers to ranters and chanters and ant-drone folk (strolling along with a mobile replica of a drone to make their point nicely), all angelic, or at least all also on the right side of the angels, the VFP component looked a little smaller. This reflecting the inevitable aging, can’t make the walk, reality that VFP like myriad peace and social justice-oriented organizations are now peopled, alarmingly so, mainly by older activists who cut their teeth in the struggles of the 1960s (or earlier).

Equally as alarming was the sight of more of my Vietnam era veterans using canes, walkers and other aids to either walk the parade or to get around and listen to the program at the end of the march at the Samuel Adams Park at Fanuiel Hall. The hopeful sign though was an increased number of Iraq (Iraq II, 2003) and Afghanistan veterans who have had enough time to reflect on their war experiences and made a decision to come over to the side of the angels.
One such veteran spoke from platform, as did veterans from World War II,  the Korean and Vietnam War eras, as well as a speakers, young speakers and proud from the Iraq and Afghan war zones, who sang, read their poets, or read their prose pieces to flush out the event. And to say that a new generation of anti-war soldiers will take the torch, take it and go forward as the older generations fades away.

But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in this wicked old world. In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers in 2010 and this year well, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we again this year formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited for us after the official paraders had marched by and waved, clapped, and flashed the ubiquitous peace sign at our procession from the sidelines. Be still my heart.

That response just provides another example of the "street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these fellow vets would go beyond then “bring the troops home” and pacific vigil tactics and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from everywhere, embrace a more studied response to the nature of war policy “in the belly of the beast” then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today, like at that first white flag sighting in 2010 I was very glad to be fighting for our peaceful more social future among those who know first-hand about the dark side of the American experience. No question.

From The Archives -PEACE FOR SYRIA Rally In Boston

PEACE FOR SYRIA Rally 

Saturday, August 29, 1pm-3pm

Copley Square (Dartmouth St at Boylston St), Boston

Organized by Syrian American Forum

"Peace in Syria is long overdue. The conflict is in its fifth year and going unabated. Terrorism is on the rise, extremists are recruited all over the world, including in the U.S. Some are from here, our town of Boston. It is high time the administration acknowledges that its Syria policy has to change.

The Syrian American Forum (SAF), a national non-for-profit organization seeking peace in Syria, urges the Obama administration to exercise all in its power to help bring an end to this bloody conflict. The armed elements committing hideous crimes against civilians and minorities are mostly groups listed by the administration as “terrorist organizations”, such as ISIS, Al-Nusra, and others. While the administration launched a direct war against ISIS, it should be noted here that this war against the so-called ISIS will not succeed unless coordinated with the countries in the region that are the real victims of its atrocities. The recent nuclear agreement with Iran should open the door for future cooperation in this battle.

The so-called ISIS did not emerge from a mirage. It is a result of the policies of the U.S. and its allies, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Whether by turning a blind eye to its growth, or through arming, financing and enabling by our allies, the administration bears some direct responsibility for some of what is going on in Syria. 

We call on you to join us Saturday ِAug 29, 2015 at 1:00 pm in Copley Square to help send a message to Washington that the Syrian people deserve peace. The continuation of the war against Syria, with the support of the U.S. allies, will raise the risk of terrorism reaching us here. We in Boston know fully well what that means; we should make sure it is not repeated."

 

https://www.facebook.com/events/1656597697911156/

 

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In Boston- Somerville 18 Need Support

In Boston- Somerville 18 Need Support
by Somerville 18	14 Jul 2015
On January 15, 2015, the #Somerville18, a group of Pan-Asians, Latinos, and white people, some of whom identify as queer or transgender, stood in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement by temporarily blocking the I-93 highway in Massachusetts. The demonstration called for the end to racial profiling, incarceration, murders, and other forms of police violence against Black people in the United States and beyond.
Click on image for a larger version
Now District Attorney Ryan has decided to harshly retaliate against the #Somerville18 with criminal charges and outrageous restitution fines for exercising their First Amendment rights, which guarantee freedom of expression. The #Somerville18 believes DA Ryan's excessive punishments reinforce a nationwide intimidation tactic to suppress demonstrations, particularly those in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Take action now to stand with the #Somerville18 and push back against the criminalization of demonstrations in Boston and beyond. Tell DA Ryan that 90 days jail time, 18 months probation, and $14,580 in restitution fine are unreasonable punishments for demonstrations. DA Ryan's hostile punishments set a dangerous precedent that restricts civic participation and violates First Amendment rights. Tell DA Ryan to drop the charges now! The Reverend Jason Lydon and several other clergy and ministers recently sent a letter to DA Ryan urging her to drop the charges against the 18. DA Ryan can be reached at the phone number for the Middlesex County prosecutor's office, 781-897-8300.