A View From The Left-British Labour Party Elections-Corbyn Landslide, Blairite Backlash

Workers Vanguard No. 1075	2 October 2015

British Labour Party Elections-Corbyn Landslide, Blairite Backlash

 

The following article has been reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 232 (Autumn 2015), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain.

 

Jeremy Corbyn’s stunning victory in the Labour leadership election, and the campaign that achieved it, have opened a new chapter in British politics. For the first time in decades, a Labour Party leader describes himself as a socialist and has declared himself on the side of the working class, oppressed minorities and all those striving for social justice, to the horror of the bourgeoisie and their political creatures, including those in the Labour Party itself. In his acceptance speech to the party grandees on 12 September, Corbyn repeated proudly that Labour is “organically linked” to the trade unions. He proclaimed his determination to fight the Tories’ anti-trade union bill which aims to further shackle the unions.

Two decades ago, Tony Blair declared his intention to “modernise” the party by dumping the union link, thus to transform Labour into an outright capitalist party like the U.S. Democratic Party. This process has been protracted, not least because the party tops wanted to keep the trade-union donations which remain the party’s main source of funding. Meanwhile, the pro-capitalist leadership of the unions clung to Labour under Blair and his successors Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. Finally, in March 2014, a special party conference voted to disaffiliate the trade unions over a period of five years. For some years, Labour has been moribund as a reformist party of the working class. Now that is changing, as hundreds of thousands have signed up or rejoined the party in order to support a party leader who unambiguously upholds the trade-union link. In a delightful irony, the new members were eligible to vote for the party leader courtesy of new rules adopted at the 2014 conference.

Corbyn trounced his opponents—Andy Burnham, Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper—winning nearly 60 per cent of the vote. In so doing, Corbyn has delivered a body blow to the Blair project and has reawakened working-class expectations towards Labour.

The day after his victory was announced, bourgeois newspapers headlined “Red and Buried,” “Bye Bye Labour,” and “Leader Nightmare,” predicting “extremism,” mayhem and ruin for the Labour Party, and for the country if Labour were to win the next general election. From Tory [Conservative Party] prime minister David Cameron came the none too subtle warning that Corbyn’s victory means Labour is now a “threat to our national security, our economic security.” In other words, Corbyn is not committed to NATO or to continuing Britain’s slavish military support to U.S. imperialism. Furthermore, he does not kowtow to the City of London financiers. Corbyn’s appointment of Labour leftist John McDonnell as shadow chancellor is for the Financial Times, mouthpiece of the City, an outrage against the sacred right to private property: McDonnell’s “cavalier disregard for property rights,” they rant in a 15 September editorial, “violates basic tenets of natural justice.”

Corbyn’s opponents in the Blair-Brown wing of the party—the majority of MPs [Members of Parliament], and party leaders past and present—have likewise been screaming their heads off about a Corbyn-led Labour Party becoming “unelectable.” Doubtless the coming period will see multiple bitter clashes between these two camps. The schism within the Labour Party mirrors the two opposing classes in bourgeois society. Corbyn has consistently emphasised his commitment to party unity, but those MPs who are deeply hostile to Corbyn’s politics would be only too willing to see him ousted. While the major trade unions all backed Corbyn, some elements of the union bureaucracy are leery of his left-wing politics and could easily join with those who would depose him.

The vast majority of Labour MPs in July refused to vote against the Tories’ latest welfare-cutting bill, which increases the immiseration of the poor. Tom Watson, the newly elected deputy party leader, like the majority of Labour MPs, supported the invasion of Iraq, wholeheartedly supports NATO and opposes Corbyn’s stance of scrapping the Trident nuclear missile system. Within one day of Corbyn’s victory announcement eight shadow cabinet ministers had resigned their posts, one tweeting his resignation as Corbyn concluded his acceptance speech.

Chuka Umunna, a key Blairite, resigned from the shadow cabinet the next day, citing Corbyn’s hesitation over whether Labour should campaign for Britain to stay in the European Union (EU). Corbyn has since made it clear that he is not likely to support a British exit and promotes the illusion of the EU creating a “social Europe” in which workers rights are protected. The EU is an inherently unstable bloc aimed at improving the competitive edge of its dominant members, chiefly Germany, vis-à-vis their imperialist rivals, centrally Japan and the U.S. The EU has always been a mechanism for the capitalist rulers to maximise the rate of exploitation of the working class. We oppose the EU on principle from an internationalist perspective, as opposed to the nationalist, chauvinist opposition of UKIP [UK Independence Party]. We call for working-class struggle in every European country against the bosses. In the planned referendum asking if Britain should stay in the EU or exit, we would vote for Britain to exit.

The Spartacist League welcomed the Corbyn campaign, distributing a 12 August leaflet to campaign rallies around the country [see “Jeremy Corbyn: Tony Blair’s Nightmare!” WV No. 1073, 4 September]. The leaflet noted that Corbyn addresses issues that are in the interests of working people. At the same time we said that although the campaign’s chief demands are supportable, the fundamental issues facing the exploited and oppressed cannot be solved within the framework of Corbyn’s old Labour parliamentary reformism, which has always upheld the capitalist system.

The State—Organ of Class Rule

Corbyn opposed the U.S./British invasion of Iraq—for which Blair remains widely despised—as well as the occupation of Afghanistan. But what really makes him unfit to lead Her Majesty’s Opposition, never mind to become prime minister, in the eyes of the British (and U.S.) capitalist rulers is Corbyn’s history of opposing the U.S.-led NATO military alliance. Corbyn is chairman of the Stop the War Coalition, a campaign initiated by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which seeks to persuade British imperialism not to automatically support the U.S. in its wars and occupations. This was summed up during the Iraq war in the caricature of Blair as “Bush’s poodle.”

Britain’s staunch military support to U.S. imperialism is a product of British imperialism’s long decline to the level of a decrepit third-rate power which has little choice but to act as a junior partner to the U.S. The City of London, a world centre of finance capital, is a haven for U.S. (as well as German and Swiss) investment banks and plays second fiddle to Wall Street. Imperialist militarism and the dominance of finance capital will not be held to account by legislation in Parliament. It will take socialist revolution to rip the wealth out of the hands of the capitalists and bankers and overturn their system based on production for private profit.

Behind the governmental apparatus in all capitalist countries is the machinery of the state—cops, courts and military. Its function can be seen in the police brutality meted out to racial minorities, the deaths in state custody, disproportionately suffered by black, Asian and immigrant detainees. The capitalist state wages the “war on terror” which targets Muslims and serves as a pretext to enhance its repressive powers. Governments come and go, implementing policies dictated by the capitalists’ political and economic demands, but the machinery of the state remains. Its purpose is to preserve, ultimately through organised violence, capitalist class exploitation of the working people. All past experience of class struggle shows that fundamental change in the interests of the working class cannot be achieved by pressuring the “Mother of Parliaments” while leaving the capitalist state intact.

As Marxist historian Ralph Miliband, whom Corbyn hails, wrote in Parliamentary Socialism (1961), “Of political parties claiming socialism to be their aim, the Labour Party has always been one of the most dogmatic—not about socialism, but about the parliamentary system.” The idea that socialism can be achieved through Parliament rests on the illusion that exploiter and exploited, rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed, all have an equal vote in how society is run. But it is not the working people and minorities who control the mass media, the economy, or for that matter the cops, courts and military.

For example, Corbyn argues for reindustrialisation of the country, which indeed is necessary, as is regenerating Britain’s infrastructure wholesale, rebuilding its rusting manufacturing base and putting the population back into productive work. But finance capitalists will not opt to forgo the cool billions made through banking deals in favour of unknown returns on investment in reindustrialising the north of England. The bottom line for the capitalists is to invest where they can get the highest rate of return, and this cannot be changed through enacting legislation in Parliament.

The Westminster Parliament embodies the privileged status of finance capital afforded London and the southeast of England by the capitalist rulers who are contemptuous of the de-industrialised areas of northern England as well as of Scotland and Wales. As Marxists we oppose the so-called United Kingdom which incorporates the Orange statelet in Northern Ireland. Down with the monarchy, the House of Lords and the established churches! We support the right of self-determination for Scotland and Wales. Our programme is for a voluntary federation of workers republics in the British Isles within a Socialist United States of Europe.

What Kind of Party Does the Working Class Need?

Thousands of youth throughout the country, previously alienated by the cesspit of mainstream politics, were drawn to Corbyn’s campaign. As a young supporter quoted by Seumas Milne in the Guardian (5 August) explained: “People say he is an old leftwinger or an old Marxist but to my generation his ideas seem quite new.”

Corbyn is not and does not claim to be a revolutionary Marxist. His victory represents a welcome upheaval in British political life, opening up a political debate into which Marxist revolutionaries can intervene. Yet in a “Letter to a Jeremy Corbyn supporter,” the SWP’s Charlie Kimber commented that: “The real danger is that Corbyn supporters are plunged into internal party struggles rather than struggles at work and in working class areas,” adding that “the crucial question is to march, protest, occupy and strike together against the Tories” (Socialist Worker, 12 September). Contrary to Kimber’s “fight the right” philistinism, we Marxists see a longed-for opportunity for political struggle and debate—about socialism, and the means to achieve it.

The fundamental question posed in Britain today is: what kind of party is needed to represent the interests of the working class and oppressed, independently of and in opposition to the capitalists? The Labour Party was founded at the beginning of the 20th century by the trade-union bureaucracy in order to gain a voice in Parliament. Born out of the class division in society, the party’s formation was an expression, at the organisational level, of working-class independence from the bourgeois Liberals. Yet despite its base consisting of the organised working class, the programme of the Labour Party was pro-capitalist. As such, the Labour Party exemplified what Russian Revolution leader V.I. Lenin termed a bourgeois workers party, having a working-class base saddled with a pro-capitalist leader ship and programme. Lenin stressed that the Labour Party was not the political arm of the trade-union movement, but the party of the pro-imperialist trade-union bureaucracy. In a 1920 debate in the Communist International, Lenin said:

“Regarded from this point of view, the only correct one, the Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie.”

This was an apt description of then-Labour leaders such as Arthur Henderson, who had helped line up the working class in support of British imperialism during World War I.

The Labour Party’s claim to be “socialist” was belatedly introduced in 1918, with the adoption of Clause IV. This was an attempt to deflect the radicalising effect of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, consoling the workers with the illusion that the British road to “socialism” was through standing for elections to Parliament. The parliamentary road assumed collaboration—open or covert—with the capitalist ruling class on matters of “national interest.” Loyalty to the monarch was taken for granted—witness the hysteria over whether Corbyn will kneel before the Queen so that he can join her secretive Privy Council, and sing “God Save the Queen” on state occasions.

In the period following World War II, when the Labour leadership again supported British imperialism, Labour’s formal commitment to “common ownership of the means of production” came to be associated with the nationalisation of industry under capitalism and the introduction of welfare measures such as the National Health Service. Far from an attempt to introduce “socialism,” the nationalisations of coal, steel and other basic industries by the Clement Attlee Labour government were in reality giant capitalist bailouts designed to help British capitalism compete in the world market. In that sense they were no more “socialist” than the bailout of the banks carried out under Labour prime minister Gordon Brown following the 2008 banking crisis.

The traditional Labour Party that Corbyn seeks to reconstitute prided itself on being a “broad church,” meaning that it had room for a wide spectrum of political currents and opinions. In practice this meant that the right wing predominated, while the left bowed to it for the sake of unity. In today’s terms, reconstituting the “broad church” means Corbyn’s supporters will co-exist side by side with the Blairites including Tony Blair himself, who many regard as a war criminal over Iraq. Within the Corbyn camp, the “broad church” means that while Corbyn himself is a defender of the rights of immigrants, his deputy Tom Watson wants the party to pander to ex-Labour voters who turned to UKIP. This can only mean making concessions to UKIP’s vile anti-immigrant racism. In the old Labour Party, bloc affiliation by the trade unions meant that the most advanced layers of the class were submerged into the most backward ones. Mass reformist parties are inevitably tinged with chauvinism, based on the dominant ethnic grouping and tied to the defence of the interests of its own ruling class.

A Leninist party, by contrast, consists only of the most politically advanced, class-conscious elements of the working class and oppressed which can translate the historic interests of the proletariat into the fight for socialist revolution. Such a party would champion the cause of the multiethnic working class and fight against all manifestations of oppression—racism, discrimination against women and all forms of chauvinism.

The Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, which led the Russian proletariat to power in the October 1917 Revolution was a party of a new type, sharply breaking from the European social-democratic parties of the time. Cohering the advanced elements of the proletariat together with declassed intellectuals, the Bolshevik party acted as a “tribune of the people” taking up the struggles of all: workers and the unemployed, women, the poor peasantry, the millions composing the downtrodden national minorities. The Bolsheviks’ purpose was to render the working class conscious of its historic task—the seizure of power through proletarian revolution and the establishment of a workers state. They saw their fight as part of the necessary worldwide revolution, to bring about the international socialist order that Marx and Engels envisioned.

Jeremy Corbyn believes that the poverty, injustice and degradation inflicted on whole swathes of the population are not necessary, and he is right. But to eliminate those ills requires not a government based on the bosses’ parliament, but a government based on workers councils, which expropriates the bourgeoisie as a class. A revolutionary workers party must be rooted in the understanding that only through mass mobilisation in struggle can the workers fight for their own interests and act in defence of all the oppressed. Socialist revolutions especially in the advanced capitalist countries including Britain will establish rationally planned economies based on an international division of labour. The development of the productive forces, ripped out of the clutches of the capitalist bloodsuckers, will open the road to the creation of a classless, egalitarian socialist society.

A View From The Left-Cancel the Debt!-U.S. Colonialism Chokes Puerto Rico-For the Right of Independence!-Free Oscar Lopez Rivera Too!

Workers Vanguard No. 1075	2 October 2015

Cancel the Debt!-U.S. Colonialism Chokes Puerto Rico-For the Right of Independence!

 

After declaring Puerto Rico to be in a “death spiral” of unpayable debt totaling $72 billion, Governor Alejandro García Padilla on September 9 unveiled a five-year economic plan that amounts to more misery and crippling austerity for the Puerto Rican masses. Already this year, Puerto Ricans have been hit with a sales tax increase (from 7 to 11.5 percent), strict water rationing, school closures and rising costs for gas and utilities, while the profit-hungry U.S. creditors and bankers demanded interest payments on their loans in full. Like a nail in the coffin, Padilla’s “Fiscal and Economic Growth Plan” is an all-sided assault on health care, education, union rights and the overall standard of living.

Puerto Rico’s current debt crisis is a direct consequence of U.S. colonial domination. For the last 117 years, the U.S. rulers have pillaged and exploited the island’s land and labor—from the early sugar barons who did away with the coffee, tobacco and fruit harvests in order to use the colony as an oversized plantation, to the post-World War II capitalists who transformed it into a cheap-labor manufacturing base for American corporations. For the last several decades, U.S. businesses have benefited from a litany of tax breaks, while Puerto Rico was forced to borrow from speculators to build local infrastructure and cover the costs of pensions and social services. By the time of the global financial crisis that began in 2007-08, Puerto Rico was already in a deep recession, and the government was unable to repay the bonds it had issued. Wall Street predators and hedge fund vultures soon swooped in to buy up the devalued bonds on the cheap and cash in on Puerto Rican debt.

With an economy tied to the U.S. dollar and the island governed by laws dictated by the U.S. Congress, Puerto Rico has virtually no room to maneuver around the junta of bankers and colonialists who call the shots. The American overlords control the territory’s currency, foreign relations, banks, communications, trade relations and shipping. There have been a number of protests against the threatened austerity measures, including on September 11 when WV and Espartaco salesmen attended a rally in San Juan of thousands of public-sector workers and others against Padilla’s plan. Workers in the U.S., squeezed and exploited by the same capitalist ruling class that is choking the Puerto Rican masses, have a clear interest as well in opposing the debt peonage of America’s largest colony. What is needed is joint class struggle by workers on the mainland and the island to halt the rulers’ vicious attacks, beginning with the demand: Cancel the debt!

With talk of a looming default, bourgeois politicians have been debating what legal framework to set up in order to renegotiate the debt while forcing austerity down the throats of the Puerto Rican masses. When the Puerto Rican government attempted to enact a bankruptcy law for the island, U.S. federal courts declared the proposal unconstitutional. New York governor Andrew Cuomo and others have called to extend Chapter 9 bankruptcy law to Puerto Rico’s municipalities. To see what that would mean, just look at bankrupted Detroit. Under that city’s financial restructuring plan, backed by the Obama administration, municipal workers’ pensions were looted and social services slashed. Meanwhile, under Governor Padilla’s September 9 plan, a financial control board would oversee the implementation of draconian measures resembling those in the infamous Krueger report issued in June by former International Monetary Fund officials.

Padilla’s plan includes restricting minimum-wage increases for workers under 25, tightening welfare eligibility, gutting job protections like seniority, cutting paid vacation days for public-sector workers and issuing a freeze on new hiring and collective bargaining. Subsidies for the University of Puerto Rico are being slashed while the collapsing health care system is facing more cuts. Public transportation is slated to be privatized and the island’s electrical utility, PREPA, could be deregulated.

Puerto Ricans already suffer from impoverishment: at least 45 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and the per capita income is around $15,000, less than half that of the poorest state, Mississippi. At the same time, workers and the unemployed are saddled with high costs for consumer goods, in no small part due to a shakedown provision of the Jones Act. Enacted almost a century ago, this protectionist legislation mandates that every product that enters or leaves Puerto Rico must be carried on a U.S. ship, or face high tariffs and fees that are then passed on to the Puerto Rican population. The tiny Caribbean island—which relies heavily on imports, including 85 percent of its food—is a dumping ground for U.S. products.

Enduring the weight of national oppression and colonial repression, Puerto Ricans have formal citizenship but are treated by the U.S. rulers with racist contempt as second-class citizens. Residents of the island are used as cannon fodder in U.S. imperialist wars, though they cannot vote in federal elections and have no voting representation in Congress. With few natural resources and now skeletal industry in the colony, the main employer is the government. As jobs and opportunities dry up, a growing emigration from the island threatens to leave an aging and vulnerable population behind. As many as half a million Puerto Ricans have left in the last decade. Today, the total number of Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. far exceeds the island’s 3.5 million inhabitants.

While there is deep resentment over Puerto Rico’s status as a U.S. commonwealth, this anger is contradictory and does not translate into broad support for independence. The majority of Puerto Ricans fear that independence would come at a painful cost—specifically, that they would relinquish the benefits of U.S. citizenship, such as the right to live and work on the mainland. Under capitalist rule, an independent Puerto Rico would continue to be dominated economically by U.S. imperialism, while being forced to compete on the world capitalist market with other small, resource-poor Caribbean islands. Meanwhile, statehood, or direct annexation to the U.S., would aggravate racist nativist hostility toward Puerto Ricans. It would also accelerate the tendency of English to replace Spanish on the island, ultimately threatening the national identity of the Puerto Rican people.

As forthright opponents of U.S. imperialism, we would favor the independence of Puerto Rico in order to take a stand against American colonial domination and fight against chauvinism in the U.S. Likewise, we seek to undercut the nationalist leaders of the Puerto Rican working class, who preach class collaboration with the island’s capitalists in the name of national unity. Ending Puerto Rico’s formal subjugation would help move beyond the question of the island’s status vis-à-vis the American behemoth and could clear the road for revolutionary internationalist class struggle. However, the wishes of the population are an important factor for Marxists in determining how to get the national question off the agenda, and we are against forcing annexation or independence upon the island’s population. Therefore, we champion the right of independence for Puerto Rico.

National Oppression and Colonial Subjugation

Since the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. rulers have claimed the Americas and the Caribbean as their own fiefdom. With the advent of the imperialist epoch, the American bourgeoisie grabbed Puerto Rico—along with other Spanish colonies Cuba, Guam and the Philippines—during the 1898 Spanish-American War. During the Cold War, Puerto Rico was a staging ground for U.S. aggression in the Caribbean—from the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 to the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983. While the two largest military bases, Vieques and Roosevelt Roads, have closed, the Coast Guard, National Guard and other U.S. troops still remain on the island.

For decades, U.S. forces carried out brutal state repression and crackdowns against Puerto Rican trade unionists, nationalists and others deemed dissidents. The island’s 1948 Gag Law, widely used against the independence movement, was modeled on the federal Smith Act of 1940 that made it a criminal offense to advocate the revolutionary overthrow of the government. Using the island as a testing ground for carrying out infiltration, disruption and provocation, federal agents have viciously targeted Puerto Rican independentistas for imprisonment and political assassination. We demand freedom for Puerto Rican independence activists like Oscar López Rivera who are imprisoned in the U.S. All U.S. troops and federal agents out of Puerto Rico now!

Starting in the late 1940s, Puerto Rico’s status became a thorn in the side of the U.S. ruling class. In colonies across the globe, independence struggles were being waged to shake off their respective yokes. The subjugation of Puerto Rico was, along with Jim Crow segregation in the South, a source of embarrassment to the American rulers, who postured as defenders of “democracy” against their Cold War rival, the Soviet Union. To provide the illusion of Puerto Rican self-government, Washington in 1952 labeled the island a “commonwealth”—also termed a Free Associated State (Estado Libre Asociado), as local elections and a constitution were introduced. Puerto Rico, it was claimed, was no longer a colony, even as the U.S. Congress continued to exercise complete authority over the territory.

Under this new form of U.S. colonial rule, a fresh layer of local henchmen and middlemen loyal to U.S. capital came to the fore, including Puerto Rico’s first elected governor, Luis Muñoz Marín. His Popular Democratic Party (PPD), today led by Governor Padilla, continues to support commonwealth status. Muñoz Marín promoted the federal government’s Operation Bootstrap, a postwar industrialization plan to entice U.S. businesses through tax exemptions and cheap labor (including for a period by waiving federal minimum-wage requirements).

With the 1959 Cuban Revolution, U.S. imperialism tried to prop up Puerto Rico as a free-market miracle and bulwark against Communism in the Caribbean. The Cuban Revolution led to the expropriation of the U.S. and Cuban capitalists and the creation of a deformed workers state. Despite the rule of a bureaucratic caste led by Fidel Castro, the Cuban Revolution, with crucial Soviet military and economic aid, resulted in enormous gains for the country’s working masses, including guaranteed housing, free health care and education. Following the revolution, a substantial number of gusano Cuban capitalists fled to Puerto Rico, soon becoming a reactionary tool for the local establishment’s promotion of American anti-Communist interests.

By the early 1990s, with the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, the American ruling class no longer saw an interest in providing indirect subsidies to the businesses used to showcase Puerto Rico’s economic development—mainly in electronics and pharmaceuticals. In the course of phasing out Section 936 tax incentives, there was an exodus of U.S. operations, with the number of manufacturing jobs falling by almost half since 1996. The outflow of capital worsened conditions of poverty and unemployment, making Puerto Ricans even more dependent on federal programs and benefits.

Today, the Obama administration’s easing of relations with Cuba has Governor Padilla and other bourgeois politicians in Puerto Rico bemoaning the possibility of losing out in the competition for U.S. investment and tourism dollars. At the same time, Puerto Rican entrepreneurs have been working alongside the White House to help foster American influence in the Cuban workers state.

Increased commercial and financial ties to U.S. corporations pose the very real danger of strengthening the internal forces for capitalist counterrevolution within Cuba. Nonetheless, from our standpoint as revolutionary Marxists, Cuba has the right to enter into diplomatic and economic relations with any capitalist country it chooses, not least to try to overcome its very real economic isolation. We demand an end to the U.S. economic embargo that aims to starve the small island, and we call for U.S. out of Guantánamo.

As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of the Cuban workers state against the threat of domestic counterrevolution and imperialist attack. Yet the necessary defense of Cuba against the imperialists is undermined by the nationalist program of the ruling Havana bureaucracy, which embraces the false Stalinist dogma of building “socialism in one country.” The ultimate answer to Cuba’s economic backwardness is proletarian revolution across the globe—not least in the imperialist U.S.—that integrates the island into an internationally planned economy. We fight for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and establish a regime based on workers democracy and committed to this fight for world socialism.

A Revolutionary, Working-Class Perspective

The struggle for the liberation of Puerto Rico must be waged along the axis of proletarian internationalism. In the U.S., we fight to mobilize the multiracial working class against the racist chauvinism fomented by the American bourgeoisie and echoed by the trade-union leaders, which pits sectors of workers against one another. Much of the social power of the Puerto Rican working class is found in the U.S., in heavy metropolitan concentrations in the Northeast and South, and represented in hospital, transit and other unions. These Puerto Rican workers, along with Dominicans, Haitians and others from the region now residing in the U.S., can form a living link to the class struggle of the proletariat in the Caribbean.

In Puerto Rico, the working class has shown the will and interest to fight back against the recent onslaught of attacks, including through work stoppages and strikes by teachers and transit workers. Back in 2010, a two-month student strike at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) against budget cuts and tuition hikes was supported by key sectors of the working class. That strike, along with subsequent struggles at the UPR, electrified the island and demonstrated the link between the right to education and the fight against job layoffs.

Puerto Rican workers must reject the perspective offered up by the trade-union bureaucracy, which counsels workers to make sacrifices in the so-called national interest. Addressing the debt crisis, an August 22 assembly of leaders and delegates from various trade unions representing teachers, public-sector workers and others adopted a resolution demanding “unity of all sectors of society” to renegotiate the debt. Outlining an entirely legalistic strategy, the resolution declared a commitment “to contribute to solving the problems of Puerto Rico” and recommended measures such as reorganizing the Treasury Department and amending the tax code.

In Puerto Rico, the union leadership’s main mechanism for class collaboration is through nationalist ideology, which means chaining the exploited and oppressed to the local capitalist rulers, largely through the bourgeois PPD. Many workers view this party, which is connected to the Democratic Party in the U.S., as the “lesser evil” to the right-wing, pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP). In 2012, PPD governor Padilla was elected on just such a basis after the prior PNP government headed by Luis Fortuño became widely despised for its corrupt mismanagement and massive austerity, including the firing of tens of thousands of public employees, union-busting attacks and a drive to privatize public services. Right after coming into office, Padilla proved his allegiance to Wall Street by promoting new tax incentives to attract private investment. Now he is the ringleader for the next round of vicious austerity.

Puerto Rico is a vivid confirmation of the need for a program that centers on proletarian class independence from all wings of the capitalists. This requires a political break from nationalist bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces. In the economically backward countries, the bourgeoisies are too weak, corrupt and dependent on the imperialists to resolve essential tasks such as breaking the stranglehold of imperialism. Only through the proletarian seizure of power can there be liberation from imperialist domination and the basis laid to eradicate poverty.

A victorious workers revolution in the U.S., in which class-conscious Puerto Rican workers can play a vanguard role, would immediately grant Puerto Rico independence and massive amounts of economic aid, establishing relations on the basis of its freedom to exercise national self-determination. But the spark of revolution could also come from the colonial or neocolonial countries. Workers struggle in Puerto Rico against U.S. colonial domination could inspire the multiracial working class on the mainland in the revolutionary overthrow of U.S. imperialism.

Only a socialist federation (or federations) of the Caribbean, in the context of world socialist revolution making possible international collectivized planning, can open the road to qualitative economic development for Puerto Rico and neighboring countries that today are under the imperialist boot. For this perspective to become a reality, Trotskyist parties must be built in Puerto Rico and the U.S. as part of a reforged Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution

A View From The Left-Blood, Sweat and Tiers-Auto Workers Oppose Sellout Contract -Victory To The Autoworkers

Workers Vanguard No. 1075	2 October 2015

Blood, Sweat and Tiers-Auto Workers Oppose Sellout Contract

 

SEPTEMBER 28—As we go to press, members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) are voting in large numbers against the rotten contract that union officials worked out with Fiat Chrysler. Workers are rightly furious at the union tops for their broken promises, chiefly to get rid of the hated two-tier wage system, a blatant affront to the basic union principle of equal pay for equal work. UAW head Dennis Williams and his negotiating team not only failed to (in his words) “bridge the gap,” but bent over backward to accommodate management, abandoning the expected 25 percent cap on second-tier workers and introducing third and fourth tiers for Mopar parts workers and axle operators. As one worker at Detroit’s Mack Avenue Engine Complex said to the Detroit Free Press, “They promised to get rid of the two tier system and they did just the opposite and created a bunch of tiers.”

Defiant UAW members should throw the contract back in the faces of the union bureaucrats and prepare for a fight for higher wages, good benefits and an end to tiers. Many workers, wanting to get something back for the sacrifices foisted on them in recent years, especially as part of the 2009 bailout of the auto bosses, have shown a willingness to bring their social power to bear by shutting down production. As the clock ticked down to the expiration of the contract at midnight on September 14, many workers were itching to walk out; when the clock struck twelve, UAW members at one parts plant in California reportedly downed tools, only to be told the contract had been extended. In the lead-up to the contract vote at the Fiat Chrysler plant in Belvidere, Illinois, one worker, expressing widespread sentiment, told WV: “If you don’t stand up, you will continue to be pushed down.”

The unions are supposed to be instruments of struggle for the everyday needs of workers; wages, benefits and working conditions are ultimately decided by the relationship of class forces whose interests are irreconcilable. For the workers to prevail, they must make use of the class-struggle weapons that built the UAW and other industrial unions in the first place. A hard-fought battle would deliver a much-needed blow against the attacks on working people across the country.

But Williams and the rest of the union misleaders push the lie that there can be some sort of partnership between the workers and the class enemy. The union bureaucracy subordinates the interests of workers to the profitability of the companies, as Williams made clear last December when he outlined his aims in the contract negotiations: “It is about how we keep the companies competitive.” The UAW bureaucracy also reveals its allegiance to the bosses by its longstanding support to the Democratic Party, one of the dual parties of capitalist rule in this country.

The disastrous results for the union came to a head in the 2009 bailout engineered by the administration of Democratic president Barack Obama with the full cooperation of the union misleaders (who poured some $5 million into Obama’s election campaign). Massive concessions were imposed on auto workers, including a no-strike clause that only expired this year. By destroying the livelihoods of working people and eliminating tens of thousands of jobs, the auto industry was reshaped to make it once again a source of tremendous profits for Wall Street.

The UAW bureaucracy’s perspective of class collaboration has today resulted in a contract that contains multiple tiers and two other giant steps backward for the union: the expansion of profit sharing and the shifting of health care costs from the company to some sort of co-op overseen by the union. Profit sharing gives up wage hikes today for possible (and overall lower) payouts in the future. The worst part is that such schemes, which aim to get workers to “willingly” go along with speedup, obscure the fundamental truth that the capitalists generate profits by exploiting the workers.

Details on the health care co-op ploy are sketchy and workers are correctly worried. The bottom line is that it will let the company off the hook for providing health care and place all liability on the union. The UAW tops are holding up as a model the Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA) trust fund covering retiree health care. Under such trust funds, benefits are entirely at the mercy of the stock and bond markets; it’s like having a 401(k) instead of a defined-benefit pension plan. In the contract summary, the UAW bureaucrats state that a central aim is to “reduce costs in an innovative and sustainable way,” that is, to help the company shaft the workers. One of the big costs the union tops are trying to help the company avoid is the so-called Cadillac tax that Obama’s Affordable Care Act will impose on employer-paid health plans.

The UAW bureaucrats have made a living helping the auto bosses cut labor costs. In the 2007 contract, these labor lieutenants of capital agreed to the slashing of wages to boost the profits of the greedy capitalists who had driven the auto companies to the brink of bankruptcy. It was this contract that codified the two-tier wage structure at the Big Three assembly plants (tiers had previously existed in parts plants). Workers hired after 2007 earn wages of between $15.78 and $19.28 an hour while working alongside top-tier workers paid $28 an hour. While the new contract proposes larger raises for the lower-tier workers, the gap between the top tier and new hires will still be more than $10 an hour. The auto bosses expect all the top-tier workers to retire or die off in a few years, reducing the top level of pay to that of the second tier.

For years, the UAW bureaucracy has justified its sellouts by stoking fears of jobs moving overseas while invoking “America First” protectionism. At the start of contract negotiations in July, shortly after going to the White House to complain to Obama that free-trade agreements are hurting U.S. manufacturing, Williams declared: “Mexico continues to be an issue for us.” The U.S. automakers, like their German and Japanese competitors, always seek to maximize productivity and minimize costs, whether that means making cars in Detroit or Mexico or the U.S. South.

While the protectionist union bureaucracy portrays foreign workers as competitors, if not outright enemies, the way to advance workers’ interests is for the unions to struggle jointly with their foreign counterparts in concrete acts of international labor solidarity. From the standpoint of working-class internationalism, the growth of the proletariat in the Third World means the growth of international allies of the U.S. working class. The burgeoning auto plants of Mexico are integral to auto production in North America, posing the possibility of and necessity for joint labor action between U.S. and Mexican auto workers.

Joint action by workers across national borders, especially when they work for the same company, would clearly be to the benefit of all the workers. A recent series of strikes in Brazil by thousands of auto workers against GM, Ford, Volkswagen and Mercedes provided one such opportunity. The automakers were beaten back in their efforts to force through mass layoffs; if the UAW had mobilized in solidarity, it would have strengthened the union’s hand in negotiations with the Big Three here.

Similarly, a winning fight to improve the lot of workers at the Big Three could boost stalled UAW and other union organizing efforts elsewhere, including in the open shop South, where the low wages for auto workers are an ongoing threat to UAW members. There is an urgent need for a mass, militant struggle to organize the South. This task requires tackling head-on the anti-black racism that has long served the capitalists in dividing workers and weakening their struggles.

The policies of the pro-capitalist UAW bureaucrats undercut the very notion of a union as a vehicle for the defense of the common interests of the workers against the capitalists. What is needed is a new, class-struggle union leadership to mobilize the social power of the working class independently of the bosses and their political representatives, including the Democrats. Such a leadership, forged in the course of strikes and other class battles, would have the union take up vitally necessary struggles, including for permanent jobs for all workers in the plants, equal pay for equal work and a shorter workweek with no loss in weekly pay to create more jobs.

The working class needs its own party—a revolutionary workers party—to fight for its class interests. Such a party would struggle not only for the immediate economic needs of the working class, but also seek to lead broader struggles against the depredations of capitalism, from racial oppression and anti-immigrant bigotry to imperialist war. Through these struggles, a workers party would imbue the class with revolutionary consciousness of its real power and interest in sweeping away capitalism and establishing a workers government.

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

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

 

 A link below to link to the Steve Lendman Blog

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/

 

Sam Lowell was feeling his years these days, not so much the physical aches and pains that seem to reside for months when in the days of his youth, the days when he would cavort around the country doing his best Jack Kerouac on the road imitation and later after Jake Jacobs was killed in some Vietnam outpost in the Central Highlands his best high hat radical fight against the American monster role, and think nothing of it but politically weary.  As he told his old time friend and comrade Ralph Morris over the cellphone one night when he was feeling down after a day of trying to get his Congressman, Danny Shea, to listen to him and the others in his delegation to vote against the war appropriations for the Middle East nightmare and for the umpteenth time was told that by Shea that he had to support  the supply of American “boots on the ground” no matter what,  he was weary unto death of such thankless delegations, small anti-war rallies where passers-by show utter indifference and of people refusing to talk any serious politics except the fruitless “horse race” stuff for President and the like. (That comrade expression by the way not signifying some allegiance to Moscow or Peking [sic] like it very well might have done in the old days but in the old fashion 19^th century way to connote a politically solid friendship for which either party would scale the barricades for, and gladly.

Of course Ralph felt a little badly for Sam (although he knew better than to mention the fact to Sam for Sam was not the kind of guy who took feeling badly for, especially in politics, with good grace) since he had been instrumental in getting Sam back into the left-wing liberal political battles back in 2002 in the lead-up to the Bush junior Iraq War after years of badgering him about his withdrawal from active progressive politics when the great wave of the 1960s ebbed and it looked like an Ice Age had set in for the kind of world that they both were seeking in their callow youths. Ralph had stayed far more active in progressive circles over the years but even he had to admit that he had drifted far from the in-your-face street confrontations like the one down in Washington in 1971 where he and Sam had met in RFK Stadium after they had been arrested and placed there after an indiscriminate police round-up of anybody who even looked young and was not wearing a three-piece suit that day. He had spent his off-hours when not running his father’s electrical shop doing the exact same things that Sam had bitched to him about over the phone. With the advent of the Internet and the rise of social networking he had originally thought that the old idea of a world “tribal youth nation” had traction again. He had even gone full force when the rising star of Barack Obama seemed like it would push the rock up the hill. And although that particular star had turned into a cipher he was still fighting the good fight trying to make this foolish messy democratic system work since those old street confrontation days didn’t produce anything but forty plus years of cold cultural civils wars, and they were not on the winning side.

Ralph thought he would try to buck Sam up after that last call by referring him to some blogs that he “followed” (followed here meaning merely clinking onto the blogger’s homepage and nothing more sinister like some cultish madness that he had nearly got caught up in after the ‘60s wave turned tepid and he was looking for some “new age” personal solutions) to show he had kindred out there in the progressive political universe. Sam did pay attention to a couple, one in particular the Steve Lendman blog which gave good analyses but after a while he had this abiding feeling that he was again spinning his wheels in this progressive mish-mash. He decided to write something about his dilemma although he is not a writer but rather had just recently retired from the printing business which was taken over by his son. Here is what he had to say, and here is where the problem lies:    

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

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

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

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

The left-liberal/radical arena in American politics has been on a steep decline since I was a whole-hearted denizen of that milieu in my youth somewhere slightly to the left of Robert Kennedy back in 1968 say but still immersed in trying put band-aids on the capitalist system. That is the place where Steve Lendman with his helpful well informed blog finds himself. As do my old anti-war comrade Ralph Morris and myself as well. It is not an enviable place to be for anyone to have a solid critique of bourgeois politics, hard American imperial politics in the 21st century and have no ready source in that milieu to take on the issues and make a difference (and as an important adjunct to that American critique a solid critique of the American government acting as front-man for every nefarious move the Israeli government makes toward increasing the oppression of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank). 

Of course I had the luxury, if one could call it that, which a look at Mr. Lendman's bio information indicates that he did not have, was the pivotal experience in the late 1960s of being inducted, kicking and screaming but inducted, into the American army in its losing fight against the heroic Vietnamese resistance. That signal event disabused me, although it took a while to get "religion," on the question of the idea of depending on bourgeois society to reform itself. On specific issues like the fight against the death penalty, the fight for the $15 minimum wage, immigration reform and the like I have worked with that left-liberal/ radical milieu, and gladly, but as for continuing to believe against all evidence that the damn thing can be reformed that is where we part company. Still Brother Lendman keep up the good work and I hope you find a political home worthy of your important work. Hell, I hope I can find such a home too because this endless beseeching of bourgeois politicians to do the right thing is getting threadbare and getting me    old time street action crazy.                 

President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues

President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind-A Personal Letter From The Pen Of Chelsea Manning From Fort Leavenworth 

  

 

Updated-September 2015  

A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I was asked by a fellow member of Veterans For Peace at a monthly meeting in Cambridge about the status of the case of Chelsea Manning since he knew that I had been seriously involved with publicizing her case and he had not heard much about the case since she had been convicted in August 2013 (on some twenty counts including several Espionage Act counts, the Act itself, as it relates to Chelsea and its constitutionality will be the basis for one of her issues on appeal) and sentenced by Judge Lind to thirty-five years imprisonment to be served at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. (She had already been held for three years before trial, the subject of another appeals issue and as of May 2015 had served five years altogether thus far and will be formally eligible for parole in the not too distant future although usually the first parole decision is negative).

That had also been the time immediately after the sentencing when Private Manning announced to the world her sexual identity and turned from Bradley to Chelsea. The question of her sexual identity was a situation than some of us already had known about while respecting Private Manning’s, Chelsea’s, and those of her ardent supporters at Courage to Resist and elsewhere the subject of her sexual identity was kept in the background so the reasons she was being tried would not be muddled and for which she was savagely fighting in her defense would not be warped by the mainstream media into some kind of identity politics circus.

I had responded to my fellow member that, as usual in such super-charged cases involving political prisoners, and there is no question that Private Manning is one despite the fact that every United States Attorney-General including the one in charge during her trial claims that there are no such prisoners in American jails only law-breakers, once the media glare of the trial and sentencing is over the case usually falls by the wayside into the media vacuum while the appellate process proceed on over the next several years.

At that point I informed him of the details that I did know. Chelsea immediately after sentencing had been put in the normal isolation before being put in with the general population at Fort Leavenworth. She seemed to be adjusting according to her trial defense lawyer to the pall of prison life as best she could. Later she had gone to a Kansas civil court to have her name changed from Bradley to Chelsea Elizabeth which the judge granted although the Army for a period insisted that mail be sent to her under her former male Bradley name. Her request for hormone therapies to help reflect her sexual identity had either been denied or the process stonewalled despite the Army’s own medical and psychiatric personnel stating in court that she was entitled to such measures.

At the beginning of 2014 the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, General Buchanan, who had the authority to grant clemency on the sentence part of the case, despite the unusual severity of the sentence, had denied Chelsea any relief from the onerous sentence imposed by Judge Lind.

Locally on Veterans Day 2013, the first such event after her sentencing we had honored Chelsea at the annual VFP Armistice Day program and in December 2013 held a stand-out celebrating Chelsea’s birthday (as we did in December 2014 and will do again this December of 2015).  Most important of the information I gave my fellow VFPer was that Chelsea’s case going forward to the Army appellate process was being handled by nationally renowned lawyer Nancy Hollander and her associate Vincent Ward. Thus the case was in the long drawn out legal phase that does not generally get much coverage except by those interested in the case like well-known Vietnam era Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, various progressive groups which either nominated or rewarded her with their prizes, and the organization that has steadfastly continued to handle her case’s publicity and raising financial aid for her appeal, Courage to Resist (an organization dedicated to publicizing the cases of other military resisters as well).   

 

At our February 2015 monthly meeting that same VFPer asked me if it was true that as he had heard the Army, or the Department of Defense, had ordered Chelsea’s hormone therapy treatments to begin. I informed him after a long battle, including an ACLU suit ordering such relief, that information was true and she had started her treatments a month previously. I also informed him that the Army had thus far refused her request to have an appropriate length woman’s hair-do. On the legal front the case was still being reviewed for issues to be presented which could overturn the lower court decision in the Army Court Of Criminal Appeals by the lawyers and the actual writing of the appeal was upcoming. A seemingly small but very important victory on that front was that after the seemingly inevitable stonewalling on every issue the Army had agreed to use feminine or neutral pronoun in any documentation concerning Private Manning’s case. The lawyers had in June 2014 also been successful in avoiding the attempt by the Department of Defense to place Chelsea in a civil facility as they tried to foist their “problem” elsewhere.

 

On the political front Chelsea continued to receive awards, and after a fierce battle in 2013 was finally in 2014 made an honorary grand marshal of the very important GLBTQ Pride Parade in San Francisco (and had a contingent supporting her freedom again in the 2015 parade). Recently she has been given status as a contributor to the Guardian newspaper, a newspaper that was central to the fight by fellow whistle-blower Edward Snowden, where her first contribution was a very appropriate piece on what the fate of the notorious CIA torturers should be, having herself faced such torture down in Quantico adding to the poignancy of that suggestion. More recently she has written articles about the dire situation in the Middle East and the American government’s inability to learn any lessons from history and a call on the military to stop the practice of denying transgender people the right to serve. (Not everybody agrees with her positon in the transgender community or the VFP but she is out there in front with it.) 

[Maybe most important of all in this social networking, social media, texting world of the young (mostly) Chelsea has a twitter account- @xychelsea

 

Locally over the past two year we have marched for Chelsea in the Boston Pride Parade, commemorated her fourth year in prison last May [2014] and the fifth this year with a vigil, honored her again on Armistice Day 2014, celebrated her 27^th birthday in December with a rally (and will again this year on her 28^th birthday).

More recently big campaigns by Courage To Resist and the Press Freedom Foundation have almost raised the $200, 000 needed (maybe more by now) to give her legal team adequate resources during her appeals process (first step, after looking over the one hundred plus volumes of her pre-trial and trial hearings, the Army Court Of Criminal Appeal)

Recently although in this case more ominously and more threateningly Chelsea has been charged and convicted of several prison infractions (among them having a copy of the now famous Vanity Fair with Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner’s photograph on the cover) which could affect her parole status and other considerations going forward.     

We have continued to urge one and all to sign the on-line Amnesty International petition asking President Obama to grant an immediate pardon as well as asking that those with the means sent financial contributions to Courage To Resist to help with her legal expenses.

After I got home that night of the meeting I began thinking that a lot has happened over the past couple of years in the Chelsea Manning case and that I should made what I know more generally available to more than my local VFPers. I do so here, and gladly. Just one more example of our fervent belief that as we have said all along in Veterans for Peace and elsewhere- we will not leave our sister behind… More later.              

Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind

Out Of The Hills And Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally Brothers In Mind  

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

You know sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco Bay Area Town and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, looked like difference from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence. Oh sure, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood and have it count has tried to march to its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of the decade, maybe the first part of the next. But what Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed. 

The way Sam told it one night at his bi-weekly book club where the topic selected for that meeting had been the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook was that he had been looking for roots as a kid. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of his generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree. Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So his generation had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.

Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different. That transistor radio for those not in the know was “heaven sent” for a whole generation of kids in the 1950s who could care less, who hated the music that was being piped into the family living room big ass floor model radio which their parents grew up with since it was small, portable and could be held to the ear and the world could go by without bothering you while you were in thrall to the music. That was the start. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week.

Sam’s lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music, well, cheaply alone or on a date. Basically as he related to his listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs).

He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Muddy River Boys, and some bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.

This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school and had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement of Jimmy Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.                                 

As Sam warmed up to his subject he told his audience two things that might help explain his interest when he started to delve into the reasons why fifty years later the sound of that finely-tuned fiddle still beckons him home. The first was that when he had begun his freshman year at Boston University he befriended a guy, Everett Lally, the first day of orientation since he seemed to be a little uncomfortable with what was going on. See Everett was from a small town outside of Wheeling, West Virginia and this Boston trip was only the second time, the first time being when he came up for an interview, he had been to a city larger than Wheeling. So they became friends, not close, not roommate type friends, but they had some shared classes and lived in the same dorm on Bay State Road.

One night they had been studying together for an Western History exam and Everett asked Sam whether he knew anything about bluegrass music, about mountain music (Sam’s term for it Everett was Bill Monroe-like committed to calling it bluegrass). Sam said sure, and ran off the litany of his experiences at Harvard Square, the Village, listening on the radio. Everett, still a little shy, asked if Sam had ever heard of the Lally Brothers and of course Sam said yes, that he had heard them on the radio playing the Orange Blossom Express, Rocky Mountain Shakedown as well as their classic instrumentation version of The Hills of Home.  Everett perked up and admitted that he was one of the Lally Brothers, the mandolin player.

Sam was flabbergasted. After he got over his shock Everett told him that his brothers were coming up to play at the New England Bluegrass Festival to be held at Brandeis on the first weekend of October. Everett invited Sam as his guest. He accepted and when the event occurred he was not disappointed as the Lally Brothers brought the house down. For the rest of that school year Sam and Everett on occasion hung out together in Harvard Square and other haunts where folk music was played since Everett was interested in hearing other kinds of songs in the genre. After freshman year Everett did not return to BU, said his brothers needed him on the road while people were paying to hear their stuff and that he could finish school later when things died down and they lost touch, but Sam always considered that experience especially having access to Everett’s huge mountain music record collection as the lynchpin to his interest.             

Of course once the word got out that Everett Lally was in a bluegrass group, played great mando, could play a fair fiddle and the guitar the Freshman girls at BU drew a bee-line for him, some of them anyway. BU, which later in the decade would be one of the hotbeds of the anti-war movement locally and nationally but then was home to all kinds of different trends just like at campuses around the country, was filled with girls (guys too but for my purposes her the girls are what counts) from New York City, from Manhattan, from Long Island who knew a few things about folk music from forays into the Village. Once they heard Everett was a “mountain man,” or had been at Brandeis and had seen him with his brothers, they were very interested in adding this exotic plant to their collections. Everett, who really was pretty shy although he was as interested in girls as the rest of the guys at school were, told Sam that he was uncomfortable around these New York women because they really did treat him like he was from another world, and he felt that he wasn’t. Felt he was just a guy. But for a while whenever they hung out together girls would be around. Needless to say as a friend of Everett’s when there were two interested girls Sam got the overflow. Not bad, not bad at all.        

But there is something deeper at play in the Sam mountain music story as he also told the gathering that night. It was in his genes, his DNA he said. This was something that he had only found out a few years before. On his father’s side, his grandfather, Homer, whom he had never met since after his wife, Sam’s grandmother, Sara died he had left his family, all grown in any case, without leaving a forwarding address, had actually been born and lived his childhood down in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, down near the fabled Hazard of song and labor legend before moving to the North after World War I. Here is the funny part though when his father and mother Laura were young after World War II and at wits end about where his grandfather might be they travelled down to Prestonsburg in search of him. While they stayed there for a few months looking Sam had been conceived although they left after getting no results on their search, money was getting low, and there were no father jobs around so he had been born in the South Shore Hospital in Massachusetts. So yes, that mountain music just did not happen one fine night but was etched in his body, the whirlwind sounds on Saturday night down amount the hills and hollows with that sad fiddle playing one last waltz to end the evening.