Out In Waldo’s World-Every Man’s World-With The Film Laura In Mind

Out In Waldo’s World-Every Man’s World-With The Film  Laura In Mind

By Bart Webber

My old friend Sam Lowell, a guy married three times and who has struck out three time and now “single” (meaning he has had a long-time companion and has given up the idea of marriage although not the idea of love after three sets of alimony, child support and college tuitions, that latter category which almost broke him on the wheel) had been watching an old time film noir from the 1940s, Laura, with his own Laura, Laura Perkins, that long-time companion parenthetically mentioned above one night. A few days later after that viewing he called me up for our weekly session at Jack’s Grille and mentioned the film, knowing that I had seen it several times and consider it one of the great noirs along with Gilda, Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon and a few others. He said then, and we would get into more at Jack’s, a couple of nights later, that you could never figure what will drive a guy off the deep end but that six, two and even ninety-nine times out of one hundred it would be over a dame. I begged to differ with him figuring the odds more like sixty to forty on the dame reason but that only added fuel to his fire that night (that and a few too many high end scotches since he was not driving that night but staying at my place in Carver, our growing up home town down in Southeastern Massachusetts). The difference in our calculations I figured out later being that I have been with my one wife, the lovely Betsy Binstock, now for almost thirty-seven years.           

But Sam was on his high horse that night which meant that I was in for a regular slugfest, a regular barrage of chatter about Waldo, Waldo the guy who went over the edge for this dame, yeah, a dame, nice, pretty, smart, a go-getting but still a dame, this Laura, Laura Hunt in case you needed a last name. Here’s how Sam put the case, see Sam is nothing but a good country lawyer and so he saw the whole thing in terms of a case in a court of law like he was arguing for mercy for Waldo or something. Like maybe he was arguing the case for real like he would plea out Waldo on some diminished capacity foolishness just because the guy was skirt-addled.

As Sam was talking though I was putting my own two and two together about Waldo, Waldo Lydecker if you needed a last name for a skirt-addled guy although they are legion. Thinking back on the plot line that I knew well I found myself trying to figure out how did it figure that a high society guy, a well-known and syndicated newspaper columnist and radio personality, an older guy, an older single guy, an older single guy who seemed “light on his feet” if you asked me, you know seemed kind of “faggy” would tumble to this Laura from nowhere. Let this fresh breeze young thing of which there were about six million in New York City back in the day, break him. Make him do weird (unlawful things as Sam would put it) that would have him winding up facing downward on Laura’s apartment floor pledging his eternal love as the life was bleeding out of him from about six slugs of copper guns.

(Sam, by the way, who works in the court system and has to mind his Ps &Qs on sexual and ethnical stuff doesn’t like that term, those terms, faggy and light on his feet, but the old ways die hard with some of us old-time corner boys who grew up on the rough streets of the Acre in Carver and who used to while idly hanging out in front of  Jack Slack’s bowling alleys  fag bait each other just for kicks to enhance our own man-hoods, so faggy.)        

But maybe I should start at the beginning while Sam is drawing circles in the air with his hands just like if he was in the courtroom, just like he was trying the case of Waldo Lydecker vs. The State Of New York except not for murder, murder one, which what the bastard would be up for if he wasn’t lying face down in that pool of blood in that dame Laura’s apartment but for being a toy for some perfidious dame. See Waldo was like I said a big time newspaper and radio guy, knew everybody who counted in New York and Washington high society, had “drag” in all the right places as my old Irish grandfather would say. Also knew all the secret vices, and some not so secret, of those in the rarified air, knew that they had to treat him something like a rattlesnake with very proper kid gloves, knew they would be front and center in one of his columns, page one, if they didn’t play ball. Yes so Waldo Lydecker was not one of the world’s noblemen, was a bitch on wheels if anybody was asking around about him of late, not hopefully looking to give him a certified good conduct certificate. It was kind of funny because this guy had more dough than the King of Siam, had come from wealth, good school, good breeding the whole nine yards so you would think that being what really was a gossip columnist, a venomous one to boot would be beneath him. But guys, people are funny about their occupations and in any case the job, such as it was better than him sitting at home in palatial Westchester clipping coupons. 

Like I said before this Waldo as he aged, got to middle age, maybe a little older was nothing but a bachelor, hadn’t been seen with a real girlfriend, nothing serious anyway. So the talk around town, very discreetly around town out of his earshot, was that he was either asexual, which was Sam’s take on the matter, some guys are like that, maybe so hung up on their mothers that no young dame could ever be good enough for them. Maybe something got lost in the genes, something about attraction to any human relationship except to hit hard at weak points. So no women, except he obvious mixing at his lavish parties, you know ornaments. You know my take already, my position that he was gay, maybe unconsciously, maybe he was hiding some guy, some fag, out in some apartment far from the high end crowd you never know. Yeah, I liked that take although Sam in one of his more compromising moments wished I would just call him effete and let it go at that. Like effete didn’t mean in high tone language noting but fag. I’ll stick with my old time corner boy expression if you please, an expression that Sam was as likely to use in the old days as I was-if anybody is asking.                 

So everybody was surprised when Waldo started being seen around the clubs, the swanky clubs like the High Hat where the jazz was be-bop, the drinks expensive and exotic and the smoke thick and the White Note where the younger crowd hung out where the smoke was scented, was dope no question dope, tea, hemp, ganja, to appease this Laura twist. But you could tell he was out of his element there in that latter place, that Jimmy Jones’ be-bop band with Milt Rosen blowing heavenly high white notes off the cuff ruled the night not him. No question this Laura was a looker, a long tall brunette with those bright eyes and sulky lips that guys went big for then and guys while not going big for now looking for thin hipless dames with sneers these day could appreciate, could see even an effete guy taking a run at even if just to have as a trophy, or cover against that so-called discreet talk among the high society types about his sexual habits (like a snoop like Waldo wasn’t “connected” into that talk by a thousand snitches looking to keep their own hijinks out of the front page and off the air).        

The story Waldo told about their meeting, their fateful meeting, take it for what it was worth after all that really happened, after he wound up face down and very dead, was that Laura had purposely gone to his table at his favorite lunch place (and daytime watering hole), Matty’s on 54^th Street across from the newspaper, and “accosted” him, that was his word, had pestered him about endorsing some product, a pen. See this Laura was nothing but a runt one of thousands, no, what did I say before, millions, of young women trying to get ahead in the advertising racket, any New York City racket, which is why young women, smart young women went to New York City from Buffalo, Cleveland, Eire, hell, maybe the wheat fields of Kansas too, to grab fame and fortune in one of the few serious upward mobile jobs for aspiring college graduates. Or just gals with big dreams and some talents other than hitting the silky sheets.

This is the oddest part. He blew her off, treated less graciously than some six year old brat for disturbing milord’s solo lunch, but something about her got under his skin, some ancient memory of some young woman in that long gone time when he might have thought about an affair, that fatal disease that has taken all the gold of more than one man. The blood too.  Get this, get this for a guy who treated her like a wayward child Waldo eventually went to her advertising agency, signed on for the endorsement of that fucking pen. Laura’s career thereafter went through the roof, he had called in plenty of chips to get guys and gals he knew around town to throw business her way, or else.  Seeing her as a rough diamond, obviously not from his class, maybe even then as a tramp with big “wanting habits” you never know about the Waldos of the world and what drives them, although the smitten part is easy to explain, he taught her a few things about style and poise, style and poise as interpreted by high society just then. That was the fluff part, the public story.  

Who knows what the real deal was. Sam’s lamo theory about mother fixation, or mother dread is okay for okay country lawyers if they have to defend some geek in court but that angle seems to have been worked to death and I wouldn’t want to have to throw that to a jury but since I am merely a retired printer and not a lawyer I don’t have to worry about that. Hell, the obvious is that she was damn good-looking woman and that was that. Maybe it was the long hair that always made every hat she wore in the days when women went in for serious hats for fashion and not utility look just right, maybe it was those sullen lips showing slightly parted pearly white teeth, hell, maybe it, like a for a billion guys since Adam and maybe before, was the sandalwood scent she gave off, that latter would be the downfall of more than one man. But he was hooked on her, hooked as bad as a guy who couldn’t express such thoughts in public could be, it was just not done in high society, could be hooked on a dame (of course a guy like Waldo wouldn’t dream of calling a woman a dame, a frail, a frill, a twist, names we used back in the day but like I said before the old ways die hard with some guys like me). 

Here’s the funny thing, here’s where the old guy, young dame problem comes in, or maybe just Waldo’s whole freaking silly upbringing, he never had sex with her, never went under the downy billows with her which is the way Tom Wolfe put how the upper crust likes to call “hitting the satin sheets.” The thing was strictly platonic with the unspoken proviso (Sam’s word not mine) that she was his “property.” Waldo’s alone. 

That didn’t play very well with Laura. Didn’t play well with a young lustrous sexy woman like Laura who had big sexual appetites, liked men, and lots of them as any young pretty woman who was grabbing lots of attention from the young bucks would. (All the sex stuff as per usual in 1940s films was either off the film or just implied but even a goof like Sam could read between the lines that Laura was a sexual being. Hell, one night, no, one very early morning, wacko Waldo in a fit “stalked” her apartment on West 56^th Street as one young buck, Jack Jacobs the well-known painter came strolling out the front door of the building looking a little the worse for wear.) Waldo was forever shooing guys away and as quickly as Laura, on Waldo’s fatherly, to her, recommendation would ditch one guy another guy would pop up. That went on for a while and Waldo, for his own nefarious reasons, thought he was home free. That Laura was all his.         

Then the roof caved in. Laura got caught up with this guy Shelby, a ne’er do well, a guy from decayed Southern stock, meaning he was broke and living off of women, living off of Laura’s aunt who liked the idea of a “kept” man, liked a young stud around and could afford the freight. Problem was Shelby like many another guy wanted to be around some young tail (ass) and so despite his “kept” status with the aging and demanding aunt he made a run at Laura, got her to the stage where marriage might be in the air. Got her to give him a job at her ad agency where he actually flowered, brought some fresh light into the office. Bad move, bad move on Laura’s part even thinking about marriage to a gigolo like Shelby. That is when Waldo’s wheels started coming off, when his better judgment took a back seat to his unspoken lust for Laura. He tried to kill her, shoot her dead with a shotgun in her own apartment, the place which would be his final resting place if he had only been prophetic rather than blood-lustful. Problem though was Laura was not there that night of the murder, had been upstate at a cozy country retreat thinking things through about the possibilities of marriage to Shelby. When everything came out later, much later, the girl who was killed had been one of Laura’s models at the ad agency, a model whom Shelby was playing footsies with. Some guys, guys like Shelby, never change, never get off the wagon even when easy street beckons (and that silly aunt was still ready to move heaven and earth to get his silly ass back in her crib under the principle that birds of a feather flock together-he was a tramp and she was too so comingle their tainted blood.)         

Well murder most foul done by gigolos, deadbeats, mass murderers, ”hit” men or the lovelorn has to be investigated, especially in the high rent district. Most especially in the high rent district after all what the hell were they paying the public coppers for anyway. So they put crackerjack homicide detective Mark, Mark McPherson, on the case. Oh yeah a young, good-looking, didn’t miss a trick, knew the means streets as well as the leafy streets to look closely, very closely into the Laura Hunt murder. Naturally he got nothing but the backs of their hands from the Mayfair swells, got nothing but grief and snide remarks from old Waldo who I will say held himself together during the critical hours and days when McPherson was putting the screws to the case, was giving everybody his cool modern scientific detective shifting through all the evidence routine. Stayed cool enough and cagey enough to throw a big shadow over Shelby as the fall guy. And why not he had been playing footsies with that foxy model right in Laura’s apartment. Yeah, I admit I liked him for it, liked him a lot when McPherson turned the screws on. Didn’t like that he was two-three, who knows how many timing Laura, with the poor dead model even the old battle ax aunt and who knows who else. Such guys as Shelby in the old neighborhood as Sam would be the first to tell you would be tailor-made for the big step-off and nobody except some poor old bedraggled mother would shed tear one for such a guy. And that is a fact.                

Then to break up the monotony of the run-down murder case getting kind of cold by the minute and to ruin my theory about Shelby as the fall guy who pops back into the picture. Laura. That’s when everybody found out that the dead girl was the model at Laura’s agency (conveniently her face had been blown off by the shotgun blast so the initial identification of Laura as the victim had been based on the very important circumstantial evidence that late at night the woman opening the door to Laura’s apartment would be, well, Laura). Waldo held up even through all of that as Sam will admit if less than gladly for his bogus love-addled insanity bit. Like I said before Laura was upstate thinking stuff through around a possible marriage to Shelby and nobody thought anything of it once she resurfaced. Still there was a murder to be solved now that the true victim was known. McPherson was still on the case, still needed to close out the case even if it now was a run of the mill model that was making the case run and not some darling of the Mayfair swells.

Waldo might have held up pretty well through all of that, might have slide through to old manhood but he flipped out when he sensed that the tramp, Laura of his dreams, what else could you call her in his effete book, was once again falling ofr any young guy in a suit, falling for Mark (and he her). Yeah, Waldo again lost his judgment rather than moving on to the cocktail circuit and forgetting about what could never be. See, and Sam in his more sober moments would have to agree, Laura had gotten deep under his skin, as deep as woman can a man who spent his whole life dishing it out and not taking it. Shelby was a non-starter for Laura and Waldo could have pieced him off easily enough but this Mark McPherson, this guy from the mean streets, from Laura’s mean streets wasn’t going to be easy to dismiss.

Here is where Sam said Waldo made his mistake, the mistake that would have made even a pretty good country lawyer like him have a hard time selling a jury that Waldo was temporarily insane, needed to go to the sicko hospital and not the death house. Waldo tempted fate one time too often (that model murder would have hit the “cold” files soon enough now that Laura was alive). He tried to kill Laura-again. No soap this time for the poor sap-he was wasted in a hail of bullets by New York’s finest. Get this though-the guy is lying face down in a pool of his own corrupted blood and his last words were of undying devotion to Laura. What a sap. Leave it to Sam to get the last word though and even I couldn’t say it better, although he said it more in sorrow than anger. Waldo Lydecker was not the first guy nor will he be the last who got all twisted around by some frail’s sandalwood scent. Maybe Sam’s 99.9 % number was not so far off after all.                   

Scenes In Search Of The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-Setting The Mood

Scenes In Search Of The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-Setting The Mood


Setting The Mood


I, once a while back, was asked, in earnest, what I meant by the “blue-pink western skies” that has formed the backdrop for several entries in this space of late. Or rather the way I would prefer to formulate it, and have taken some pains to emphasize it this way, “the search for the blue-pink great American West night.” Well, of course, there was a literal part to the proposition since ocean-at-my back (sometimes right at my back) New England homestead meant unless I wanted to take an ill-advised turn at piracy or high-seas hijacking or some such thing east that the hitchhike road meant heading west.


So that night is clearly not in the vicinity of the local Blues Hills or of the Berkshires since early childhood ocean-fronted Massachusetts, those are too confined and short-distanced to even produce blues skies much less that west-glanced sweet shade just before heaven, if there was a heaven shade, blue-pink. And certainly not hog-butcher-to-the-world, sinewy Midwest Chicago night, Christ no, nor rarefied, deep-breathed, rockymountainhigh Denver night, although jaded sojourner-writer not known for breathe-taking, awe-bewilderment could have stopped there for choice of great western night. Second place, okay.


But no, onward, beyond, beyond pioneer, genetically-embedded pioneer America, past false god neon blue-pink glitter Las Vegas in the Nevada desert night to the place where, about fifty miles away from sanctified west coast, near some now nameless abandoned ghost town, nameless here for it is a mere speck on the map and you would not know the name, you begin, ocean man that you are, if you are, and organically ocean-bred says you are, to smell the dank, incense-like, seaweed-driven, ocean-seized air as it comes in from the Japanese stream, or out there somewhere in the unknown, some Hawaii or Guam or Tahiti of the mind, before the gates of holy city, city of a thousand, thousand land’s end dreams, San Francisco. That is where the blue-pink sky devours the sun just before the be-bop, the bop-bop, the do wang-doodle night, the great American Western star-spangled (small case) night I keep reaching for, like it was some physical thing and not the stuff of dreams.

*******

The scenes below stand (or fall) as moments in support of that eternal search.

Scene One: The Prequel- Germantown Monday, Summer 1957


I wake up early, with a sudden start like something hit me but it kind of missed, kind of just glanced off me, something that felt like a pebble, maybe thinner and a little lighter, but I don’t see anything out of my watery, half-closed eyes. And I don’t feel anything around me in this feeble excuse for a bed that my father lashed together out of old blankets when my previous mattress fell apart, something like you see down at the Plymouth Plantation when the Pilgrims, a few hundred years ago, made beds for their kids except not with the corn husking filler they used. See, Ma and Pa couldn’t see their way clear to getting me a new one since my younger brother, Kevin, really needed one for his “problem”. A “problem” that I don’t understand about, and that nobody ever talks about, even Grandma, and she talks about everything and will tell me anything, anything but that, at least when I am around they don’t.


Maybe, I wouldn’t understand it even if they blabbed about it all day, but here I am with this low-rent sleeping bag, our lord in the manger kind of a bed. And Kevin’s sleeping like a king in the room across the hall all by himself away from this midget-sized room that they must have thought of when kids were smaller than they are these days, what with us drinking more milk with “Big Brother” Bob Emery every school day when we go home at lunchtime. Ma says I should be thankful (including to the Lord, as she always says, without fail) that I have any bed at all as some kids in India don’t even have that. The reasons for that, I guess, are ‘cause those people don’t thank the Lord, or at least thank our “the Lord.”


Darn it, I now suddenly remember, whatever it was that hit me, maybe something from outer space, broke up a nice half-formed dream that was just starting to get somewhere and that was about being on some television show and winning something like a thousand dollars and me getting to buy stuff for me and my friends like serious bicycles or a big record player, and getting girls stuff too, like a box of candy from the Rexall drugstore up in Adamsville Square, and just like that its gone, gone, now long gone. Just like shutting off the television before the end and the good guys, or whoever has the right to be on the right side of the law like Maverick, wins; just like missing American Bandstand before Dick Clark gets to the big dance off thing at the end where everybody’s jumping and grooving and having a good time, the band is rocking, and the guys, especially the guys that get the cute girls and not the left-over ones that they must just put on to be nice, or something are smiling, smiling the smile of the just. Double darn it.


Ya, something’s out of whack, something’s definitely out of whack, or it’s gonna be. Every time I have one of these broken-up dreams something goes awry pretty soon only not today please, and I am scared, no, really scared about it this time. Wouldn’t you be? I suddenly notice something in a split-second that confirms this bad omen coming-Oh no, not again, for the hundredth hundredth time this ratty old summer, this boring never-ending summer that I wish would end so bad I am praying, and praying hard, that it will be over and we can go back to the cool air in Snug Harbor school that we left the last part of last month. I told you it was bad, bad as all that. I’m all sweaty, I feel under my arms, underarms sticky, underwear, all cottony, sticking to me like it’s part of my skin forever, eyes sticky and half shut from a nighttime’s worth of perspiration, and maybe more than a night at that. I don’t think I took a bath yesterday, did I? I sniff, no. Sticky, that me, that’s gonna be my middle name before long if this mind-numbing weather keeps up.


Heck, I’m tired, tired to hell and back, no, farther than that, of these half-sleep, restless nights; god awful humid, sultry, breathless summer’s nights, no relief and no air conditioning in sight. No air, no wind coming from the channel across the parking lot from our house, or I should say apartment. No air, less than no air, coming from Adamsville Bay, so still that throwing a rock on it would make ripples all the way to Merrymount. And certainly no air coming from god forsaken Hough’s Neck. I know that for sure, ‘cause I went over there, walked all the way up to Rock Island and down that dusty dirt road all the way to Nut Island almost before I realized that the air had died, or gone on vacation.


Ma, making fun of me and my sweating every second of every minute of every day for about a week now, the other day told me that this was my own personal preview of what it is gonna be like for me in hell, if I don’t change my ways. Yes, Ma. But that is just her con, she’s always conning me and my brothers, trying make us do good by bringing God, his son, his holy ghost, his mother, his father, his sisters and brothers and whoever else she can conjure up using to make us do good, to do as she’s says every chance she gets in order to do God’s work, but that’s impossible using her tried and true method. She must have learned that “method” from some priest over at Saint Boniface, or something. She sure didn’t learn it from that cool doctor, Doctor Spock, I think was his name, that I saw on TV the other day on that Mike Douglas, or one of them talk shows. He knows a lot about kids, they say, at least that’s what someone said. I wouldn’t know, I ‘m stuck with Ma, and that ain’t no nice to kids lady, nor does she want to be.

But saying all that ain’t doing me any good, lying here in a pool of sweat, thinking about getting up.

I’m getting mad, even though I know getting mad today is tempting fate, I guess I was born mad, or got that way early because even though I know its gonna get me in trouble , I’m mad . You would think that in the year 1957, in a year when everybody else seems to have money and is spending it, that even in this woe begotten tiny airless apartment filled to the brim with three growing boys and two grown, overgrown if you ask me, adults; in this woe begotten tiny airless room filled to the brim with two growing boys, one sleeping like a log, sleeping the sleep of the just, I guess, across from me right now; in this woe begotten no account housing project where you can’t get anything fixed without about twenty forms and a six month wait and even then you have to wait, nothing less. Even for a light fixture it takes a civil war. Christ, how long, in this woe begotten town before we could have this “necessity,” air conditioning. Ma says we can’t afford it, or whatever her excuse of the week is. “How about a fan, Ma?” Nope, can’t afford the extra electricity ‘cause Dad just got laid off, whatever that means. He’s always getting laid off so I can’t tell what is so different about this time so that we can’t get air conditioning. Johnny Jakes has it, and his father hasn’t ever worked. Can’t, for some reason.


Enough of this, I‘m getting up, if only to splash some water on my face and get my eyes unstuck, or get a cool drink of water to bring down what has got be about a 110 degrees of temperature running through my body, maybe 115. Nah, that can’t be right, we learned about body temperatures in class. I would have to be some alien from outer space maybe. But I’m feverish, that’s for sure. Just then I am stopped short by a sound, a familiar sound. A sound that if I had just one sound to hear in the whole universe of sounds that I have heard in my long eleven year old life it would be that one. The sound of fleeing this hellish, airless place for parts unknown, any unknown. Ya, that old, sweet, lonesome, high whistle sound that cuts me to the bone, that sweet old fog horn sound when the air is like pea soup down the channel ‘cause that means a big old firemen’s red, rubber tire-draped tugboat, or maybe two, is bringing a low-riding, rusty old tanker, or some ship to port across the channel to the Proctor & Gamble factory, the place of a thousand perfume smells, as we call it when the wind is up and all the world here smells like a bar of soap.


If I live to be a hundred, if I live to be a thousand, I’m always gonna watch, even if only in my mind, when that old tanker comes down the line, dragging or getting dragged by that old tug, whistling away, to keep river traffic away, and like it just as much then I bet. I know what I will be doing this morning, or the first part of the morning, heat or no heat, air conditioning or no air conditioning. I will be perched on my very own private, for invited guests only which means nobody, viewing stand at the little point along the shoreline that is my real home, or the home that I wish was my home except maybe in winter, just across from where the big boy boat will settle in.


“Hey, a boat’s coming in, I’m off,” I yell to no one in particular. And from not one of those no one in particulars do I get an answer. My brothers don’t suffer the sweats like I do, they have their own problems which I already sense will be their undoing later, but it ain’t the sweats and so they just sleep away. I rush, and I mean rush, to the bathroom, use the toilet, splash that life-saving water on my face, it always feels good, brush my teeth perfunctorily, and run down the stairs. “Ma, a ship’s coming in,” I say excitedly, even though its about the hundredth time I seen one come in, to my mother who is distracted by something, as usual, especially when my father is out of work, and especially today, Monday, when he goes off in search of new work with a lot of hope about getting some job that will keep the wolves from the doors, that is the constant phrase that he uses to deal with the situation. I’ll tell you about him sometime but today I ain’t got any time for nothing but my ship coming in, and that ain’t no lie either.


“Well, it is not our ship that is coming in so don’t worry about it and just eat your breakfast,” she, dear old Ma, blurred out, and then I know she is in a fit and even if my ship wasn’t coming in I know the ropes enough to know to keep low, very low and out of the range of fire that I know is coming from her direction. I go to the cabinet, grab a cracked, slightly cracked bowl, get a spoon and go over to the stove, take the cover off the pot, steam escaping, and without even looking start dishing out my Quaker Oats oatmeal. Rain, shine, sleet or snow, summer, winter, spring or fall that is my nectar of the gods. With a little milk, when we have it, and even if we don’t a little Karo syrup, I am fortified for the day. Ma, can be a pain, Ma and I have a thousand battles a week over two thousand different things, and I know that already things are never gonna be right between us, even if at times we have an armed truce but, mark this down I always got my oatmeal, and always when I wanted it. I guess that put her on the right side of the angels, a little.


A few gulps later, washed down with about a half glass of milk, I am out the door, hell, even my blessed oatmeal gets short shrift when the tankers blow in. Now going out the door most places that you know about means just going out the door straight. Bu in this urban planner’s nightmarish hangover not at 666 Taffrail Road. First you have the obstacle course of getting around the ten million poles and fences that are plucked right in the “courtyard” when my mother and the other housewives in the other three units that make up our complex they call it hang out their daily washing, or dry their curtains or whatever people like my mother do to keep places like this from reverting back to caveman times. Then I have to cross the parking lot, a lot filled with all kinds of cars, for those that have them. These days we don’t have one, in case I didn’t tell you before, because Dad is out of work so we are all reduced to waiting for an eternity for that slow-rolling, seems never to be here when you need it, Eastern Avenue bus that ambles on to Adamsville Square, making so many stops that I usually just walk it, if I am in a hurry to get something, even on a hot, sweltering summer day like this.


As I hit the already hot asphalt of the lot I look around longingly at the vast array of cars; Plymouths with fins that look like a fish; Chevies, my favorite, sleek and so, Timmy McDevitt tells me, go real fast when you get onto Route 128 and let her rip; Fords that look like something they want to use to go up into space with, and I don’t know what else, but there are plenty. Finally I get to the lower parking lot that’s for guests or people who don’t get a parking spot in front of their house, or maybe just run out of steam before making the turn into hell-bent Taffrail Road. I don’t know and I am now passed that spot on the move along the fence anyhow to get to the little opening that will take me to my grand viewing area. I’m okay though, I still hear the old tug whistle coming up the line so I have some time to wait.


I get to my little sliver of land, just a little jut out of the shoreline, covered with old, oil-slicked quarry rock probably from the ground around here about a million years ago, ‘cause this town is known for its granite rock, cause it’s a granite city, even though the real work done around here is over at the Five Rivers Shipyard that is just across the bridge from the Proctor & Gamble factory, and where even on this hot, god forsaken morning I can faintly hear the sounds of metal being banged by hammers or whatever they use to put the ship together, and the flashes of welders’ torches as they put that banged metal in seamless water-tight condition.

I also notice some empty beer cans, cigarette butts, chip bags left haphazardly all over my viewing stand, somebody last night, or the night before, must have said the hell with it and got out one of the sweltering houses and came over here to get whatever little, little breeze that could be eked out of the windless night. I rule the day here in this spot, especially when the boats come in, no question about that, but what others do at night I have no control over. I just wish they wouldn’t leave a mess on my sacred site.


But that is all so much made-up irritation, probably ‘cause I am so hot, for now I can see the first glimmer of the smokestack of a ship coming up the line. I wonder whose oil it is, Esso? Texaco? Shell? Esso has been in the lead this year, and they are bigger ships and ride real low in the water coming in, and real high going out. I can start to see specks on the bridge, human specks that are busy doing the work of preparing the ship for the dock.


I wonder, wonder a lot, about these guys and the work they do and whether they like it and like being on the sea and whether they ever have any trouble like in stories that I read down at the Thomas Crane Library attached to the school, and where they have been and what adventures they have had, and where, and with whom. Maybe that’s the life for me. And I wonder about the girls they know from all over and whether they are nicer than the girls in the "projects" who are beginning to get on my nerves, for some reason. At least I don’t know what to do or what to say around them, or what they want me to do, or want me to say. I hope this is just being a boy kid and that it goes away, and I hope it a lot.


Oh, there she is, an Esso. The tugs are in position, gently nudging her and getting her ready to go dockside, tie up and unload. Wonder how long she will stay? Usually its takes a couple of days and then they are gone, sometimes in the middle of the night and they are not there in the morning depending on the tides and the traffic on the roads, oh, ocean roads, that is. Hey, its almost lunchtime, guess I’ll go home and eat and go down the cellar, maybe to try to cool off. I know one thing now though that kind of had me worried and kind of bothered me for a while 'cause I am just a kid. I now know I will always take time to watch the boats as they blow in, any dream about catching a boat out, wherever I am. Maybe, that is an omen, a good omen, about my future. I'll let you know.

When The Deal Went Down December 7, 1941- Humphrey Bogart’s “Across The Pacific” (1942)-A Film Review

When The Deal Went Down December 7, 1941- Humphrey Bogart’s “Across The Pacific” (1942)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

Across The Pacific, starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, 1942

Free, free at last, good god in Heaven free at last-for the moment anyway. All readers, young and old, recent or longtime, interested or disinterested, movie aficionados or not, but at least breathing will note, or should be expected to note, that one Phillip Larkin did not start out his usually beautifully-etched film review with an expletive (which one for the young, recent, disinterested, not aficionado brethren although I assume still breathing is a book sealed with seven seals). Why? Finally, good God in heaven finally, the divinely-inspired site impresario Greg Green and he hard-working thoughtful minions on the recently established Editorial Board have by unanimous assent permitted me to go through my paces on a real movie review, an Bogie- aficionado drenched review of one of his lesser classics-Across the Pacific.  

For those who have been out of the country, have been hospitalized, have been up the Amazon with no means of transportation or communication here is a quick primer on why what should have been a routine past through quickie review by me is worthy of every hosanna in the book. Through inexperience, newness to this site, or bad advice from that hither-to-fore deadbeat Ed Board our esteemed guru Greg Green had the bizarre idea that I should do kiddie film reviews, you know things like Captain America, The Avengers, Batman. All that silliness that passes for film experiences among the younger set for the simple fact that the eight to maybe twenty-one audience they are geared to do not have the energy or ability to sit for twenty minutes and read a freaking comic book. Instead are popcorn-addled and soft drink-doped for a couple of hours to listen to grunts and two word sentences, physically violent action every thirty seconds warranted or not, and some silly mid-credit come-ons to the next so-called adventure film. The reasoning at the time and I am not sure reasoning is the right word is that unlike the old regime under the now fully deposed, some unkind older writer-types saying purged, and exiled former site manager, my old growing up friend Allan Jackson who let us do whatever interested us as long as we did it well, the whole writing staff should “broaden their horizons by random assignment. Sorry, bullshit, sorry. 

Moreover that whole policy, and I used that word advisedly, was to let the self-designated “Young Turks” who rebelled against the old Jackson regime and led the ugly purging process get to write some decent stuff and not a rehash of what the older writers threw away as drafts. Under Allan mostly stuff about that growing up in the 1960s during that paradise time to be living, Allan and the older writers time which they could have given a damn about. Couldn’t know things about like the Summer of Love, 1967 for the simple fact that were in swaddling clothes or not yet born. In my case I drew that kiddie stuff because Greg fell weak-kneed for the line this young kid, Jesus, twenty-five years old, Kenny Jacobs gave him about how his movie-addled film noir parents dragged his young ass to a bunch of film festival retrospectives when he was about eight. As against my spending real-time, real-time growing up teenager, young adult, adult, old adult time starting on those lonely Saturday afternoon matinees Strand Theater double-features to get out of my turbulent household haunting the retros every chance I got. Won my spurs on doing Bogie, Robert Mitchum, Glenn Ford Gloria Grahame, Lauren Bacall, Mary Astor, Jane Greer, background reviews under the old regime which loved to mix it up with the older material. (Allan Jackson frowned on most of the modern stuff saying that other more informed sources could provide those kind of reviews quite nicely in places like the American Film Gazette where he had started out and that our job was to do films, books, music, culture, etc. which reflected the broader history of the American experience which this site is committed too.)          

Without tooting my own horn too much I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how I got back on top. Maybe provide an object lesson in how to work through the increasing bureaucracy of even barebones on-line operations which supposedly don’t have the hassles of brick and mortar hard copy publications to slow things down and make everybody a speck. At first I resented being “demoted” via the Greg Green so-called democratic new regime from being a longtime Associate Film Critic to just another generic writer. I let that pass figuring eventually the bureaucratic mentality would catch up to the new crowd and they would be handing out titles like candy. What ate at me and I am not afraid to say so now that the situation has been permanently resolved was being pushed aside on my specialty (they wouldn’t dare sent me back to the comics they don’t need the seven kinds of hell I would bring down which would make beautiful super-hero Thor’s hammerings seem like some street junkie’s).

I already gave you what the kid tried to pull with his lame parent story. What I did in response was my classic belly-aching in print, okay in cyberspace, moaning and groaning leaving about three lines for the review (for films probably bam-bam kick worth about two) against that punk kid, Kenny Jacobs, you have seen his weird reviews I am sure. Did it enough to switch gears on the wily young bastard. Got my old route back and here I am ready to dig deep into this low-rent 1940s Bogie pic that will never make his top ten films list but who cares because given the actors lined up in this one I can hit a homerun with The Maltese Falcon and make everybody forget this clunker.            

**********

Everybody, at least everybody over the past few generations has certain touchstone events which affect, even if indirectly, their lives.   

Will know exactly where they were when they heard the news. For mine John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963 (informed over the high school PA system by a distraught headmaster). For younger generations 9/11 and you need not say more, need to throw a year date in. For my parents, the ones who came of age in the 1930s Great Depression and slogged through World War II on two oceans, December 7, 1941, the day of FDR’s famous infamy, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor is that touchstone and sets the framework for this film. (And Greg Green, no many how many reviews he oversaw over at American Film Gazette before coming here, must have had blinders on when young Kenny Jacobs begged him to do this review. What possible frame of reference, other than he had seen the film when he was a kid with those film freak parents, could he bring to any such review.)          

That sets the plot-line frame. The other component is the cohort of actors here led by Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet who the previous year under the original director here, John Huston, who signed on to the Army before the finish, starred in one of the great movies of all time, The Maltese Falcon. Although this veiled propaganda film does not come close the three artists work through the problems presented by such a film fairly well although as I mentioned this will not go down as one of Bogie’s best.  

As my old friend and former boss as Senior Film Critic now retired, Sam Lowell, would say at this point (and encourage us to do so as well) here’s the “skinny.” Captain Leland, Bogie’s role, has been cashiered out of the Coast Guard for some petty crime. All that a ruse so that he can work an operation as a secret agent against those who were working their asses off for the soon-to-be formal enemies, the Japanese, as the war clouds thicken in late 1941. Number one agent is a sociology professor, Doctor Lorenz, out of the Philippines (whose citizens will be treated very badly when Japanese invasion time comes), played by the nefarious slippery Sydney Greenstreet who admires the Japanese way of doing things. The joker in the deck is the good-looking footloose woman, Alberta, played by Mary Astor, not a femme fatale this time but eye candy to Leland’s eyes. The Captain is not sure where she fits in but he takes an under the sheets run at her anyway. Their meeting place, a Japanese freighter which is heading, well, across the Pacific via the short route Panama Canal in the days when that meant a considerably shorter trip than around the Cape, maybe now too since it had been upgraded for the super-tankers.       

Things go along as they do with Leland making it clear to Lorenz he is a hired gun, a mercenary, a soldier of fortune ready to throw lead for the highest bidder. Willing too to tell what he knows about gun emplacements when the time comes. Al the while playing footsie with Alberta and while trying to figure out what the good Doctor is up to. Things start getting dicey when the Japanese ship is not permitted to enter the canal locks and things get hairy with Lorenz and Alberta departing for whereabouts unknown. The day, December 6, 1941 telegraphed through a newspaper popped on screen, so you know something bad is going to happen when all trails lead Leland to a plantation. To a place where it turns out Alberta’s drunken father lives and where the damn Japanese were painfully constructing a torpedo plane piece by piece to blow the strategic canal locks to kingdom come (my father a Pacific War battle-tested Marine never until he died called them anything but Nips, with a snarl, never.)   

Of course you know that is never going to happen as Bogie pulls the plug in the plan blasting every Japanese in sight (not going to happen as it didn’t in history but the reason here one heroic Bogart saving the day). Just like in The Maltese Falcon the evil Greenstreet bites the dust on his dreams. Here though innocent Alberta is not subject to being sent-over, sent to face the big step-off. Hey, I did pretty well with this period piece loser. Yeah I’m back in the saddle.      

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance

Support The Class-War Prisoners During The Holidays-Support The Partisan Defense Committee’s Holiday Appeal- Help Build The Resistance  

By Josh Breslin  

My yearly comment on behalf of the Holiday Appeal

I like to think of myself as a long-time fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the international working class. Cases from early on in the 1970s when the organization was founded and the committee defended the Black Panthers who were being targeted by every police agency that had an say in the matter, the almost abandoned by the left Weather Underground (in its various incantations) and Chilean miners in the wake of the Pinochet coup there in 1973 up to more recent times with the Mumia death penalty case, defense of the Occupy movement and the NATO three, and defense of the heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley) and more recently the courageous anti-fascist fighters who have been rounded up for protesting the alt-right, Nazi, KKK, white supremacist bastards.      

Moreover the PDC is an organization committed, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program through the annual Holiday Appeal drive. Unfortunately having to raise these funds in support of political prisoners for many years now, too many years, as the American and international capitalist class and their hangers-on have declared relentless war, recently a very one-sided war, against those who would cry out against the monster. Attempting to silence voices from zealous lawyers like the late Lynne Stewart, articulate death-row prisoners like Mumia and the late Tookie Williams, the Anti-fa anti-fascist street fighters to black liberation fighters like the Assata Shakur, the Omaha Three and the Angola Three and who ended up on the wrong side of a cop and state vendetta and anti-imperialist fighters like the working-class based Ohio Seven and student-based Weather Underground who took Che Guevara’s admonition to wage battle inside the “belly of the beast” seriously. Of course a couple of years ago  we lost Hugo Pinell, George Jackson’s comrade-in-arms from the San Quentin Six to a murderous vendetta. Others, other militant labor and social liberation fighters as well, too numerous to mention here but remembered.

Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. One year though, and it now bears repeating each year, after I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson’s present class-war prisoner the late Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers in their better days, the days when the American state really was out to kill or detain every last supporter, and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven,  as represented by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and the late wa Langa), in their younger days; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today (also Black Panther-connected); the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly. I urge others to do the same now at the holidays and throughout the year. 

The class-war prisoners must not stand alone. 

                                                                                                

PDC    

Box 99 Canal Street Station                        

New York, N.Y. 10013

Google Partisan Defense Committee for more information and updates  

Down And Out In Gotham Town- “Batman” (1989)-A Film Review

Down And Out In Gotham Town- “Batman” (1989)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

Batman, starring Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton, Kim Basinger, 1989

WTF. Yeah WFT I am still standing although for the life of me I don’t why after the screed I ran through in the last film review I did if you could call it that Marvel Comics’ The Avengers. WTF too that I am still doing kids’ silly super-hero comic book airheads turned to the multi-plex screens all because everybody, boy or girl from the look of things, between the age of about eight to twenty-one no longer can sit through the twenty minutes it takes to read a comic book. Said kids will only sit through a couple of hours of swill, as long as the dialogue doesn’t exceed short sentences and grunts, there is kick-ass action every thirty seconds for no apparent reason, and there is an ample supply of vat- tubbed butter-drenched popcorn and gigantic refillable soda cups.

Although you and I both know if you have been following this race to the bottom of filmdom being forced on me with this brainless twit stuff that this is the first stages of a purge by the recently installed new leadership which seems to be making every effort to get rid of the old writers who held this operation together in the days when the assuredly purged, don’t believe that voluntary retirement stuff, Allan Jackson (aka Peter Paul Markin on this site) was made to fall on his sword. We who voted for his retention, meaning against the installation of the new pope Greg Green and his flunky Ed Board, are expected to follow suit. And assuredly as well the quickest way to get rid of senior writers is to give them assignments picking up the popcorn tubs and soda cups after a bunch of lazy kids who won’t read.          

Here is the latest step in the big step-off for this writer in this space (needless to say I won’t give them the satisfaction of quitting even if I do take that now obvious big step-off-no way). Greg Green has ordered me put on “probation” and hence this disciplinary assignment from hell  (yeah, yeah through the Ed Board but even those know nothing eight to twenty-one year olds know this has the earmarks of the “boss” making the decision and not some hireling nonsense). The reason? Well off that last review if not the first one there are a million possibilities. Start off with my WFT assorted languages that might offend those eight to twenty year olds who emphatically don’t read much less peep at screed-like film reviews. Even there PG parents don’t care as long as they don’t hear their precious Jills and Johnnies don’t use that language around the house. How very liberal. But strangely, or maybe not so strangely since “teacher’s pet” Kenny Jacobs mimicking me started using salty language that is not the reason. Although given this new crew’s kind of left-handed way of doing things since Allan’s purge now that they have wind in their sails that could be the disguised reason. Probably not though since in some weird modern let’s be hip and let everything but the very worse language slide through they are catering to that younger crowd which see the whole thing as picturesque. How very liberal.       

       

You might think that daring them to print that last damn review after skewering not only the film’s reasons for existence but basely calling the whole thing an empty shell would be the reason. After all a bad review, which by the way Alan Jackson cared less about which way the review went as long as it was well-written and less than three thousand words (so he didn’t have to pay a premium bonus number of words although in cyberspace being meaningless). This crew from what I have heard in order to grab some extra revenue is taking “advertisements” from the movie companies in this space. And the surest way to lose such lucrative emoluments is to have one of your writers declare their whole operation a house of cards. Call the whole thing a charade, an insult to the intelligence of amoebas and sea pods. However Greg mentioned to, I think, Lance Lawrence that these modern day studios still work on the old premise that the only bad publicity is no publicity. So no sale.     

You might think, and again be wrong, that skewering the characters and their personal identities would draw the line and put me beyond the pale. Calling patriotic Captain America a brawny brainless twit who would be hard-pressed to figure out how to use a spoon if he ever had occasion to use one. Ditto the Hulk except dumber when he goes off the deep end and turns into a green balloon-ish cretin. Calling beautiful Thor a wooden head, as wooden as those Valhalla Viking ships that faded from history fast for no known explanation except brain death. Sorrowfully calling Black Widow nothing but a commie bitch, eye candy for the jet set, and not to be trusted under any circumstances. Mutants, social misfits and rogues all. Even the brainy Ironman who in the end didn’t want to play ball, thought for at least a minute that going after a half dozen well-recognized thugs didn’t require making half of  humankind “collateral damage” in their wide-open wake, got all crazy and stuff.       

No, the reason if you can believe, this that I am on “probation’ is that as has been standard policy at this site since the old days when Sam Lowell, now really in retirement but of late muzzled, ruled the roost as official Senior film critic, a title now abolished in the new ‘democratic’ era that I did not give an adequate plot-line summary. What? What plot beyond kick-ass bad guys every thirty seconds in between gulps of soda or throated popcorn for the audience and don’t get any scratches on the uniforms or one’s person. Does it matter if the “enemy” is Hydra or Thor’s aunt? No, I think not and so there is the very real substance to my feeling that my days in this space are numbered. Once they say they have a pressing assignment for me out with the now exiled Allan Jackson out in Utah I can kiss my ass good-bye.    

That brings to the so-called plot-line of this Batman film from 1989. I am doomed anyway so once again I will say –what plot. Batman, played by mild-mannered Michael Keaton in between bouts of going under the Wayne mansion downy billow beds with investigative reporter Kim Basinger has a run-in or seven with the Joker, played by living maniac Jack Nicholson, who got caught short in an acid vat after killing his mobster boss which skewed his personality quite a bit although he was always a thug. In the end, ho-hum, the Joker takes the big fall, takes the trip six feet under. Any more plot line than that Greg Green can sue me. Enough said.     

Free All The Political Prisoners-From Those Outside The Walls To Those Inside-Its The Same Struggle-Build The Resistance

Free All The Political Prisoners-From Those Outside The Walls To Those Inside-Its The Same Struggle-Build The Resistance   

This holiday time of year (and Political Prisoner Month each June as well) is when by traditions of solidarity and comradeship those of us who today stand outside the prison walls sent our best wishes from freedom to our class-war sisters and brothers inside the walls and redouble our efforts in that task.  

Don't forget Mumia, Leonard Peltier, Reality Leigh Winner, The Ohio 7's Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman and all those Black Panther and other black militants still be held in this country's prisons for  risking their necks for a better world for their people, for all people.

From the Archives of Marxism-Friedrich Engels' “From the Kingdom of Necessity to the Kingdom of Freedom”

Workers Vanguard No. 1096	23 September 2016

From the Archives of Marxism-Friedrich Engels' “From the Kingdom of Necessity to the Kingdom of Freedom”

We publish below excerpts from Friedrich Engels’ 1880 work Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. In explaining scientific socialism, Engels makes clear that only through the conquest of power by the working class and the expropriation of the capitalist class can the benefits of science, technology and education be available to all, laying the material basis for the full liberation of humanity. The excerpts below are taken from the Marx and Engels Selected Works (Progress Publishers, 1976).

The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason and right wrong, is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the stubborn facts of the existing system of production.

What is, then, the position of modern socialism in this connection?

The present structure of society—this is now pretty generally conceded—is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since Marx, as the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the feudal system, with the privileges it conferred upon individuals, entire social ranks and local corporations, as well as with the hereditary ties of subordination which constituted the framework of its social organisation. The bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society, the kingdom of free competition, of personal liberty, of the equality, before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the capitalist blessings. Thenceforward the capitalist mode of production could develop in freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie developed with a rapidity and in degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in its more complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the capitalistic mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on. Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class....

The perfecting of machinery is making human labour superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845, available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead weight upon the limbs of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital. Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labour constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the labourer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation. Thus it comes about that the economising of the instruments of labour becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labour power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labour functions; that machinery, the most powerful instrument for shortening labour time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital. Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry, which hunts after new consumers over the whole world, forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a starvation minimum, and in doing thus destroys its own home market. “The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time, accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.” (Marx’s Capital, p. 671)....

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers—proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.

This solution can only consist in the practical recognition of the social nature of the modern forces of production, and therefore in the harmonising of the modes of production, appropriation, and exchange with the socialised character of the means of production. And this can only come about by society openly and directly taking possession of the productive forces which have outgrown all control except that of society as a whole. The social character of the means of production and of the products today reacts against the producers, periodically disrupts all production and exchange, acts only like a law of Nature working blindly, forcibly, destructively. But with the taking over by society of the productive forces, the social character of the means of production and of the products will be utilised by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and instead of being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become the most powerful lever of production itself....

Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by sects, as the ideal of the future. But it could become possible, could become a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realisation were there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable, not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions. The separation of society into an exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the necessary consequence of the deficient and restricted development of production in former times....

Division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces. And, in fact, the abolition of classes in society presupposes a degree of historical evolution at which the existence, not simply of this or that particular ruling class, but of any ruling class at all, and, therefore, the existence of class distinction itself has become an obsolete anachronism. It presupposes, therefore, the development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and, with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only superfluous but economically, politically, intellectually, a hindrance to development.

This point is now reached. Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless, face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself. Nor is this all. The socialised appropriation of the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial restrictions upon production, but also with the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable concomitants of production, and that reach their height in the crises. Further, it sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and of products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling classes of today and their political representatives. The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialised production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties—this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here.

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of Nature, because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom....

To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.

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