Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check - The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967- When Doctor Gonzo Was “Riding With The King”- Hunter S. Thompson’s The Gonzo Letters. Volume Two, 1968-1976

Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check

By Bart Webber

I had been, strangely enough, in La Jolla out in California attending yet another writers’ conference which seems to be the makings of my days these days, attending writers’ conferences that is instead of taking pen to paper or rather fingers to word processor keyboard, when I heard Tom Wolfe had cashed his check. “Cashed his check” a term (along with synonymous “cashed his ticket”) grabbed from memory bank as a term used when I was “on the bum” hanging out in hobo jungle camps and the whole trail of flop houses and Salvation Army digs to signify that a kindred had passed to the great beyond. Was now resting in some better place that a stinking stew-bitten, flea –bitten, foul-aired and foul-person place. No more worries about the next flop, the next jug of cheapjack wine, the next run-in with vicious coppers and railroad bulls, and the next guy who was ready to rip whatever you had off to feed his own sullen addiction.

By the way this is not Thomas Wolfe of You Can’t Go Home Again, Look Homeward, Angels, etc. but the writer, maybe journalist is a better way to put the matter of tons of interesting stuff from acid trips in the 1960s hanging with Ken Kesey and his various tribes of merry pranksters, the Hell’s Angels, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, to marveled space flights in the 1970s to Wall Street in the reckless 1980 and back who had cashed his check. The strange part of the “strangely enough” mentioned above was that on Monday May 14^th 2018, the day he died, I was walking along La Jolla Cove and commenting to my companion without knowing his fate that Tom Wolfe had made the La Jolla surfing scene in the early 1960s come alive with his tale of the Pump House Gang and related stories about the restless California tribes, you know those Hell’s Angels, Valley hot-rod freaks and the like who parents had migrated west from dustbowl Okies and Arkies to start a new life out in Eden. These next generation though lost in a thousand angsts and alienation not having to fight for every breath of fresh air (with the exception of the Angels who might as well have stayed in the Okies and McAllister Prison which would have been their fate.   

I don’t know how Tom Wolfe did at the end as a writer, or toward the end, when things seemed to glaze over and became very homogenized, lacked the verve of hard ass 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s times. Although I do note that he did a very although I note he did an interesting take on the cultural life at the Army base at Fort Bragg down in North Carolina in a book of essays around the theme of hooking up. That hooking up angle a sign that social cohesiveness in the age of the Internet was creating some strange rituals. Know this those pound for pound in his prime he along with Hunter Thompson could write the sociology of the land with simple flair and kept this guy, me, flipping the pages in the wee hours of the morning. RIP, Tom Wolfe, RIP.  

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the late gonzo journalist Hunter S, Thompson

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967- When Doctor Gonzo Was “Riding With The King”- Hunter S. Thompson’s The Gonzo Letters. Volume Two, 1968-1976  

Book Review

By Joshua Lawrence Breslin

Fear And Loathing In America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, The Gonzo Letters, Volume Two, 1968-1976, Hunter S. Thompson, Simon &Schuster, New York, 2006



I have written a number of reviews about the book s of the late outlaw gonzo journalist “Doctor Gonzo” Hunter S. Thompson. Those reviews have centered on the impact of his journalistic work in the pantheon of American political and social criticism and the jail break way that he presented his material that was like a breath of fresh air coming from out in the jet stream somewhere after all the lame gibberish of most reportage in the 1960s and 1970s (extending unfortunately to this day). His seemingly one man revolt (okay, okay Tom Wolfe and others too but he was the king hell king, alright) against paid by the word minute stuff of hack journalism told us the “skinny,” and told that straight, warts and all. The book under review however is more for aficionados like this writer who are interested in the minutiae about how this man created what he created, and the trials and tribulations, sometime bizarre, he went through to get the damn stuff published. And while one can rightly pass on the pre-Gonzo first volume of Thompson’s letters this one is worth reading for it provides the back drop to Doctor Gonzo’s most creative period, that period from about the publication of Hell’s Angels until his “discovery” of one Jimmy Carter. The period when Hunter S. Thompson was “riding with the king.”

In those earlier reviews (especially Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing On Campaign 1972, and Songs of The Doomed) I began with some generic comments applicable to all his work and they apply here as well so I will recycle them and intersperse additional comments about this book as well.

“Generally the most the trenchant social criticism, commentary and analysis complete with a prescriptive social program ripe for implementation has been done by thinkers and writers who work outside the realm of bourgeois society, notably socialists and other progressive thinkers. Bourgeois society rarely allows itself, in self-defense or hidebound fear, to be skewered by trenchant criticism from within. This is particularly true when it comes from a known dope fiend, gun freak and all-around lifestyle addict like the late, lamented Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Nevertheless, although he was far from any thought of a socialist solution to what ails society, particularly American society, and would reject such a political designation we of the extra-parliamentary could travel part of the way with him. We saw him as a kindred spirit. He was not one of us- but he was one of us. All honor to him for pushing the envelope of journalism in new directions and for his pinpricks at the hypocrisy of bourgeois society. Such men are dangerous.

I am not sure whether at the end of the day Hunter Thompson saw himself or wanted to been seen as a voice, or the voice, of his generation but he would not be an unworthy candidate. In any case, his was not the voice of the generation of 1968 being just enough older than us to have been formed by an earlier, less forgiving milieu. The hellhole, red scare, cold war night in all its infamy that even singed my generation. His earliest writings show that shadow night blanket, the National Observer stuff, well-written but mainly “objective” stuff that a thousand other guys were writing (and were getting better paid for). Nevertheless, only a few, and with time it seems fewer in each generation, allow themselves to search for some kind of truth even if they cannot go the whole distance. This compilation under review is a hodgepodge of letters over the best part of Thompson’s career, 1968-76.

As with all journalists, as indeed with all writers especially those who are writing under the gun and for mass circulation media, these letters reveal the tremendous time pressures put on writers under contractual publishing deadlines, the ridiculous amount of time spent trying to “hustle” one’s work around the industry even by a fairly well-known writer , the creative processes behind specific works (particularly the Fear and Loathing books) as outlined in several letters, including some amusing “cut and paste” efforts to use one article to serve about six purposes , and horror of horrors, damn writer’s block (or ennui). Some of these letters are minor works of art; others seem to have been thrown in as filler. However the total effect is to show the back story of a guy who blasted old bourgeois society almost to its foundations. Others will have to push on further.

“Gonzo” journalism as it emerges in the crucible of these letters, by the way, is quite compatible, with historical materialism. That is, the writer is not precluded from interpreting the events described within himself/herself as an actor in the story. The worst swindle in journalism, fostered by the formal journalism schools, as well as in other disciplines like history and political science is that somehow one must be ‘objective.’ Reality is better served if the writer puts his/her analysis correctly and then gets out of the way. In his best work that was Hunter’s way. And that premise shines through some of these letters.

As a member of the generation of 1968 I note that this was a period of particular importance in which won Hunter his spurs as a journalist. Hunter, like many of us, cut his political teeth on raging deep into the night against one Richard Milhous Nixon, at one time President of the United States, common criminal (unindicted, of course), and all- around political chameleon. Thompson went way out of his way, and with pleasure, skewering that man when Nixon was riding high. He was moreover just as happy to kick Nixon when he was down, just for good measure. Nixon represented the “dark side” of the American spirit- the side that appeared then, and today, as the bully boy of the world and as craven brute. If for nothing else Brother Thompson deserves a place in the pantheon of journalistic heroes for this exercise in elementary hygiene. Anyone who wants to rehabilitate THAT man before history please consult Thompson’s work first. Hunter, I hope you find the Brown Buffalo wherever you are. Read this book. Read all his books to know what it was like when men and women plied the journalist trade for keeps.

From The Marxist Archives- Labor and Capital Have No Common Interests

From The Marxist Archives- Labor and Capital Have No Common Interests Workers Vanguard No. 1133	4 May 2018

TROTSKY

LENIN

Labor and Capital Have No Common Interests

(Quote of the Week)

The trade unions are the mass defensive organizations of the working class. The trade-union bureaucracy undermines the power of the unions by its allegiance to the U.S. capitalist order, particularly expressed through support to the Democratic Party. In a 1942 lecture, James P. Cannon emphasized that the Trotskyists who led the successful 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes fought against illusions in the politicians and government agencies of the capitalist class enemy. The understanding that the interests of the workers and bosses are counterposed is vital to reviving the unions as battalions of class struggle and to the fight to forge a new leadership of labor.

All modern strikes require political direction. The strikes of that period brought the government, its agencies and its institutions into the very center of every situation. A strike leader without some conception of a political line was very much out of date already by 1934. The old fashioned trade union movement, which used to deal with the bosses without governmental interference, belongs in the museum. The modern labor movement must be politically directed because it is confronted by the government at every turn. Our people were prepared for that since they were political people, inspired by political conceptions. The policy of the class struggle guided our comrades; they couldn’t be deceived and outmaneuvered, as so many strike leaders of that period were, by this mechanism of sabotage and destruction known as the National Labor Board and all its auxiliary setups. They put no reliance whatever in Roosevelt’s Labor Board; they weren’t fooled by any idea that Roosevelt, the liberal “friend of labor” president, was going to help the truck drivers in Minneapolis win a few cents more an hour. They weren’t deluded even by the fact that there was at that time in Minnesota a Farmer-Labor Governor, presumed to be on the side of the workers.

Our people didn’t believe in anybody or anything but the policy of the class struggle and the ability of the workers to prevail by their mass strength and solidarity. Consequently, they expected from the start that the union would have to fight for its right to exist; that the bosses would not yield any recognition to the union, would not yield any increase of wages or reduction of the scandalous hours without some pressure being brought to bear. Therefore they prepared everything from the point of view of class war. They knew that power, not diplomacy, would decide the issue. Bluffs don’t work in fundamental things, only in incidental ones. In such things as the conflict of class interests one must be prepared to fight.

—James P. Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism (1944)

For Class Struggle, Not Reliance on Democrats! Janus Case: Assault on Labor

Workers Vanguard No. 1133	4 May 2018

For Class Struggle, Not Reliance on Democrats!

Janus Case: Assault on Labor

The Supreme Court case of Janus v. AFSCME is aimed squarely at destroying public-sector unions, posing a direct threat to all of labor. A ruling against AFSCME—the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—would ban the agency shop in public employment, whereby employees who refuse to join the union must pay “agency fees” to the union, which bargains on their behalf as well as that of its members. Such a ruling would overturn the 1977 Abood v. Detroit Board of Education decision upholding the agency shop, and thereby make “right to work” the law of the land for all public employees. With the decisive vote in the hands of conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, a corporate lawyer appointed by Donald Trump, an anti-union decision is all but assured.

The Janus case has been bankrolled by a viciously union-busting cabal, including the billionaire Koch brothers and the far-right lobbyists of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The original lawsuit was filed by Republican Illinois governor and venture capitalist Bruce Rauner on behalf of Mark Janus, a social worker who would not join AFSCME. The case is premised on the bogus argument that having to pay agency fees is “coerced” speech and a violation of the First Amendment. This is just a cover for trying to bankrupt AFSCME and other public-sector unions and bleed them of members. The same red herring was at the center of an earlier case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which tried to strike down mandatory union fees but ended in a deadlock.

Janus is the latest attack in a decades-long war waged by the capitalist rulers against organized labor, during which the percentage of unionized workers has fallen to just over 10 percent, about half of what it was in the 1980s. Public workers are in the sights of the labor-haters because they make up the largest concentration of unionized workers in the country. Their unionization rate of 34 percent is five times greater than in the private sector.

A ruling against AFSCME would strike especially hard at black workers, who are highly represented in these unions. Black people are 30 percent more likely than whites to have a public-sector job, and for many of them, getting a unionized job in transit, sanitation or the postal service provides one of the few ways out of all-sided destitution. In the 28 states with “right to work” laws, wages are lower and workers are less likely to have health insurance or retirement benefits. It was the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, passed with overwhelming support from racist Dixiecrats (Democrats) in the open shop South, that contained a “right to work” provision allowing states to pass legislation prohibiting compulsory union membership. Taft-Hartley also banned militant strike tactics and opened up a red purge of the unions.

It is the labor misleaders themselves who have paved the way for the Janus attack. Abandoning the class-struggle methods that built the unions, the labor bureaucracy has simply lain down in the face of relentless attacks on unions while resorting to reliance on the capitalist government, the courts and the Democratic Party. In Wisconsin in 2011, tens of thousands of unionists—both public employees and others—rallied day after day at the State Capitol to beat back Republican governor Scott Walker’s attack on public unions’ collective bargaining rights. Workers were ready to strike to defend their unions. But the AFL-CIO bureaucrats demobilized the workers in favor of a campaign to recall Walker (and install a Democrat in his place). This sealed the unions’ defeat, opening the floodgates for “right to work” in former union bastions in the Midwest and elsewhere.

Today, in opposing Janus, the “labor statesmen” who run the unions present themselves as an essential force for keeping a lid on working-class struggle. Peddling the dominant argument of the labor tops against Janus, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), warned that an anti-union decision would disrupt “labor peace”! Making clear the role of the current union tops as the docile servants of the capitalist bosses, Weingarten declared in a January 19 amicus brief to the Supreme Court, “The current law [Abood decision] has preserved labor peace for four decades by balancing the interests of workers and employers.”

So beholden to the bosses’ laws, the union tops are begging Democratic politicians to prepare new laws that would mitigate a bad Janus decision. With an eye on his bid for re-election in November, New York’s Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo has enacted measures supposedly staving off the most devastating aspects of Janus, winning hearty praise from the state’s union officials. Cuomo did this by ratifying amendments to the state’s Taylor Law, which bans public employee strikes. Far from preparing the unions for some hard battles to smash the Taylor Law, the labor tops tinker with the very mechanism that keeps their members in chains.

At every turn, the union misleaders showcase their support to the capitalist system while enjoying the perks and privileges of union office, including posts inside the Democratic Party. Every election cycle, millions of union dollars and millions of union members are mobilized for voter turnout for the bourgeois “lesser evil.” This is evident as the anti-Trump “resistance” builds toward the midterm elections. The labor tops stake the fate of unions on getting Democrats into office and in the courts. A Democrat-dominated Supreme Court would likely turn down Janus, for the simple reason that Democrats recognize the key role the labor bureaucracy plays in keeping the wage slaves in line.

But when the workers get out of line and engage in class struggle, the Democrats, as much as the Republicans, bring down the hammer. In 1947, Harry S. Truman made a show of vetoing Taft-Hartley, knowing that Congress would override him, and then enforced it the following year against striking miners and other workers. In 1978, Jimmy Carter invoked Taft-Hartley against coal miners engaged in a bitter strike that lasted 110 days. Bill Clinton used the Railway Labor Act (RLA) 14 times in order to ban potential rail and airline strikes. For his part, Barack Obama effectively gutted the United Auto Workers while bailing out the auto bosses and banks. Even the smashing of the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers strike by Ronald Reagan, a watershed defeat for labor, was carried out under a plan drawn up by his predecessor, Carter.

For a Class-Struggle Leadership of Labor!

The labor bureaucracy’s many decades of subservience to the capitalists and their government have served to erode elementary union consciousness and demoralize workers. The reactionary forces behind the Janus case are banking on frustrated workers opting to quit their union in order to deny the bureaucrats dues money. This could only lead to a disastrous weakening of the labor movement. The unions remain the basic defense organizations of the working class and should not be equated with the sellout policies of their leaders. The effectiveness of unions lies in their ability to carry out actions through their collective power; workers who abandon their union become a potential reserve of scabs.

The Janus case poses defense of the unions pointblank. As we wrote after the 2014 Harris v. Quinn ruling, which excluded home health care workers from having to pay agency fees but upheld the agency shop for other public-sector workers: “Marxists defend the agency shop against the bosses’ attacks. But what we are for is the closed shop, where workers must be members of the union before being hired” (“Supreme Court Clobbers Home Health Care Workers Unions,” WV No. 1049, 11 July 2014). Our article continued: “What is needed are fighting unions that encompass all workers in a company or industry, uniting them in struggle against the bosses for improved pay, benefits and work conditions.”

The capitalists’ attacks on unions go hand in hand with the relentless ravaging of social programs like health care, education and anything else that smacks of helping working people and the oppressed. Public workers would find plenty of allies among the unemployed, black people, Latinos, immigrants and all those who have been thrown under the bus by the capitalist rulers if they take up the fight for quality health care for all, for free education, free public transit and other such demands.

This perspective requires a political fight to forge a new, class-struggle leadership of the unions—a leadership that understands that the interests of labor and capital cannot be reconciled. Such a leadership would fight to organize the unorganized. Waging this battle means fighting against the race-color caste oppression of black people, which is the bedrock of capitalist rule in this country. A class-struggle leadership of the unions would be rooted in the understanding that the fight for black freedom is inextricably tied to labor’s cause and would take up the defense of foreign-born workers, demanding an end to deportations and full citizenship rights for all immigrants. 

A fighting workers leadership in the unions would be committed to waging battle on the picket lines armed with a program dedicated to the liberation of humanity from a social system based on production for profit rather than for human need. The struggle to revitalize the labor movement must be understood as part of a fight to build a multiracial workers party whose aim is to sweep away the capitalist order of wage slavery through a workers revolution that establishes workers rule.

No Illusions in the Capitalist State!

A grotesque measure of the labor bureaucrats’ allegiance to U.S. capitalism and its state is the lie sold by leaders of AFSCME and the SEIU service workers union that cops and prison guards are fellow “workers,” organizing them into the unions. This is also the case with the bureaucrats atop the Teamsters and International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), whose Local 65 organizes Los Angeles port police—the very cops who would be used to break a longshore strike. The cops are the hired thugs of the capitalist rulers, charged with repressing labor and terrorizing the ghettos and barrios. Among the victims of these so-called “union brothers” are the black and minority members of the same unions, as well as their families. Cops and prison guards out of the unions!

Fearing that Janus threatens a further drop in membership and a decline in their economic and political clout, union officials have been scrambling to re-register members through “educational campaigns.” Amalgamated Transit Union locals have combined this effort with distributing dues checkoff authorization forms, hoping to minimize disruption to the dues income stream post-Janus.

We oppose the capitalist state abolishing dues checkoff or intervening in any other way into union affairs. But the whole checkoff system, where dues are automatically deducted from paychecks, hands the bosses control over the unions’ purse strings, giving them an instrument for financial blackmail. It originated during World War II, when, in exchange for their “no-strike” pledge to bolster war production, the CIO industrial union leaders negotiated with the National War Labor Board for “union security.” Under this formula, union members were bound to pay dues, usually under a checkoff arrangement. This deal was premised on subordination of the unions to the capitalist state. Under a class-struggle leadership, union reps would collect dues, which would help to make the leadership accountable to the ranks.

Every major labor battle shows the need for unions to rely on their own independent power, including control over finances. In the heat of an eleven-day New York City transit strike in 1980, Transport Workers Union Local 100 saw its dues checkoff taken away, and restored six months later after union leaders sold out work and safety standards. After a three-day Local 100 strike in 2005, dues checkoff was revoked in an attempt to bankrupt the union; it was restored three years later in return for a no-strike pledge.

A direct contrast was the effort made by the British National Union of Mineworkers to keep hold of its financial war chest during its historic 1984-85 strike. First, the union dispersed funds to banks and trusted workers leaders throughout Europe as a precautionary measure against seizure by the courts. After Margaret Thatcher’s government tracked down those funds, the union conducted its transactions in cash.

The industrial unions in this country were built through hard-fought class battles in defiance of anti-labor laws. Liberals and labor reformists claim that those unions were established by the grace of Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt and New Deal legislation such as the 1935 Wagner Act. In fact, while the Wagner Act secured some legal rights for unions in private industry, it specifically excluded public employees. Creating mechanisms for state supervision of union elections and other activities, the Wagner Act’s central purpose was to undercut class struggle. It came into effect as a response to the historic 1934 citywide strikes in Minneapolis, San Francisco and Toledo.

Those labor battles, which helped spur the growth of the CIO industrial unions later in the decade, were led by reds—supporters of the Trotskyist Communist League of America in Minneapolis, A.J. Muste’s American Workers Party in Toledo and the Communist Party in San Francisco. The strikes were virtual civil wars that pitted the mass of workers against the strikebreakers and their cop protectors. Strike leaders had to take on the conservative AFL union bureaucrats, who did the government’s bidding and had enforced the craft, ethnic and racial divisions that undermine workers’ struggles. As we wrote in a series of WV articles, reprinted in our 2015 pamphlet Then and Now: “What made the difference was that the workers were politically and organizationally armed by leaders who understood that the only possible road to victory lay in mobilizing their power as a class against the capitalist class enemy.”

“Rank-and-File” Reformism

A few leftists have made the argument, perverse as it is, that a Janus ruling against AFSCME could actually revitalize the unions by removing bureaucratic impediments to militancy. This is the line of “Do-It-Yourself Class Struggle” by United Federation of Teachers representative Kevin Prosen in Jacobin (2 March), a project of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Prosen writes that “by gutting the institutions of the union movement,” the right wing may also be “removing the brakes on much more explosive forms of worker activity.”

Gutting the unions has not led to “renewed volatility” among workers, as Prosen projects from the expected Janus decision. Rather, the implementation of union-busting legislation has meant the decimation of public-sector unions. After collective bargaining was abolished for state workers in Wisconsin in 2011, the rate of public-sector unionization plummeted by half, from over 50 percent to under 23 percent in 2016.

Janus was a major focus of the Labor Notes Conference held in Chicago in early April that drew some 3,000 trade unionists and leftists. Supporters of the social-democratic publication Labor Notes, as well as the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and other reformist groups, talked a lot about rank-and-file (or “bottom up”) activism as the answer to the business unionism of the top labor bureaucrats. To be sure, we could use a lot more militant labor action in this country. But the key to mobilizing workers in their own class interests is to break the political chains binding them to the exploiting class. Supporters of Workers Vanguard were the only ones at the conference who raised the call to break with the Democrats and build a class-struggle workers party.

From the opening session of the conference to its close, the same groups who cheered “bottom up” organizing—the DSA, Socialist Alternative, et al.—also cheered Bernie Sanders, a capitalist politician whose “socialist” garb has helped corral disaffected youth and workers into the Democratic fold (see “Bernie Sanders: Imperialist Running Dog,” WV No. 1083, 12 February 2016). And the DSA is itself a component of the Democratic Party. For all their talk of workers “rebellion,” these outfits share the same framework as the business unionists, seeking at most a better deal under this decrepit system of exploitation. Politically, this boils down to hitching the unions’ fate to “friend of labor” Democrats and relying on the courts and other arms of the state.

Recent teachers strikes in West Virginia and other Republican-run states had Labor Notes participants touting the “red state revolts.” WV supporters were applauded when they pointed out that workers are also under the gun in the very blue city where the gathering was being held, and that the Obama administration had spearheaded attacks on teachers unions and public education, with the complicity of the labor fakers. And the ISO, despite occasional complaints about the unions relying too heavily on the Democrats, is itself complicit. They blab on about “a revival of rank and file activity” to counter Janus, but when such activity hits close to home, it’s a different story. In 2016, ISO supporter Jesse Sharkey, who is currently running the Chicago Teachers Union, called off a much-anticipated strike by the membership and rammed through a concessionary contract, selling out the very rank and file he represents.

Militant union struggle can strike important blows against exploitation and austerity. But the key lies in making the working class conscious of its historic role as the gravedigger of the capitalist system and of class society as a whole. Such consciousness does not emerge spontaneously from the day-to-day struggles of the working class, which do not in themselves challenge the capitalist mode of production, but must be brought into the proletariat from the outside through the instrumentality of a revolutionary workers party. One militant trade-unionist and WV supporter speaking from the floor at a transit workers panel put it plainly: “What we need is a break with class collaborationism. We need to rebuild the type of radical unionism that understood that workers and bosses have nothing in common whatsoever. And on the way to that, we need to build a workers party, our own party, multiracial, that will fight for black rights, for immigrant rights and for a workers government.”

Support Courage To Resist-The Defenders Of Military Resisters, The Draft Resistance And Whistleblowers-Free Reality Leigh Winner

Support Courage To Resist-The Defenders Of Military Resisters, The Draft Resistance And Whistleblowers-Free Reality Leigh Winner

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.

June Is Class-War Prisoners Month-Free The Jericho Movement Prisoners-Free All The Class-War Prisoners!

June Is Class-War Prisoners Month-Free The Jericho Movement Prisoners-Free All The Class-War Prisoners!  

Chelsea Manning, Albert Woodfox and Oscar Lopez Rivera are out let's get the rest out as well  

On The 50th Anniversary Of Doctor Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church “Beyond Vietnam” Speech (1967)

On The 50^th Anniversary Of Doctor Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church “Beyond Vietnam” Speech (1967)

By Political Commentator Frank Jackman

I have mentioned a number of times earlier in this space that I have been at times annoyed by the proliferation of celebrations and commemoratives of events that don’t, to my mind at least, rate either celebration or odd-ball year observance. You know like the 38^th anniversary of some unremarkable space flight or the 10^th anniversary of the demise of some event faded from memory except in some fill-in starved newsroom. On the other hand some events in my left-wing calendar are worthy like the anniversaries of the Paris Commune uprising of 1871 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 are worthy of orderly and odd-ball yearly observance. Then there is the subject today (see above) the commemoration of Doctor Martin Luther King’s important speech to the congregation at the Riverside Church in Manhattan in April of 1967 where he decisively broke with the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration’s Vietnam War policy. No question that the speech is in many quarters and maybe objectively worthy of a fiftieth anniversary commemoration but for personal reasons I had been ambiguous about placing it in this space.           

In my high school days I was a lonely ardent defender in my Irish Catholic enclave in North Adamsville of the black civil rights struggle down south in this country. A struggle that was strongly identified with the personage and non-violent strategies of Doctor King. That defense was one that placed me in an extreme minority both in my Northern lily white school and in the community at large. I was called, falsely at the time, seven kinds of commie red and a n----r loving for the simple acts of heading to Boston several times to join picket lines at the downtown Woolworth’s department store in support of the attempts to integrate the lunch counters down South (and maybe up North as well) and heading down to join the freedom riders trying to integrate the buses. Simple democratic and civil demands. Thus I, of necessity, had a great admiration for both the personal courage of Doctor King (and his supporters in the field in the front line battles of the South) and of his philosophy of non-violent direct action.

As is well known those action were directly responsible for various pieces of civil rights legislation and attempts to integrate various social institutions highlighted by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That year was kind of watershed on two fronts. It spelled the demise of the intensity of the civil rights struggle and the emergence of the Vietnam War as the decisive social battle of the time. Opposition to the Vietnam War in 1965 was an extremely small and radical position as the start of a seemingly endless war unfolded. Doctor King in many ways was a natural leader for such opposition as more and more people began to protest. Yet for those various reasons just mentioned he held his fire, held it after lesser public figures began to openly oppose the war, until the major Riverside speech. Some of that had to do with pushing the civil rights agenda forward but it also had to do with that latent anti-communism still alive in the land and the politics of the “domino” theory attached to it.

Here is where my personal dilemma comes in dealing with presenting this commemoration. I too was late, very late, in opposition to the Vietnam War for those same domino theory adherence reasons that drove Doctor King. Except mine lasted at least until the Tet offensive of 1968. With that caveat though I present the rightly commemorated speech. Despite the subsequent political gulf that has separated me from Doctor King’s philosophy and strategies the ideas presented still retain their power. 

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Time Of Frankie’s Carnival Time-With The Silhouettes’ Get A Job In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Time Of Frankie’s Carnival Time-With The Silhouettes’ Get A Job In Mind  

Introduction by Allan Jackson

[Maybe the worse thing about growing up poor, poorer than church mice as my Grandma would have it with a slight sneer since she was referring to my poor father’s inability to adequately provide for his family of four boys and a wife since he was an uneducated man and she thought my mother had married beneath her station, for a kid was always wanting things that couldn’t be bought. Of course a kid doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know, would have not have given a fuck to put it starkly that it was a struggle to just keep a roof over the head and food on the table and only saw and heard that he or she could not have what some other Johnnie or Janie had on the consumer dream television. Of course a kid will still even if he or she becomes aware of the situation later doesn’t want to hear about all the thin air talk about how this or that was not affordable.

That conflict between those freaking wanting habits and the empty envelope come payday reality in the end determined my youthful fate (my mother like many mothers in the neighborhood had weekly envelopes which were usually short on each bill due but enough to keep the wolves from the door. When that was not enough I was send to say the landlord to give the pittance and some story so yes things were close, very close indeed especially in father unemployed times). When it came time to hang with guys, with corner boys I came up with a bunch of guys like the eternally mentioned Scribe and Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader of our crew mainly because he was tight with Tonio the guy who ran the pizza place where we hung out who treated him like a son. That “headquarters,” known or unknown  to good guy Tonio who had immigrated from Italy and had a great beauty of an Italian girlfriend whom despite her age we googled, was where Scribe would hatch some weird but workable plan to grab dough from the rich houses in town near the beach at Squaw Rock. After we almost got catch when Scribe led his one and only expedition when Frankie was out of town we swore that he would never lead another no matter how good the plan.

All of this to say the simple truth that living down in nowhere land at the base of society is not conductive to bringing out the better angels of our natures and those wanting habits twisted plenty of ordinary guys for a long time. So running away with the glamorous circus, carnival, sideshow was not some aberration or some far-fetched thing not when the con men, grifters and hustlers were showing all kinds of exciting tricks to kids who were ready to grab dough with every hand. Can you blame them. Allan Jackson]       

*********** 

An old man walked, walked haltingly down a North Adamsville street, maybe Hancock Street, or maybe a street just off of it, maybe a long street like West Main Street, he has forgotten which exactly in the time between his walking and his telling me his story. A street near the high school anyway, North Adamsville High School, where he had graduated from back in the mist of time, the 1960s mist of time. A time when he was known, far and wide, as the king, the king hell king, if the truth be known, of the schoolboy be-bop night. And headquartered himself, properly headquartered himself as generations of schoolboy king hell kings had done previously, at Salducci’s Pizza Parlor as was his due as the reigning schoolboy king of the night. But that schoolboy corner boy king thing is an old story, an old story strictly for cutting up old touches, according to the old man, Frankie, yes, Francis Xavier Riley, as if back from the dead, and not fit, not fit by a long shot for what he had to tell me about his recent “discovery,” and its meaning.

Apparently as Frankie, let us skip the formalities and just call him Frankie, walked down that nameless, maybe unnamable street he was stricken by sight of a sign on a vagrant telephone pole announcing that Jim Byrd’s Carnival and Traveling Show was coming to town and setting up tent at the Veteran’s Stadium in the first week in June, this past June, for the whole week. And seeing this sign, this vagrant sign on this vagrant telephone pole, set off a stream of memories from when the king hell king of the schoolboy corner boy night was so enthralled with the idea of the “carny” life, of this very Jim Byrd’s Carnival and Traveling Show carnival life, that he had plans, serious plans, to run away, run away with it when it left town.

Under this condition, and of course there was always a condition: if Ma Riley, or Pa Riley if it came to it, although Pa was usually comfortably ensconced in the Dublin Pub over on Sagamore Street and was not a big factor in Frankie’s life when it came time for him to make his mark as king hell king, just bothered him one more time, bothered about what was never specified at least to me. Of course they never did, or Frankie never let on that they did, bother him enough to force the issue, and therefore never forced him on the road. But by then he was into being the corner boy king so that dream must have faded, like a lot of twelve- year old dreams.

In any case rather than running away with the carnival Frankie served his high school corner boy term as king hell king, went to college and then to law school, ran a successful mid-sized law practice, raised plenty of kids and political hell and never looked back. And not until he saw that old-time memory sign did he think of regrets for not having done what he said that “he was born for.” And rather than have the reader left with another in the endless line of cautionary tales, or of two roads, one not taken tales, or any of that, Frankie, Frankie in his own words, wants to expand on his carnival vision reincarnation and so we will let him speak :

“Who knows when a kid first gets the carnival bug, maybe it was down in cradle times hearing the firecrackers in the heated, muggy Fourth Of July night when in old, old time North Adamsville a group of guys, a group of guys called the “Associates,” mainly Dublin Pub guys, and at one time including my father, Joe Riley, Senior, grabbed some money from around the neighborhood. And from the local merchants like Doc over at Doc’s Drug Store, Mario over at Estrella’s Grocery Store, Mac, owner of the Dublin Pub, and always, always, Tonio, owner of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor. What they did with this money was to hire a small time, usually very small time, carnival outfit, something with a name like Joe’s Carny, or the like, maybe with a merry-go-round, some bumping cars, a whip thing, a few one-trick ponies, and ten or twelve win-a-doll-for-your-lady tents. On the side maybe a few fried dough, pizza, sausage and onions kind of eateries, with cotton candy to top it off. And in a center tent acts, clown acts, trapeze acts with pretty girls dangling every which way, jugglers, and the like. Nothing fancy, no three-ring circus, or monster theme amusement park to flip a kid’s head stuff. Like I say small time, but not small time enough to not enflame the imagination of every kid, mainly every boy kid, but a few girls too if I remember right, with visions of setting up their own show.

Or maybe it was when this very same Jim Byrd, a dark-haired, dark-skinned (no, not black, not in 1950s North Adamsville, christ no, but maybe a gypsy or half-gypsy, if that is possible), a friendly guy, slightly wiry, a slightly side-of-his-mouth-talking guy just like a lawyer, who actually showed me some interesting magic tricks when I informed him, aged eight, that I wanted to go “on the road” with him first brought his show to town. Brought it to Veteran’s Stadium then too. That’s when I knew that that old time Associates thing, that frumpy Fourth of July set-up-in-a-minute-thing-and-then-gone was strictly amateur stuff. See Jim’s Carny had a Ferris wheel, Jim had a Mini-Roller Coaster, and he had about twenty-five or thirty win-a-doll, cigarettes, teddy bears, or candy tents. But also shooting galleries, gypsy fortune-telling ladies with daughters with black hair and laughing eyes selling roses, or the idea of roses. And looking very foxy, the daughters that is, although I did not know what foxy was then. Oh yah, sure Jim had the ubiquitous fried dough, sausage and onion, cardboard pizza stuff too. Come on now this was a carnival, big time carnival, big time to an eight-year old carnival. Of course he had that heartburn food. But what set Jim’s operation off was that central tent. Sure, yawn, he had the clowns, tramp clowns, Clarabelle clowns, what have you, and the jugglers, juggling everything but mainly a lot of whatever it was they were juggling , and even the acrobats, bouncing over each other like rubber balls. The big deal, the eight- year old big deal though, was the animals, the real live tigers and lions that performed in a cage in center stage with some blonde safari-weary tamer doing the most incredible tricks with them. Like, well, like having them jump through hoops, and flipping over each other and the trainer too. Wow.

But now that I think about it seriously the real deal of the carny life was neither the Associates or Jim Byrd’s, although after I tell you about this Jim’s would enter into my plans because that was the carnival, the only carnival I knew, to run away with. See what really got me going was down in Huntsville, a town on the hard ocean about twenty miles from North Adamsville, there was what would now be called nothing but an old-time amusement park, a park like you still might see if you went to Seaside Heights down on the Jersey shore. This park, this Wild Willie’s Amusement Park, was the aces although as you will see not a place to run away to since everything stayed there, summer open or winter closed. I was maybe nine or ten when I first went there but the story really hinges on when I was just turning twelve, you know, just getting ready to make my mark on the world, the world being girls. Yes, that kind of turning twelve.

But nine or twelve this Wild Willie’s put even Jim Byrd’s show to shame. Huge roller-coasters (yes, the plural is right, three altogether), a wild mouse, whips, dips, flips and very other kind of ride, covered and uncovered, maybe fifteen or twenty, all based on the idea of trying to make you scared, and want to go on again, and again to“ conquer” that scared thing. And countless win things (yah, cigarettes, dolls, teddy bears, candy, and so on in case you might have forgotten). I won’t even mention that hazardous to your health but merciful, fried dough, cardboard pizza (in about twenty flavors), sausage and onions, cotton candy and salt water taffy because, frankly I am tired of mentioning it and even a flea circus or a flea market today would feel compelled to offer such treats so I will move on.

What it had that really got me going, at first anyway, was about six pavilions worth of pinball machines, all kinds of pinball machines just like today there are a zillion video games at such places. But what these pinball machines had (beside alluring come-hither and spend some slot machine dough on me pictures of busty young women on the faces of the machines) were guys, over sixteen year old teenage guys, mainly, some older, some a lot older at night, who could play those machines like wizards, racking up free games until the cows came home. I was impressed, impressed to high heaven. And watching them, watching them closely were over sixteen- year old girls, some older, some a lot older at night, who I wondered, wondered at when I was nine but not at twelve, might not be interfering with their pinball magic. Little did I know then that the pinball wizardry was for those sixteen year old, some older, some a lot older, girls.

But see, if you didn’t already know, nine or twelve-year old kids were not allowed to play those machines. You had to be sixteen (although I cadged a few free games left on machines as I got a little older, and I think the statute of limitations has run out on this crime so I can say I was not sixteen years or older). So I gravitated toward the skee ball games located in one of those pinball pavilions, games that anybody six to sixty or more could play. You don’t know skees. Hey where have you been? Skee, come on now. Go over to Seaside Heights on the Jersey shore, or Old Orchard up on the Maine coast and you will have all the skees you want, or need. And if you can’t waggle your way to those hallowed spots then I will give a little run-down. It’s kind of like bowling, candle-pin bowling (small bowling balls for you non-New Englanders) with a small ball and it’s kind of like archery or darts because you have to get the balls, usually ten or twelve to a game, into tilted holes.

The idea is to get as high a score as possible, and in amusement park land after your game is over you get coupons depending on how many points you totaled. And if you get enough points you can win, well, a good luck rabbit’s foot, like I won for Karen stick-girl one time (a stick girl was a girl who didn’t yet have a shape, a womanly shape, and maybe that word still is used, okay), one turning twelve-year old time, who thought I was the king of the night because I gave her one from my “winnings,” and maybe still does. Still does think I am king of the hill. But a guy, an old corner boy guy that I knew back then, a kind of screwy guy who hung onto my tail at Salducci’s like I was King Solomon, a guy named Markin who hung around me from middle school on, already wrote that story once.

Although he got one part wrong, the part about how I didn’t know right from left about girls and gave this Karen stick girl the air when, after showering her with that rabbit’s foot, she wanted me to go with her and sit on the old seawall down at Huntsville Beach and according to Markin I said no-go. I went, believe me I went, and we both practically had lockjaw for two weeks after we got done. But you know how stories get twisted when third parties who were not there, had no hope of being there, and had questionable left from right girl knowledge themselves start their slanderous campaigns on you. Yes, you know that scene, I am sure.

So you see, Karen stick and lockjaw aside, I had some skill at skees, and the way skees and the carny life came together was when, well let me call her Gypsy Love, because like the name of that North Adamsville vagrant telephone pole street where I saw the Byrd’s carnival in town sign that I could not remember the name of I swear I can’t, or won’t remember hers. All I remember is that jet-black long hair, shiny dark-skinned glean (no, no again, she was not black, christ, no way, not in 1950s Wild Willie’s, what are you kidding me?), that thirteen-year old winsome smile, half innocent, half-half I don’t know what, that fast-forming girlish womanly shape and those laughing, Spanish gypsy black eyes that would haunt a man’s sleep, or a boy’s. And that is all I need to remember, and you too if you have any imagination. See Gypsy Love was the daughter of Madame La Rue, the fortune-teller in Jim Byrd’s carnival. I met her in turning twelve time when she tried to sell me a rose, a rose for my girlfriend, my non-existent just then girlfriend. Needless to say I was immediately taken with her and told her that although I had no girlfriend I would buy her a rose.

And that, off and on, over the next year is where we bounced around in our “relationship.” One day I was down at Wild Willie’s and I spotted her and asked her why she wasn’t on the road with Jim Byrd’s show. Apparently Madame LaRue had had a falling out with Jim, quit the traveling show and landed a spot at Wild Willie’s. And naturally Gypsy Love followed mother, selling flowers to the rubes at Wild Willie’s. So naturally, naturally to me, I told Gypsy Love to follow me over to the skees and I would win her a proper prize. And I did, I went crazy that day. A big old lamp for her room. And Gypsy Love asked me, asked me very nicely thank you, if I wanted to go down by the seawall and sit for a while. And let’s get this straight, no third party who wasn’t there, no wannabe there talk, please, I followed her, followed her like a lemming to the sea. We had lockjaw for a month afterward to prove it. And you say, you dare to say I was not born for that life, that carnival life. Ha.

Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check -The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967-Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night- The Music Of Tom Waits

Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check

By Bart Webber

I had been, strangely enough, in La Jolla out in California attending yet another writers’ conference which seems to be the makings of my days these days, attending writers’ conferences that is instead of taking pen to paper or rather fingers to word processor keyboard, when I heard Tom Wolfe had cashed his check. “Cashed his check” a term (along with synonymous “cashed his ticket”) grabbed from memory bank as a term used when I was “on the bum” hanging out in hobo jungle camps and the whole trail of flop houses and Salvation Army digs to signify that a kindred had passed to the great beyond. Was now resting in some better place that a stinking stew-bitten, flea –bitten, foul-aired and foul-person place. No more worries about the next flop, the next jug of cheapjack wine, the next run-in with vicious coppers and railroad bulls, and the next guy who was ready to rip whatever you had off to feed his own sullen addiction.

By the way this is not Thomas Wolfe of You Can’t Go Home Again, Look Homeward, Angels, etc. but the writer, maybe journalist is a better way to put the matter of tons of interesting stuff from acid trips in the 1960s hanging with Ken Kesey and his various tribes of merry pranksters, the Hell’s Angels, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters, to marveled space flights in the 1970s to Wall Street in the reckless 1980 and back who had cashed his check. The strange part of the “strangely enough” mentioned above was that on Monday May 14^th 2018, the day he died, I was walking along La Jolla Cove and commenting to my companion without knowing his fate that Tom Wolfe had made the La Jolla surfing scene in the early 1960s come alive with his tale of the Pump House Gang and related stories about the restless California tribes, you know those Hell’s Angels, Valley hot-rod freaks and the like who parents had migrated west from dustbowl Okies and Arkies to start a new life out in Eden. These next generation though lost in a thousand angsts and alienation not having to fight for every breath of fresh air (with the exception of the Angels who might as well have stayed in the Okies and McAllister Prison which would have been their fate.   

I don’t know how Tom Wolfe did at the end as a writer, or toward the end, when things seemed to glaze over and became very homogenized, lacked the verve of hard ass 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s times. Although I do note that he did a very although I note he did an interesting take on the cultural life at the Army base at Fort Bragg down in North Carolina in a book of essays around the theme of hooking up. That hooking up angle a sign that social cohesiveness in the age of the Internet was creating some strange rituals. Know this those pound for pound in his prime he along with Hunter Thompson could write the sociology of the land with simple flair and kept this guy, me, flipping the pages in the wee hours of the morning. RIP, Tom Wolfe, RIP.  

The 50th Anniversary Of The Summer Of Love, 1967-Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night- The Music Of Tom Waits

CD Reviews


Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Tom Waits, Electra/Asylum Records, 1975


The inner lives of the denizens of that late night diner in the famous painting by the American realist artist Edward Hopper, “Nighthawks” (1942). The scorching literary sketches of the rich and famous and the skid row bums provided by the late “Gonzo” journalist Doctor Hunter Thompson, accompanied by the renderings of the artist Ralph Steadman. The jingle-jangle high side lyrics of the legendary folk musician Bob Dylan of the “Blood On The Tracks” period. The reach into the far side of the part of the psyche exhibited by those down at the base of American society in an earlier period by the novelist Nelson Algren in “Walk On The Wild Side”. And that same reach later by the man of the “mean” Los Angeles streets, Charles Bukowski. Wrap them all up in a whiskey-soaked, cigarette-scarred, gravelly, rasping voice and you have the idiosyncratic musician Tom Waits. Placed in that same company as above? Yes, by all means. Not a bad place to be, right?

Although I have been listening to the music of one Tom Waits for decades, every since I heard Jerry Jeff Walker do a cover of his classic song of loneliness, longing and reaching for the elusive promise of Saturday night dreams in “Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night”, I am not familiar with his biography. All I know is that aside from his own far-reaching musical endeavors, as expressed in numerous albums over the years, he has acted in some motion pictures, most notably as a skid row philosopher of sorts in the movie version of William Kennedy’s “Ironweed” (a natural, right?) and has provided the soundtrack music to many movies, most notably the Al Pacino-starring “Sea Of Love”. That Waits soundtrack version of the late 1950’s, early 1960’s classic teenage anthem to longing and love is just the right example of what Brother Waits means musically to this reviewer. Taking that simple song of teenage longing, Waits’ husky-voiced rendition reaches back and turns it into something almost primordial, something that goes back beyond time to our first understandings that we are ‘alone’ in the universe. Enough said.

But so much for all of that because what I really want to mention is the “Waits effect”. Every once in a while I ‘need’ to listen to words and sounds that express the dark, misbegotten side of the human experience. You know, sagas of Gun Street girls, guys talking “Spanish in the halls’, people lost out there on the edge of society and the like. Is there anyone today who can musically put it better? If you need to hear about hope, dope, the rope. Wine, women and song or no wine, no women or no song. About whiskey-caked barroom floors, floozies, boozies, flotsam, jetsam, stale motel rooms, cigarette-infested hotels, wrong gees, jokers, smokers and ten-cent croakers. Drifters, grifters, no good midnight sifters. Life on the fast lane, nowhere lane, some back street alley, perhaps, out in the valley. This, my friends is you address. Listen up. Professor Waits is at the lectern.

"(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night"

Well you gassed her up
Behind the wheel
With your arm around your sweet one
In your Oldsmobile
Barrelin' down the boulevard
You're looking for the heart of Saturday night

And you got paid on Friday
And your pockets are jinglin'
And you see the lights
You get all tinglin' cause you're cruisin' with a 6
And you're looking for the heart of Saturday night

Then you comb your hair
Shave your face
Tryin' to wipe out ev'ry trace
All the other days
In the week you know that this'll be the Saturday
You're reachin' your peak

Stoppin' on the red
You're goin' on the green
'Cause tonight'll be like nothin'
You've ever seen
And you're barrelin' down the boulevard
Lookin' for the heart of Saturday night

Tell me is the crack of the poolballs, neon buzzin?
Telephone's ringin'; it's your second cousin
Is it the barmaid that's smilin' from the corner of her eye?
Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye.

Makes it kind of quiver down in the core
'Cause you're dreamin' of them Saturdays that came before
And now you're stumblin'
You're stumblin' onto the heart of Saturday night

Well you gassed her up
And you're behind the wheel
With your arm around your sweet one
In your Oldsmobile
Barrellin' down the boulevard,
You're lookin' for the heart of Saturday night

Is the crack of the poolballs, neon buzzin?
Telephone's ringin'; it's your second cousin
And the barmaid is smilin' from the corner of her eye
Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye.

Makes it kind of special down in the core
And you're dreamin' of them Saturdays that came before
It's found you stumblin'
Stumblin' onto the heart of Saturday night
And you're stumblin'
Stumblin onto the heart of Saturday night