Memorial Day for Peace
When: Monday, May 30, 2011, 1:00 pm
Where: Christopher Columbus Park • Atlantic Ave. at Long Wharf • Aquarium T • Boston
Start: 2011 May 30 - 1:00pm
Please join Veterans For Peace, Military Families Speak Out, United for Justice with Peace, Gold Star Families for Peace and the American Friends Service Committee for a ceremony for Peace on Memorial Day.
Speakers to include:
John Schuchardt – House of Peace, Ipswich, MA
Ross Caputi – Marine veteran of the Iraq War (2003 – 2006)
President of Boston University Anti-War Coalition
Kevin & Joyce Lucey, parents of Corporal Jeffrey Lucey, U.S. M.C.
Melida & Carlos Arredondo, Gold Star Families for Peace, parents of Marine Lance Corporal Alex Arredondo U.S,M.C.
Oday Mahmood & Ayfer AbedAljibar– Iraqi Refugees – Will speak on behalf of the new Iraqi community here in Massachusetts.
James Vanloy – Poet
John Olivere – Singer Songwriter
*******
Fritz, old battle-scarred and battle-weary purple-hearted Fritz Taylor, Vietnam, 1969-1971, Fritz John Taylor, RA048433691 to be exact, had to laugh as he made his way from Adamsville to the downtown Boston waterfront. To the green jut of land Christopher Columbus Park (and that name, causing further bemusement when he first heard the locale, could itself tell a big story about the old days European-centered military adventures to the Americas)for what he was not sure, exactly, was either the third or fourth annual Veterans For Peace counter-Memorial Day commemoration (really counter-traditional observance).
Fritz had not laughed a funny laugh as he was prone to do these days when something struck him as unusual, but laughed out loud at the thought of a no-go, not even boot camp as far as he knew, commander-in chief of all the American imperial armed forces , United States President Barack Obama, suddenly warming up to his post-Osama Bin Laden kill authorization (after having , vicariously, watched the SEAL action in “real time”) very consciously earlier this day placing himself at the center of the Memorial Day action in Arlington National Cemetery trying to draw succor from the ghost of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. Talking aimlessly, or maybe better superficially, about valor, about the good of the cause, about the last full measure of devotion, and lastly, what war in the end is all about, saving your buddy’s ass, or he yours.
But see, to Fritz’s way of thinking, Lincoln at least had the advantage, the very distinct advantage, of not only having said those kinds of words and those kinds of sentiments first and therefore in a more free-lance, free-wheeling eloquent way but said them at humankind's hallowed Gettysburg in the wake of what turned out to the decisive great Northern victory (along with Grant’s Vicksburg victory) in a war, that by hook or by crook, turned chattel slavery times out the door.
What could one imperial chief, Barack Obama, today draw on for succor? Leading a 50,000 troop wind-down in Iraq, a thoughtlessly unjust war if there ever was one, with more than its fair share of collateral damage, read American troop-driven civilian killings, and to call it by its right name murder. Yes, yes, by all means Fritz Taylor knew, knew chapter and verse, that when it did not really count one non-president Barack Obama opposed George’s Follies but that was then, and this, this was desperately now with the latest headlines out of Baghdad announcing a 200,000 mass march calling for an American withdrawal post-haste. And Fritz Taylor, Fritz Taylor who had gotten “religion” on the subject of war, on collateral damage, on don’t give a damn about spent soldiers’ lives since those lost Vietnam days, lost in some drug addiction time, some newspaper-strewn park bench time, some lost family connection time, took a moment to reflect on that fact, and to murmur softly to himself- Obama, Mr. President, since Fritz is putting things in a more kindly fashion now- get the hell out of Iraq, completely out, and stay out.
And Fritz had to laugh, and the nature of that laugh need not be repeated here, about how big bad Barrack Obama, whom almost every non-veteran of any battle, except maybe the battle for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008, or of the bar stool in some ill-lit barroom but those don’t count in real battle scars world, has been touting as some kind of Gandhian pacifist while constantly upping the ante in Afghanistan since about day one of his administration, the troop commitment ante, the one that really counts. And making that ill-conceived policy the lynch-pin for his whole world-wide war strategy, with no serious end date in sight (and no congressional oversight to stop him, according to a recent vote on the question of war budget authorizations-the real deal when it comes to war policy).
Fritz’s thoughts just then as well dwelled on the more recent, the more off-hand stuff, the several hundred drones attacks in Pakistan, the few thousand, give or take, cruise missiles (oops, that’s a NATO operation, he forgot, sorry) in Libya and the general policeman of the world carrying a big stick, a very big stick indeed, in the rest of the world. So he felt compelled to murmur under his breathe, no really curse under his breathe, Mr. President, Fritz still being the soul of politeness these days, these got anti-war “religion,” drug- free, alcohol-free, stable home under his feet days, get the hell out of Afghanistan and stay out. And while you are at it, Mr. Obama, keep American hands off, way off the rest of the world, as he then saw the first of several white dove on black background Veterans for Peace (VFP) flags flying in the wind down near the ferry docks adjacent to this Columbus honor park.
And while a moment ago he raged with grievous anger at the American imperial state and its two-bit sheriff (oops, sorry again, President) he felt calmer, as he always felt calmer, when he spied the white-doved, black-background flags because that meant kindred, mainly Vietnam-era kindred but sprinkles of others as well. Guys, mostly, and a few women as well, now graying guys, seriously graying guys, now walking a little more haltingly due to life’s toll, now maybe not in that tip-top shape that made them prime Grade A cannon fodder back in the days, who had been through battles, real battles and post-war battles, some of them anyway just like him, whom he always argued had more than enough “cred” when anti-war talk time came around. And others, other anti-warriors, who only credentials were some well-written papers, some well-spoken speech, or a safely-protected street march in some big or middle-sized American city or town who knew, knew deep in their hearts that Fritz’s point was true. And they were deferential, sometimes just a little too paternally or maternally deferential, when the big brassy white flag-draped veterans came marching their way.
Oh sure, this third (or was it fourth) commemoration was not well-attended, maybe a hundred, not the thousands standing on those big and mid-sized city and town street corners, or walking past those benighted American flag-bedecked blessed sweet good night grave sites with their complements of still-grieving kin, but this place, this momentarily hallowed anti-war place is not measured by numbers this day but by remembrance, hard-earned remembrance, hard-earned rage against the night cannon fodder-used and folly remembrance. And, oh sure, the speeches, the speeches by those graying activists, with just the barest sprinkle of newer Iraq and Afghanistan era veterans, were directed at that hundred angel choir of kindred. And Fritz, having heard every anti-war argument before, having heard every political prisoner Private Bradley Manning story before, having heard about the collateral damage, foreign division, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Palestine, civilian horror story before; and every collateral damage, domestic division, devastated military families story before still drank in the words. And said his fair share of old-time protest “right on,” brother, or sister. And yelled loudly and proudly, “Free Bradley Manning.” Yes, these days Bradley Manning’s fight is us, our younger fighting spirit us. The torch has now been passed to the new guys, and the couple of hours as well. Fritz Taylor just for that moment felt ten feet tall for having made this day’s journey. He was charged-up again.
On the way home, or rather on the way to meet, over near the Adamsville River, his better other, Lillian, his “sweet pea” he had named her for her sunny disposition, and her tough determination to give him a home to feel planted in and, early on, a little anti-war “religion” bump start too he passed, as thinking about it later he should have expected, a very different Memorial Day celebration sponsored by the Adamsville Veterans Of Foreign Wars (VFW). Before he got “religion” he had spent many a cheap drinks drinking hour at that same VFW hall, or the American Legion hall farther up the street, and had thought nothing of retelling many bar stool battle stories to anyone who would listen. And listen they did because Fritz had another kind of “cred” in those days, battle-tested credentials, as against the state-side duty and or rear area supply sergeants that populate these VFW and American Legion barrooms.
But right now he was chagrined at this tactless “celebration” going on before his eyes, complete with family-friendly barbecue, pony rides and merry-go-round for the kids, and more thoughtless, neglected and discarded American flags than one could shake a stick at. Those quickly passed scenes momentarily brought back to Fritz’s mind ancient unhealed, unheal-able, wounds, and ancient, also unheal-able, angers as well. What was not ancient, although also unheal-able, was when, as he quietly passed by, some long-in-the-tooth ex- supply sergeant VFW honcho noticed Fritz’s still shirt-pinned buttons calling for Obamian troop withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan and freedom for Private Bradley Manning and called him a “commie”. Fritz thought, jesus, where has this guy been but he also reflected, especially seeing the kids unconsciously drink in the warrior atmospherics that went with this celebration, that charged-up or not, he still had a hell of a lot of work to do. A hell of a lot.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
War And Remembrance- A Boston Veterans For Peace Memorial Day-May 30, 2011
Click on the headline to link to a Boston Indymedia entry, dated May 31, 2011, detaling the Boston Veterans For Peace Memorial Day Observance.
Fritz, old battle-scarred and battle-weary purple-hearted Fritz Taylor, Vietnam, 1969-1971, Fritz John Taylor, RA048433691 to be exact, had to laugh as he made his way from Adamsville to the downtown Boston waterfront. To the green jut of land Christopher Columbus Park (and that name, causing further bemusement when he first heard the locale, could itself tell a big story about the old days European-centered military adventures to the Americas)for what he was not sure, exactly, was either the third or fourth annual Veterans For Peace counter-Memorial Day commemoration (really counter-traditional observance).
Fritz had not laughed a funny laugh as he was prone to do these days when something struck him as unusual, but laughed out loud at the thought of a no-go, not even boot camp as far as he knew, commander-in chief of all the American imperial armed forces , United States President Barack Obama, suddenly warming up to his post-Osama Bin Laden kill authorization (after having , vicariously, watched the SEAL action in “real time”) very consciously earlier this day placing himself at the center of the Memorial Day action in Arlington National Cemetery trying to draw succor from the ghost of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. Talking aimlessly, or maybe better superficially, about valor, about the good of the cause, about the last full measure of devotion, and lastly, what war in the end is all about, saving your buddy’s ass, or he yours.
But see, to Fritz’s way of thinking, Lincoln at least had the advantage, the very distinct advantage, of not only having said those kinds of words and those kinds of sentiments first and therefore in a more free-lance, free-wheeling eloquent way but said them at humankind's hallowed Gettysburg in the wake of what turned out to the decisive great Northern victory (along with Grant’s Vicksburg victory) in a war, that by hook or by crook, turned chattel slavery times out the door.
What could one imperial chief, Barack Obama, today draw on for succor? Leading a 50,000 troop wind-down in Iraq, a thoughtlessly unjust war if there ever was one, with more than its fair share of collateral damage, read American troop-driven civilian killings, and to call it by its right name murder. Yes, yes, by all means Fritz Taylor knew, knew chapter and verse, that when it did not really count one non-president Barack Obama opposed George’s Follies but that was then, and this, this was desperately now with the latest headlines out of Baghdad announcing a 200,000 mass march calling for an American withdrawal post-haste. And Fritz Taylor, Fritz Taylor who had gotten “religion” on the subject of war, on collateral damage, on don’t give a damn about spent soldiers’ lives since those lost Vietnam days, lost in some drug addiction time, some newspaper-strewn park bench time, some lost family connection time, took a moment to reflect on that fact, and to murmur softly to himself- Obama, Mr. President, since Fritz is putting things in a more kindly fashion now- get the hell out of Iraq, completely out, and stay out.
And Fritz had to laugh, and the nature of that laugh need not be repeated here, about how big bad Barrack Obama, whom almost every non-veteran of any battle, except maybe the battle for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008, or of the bar stool in some ill-lit barroom but those don’t count in real battle scars world, has been touting as some kind of Gandhian pacifist while constantly upping the ante in Afghanistan since about day one of his administration, the troop commitment ante, the one that really counts. And making that ill-conceived policy the lynch-pin for his whole world-wide war strategy, with no serious end date in sight (and no congressional oversight to stop him, according to a recent vote on the question of war budget authorizations-the real deal when it comes to war policy).
Fritz’s thoughts just then as well dwelled on the more recent, the more off-hand stuff, the several hundred drones attacks in Pakistan, the few thousand, give or take, cruise missiles (oops, that’s a NATO operation, he forgot, sorry) in Libya and the general policeman of the world carrying a big stick, a very big stick indeed, in the rest of the world. So he felt compelled to murmur under his breathe, no really curse under his breathe, Mr. President, Fritz still being the soul of politeness these days, these got anti-war “religion,” drug- free, alcohol-free, stable home under his feet days, get the hell out of Afghanistan and stay out. And while you are at it, Mr. Obama, keep American hands off, way off the rest of the world, as he then saw the first of several white dove on black background Veterans for Peace (VFP) flags flying in the wind down near the ferry docks adjacent to this Columbus honor park.
And while a moment ago he raged with grievous anger at the American imperial state and its two-bit sheriff (oops, sorry again, President) he felt calmer, as he always felt calmer, when he spied the white-doved, black-background flags because that meant kindred, mainly Vietnam-era kindred but sprinkles of others as well. Guys, mostly, and a few women as well, now graying guys, seriously graying guys, now walking a little more haltingly due to life’s toll, now maybe not in that tip-top shape that made them prime Grade A cannon fodder back in the days, who had been through battles, real battles and post-war battles, some of them anyway just like him, whom he always argued had more than enough “cred” when anti-war talk time came around. And others, other anti-warriors, who only credentials were some well-written papers, some well-spoken speech, or a safely-protected street march in some big or middle-sized American city or town who knew, knew deep in their hearts that Fritz’s point was true. And they were deferential, sometimes just a little too paternally or maternally deferential, when the big brassy white flag-draped veterans came marching their way.
Oh sure, this third (or was it fourth) commemoration was not well-attended, maybe a hundred, not the thousands standing on those big and mid-sized city and town street corners, or walking past those benighted American flag-bedecked blessed sweet good night grave sites with their complements of still-grieving kin, but this place, this momentarily hallowed anti-war place is not measured by numbers this day but by remembrance, hard-earned remembrance, hard-earned rage against the night cannon fodder-used and folly remembrance. And, oh sure, the speeches, the speeches by those graying activists, with just the barest sprinkle of newer Iraq and Afghanistan era veterans, were directed at that hundred angel choir of kindred. And Fritz, having heard every anti-war argument before, having heard every political prisoner Private Bradley Manning story before, having heard about the collateral damage, foreign division, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Palestine, civilian horror story before; and every collateral damage, domestic division, devastated military families story before still drank in the words. And said his fair share of old-time protest “right on,” brother, or sister. And yelled loudly and proudly, “Free Bradley Manning.” Yes, these days Bradley Manning’s fight is us, our younger fighting spirit us. The torch has now been passed to the new guys, and the couple of hours as well. Fritz Taylor just for that moment felt ten feet tall for having made this day’s journey. He was charged-up again.
On the way home, or rather on the way to meet, over near the Adamsville River, his better other, Lillian, his “sweet pea” he had named her for her sunny disposition, and her tough determination to give him a home to feel planted in and, early on, a little anti-war “religion” bump start too he passed, as thinking about it later he should have expected, a very different Memorial Day celebration sponsored by the Adamsville Veterans Of Foreign Wars (VFW). Before he got “religion” he had spent many a cheap drinks drinking hour at that same VFW hall, or the American Legion hall farther up the street, and had thought nothing of retelling many bar stool battle stories to anyone who would listen. And listen they did because Fritz had another kind of “cred” in those days, battle-tested credentials, as against the state-side duty and or rear area supply sergeants that populate these VFW and American Legion barrooms.
But right now he was chagrined at this tactless “celebration” going on before his eyes, complete with family-friendly barbecue, pony rides and merry-go-round for the kids, and more thoughtless, neglected and discarded American flags than one could shake a stick at. Those quickly passed scenes momentarily brought back to Fritz’s mind ancient unhealed, unheal-able, wounds, and ancient, also unheal-able, angers as well. What was not ancient, although also unheal-able, was when, as he quietly passed by, some long-in-the-tooth ex- supply sergeant VFW honcho noticed Fritz’s still shirt-pinned buttons calling for Obamian troop withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan and freedom for Private Bradley Manning and called him a “commie”. Fritz thought, jesus, where has this guy been but he also reflected, especially seeing the kids unconsciously drink in the warrior atmospherics that went with this celebration, that charged-up or not, he still had a hell of a lot of work to do. A hell of a lot.
Fritz, old battle-scarred and battle-weary purple-hearted Fritz Taylor, Vietnam, 1969-1971, Fritz John Taylor, RA048433691 to be exact, had to laugh as he made his way from Adamsville to the downtown Boston waterfront. To the green jut of land Christopher Columbus Park (and that name, causing further bemusement when he first heard the locale, could itself tell a big story about the old days European-centered military adventures to the Americas)for what he was not sure, exactly, was either the third or fourth annual Veterans For Peace counter-Memorial Day commemoration (really counter-traditional observance).
Fritz had not laughed a funny laugh as he was prone to do these days when something struck him as unusual, but laughed out loud at the thought of a no-go, not even boot camp as far as he knew, commander-in chief of all the American imperial armed forces , United States President Barack Obama, suddenly warming up to his post-Osama Bin Laden kill authorization (after having , vicariously, watched the SEAL action in “real time”) very consciously earlier this day placing himself at the center of the Memorial Day action in Arlington National Cemetery trying to draw succor from the ghost of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. Talking aimlessly, or maybe better superficially, about valor, about the good of the cause, about the last full measure of devotion, and lastly, what war in the end is all about, saving your buddy’s ass, or he yours.
But see, to Fritz’s way of thinking, Lincoln at least had the advantage, the very distinct advantage, of not only having said those kinds of words and those kinds of sentiments first and therefore in a more free-lance, free-wheeling eloquent way but said them at humankind's hallowed Gettysburg in the wake of what turned out to the decisive great Northern victory (along with Grant’s Vicksburg victory) in a war, that by hook or by crook, turned chattel slavery times out the door.
What could one imperial chief, Barack Obama, today draw on for succor? Leading a 50,000 troop wind-down in Iraq, a thoughtlessly unjust war if there ever was one, with more than its fair share of collateral damage, read American troop-driven civilian killings, and to call it by its right name murder. Yes, yes, by all means Fritz Taylor knew, knew chapter and verse, that when it did not really count one non-president Barack Obama opposed George’s Follies but that was then, and this, this was desperately now with the latest headlines out of Baghdad announcing a 200,000 mass march calling for an American withdrawal post-haste. And Fritz Taylor, Fritz Taylor who had gotten “religion” on the subject of war, on collateral damage, on don’t give a damn about spent soldiers’ lives since those lost Vietnam days, lost in some drug addiction time, some newspaper-strewn park bench time, some lost family connection time, took a moment to reflect on that fact, and to murmur softly to himself- Obama, Mr. President, since Fritz is putting things in a more kindly fashion now- get the hell out of Iraq, completely out, and stay out.
And Fritz had to laugh, and the nature of that laugh need not be repeated here, about how big bad Barrack Obama, whom almost every non-veteran of any battle, except maybe the battle for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008, or of the bar stool in some ill-lit barroom but those don’t count in real battle scars world, has been touting as some kind of Gandhian pacifist while constantly upping the ante in Afghanistan since about day one of his administration, the troop commitment ante, the one that really counts. And making that ill-conceived policy the lynch-pin for his whole world-wide war strategy, with no serious end date in sight (and no congressional oversight to stop him, according to a recent vote on the question of war budget authorizations-the real deal when it comes to war policy).
Fritz’s thoughts just then as well dwelled on the more recent, the more off-hand stuff, the several hundred drones attacks in Pakistan, the few thousand, give or take, cruise missiles (oops, that’s a NATO operation, he forgot, sorry) in Libya and the general policeman of the world carrying a big stick, a very big stick indeed, in the rest of the world. So he felt compelled to murmur under his breathe, no really curse under his breathe, Mr. President, Fritz still being the soul of politeness these days, these got anti-war “religion,” drug- free, alcohol-free, stable home under his feet days, get the hell out of Afghanistan and stay out. And while you are at it, Mr. Obama, keep American hands off, way off the rest of the world, as he then saw the first of several white dove on black background Veterans for Peace (VFP) flags flying in the wind down near the ferry docks adjacent to this Columbus honor park.
And while a moment ago he raged with grievous anger at the American imperial state and its two-bit sheriff (oops, sorry again, President) he felt calmer, as he always felt calmer, when he spied the white-doved, black-background flags because that meant kindred, mainly Vietnam-era kindred but sprinkles of others as well. Guys, mostly, and a few women as well, now graying guys, seriously graying guys, now walking a little more haltingly due to life’s toll, now maybe not in that tip-top shape that made them prime Grade A cannon fodder back in the days, who had been through battles, real battles and post-war battles, some of them anyway just like him, whom he always argued had more than enough “cred” when anti-war talk time came around. And others, other anti-warriors, who only credentials were some well-written papers, some well-spoken speech, or a safely-protected street march in some big or middle-sized American city or town who knew, knew deep in their hearts that Fritz’s point was true. And they were deferential, sometimes just a little too paternally or maternally deferential, when the big brassy white flag-draped veterans came marching their way.
Oh sure, this third (or was it fourth) commemoration was not well-attended, maybe a hundred, not the thousands standing on those big and mid-sized city and town street corners, or walking past those benighted American flag-bedecked blessed sweet good night grave sites with their complements of still-grieving kin, but this place, this momentarily hallowed anti-war place is not measured by numbers this day but by remembrance, hard-earned remembrance, hard-earned rage against the night cannon fodder-used and folly remembrance. And, oh sure, the speeches, the speeches by those graying activists, with just the barest sprinkle of newer Iraq and Afghanistan era veterans, were directed at that hundred angel choir of kindred. And Fritz, having heard every anti-war argument before, having heard every political prisoner Private Bradley Manning story before, having heard about the collateral damage, foreign division, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Palestine, civilian horror story before; and every collateral damage, domestic division, devastated military families story before still drank in the words. And said his fair share of old-time protest “right on,” brother, or sister. And yelled loudly and proudly, “Free Bradley Manning.” Yes, these days Bradley Manning’s fight is us, our younger fighting spirit us. The torch has now been passed to the new guys, and the couple of hours as well. Fritz Taylor just for that moment felt ten feet tall for having made this day’s journey. He was charged-up again.
On the way home, or rather on the way to meet, over near the Adamsville River, his better other, Lillian, his “sweet pea” he had named her for her sunny disposition, and her tough determination to give him a home to feel planted in and, early on, a little anti-war “religion” bump start too he passed, as thinking about it later he should have expected, a very different Memorial Day celebration sponsored by the Adamsville Veterans Of Foreign Wars (VFW). Before he got “religion” he had spent many a cheap drinks drinking hour at that same VFW hall, or the American Legion hall farther up the street, and had thought nothing of retelling many bar stool battle stories to anyone who would listen. And listen they did because Fritz had another kind of “cred” in those days, battle-tested credentials, as against the state-side duty and or rear area supply sergeants that populate these VFW and American Legion barrooms.
But right now he was chagrined at this tactless “celebration” going on before his eyes, complete with family-friendly barbecue, pony rides and merry-go-round for the kids, and more thoughtless, neglected and discarded American flags than one could shake a stick at. Those quickly passed scenes momentarily brought back to Fritz’s mind ancient unhealed, unheal-able, wounds, and ancient, also unheal-able, angers as well. What was not ancient, although also unheal-able, was when, as he quietly passed by, some long-in-the-tooth ex- supply sergeant VFW honcho noticed Fritz’s still shirt-pinned buttons calling for Obamian troop withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan and freedom for Private Bradley Manning and called him a “commie”. Fritz thought, jesus, where has this guy been but he also reflected, especially seeing the kids unconsciously drink in the warrior atmospherics that went with this celebration, that charged-up or not, he still had a hell of a lot of work to do. A hell of a lot.
Mission: seemingly impossible-The "Endgame" In Iraq
Click on the headline to link to a Boston Globe article, dated May 30, 2011, concerning the drawdown in Iraq.
Fritz John Taylor's comment:
Fritz, old battle-scarred and battle-weary purple-hearted Fritz Taylor, Vietnam, 1969-1971, Fritz John Taylor, RA048433691 to be exact, had to laugh as he made his way from Adamsville to the downtown Boston waterfront. To the green jut of land Christopher Columbus Park (and that name, causing further bemusement when he first heard the locale, could itself tell a big story about the old days European-centered military adventures to the Americas)for what he was not sure, exactly, was either the third or fourth annual Veterans For Peace counter-Memorial Day commemoration (really counter-traditional observance).
Fritz had not laughed a funny laugh as he was prone to do these days when something struck him as unusual, but laughed out loud at the thought of a no-go, not even boot camp as far as he knew, commander-in chief of all the American imperial armed forces , United States President Barack Obama, suddenly warming up to his post-Osama Bin Laden kill authorization (after having , vicariously, watched the SEAL action in “real time”) very consciously earlier this day placing himself at the center of the Memorial Day action in Arlington National Cemetery trying to draw succor from the ghost of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. Talking aimlessly, or maybe better superficially, about valor, about the good of the cause, about the last full measure of devotion, and lastly, what war in the end is all about, saving your buddy’s ass, or he yours.
But see, to Fritz’s way of thinking, Lincoln at least had the advantage, the very distinct advantage, of not only having said those kinds of words and those kinds of sentiments first and therefore in a more free-lance, free-wheeling eloquent way but said them at humankind's hallowed Gettysburg in the wake of what turned out to the decisive great Northern victory (along with Grant’s Vicksburg victory) in a war, that by hook or by crook, turned chattel slavery times out the door.
What could one imperial chief, Barack Obama, today draw on for succor? Leading a 50,000 troop wind-down in Iraq, a thoughtlessly unjust war if there ever was one, with more than its fair share of collateral damage, read American troop-driven civilian killings, and to call it by its right name murder. Yes, yes, by all means Fritz Taylor knew, knew chapter and verse, that when it did not really count one non-president Barack Obama opposed George’s Follies but that was then, and this, this was desperately now with the latest headlines out of Baghdad announcing a 200,000 mass march calling for an American withdrawal post-haste. And Fritz Taylor, Fritz Taylor who had gotten “religion” on the subject of war, on collateral damage, on don’t give a damn about spent soldiers’ lives since those lost Vietnam days, lost in some drug addiction time, some newspaper-strewn park bench time, some lost family connection time, took a moment to reflect on that fact, and to murmur softly to himself- Obama, Mr. President, since Fritz is putting things in a more kindly fashion now- get the hell out of Iraq, completely out, and stay out.
Fritz John Taylor's comment:
Fritz, old battle-scarred and battle-weary purple-hearted Fritz Taylor, Vietnam, 1969-1971, Fritz John Taylor, RA048433691 to be exact, had to laugh as he made his way from Adamsville to the downtown Boston waterfront. To the green jut of land Christopher Columbus Park (and that name, causing further bemusement when he first heard the locale, could itself tell a big story about the old days European-centered military adventures to the Americas)for what he was not sure, exactly, was either the third or fourth annual Veterans For Peace counter-Memorial Day commemoration (really counter-traditional observance).
Fritz had not laughed a funny laugh as he was prone to do these days when something struck him as unusual, but laughed out loud at the thought of a no-go, not even boot camp as far as he knew, commander-in chief of all the American imperial armed forces , United States President Barack Obama, suddenly warming up to his post-Osama Bin Laden kill authorization (after having , vicariously, watched the SEAL action in “real time”) very consciously earlier this day placing himself at the center of the Memorial Day action in Arlington National Cemetery trying to draw succor from the ghost of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. Talking aimlessly, or maybe better superficially, about valor, about the good of the cause, about the last full measure of devotion, and lastly, what war in the end is all about, saving your buddy’s ass, or he yours.
But see, to Fritz’s way of thinking, Lincoln at least had the advantage, the very distinct advantage, of not only having said those kinds of words and those kinds of sentiments first and therefore in a more free-lance, free-wheeling eloquent way but said them at humankind's hallowed Gettysburg in the wake of what turned out to the decisive great Northern victory (along with Grant’s Vicksburg victory) in a war, that by hook or by crook, turned chattel slavery times out the door.
What could one imperial chief, Barack Obama, today draw on for succor? Leading a 50,000 troop wind-down in Iraq, a thoughtlessly unjust war if there ever was one, with more than its fair share of collateral damage, read American troop-driven civilian killings, and to call it by its right name murder. Yes, yes, by all means Fritz Taylor knew, knew chapter and verse, that when it did not really count one non-president Barack Obama opposed George’s Follies but that was then, and this, this was desperately now with the latest headlines out of Baghdad announcing a 200,000 mass march calling for an American withdrawal post-haste. And Fritz Taylor, Fritz Taylor who had gotten “religion” on the subject of war, on collateral damage, on don’t give a damn about spent soldiers’ lives since those lost Vietnam days, lost in some drug addiction time, some newspaper-strewn park bench time, some lost family connection time, took a moment to reflect on that fact, and to murmur softly to himself- Obama, Mr. President, since Fritz is putting things in a more kindly fashion now- get the hell out of Iraq, completely out, and stay out.
Winding Down An Almost Forgotten War-Iraq
Click on the headline to link to a Sunday Boston Globe article, dated May 29, 2011, concerning the drawdown in Iraq.
Fritz John Taylor's comment:
Fritz, old battle-scarred and battle-weary purple-hearted Fritz Taylor, Vietnam, 1969-1971, Fritz John Taylor, RA048433691 to be exact, had to laugh as he made his way from Adamsville to the downtown Boston waterfront. To the green jut of land Christopher Columbus Park (and that name, causing further bemusement when he first heard the locale, could itself tell a big story about the old days European-centered military adventures to the Americas)for what he was not sure, exactly, was either the third or fourth annual Veterans For Peace counter-Memorial Day commemoration (really counter-traditional observance).
Fritz had not laughed a funny laugh as he was prone to do these days when something struck him as unusual, but laughed out loud at the thought of a no-go, not even boot camp as far as he knew, commander-in chief of all the American imperial armed forces , United States President Barack Obama, suddenly warming up to his post-Osama Bin Laden kill authorization (after having , vicariously, watched the SEAL action in “real time”) very consciously earlier this day placing himself at the center of the Memorial Day action in Arlington National Cemetery trying to draw succor from the ghost of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. Talking aimlessly, or maybe better superficially, about valor, about the good of the cause, about the last full measure of devotion, and lastly, what war in the end is all about, saving your buddy’s ass, or he yours.
But see, to Fritz’s way of thinking, Lincoln at least had the advantage, the very distinct advantage, of not only having said those kinds of words and those kinds of sentiments first and therefore in a more free-lance, free-wheeling eloquent way but said them at humankind's hallowed Gettysburg in the wake of what turned out to the decisive great Northern victory (along with Grant’s Vicksburg victory) in a war, that by hook or by crook, turned chattel slavery times out the door.
What could one imperial chief, Barack Obama, today draw on for succor? Leading a 50,000 troop wind-down in Iraq, a thoughtlessly unjust war if there ever was one, with more than its fair share of collateral damage, read American troop-driven civilian killings, and to call it by its right name murder. Yes, yes, by all means Fritz Taylor knew, knew chapter and verse, that when it did not really count one non-president Barack Obama opposed George’s Follies but that was then, and this, this was desperately now with the latest headlines out of Baghdad announcing a 200,000 mass march calling for an American withdrawal post-haste. And Fritz Taylor, Fritz Taylor who had gotten “religion” on the subject of war, on collateral damage, on don’t give a damn about spent soldiers’ lives since those lost Vietnam days, lost in some drug addiction time, some newspaper-strewn park bench time, some lost family connection time, took a moment to reflect on that fact, and to murmur softly to himself- Obama, Mr. President, since Fritz is putting things in a more kindly fashion now- get the hell out of Iraq, completely out, and stay out.
Fritz John Taylor's comment:
Fritz, old battle-scarred and battle-weary purple-hearted Fritz Taylor, Vietnam, 1969-1971, Fritz John Taylor, RA048433691 to be exact, had to laugh as he made his way from Adamsville to the downtown Boston waterfront. To the green jut of land Christopher Columbus Park (and that name, causing further bemusement when he first heard the locale, could itself tell a big story about the old days European-centered military adventures to the Americas)for what he was not sure, exactly, was either the third or fourth annual Veterans For Peace counter-Memorial Day commemoration (really counter-traditional observance).
Fritz had not laughed a funny laugh as he was prone to do these days when something struck him as unusual, but laughed out loud at the thought of a no-go, not even boot camp as far as he knew, commander-in chief of all the American imperial armed forces , United States President Barack Obama, suddenly warming up to his post-Osama Bin Laden kill authorization (after having , vicariously, watched the SEAL action in “real time”) very consciously earlier this day placing himself at the center of the Memorial Day action in Arlington National Cemetery trying to draw succor from the ghost of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. Talking aimlessly, or maybe better superficially, about valor, about the good of the cause, about the last full measure of devotion, and lastly, what war in the end is all about, saving your buddy’s ass, or he yours.
But see, to Fritz’s way of thinking, Lincoln at least had the advantage, the very distinct advantage, of not only having said those kinds of words and those kinds of sentiments first and therefore in a more free-lance, free-wheeling eloquent way but said them at humankind's hallowed Gettysburg in the wake of what turned out to the decisive great Northern victory (along with Grant’s Vicksburg victory) in a war, that by hook or by crook, turned chattel slavery times out the door.
What could one imperial chief, Barack Obama, today draw on for succor? Leading a 50,000 troop wind-down in Iraq, a thoughtlessly unjust war if there ever was one, with more than its fair share of collateral damage, read American troop-driven civilian killings, and to call it by its right name murder. Yes, yes, by all means Fritz Taylor knew, knew chapter and verse, that when it did not really count one non-president Barack Obama opposed George’s Follies but that was then, and this, this was desperately now with the latest headlines out of Baghdad announcing a 200,000 mass march calling for an American withdrawal post-haste. And Fritz Taylor, Fritz Taylor who had gotten “religion” on the subject of war, on collateral damage, on don’t give a damn about spent soldiers’ lives since those lost Vietnam days, lost in some drug addiction time, some newspaper-strewn park bench time, some lost family connection time, took a moment to reflect on that fact, and to murmur softly to himself- Obama, Mr. President, since Fritz is putting things in a more kindly fashion now- get the hell out of Iraq, completely out, and stay out.
Monday, May 30, 2011
From The Archives Of The International Communist League- The Development of the Spartacist League by the Spartacist League of New Zealand, August 1972
Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on this entry:
This document is well worth reading, despite its age and the demise of some of the organizations and personalities mentioned, because in the report are distilled most of the great questions that confront small groups of revolutionaries (our status today) even at a time when there were somewhat greater possibilities for developing into a solid propaganda group during the late 1960s-early 1970s. That, unfortunately, whether we like it or not and whether political people act on that understanding or not, is where we are today-struggling to create stable revolutionary communist propaganda operations. There is no way around it. Those who deny that reality and assume the appearance of a "mass" organizational front are not in tune with current tasks. And we need to do this all without succumbing to an inward-looking "circle spirit" in these tough times or a notion of the "remnant" (the small, virtuous us against the ignorant mass "them")to justify passive political action. Communist propaganda is what we must produce, distribute, organize and recruit others to join us in creating before we "step-up" to crush the monster of American and world imperialism.
********
The Development of the Spartacist League
by the Spartacist League of New Zealand, August 1972
Introductory Note
The New Zealand Spartacist League broke in March from a state of complete disorganisation, but until recently largely confined its activity to serious internal discussion. This document, "The Development of the Spartacist League", is a summary of the conclusions of this discussion completed in early June. In it the Spartacist League looks at its own development in the light of the experience of international Bolshevism and thereby reaches a qualitatively higher level of revolutionary politics. The Spartacist League does not worship orthodoxy, but it does seek to benefit from the experience of the revolutionary past (hence the extensive use of the words of past revolutionaries here). Only in this way can the revolutionary party be built.
Since the completion of the document Owen Gager (who has a significant place in the history of the Spartacist League) seems to have moved towards organised international Pabloism. Some recent developments in his position are looked at in an article in New Zealand Spartacist, number 7.
15 August 1972
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1. Development of the Fourth International
The Fourth International, led by Leon Trotsky and carrying on the struggle of Marx, Engels and Lenin for international socialist revolution, was founded in 1938. The loss of political leadership with Trotsky’s death in 1940, the organisational disruption of the Fourth International as a result of World War II, the failure of the war to lead directly into world proletarian revolution, and the expansion of the bloc of deformed workers’ states following the war brought about the profound disorientation of the Fourth International.
In this period the Socialist Workers Party of the United States of America (SWP), which was the strongest section and Trotsky’s closest political collaborator, abdicated its responsibility to play an international leadership role. This followed the advance of Pabloism, a revisionist current which renounces the need for a revolutionary party and adapts to reformist and Stalinist misleaderships. Pabloism denies that the proletariat is the only force capable of destroying capitalism internationally and the only force capable of laying the basis for socialism. A basic unhealthiness in the SWP is shown by the fact that only when its organisational autonomy was threatened in 1953 did it lead a fight against the growth of Pabloist leadership internationally.
Revisionism in the SWP came to a head in the early 1960s. In 1961 it publicly called Castro’s Cuba a healthy workers’ state and denied there was any need for a political revolution. And in 1963 it reunited with the mainstream Pabloites to form the "United Secretariat of the Fourth International".
The Spartacist grouping developed in the United States out of the fight against revisionism in the SWP. Although differences were clear from the first, Spartacist strongly orientated towards Gerry Healy’s "International Committee" as an instrument for the rebuilding of the Fourth International until being kicked out on a manufactured pretext. This was done to prevent Spartacist criticisms in the International Committee directed at its leaders for their Pabloist method (shown in their positions on such matters as the Cuban revolution). Although the International Committee’s defence of its Pabloism was at this stage fought by anti-political diversionary means, its subsequent further degeneration proves beyond all doubt that it is basically Pabloist. For example it gave political support to the "Arab revolution" and to the Mao wing of the Chinese bureaucracy in the "Cultural Revolution". This softness is "balanced" by an extreme sectarianism, use of physical violence against opponent groups inside the movement, threats to take opponent radical groups to the bourgeois courts, etc.
So, by its founding conference in late 1966, the Spartacist League of the United States (SLUS), having sharpened its position in struggle first within the SWP and then the International Committee, was internationally in isolation. The conference issued a brief and definitive "Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League", which has become the basic document of our tendency internationally. This statement aroused great international interest in the months after the recent split in the International Committee.
2. Trotskyism in New Zealand
The Socialist Labour Movement, a small loose organisation of Pabloists and others influenced by Trotskyism, existed in New Zealand at the time of the founding conference of the SLUS and the "Declaration of Principles" had immediate and considerable impact on this grouping. Owen Gager, the editor of the left-wing journal Dispute and a member of the Socialist Labour Movement, wrote to the SLUS describing the "Declaration of Principles" as "a statement of Trotskyist principle which I myself have always believed in but despaired of ever seeing clearly and unadulteratedly stated by the revisionist Pabloite ‘Fourth International’."1 Gager tried to lead the Socialist Labour Movement to acceptance of the "Declaration of Principles" but was fought by Keith Locke, a member studying in Canada and under the influence of the League for Socialist Action (which is closely aligned to the SWP in the United States). The Gager-Locke polemic was associated with a de facto split in the Socialist Labour Movement and the emergence of the New Zealand Spartacist League in 1967, and the Pabloist Socialist Action League in late 1968. (The NZSL had close fraternal ties, though no organisational links, with the SLUS.)
Except for a few months at the end of 1970 and the beginning of 1971, the NZSL has never had any organisational definition, but has been a very small "diffuse group of co-thinkers".2 Discussion within the group was that of friends and without the dimension of political struggle or Bolshevik theoretical training. The NZSL was defined by its political basis, the "Declaration of Principles", on which it was founded, and which it republished in New Zealand in December 1970 as one of its basic documents.
The leadership of the comrades working together in solidarity with these politics was in the hands of Owen Gager. But unfortunately, his statements of political solidarity notwithstanding, Gager’s acceptance of the "Declaration of Principles" was never more than superficial. Weakness of method (specifically an inability to appreciate the contradictory nature of social phenomena) laid him open under conditions of virtual isolation to programmatic errors: at some times capitulation to right-wing pressure; at other times a tendency towards sectarianism.
3. Deformed Workers States
The "Declaration of Principles" holds that Russia, Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba are deformed workers’ states which on the one hand have made advances based on the "nationalisation of the means of production, establishment of economic planning, and the state monopoly of foreign trade", and on the other hand have seen the "formation of bureaucratic ruling castes which exclude the working class from political power."3 A deformed workers’ state is a form of dictatorship of the proletariat parallel to a bonapartist military dictatorship as a form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. In Russia it was formed by the degeneration of a state which had formerly been under the political control of the working class, whereas in the other countries political control was in the hands of a bureaucratic ruling caste from the very beginning.
"The Spartacist League stands for the unconditional defence of these countries against all attempts of imperialism to re-establish its control.
"At the same time we assert the necessity for the working class to take direct control and defence of these states into their own hands through political revolution and thus sweep away the internal barrier to the advance towards socialism. Only the spread of revolution internally and internationally can successfully maintain these partial conquests of the workers."4
This has always been the position of the Fourth International. To quote from the documents of the 1936 conference preparing for the Fourth International:
"The Soviet Union can be called a workers’ state in approximately the same sense—despite the vast difference in scale—in which a trade union, led and betrayed by opportunists, that is, agents of capital, can be called a workers’ organisation. Just as revolutionists defend every trade union, even the most thoroughly reformist, from the class enemy, combating intransigently the treacherous leaders at the same time, so the parties of the Fourth International defend the USSR against the blows of imperialism without for a single moment giving up the struggle against the reactionary Stalinist apparatus."5
And for the manifesto adopted by the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International in 1940:
"While waging tireless struggle against the Moscow oligarchy, the Fourth International decisively rejects any policy which would aid imperialism against the USSR."6
Gager departed from this principle when, under the pressures of the Ban-The-Bomb milieu in which he was working, he developed a position which would deprive the deformed workers’ states of nuclear weapons. Prior to the "Declaration of Principles" the November-December 1964 and March-April 1966 issues of Dispute editorialised against the testing or possession of nuclear weapons, specifically including the deformed workers’ states. After his "acceptance" of the "Declaration of Principles" these editorial statements were defended by Gager in his polemic with Keith Locke. His argument involves the view that "socialism" (!) cannot "be defended by the same means as capitalism"7 and that the only defence of the deformed workers’ states is to "organise political struggle against capitalism, organising for revolution."8 By so narrowly circumscribing the defence of the deformed workers states, by emphasising indeed, only the importance of the necessary struggle for world revolution, Gager manages to escape responsibility for any real measures in defending the existing gains of the working class against imperialism prior to world socialist revolution. As the Bolsheviks knew when they set Trotsky to organising the Red Army, and as is implicit in the "Declaration of Principles", brute military power is sometimes the only immediately available weapon to use in defence against imperialism. The Fourth Internationalist defence of the deformed workers’ states is unconditional, and while the working class internationally is led by various counter-revolutionaries the military power of the vacillating and anti-working class Stalinist bureaucracies is the only immediate available—if poor, unreliable, and ultimately wholly inadequate—defence. Those "Trotskyist" groupings internationally with positions similar to Gager’s justify them on the basis of un-Marxist theories which in the end all turn out to deny that the countries in question are any form of the dictatorship of the proletariat at all—theories such as Tony Cliff’s "state capitalism" and Max Shachtman’s "bureaucratic collectivism" which comrade Trotsky refuted in In Defence of Marxism. Gager denies his kinship with such theories. "There is no validity in your claim that we are drifting to a state-capitalist position on China etc—my view is that the dictatorship of the proletariat has never been achieved" but that it is "only half developed"9. A dictatorship of the proletariat grossly deformed by bourgeois pressures (that is, a deformed workers’ state) is quite clearly not perfectly developed—but this is secondary. The Chinese state protects nationalised property as the dominant form of ownership of the means of production and is thus, without qualification, a dictatorship of the proletariat. Gager’s undialectical Theory of Half a Workers’ State is clearly incompatible with the Trotskyist analysis of deformed workers’ states. The most charitable interpretation of Gager’s muddled discussion of his clearly un-Marxist position is that it is still incompletely formed.
4. The Labour Party
Another example of Gager’s deviation from the general line of the "Declaration of Principles" involves his sectarian attitude towards the Labour Party. He finds it impossible to understand that the Labour Party embodies a profound contradiction between a petty-bourgeois programme and leadership, and a working class following. The "Declaration" is fully aware of such contradictions:
"The ideas of the bourgeoisie penetrate into the very movements and organisation of the workers through the agency of the petty-bourgeois labour lieutenants—particularly the parasitic trade-union, social-democratic, and Stalinist bureaucracies which are based on the "aristocratic" upper strata of the working class. Enjoying privileges not accorded to the vast majority of workers, these misleaders betray the masses of working people through class-collaboration, social-patriotism, and chauvinist-racist policies which sabotage proletarian understanding and solidarity. If not replaced by revolutionary leaderships, they will allow the organisation of the workers to become impotent in the fight for the economic needs of the workers under conditions of bourgeois democracy or will allow these organisations to be destroyed by victorious fascism."10
The first issue of Dispute promised "a very definite commitment to work for a Labour Party victory in the 1966 election"11 and Gager was active in the Labour Party until 1968, but some time in that year he apparently changed his mind, adopting the position that revolutionaries should abstain entirely from struggle directed at the Labour Party. As Trotsky said of one sectarian group:
"From the initial thesis that the proletarian party must be independent at all costs our English comrades concluded that it would be impossible to go into the ILP12. Alas! They only forgot that they were far from being a party, but were only a propaganda circle, that a party does not fall from heaven, that a propaganda circle must pass through a period of embryonic existence before it can become a party."13
Gager believes that the NZLP is petty-bourgeois through and through. He recently wrote:
"Social democracy offers nothing political to the working class and excludes workers increasingly from party membership and counters working-class politics by bureaucratic, police and military repression; it meets as few of the economic trade-union demands of a portion, though a large portion, of the working class as almost direct bribery; faced with the growth of productive resources it makes every effort to hold back their development for ‘human’ and ‘social’ reasons; it gives economic gains to white workers only by denying them to two thirds of the world. It is a petty-bourgeois party in composition and programme with reactionary and utopian policies."14
But what Gager fails to recognise is that the NZLP at one time led the working class in struggles which brought real material gain to the class, despite the reformist limitations of these struggles within the structure of the bourgeois state. Despite its subsequent degeneration, recognition of the Labour Party as it political leadership remains one of the most ingrained and central aspects of working-class culture. The Labour Party thus is a major problem for a revolutionary grouping aspiring to lead the working class. Although the masses of the working class have been profoundly disillusioned (substantially as a result of the degeneration of social democracy) and although few workers are active in any political organisation, in a hopeless position they still retain a sort of religious faith in the party which their parents supported on the basis of their real (if reformist) interests. Peter Frazer and Michael Joseph Savage15 get far more votes for today’s Labour Party than Norman Kirk. Using its historically developed relationship with the working class the NZLP is an extremely effective propagator of counter-revolutionary ideology in the working class.
Gager’s sectarianism is linked to a misunderstanding of Marx and Engels’ Address to the Communist League (1850) on the experience of the revolutionary activity of 1848 and 1849. However, the Labour Party is not the same as the petty-bourgeois/democratic parties dealt with by Marx. The difference lies in the relationship of the party to the working class. In Marx’s time the various petty-bourgeois parties sought the support of the workers, and received it in some measure, but were not seen as the leadership of the working class by the working class.
"The chief obstacle in the path of transforming the prerevolutionary into a revolutionary state is the opportunist character of the proletarian leadership: its petty-bourgeois cowardice before the big bourgeoisie and its perfidious connection with it even in its own death agony."16
Thus the revolutionary nucleus must, if it is to become the vanguard of the working class, have a strategy of political struggle with the bureaucracy for the leadership of its working-class followers. It is a fundamental strategic necessity that the Labour Party be broken asunder. The New Zealand revolution cannot go around the New Zealand Labour Party. We must "set the base against the top".
One tactic which may at some time be demanded by the historic situation to this end is shallow entrism—always a dangerous tactic, but successfully practised by the early Third International, and by the Fourth Internationalists of the 1930s. The tactic requires first a tightly organised grouping of revolutionary cadres solidly based in the working class, who join for a limited period of time a non-revolutionary party to build an alternative and revolutionary leadership by fighting for principled politics within the arena looked to by the working class for leadership. When these cadres are the recognised leadership of the working-class base of the Labour Party, it will wrench itself apart from the reactionary leadership. This is not Socialist Action League’s policy of trying to pressure the Labour Party to the left, but a strategy for tearing it apart.
"But isn’t it a fact that a Marxist faction would not succeed in changing the structure and policy of the Labour Party? With this we are entirely in accord: the bureaucracy will not surrender. But the revolutionists functioning outside and inside can and must succeed in winning over tens and hundreds of thousands of workers."17
In Gager’s sectarian mind such a policy would not only suggest an understanding of the (for him non-existent) working-class side of the NZLP, but would also be proof of Pabloism, economism and all kinds of dire disease. To Trotsky "entry in itself proves nothing, the decisive thing is programme and action taken in the spirit of this programme after the entry."18
In the meantime we adopt a stance of critical support towards the Labour Party - intransigent criticism of its bureaucracy, and revolutionary support for its base, which will smash the bureaucracy. This has nothing in common with the Socialist Action League’s policy of "critical" support, which is in fact merely an attempt to "pressure" the Labour bureaucrats to the "left". We will fight for working-class control of the Labour Party, and while having no confidence in its programme or leadership, will campaign for its electoral victory as the party of the working class on the slogan: FOR LABOUR TO POWER - SMASH KIRK AND THE LABOUR BUREAUCRATS.
5. Organisational Primitiveness
Despite his weakness (which had ultimately to be resolved in either the direction of bourgeois ideology or in the acceptance of Marxism) Gager remained in the vicinity of revolutionary Trotskyism, maintaining a fairly uncompromising working class line. By the end of 1969 he had managed to attract only one other person who would have identified himself politically as a member of the NZSL (although a small number of supporters, mostly more interested in armchair discussion than political struggle, gave the NZSL a slightly greater impact than this would suggest). In 1970 the SL increased its publishing activities, made a concerted intervention in the Wellington Progressive Youth Movement and played a leading role in the campaign against a New Zealand rugby team going to play South African whites.
By the end of August Menshevik organisational principles had allowed the small old armchair periphery to see themselves as members, and we had recruited a number of new activists. We had a small but in respect of the activists fairly disciplined group in Wellington. There was also a group in Auckland of less satisfactory quality, who had only intermittent contact with the centre. The SL had become an organised group of revolutionaries struggling to build a vanguard party of the proletariat. The general thrust of activity and publications, despite errors, was good, and the development was generally in a favourable direction.
However, the later degeneration of the NZSL derived from its inability to train cadre capable of successfully resisting counter-revolutionary ideology (for example, Gager’s growing revisionist impulse). In the chapter of What Is To Be Done? entitled "The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organisation of the Revolutionaries," Lenin characterises as "primitiveness" organisational practices similar to those of the NZSL in this period19. The newer recruits, who came from a background of "mindless activism", were kept in frantic public activity by the leadership, without any significant attempt to raise their level of political consciousness. The older members, interested in armchair discussion among themselves (though not in the theoretical arming of the newer membership, in organisational meetings, or in propagandistic activities) were benignly tolerated in their atrocious indiscipline and lazy inactivity. Thus, yielding to spontaneity in the field of organisation, the NZSL was left quite incapable of turning itself into a highly trained body of professional revolutionaries—a Bolshevik organisation. As Lenin remarked of the Russian movement at this stage:
"One cannot help comparing this kind of warfare with that conducted by a mass of peasants, armed with clubs, against modern troops. And one can only wonder at the vitality of the movement which expanded, grew, and scored victories despite the total lack of training on the part of the fighters ... but as soon as serious war operations began ... the defects of our fighting organisations made themselves felt to an ever-increasing degree."20
6. The need for a propaganda orientation
No particular area of work (the unions, the Labour Party, the universities) in itself constitutes capitulation to economism or the bourgeoisie. No particular area of work is in itself revolutionary. The question is: what is the political programme directing the work. True, we must make a revolutionary party able to lead the working class, but before we can get far with the problem of leading the working class, we must get together the nucleus of an organisation of revolutionaries. Quoting an opponent in What is To Be Done? Lenin says "A committee of students is no good, it is not stable." And then he replies to it: "Quite true. But the conclusion that should be reached is that we must have a committee of professional revolutionaries, and it does not matter whether a student or a worker is capable of qualifying himself as a professional revolutionary."21 And we must move towards the implantation of revolutionaries in the working class, and intervening in its day-to-day struggles.
As Lenin and Trotsky said repeatedly, every revolutionary party must pass through a period of cadre-training and recruitment, and of theoretical struggle - at first predominantly within the organisation but with growing emphasis on testing its programme in propaganda struggle against revisionist organisations. The development of a tough cadre organisation is a necessary embryonic stage in becoming the party of the proletariat.
"We must not only tell the Russian, but also the foreign comrades that the most important thing in the ensuing period is study. We are studying in the general sense. They, however, must study in the special sense in order that they may really understand the organisation, structure, method and content of revolutionary work. If they do that I am sure the prospects of the world revolution will not only be good but excellent."22
A propaganda group orientation implies recognition of the fact that a group’s capabilities for leadership of masses is roughly proportional to its hold over the most politically conscious, so:
"As long as the question was (and in so far as it still is) one of winning over the vanguard of the proletariat to communism, so long and to that extent, propaganda was at the forefront."23
The press of the Spartacist League must be geared to this task. The importance Gager places in the immediate production of a newspaper for mass distribution is entirely misplaced. Trotsky’s words to French comrades in his 1935-36 writings are sound. The task of building a mass newspaper is of great importance.
"This task cannot be effectively solved except as a function of the growth of the organisation and its cadres who must pave the way to the masses for the newspaper - since it is not enough, it is understood, to call a publication a ‘mass paper’ to have the masses accept it in reality."24
In the meantime ours must be a propaganda paper geared to building the nucleus of the cadre grouping.
7. The disorganisation of the Spartacist League
The NZSL’s premature indulgence in mass agitation as its main activity constituted a major deviation which, in keeping the group to a low theoretical level caused its degeneration and disintegration. In the absence of a hardness and homogeneity of politics, the organisation was unified by a leadership structure depending on close collaboration between Gager, who gave leadership in matters of theory, and Bill Logan whose work was mostly organisational. This leadership broke down with comrade Logan’s departure overseas in December 1970, and tensions developed between Gager (supposedly supported by some theoretical members who had ceased coming to meetings) and the newly recruited members. The newer members fought particularly against Gager’s tendency to sectarian abstention from political struggle against other ostensible revolutionary groupings. The ideological roots of sectarianism lie in an inability to understand the theory of revolutionary leadership. The sectarian sees leadership merely as a matter of having the correct theory—he who has the correct theory is thought thereby to be the leadership—but in fact leadership must be won by struggle in the working class movement for the correct politics.
At about this time Gager had to be prevented from holding a separate "revolutionary" anti-war demonstration at the same time (but on a different route) as the official one. For reasons associated with his fundamental methodological weakness he is incapable of appreciating the possibilities for political development in some subjective revolutionaries in and around the ostensible revolutionary groupings, and he seldom sees any reason to be fighting for revolutionary politics at meetings and demonstrations organised by revisionists. (Of course, at times he can be forced to fight for his views politically.)
The tensions between the membership of the Spartacist League and Gager culminated with his holding of a rock concert, against the decision of two Spartacist League meetings, in the name of the Spartacist League, at a time conflicting with a Committee on Vietnam atrocity film-showing. Besides displaying once again Gager’s sectarianism, the holding of this rock concert was a blatant disregard on the part of the leadership for the operation of democratic centralism, and this on merely a tactical question. This led to the final collapse of the rank and file’s trust in the leadership.
Gager did not like the decisions reached by meetings of the Spartacist League in this period and he says "...more basic decisions were being made by people who ... couldn’t attend meetings."25 The Spartacist League had ceased to be an organisation, as meetings are a necessary condition for revolutionary organisation. The only alternative is autocracy. The people he agreed with and in Menshevik fashion wished to call members were unorganisable. As Lenin says in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, "the Party should admit to its ranks only such elements as allow of at least a minimum of organisation."26 Gager’s principle that those who work for the organisation but cannot attend meetings should make decisions, smells very much like the Menshevik principle which allows people who do not belong to any of the organisations of the Party, but only "help it in one way or another", to call themselves Party members. This, "is in reality an anarchist principle. To refute this, one would have to show that control, direction and discipline are possible outside an organisation" - or a meeting.
After the rock concert episode, the organisation disintegrated. Members were "expelled" or "resigned". According to Gager, it was "as it was in early 1970"27.
8. Gager’s "theoretical advances" and final betrayal
In a lengthy exchange of letters with comrades Logan and Hannah, Gager claimed great theoretical advances as compensation for this organisational catastrophe. But these "advances" were nothing more than a complete swing away from revolutionary Marxism, though not completely inconsistent with his past which is one of theoretical muddlement over the deformed workers’ states, and of an undialectical view of the Labour Party (constituting an unrounded form of inverted Pabloism similar to the Healyite position on Cuba that it is not a deformed workers’ state but a capitalist state). In this period he became more clearly Pabloist, going completely soft on Stalinism and forming an uncritical alliance with the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ). Softness towards Stalinism has always been a characteristic of Pabloists. Jim Cannon was talking of Pabloism when he said:
"The simple truth, which we must now recognise and deal with, is that we have nothing less than a pronounced tendency towards Stalinist conciliationism in the Party."28
For Pabloists: "The working class is transformed into a pressure grouping, and the Trotskyists into a pressure grouping along with it ...."29 "The Pabloites tend to replace the role of the working class and its organised vanguard—that is, the world Trotskyist movement—with other forces which seem to offer greater chances of success.30" Thus the foundation of Pabloism is the denial of the proletariat as the world historic revolutionary force. The theoretical advance claimed by Gager at this time involved the view that action by revolutionaries in any milieu in which the working class was in any way organised was necessarily "economist" and therefore bad. Gager’s "anti-economism" is no more than an unsuccessful attempt to dress his denial of the proletariat’s role in orthodox clothing.
With the publication of the first issue of a newspaper entitled Red Gager showed that the final resolution of the contradiction between the subjective revolutionism and the un-Marxist method of his thinking is in a complete break from revolutionary working-class politics. In its statement of principle, "Where we Stand" he says:
"The Trad Left believes that the bigger and better the unions, the closer the people are to socialism. Red believes that unions exist to make agreements with bosses, not to make workers their own bosses. The unions in every big confrontation with the state in New Zealand have always been defeated. For victory what is needed is a political party standing for Power to People. Agreements between employers and unions end up as conspiracies to defraud the consumer. What is needed is an alliance of workers and consumers against employers. Red stands for voluntary unionism.
"... Red stands for full military training for the people."31
"Power to People"? Which people? Which class? What sort of power? Not state power of course? The state is nothing more than a class organised to oppress other classes. It is clearly impossible for the "people" to hold state power, for them to be organised as oppressors—who would they oppress? As Engels says of the revolutionary state (and this is repeated by Lenin in State and Revolution): "the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s [class] adversaries by force ... so long as the proletariat still needs the state it does not need it in the interests of freedom [or of the ‘people’] but in order to hold down its adversaries"32. When things develop to the stage when there are no longer distinctions between classes, when all the people have the same interests, there will be no state, no power.
When pressured on this question Gager retreats, saying he means to call for a "people’s revolution". Trotsky answers this quite clearly:
"Thanks for the quotation about the ‘people’s’ revolution from Thaelmann’s speech, which I glanced through. A more ridiculous and maliciously confused manner of putting the question cannot be imagined! ‘The people’s revolution’ - as a slogan and even with a reference to Lenin .... It is understood that every great revolution is a people’s or national revolution, in the sense that it unites around the revolutionary class all the virile and creative forces of the nation around a new core. But this is not a slogan; it is a sociological description of the revolution, which requires, moreover, precise and concrete definition. As a slogan, it is inane and charlatanism, market competition with the fascists, paid for at the price of injecting confusion into the minds of the workers.
"... In order that the nation should indeed be able to reconstruct itself around a new class core, it must be reconstructed ideologically and this can be achieved only if the proletariat does not dissolve itself into the ‘people’, into the ‘nation’, but on the contrary develops a programme of its proletarian revolution and compels the petty bourgeoisie to choose between two regimes. The slogan of the people’s revolution lulls the petty-bourgeoisie as well as the broad masses of the workers, reconciles them to the bourgeois-hierarchial structure of the ‘people’ and retards their liberation."33
But it is clear from the passage quoted from "Where we stand" that Gager does not want merely to lull the "people". Remember: "Red believes that unions exist to make agreements with bosses .... Agreements between employers and unions end up as conspiracies to defraud the consumer. What is needed is an alliance of workers and consumers against employers. Red stands for voluntary unionism." Even without the last sentence it would be clear that Red wants to smash the unions. But the call for voluntary unionism in New Zealand is clearly a call to end the system under which all unions have won from the employers union membership as a condition of employment. Thus "voluntary unionism" would in itself smash all but the strongest unions. Gager without doubt wants to mobilise his "people" to smash the organisations of the working class. A more pernicious manifestation of bourgeois politics has seldom been presented in left-wing disguise. It is true that the bureaucratic leaders of the unions confine them to inadequate attempts to keep wages rising as fast as prices. It is true that they are at present merely instruments to keep the workers quiet. It is true that trade unions, without the leadership of a revolutionary party, will never rise above the level of tomorrow’s bread and butter. The point is not merely to understand this but to change it.
"The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination an disciplining of the workers, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat."34
We will build a revolutionary party, we will organise revolutionary caucuses among the union rank and file, we will lead the struggles of the workers from the partial and economist, from the level of bread and butter, to the level of revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary struggle. We will work around a transitional programme "stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat."35 We will lead "the base against the top", smash the union bureaucrats, and turn the unions into instruments of the revolutionary working class. The unions have within them that potentiality, but Gager’s inability to see and exploit the contradiction between the bourgeois interests served by the union leaderships and their working-class membership have resulted in a sectarianism so extreme that it amounts to an attack on the working class.
Red was the dividing line. It marked Gager’s final break from revolutionary politics. In a situation of political isolation he used the disintegration of the NZSL in order to purport to make completely fundamental changes in its line. Without any proper decision-making process he presented some sort of new-left populism or worse, specifically counterposed to the working-class movement.
Gager had previously counterposed the propaganda orientation advocated by comrades Hannah and Logan with a plan for a popular paper. In style, content and programme Red, number 1, shows itself to be a truly "popular paper" - for the petty bourgeoisie. On the front page greatest prominence was given to an article on ecology signed by one Brian Longrigg - a man obviously more sympathetic to the ideology of the National Party lawyers in the Save the Manapouri Campaign than to any even ostensibly revolutionary group. On the back page in uncritical support of the bourgeois puppet Awami League, Red calls for "us" to "cease hiding behind legalisms and recognise the Provisional Government of Bangladesh." Inside the paper was a mish-mash of notes in gentle criticism of the Labour Party bureaucracy, left-liberal support for Vietnamese Stalinism, and rock-record reviews. Despite the paper’s great interest in international affairs, its statement of principle fails to call for an international revolutionary leadership. The paper makes it quite clear that Gager has completely deserted the struggle to rebuild the Fourth International.
"... the question of the International, as well as the question of national parties, cannot be deferred for a single hour: we have here in essence two sides of one and the same question. Without a Marxist International, national organisations, even the most advanced, are doomed to narrowness, vacillation and helplessness; the advanced workers are forced to feed upon surrogates for internationalism."36
But though Red marks Gager’s final break from the politics of the Spartacist League some organisational unclarity remained, and he participated in some of the meetings of members of the Spartacist League which rebuilt in March. He was too arrogant and unorganisable to subject himself to the discipline of any group, and despite the fact that he continues to respond to criticisms with smokescreens of faked orthodoxy he is too far from Marxism to stand by seeing it used to test his views. His walk-out was merely the organisational expression of his earlier desertion of Marxism-Leninism. He was finally formally expelled.
The Spartacist League’s immediate task is to sharpen itself into a fighting propaganda group, a nucleus of trained Marxists capable of intervening in every radical movement and in the trade unions with revolutionary politics. One of our first steps towards this has been the establishment of a regular propaganda press.
The Spartacist League, as a national section fighting for the rebuilding of the Fourth International, is in the vanguard of the struggle for a socialist revolution, which will prepare for the freeing of the energies of all mankind and the creation of a truly liberated society.
"Our day-to-day preparation of the working class and our intervention and leadership in the decisive moments of the class struggle will propel the struggle forward to the final victory."37
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Endnotes
8 January 1967
Letter from Gager to Logan, 3 January 1971.
"Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League", Marxist Bulletin, n 9, p 10. The Marxist Bulletin series is published by the Spartacist League US. The "Declaration of Principles" was also published in Spartacist, n 8, November-December 1966 - PRG, January 1991.
"Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League", p 10
"The Fourth International and the Soviet Union", Documents of the Fourth International, Pathfinder, New York, 1973, p 107
"Imperialist War and World Revolution", Documents of the Fourth International, p 327
Dispute, November-December 1964
Letter from Gager to Locke, undated, about September 1968
Letter from Gager to Logan, 28 November 1971
"Declaration of Principles", p 10
Dispute, September 1964
The Independent Labour Party of England was a left-social democratic, sometimes centrist, organisation. Originally formed in 1893, it helped found the Labour Party, left it in 1932, and then returned to it in 1939 - PRG, January 1991
"The League Faced with a Decisive Turn" (June 1934), Writings of Leon Trotsky [1934-35], Pathfinder, New York, 1974, p 42
"Reformism Now", an internal discussion document by Owen Gager, 26 September 1971
Peter Frazer: Labour Prime Minister 1940-49; Michael Joseph Savage: Labour Prime Minister 1935-40 - PRG footnote, January 1991
The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Programme) [1938], New Park, London, 1980, p 13
"The ILP and the Fourth International" (18 September 1935), Writings of Leon Trotsky [1935-36], Pathfinder, New York, 1977, p 142
"Centrist Combination and Marxist Tactics" (28 February 1935), Writings of Leon Trotsky [1934-35], p 203-4. (The original citation given by the NZSL was from an earlier edition of Trotsky's Writings which gave this article's title as "Centrist Combination and Marxist Faction" - PRG, January 1991.)
V I Lenin, What Is to Be Done? [1902], Collected Works, Progress, Moscow, 1961, v 5, p 440
As above, p 442-3
As above, p 462
V I Lenin, "Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of World Revolution" (Report to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 13 November 1922). (A slightly different translation can be found in: Collected Works, 1965, v 33, p 431-2 - PRG, January 1991.)
V I Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism - An Infantile Disorder (1920). (A slightly different translation can be found in: Collected Works, 1966, v 31, p 93-4 - PRG, January 1991.)
Leon Trotsky, "What Is a 'Mass Paper'?" (30 November 1935). (A slightly different translation can be found in: The Crisis of the French Section [1935-36], Pathfinder, New York, 1977, p 97 -PRG, January 1991.)
Letter from Gager to Logan, 28 November 1971
V I Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back [1904], Collected Works, 1965, v 7, p 256
Letter from Gager to Logan, 21 August 1971
James P Cannon, Letter to Dobbs (6 April 1953), Speeches to the Party, Pathfinder, New York, 1973
Socialist Workers Party, "Against Pabloist Revisionism" (1953), International Committee Documents 1951-54, Towards a History of the Fourth International, Part 4, Education for Socialists series, New York, 1974, p 152.
Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP, "In Defence of a Revol-utionary Perspective" (1962), Marxist Bulletin, n 1, p 3
Red, n 1, November 1972
V I Lenin, The State and Revolution [1917], Collected Works, 1964, v 25, p 445. (The additions in square brackets are those of the NZSL in 1972 - PRG, January 1991.)
Leon Trotsky, "Thaelmann and the 'Peoples Revolution'" (14 April 1931), The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, Pathfinder, New York, 1971, p 75-6
Leon Trotsky, "Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay" (1940), Leon Trotsky on the Trade Unions, New York, Pathfinder, 1975, p 71.
The Transitional Programme, p 14-5
Leon Trotsky, "The ILP and the Fourth International", p 147
"Declaration of Principles", p 11
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on this entry:
This document is well worth reading, despite its age and the demise of some of the organizations and personalities mentioned, because in the report are distilled most of the great questions that confront small groups of revolutionaries (our status today) even at a time when there were somewhat greater possibilities for developing into a solid propaganda group during the late 1960s-early 1970s. That, unfortunately, whether we like it or not and whether political people act on that understanding or not, is where we are today-struggling to create stable revolutionary communist propaganda operations. There is no way around it. Those who deny that reality and assume the appearance of a "mass" organizational front are not in tune with current tasks. And we need to do this all without succumbing to an inward-looking "circle spirit" in these tough times or a notion of the "remnant" (the small, virtuous us against the ignorant mass "them")to justify passive political action. Communist propaganda is what we must produce, distribute, organize and recruit others to join us in creating before we "step-up" to crush the monster of American and world imperialism.
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The Development of the Spartacist League
by the Spartacist League of New Zealand, August 1972
Introductory Note
The New Zealand Spartacist League broke in March from a state of complete disorganisation, but until recently largely confined its activity to serious internal discussion. This document, "The Development of the Spartacist League", is a summary of the conclusions of this discussion completed in early June. In it the Spartacist League looks at its own development in the light of the experience of international Bolshevism and thereby reaches a qualitatively higher level of revolutionary politics. The Spartacist League does not worship orthodoxy, but it does seek to benefit from the experience of the revolutionary past (hence the extensive use of the words of past revolutionaries here). Only in this way can the revolutionary party be built.
Since the completion of the document Owen Gager (who has a significant place in the history of the Spartacist League) seems to have moved towards organised international Pabloism. Some recent developments in his position are looked at in an article in New Zealand Spartacist, number 7.
15 August 1972
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1. Development of the Fourth International
The Fourth International, led by Leon Trotsky and carrying on the struggle of Marx, Engels and Lenin for international socialist revolution, was founded in 1938. The loss of political leadership with Trotsky’s death in 1940, the organisational disruption of the Fourth International as a result of World War II, the failure of the war to lead directly into world proletarian revolution, and the expansion of the bloc of deformed workers’ states following the war brought about the profound disorientation of the Fourth International.
In this period the Socialist Workers Party of the United States of America (SWP), which was the strongest section and Trotsky’s closest political collaborator, abdicated its responsibility to play an international leadership role. This followed the advance of Pabloism, a revisionist current which renounces the need for a revolutionary party and adapts to reformist and Stalinist misleaderships. Pabloism denies that the proletariat is the only force capable of destroying capitalism internationally and the only force capable of laying the basis for socialism. A basic unhealthiness in the SWP is shown by the fact that only when its organisational autonomy was threatened in 1953 did it lead a fight against the growth of Pabloist leadership internationally.
Revisionism in the SWP came to a head in the early 1960s. In 1961 it publicly called Castro’s Cuba a healthy workers’ state and denied there was any need for a political revolution. And in 1963 it reunited with the mainstream Pabloites to form the "United Secretariat of the Fourth International".
The Spartacist grouping developed in the United States out of the fight against revisionism in the SWP. Although differences were clear from the first, Spartacist strongly orientated towards Gerry Healy’s "International Committee" as an instrument for the rebuilding of the Fourth International until being kicked out on a manufactured pretext. This was done to prevent Spartacist criticisms in the International Committee directed at its leaders for their Pabloist method (shown in their positions on such matters as the Cuban revolution). Although the International Committee’s defence of its Pabloism was at this stage fought by anti-political diversionary means, its subsequent further degeneration proves beyond all doubt that it is basically Pabloist. For example it gave political support to the "Arab revolution" and to the Mao wing of the Chinese bureaucracy in the "Cultural Revolution". This softness is "balanced" by an extreme sectarianism, use of physical violence against opponent groups inside the movement, threats to take opponent radical groups to the bourgeois courts, etc.
So, by its founding conference in late 1966, the Spartacist League of the United States (SLUS), having sharpened its position in struggle first within the SWP and then the International Committee, was internationally in isolation. The conference issued a brief and definitive "Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League", which has become the basic document of our tendency internationally. This statement aroused great international interest in the months after the recent split in the International Committee.
2. Trotskyism in New Zealand
The Socialist Labour Movement, a small loose organisation of Pabloists and others influenced by Trotskyism, existed in New Zealand at the time of the founding conference of the SLUS and the "Declaration of Principles" had immediate and considerable impact on this grouping. Owen Gager, the editor of the left-wing journal Dispute and a member of the Socialist Labour Movement, wrote to the SLUS describing the "Declaration of Principles" as "a statement of Trotskyist principle which I myself have always believed in but despaired of ever seeing clearly and unadulteratedly stated by the revisionist Pabloite ‘Fourth International’."1 Gager tried to lead the Socialist Labour Movement to acceptance of the "Declaration of Principles" but was fought by Keith Locke, a member studying in Canada and under the influence of the League for Socialist Action (which is closely aligned to the SWP in the United States). The Gager-Locke polemic was associated with a de facto split in the Socialist Labour Movement and the emergence of the New Zealand Spartacist League in 1967, and the Pabloist Socialist Action League in late 1968. (The NZSL had close fraternal ties, though no organisational links, with the SLUS.)
Except for a few months at the end of 1970 and the beginning of 1971, the NZSL has never had any organisational definition, but has been a very small "diffuse group of co-thinkers".2 Discussion within the group was that of friends and without the dimension of political struggle or Bolshevik theoretical training. The NZSL was defined by its political basis, the "Declaration of Principles", on which it was founded, and which it republished in New Zealand in December 1970 as one of its basic documents.
The leadership of the comrades working together in solidarity with these politics was in the hands of Owen Gager. But unfortunately, his statements of political solidarity notwithstanding, Gager’s acceptance of the "Declaration of Principles" was never more than superficial. Weakness of method (specifically an inability to appreciate the contradictory nature of social phenomena) laid him open under conditions of virtual isolation to programmatic errors: at some times capitulation to right-wing pressure; at other times a tendency towards sectarianism.
3. Deformed Workers States
The "Declaration of Principles" holds that Russia, Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, North Vietnam and Cuba are deformed workers’ states which on the one hand have made advances based on the "nationalisation of the means of production, establishment of economic planning, and the state monopoly of foreign trade", and on the other hand have seen the "formation of bureaucratic ruling castes which exclude the working class from political power."3 A deformed workers’ state is a form of dictatorship of the proletariat parallel to a bonapartist military dictatorship as a form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. In Russia it was formed by the degeneration of a state which had formerly been under the political control of the working class, whereas in the other countries political control was in the hands of a bureaucratic ruling caste from the very beginning.
"The Spartacist League stands for the unconditional defence of these countries against all attempts of imperialism to re-establish its control.
"At the same time we assert the necessity for the working class to take direct control and defence of these states into their own hands through political revolution and thus sweep away the internal barrier to the advance towards socialism. Only the spread of revolution internally and internationally can successfully maintain these partial conquests of the workers."4
This has always been the position of the Fourth International. To quote from the documents of the 1936 conference preparing for the Fourth International:
"The Soviet Union can be called a workers’ state in approximately the same sense—despite the vast difference in scale—in which a trade union, led and betrayed by opportunists, that is, agents of capital, can be called a workers’ organisation. Just as revolutionists defend every trade union, even the most thoroughly reformist, from the class enemy, combating intransigently the treacherous leaders at the same time, so the parties of the Fourth International defend the USSR against the blows of imperialism without for a single moment giving up the struggle against the reactionary Stalinist apparatus."5
And for the manifesto adopted by the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International in 1940:
"While waging tireless struggle against the Moscow oligarchy, the Fourth International decisively rejects any policy which would aid imperialism against the USSR."6
Gager departed from this principle when, under the pressures of the Ban-The-Bomb milieu in which he was working, he developed a position which would deprive the deformed workers’ states of nuclear weapons. Prior to the "Declaration of Principles" the November-December 1964 and March-April 1966 issues of Dispute editorialised against the testing or possession of nuclear weapons, specifically including the deformed workers’ states. After his "acceptance" of the "Declaration of Principles" these editorial statements were defended by Gager in his polemic with Keith Locke. His argument involves the view that "socialism" (!) cannot "be defended by the same means as capitalism"7 and that the only defence of the deformed workers’ states is to "organise political struggle against capitalism, organising for revolution."8 By so narrowly circumscribing the defence of the deformed workers states, by emphasising indeed, only the importance of the necessary struggle for world revolution, Gager manages to escape responsibility for any real measures in defending the existing gains of the working class against imperialism prior to world socialist revolution. As the Bolsheviks knew when they set Trotsky to organising the Red Army, and as is implicit in the "Declaration of Principles", brute military power is sometimes the only immediately available weapon to use in defence against imperialism. The Fourth Internationalist defence of the deformed workers’ states is unconditional, and while the working class internationally is led by various counter-revolutionaries the military power of the vacillating and anti-working class Stalinist bureaucracies is the only immediate available—if poor, unreliable, and ultimately wholly inadequate—defence. Those "Trotskyist" groupings internationally with positions similar to Gager’s justify them on the basis of un-Marxist theories which in the end all turn out to deny that the countries in question are any form of the dictatorship of the proletariat at all—theories such as Tony Cliff’s "state capitalism" and Max Shachtman’s "bureaucratic collectivism" which comrade Trotsky refuted in In Defence of Marxism. Gager denies his kinship with such theories. "There is no validity in your claim that we are drifting to a state-capitalist position on China etc—my view is that the dictatorship of the proletariat has never been achieved" but that it is "only half developed"9. A dictatorship of the proletariat grossly deformed by bourgeois pressures (that is, a deformed workers’ state) is quite clearly not perfectly developed—but this is secondary. The Chinese state protects nationalised property as the dominant form of ownership of the means of production and is thus, without qualification, a dictatorship of the proletariat. Gager’s undialectical Theory of Half a Workers’ State is clearly incompatible with the Trotskyist analysis of deformed workers’ states. The most charitable interpretation of Gager’s muddled discussion of his clearly un-Marxist position is that it is still incompletely formed.
4. The Labour Party
Another example of Gager’s deviation from the general line of the "Declaration of Principles" involves his sectarian attitude towards the Labour Party. He finds it impossible to understand that the Labour Party embodies a profound contradiction between a petty-bourgeois programme and leadership, and a working class following. The "Declaration" is fully aware of such contradictions:
"The ideas of the bourgeoisie penetrate into the very movements and organisation of the workers through the agency of the petty-bourgeois labour lieutenants—particularly the parasitic trade-union, social-democratic, and Stalinist bureaucracies which are based on the "aristocratic" upper strata of the working class. Enjoying privileges not accorded to the vast majority of workers, these misleaders betray the masses of working people through class-collaboration, social-patriotism, and chauvinist-racist policies which sabotage proletarian understanding and solidarity. If not replaced by revolutionary leaderships, they will allow the organisation of the workers to become impotent in the fight for the economic needs of the workers under conditions of bourgeois democracy or will allow these organisations to be destroyed by victorious fascism."10
The first issue of Dispute promised "a very definite commitment to work for a Labour Party victory in the 1966 election"11 and Gager was active in the Labour Party until 1968, but some time in that year he apparently changed his mind, adopting the position that revolutionaries should abstain entirely from struggle directed at the Labour Party. As Trotsky said of one sectarian group:
"From the initial thesis that the proletarian party must be independent at all costs our English comrades concluded that it would be impossible to go into the ILP12. Alas! They only forgot that they were far from being a party, but were only a propaganda circle, that a party does not fall from heaven, that a propaganda circle must pass through a period of embryonic existence before it can become a party."13
Gager believes that the NZLP is petty-bourgeois through and through. He recently wrote:
"Social democracy offers nothing political to the working class and excludes workers increasingly from party membership and counters working-class politics by bureaucratic, police and military repression; it meets as few of the economic trade-union demands of a portion, though a large portion, of the working class as almost direct bribery; faced with the growth of productive resources it makes every effort to hold back their development for ‘human’ and ‘social’ reasons; it gives economic gains to white workers only by denying them to two thirds of the world. It is a petty-bourgeois party in composition and programme with reactionary and utopian policies."14
But what Gager fails to recognise is that the NZLP at one time led the working class in struggles which brought real material gain to the class, despite the reformist limitations of these struggles within the structure of the bourgeois state. Despite its subsequent degeneration, recognition of the Labour Party as it political leadership remains one of the most ingrained and central aspects of working-class culture. The Labour Party thus is a major problem for a revolutionary grouping aspiring to lead the working class. Although the masses of the working class have been profoundly disillusioned (substantially as a result of the degeneration of social democracy) and although few workers are active in any political organisation, in a hopeless position they still retain a sort of religious faith in the party which their parents supported on the basis of their real (if reformist) interests. Peter Frazer and Michael Joseph Savage15 get far more votes for today’s Labour Party than Norman Kirk. Using its historically developed relationship with the working class the NZLP is an extremely effective propagator of counter-revolutionary ideology in the working class.
Gager’s sectarianism is linked to a misunderstanding of Marx and Engels’ Address to the Communist League (1850) on the experience of the revolutionary activity of 1848 and 1849. However, the Labour Party is not the same as the petty-bourgeois/democratic parties dealt with by Marx. The difference lies in the relationship of the party to the working class. In Marx’s time the various petty-bourgeois parties sought the support of the workers, and received it in some measure, but were not seen as the leadership of the working class by the working class.
"The chief obstacle in the path of transforming the prerevolutionary into a revolutionary state is the opportunist character of the proletarian leadership: its petty-bourgeois cowardice before the big bourgeoisie and its perfidious connection with it even in its own death agony."16
Thus the revolutionary nucleus must, if it is to become the vanguard of the working class, have a strategy of political struggle with the bureaucracy for the leadership of its working-class followers. It is a fundamental strategic necessity that the Labour Party be broken asunder. The New Zealand revolution cannot go around the New Zealand Labour Party. We must "set the base against the top".
One tactic which may at some time be demanded by the historic situation to this end is shallow entrism—always a dangerous tactic, but successfully practised by the early Third International, and by the Fourth Internationalists of the 1930s. The tactic requires first a tightly organised grouping of revolutionary cadres solidly based in the working class, who join for a limited period of time a non-revolutionary party to build an alternative and revolutionary leadership by fighting for principled politics within the arena looked to by the working class for leadership. When these cadres are the recognised leadership of the working-class base of the Labour Party, it will wrench itself apart from the reactionary leadership. This is not Socialist Action League’s policy of trying to pressure the Labour Party to the left, but a strategy for tearing it apart.
"But isn’t it a fact that a Marxist faction would not succeed in changing the structure and policy of the Labour Party? With this we are entirely in accord: the bureaucracy will not surrender. But the revolutionists functioning outside and inside can and must succeed in winning over tens and hundreds of thousands of workers."17
In Gager’s sectarian mind such a policy would not only suggest an understanding of the (for him non-existent) working-class side of the NZLP, but would also be proof of Pabloism, economism and all kinds of dire disease. To Trotsky "entry in itself proves nothing, the decisive thing is programme and action taken in the spirit of this programme after the entry."18
In the meantime we adopt a stance of critical support towards the Labour Party - intransigent criticism of its bureaucracy, and revolutionary support for its base, which will smash the bureaucracy. This has nothing in common with the Socialist Action League’s policy of "critical" support, which is in fact merely an attempt to "pressure" the Labour bureaucrats to the "left". We will fight for working-class control of the Labour Party, and while having no confidence in its programme or leadership, will campaign for its electoral victory as the party of the working class on the slogan: FOR LABOUR TO POWER - SMASH KIRK AND THE LABOUR BUREAUCRATS.
5. Organisational Primitiveness
Despite his weakness (which had ultimately to be resolved in either the direction of bourgeois ideology or in the acceptance of Marxism) Gager remained in the vicinity of revolutionary Trotskyism, maintaining a fairly uncompromising working class line. By the end of 1969 he had managed to attract only one other person who would have identified himself politically as a member of the NZSL (although a small number of supporters, mostly more interested in armchair discussion than political struggle, gave the NZSL a slightly greater impact than this would suggest). In 1970 the SL increased its publishing activities, made a concerted intervention in the Wellington Progressive Youth Movement and played a leading role in the campaign against a New Zealand rugby team going to play South African whites.
By the end of August Menshevik organisational principles had allowed the small old armchair periphery to see themselves as members, and we had recruited a number of new activists. We had a small but in respect of the activists fairly disciplined group in Wellington. There was also a group in Auckland of less satisfactory quality, who had only intermittent contact with the centre. The SL had become an organised group of revolutionaries struggling to build a vanguard party of the proletariat. The general thrust of activity and publications, despite errors, was good, and the development was generally in a favourable direction.
However, the later degeneration of the NZSL derived from its inability to train cadre capable of successfully resisting counter-revolutionary ideology (for example, Gager’s growing revisionist impulse). In the chapter of What Is To Be Done? entitled "The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organisation of the Revolutionaries," Lenin characterises as "primitiveness" organisational practices similar to those of the NZSL in this period19. The newer recruits, who came from a background of "mindless activism", were kept in frantic public activity by the leadership, without any significant attempt to raise their level of political consciousness. The older members, interested in armchair discussion among themselves (though not in the theoretical arming of the newer membership, in organisational meetings, or in propagandistic activities) were benignly tolerated in their atrocious indiscipline and lazy inactivity. Thus, yielding to spontaneity in the field of organisation, the NZSL was left quite incapable of turning itself into a highly trained body of professional revolutionaries—a Bolshevik organisation. As Lenin remarked of the Russian movement at this stage:
"One cannot help comparing this kind of warfare with that conducted by a mass of peasants, armed with clubs, against modern troops. And one can only wonder at the vitality of the movement which expanded, grew, and scored victories despite the total lack of training on the part of the fighters ... but as soon as serious war operations began ... the defects of our fighting organisations made themselves felt to an ever-increasing degree."20
6. The need for a propaganda orientation
No particular area of work (the unions, the Labour Party, the universities) in itself constitutes capitulation to economism or the bourgeoisie. No particular area of work is in itself revolutionary. The question is: what is the political programme directing the work. True, we must make a revolutionary party able to lead the working class, but before we can get far with the problem of leading the working class, we must get together the nucleus of an organisation of revolutionaries. Quoting an opponent in What is To Be Done? Lenin says "A committee of students is no good, it is not stable." And then he replies to it: "Quite true. But the conclusion that should be reached is that we must have a committee of professional revolutionaries, and it does not matter whether a student or a worker is capable of qualifying himself as a professional revolutionary."21 And we must move towards the implantation of revolutionaries in the working class, and intervening in its day-to-day struggles.
As Lenin and Trotsky said repeatedly, every revolutionary party must pass through a period of cadre-training and recruitment, and of theoretical struggle - at first predominantly within the organisation but with growing emphasis on testing its programme in propaganda struggle against revisionist organisations. The development of a tough cadre organisation is a necessary embryonic stage in becoming the party of the proletariat.
"We must not only tell the Russian, but also the foreign comrades that the most important thing in the ensuing period is study. We are studying in the general sense. They, however, must study in the special sense in order that they may really understand the organisation, structure, method and content of revolutionary work. If they do that I am sure the prospects of the world revolution will not only be good but excellent."22
A propaganda group orientation implies recognition of the fact that a group’s capabilities for leadership of masses is roughly proportional to its hold over the most politically conscious, so:
"As long as the question was (and in so far as it still is) one of winning over the vanguard of the proletariat to communism, so long and to that extent, propaganda was at the forefront."23
The press of the Spartacist League must be geared to this task. The importance Gager places in the immediate production of a newspaper for mass distribution is entirely misplaced. Trotsky’s words to French comrades in his 1935-36 writings are sound. The task of building a mass newspaper is of great importance.
"This task cannot be effectively solved except as a function of the growth of the organisation and its cadres who must pave the way to the masses for the newspaper - since it is not enough, it is understood, to call a publication a ‘mass paper’ to have the masses accept it in reality."24
In the meantime ours must be a propaganda paper geared to building the nucleus of the cadre grouping.
7. The disorganisation of the Spartacist League
The NZSL’s premature indulgence in mass agitation as its main activity constituted a major deviation which, in keeping the group to a low theoretical level caused its degeneration and disintegration. In the absence of a hardness and homogeneity of politics, the organisation was unified by a leadership structure depending on close collaboration between Gager, who gave leadership in matters of theory, and Bill Logan whose work was mostly organisational. This leadership broke down with comrade Logan’s departure overseas in December 1970, and tensions developed between Gager (supposedly supported by some theoretical members who had ceased coming to meetings) and the newly recruited members. The newer members fought particularly against Gager’s tendency to sectarian abstention from political struggle against other ostensible revolutionary groupings. The ideological roots of sectarianism lie in an inability to understand the theory of revolutionary leadership. The sectarian sees leadership merely as a matter of having the correct theory—he who has the correct theory is thought thereby to be the leadership—but in fact leadership must be won by struggle in the working class movement for the correct politics.
At about this time Gager had to be prevented from holding a separate "revolutionary" anti-war demonstration at the same time (but on a different route) as the official one. For reasons associated with his fundamental methodological weakness he is incapable of appreciating the possibilities for political development in some subjective revolutionaries in and around the ostensible revolutionary groupings, and he seldom sees any reason to be fighting for revolutionary politics at meetings and demonstrations organised by revisionists. (Of course, at times he can be forced to fight for his views politically.)
The tensions between the membership of the Spartacist League and Gager culminated with his holding of a rock concert, against the decision of two Spartacist League meetings, in the name of the Spartacist League, at a time conflicting with a Committee on Vietnam atrocity film-showing. Besides displaying once again Gager’s sectarianism, the holding of this rock concert was a blatant disregard on the part of the leadership for the operation of democratic centralism, and this on merely a tactical question. This led to the final collapse of the rank and file’s trust in the leadership.
Gager did not like the decisions reached by meetings of the Spartacist League in this period and he says "...more basic decisions were being made by people who ... couldn’t attend meetings."25 The Spartacist League had ceased to be an organisation, as meetings are a necessary condition for revolutionary organisation. The only alternative is autocracy. The people he agreed with and in Menshevik fashion wished to call members were unorganisable. As Lenin says in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, "the Party should admit to its ranks only such elements as allow of at least a minimum of organisation."26 Gager’s principle that those who work for the organisation but cannot attend meetings should make decisions, smells very much like the Menshevik principle which allows people who do not belong to any of the organisations of the Party, but only "help it in one way or another", to call themselves Party members. This, "is in reality an anarchist principle. To refute this, one would have to show that control, direction and discipline are possible outside an organisation" - or a meeting.
After the rock concert episode, the organisation disintegrated. Members were "expelled" or "resigned". According to Gager, it was "as it was in early 1970"27.
8. Gager’s "theoretical advances" and final betrayal
In a lengthy exchange of letters with comrades Logan and Hannah, Gager claimed great theoretical advances as compensation for this organisational catastrophe. But these "advances" were nothing more than a complete swing away from revolutionary Marxism, though not completely inconsistent with his past which is one of theoretical muddlement over the deformed workers’ states, and of an undialectical view of the Labour Party (constituting an unrounded form of inverted Pabloism similar to the Healyite position on Cuba that it is not a deformed workers’ state but a capitalist state). In this period he became more clearly Pabloist, going completely soft on Stalinism and forming an uncritical alliance with the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ). Softness towards Stalinism has always been a characteristic of Pabloists. Jim Cannon was talking of Pabloism when he said:
"The simple truth, which we must now recognise and deal with, is that we have nothing less than a pronounced tendency towards Stalinist conciliationism in the Party."28
For Pabloists: "The working class is transformed into a pressure grouping, and the Trotskyists into a pressure grouping along with it ...."29 "The Pabloites tend to replace the role of the working class and its organised vanguard—that is, the world Trotskyist movement—with other forces which seem to offer greater chances of success.30" Thus the foundation of Pabloism is the denial of the proletariat as the world historic revolutionary force. The theoretical advance claimed by Gager at this time involved the view that action by revolutionaries in any milieu in which the working class was in any way organised was necessarily "economist" and therefore bad. Gager’s "anti-economism" is no more than an unsuccessful attempt to dress his denial of the proletariat’s role in orthodox clothing.
With the publication of the first issue of a newspaper entitled Red Gager showed that the final resolution of the contradiction between the subjective revolutionism and the un-Marxist method of his thinking is in a complete break from revolutionary working-class politics. In its statement of principle, "Where we Stand" he says:
"The Trad Left believes that the bigger and better the unions, the closer the people are to socialism. Red believes that unions exist to make agreements with bosses, not to make workers their own bosses. The unions in every big confrontation with the state in New Zealand have always been defeated. For victory what is needed is a political party standing for Power to People. Agreements between employers and unions end up as conspiracies to defraud the consumer. What is needed is an alliance of workers and consumers against employers. Red stands for voluntary unionism.
"... Red stands for full military training for the people."31
"Power to People"? Which people? Which class? What sort of power? Not state power of course? The state is nothing more than a class organised to oppress other classes. It is clearly impossible for the "people" to hold state power, for them to be organised as oppressors—who would they oppress? As Engels says of the revolutionary state (and this is repeated by Lenin in State and Revolution): "the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s [class] adversaries by force ... so long as the proletariat still needs the state it does not need it in the interests of freedom [or of the ‘people’] but in order to hold down its adversaries"32. When things develop to the stage when there are no longer distinctions between classes, when all the people have the same interests, there will be no state, no power.
When pressured on this question Gager retreats, saying he means to call for a "people’s revolution". Trotsky answers this quite clearly:
"Thanks for the quotation about the ‘people’s’ revolution from Thaelmann’s speech, which I glanced through. A more ridiculous and maliciously confused manner of putting the question cannot be imagined! ‘The people’s revolution’ - as a slogan and even with a reference to Lenin .... It is understood that every great revolution is a people’s or national revolution, in the sense that it unites around the revolutionary class all the virile and creative forces of the nation around a new core. But this is not a slogan; it is a sociological description of the revolution, which requires, moreover, precise and concrete definition. As a slogan, it is inane and charlatanism, market competition with the fascists, paid for at the price of injecting confusion into the minds of the workers.
"... In order that the nation should indeed be able to reconstruct itself around a new class core, it must be reconstructed ideologically and this can be achieved only if the proletariat does not dissolve itself into the ‘people’, into the ‘nation’, but on the contrary develops a programme of its proletarian revolution and compels the petty bourgeoisie to choose between two regimes. The slogan of the people’s revolution lulls the petty-bourgeoisie as well as the broad masses of the workers, reconciles them to the bourgeois-hierarchial structure of the ‘people’ and retards their liberation."33
But it is clear from the passage quoted from "Where we stand" that Gager does not want merely to lull the "people". Remember: "Red believes that unions exist to make agreements with bosses .... Agreements between employers and unions end up as conspiracies to defraud the consumer. What is needed is an alliance of workers and consumers against employers. Red stands for voluntary unionism." Even without the last sentence it would be clear that Red wants to smash the unions. But the call for voluntary unionism in New Zealand is clearly a call to end the system under which all unions have won from the employers union membership as a condition of employment. Thus "voluntary unionism" would in itself smash all but the strongest unions. Gager without doubt wants to mobilise his "people" to smash the organisations of the working class. A more pernicious manifestation of bourgeois politics has seldom been presented in left-wing disguise. It is true that the bureaucratic leaders of the unions confine them to inadequate attempts to keep wages rising as fast as prices. It is true that they are at present merely instruments to keep the workers quiet. It is true that trade unions, without the leadership of a revolutionary party, will never rise above the level of tomorrow’s bread and butter. The point is not merely to understand this but to change it.
"The trade unions of our time can either serve as secondary instruments of imperialist capitalism for the subordination an disciplining of the workers, or, on the contrary, the trade unions can become the instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat."34
We will build a revolutionary party, we will organise revolutionary caucuses among the union rank and file, we will lead the struggles of the workers from the partial and economist, from the level of bread and butter, to the level of revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary struggle. We will work around a transitional programme "stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat."35 We will lead "the base against the top", smash the union bureaucrats, and turn the unions into instruments of the revolutionary working class. The unions have within them that potentiality, but Gager’s inability to see and exploit the contradiction between the bourgeois interests served by the union leaderships and their working-class membership have resulted in a sectarianism so extreme that it amounts to an attack on the working class.
Red was the dividing line. It marked Gager’s final break from revolutionary politics. In a situation of political isolation he used the disintegration of the NZSL in order to purport to make completely fundamental changes in its line. Without any proper decision-making process he presented some sort of new-left populism or worse, specifically counterposed to the working-class movement.
Gager had previously counterposed the propaganda orientation advocated by comrades Hannah and Logan with a plan for a popular paper. In style, content and programme Red, number 1, shows itself to be a truly "popular paper" - for the petty bourgeoisie. On the front page greatest prominence was given to an article on ecology signed by one Brian Longrigg - a man obviously more sympathetic to the ideology of the National Party lawyers in the Save the Manapouri Campaign than to any even ostensibly revolutionary group. On the back page in uncritical support of the bourgeois puppet Awami League, Red calls for "us" to "cease hiding behind legalisms and recognise the Provisional Government of Bangladesh." Inside the paper was a mish-mash of notes in gentle criticism of the Labour Party bureaucracy, left-liberal support for Vietnamese Stalinism, and rock-record reviews. Despite the paper’s great interest in international affairs, its statement of principle fails to call for an international revolutionary leadership. The paper makes it quite clear that Gager has completely deserted the struggle to rebuild the Fourth International.
"... the question of the International, as well as the question of national parties, cannot be deferred for a single hour: we have here in essence two sides of one and the same question. Without a Marxist International, national organisations, even the most advanced, are doomed to narrowness, vacillation and helplessness; the advanced workers are forced to feed upon surrogates for internationalism."36
But though Red marks Gager’s final break from the politics of the Spartacist League some organisational unclarity remained, and he participated in some of the meetings of members of the Spartacist League which rebuilt in March. He was too arrogant and unorganisable to subject himself to the discipline of any group, and despite the fact that he continues to respond to criticisms with smokescreens of faked orthodoxy he is too far from Marxism to stand by seeing it used to test his views. His walk-out was merely the organisational expression of his earlier desertion of Marxism-Leninism. He was finally formally expelled.
The Spartacist League’s immediate task is to sharpen itself into a fighting propaganda group, a nucleus of trained Marxists capable of intervening in every radical movement and in the trade unions with revolutionary politics. One of our first steps towards this has been the establishment of a regular propaganda press.
The Spartacist League, as a national section fighting for the rebuilding of the Fourth International, is in the vanguard of the struggle for a socialist revolution, which will prepare for the freeing of the energies of all mankind and the creation of a truly liberated society.
"Our day-to-day preparation of the working class and our intervention and leadership in the decisive moments of the class struggle will propel the struggle forward to the final victory."37
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Endnotes
8 January 1967
Letter from Gager to Logan, 3 January 1971.
"Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League", Marxist Bulletin, n 9, p 10. The Marxist Bulletin series is published by the Spartacist League US. The "Declaration of Principles" was also published in Spartacist, n 8, November-December 1966 - PRG, January 1991.
"Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League", p 10
"The Fourth International and the Soviet Union", Documents of the Fourth International, Pathfinder, New York, 1973, p 107
"Imperialist War and World Revolution", Documents of the Fourth International, p 327
Dispute, November-December 1964
Letter from Gager to Locke, undated, about September 1968
Letter from Gager to Logan, 28 November 1971
"Declaration of Principles", p 10
Dispute, September 1964
The Independent Labour Party of England was a left-social democratic, sometimes centrist, organisation. Originally formed in 1893, it helped found the Labour Party, left it in 1932, and then returned to it in 1939 - PRG, January 1991
"The League Faced with a Decisive Turn" (June 1934), Writings of Leon Trotsky [1934-35], Pathfinder, New York, 1974, p 42
"Reformism Now", an internal discussion document by Owen Gager, 26 September 1971
Peter Frazer: Labour Prime Minister 1940-49; Michael Joseph Savage: Labour Prime Minister 1935-40 - PRG footnote, January 1991
The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Programme) [1938], New Park, London, 1980, p 13
"The ILP and the Fourth International" (18 September 1935), Writings of Leon Trotsky [1935-36], Pathfinder, New York, 1977, p 142
"Centrist Combination and Marxist Tactics" (28 February 1935), Writings of Leon Trotsky [1934-35], p 203-4. (The original citation given by the NZSL was from an earlier edition of Trotsky's Writings which gave this article's title as "Centrist Combination and Marxist Faction" - PRG, January 1991.)
V I Lenin, What Is to Be Done? [1902], Collected Works, Progress, Moscow, 1961, v 5, p 440
As above, p 442-3
As above, p 462
V I Lenin, "Five Years of the Russian Revolution and the Prospects of World Revolution" (Report to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 13 November 1922). (A slightly different translation can be found in: Collected Works, 1965, v 33, p 431-2 - PRG, January 1991.)
V I Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism - An Infantile Disorder (1920). (A slightly different translation can be found in: Collected Works, 1966, v 31, p 93-4 - PRG, January 1991.)
Leon Trotsky, "What Is a 'Mass Paper'?" (30 November 1935). (A slightly different translation can be found in: The Crisis of the French Section [1935-36], Pathfinder, New York, 1977, p 97 -PRG, January 1991.)
Letter from Gager to Logan, 28 November 1971
V I Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back [1904], Collected Works, 1965, v 7, p 256
Letter from Gager to Logan, 21 August 1971
James P Cannon, Letter to Dobbs (6 April 1953), Speeches to the Party, Pathfinder, New York, 1973
Socialist Workers Party, "Against Pabloist Revisionism" (1953), International Committee Documents 1951-54, Towards a History of the Fourth International, Part 4, Education for Socialists series, New York, 1974, p 152.
Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP, "In Defence of a Revol-utionary Perspective" (1962), Marxist Bulletin, n 1, p 3
Red, n 1, November 1972
V I Lenin, The State and Revolution [1917], Collected Works, 1964, v 25, p 445. (The additions in square brackets are those of the NZSL in 1972 - PRG, January 1991.)
Leon Trotsky, "Thaelmann and the 'Peoples Revolution'" (14 April 1931), The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, Pathfinder, New York, 1971, p 75-6
Leon Trotsky, "Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay" (1940), Leon Trotsky on the Trade Unions, New York, Pathfinder, 1975, p 71.
The Transitional Programme, p 14-5
Leon Trotsky, "The ILP and the Fourth International", p 147
"Declaration of Principles", p 11
Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- Billie’s Back- The Crests’ “Step By Step”
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Crests performing Step by Step.
Markin comment:
This is the back story, the teen listener back story if you like, going back to the primordial youth time of the mid to late 1950s with its bags full of classic rock songs for the ages. Of course, any such efforts have to include the views of one Billie, William James Bradley, the schoolboy mad-hatter of the 1950s rock jailbreak out in our “the projects” neighborhood. Ya, in those days, unlike during his later fateful wrong turn trajectory days, every kid, including best friend Markin, me, lived to hear what he had to say about any song that came trumpeting over the radio, at least every one that we would recognize as our own.
Billie and I spent many, many hours mainly up in his tiny bedroom, his rock heaven bedroom, walls plastered with posters of Elvis, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, somewhat later Jerry Lee Lewis, and of every new teen heartthrob singer, heartthrob to the girls that is, around, on his night table every new record Billie could get his hands on, by hook or by crook, and neatly folded piles of clothing, also gathered by that same hook or by crook, appropriate to the king hell king of the schoolboy rock scene, the elementary school rock scene between about 1956 to 1960. Much of that time was spent discussing the “meaning” of various songs, especially their sexual implications, ah, their mystery of girls-finding-out-about worthiness.
Although in early 1959 my family had started the process of moving out of the projects, and, more importantly, I had begun to move away from Billie’s orbit, his new found orbit as king hell gangster wannabe, I still would wander back there until mid-1960 just to hear his take on whatever music was interesting him at the time. These commentaries, these Billie commentaries, are my recollections of his and my conversations on the song lyrics in this series. But I am not relying on memory alone. During this period we would use my father’s tape recorder, by today’s standard his big old reel to reel monstrosity of a tape recorder, to record Billie’s covers of the then current hit songs (for those who have not read previously of Billie’s “heroics” he was a pretty good budding rock singer at the time) and our conversations of those song meanings that we fretted about for hours. I have, painstakingly, had those reels transcribed so that many of these commentaries will be the actual words spoken during those conversations (somewhat edited, of course). That said, Billie, king hell rock and roll king of the old neighborhood, knew how to call a lyric, and make us laugh to boot. Wherever you are Billie I’m still pulling for you. Got it.
******
The Crests
Step By Step lyrics
Step, step. Step, step. Step, step... Step, step
Step by step I fell in love with you
And step by step it wasn't hard to do
Kiss by kiss and hand in hand
That's the way it all began
Soon we found the perfect plan for love
Side by side we took a lovers walk
Word by word we had a lover's talk
One word led to another and then
Then in no time we're up to ten
My heart knew it was gonna end in love
1st step, a sweet hello
2nd step, my heart's aglow
3rd step, we had a date
4th step, we stayed up late
5th step, I walk you home
6th step, we're all alone
7th step, we took a chance
One kiss and true romance
Step by step we climbed to heaven's door
Step by step, each thrill invited more
Then you promised faithfully
All your love belonged to me
Now I know we'll always be in love
Step, step. Step, step. Step, step. Step step
*********
Billie, William James Bradley, comment:
What the hell’s going on? It is almost like I can’t even listen to my transistor radio these days without wanting to throw up. Yes, that’s right throw up. And Markin, Peter Paul Markin, my best friend over at Adamsville South Elementary a couple of years back will back me up on this if he even comes back around the old neighborhood to breathe some real air, some fresh sea air, and get the low-down on what is good in music these days. Except I won’t have much to tell him right now. Like I said I feel like throwing up most of the time when I listen to the radio. Nothing righteous. Nothing like Elvis when he was righteous, hungry and righteous, a few years back. Or Jerry Lee before he got into cousin-marrying trouble or Chuck Berry when he got into no-no white girl trouble. Fabian, Conway Twitty, Duane Eddy, Ricky Nelson, jesus, even Ricky Nelson, the Everly Brothers and on and on with twaddle, yes, twaddle about this and that oddball thing about teen life. And girls, girls with money to buy the records, who seem to just want dreamy stuff about sad movies, some sad-sack boy friends, johnny, jimmy, joey angels, following guys to the end of the earth, and all that. No more be-bop-a-loola. I tell you we are in the dumps and it ain’t getting better, if anything worst.
Here is what I am up to these days, and maybe you should be too. I am starting to listen and listen hard to doo wop stuff. The stuff that came out of the street corners of New York City and other big town places where you had guys (and chicks too) singing, no instruments, or maybe some low-down, low-key piano, just doing harmonies, and doo wop background responses. Cool. Ya, I know I got in trouble, musically anyway, trying to cover righteous Bo Diddley down here in the white projects playing off “colored” music that really, really I say, drove early rock. Just ask Elvis, if he is in a truthful mood.
But this stuff, this doo wop stuff, if it gets around more, can break the pretty boys and their dreamy girl thing up.
So here is what I am doing now that it is summer, school is out, it’s hot, and we haven’t got a damn thing to do, and no money to do it with if we had that damn thing to do. I have been listening to doo wop records like crazy, right now I am concentrating on the Crests and their great harmonies on Step by Step. Here is what I want to do just like we tried last summer when Markin was around more. A few guys, a few of my guys, my hanging-around-waiting-to-do-this-and-that-but-just-now-waiting-fire-guys, would get together around dusk in back of the old school around the playground area and start practicing harmonies. Markin scoffed at the idea at the time, as usual. But then, just as the sun started going down, a couple of girls would come by to listen and not “dogs” either, or sticks. Then a couple more, and a couple more, and there you have it.
Of course after that Markin wanted to do it every day, all day, even in the afternoon heat, and Markin hates the heat. So I figure that we can try it again this year and maybe we can break out of the Bobby Vee mold. But see here is where I am on the hook. If you can believe this I need Markin, need him bad. Last summer when he was around more I tried to keep him in the background as his voice was starting to change. Ya, I tried to ship him and his voice to Chicago if you want to know the truth, best friend and all. But lately I have been having trouble on the call and response side of Step by Step and now that Markin has a more bassy voice I sure could use him otherwise I will never break out into my proper place in the doo wop world. Got it, Markin.
Markin comment:
This is the back story, the teen listener back story if you like, going back to the primordial youth time of the mid to late 1950s with its bags full of classic rock songs for the ages. Of course, any such efforts have to include the views of one Billie, William James Bradley, the schoolboy mad-hatter of the 1950s rock jailbreak out in our “the projects” neighborhood. Ya, in those days, unlike during his later fateful wrong turn trajectory days, every kid, including best friend Markin, me, lived to hear what he had to say about any song that came trumpeting over the radio, at least every one that we would recognize as our own.
Billie and I spent many, many hours mainly up in his tiny bedroom, his rock heaven bedroom, walls plastered with posters of Elvis, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, somewhat later Jerry Lee Lewis, and of every new teen heartthrob singer, heartthrob to the girls that is, around, on his night table every new record Billie could get his hands on, by hook or by crook, and neatly folded piles of clothing, also gathered by that same hook or by crook, appropriate to the king hell king of the schoolboy rock scene, the elementary school rock scene between about 1956 to 1960. Much of that time was spent discussing the “meaning” of various songs, especially their sexual implications, ah, their mystery of girls-finding-out-about worthiness.
Although in early 1959 my family had started the process of moving out of the projects, and, more importantly, I had begun to move away from Billie’s orbit, his new found orbit as king hell gangster wannabe, I still would wander back there until mid-1960 just to hear his take on whatever music was interesting him at the time. These commentaries, these Billie commentaries, are my recollections of his and my conversations on the song lyrics in this series. But I am not relying on memory alone. During this period we would use my father’s tape recorder, by today’s standard his big old reel to reel monstrosity of a tape recorder, to record Billie’s covers of the then current hit songs (for those who have not read previously of Billie’s “heroics” he was a pretty good budding rock singer at the time) and our conversations of those song meanings that we fretted about for hours. I have, painstakingly, had those reels transcribed so that many of these commentaries will be the actual words spoken during those conversations (somewhat edited, of course). That said, Billie, king hell rock and roll king of the old neighborhood, knew how to call a lyric, and make us laugh to boot. Wherever you are Billie I’m still pulling for you. Got it.
******
The Crests
Step By Step lyrics
Step, step. Step, step. Step, step... Step, step
Step by step I fell in love with you
And step by step it wasn't hard to do
Kiss by kiss and hand in hand
That's the way it all began
Soon we found the perfect plan for love
Side by side we took a lovers walk
Word by word we had a lover's talk
One word led to another and then
Then in no time we're up to ten
My heart knew it was gonna end in love
1st step, a sweet hello
2nd step, my heart's aglow
3rd step, we had a date
4th step, we stayed up late
5th step, I walk you home
6th step, we're all alone
7th step, we took a chance
One kiss and true romance
Step by step we climbed to heaven's door
Step by step, each thrill invited more
Then you promised faithfully
All your love belonged to me
Now I know we'll always be in love
Step, step. Step, step. Step, step. Step step
*********
Billie, William James Bradley, comment:
What the hell’s going on? It is almost like I can’t even listen to my transistor radio these days without wanting to throw up. Yes, that’s right throw up. And Markin, Peter Paul Markin, my best friend over at Adamsville South Elementary a couple of years back will back me up on this if he even comes back around the old neighborhood to breathe some real air, some fresh sea air, and get the low-down on what is good in music these days. Except I won’t have much to tell him right now. Like I said I feel like throwing up most of the time when I listen to the radio. Nothing righteous. Nothing like Elvis when he was righteous, hungry and righteous, a few years back. Or Jerry Lee before he got into cousin-marrying trouble or Chuck Berry when he got into no-no white girl trouble. Fabian, Conway Twitty, Duane Eddy, Ricky Nelson, jesus, even Ricky Nelson, the Everly Brothers and on and on with twaddle, yes, twaddle about this and that oddball thing about teen life. And girls, girls with money to buy the records, who seem to just want dreamy stuff about sad movies, some sad-sack boy friends, johnny, jimmy, joey angels, following guys to the end of the earth, and all that. No more be-bop-a-loola. I tell you we are in the dumps and it ain’t getting better, if anything worst.
Here is what I am up to these days, and maybe you should be too. I am starting to listen and listen hard to doo wop stuff. The stuff that came out of the street corners of New York City and other big town places where you had guys (and chicks too) singing, no instruments, or maybe some low-down, low-key piano, just doing harmonies, and doo wop background responses. Cool. Ya, I know I got in trouble, musically anyway, trying to cover righteous Bo Diddley down here in the white projects playing off “colored” music that really, really I say, drove early rock. Just ask Elvis, if he is in a truthful mood.
But this stuff, this doo wop stuff, if it gets around more, can break the pretty boys and their dreamy girl thing up.
So here is what I am doing now that it is summer, school is out, it’s hot, and we haven’t got a damn thing to do, and no money to do it with if we had that damn thing to do. I have been listening to doo wop records like crazy, right now I am concentrating on the Crests and their great harmonies on Step by Step. Here is what I want to do just like we tried last summer when Markin was around more. A few guys, a few of my guys, my hanging-around-waiting-to-do-this-and-that-but-just-now-waiting-fire-guys, would get together around dusk in back of the old school around the playground area and start practicing harmonies. Markin scoffed at the idea at the time, as usual. But then, just as the sun started going down, a couple of girls would come by to listen and not “dogs” either, or sticks. Then a couple more, and a couple more, and there you have it.
Of course after that Markin wanted to do it every day, all day, even in the afternoon heat, and Markin hates the heat. So I figure that we can try it again this year and maybe we can break out of the Bobby Vee mold. But see here is where I am on the hook. If you can believe this I need Markin, need him bad. Last summer when he was around more I tried to keep him in the background as his voice was starting to change. Ya, I tried to ship him and his voice to Chicago if you want to know the truth, best friend and all. But lately I have been having trouble on the call and response side of Step by Step and now that Markin has a more bassy voice I sure could use him otherwise I will never break out into my proper place in the doo wop world. Got it, Markin.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
In Saakashvili's Georgia, the Bloom Is Off the Rose - by Stephen Lendman
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
In Saakashvili's Georgia, the Bloom Is Off the Rose
In Saakashvili's Georgia, the Bloom Is Off the Rose - by Stephen Lendman
Since May 21, anti-goverment protests rocked Georgia. Organized by an alliance of opposition parties, they erupted initially in September 2007 for early elections and democratic change, as well as ending corruption and police state terror. More on current protests below.
In 2003, Georgia's bloodless "Rose Revolution" replaced Edouard Shevardnadze with Mikhail Saakashvili, a totalitarian US-installed puppet with ties to other NATO countries and Israel.
Shevardnadze became a liability when he began dealing with Russia on energy pipelines and privatizations. Funded by the State Department, US intelligence, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), George Soros, and Freedom House, efforts to replace him played out as follows.
Georgia held parliamentary elections on November 2, 2003. Without evidence, pro-western international observers called them unfair. Saakashvili claimed he won. He and the united opposition called for protests and civil disobedience.
They began in mid-November in the capital Tbilisi, then spread throughout the country, peaking on November 22, parliament's scheduled opening day. While it met, Saakashvili-led supporters placed "roses" in the barrels of soldiers' rifles, seized the parliament building, interrupted Shevardnadze's speech, forcing him out for his safety.
Saakashvili declared a state of emergency, mobilized troops and police, met with Sherardnadze and Zurab Zhvania (former parliament speaker, chosen for new prime minister, then killed in February 2005), apparently convincing the Georgian president to resign.
Celebrations erupted. A temporary head of state was installed. Georgia's Supreme Court annulled the elections, and on January 4, 2004, Saakashvili was elected and inaugurated president on January 25.
On March 28, new parliamentary elections were held. Saakashvili's supporters used heavy-handed tactics to win. Carefully scripted events assured it. Once installed, neoliberal reforms followed, including privatizing state enterprises, gutting the civil service, and instituting a regressive pro-business tax system, as well as widespread corruption to game the system for profit.
Moreover, heavy-handed terror solidified power, turning Georgia into a police state. As a result, political and popular opposition was crushed by suspicious deaths, mass arrests, detentions, torture, closing an opposition television station, and suspending civil liberties.
Early on, the bloom was off the rose, including by allying with Washington's imperial agenda. Georgia is strategically important for the Anglo-American Caspian oil pipeline. It extends from Baku, Azerbaijan (on the Caspian) through Georgia, bypassing Russia and Iran, and across Turkey to its port city of Ceyhan. Called the BTC pipeline, it's adjacent to the South Causasus (gas) Pipeline with a capacity of about 16 billion cubic meters annually. BTC handles around one million barrels of oil daily.
Georgia also became a coalition partner in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a proxy force against Russia in August 2008 by attacking South Ossetia, Georgia's breakaway province. Calling it blatant aggression, Russia responded and prevailed, including in Abkhazia, Georgia's other independent province. Both conflicts, in fact, threatened a potential East - West confrontation, especially if Georgia and Ukraine joined NATO, pushing it and Washington's missile defense to Russia's border, what Moscow won't tolerate.
Anti-Government Protests Rock Georgia
On May 21, over 10,000 Georgians protested in Tbilisi, demanding Saakashvili resign. According to Reuters, a television building was also attacked in Batumi, capital of Georgia's southwestern autonomous Adjara republic.
Opposing Saakashvili's rule, former parliament speaker Nino Burdzhanadze rallied protesters in Tbilisi's Freedom Square, saying:
"We will fight to the end together with you. It is the final and decisive fight for all of us and we are not going to take any steps back. We cannot wait until the next election and if we do not want to wait we should act now."
Saakashvili's term ends in 2013. Protesters want him out now.
On May 22, New York Times writer Michael Schwirtz headlined, "Protesters Call for the Resignation of Georgia's President," saying:
"Police clashed with anti-government protesters (Sunday), at one point firing tear gas and rubber bullets, as hundreds....gathered in (Tbilisi)," demanding Saakashvili's ouster.
On May 23, Russia Today (RT) headlined, "Georgian opposition promise president's ouster by Wednesday," saying:
"Thousands of anti-government protesters" filled Tbilisi streets for the third straight day, opposition leader Burdzhanadze saying:
"A revolution is already going on. And it is not up to us - the government began the revolution (when it started terrorizing) people, when (it) arrested hundreds of absolutely innocent people, when (it) very seriously beat lots of people, when they confiscated property of the citizens and....cracked down four times on peaceful manifestations."
Political analyst Irina Kobrinskaya believes, unlike past failures, this protest may succeed, saying:
"In fact, (Saakashvili) is not a political personality, who can easily step down." He won't go quietly. "But this time, really, the scale of the protest may go far and wide. (If) the opposition is consolidated enough," he may have no choice but to go.
On May 24, RT said Georgian opposition supporters continue round-the-clock protests, preparing for a decisive "day of rage." According to Burdzhanadze:
"We are fighting for democracy. We are fighting for a better future for everybody in Georgia....We do not want to live in a neo-bolshevik country. I know the government will use any kind of force....to survive. (We're getting reports) that our supporters have been kidnapped or arrested."
Undeterred, she expressed assurance "we will achieve our goal - the resignation of the president as well as free and democratic elections...." Millions of Georgians hope she's right, wanting out from Saakashvili's repressive rule.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
posted by Steve Lendman @ 1:20 AM
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In Saakashvili's Georgia, the Bloom Is Off the Rose
In Saakashvili's Georgia, the Bloom Is Off the Rose - by Stephen Lendman
Since May 21, anti-goverment protests rocked Georgia. Organized by an alliance of opposition parties, they erupted initially in September 2007 for early elections and democratic change, as well as ending corruption and police state terror. More on current protests below.
In 2003, Georgia's bloodless "Rose Revolution" replaced Edouard Shevardnadze with Mikhail Saakashvili, a totalitarian US-installed puppet with ties to other NATO countries and Israel.
Shevardnadze became a liability when he began dealing with Russia on energy pipelines and privatizations. Funded by the State Department, US intelligence, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), George Soros, and Freedom House, efforts to replace him played out as follows.
Georgia held parliamentary elections on November 2, 2003. Without evidence, pro-western international observers called them unfair. Saakashvili claimed he won. He and the united opposition called for protests and civil disobedience.
They began in mid-November in the capital Tbilisi, then spread throughout the country, peaking on November 22, parliament's scheduled opening day. While it met, Saakashvili-led supporters placed "roses" in the barrels of soldiers' rifles, seized the parliament building, interrupted Shevardnadze's speech, forcing him out for his safety.
Saakashvili declared a state of emergency, mobilized troops and police, met with Sherardnadze and Zurab Zhvania (former parliament speaker, chosen for new prime minister, then killed in February 2005), apparently convincing the Georgian president to resign.
Celebrations erupted. A temporary head of state was installed. Georgia's Supreme Court annulled the elections, and on January 4, 2004, Saakashvili was elected and inaugurated president on January 25.
On March 28, new parliamentary elections were held. Saakashvili's supporters used heavy-handed tactics to win. Carefully scripted events assured it. Once installed, neoliberal reforms followed, including privatizing state enterprises, gutting the civil service, and instituting a regressive pro-business tax system, as well as widespread corruption to game the system for profit.
Moreover, heavy-handed terror solidified power, turning Georgia into a police state. As a result, political and popular opposition was crushed by suspicious deaths, mass arrests, detentions, torture, closing an opposition television station, and suspending civil liberties.
Early on, the bloom was off the rose, including by allying with Washington's imperial agenda. Georgia is strategically important for the Anglo-American Caspian oil pipeline. It extends from Baku, Azerbaijan (on the Caspian) through Georgia, bypassing Russia and Iran, and across Turkey to its port city of Ceyhan. Called the BTC pipeline, it's adjacent to the South Causasus (gas) Pipeline with a capacity of about 16 billion cubic meters annually. BTC handles around one million barrels of oil daily.
Georgia also became a coalition partner in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a proxy force against Russia in August 2008 by attacking South Ossetia, Georgia's breakaway province. Calling it blatant aggression, Russia responded and prevailed, including in Abkhazia, Georgia's other independent province. Both conflicts, in fact, threatened a potential East - West confrontation, especially if Georgia and Ukraine joined NATO, pushing it and Washington's missile defense to Russia's border, what Moscow won't tolerate.
Anti-Government Protests Rock Georgia
On May 21, over 10,000 Georgians protested in Tbilisi, demanding Saakashvili resign. According to Reuters, a television building was also attacked in Batumi, capital of Georgia's southwestern autonomous Adjara republic.
Opposing Saakashvili's rule, former parliament speaker Nino Burdzhanadze rallied protesters in Tbilisi's Freedom Square, saying:
"We will fight to the end together with you. It is the final and decisive fight for all of us and we are not going to take any steps back. We cannot wait until the next election and if we do not want to wait we should act now."
Saakashvili's term ends in 2013. Protesters want him out now.
On May 22, New York Times writer Michael Schwirtz headlined, "Protesters Call for the Resignation of Georgia's President," saying:
"Police clashed with anti-government protesters (Sunday), at one point firing tear gas and rubber bullets, as hundreds....gathered in (Tbilisi)," demanding Saakashvili's ouster.
On May 23, Russia Today (RT) headlined, "Georgian opposition promise president's ouster by Wednesday," saying:
"Thousands of anti-government protesters" filled Tbilisi streets for the third straight day, opposition leader Burdzhanadze saying:
"A revolution is already going on. And it is not up to us - the government began the revolution (when it started terrorizing) people, when (it) arrested hundreds of absolutely innocent people, when (it) very seriously beat lots of people, when they confiscated property of the citizens and....cracked down four times on peaceful manifestations."
Political analyst Irina Kobrinskaya believes, unlike past failures, this protest may succeed, saying:
"In fact, (Saakashvili) is not a political personality, who can easily step down." He won't go quietly. "But this time, really, the scale of the protest may go far and wide. (If) the opposition is consolidated enough," he may have no choice but to go.
On May 24, RT said Georgian opposition supporters continue round-the-clock protests, preparing for a decisive "day of rage." According to Burdzhanadze:
"We are fighting for democracy. We are fighting for a better future for everybody in Georgia....We do not want to live in a neo-bolshevik country. I know the government will use any kind of force....to survive. (We're getting reports) that our supporters have been kidnapped or arrested."
Undeterred, she expressed assurance "we will achieve our goal - the resignation of the president as well as free and democratic elections...." Millions of Georgians hope she's right, wanting out from Saakashvili's repressive rule.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
posted by Steve Lendman @ 1:20 AM
<< Home
Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- "Ain’t Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Street Making All That Noise"- When Billie Ruled The Roost-First Take
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Eddie Cochran performing his classic rock number, Summertime Blues.
He was the first. A certified 1958 A-One prime custom model first. Yes, Billie was the first. Billie, William James Bradley that is if you did not know his full moniker, was the first. No question about it, no controversy, no alternate candidates, no hemming and hawing agonizing about this guy’s attributes or that guy’s style and how they lined up against Billie’s shine in order to pick a winner. No way, get it. Billie, first in what anyway? Billie, first, see, first in line of the then ever sprouting young schoolboy king corner boy wannabes. Wannabes because the weres, the corner boy weres, the already king corner boy weres, the older, mainly not schoolboys or, christ, not for long schoolboys, mainly not working, jesus, mainly not working, mainly just hanging around (laying about was a name for it, a fit name at that) were already playing, really hip-swaying, lazily hip-swaying if you wanted to win games, wizard pinball machines in the sacred corner boy small town mom and pop variety night or cueing up in some smoke-filled big town pool hall.
Or working on hot souped-up cars, a touch of grease pressed, seemingly decaled pressed, into their uniform white tee-shirts (no vee-necks need apply) and always showed, showed an oily speck anyway, on their knuckles. But the cars were to die for, sleek tail-finned, pray to god cherry red if you put the finish on right (no going to some hack paint shop, no way, not for this baby, not for that ’57 Chevy), dual exhaust, big cubic engine numbers that no amateur had a clue to but just knew when sighted that thing would fly (well, almost fly) into the boulevard night, that sea air, sex-charged boulevard night. Tuned-up just right for that cheap gas to make her run, ya, that cheap City Service gas that was even cheaper than the stuff over at the Merit gas station, by two cents.
Or talking some boffo, usually blonde, although not always, maybe a cute rosy red-lipped and haired number or, in a pinch, a soft, sultry, svelte brunette, tight cashmere sweater-wearing, all, Capri pant-wearing, all, honey out of her virtue (or maybe into her virtue) down by the seashore after some carnival-filled night. A night that had been filled with arcade pinball wizardry, cotton candy, salt-water taffy, roller coaster rides, and a few trips in the tunnel of love, maybe win a prize from the wheel of fortune game too. A night capped with a few illicit drinks from some old tom, or johnny, Johnny Walker that is, rotgut to make that talking easier, and that virtue more questionable, into or out of. All while the ocean waves slap innocently against the shore, drowning out the night’s heavy breathed, hard-voiced sighs.
Or, get this, because it tells a lot about the byways and highways of the high-style corner boy steamy black and white 1950s night, preparing, with his boys, his trusted unto death boys, his omerta-sworn boys, no less to do some midnight creep (waylaying some poor bedraggled sap, sidewalk drunk or wrong neighborhooded, with a sap to the head for dough, or going through some back door, and not gently, to grab somebody’s family heirlooms or fungibles, better yet cash on hand) in order to maintain that hot car, cheap gas or not, or hot honey, virtuous or not. Ya, things cost then, as now.
And, ya, in 1958, in hard look 1958, those king hell corner boy weres already sucked up the noteworthy, attention-getting black and white television, black and white newsprint night air. Still the lines were long with candidates and the mom and pop variety store-anchored, soda fountain drugstore-anchored, pizza parlor-anchored, pool hall-anchored corners, such as they were, were plentiful in those pre-dawn mall days. But see that is the point, the point of those long lines of candidates in every burg in the land or, at least became the point, because in 1948, or 1938, or maybe even 1928 nobody gave a rat’s ass, or a damn, about corner boys except to shuffle them out of town on the first Greyhound bus.
Hell, in 1948 they were still in hiding from the war, whatever war it was that they wanted no part of, which might ruin their style, or their dough prospects. They were just getting into those old Nash jalopies, revving them up in the "chicken run" night out in the exotic west coast ocean night. In 1938 you did not need a Greyhound bus coming through your town because these guys were already on the hitchhike road, or were bindled-up in some railroad jungle, or getting cracked over the head by some “bull”, in the great depression whirlwind heading west for adventure, or hard-scrabble work. And in 1928 these hard boys were slugging it out, guns at the ready, in fast, prohibition liquor-load filled cars, and had no time for corners and silly corner pinball wizard games (although maybe they had time for running the rack at Gus’s pool hall, if they lived long enough).
That rarified, formerly subterranean corner boy way of life, was getting inspected, dissected, rejected, everything but neglected once the teen angst, teen alienation wave hit 1950s America. You heard some of the names, or thought you heard some of the names that counted, but they were just showboat celebrities, celebrities inhabiting Cornerboy, Inc. complete with stainless tee-shirt, neatly pressed denim jeans, maybe a smart leather jacket against the weather’s winds, unsmoked, unfiltered cigarettes at the ready, and incurably photogenic faces that every girl mother could love/hate.
Forget that. Down in the trenches, ya, down in the trenches is where the real corner boys lived, and lived without publicity most days, thank you. Guys like Red Hickey, tee-shirted, sure, denim-jeaned, sure, leather-jacketed, sure, chain-smoking (Lucky Strikes, natch), sure, angelic-faced, sure, who waylaid a guy, put him in an ambulance waylaid, just because he was a corner boy king from another cross-town corner who Red thought was trying to move in, or something like that. Or guys like Bruce “The Goose” McNeil, ditto shirted, jeaned, jacketed, smoked (Camels), faced who sneak-thieved his way through half of the old Adamsville houses taking nothing but high-end stuff from the swells. Or No Name McGee, corner boy king of the liquor store clip. Ya, and a hundred other guys, a hundred no name guys, except maybe to the cops, and to their distressed mothers, mainly old-time Irish and Italian novena-praying Catholic mothers, praying against that publicity day, the police blotter publicity day.
But you did not, I say, you did not hear those Hickey, McNeil, No Name stories in the big town newspapers or in some university faculty room when those guys zeroed in on the corner boy game trying to explain, like it was not plain as the naked eye to see, and why, all that angst and alienation. And then tried to tell one and all that corner boy was a phase, a minute thing, that plentiful America had an edge, like every civilized world from time immemorial had, where those who could not adjust, who could not decode the new American night, the odorless American night, the pre-lapsarian American night shifted for themselves in the shadows. Not to worry though it was a phase, just a phase, and these guys too will soon be thinking about that ticky-tack little white house with the picket fence.
Ya, but see, see again, just the talk through the grapevine about such guys as Red, The Goose, No Name, the legendary jewelry store clip artist, Brother Johnson (who set himself apart because he made a point of the fact that he didn’t smoke, smoke cigarettes anyway), and a whole host of guys who made little big names for themselves on the corners was enough to get guys like Billie, and not just primo candidate Billie either, hopped-up on the corner boy game. Ya, the corner boys whose very name uttered, whose very idea of a name uttered, whose very idea of a name thought up in some think-tank academy brain-dust, and whose very existence made a splash later (after it was all over, at least the public, publicity all over, part), excited every project schoolboy, every wrong side of the tracks guy (and it was always guys, babes were just for tangle), every short-cut dreaming boy who could read the day’s newspaper or watch some distended television, or knew someone who did.
And Billie was the first. The star of the Adamsville elementary schoolboy corner boy galaxy. No first among equals, or any such combination like that either, if that is what you are thinking. Alone. Oh sure his right-hand man, Peter Paul Markin, weak-kneed, bookwormy, girl-confused but girl-addled, took a run at Billie but that was seen, except maybe by Peter Paul himself, as a joke. Something to have a warm chuckle over on dreary nights when a laugh could not be squeezed out any other way. See, Peter Paul, as usual, had it all wrong on his figuring stuff. He thought his two thousand facts knowledge about books, and history, and current events, and maybe an off-hand science thing or two entitled, get this, entitled him to the crown. Like merit, or heredity, or whatever drove him to those two thousand facts meant diddly squat against style, and will.
Billie tried to straighten him out, gently at first, with a short comment that a guy who had no denim blue jeans, had no possibility of getting denim blue jeans, and was in any case addicted to black chinos, black cuffed chinos, has no chance of leading anybody, at any time, in anything. Still Peter Paul argued some nonsense about his organizing abilities. Like being able to run a low-rent bake sale for some foolish school trip, or to refurbish the U.S.S. Constitution, counted when real dough, real heist dough, for real adventures was needed. Peter simmered in high-grade pre-teen anguish for a while over that one, more than a while.
Billie and Peter Paul, friends since the first days of first grade, improbably friends on the face of it although Billie’s take on it was that Peter Paul made him laugh with that basketful of facts that he held on to like a king’s ransom, protecting them like they were gold or something, finally had it out one night. No, not a fist fight, see that was not really Billie’s way, not then anyway or at least not in this case, and Peter Paul was useless at fighting, except maybe with feisty paper bags or those blessed facts. Billie, who not only was a king corner contender but a very decent budding singer, rock and roll singer, had just recently lost some local talent show competition to a trio of girls who were doing a doo wop thing. That part was okay, the losing part, such things happen in show biz and even Billie recognized, recognized later, that those girls had be-bopped him with their cover of Eddie, My Love fair and square. Billie, who for that contest was dressed up in a Bill Haley-style jacket made by his mother for the occasion, did the classic Bill Haley and the Comets Rock- Around-The-Clock as his number. About halfway through though one of the arms of his just made suit came flying off. A few seconds later the other arm came off. And the girls, the coterie of Adamsville girls in the audience especially, went crazy. See they thought it was part of the act.
After that, at school and elsewhere, Billie was besieged daily by girls, and not just stick-shaped girls either, who hung off all his arms, if you want to know. And sensitive soul Peter Paul didn’t like that. He didn’t care about the girl part, because as has already been noted, and can be safely placed on golden tablets Peter Paul was plenty girl-confused and girl-addled but girl-smitten in his funny way. What got him in a snit was that Billie was neglecting his corner boy king duty to be on hand with his boys at all available times. Well, this one night the words flew as Billie tired, easily tired, of Peter Paul’s ravings on the subject. And here is the beauty of the thing, the thing that made Billie the king corner boy contender. No fists, no fumings, no forget friendships. Not necessary. Billie just told Peter Paul this- “You can have my cast-offs.” Meaning, of course, the extra girls that Billie didn’t want, or were sticks, or just didn’t appeal to him. “Deal,” cried Peter Paul in a flash. Ya, that was corner boy magic. And you know what? After that Peter Paul became something like Johnson’s Boswell and really started building up Billie as the exemplar corner boy king. Nice work, Billie.
You know Freddie Jackson too took his shots but was strictly out of his league against the Billie. Here it was a question not of facts, or books, or some other cranky thing bought off, bought off easily, by dangling girls in front of a guy a la Peter Paul but of trying to out dance Billie. See Freddie, whatever else his shortcomings, mainly not being very bright and not being able to keep his hands out of his mother’s pocketbook when he needed dough so that he had to stay in many nights, worst many summer nights, could really dance. What Freddie didn’t know, and nobody was going to tell him, nobody, from Peter Paul on down if they wanted to hang with Billie was that Billie had some great dance moves along with that good and growing singing voice. See, Freddie never got to go to the school or church dances and only knew that Billie was an ace singer. But while Freddie was tied to the house he became addicted to American Bandstand and so through osmosis, maybe, got some pretty good moves too.
So at one after-school dance, at a time when Freddie had kept his hands out of his mother’s pocketbook long enough not to be house-bound, he made his big move challenge. He called Billie out. Not loud, not overbearing but everybody knew the score once they saw Freddie’s Eddie Cochran-style suit. The rest of the guys (except Billie, now wearing jeans and tee-shirt when not on stage in local talent contests where such attire got you no where) were in chinos (Peter Paul in black-cuffed chinos, as usual) and white shirts, or some combination like that, so Freddie definitely meant business. Freddie said, “If I beat you at dancing I’m running the gang, okay?” (See corner boys was what those professors and news hawks called them but every neighborhood guy, young or old, knew, knew without question, who led, and who was in, or not in, every, well, gang). Billie, always at the ready when backed up against the wall, said simply, “Deal.” Freddie came out with about five minutes of jitter buggery, Danny and the Juniors At The Hop kind of moves. He got plenty of applause and some moony-eyedness from the younger girls (the stick girls who were always moony-eyed until they were not stick girls any more).
Billie came sauntering out, tee-shirt rolled up, tight jeans staying tight and just started to do the stroll as the song of the same name, The Stroll, came on. Now the stroll is a line dance kind of thing but Billie is out there all by himself and making moves, sexual-ladened moves, although not everybody watching would have known to call them that. And those moves have all the girls, sticks and shapes, kind of glassy-eyed with that look like maybe Billie needed a partner, or something and why not me look. Even Freddie knew he was doomed and took his lost pretty well, although he still had that hankering for mom’s purse that kept him from being a real regular corner boy when Billie got the thing seriously organized.
Funny thing, Lefty Wright, who actually was on the dance floor the night of the Freddie-Billie dance-off, pushed Billie with the Freddie challenge. And Freddie was twenty times a better dancer than Lefty. Needless to say, join the ranks, Lefty. Canny Danny O’Toole (Cool Donna O’Toole’s, a stick flame of Billie’s, early Billie, brother) was a more serious matter but after a couple of actions (actions best left unspecified) he fell in line. Billie, kind of wiry, kind of quick-fisted as it turned out, and not a guy quick to take offense knew, like a lot of wiry guys, how to handle himself without lots of advertising of that fact. He was going to need that fist-skill when the most serious, more serious than the Canny Danny situation came up. And it did with Badass Bobby Riley, Badass was a known quality, but he was a year older than the others and everybody knew was a certified psychopath who eventually drifted out of sight. Although not before swearing his fealty to Billie. After taking a Billie, a wiry Billie, beating the details of which also need no going into now. And there were probably others who stepped up for a minute, or who didn’t stay long enough to test their metal. Loosey Goosey Hughes, Butternut Walsh, Jimmy Riley (no relation to Badass), Five Fingers Kelly, Kenny Ricco, Billy Bruno, and on and on.
But such was the way of Billie’s existence. He drew a fair share of breaks, for a project kid, got some notice for his singing although not enough to satisfy his huge hunger, his way out, he way out of the projects, projects that had his name written all over them(and the rest of his boys too). And then he didn’t draw some breaks after a while, got known as a hard boy, a hard corner boy when corner boy was going out of style and also his bluesy rockabilly singing style was getting crushed by clean-cut, no hassle, no hell-raising boy boys. And then he started drawing to an outside straight, first a couple frame juvenile clip busts, amid the dreaded publicity, the Roman Catholic mother novena dread publicity, police blottered. Then a couple of house break-ins, taking fall guy lumps for a couple of older, harder corner boys who could make him a fall guy then, as he would others when his turn came. All that was later, a couple of years later. But no question in 1958, especially the summer of 1958 when such things took on a decisive quality, Billie, and for one last time, that’s William James Bradley, in case anyone reading needs the name to look up for the historical record was Billie's time. Ya, 1958, Billie, ah, William James Bradley, and corner boy king.
Funny, as you know, or you should know, corner boys usually gain their fleeting fame from actually hanging around corners, corner mom and pop variety stores, corner pizza parlors, corner pool halls, corner bowling alleys, corner pinball wizard arcades, becoming fixtures at said corners and maybe passing on to old age and social security check collection at said corner. Or maybe not passing to old age but to memory, memory kid’s memory. But feature this, in Billie’s great domain, his great be-bop night kingship, and in his various defenses of his realm against smart guys and stups alike, he never saw so much as a corner corner to rest his laurels on. And not because he did not know that proper etiquette in such matters required some formal corner to hang at but for the sheer, unadulterated fact that no such corner existed in his old-fashioned housing project (now old-fashioned anyway because they make such places differently today), his home base.
See, the guys who made the projects “forgot” that, down and out or not, people need at least a mom and pop variety store to shop at, or nowadays maybe a strip mall, just like everybody else. But none was ever brought into the place and so the closest corner, mom and pop corner anyway, was a couple of miles away up the road. But that place was held by a crowd of older corner boys whose leader, from what was said, would have had Billie for lunch (and did in the end).
But see here is where a guy like Billie got his corner boy franchise anyway. In a place where there are no corners to be king of the corner boy night there needs to be a certain ingenuity and that is where “His Honor” held forth. Why not the back of the old schoolhouse? Well, not so old really because in that mad post-World War II boom night (no pun intended), schools, particularly convenient elementary schools even for projects
kids were outracing the boomers. So the school itself was not old but the height of 1950s high-style, functional public building brick and glass. Boxed, of course, building-boxed, classroom-boxed, gym-boxed, library-ditto boxed. No cafeteria-boxed, none necessary reflecting, oddly, walk to school, walk home for lunch, stay-at-home mom childhood culture even in public assistance housing world. And this for women who could have, if they could have stood the gaff from neighbor wives, family wives, society wives screamed to high heaven for work, money work. That was Billie world too, Billie day world. Billie September to June world.
But come dusk, summer dusk best of all, Billie ruled the back end of the school, the quiet unobserved end of the school, the part near the old sailors’ graveyard, placed there to handle the tired old sailors who had finished up residing at the nearby but then no longer used Old Sailors’ Rest Home built for those who roamed the seven seas, the inlet bays, and whatever other water allowed you to hang in the ancient sailors’ world. There Billie held forth, Peter Paul almost always at hand, seeking, always seeking refuge from his hellfire home thrashings. Canny Danny, regularly, same with Lefty and Freddie (when not grounded), and Bobby while he was around. And other guys, other unnamed, maybe unnamable guys who spent a minute in the Billie night. Doing? Ya, just doing some low murmur talking, most nights, mostly some listening to Billie dreams, Billie plans, Billie escape route. All sounding probable, all wistful once you heard about it later. All very easy, all very respectful, in back of that old school unless some old nag of a neighbor, fearful that the low murmur spoke of unknown, unknowable conspiracies against person, against the day, hell, even against the night. Then the cops were summoned. But mainly not.
And then as dusk turned to dark and maybe a moon, an earth moon (who knew then, without telescope, maybe a man-made moon), that soft talk, that soft night talk, turned to a low song throat sound as Billie revved up his voice to some tune his maddened brain caught on his transistor radio (bought fair and square up at the Radio Shack so don’t get all huffy about it). Say maybe Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers Why Do Fools Fall In Love? and then the other ragamuffins would do harmony. Ya, that was twelve, maybe thirteen year old night, most nights, the nights of no rough stuff, the nights of dreams, maybe. But like some ancient siren call that sound penetrated to the depths of the projects and soon a couple of girls, yes, girls, twelve and thirteen year old girls, what do you expect, stick girls and starting shape girls, would hover nearby, maybe fifty yards away but the electricity was in the air, and those hardly made out forms drove Billie and his choir corner boys on. Maybe Elvis’ One Night as a come on. Then a couple more girls, yes, twelve and thirteen year old girls, have you been paying attention, sticks and starting shapes, join those others quietly swaying to the tempo. A few more songs, a few more girls, girls coming closer. Break time. Girl meet boy. Boy meet girl. Hell, even Peter Paul got lucky this night with one of Billie’s stick rejects. And as that moon turned its shades out and the air was fragrance with nature’s marshlands sea air smells and girls’ fresh soap smells and boys’ anxiety smells the Billie corner boy wannabe world seemed not so bad. Ya, 1958 was Billie’s year. Got it.
He was the first. A certified 1958 A-One prime custom model first. Yes, Billie was the first. Billie, William James Bradley that is if you did not know his full moniker, was the first. No question about it, no controversy, no alternate candidates, no hemming and hawing agonizing about this guy’s attributes or that guy’s style and how they lined up against Billie’s shine in order to pick a winner. No way, get it. Billie, first in what anyway? Billie, first, see, first in line of the then ever sprouting young schoolboy king corner boy wannabes. Wannabes because the weres, the corner boy weres, the already king corner boy weres, the older, mainly not schoolboys or, christ, not for long schoolboys, mainly not working, jesus, mainly not working, mainly just hanging around (laying about was a name for it, a fit name at that) were already playing, really hip-swaying, lazily hip-swaying if you wanted to win games, wizard pinball machines in the sacred corner boy small town mom and pop variety night or cueing up in some smoke-filled big town pool hall.
Or working on hot souped-up cars, a touch of grease pressed, seemingly decaled pressed, into their uniform white tee-shirts (no vee-necks need apply) and always showed, showed an oily speck anyway, on their knuckles. But the cars were to die for, sleek tail-finned, pray to god cherry red if you put the finish on right (no going to some hack paint shop, no way, not for this baby, not for that ’57 Chevy), dual exhaust, big cubic engine numbers that no amateur had a clue to but just knew when sighted that thing would fly (well, almost fly) into the boulevard night, that sea air, sex-charged boulevard night. Tuned-up just right for that cheap gas to make her run, ya, that cheap City Service gas that was even cheaper than the stuff over at the Merit gas station, by two cents.
Or talking some boffo, usually blonde, although not always, maybe a cute rosy red-lipped and haired number or, in a pinch, a soft, sultry, svelte brunette, tight cashmere sweater-wearing, all, Capri pant-wearing, all, honey out of her virtue (or maybe into her virtue) down by the seashore after some carnival-filled night. A night that had been filled with arcade pinball wizardry, cotton candy, salt-water taffy, roller coaster rides, and a few trips in the tunnel of love, maybe win a prize from the wheel of fortune game too. A night capped with a few illicit drinks from some old tom, or johnny, Johnny Walker that is, rotgut to make that talking easier, and that virtue more questionable, into or out of. All while the ocean waves slap innocently against the shore, drowning out the night’s heavy breathed, hard-voiced sighs.
Or, get this, because it tells a lot about the byways and highways of the high-style corner boy steamy black and white 1950s night, preparing, with his boys, his trusted unto death boys, his omerta-sworn boys, no less to do some midnight creep (waylaying some poor bedraggled sap, sidewalk drunk or wrong neighborhooded, with a sap to the head for dough, or going through some back door, and not gently, to grab somebody’s family heirlooms or fungibles, better yet cash on hand) in order to maintain that hot car, cheap gas or not, or hot honey, virtuous or not. Ya, things cost then, as now.
And, ya, in 1958, in hard look 1958, those king hell corner boy weres already sucked up the noteworthy, attention-getting black and white television, black and white newsprint night air. Still the lines were long with candidates and the mom and pop variety store-anchored, soda fountain drugstore-anchored, pizza parlor-anchored, pool hall-anchored corners, such as they were, were plentiful in those pre-dawn mall days. But see that is the point, the point of those long lines of candidates in every burg in the land or, at least became the point, because in 1948, or 1938, or maybe even 1928 nobody gave a rat’s ass, or a damn, about corner boys except to shuffle them out of town on the first Greyhound bus.
Hell, in 1948 they were still in hiding from the war, whatever war it was that they wanted no part of, which might ruin their style, or their dough prospects. They were just getting into those old Nash jalopies, revving them up in the "chicken run" night out in the exotic west coast ocean night. In 1938 you did not need a Greyhound bus coming through your town because these guys were already on the hitchhike road, or were bindled-up in some railroad jungle, or getting cracked over the head by some “bull”, in the great depression whirlwind heading west for adventure, or hard-scrabble work. And in 1928 these hard boys were slugging it out, guns at the ready, in fast, prohibition liquor-load filled cars, and had no time for corners and silly corner pinball wizard games (although maybe they had time for running the rack at Gus’s pool hall, if they lived long enough).
That rarified, formerly subterranean corner boy way of life, was getting inspected, dissected, rejected, everything but neglected once the teen angst, teen alienation wave hit 1950s America. You heard some of the names, or thought you heard some of the names that counted, but they were just showboat celebrities, celebrities inhabiting Cornerboy, Inc. complete with stainless tee-shirt, neatly pressed denim jeans, maybe a smart leather jacket against the weather’s winds, unsmoked, unfiltered cigarettes at the ready, and incurably photogenic faces that every girl mother could love/hate.
Forget that. Down in the trenches, ya, down in the trenches is where the real corner boys lived, and lived without publicity most days, thank you. Guys like Red Hickey, tee-shirted, sure, denim-jeaned, sure, leather-jacketed, sure, chain-smoking (Lucky Strikes, natch), sure, angelic-faced, sure, who waylaid a guy, put him in an ambulance waylaid, just because he was a corner boy king from another cross-town corner who Red thought was trying to move in, or something like that. Or guys like Bruce “The Goose” McNeil, ditto shirted, jeaned, jacketed, smoked (Camels), faced who sneak-thieved his way through half of the old Adamsville houses taking nothing but high-end stuff from the swells. Or No Name McGee, corner boy king of the liquor store clip. Ya, and a hundred other guys, a hundred no name guys, except maybe to the cops, and to their distressed mothers, mainly old-time Irish and Italian novena-praying Catholic mothers, praying against that publicity day, the police blotter publicity day.
But you did not, I say, you did not hear those Hickey, McNeil, No Name stories in the big town newspapers or in some university faculty room when those guys zeroed in on the corner boy game trying to explain, like it was not plain as the naked eye to see, and why, all that angst and alienation. And then tried to tell one and all that corner boy was a phase, a minute thing, that plentiful America had an edge, like every civilized world from time immemorial had, where those who could not adjust, who could not decode the new American night, the odorless American night, the pre-lapsarian American night shifted for themselves in the shadows. Not to worry though it was a phase, just a phase, and these guys too will soon be thinking about that ticky-tack little white house with the picket fence.
Ya, but see, see again, just the talk through the grapevine about such guys as Red, The Goose, No Name, the legendary jewelry store clip artist, Brother Johnson (who set himself apart because he made a point of the fact that he didn’t smoke, smoke cigarettes anyway), and a whole host of guys who made little big names for themselves on the corners was enough to get guys like Billie, and not just primo candidate Billie either, hopped-up on the corner boy game. Ya, the corner boys whose very name uttered, whose very idea of a name uttered, whose very idea of a name thought up in some think-tank academy brain-dust, and whose very existence made a splash later (after it was all over, at least the public, publicity all over, part), excited every project schoolboy, every wrong side of the tracks guy (and it was always guys, babes were just for tangle), every short-cut dreaming boy who could read the day’s newspaper or watch some distended television, or knew someone who did.
And Billie was the first. The star of the Adamsville elementary schoolboy corner boy galaxy. No first among equals, or any such combination like that either, if that is what you are thinking. Alone. Oh sure his right-hand man, Peter Paul Markin, weak-kneed, bookwormy, girl-confused but girl-addled, took a run at Billie but that was seen, except maybe by Peter Paul himself, as a joke. Something to have a warm chuckle over on dreary nights when a laugh could not be squeezed out any other way. See, Peter Paul, as usual, had it all wrong on his figuring stuff. He thought his two thousand facts knowledge about books, and history, and current events, and maybe an off-hand science thing or two entitled, get this, entitled him to the crown. Like merit, or heredity, or whatever drove him to those two thousand facts meant diddly squat against style, and will.
Billie tried to straighten him out, gently at first, with a short comment that a guy who had no denim blue jeans, had no possibility of getting denim blue jeans, and was in any case addicted to black chinos, black cuffed chinos, has no chance of leading anybody, at any time, in anything. Still Peter Paul argued some nonsense about his organizing abilities. Like being able to run a low-rent bake sale for some foolish school trip, or to refurbish the U.S.S. Constitution, counted when real dough, real heist dough, for real adventures was needed. Peter simmered in high-grade pre-teen anguish for a while over that one, more than a while.
Billie and Peter Paul, friends since the first days of first grade, improbably friends on the face of it although Billie’s take on it was that Peter Paul made him laugh with that basketful of facts that he held on to like a king’s ransom, protecting them like they were gold or something, finally had it out one night. No, not a fist fight, see that was not really Billie’s way, not then anyway or at least not in this case, and Peter Paul was useless at fighting, except maybe with feisty paper bags or those blessed facts. Billie, who not only was a king corner contender but a very decent budding singer, rock and roll singer, had just recently lost some local talent show competition to a trio of girls who were doing a doo wop thing. That part was okay, the losing part, such things happen in show biz and even Billie recognized, recognized later, that those girls had be-bopped him with their cover of Eddie, My Love fair and square. Billie, who for that contest was dressed up in a Bill Haley-style jacket made by his mother for the occasion, did the classic Bill Haley and the Comets Rock- Around-The-Clock as his number. About halfway through though one of the arms of his just made suit came flying off. A few seconds later the other arm came off. And the girls, the coterie of Adamsville girls in the audience especially, went crazy. See they thought it was part of the act.
After that, at school and elsewhere, Billie was besieged daily by girls, and not just stick-shaped girls either, who hung off all his arms, if you want to know. And sensitive soul Peter Paul didn’t like that. He didn’t care about the girl part, because as has already been noted, and can be safely placed on golden tablets Peter Paul was plenty girl-confused and girl-addled but girl-smitten in his funny way. What got him in a snit was that Billie was neglecting his corner boy king duty to be on hand with his boys at all available times. Well, this one night the words flew as Billie tired, easily tired, of Peter Paul’s ravings on the subject. And here is the beauty of the thing, the thing that made Billie the king corner boy contender. No fists, no fumings, no forget friendships. Not necessary. Billie just told Peter Paul this- “You can have my cast-offs.” Meaning, of course, the extra girls that Billie didn’t want, or were sticks, or just didn’t appeal to him. “Deal,” cried Peter Paul in a flash. Ya, that was corner boy magic. And you know what? After that Peter Paul became something like Johnson’s Boswell and really started building up Billie as the exemplar corner boy king. Nice work, Billie.
You know Freddie Jackson too took his shots but was strictly out of his league against the Billie. Here it was a question not of facts, or books, or some other cranky thing bought off, bought off easily, by dangling girls in front of a guy a la Peter Paul but of trying to out dance Billie. See Freddie, whatever else his shortcomings, mainly not being very bright and not being able to keep his hands out of his mother’s pocketbook when he needed dough so that he had to stay in many nights, worst many summer nights, could really dance. What Freddie didn’t know, and nobody was going to tell him, nobody, from Peter Paul on down if they wanted to hang with Billie was that Billie had some great dance moves along with that good and growing singing voice. See, Freddie never got to go to the school or church dances and only knew that Billie was an ace singer. But while Freddie was tied to the house he became addicted to American Bandstand and so through osmosis, maybe, got some pretty good moves too.
So at one after-school dance, at a time when Freddie had kept his hands out of his mother’s pocketbook long enough not to be house-bound, he made his big move challenge. He called Billie out. Not loud, not overbearing but everybody knew the score once they saw Freddie’s Eddie Cochran-style suit. The rest of the guys (except Billie, now wearing jeans and tee-shirt when not on stage in local talent contests where such attire got you no where) were in chinos (Peter Paul in black-cuffed chinos, as usual) and white shirts, or some combination like that, so Freddie definitely meant business. Freddie said, “If I beat you at dancing I’m running the gang, okay?” (See corner boys was what those professors and news hawks called them but every neighborhood guy, young or old, knew, knew without question, who led, and who was in, or not in, every, well, gang). Billie, always at the ready when backed up against the wall, said simply, “Deal.” Freddie came out with about five minutes of jitter buggery, Danny and the Juniors At The Hop kind of moves. He got plenty of applause and some moony-eyedness from the younger girls (the stick girls who were always moony-eyed until they were not stick girls any more).
Billie came sauntering out, tee-shirt rolled up, tight jeans staying tight and just started to do the stroll as the song of the same name, The Stroll, came on. Now the stroll is a line dance kind of thing but Billie is out there all by himself and making moves, sexual-ladened moves, although not everybody watching would have known to call them that. And those moves have all the girls, sticks and shapes, kind of glassy-eyed with that look like maybe Billie needed a partner, or something and why not me look. Even Freddie knew he was doomed and took his lost pretty well, although he still had that hankering for mom’s purse that kept him from being a real regular corner boy when Billie got the thing seriously organized.
Funny thing, Lefty Wright, who actually was on the dance floor the night of the Freddie-Billie dance-off, pushed Billie with the Freddie challenge. And Freddie was twenty times a better dancer than Lefty. Needless to say, join the ranks, Lefty. Canny Danny O’Toole (Cool Donna O’Toole’s, a stick flame of Billie’s, early Billie, brother) was a more serious matter but after a couple of actions (actions best left unspecified) he fell in line. Billie, kind of wiry, kind of quick-fisted as it turned out, and not a guy quick to take offense knew, like a lot of wiry guys, how to handle himself without lots of advertising of that fact. He was going to need that fist-skill when the most serious, more serious than the Canny Danny situation came up. And it did with Badass Bobby Riley, Badass was a known quality, but he was a year older than the others and everybody knew was a certified psychopath who eventually drifted out of sight. Although not before swearing his fealty to Billie. After taking a Billie, a wiry Billie, beating the details of which also need no going into now. And there were probably others who stepped up for a minute, or who didn’t stay long enough to test their metal. Loosey Goosey Hughes, Butternut Walsh, Jimmy Riley (no relation to Badass), Five Fingers Kelly, Kenny Ricco, Billy Bruno, and on and on.
But such was the way of Billie’s existence. He drew a fair share of breaks, for a project kid, got some notice for his singing although not enough to satisfy his huge hunger, his way out, he way out of the projects, projects that had his name written all over them(and the rest of his boys too). And then he didn’t draw some breaks after a while, got known as a hard boy, a hard corner boy when corner boy was going out of style and also his bluesy rockabilly singing style was getting crushed by clean-cut, no hassle, no hell-raising boy boys. And then he started drawing to an outside straight, first a couple frame juvenile clip busts, amid the dreaded publicity, the Roman Catholic mother novena dread publicity, police blottered. Then a couple of house break-ins, taking fall guy lumps for a couple of older, harder corner boys who could make him a fall guy then, as he would others when his turn came. All that was later, a couple of years later. But no question in 1958, especially the summer of 1958 when such things took on a decisive quality, Billie, and for one last time, that’s William James Bradley, in case anyone reading needs the name to look up for the historical record was Billie's time. Ya, 1958, Billie, ah, William James Bradley, and corner boy king.
Funny, as you know, or you should know, corner boys usually gain their fleeting fame from actually hanging around corners, corner mom and pop variety stores, corner pizza parlors, corner pool halls, corner bowling alleys, corner pinball wizard arcades, becoming fixtures at said corners and maybe passing on to old age and social security check collection at said corner. Or maybe not passing to old age but to memory, memory kid’s memory. But feature this, in Billie’s great domain, his great be-bop night kingship, and in his various defenses of his realm against smart guys and stups alike, he never saw so much as a corner corner to rest his laurels on. And not because he did not know that proper etiquette in such matters required some formal corner to hang at but for the sheer, unadulterated fact that no such corner existed in his old-fashioned housing project (now old-fashioned anyway because they make such places differently today), his home base.
See, the guys who made the projects “forgot” that, down and out or not, people need at least a mom and pop variety store to shop at, or nowadays maybe a strip mall, just like everybody else. But none was ever brought into the place and so the closest corner, mom and pop corner anyway, was a couple of miles away up the road. But that place was held by a crowd of older corner boys whose leader, from what was said, would have had Billie for lunch (and did in the end).
But see here is where a guy like Billie got his corner boy franchise anyway. In a place where there are no corners to be king of the corner boy night there needs to be a certain ingenuity and that is where “His Honor” held forth. Why not the back of the old schoolhouse? Well, not so old really because in that mad post-World War II boom night (no pun intended), schools, particularly convenient elementary schools even for projects
kids were outracing the boomers. So the school itself was not old but the height of 1950s high-style, functional public building brick and glass. Boxed, of course, building-boxed, classroom-boxed, gym-boxed, library-ditto boxed. No cafeteria-boxed, none necessary reflecting, oddly, walk to school, walk home for lunch, stay-at-home mom childhood culture even in public assistance housing world. And this for women who could have, if they could have stood the gaff from neighbor wives, family wives, society wives screamed to high heaven for work, money work. That was Billie world too, Billie day world. Billie September to June world.
But come dusk, summer dusk best of all, Billie ruled the back end of the school, the quiet unobserved end of the school, the part near the old sailors’ graveyard, placed there to handle the tired old sailors who had finished up residing at the nearby but then no longer used Old Sailors’ Rest Home built for those who roamed the seven seas, the inlet bays, and whatever other water allowed you to hang in the ancient sailors’ world. There Billie held forth, Peter Paul almost always at hand, seeking, always seeking refuge from his hellfire home thrashings. Canny Danny, regularly, same with Lefty and Freddie (when not grounded), and Bobby while he was around. And other guys, other unnamed, maybe unnamable guys who spent a minute in the Billie night. Doing? Ya, just doing some low murmur talking, most nights, mostly some listening to Billie dreams, Billie plans, Billie escape route. All sounding probable, all wistful once you heard about it later. All very easy, all very respectful, in back of that old school unless some old nag of a neighbor, fearful that the low murmur spoke of unknown, unknowable conspiracies against person, against the day, hell, even against the night. Then the cops were summoned. But mainly not.
And then as dusk turned to dark and maybe a moon, an earth moon (who knew then, without telescope, maybe a man-made moon), that soft talk, that soft night talk, turned to a low song throat sound as Billie revved up his voice to some tune his maddened brain caught on his transistor radio (bought fair and square up at the Radio Shack so don’t get all huffy about it). Say maybe Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers Why Do Fools Fall In Love? and then the other ragamuffins would do harmony. Ya, that was twelve, maybe thirteen year old night, most nights, the nights of no rough stuff, the nights of dreams, maybe. But like some ancient siren call that sound penetrated to the depths of the projects and soon a couple of girls, yes, girls, twelve and thirteen year old girls, what do you expect, stick girls and starting shape girls, would hover nearby, maybe fifty yards away but the electricity was in the air, and those hardly made out forms drove Billie and his choir corner boys on. Maybe Elvis’ One Night as a come on. Then a couple more girls, yes, twelve and thirteen year old girls, have you been paying attention, sticks and starting shapes, join those others quietly swaying to the tempo. A few more songs, a few more girls, girls coming closer. Break time. Girl meet boy. Boy meet girl. Hell, even Peter Paul got lucky this night with one of Billie’s stick rejects. And as that moon turned its shades out and the air was fragrance with nature’s marshlands sea air smells and girls’ fresh soap smells and boys’ anxiety smells the Billie corner boy wannabe world seemed not so bad. Ya, 1958 was Billie’s year. Got it.
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