Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call themselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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Markin comment October 22, 2011
As part of my comment, dated October 20, 2011, I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the “new world” we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one. In that sense previous historical models come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
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Markin comment October 26, 2011:
Recently (see October 22, 2011 comment above) I noted the following while arguing for the General Assembly concept as a form of alternate government using historic examples like the Paris Commune (1871), the early Soviets in Russia (1905 and 1917), and early antifascist militias in the Spanish Civil War (1936-37:
“However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.”
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started the series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
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The True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649)-Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers
Note on the e-text: this Renascence Editions text was transcribed by Sandra Jones from the text of the 1649 tract. This edition is in the public domain. Content unique to this presentation is copyright © 2002 The University of Oregon. For nonprofit and educational uses only. Send comments and corrections to the Publisher.
The True Levellers Standard A D V A N C E D :O R,The State of Community opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men.
By
William Everard,
Iohn Palmer,
Iohn South,
Iohn Courton.
William Taylor,
Christopher Clifford,
Iohn Barker. Ferrard Winstanley,
Richard Goodgroome,
Thomas Starre,
William Hoggrill,
Robert Sawyer,
Thomas Eder,
Henry Bickerstaffe,
Iohn Taylor, &c.
Beginning to Plant and Manure the Waste land upon
George-Hill, in the Parish of Walton, in the
County of Surrey.
____________________________________
L O N D O N,
Printed in the Yeer, M D C X L I X.
____________________________________
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To all my fellow Creatures that shall view these ensuing Lines.
HE God of this world blinding the eyes of the men of the world, have taken possession of them and their Lives, Rules and Raigns, and in a high measure opposeth the everlasting spirit, the King of Righteousness; both in them, and on the whole Creation, bending all its Wit and power to destroy this spirit, and the persons in whom it lives, rules and governs; making Lawes under specious pretences, yea and penalties too, that all Nations, Tongues and Languages, shall fall down and worship this god, become subject, yea in slavery to it, and to the men in whom it dwels: But the god of this world is Pride and Covetousness, the rootes of all Evil, from whence flowes all the Wickedness that is acted under the Sun, as Malice, Tyranny, Lording over, and despising their fellow Creatures, killing and destroying those that will not, or cannot become subject to their Tyranny, to uphold their Lordly Power, Pride and Covetousness. I have had some Conversation with the Authour of this ensuing Declaration, and the Persons Subscribing, and by experience find them sweetly acted and guided by the everlasting spirit, the Prince of Peace, to walk in the paths of Righteousness, not daring to venture upon any acts of injustice, but endeavouring to do unto all, as they would have done to them, having Peace and Joy in themselves, knit together and united in one Spirit of Glory and Truth, Love to their fellow Creatures, Contentation with Food and Rayment, shewing much Humility and Meekness of spirit; such as these shall be partakers of the Promise.
Blessed are the Meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.
Secondly, For this action of theirs, in labouring to Manure the wast places of the Earth, it is an action full of Iustice and Righteousnesse, full of Love and Charity to their fellow Creatures; nothing of the god of this world, Pride and Covetousnesse seen in it, no self seeking, or glorying in the Flesh.
Vouchsafe to reade, or view over these ensuing Lines yee Powers of the Earth; Oh that Reason might sit upon the throne of your hearts as Iudge; I am confident there is nothing written in anger or hatred to your persons, but in love to them as fellow Creatures; but against that which have bound up your own Spirits in slavery; if you could speak impartially, your own Consciences can bear me witnesse, and only bears sway in your forcing you to exercise Tyranny, scourging and trampling underfoot your fellow Creatures, especially those whose eyes are opened and can cleerly discover the great Devil, Tyranny, Pride and Covetousnesse working to and fro upon your Spirits, and raigning in you, which will prove your own destruction: The Angels that kept not their first Estate, are reserved under Chains of darknesse unto the Iudgment of the great day.
The whole Creation are the Angels of the everlasting Spirit of Righteousnesse, they are all ministring spirits, speaking every Creature in its kind the Will of the Father. The Chariots of God are 20000 thousands of Angels, Psal.&c.
But yee the great ones of the Earth, the Powers of this world, yee are the Angels that kept not your first estate; and now remain under Chains of darknesse: Your first Estate was Innocency and Equallity with your fellow Creatures, but your Lordly power over them, both Persons and Consciences, your proud fleshly imaginations, lofty thoughts of your selves, are the fruits of darknesse which you are kept under: The whole Creation groaneth and is in bondage, even until now, waiting for deliverance, and must wait till he that with-holdeth be taken away, that man of sin, that Antichrist which sits on the throne, in the hearts of the men of this world, the Powers of the Earth, above all that is called God.
I know you have high thoughts of your selves, think you know much, and see much, but the Light that is in you is Darknesse; and how great is that darknesse? They that live in the light of the Spirit can discover that to be the blacknesse of darknesse which you count light. And truly, a great Light, a bright Morning Star which will flourish and spread it self, shining in Darknesse, and darknesse shall not be able to comprehend it, though you Spurn never so much against it.
I expect nothing but opposition, mockings, deridings from Lord Esau the man of Flesh: I know it will be counted in the eye of Flesh, a foolish undertaking, an object of scorn and laughter; but in this is their Comfort and incouragement, That the power of Life and Light, the Spirit by whom they are commanded, will carry them on, strengthen and support them, rescuing them from the Jaw of the Lyon and Paw of the Bear; For great is the work which will shortly be done upon the Earth. Despise not Visions, Voyces and Revelations; examine the Scriptures, Prophecies are now fulfilling; be not like Josephs Brethren, speak not evil of things you know not: For whatsoever is of God will stand, do what you can, though you may crush it for a time, the time is neer expired it will spring up again and flourish like a green Bay tree:What is not of the Father will fall to the ground, though you bend all your wit, power and policy to keep it up; but of that will be no Resurrection. That the eternal Spirit may enlighten you, that Reason may dwel in you, and act accordingly, is the desire of your Loving Friend, and Fellow Creature,
April 20,
1649 J O H N T A Y L O R.
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A Declaration to the Powers of England, and to all the Powers of the World, Shewing the Cause why the Common People of England have begun, and gives Consent to Digge up, Manure, and Sowe Corn upon George-Hill in Surrey; by these that have Subscribed, and thousands more that gives Consent.
N the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to preserve Beasts,Birds,Fishes, and Man, the lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another.
And the Reason is this, Every single man, Male and Female, is a perfect Creature of himself; and the same Spirit that made the Globe, dwels in man to govern the Globe;so that the flesh of man being subject to Reason, his Maker, hath him to be his Teacher and Ruler within himself, therefore needs not run abroad after any Teacher and Ruler without him, for he needs not that any man should teach him, for the same Anoynting that ruled in the Son of man, teacheth him all things.
But since humane flesh (that king of Beasts) began to delight himself in the objects of the Creation, more then in the Spirit Reason and Righteousness, who manifests himself to be the indweller in the Five Sences, of Hearing, Seeing, Tasting, Smelling, Feeling; then he fell into blindness of mind and weakness of heart, and runs abroad for a Teacher and Ruler: And so selfish imaginations taking possession of the Five Sences, and ruling as King in the room of Reason therein, and working with Covetousnesse, did set up one man to teach and rule over another; and thereby the Spirit was killed, and man was brought into bondage, and became a greater Slave to such of his own kind, then the Beasts of the field were to him.
And hereupon, The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonored, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting in the comfortable Livelihood of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others. From the beginning it was not so.
But this coming in of Bondage, is called A-dam, because this ruling and teaching power without, doth dam up the Spirit of Peace and Liberty; First within the heart, by filling it with slavish fears of others. Secondly without, by giving the bodies of one to be imprisoned, punished and oppressed by the outward power of another. And this evil was brought upon us through his own Covetousnesse, whereby he is blinded and made weak, and sees not the Law of Righteousnesse in his heart, which is the pure light of Reason, but looks abroad for it, and thereby the Creation is cast under bondage and curse, and the Creator is sleighted; First by the Teachers and Rulers that sets themselves down in the Spirits room, to teach and rule, where he himself is only King. Secondly by the other, that refuses the Spirit, to be taught and governed by fellow Creatures, and this was called Israels Sin, in casting off the Lord, and chusing Saul, one like themselves to be their King, when as they had the same Spirit of Reason and government in themselves, as he had, if they were but subject. And Israels rejecting of outward teachers and rulers to embrace the Lord, and to be all taught and ruled by that righteous King, that Jeremiah Prophesied shall rule in the new Heavens and new Earth in the latter dayes, will be their Restauration from bondage, Jer.23.5,6
But for the present state of the old World that is running up like parchment in the fire, and wearing away, we see proud Imaginary flesh, which is the wise Serpent, rises up in flesh and gets dominion in some to rule over others, and so forces one part of the Creation man, to be a slave to another; and thereby the Spirit is killed in both. The one looks upon himself as a teacher and ruler, and so is lifted up in pride over his fellow Creature:The other looks upon himself as imperfect, and so is dejected in his Spirit, and looks upon his fellow Creature of his own Image, as a Lord above him.
And thus Esau, the man of flesh, which is Covetousness and Pride, hath killed Jacob, the Spirit of meeknesse, and righteous government in the light of Reason, and rules over him: And so the Earth that was made a common Treasury for all to live comfortably upon, is become through mans unrighteous actions one over another, to be a place, wherein one torments another.
Now the great Creator, who is the Spirit Reason, suffered himself thus to be rejected, and troden under foot by the covetous proud flesh, for a certain time limited; therefore saith he, The Seed out of whom the Creation did proceed, which is my Self, shall bruise this Serpents head, and restore my Creation again from this curse and bondage; and when I the King of Righteousnesse raigns in every man, I will be the blessing of the Earth, and the joy of all Nations.
And since the coming in of the stoppage, or the A-dam, the Earth hath been inclosed and given to the Elder brother Esau, or man of flesh, and hath been bought and sold from one to another; and Jacob, or the yonger brother, that is to succeed or come forth next, who is the universal spreading power of righteousnesse that gives liberty to the whole Creation, is made a servant.
And this Elder Son, or man of bondage, hath held the Earth in bondage to himself, not by a meek Law of Righteousnesse, But by subtle selfish Councels, and by open and violent force; for wherefore is it that there is such Wars and rumours of Wars in the Nations of the Earth? and wherefore are men so mad to destroy one another? But only to uphold Civil propriety of Honor, Dominion and Riches one over another, which is the curse the Creation groans under, waiting for deliverance.
But when once the Earth becomes a Common Treasury again, as it must, for all the Prophesies of Scriptures and Reason are Circled here in the Community, and mankind must have the Law of Righteousnesse once more writ in his heart, and all must be made of one heart, and one mind.
Then this Enmity in all Lands will cease, for none shall dare to seek a Dominion over others, neither shall any dare to kill another, nor desire more of the Earth then another; for he that will rule over, imprison, oppresse, and kill his fellow Creatures, under what pretence soever, is a destroyer of the Creation, and an actor of the Curse, and walks contrary to the rule of righteousnesse: (Do, as you would have others do to you; and love your Enemies, not in Words, but in actions).
Therefore you powers of the Earth, or Lord Esau, the Elder brother, because you have appeared to rule the Creation, first take notice, That the power that sets you to work, is selfish Covetousnes, and an aspiring Pride, to live in glory and ease over Jacob, the meek Spirit, that is, the Seed that lies hid, in & among the poor Common People, or yonger Brother, out of whom the blessing of Deliverance is to rise and spring up to all Nations.
And Reason, the living king of righteousnesse, doth only look on, and lets thee alone,That whereas thou counts thy self an Angel of Light, thou shalt appear in the light of the Sun, to be a Devil, A- dam and the Curse that the Creation groans under; and the time is now come for thy downfal, and Jacob must rise, who is the universal Spirit of love and righteousnesse, that fils, and will fill all the Earth.
Thou teaching and ruling power of flesh, thou hast had three periods of time, to vaunt thy self over thy Brother; the first was from the time of thy coming in, called A-dam, or a stopage, till Moses came; and there thou that wast a self-lover in Cain, killed thy brother Abel, a plain-hearted man that loved righteousnesse: And thou by thy wisdom and beastly government, made the whole Earth to stinck, till Noah came, which was a time of the world, like the coming in of the watery Seed into the womb, towards the bringing forth of the man child.
And from Noah till Moses came, thou still hast ruled in vaunting, pride, and cruel oppression; Ishmael against Isaac, Esau against Jacob; for thou hast still been the man of flesh that hath ever persecuted the man of righteousnesse, the Spirit Reason.
And Secondly, From Moses till the Son of Man came, which was a time of the world, that the man child could not speak like a man, but lisping, making signs to shew his meaning; as we see many Creatures that cannot speak do. For Moses Law was a Language lapped up in Types, Sacrifices, Forms and Customs, which was a weak time. And in this time likewise, O thou teaching and ruling power, thou wast an oppressor; for look into Scriptures and see if Aaron and the Priests were not the first that deceived the people; and the Rulers, as Kings and Governors, were continually the Ocean-head, out of whose power, Burdens, Oppressions, and Poverty did flow out upon the Earth: and these two Powers still hath been the Curse, that hath led the Earth, mankind, into confusion and death by their imaginary and selfish teaching and ruling, and it could be no otherwise; for while man looks upon himself, as an imperfect Creation, and seeks and runs abroad for a teacher and a ruler, he is all this time a stranger to the Spirit that is within himself.
But though the Earth hath been generally thus in darknesse, since the A-dam rise up, and hath owned a Light, and a Law without them to walk by, yet some have been found as watchmen, in this night time of the world, that have been taught by the Spirit within them, and not by any flesh without them, as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the Prophets: And these, and such as these, have still been the Butt, at whom, the powers of the Earth in all ages of the world, by their selfish Laws, have shot their fury.
And then Thirdly from the time of the Son of man, which was a time that the man-child began to speak like a child growing upward to manhood, till now, that the Spirit is rising up in strength. O thou teaching and ruling power of the earthy man, thou hast been an oppressor, by imprisonment, impoverishing, and martyrdom; and all thy power and wit, hath been to make Laws, and execute them against such as stand for universal Liberty, which is the rising up of Jacob; as by those ancient enslaving Laws not yet blotted out; but held up as weapons against the man-child.
O thou Powers of England, though thou hast promised to make this People a Free People, yet thou hast so handled the matter, through thy self-seeking humour, That thou hast wrapped us up more in bondage, and oppression lies heavier upon us; not only bringing thy fellow Creatures, the Commoners, to a morsel of Bread, but by confounding all sorts of people by thy Government, of doing and undoing.
First, Thou hast made the people to take a Covenant and Oaths to endeavour a Reformation, and to bring in Liberty every man in his place; and yet while a man is in pursuing of that Covenant, he is imprisoned and oppressed by thy Officers, Courts and Justices, so called.
Thou hast made Ordinances to cast down Oppressing, Popish, Episcopal, Self-willed and Prerogative Laws; yet we see, That Self- wil and Prerogative power, is the great standing Law, that rules all in action, and others in words.
Thou hast made many promises and protestations to make the Land a Free Nation: And yet at this very day, the same people, to whom thou hast made such Protestations of Liberty, are oppressed by the Courts, Sizes, Sessions, by thy Justices and Clarks of the Peace, so called, Bayliffs, Committees, are imprisoned, and forced to spend that bread, that should save their lives from Famine.
And all this, Because they stand to maintain an universal Liberty and Freedom, which not only is our Birthright, which our Maker gave us, but which thou hast promised to restore unto us, from under the former oppressing Powers that are gone before, and which likewise we have bought with our Money, in Taxes, Free- quarter, and Bloud-shed; all which Sums thou hast received at our hands, and yet thou hast not given us our bargain.
O thou A-dam, thou Esau, thou Cain, thou Hypocritical man of flesh, when wilt thou cease to kill thy yonger Brother? Surely thou must not do this great Work of advancing the Creation out of Bondage; for thou art lost extremely, and drowned in the Sea of Covetousnesse, Pride and hardness of heart. The blessing shall rise out of the dust which thou treadest under foot, Even the poor despised People, and they shall hold up Salvation to this Land, and to all Lands, and thou shalt be ashamed.
Our bodies as yet are in thy hand, our Spirit waits in quiet and peace, upon our Father for Deliverance; and if he give our Bloud into thy hand, for thee to spill, know this, That he is our Almighty Captain: And if some of you will not dare to shed your bloud, to maintain Tyranny and Oppression upon the Creation, know this, That our Bloud and Life shall not be unwilling to be delivered up in meekness to maintain universal Liberty, that so the Curse on our part may be taken off the Creation.
And we shall not do this through force of Arms, we abhorre it, For that is the work of the Midianites to kill one another; But by obeying the Lord of Hosts, who hath Revealed himself in us, and to us, by labouring the Earth in righteousness together, to eate our bread with the sweat of our brows, neither giving hire, nor taking hire, but working together, and eating together, as one man, or as one house of Israel restored from Bondage; and so by the power of Reason, the Law of righteousness in us, we endeavour to lift up the Creation from that bondage of Civil Propriety, which it groans under.
We are made to hold forth this Declaration to you that are the Great Councel, and to you the Great Army of the Land of England, that you may know what we would have, and what you are bound to give us by your Covenants and Promises; and that you may joyn with us in this Work, and so find Peace. Or else, if you do oppose us, we have peace in our Work, and in declaring this Report: And you shall be left without excuse.
The work we are going about is this, To dig up Georges Hill and the waste Ground thereabouts, and to Sow Corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our brows. And the First Reason is this, That we may work in righteousness, and lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the Land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth, according to the Reason that rules in the Creation. Not Inclosing any part into any particular hand, but all as one man, working together, and feeding together as Sons of one Father, members of one Family; not one Lording over another, but all looking upon each other, as equals in the Creation; so that our Maker may be glorified in the work of his own hands, and that every one may see, he is no respecter of Persons, but equally loves his whole Creation, and hates nothing but the Serpent, which is Covetousness, branching forth into selfish Imagination, Pride, Envie, Hypocrisie, Uncleanness; all seeking the ease and honor of flesh, and fighting against the Spirit Reason that made the Creation; for that is the Corruption, the Curse, the Devil, the Father of Lies; Death and Bondage that Serpent and Dragon that the Creation is to be delivered from.
And we are moved hereunto for that Reason, and others which hath been shewed us, both by Vision, Voyce and Revelation.
For it is shewed us, That so long as we, or any other, doth own the Earth to be the peculiar Interest of Lords and Landlords, and not common to others as well as them, we own the Curse, and holds the Creation under bondage; and so long as we or any other doth own Landlords and Tennants, for one to call the Land his, or another to hire it of him, or for one to give hire, and for another to work for hire; this is to dishonour the work of Creation; as if the righteous Creator should have respect to persons, and therefore made the Earth for some, and not for all: And so long as we, or any other maintain this Civil Propriety, we consent still to hold the Creation down under that bondage it groans under, and so we should hinder the work of Restoration, and sin against Light, that is given into us, and so through the fear of the flesh man, lose our peace.
And that this Civil Propriety is the Curse, is manifest thus, Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandments, Thou shalt not steal, or kill.
First by their Oppression. They have by their subtle imaginary and covetous wit, got the plain-hearted poor, or yonger Brethren to work for them, for small wages, and by their work have got a great increase; for the poor by their labour lifts up Tyrants to rule over them; or else by their covetous wit, they have out- reached the plain-hearted in Buying and Selling, and thereby inriched themselves, but impoverished others: or else by their subtile wit, having been a lifter up into places of Trust, have inforced people to pay Money for a Publick use, but have divided much of it into their private purses; and so have got it by Oppression.
Then Secondly for Murther; They have by subtile wit and power, pretended to preserve a people in safety by the power of the Sword; and what by large Pay, much Free-quarter, and other Booties, which they call their own, they get much Monies, and with this they buy Land, and become landlords; and if once Landlords, then they rise to be Justices, Rulers and State Governours, as experience shewes: But all this is but a bloudy and subtile Theevery, countenanced by a Law that Covetousness made; and is a breach of the Seventh Commandement, Thou shalt not kill.
And likewise Thirdly a breach of the Eighth Commandment, Thou shalt not steal; but these landlords have thus stoln the Earth from their fellow Creatures, that have an equal share with them, by the Law of Reason and Creation, as well as they.
And such as there rise up to be rich in the objects of the Earth; then by their plausible words of flattery to the plain-hearted people, whom they deceive, and that lies under confusion and blindness: They are lifted up to be Teachers, Rulers and Law makers over them that lifted them up; as if the Earth were made peculiarly for them, and not for others weal: If you cast your eye a little backward, you shall see, That this outward Teaching and Ruling power, is the Babylonish yoke laid upon Israel of old, under Nebuchadnezzar; and so Successively from that time, the Conquering Enemy, have still laid these yokes upon Israel to keep Jacob down: And the last enslaving Conquest which the Enemy got over Israel, was the Norman over England; and from that time, Kings, Lords, Judges, Justices, Bayliffs, and the violent bitter people that are Free-holders, are and have been Successively. The Norman Bastard William himself, his Colonels, Captains, inferiour Officers, and Common Souldiers, who still are from that time to this day in pursuite of that victory, Imprisoning, Robbing, and killing the poor enslaved English Israelites.
And this appears cleer, For when any Trustee or State Officer is to be Chosen, The Free-holders or Landlords must be the Chusers, who are the Norman Common Souldiers, spred abroad in the Land; And who must be Chosen? but some very rich man, who is the Successor of the Norman Colonels or high Officers. And to what end have they been thus Chosen ? but to Establish that Norman power the more forcibly over the enslaved English, and to beat them down again, when as they gather heart to seek for Liberty.
For what are all those Binding and Restraining Laws that have been made from one Age to another since that Conquest, and are still upheld by Furie over the People? I say, What are they? but the Cords, Bands, Manacles, and Yokes that the enslaved English, like Newgate Prisoners, wears upon their hands and legs as they walk the streets; by which those Norman Oppressors, and these their Successors from Age to Age have enslaved the poor People by, killed their yonger Brother, and would not suffer Iacob to arise.
O what mighty Delusion, do you, who are the powers of England live in! That while you pretend to throw down that Norman yoke, and Babylonish power, and have promised to make the groaning people of England a Free People; yet you still lift up that Norman yoke, and slavish Tyranny, and holds the People as much in Bondage, as the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War.
Take notice, That England is not a Free People, till the Poor that have no land, have a free allowance to dig and labour the Commons, and so live as Comfortably as the Landlords that live in their Inclosures. For the People have not laid out their Monies, and shed their Bloud, that their Landlords, the Norman power, should still have its liberty and freedom to rule in Tyranny in his Lords, landlords, Judges, Justices, Bayliffs, and State Servants; but that the Oppressed might be set Free, Prison doors opened, and the Poor peoples hearts comforted by an universal Consent of making the Earth a Common Treasury, that they may live together as one House of Israel, united in brotherly love into one Spirit; and having a comfortable livelihood in the Community of one Earth their Mother.
If you look through the Earth, you shall see, That the landlords, Teachers and Rulers, are Oppressors, Murtherers, and Theeves in this manner; But it was not thus from the Beginning. And this is one Reason of our digging and labouring the Earth one with another, That we might work in righteousness and lift up the Creation from bondage: For so long as we own Landlords in this Corrupt Settlement, we cannot work in righteousness; for we should still lift up the Curse, and tread down the Creation, dishonour the Spirit of universal Liberty, and hinder the work of Restauration.
Secondly, In that we begin to Digge upon George-Hill, to eate our Bread together by righteous labour, and sweat of our browes; It was shewed us by Vision in Dreams, and out of Dreams, That that should be the Place we should begin upon. And though that Earth in view of Flesh, be very barren, yet we should trust the Spirit for a blessing. And that not only this Common, or Heath should be taken in and Manured by the People, but all the Commons and waste Ground in England and in the whole World, shall be taken in by the People in righteousness, not owning any Propriety; but taking the Earth to be a Common Treasury, as it was first made for all.
Thirdly, It is shewed us, That all the Prophecies, Visions and Revelations of Scriptures, of Prophets, and Apostles, concerning the calling of the Jews, the Restauration of Israel and making of that People, the Inheritors of the whole Earth doth all seat themselves in this Work of making the Earth Common Treasury; as you may read Ezek.24.26,27& Jer.33.7. to 12. Esay. 49.17,18, &c. Zach. 8. from 9 to 12. Dan.2.44,45. Dan. 7.27. Hos.14.5,6,7. Joel 2.26,27. Amos 9. from 8 to the end, Obad.17.18.21. Mic.5. from 7 to the end, Hab. 2.6,7,8.13,14. Gen.18.18. Rom.11.15. Zeph. 3. & Zach.14.9.
And when the Son of man, was gone from the Apostles, his Spirit descended upon the Apostles and Brethren, as they were waiting at Ierusalem; and the Rich men sold their Possessions and gave part to the Poor; and no man said, That ought that he possessed was his own, for they had all things Common, Act. 4. 32. Now this Community was supprest by covetous proud flesh, which was the powers that ruled the world; and the righteous Father suffered himself thus to be suppressed for a time, times and dividing of time, or for 42 months, or for three dayes and half, which are all but one and the same term of time: And the world is now come to the half day; and the Spirit of Christ, which is the Spirit of universal Community and Freedom is risen, and is rising, and will rise higher and higher, till those pure waters of Shiloe, the Well Springs of Life and Liberty to the whole Creation, do over-run A-dam, and crown those banks of Bondage, Curse, and Slavery.
Fourthly, This work to make the Earth a Common Treasury, was shewed us by Voice in Trance, and out of Trance, which words were these,
Work together, Eate Bread together, Declare this all abroad.
Which Voice, was heard Three times: And in Obedience to the Spirit, Wee have Declared this by Word of mouth, as occasion was offered. Secondly, We have declared it by writing, which others may reade. Thirdly, We have now begun to declare it by Action, in Diging up the Common Land, and casting in Seed, that we may eat our Bread together in righteousness. Anbd every one that comes to work, shall eate the Fruit of their own labours, one having as much Freedom in the Fruit of the Earth as another. Another Voice that was heard was this,
Israel shall neither take Hire, not give Hire.
And if so, the certainly none shall say, This is my Land, work for me, and I'le give you Wages: For The Earth is the Lords, that is, Mans, who is Lord of the Creation, in every branch of mankind; for as divers members of our human bodies, make but one body perfect; so every particular man is but a member or branch of mankind; and mankind living in the light and obedience to Reason, the King of righteousness, is thereby made a fit and compleat Lord of the Creation. And the whole Earth is this Lords Man, subject to the Spirit. And not the Inheritance of covetous proud F(l)esh, that is selfish, and enmity to the Spirit.
And if the Earth be not peculiar to any one branch, or branches of mankind, but the Inheritance of all; Then is it Free and Common for all, to work together, and eate together.
And truly, you Counsellors and Powers of the Earth, know this, That wheresoever there is a People, thus united by Common Community of livelihood into Oneness, it will become the strongest Land in the World, for then they will be as one man to defend their Inheritance; and Salvation (which is Liberty and Peace) is the Walls and Bulwarks of that Land or City.
Wheras on the otherside, pleading for Propriety and single Interest, divides the People of a land, and the whole world into Parties, and is the cause of all Wars, and Bloud-shed, and Contention everywhere.
Another Voice that was heard in a Trance, was this,
Whosoever labours the Earth for any Person or Persons, that are lifted up to rule over others, and doth not look upon themselves, as Equal to others in the Creation: The hand of the Lord shall be upon that Labourer: I the Lord have spoke it, and I will do it.
This Declares likewise to all Laborers, or such as are called Poor people, that they shall not dare to work for Hire, for any Landlord, or for any that is lifted up above others; for by their labours, they have lifted up Tyrants and Tyranny; and by denying to labor for Hire, they shall pull them down again. He that works for another, either for Wages, or to pay him Rent, works unrighteously, and still lifts up the Curse; but they that are resolved to work and eat together, making the Earth a Common Treasury, doth joyn hands with Christ, to lift up the Creation from Bondage, and restores all things from the Curse.
Fiftly, That which does incourage us to go on in this work, is this; We find the streaming out of Love in our hearts towards all; to enemies as well as friends; we would have none live in Beggery, Poverty, or Sorrow, but that every one might enjoy the benefit of his creation: we have peace in our hearts, and quiet rejoycing in our work, and filled with sweet content, though we have but a dish of roots and bread for our food.
And we are assured, that in the strength of this Spirit that hath manifested himself to us, we shall not be startled, neither at Prison nor Death, while we are about his work; and we have bin made to sit down and count what it may cost us in undertaking such a work, and we know the full sum, and are resolved to give all that we have to buy this Pearl which we see in the Field.
For by this work we are assured, and Reason makes it appear to others, that Bondage shall be removed, Tears wiped away, and all Poor people by their righteous Labours shall be relieved, and freed from Poverty and Straits; For in this work of Restoration, there will be no beggar in Israel: For surely, if there was no Beggar in literal Israel, there shall be no Beggar in Spiritual Israel the Anti- type, much more.
Sixtly, We have another encouragement that this work shall prosper, Because we see it to be the fulness of Time: For whereas the Son of Man, the Lamb, came in the Fulness of Time, that is, when the Powers of the World made the Earth stink every where, by oppressing others, under pretence of worshiping the Spirit rightly, by the Types and Sacrifices of Moses law; the Priests were grown so abominably Covetous and Proud, that they made the People to loath the Sacrifices, and to groan under the Burden of their Oppressing Pride.
Even so now in this Age of the World, that the Spirit is upon his Resurrection, it is likewise the Fulness of Time in a higher measure. For whereas the People generally in former times did rest upon the very observation of the Sacrifices and Types, but persecuted the very name of the Spirit; Even so now, Professors do rest upon the bare observation of Forms and Customs, and pretend to the Spirit; and as it was then, so it is now: All places stink with the abomination of Self-seeking Teachers and Rulers: For do not I see that every one Preacheth for money, Counsels for money, and fights for money to maintain particular Interests? And none of these three that pretend to give liberty to the Creation, do give liberty to the Creation; neither can they, for they are enemies to universal liberty; So that the earth stinks with their Hypocrisie, Covetousness, Envie, sottish Ignorance, and Pride.
The common People are filled with good words from Pulpits and Councel Tables, but no good Deeds; For they wait and wait for good, and for deliverances, but none comes; While they wait for liberty, behold greater bondage comes insteed of it, and burdens, oppressions, taskmasters, from Sessions, Lawyers, Bayliffs of Hundreds, Committees, Impropriators, Clerks of Peace, and Courts of Justice, so called, does whip the People by old Popish weather- beaten Laws, that were excommunicate long ago by Covenants, Oaths, and Ordinances; but as yet are not cast out, but rather taken in again, to be standing pricks in our eys, and thorns in our side; Beside Free-quartering, Plundering by some rude Souldiers, and the abounding of Taxes; which if they were equally divided among the Souldiery, and not too much bagd up in the hands of particular Officers and Trustees, there would be less complaining: Besides the horrible cheating that is in Buying and Selling, and the cruel Oppression of Landlords, and lords of Mannours, and quarter Sessions; Many that have bin good House-keepers (as we say) cannot live, but are forced to turn Souldiers, and so to fight to uphold the Curse, or else live in great straits and beggery : O you A-dams of the Earth, you have rich clothing, full Bellies, have your Honors and Ease, and you puffe at this; But know thou stout- hearted Pharoah, that the day of Judgement is begun, and it will reach to thee ere long; Jacob hath bin very low, but he is rising, and will rise, do the worst thou canst; and the poor people whom thou oppresses, shall be the Saviours of the land; For the blessing is rising up in them, and thou shalt be ashamed.
And thus you Powers of England, and of the whole World, we have declared our Reasons, why we have begun to dig upon George hill in Surrey. One thing I must tell you more, in the close, which I received in voce likewise at another time; and when I received it, my ey was set towards you. The words were these: Let Israel go free.
Surely, as Israel lay 430. yeers under Pharaohs bondage, before Moses was sent to fetch them out: Even so Israel (the Elect Spirit spread in Sons and Daughters) hath lain three times so long already, which is the Anti-type, under your Bondage, and cruel Task-masters: But now the time of Deliverance is come, and thou proud Esau, and stout-hearted Covetousness, thou must come down, and be lord of the Creation no longer: For now the King of Righteousness is rising to Rule In, and Over the Earth.
Therefore, if thou wilt find Mercy, Let Israel go Free; break in pieces quickly the Band of particular Propriety, dis-own this oppressing Murder, Oppression and Thievery of Buying and Selling of Land, owning of landlords, and paying of Rents, and give thy Free Consent to make the Earth a Common Treasury, without grumbling; That the yonger Brethren may live comfortably upon Earth, as well as the Elder: That all may enjoy the benefit of their Creation.
And hereby thou wilt Honour thy Father, and thy Mother: Thy Father, which is the Spirit of Community, that made all, and that dwels in all. Thy Mother, which is the Earth, that brought us all forth: That as a true Mother, loves all her Children. Therefore, do not thou hinder the Mother Earth, from giving all her Children suck, by thy Inclosing it into particular hands, and holding up that cursed Bondage of Inclosure by thy Power. And then thou wilt repent of thy Theft, in maintaining the breach of the eight Commandment, by Stealing the Land as I say from thy fellow-creatures, or yonger Brothers: which thou and all thy landlords have, and do live in the breach of that Commandment. Then thou wilt Own no other God, or Ruling Power, but One, which is the King of Righteousness, ruling and dwelling in everyone, and in the whole; whereas now thou hast many gods: For Covetousness is thy God, Pride, and an Envious murdering Humor (to kill one by Prison or Gallows, that crosses thee, though their cause be pure, sound and good reason) is thy God, Self-love and slavish Fear (lest others serve thee as thou hast served them) is thy god Hypocrisie, Fleshly Imagination, that keeps no Promise, Covenant, nor Protestation, is thy God: love of Money, Honor and Ease, is thy God : And all these, and the like Ruling Powers, makes thee Blind, and hard-hearted, that thou does not, nor cannot lay to heart the affliction of others, though they dy for want of bread, in that rich City, undone under your eys.
Therefore once more, Let Israel go Free, that the poor may labour the Waste land, and suck the Brests of their mother Earth, that they starve not: And in so doing, thou wilt keep the Sabbath day, which is a day of Rest; sweetly enjoying the Peace of the Spirit of Righteousness; and find Peace, by living among a people that live in peace; this will be a day of Rest which thou never knew yet.
But I do not entreat thee, for thou art not to be intreated, but in the Name of the Lord, that hath drawn me forth to speak to thee; I, yea I say, I Command thee, To let Israel go Free, and quietly to gather together into the place where I shall appoint; and hold them no longer in bondage.
And thou A-dam that holds the Earth in slavery under the Curse: If thou wilt not let Israel go Free; for thou being the Antitype, will be more stout and lusty then the Egyptian Pharoah of old, who was thy Type; Then know, That whereas I brought Ten Plagues upon him, I will Multiply my Plagues upon thee, till I make thee weary, and miserably ashamed: And I will bring out my People with a strong hand, and stretched out arme.
Thus we have discharged our Souls in declaring the Cause of our Digging upon George-Hill in Surrey, that the Great Councel and Army of the Land may take notice of it, That there is no intent of Tumult or Fighting, but only to get Bread to eat, with the sweat of our brows; working together in righteousness, and eating the blessings of the Earth in peace.
And if any of you that are the great Ones of the Earth, that have been bred tenderly, and cannot work, do bring in your Stock into this Common Treasury, as an Offering to the work of Righteousness; we will work for you, and you shall receive as we receive. But if you will not, but Pharoah like, cry, Who is the Lord that we should obey him? and endeavour to Oppose, then know, That he that delivered Israel from Pharoah of old, is the same Power still, in whom we trust, and whom we serve; for this Conquest over thee shall be got, not by Sword or Weapon, but by my Spirit saith the Lord of Hosts.
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William Everard,
Iohn Palmer,
Iohn South,
Iohn Courton.
William Taylor,
Christopher Clifford,
Iohn Barker. Ferrard Winstanley,
Richard Goodgroome,
Thomas Starre,
William Hoggrill,
Robert Sawyer,
Thomas Eder,
Henry Bickerstaffe,
Iohn Taylor, &c.
F I N I S.
Renascence
Editions
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Monday, January 02, 2012
***Fragment Of A Fragment Of A Teenage Dream-In Honor Of The “Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flaked Streamline Baby” World -The 1950s
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip from the movie American Graffiti to set the mood for the piece below.
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964, comment:
A Fragment Of A Fragment Of A Teenage Dream-In Honor Of Tom Wolfe's “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flaked Streamline Baby.”
There was a madness in this country in the 1950s. No, not the hoary Cold War the- atomic-bomb-is-going-to-get-us-and-we-are-all-going-to-be-dead-next-week or “better dead than red” kind of madness although there was plenty of that around. Some people, mostly older, whom I knew along the way in my life, while I was doing one thing or another, got caught up in that dragnet, that “red scare” dragnet, and took a beating over it, sometimes a physical beating but definitely a beating of their psyche, with or without the physical part. All for the simple proposition, when you think about it, that working people, and the people I am talking about to a person were working people not the high-flown intellectuals who abandoned ship when things got too hot, that those who make the goods of this sad old world, I mean really make the widget gismo stuff, should make the rules. I’ll tell you more on that some other time but today I want to about cars, just about cars, about guys crazy about them and the girls crazy about the guys crazy about them, and about what they meant, no, what they really meant back then.
Like I say there was a madness for the automobile, the sleeker, the more aerodynamically-refined, more powerfully-engined, especially the powerfully-engined part but also with a classy chassis, the better. Some people who ought to know, like wannabe “gonzo” journalist Tom Wolfe who got me started on this screed from an old article that I have used as part of the title here that he wrote in “Esquire” magazine in 1963 or a real “gonzo” journalist like Hunter Thompson, except it was motorcycles too, or maybe James Dean himself who knows, say the madness started even before then, the fifties that is, back at the tail end of the Second World War. Their idea is that there was so much money around, war boom production government dough, especially so much dough around for Depression-raised “no dough” kids that the kids, if you can believe this, started going after cars and, as kids will, taking the old-fashioned ones like Hudsons, Studebakers and old time Fords and “souping” them up. That is once cars started being produced again, instead of tanks, lots of tanks, in Detroit.
Not only that, according to the stories, the kids started to get a little whacky about it. Like spending all their time hammering down heavy chrome fender and bopping to get it just right, eternally , oil-drenched, grease-monkeyed engine-tweaking, forever high-end rear axle-lifting, and, don’t forget, applying rainbow color-coded flash-painting (and, maybe, decaling). And trying to look cool while doing it and…well, and trying to impress the be-bop, short shorts wearing, slinky, saucy, sultry (did I leave anything out) tweeny-teeny girls who just happened to be walking by.
And once you start trying to impress girls, or once you actually did impress them, then the only thing left was how you were going to feed them. I mean the girls not the cars, although come to think of it maybe I am thinking of the cars. Nah. Well, sure what else is a guy to do but run down to the ubiquitous now slice-of-nostalgic- Americana, save it for “American Graffiti” drive-in food shack, complete with short-skirted bunny hoppers waiting on you and your cravings, natch. And then you were up against how you were going to excite them, the girls that is, with all that power, car power that is, natch again, on those barely asphalt ,one lane, lonesome road Saturday night “chicken” runs out on the edge of the universe, at least it seemed like that on star-studded nights. So, the long and short of it is that a little cult kind of thing got going, or maybe it was just teenagers being teenagers. I don’t know but it sounds real good, doesn’t it.
Still I don’t really know about that story, good as it sounds, because it was suppose to be kind of a West Coast kid thing. Figures, right? You know, all those guys who couldn’t get close enough, or want to get close enough, to the water to be surfer guys, or just didn’t know what the heck “hanging ten” was all about, or didn’t care. Or, maybe, from another angle, because I have heard these kinds of stories too, just Southern good old boys running white liquor through the hollows and back roads of some woe begotten mountain valley beating hell out of the revenue agents. The easy part is beating those revenue guys but you need serious wheels to beat through muddy-encrusted back roads and hollows down Appalachia way and you had better have that big old V-8 “souped-up,” I don’t think a Super 6 would do it, to beat the band if you did not want to spent your sweet roll, high-kicking young life in some old jail, state or federal, take your pick. I am closer to the nut on that story seeing as my father came from there, down in those hollows and those winding roads and those mountain mists and breezes, but still it just ain’t my madness story.
Really, I want to tell you about what I know about the madness and so I have to go from the 1950s. Like I say I don’t know, first hand anyway, about those other locales, their ethos, their humors or their quirks. I just don’t. See I think, for one thing, that those guys telling those earlier stories are just piecing us off by making it a cult thing or a small sub-set of a subset of a cult, or maybe just trying to tell colorful stories to make up for that “red scare” stuff that doesn’t sound right about America. You know democracy and all that stuff while you are running people out of town on a rail for just talking “red talk”, or trying to.
Besides, this story wasn’t just about, deafeningly mad as they were, those guys in the now almost sepia-faded photographic images of tight T-shirt wearing, rolled sleeve cigarette-packed, greased Pompadour-haired, long side-burned, dangling-combed , engineer-booted, chain-wielding, side of the mouth butt-puffing , didn’t care if school kept or not types bent over the hood of some souped-up ’57 Chevy working, no sweating pools of sweat, sweating to get even more power out of that ferocious V-8 engine for the Saturday night “ chicken" run. No way, it wasn’t.
And it wasn’t even just those mad faux James Dean-sneered, "rebel without a cause"-posed, cooled-out, maybe hop-headed guys either. And it was always guys, who you swore you would beat down if they ever even looked at your sister, if you had a sister, and if you liked her enough to beat a guy down to defend her honor, or whatever drove your sense of right. And, of course she, your sister no less, is looking for all she is worth at this “James Dean” soda jerk (hey, what else could he be) because this guy is “cute”. Go figure, right? , Aw, maybe I don’t like her all that much anyway, and we all have to fend for ourselves when the deal goes down. Jesus, a monosyllabic (uh) soda jerk. Come on, sis.
No, and, by the way, forget all those stereotypes that they, the writers and film guys, like to roll out when they want to bring a little “color”, or tap into “baby-boomer” nostalgia, to the desperately color-craving 1950s. With their monotonous line-up of blond, slick-haired, California sun-drenched, devil may care, second generation “Okie” car jockeys. This car madness really was driven, driven hard, driven white-knuckled hard right to the edge, by East Coast non-blond, non-slick, non-“Okie” guys like Stu who lived down the end of my growing up street. Down the car-wreck-filled, oil-slick splashed, gas-fume-smelling dead-end of my run down old working class, edge of the working class getting poorer not richer, neighborhood ready for the bulldozer anytime street.
And Stu was the “king” there. If such a place could have a king he was it, no question, and nobody, not us kids anyway, questioned his lordship. Stu, kind of non-descript, pimply-faced, deceptively Saturday afternoon television wrestler overweight although we swore, or we would swear, that he was just big. Hands so permanently oil-stained, so deeply gritted, that no Borax could ever penetrate. Wearing some kind of grease-ladened denims to accompany those hands too, when denim meant Farmer Brown more than fashionista. Mussed–up hair unfurled at odd angles like maybe he had just enough time for a “bowl cut” from some younger brother or maybe his mother before he got back under the hood or under the body where he “breathed’ the rarified air that kept him going. And always, always a “what the hell” smirk like he knew, and knew for certain, about the nature of the universe, as the smoke from his ever-present cigarette wrapped around in rings his (and your) head, and seemed to tell of new techniques learned and just a little more power gotten out of that old ’57 Chevy primo boss wagon that had all us neighborhood kids on the prowl for a ride (that we never ever got, but that’s a different story and you can figure out why after what I tell you the next stuff).
Ya, but that is not all, no, not by a long shot. Here is where you got to figure something is awry in the universe, or at least you’ve got to think of that possibility. “Stew-ball” Stu (that’s what we called him, although not to his face), for there was always the faint smell, and sometimes not so faint smell, of liquor, hard liquor like whiskey or scotch or who knows, maybe, Southern Comfort, it was cheap enough then, coming out of that tobacco-infested mouth of his, always had “babes” around. Hell, there were always a ton of them fussing over him and I swear I am not exaggerating because I would have been happy, very happy, to have one of his cast-offs, if I had been just a little older, and a lot wiser. And these were not just some old mirror-image Stu babes. These girls were “hot”, 1950s “hot”, ya, but still hot. A more mysterious, secretive, selective, “I wonder what she really looks like underneath” hot than today when you know, and know for certain, who is hot without having to ask that question.
I can still picture those oceans of flowing hair, that sea of tight jeans and stretch pants and those cashmere sweaters and who knows what else underneath, and what do I know what else, or care, because all I know is that to a supposedly oblivious young buck that I still was back then they smelled nice and a boy/man can dream, can’t he? And high school dropout, couldn’t care less if school kept or not, getting grease all over him, and maybe all over them Stu just kind of ignoring them. Ignoring them! Can you beat that?
Ya, but see here is what I didn’t know. I didn’t know about the late night beach Stu. The Stu watching the “submarine” races down by the now tepid ocean shore, with the waves apologizing to the beach sand for splashing it, with some quick choice girl. And they, the girls that is, were standing in line, just to get in line. And who is to say, and at least who am I to say, that they were wrong. It was a ’57 Chevy, after all. Did you hear me? I said it was a ’57 Chevy that had all the girls trembling like Stu was Elvis or something.
Okay, okay I will come clean. Here is what burns me up even today. Those girls weren’t interested, weren’t interested in the least, in what old Stu had read lately, or whether he even read anything at all. See that thing, that reading thing, was my wobbly pitch to the frails, junior grade, back then. I was a ragamuffin of a boy what with coming from a nowhere family from the wrong side of the tracks, not much of a dresser, and not that “cute,” although better looking than damn Stewball. So to make things equal I read like crazy and what I read I used as my calling card to the dames (read: teenage age girls, some of who wanted to be dames and some not).
And sometimes it worked, kind of. And this is where Stu comes in. One summer night, maybe about 1961 or ’62, I was working my book “magic” down at the Adamsville Beach seawall where we all hung out, we guys hung out perfecting our come hither girls pitches. At this time I was crazy for this Lolita, all blond, fluffy fill out a sweater, and legs, Lolita was not her real name, and that doesn’t matter now, and moreover she was young, maybe too young, and how do I know that the statute of limitations hasn’t run out on even thinking about what I was thinking about doing with her so let’s just call her Lolita. Now she might have been young but she was no stick and from what I could see she was no prude either. I knew her from some odd-ball class at school where I spent half my time looking at her legs and the other half holding forth out loud on some book, probably Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy, something like that.
She stopped me one day after class and said she liked what I had to say. Well, thanks. And so we started not exactly dating but hanging out and that is why Lolita and were sitting kind of close talking, or I was talking she was listening, maybe half-listening a little distracted in the sultry night, about poetry, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. Then Stu pulled up from off the boulevard kind of slow in his very cherry Chevy and just kind of sat there, engine high-idling, not saying nothing but looking, looking kind of intensely at Lolita and she started to look back and not answering a question I asked her about what I had just said. Stu bent over and opened the passenger door side of the car and before I could even say, “what the hell” Lolita and Stu were long gone. Somebody said they saw Stewball’s Chevy down at the “parking” end of the beach as the sun was coming up. Damn.
Hell, and you wonder why I speak of madness. Let me out of this place.
Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964, comment:
A Fragment Of A Fragment Of A Teenage Dream-In Honor Of Tom Wolfe's “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flaked Streamline Baby.”
There was a madness in this country in the 1950s. No, not the hoary Cold War the- atomic-bomb-is-going-to-get-us-and-we-are-all-going-to-be-dead-next-week or “better dead than red” kind of madness although there was plenty of that around. Some people, mostly older, whom I knew along the way in my life, while I was doing one thing or another, got caught up in that dragnet, that “red scare” dragnet, and took a beating over it, sometimes a physical beating but definitely a beating of their psyche, with or without the physical part. All for the simple proposition, when you think about it, that working people, and the people I am talking about to a person were working people not the high-flown intellectuals who abandoned ship when things got too hot, that those who make the goods of this sad old world, I mean really make the widget gismo stuff, should make the rules. I’ll tell you more on that some other time but today I want to about cars, just about cars, about guys crazy about them and the girls crazy about the guys crazy about them, and about what they meant, no, what they really meant back then.
Like I say there was a madness for the automobile, the sleeker, the more aerodynamically-refined, more powerfully-engined, especially the powerfully-engined part but also with a classy chassis, the better. Some people who ought to know, like wannabe “gonzo” journalist Tom Wolfe who got me started on this screed from an old article that I have used as part of the title here that he wrote in “Esquire” magazine in 1963 or a real “gonzo” journalist like Hunter Thompson, except it was motorcycles too, or maybe James Dean himself who knows, say the madness started even before then, the fifties that is, back at the tail end of the Second World War. Their idea is that there was so much money around, war boom production government dough, especially so much dough around for Depression-raised “no dough” kids that the kids, if you can believe this, started going after cars and, as kids will, taking the old-fashioned ones like Hudsons, Studebakers and old time Fords and “souping” them up. That is once cars started being produced again, instead of tanks, lots of tanks, in Detroit.
Not only that, according to the stories, the kids started to get a little whacky about it. Like spending all their time hammering down heavy chrome fender and bopping to get it just right, eternally , oil-drenched, grease-monkeyed engine-tweaking, forever high-end rear axle-lifting, and, don’t forget, applying rainbow color-coded flash-painting (and, maybe, decaling). And trying to look cool while doing it and…well, and trying to impress the be-bop, short shorts wearing, slinky, saucy, sultry (did I leave anything out) tweeny-teeny girls who just happened to be walking by.
And once you start trying to impress girls, or once you actually did impress them, then the only thing left was how you were going to feed them. I mean the girls not the cars, although come to think of it maybe I am thinking of the cars. Nah. Well, sure what else is a guy to do but run down to the ubiquitous now slice-of-nostalgic- Americana, save it for “American Graffiti” drive-in food shack, complete with short-skirted bunny hoppers waiting on you and your cravings, natch. And then you were up against how you were going to excite them, the girls that is, with all that power, car power that is, natch again, on those barely asphalt ,one lane, lonesome road Saturday night “chicken” runs out on the edge of the universe, at least it seemed like that on star-studded nights. So, the long and short of it is that a little cult kind of thing got going, or maybe it was just teenagers being teenagers. I don’t know but it sounds real good, doesn’t it.
Still I don’t really know about that story, good as it sounds, because it was suppose to be kind of a West Coast kid thing. Figures, right? You know, all those guys who couldn’t get close enough, or want to get close enough, to the water to be surfer guys, or just didn’t know what the heck “hanging ten” was all about, or didn’t care. Or, maybe, from another angle, because I have heard these kinds of stories too, just Southern good old boys running white liquor through the hollows and back roads of some woe begotten mountain valley beating hell out of the revenue agents. The easy part is beating those revenue guys but you need serious wheels to beat through muddy-encrusted back roads and hollows down Appalachia way and you had better have that big old V-8 “souped-up,” I don’t think a Super 6 would do it, to beat the band if you did not want to spent your sweet roll, high-kicking young life in some old jail, state or federal, take your pick. I am closer to the nut on that story seeing as my father came from there, down in those hollows and those winding roads and those mountain mists and breezes, but still it just ain’t my madness story.
Really, I want to tell you about what I know about the madness and so I have to go from the 1950s. Like I say I don’t know, first hand anyway, about those other locales, their ethos, their humors or their quirks. I just don’t. See I think, for one thing, that those guys telling those earlier stories are just piecing us off by making it a cult thing or a small sub-set of a subset of a cult, or maybe just trying to tell colorful stories to make up for that “red scare” stuff that doesn’t sound right about America. You know democracy and all that stuff while you are running people out of town on a rail for just talking “red talk”, or trying to.
Besides, this story wasn’t just about, deafeningly mad as they were, those guys in the now almost sepia-faded photographic images of tight T-shirt wearing, rolled sleeve cigarette-packed, greased Pompadour-haired, long side-burned, dangling-combed , engineer-booted, chain-wielding, side of the mouth butt-puffing , didn’t care if school kept or not types bent over the hood of some souped-up ’57 Chevy working, no sweating pools of sweat, sweating to get even more power out of that ferocious V-8 engine for the Saturday night “ chicken" run. No way, it wasn’t.
And it wasn’t even just those mad faux James Dean-sneered, "rebel without a cause"-posed, cooled-out, maybe hop-headed guys either. And it was always guys, who you swore you would beat down if they ever even looked at your sister, if you had a sister, and if you liked her enough to beat a guy down to defend her honor, or whatever drove your sense of right. And, of course she, your sister no less, is looking for all she is worth at this “James Dean” soda jerk (hey, what else could he be) because this guy is “cute”. Go figure, right? , Aw, maybe I don’t like her all that much anyway, and we all have to fend for ourselves when the deal goes down. Jesus, a monosyllabic (uh) soda jerk. Come on, sis.
No, and, by the way, forget all those stereotypes that they, the writers and film guys, like to roll out when they want to bring a little “color”, or tap into “baby-boomer” nostalgia, to the desperately color-craving 1950s. With their monotonous line-up of blond, slick-haired, California sun-drenched, devil may care, second generation “Okie” car jockeys. This car madness really was driven, driven hard, driven white-knuckled hard right to the edge, by East Coast non-blond, non-slick, non-“Okie” guys like Stu who lived down the end of my growing up street. Down the car-wreck-filled, oil-slick splashed, gas-fume-smelling dead-end of my run down old working class, edge of the working class getting poorer not richer, neighborhood ready for the bulldozer anytime street.
And Stu was the “king” there. If such a place could have a king he was it, no question, and nobody, not us kids anyway, questioned his lordship. Stu, kind of non-descript, pimply-faced, deceptively Saturday afternoon television wrestler overweight although we swore, or we would swear, that he was just big. Hands so permanently oil-stained, so deeply gritted, that no Borax could ever penetrate. Wearing some kind of grease-ladened denims to accompany those hands too, when denim meant Farmer Brown more than fashionista. Mussed–up hair unfurled at odd angles like maybe he had just enough time for a “bowl cut” from some younger brother or maybe his mother before he got back under the hood or under the body where he “breathed’ the rarified air that kept him going. And always, always a “what the hell” smirk like he knew, and knew for certain, about the nature of the universe, as the smoke from his ever-present cigarette wrapped around in rings his (and your) head, and seemed to tell of new techniques learned and just a little more power gotten out of that old ’57 Chevy primo boss wagon that had all us neighborhood kids on the prowl for a ride (that we never ever got, but that’s a different story and you can figure out why after what I tell you the next stuff).
Ya, but that is not all, no, not by a long shot. Here is where you got to figure something is awry in the universe, or at least you’ve got to think of that possibility. “Stew-ball” Stu (that’s what we called him, although not to his face), for there was always the faint smell, and sometimes not so faint smell, of liquor, hard liquor like whiskey or scotch or who knows, maybe, Southern Comfort, it was cheap enough then, coming out of that tobacco-infested mouth of his, always had “babes” around. Hell, there were always a ton of them fussing over him and I swear I am not exaggerating because I would have been happy, very happy, to have one of his cast-offs, if I had been just a little older, and a lot wiser. And these were not just some old mirror-image Stu babes. These girls were “hot”, 1950s “hot”, ya, but still hot. A more mysterious, secretive, selective, “I wonder what she really looks like underneath” hot than today when you know, and know for certain, who is hot without having to ask that question.
I can still picture those oceans of flowing hair, that sea of tight jeans and stretch pants and those cashmere sweaters and who knows what else underneath, and what do I know what else, or care, because all I know is that to a supposedly oblivious young buck that I still was back then they smelled nice and a boy/man can dream, can’t he? And high school dropout, couldn’t care less if school kept or not, getting grease all over him, and maybe all over them Stu just kind of ignoring them. Ignoring them! Can you beat that?
Ya, but see here is what I didn’t know. I didn’t know about the late night beach Stu. The Stu watching the “submarine” races down by the now tepid ocean shore, with the waves apologizing to the beach sand for splashing it, with some quick choice girl. And they, the girls that is, were standing in line, just to get in line. And who is to say, and at least who am I to say, that they were wrong. It was a ’57 Chevy, after all. Did you hear me? I said it was a ’57 Chevy that had all the girls trembling like Stu was Elvis or something.
Okay, okay I will come clean. Here is what burns me up even today. Those girls weren’t interested, weren’t interested in the least, in what old Stu had read lately, or whether he even read anything at all. See that thing, that reading thing, was my wobbly pitch to the frails, junior grade, back then. I was a ragamuffin of a boy what with coming from a nowhere family from the wrong side of the tracks, not much of a dresser, and not that “cute,” although better looking than damn Stewball. So to make things equal I read like crazy and what I read I used as my calling card to the dames (read: teenage age girls, some of who wanted to be dames and some not).
And sometimes it worked, kind of. And this is where Stu comes in. One summer night, maybe about 1961 or ’62, I was working my book “magic” down at the Adamsville Beach seawall where we all hung out, we guys hung out perfecting our come hither girls pitches. At this time I was crazy for this Lolita, all blond, fluffy fill out a sweater, and legs, Lolita was not her real name, and that doesn’t matter now, and moreover she was young, maybe too young, and how do I know that the statute of limitations hasn’t run out on even thinking about what I was thinking about doing with her so let’s just call her Lolita. Now she might have been young but she was no stick and from what I could see she was no prude either. I knew her from some odd-ball class at school where I spent half my time looking at her legs and the other half holding forth out loud on some book, probably Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy, something like that.
She stopped me one day after class and said she liked what I had to say. Well, thanks. And so we started not exactly dating but hanging out and that is why Lolita and were sitting kind of close talking, or I was talking she was listening, maybe half-listening a little distracted in the sultry night, about poetry, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. Then Stu pulled up from off the boulevard kind of slow in his very cherry Chevy and just kind of sat there, engine high-idling, not saying nothing but looking, looking kind of intensely at Lolita and she started to look back and not answering a question I asked her about what I had just said. Stu bent over and opened the passenger door side of the car and before I could even say, “what the hell” Lolita and Stu were long gone. Somebody said they saw Stewball’s Chevy down at the “parking” end of the beach as the sun was coming up. Damn.
Hell, and you wonder why I speak of madness. Let me out of this place.
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-Revolutionary Regroupment:Spartacists Win Leftists From Social Democracy (March 1979)
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-Revolutionary Regroupment:Spartacists Win Leftists From Social Democracy (March 1979)
Young Spartacus is pleased to present the following condensed version of a February 8 forum given in Ann Arbor by Bruce Richard. Comrade Richard was a leader of a heterogeneous left-critical/activist grouping in the Socialist Party. USA (SP) called the Debs Caucus. When the Caucus declared it self pro- Leninist, they stirred considerable attention on the left. The soft-Maoist Guardian and the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in particular scurried after the Caucus' members, but the serious elements in the grouping recognized that neither of these reformist outfits represented an authentic revolutionary Marxist program. Comrade Richard, who joined the SP in 1976 and was its Michigan state secretary, is now a member of the Spartacist League/Spartacus Youth League.
To preserve the verbal character of the original presentation, we have introduced only stylistic alterations and deletions.
******
What we're really talking about is a fairly important question for the left: why would anybody in 1978-1979 go from the Socialist Party (SP), the extreme right wing of anything we would call ostensibly socialist in this country, to the revolutionary communism of the Spartacist League? How is a group of militant, but raw, social democrats recruited, turned into communists, by the SL?
Those of us who came from the SP had a chance to test in action revolutionary politics in the workers movement. We had a lesson in what revolutionary politics are throughout our fight in the SP and our process of coming to the SL. Now why is it, first of all, that anyone would go to the Socialist Party in the first place? Many people who come to left politics go through a stage of thinking—some of them never leave it— that all who oppose capitalism should be organizationally united, despite their different programs. There is an illusion that there is a "family of the left" which can join together to fight the capitalists despite the fact that they have many different programs and strategies for doing so. Now the Socialist Party of today holds itself out as a "non-sectarian, multi-tendency" party, open to ill who sign an application which says, in effect,
"Relieving that socialism should be brought about by democratic means, 1 hereby apply to the SP." To politically raw youth, ignorant of the historic divisions in the workers movement, this seems only sensible.
The SP's History of Betrayal
Most of the people who later formed the Debs Caucus in the SP and split to the left were in fact ignorant of the political history of the SP, as well as of the history of the whole left movement. What we discovered, after joining the SP, was an unfolding series of revelations about the SP's history. We found out, more or less by accident—an accident which led to considerable research on our part as we grew more interested and appalled—that the SP during the whole of the Vietnam war had opposed military victory for the National Liberation Front. Under the slogan "Negotiate Now for a Neutralized South Vietnam," the SP basically supported the U.S. war effort. Leading members of the SP, such as Max Shachtman, furthermore had supported the imperialist adventure of the Bay of •Pigs invasion against the Cuban revolution—on the grounds that "totalitarian communism" had to be smashed by any means necessary.
The SP leadership for 60 years consistently fought any revolutionary tendencies that arose within the SP. In 1919 they expelled tens of thousands of people—many of whom later became the Communist Party—for adherence to the ideals of the Russian Revolution. I n 1937 they threw out a large Trotskyist cadre, which later became the Socialist Workers Party. In 1953 they basically threw their youth organization out, the Young People's Socialist League, the YPSLs, which later went to join Max Shachtman's group, which was at the time somewhat to the left. And in 1964, when the reconstituted YPSLs called for "Vote No for President" instead of endorsing Lyndon B. Johnson as the party itself did, again the youth organization was simply dissolved, the locks on its office padlocked and its membership thrown out.
The SP through most of its history was tied to the crustiest section of the labor bureaucracy—people like Albert Shanker, George Meany people who under the guise of some form of socialism had been bitterly anti-communist and had been the most consistent betrayers of working-class struggles. What we found out in fact was the historical role of the social democracy in America: to be the bourgeoisie's own anti-communist cover in the labor movement. The SP's ties with the right-wing section of the labor bureaucracy allowed it to be a transmission belt for bourgeois ideas into the labor movement.
The social democracy has had this role internationally since 1914, when the parties of the Second International supported their own bourgeois governments against the workers of other countries at the start of World War 1. Ever since then the social democrats have played the role of fighting the communists on behalf of the bourgeoisies under the guise of "democratic socialism."
A "Non-Sectarian" Swamp
Furthermore, we had a series of corresponding revelations about the present state of the organization we had joined, the product of this rotten history. We saw what the "non-sectarian party" looked like in practice. Torpid functioning. Half the membership hadn't paid its 1978 $4 dues by September of last year. The SP newspaper, % Socialist Tribune, was infrequent and •irregular. Its political content was determined erratically by a volunteer collective, which led to wild swings in political line. Because of the SP's erratic notions of discipline, individual members would put forward their own motions in the name of the party. For instance, the National Chairman, Frank Zeidler, would often issue press releases without clearing it with anyone. Although a quarter of the membership has trade-union experience, there was not a single SP trade-union fraction anywhere in the country. Many of the locals existed primarily on paper; and did absolutely nothing at all. This is basically what this "multi--tendency, non-sectarian" party looks like in .practice, it's a swamp in which nothing gets done and in; which the formal politics, such as they are, are the politics of class betrayal.
Now, the activist youth recruited over-the last two or three years realized that a concerted effort would be necessary if fife would ever be breathed into the SP's political corpse. Oppositional activity formally began at the May 1978 Wisconsin Socialist Party state convention, where there was an unsuccessful, but aggressive, challenge to the extreme right wing of the Wisconsin party led by a group of young comrades from Milwaukee. Between this May convention and the September National Convention, the left-wing activists in the SP, primarily located in Michigan and Wisconsin, coalesced into the Debs Caucus. This was to be the main organizational vehicle for left-wing opposition in the SP. The Caucus came together formally just prior to the September Convention after a series of rather vague and formless discussions.
The name. Debs Caucus, was not an acronym. It reflected, first of all, oppositional history in the SP. The Zeidlerites had been organized as the Debs Caucus when they were antiwar and against liquidation into the Democratic Party in 1973. More importantly, the name reflected a concept of the Socialist Party as it was in the time of Eugene V. Debs, before World War 1—an all-inclusive party in which revolutionaries like Big Bill Haywood, James P. Cannon and others coexisted with reformists such as Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger. This concept of the party reflected the Caucus' own political heterogeneity. It contained self-proclaimed Maoists, Trotskyists, "non-Leninist Marxists" and so on.
The basic programmatic document of the Debs Caucus set forward our philosophy: "We prefer to emphasize the commonality among socialists rather than the differences." This concept of the party, called "Kautsky-ist" after the leading theoretician of the pre-World War 1 Second International is that of the "party of the whole class." All the working-class tendencies were factions of a common organization. These "parties of the whole class" everywhere in the world split in 1914 when one section of them, the reformists, supported their own bourgeoisie in World War I. This was a historic betrayal of the workers of the world, precisely when there was a need for militant opposition to the ruling class.
Like the Kautskyists, the Debs Caucus had programmatically vague statements about the need for unity, and ignored or slid over key questions such as the Russian question. The main document of the Caucus contained not one word on the Russian question. The call for the Debs Caucus, distributed at the 1978 convention, evaded the question by simply stating that we don't believe that the USSR is the main threat in the world today. Incorrect and temporizing as this attitude was, the social-democratic majority in the SP would have none of it. We were met with red-baiting hysteria and crude anti-communist slander. One National Committee member summed up the right-wing opposition's stance with the simple statement that "Lenin was a murderer."
SP's Right Wing Calls the Cops
Furthermore, the SP majority was not about to engage in political debate with a group of potential revolutionaries. It relied instead on bureaucratic maneuverings to crush the Caucus' opposition. When it looked like the Caucus would get a significant proportional representation on the National Committee of the SP at the Convention, the majority simply canceled the elections. The national secretary, Tom Spiro (a member of the Debs Caucus), was summarily fired, and at the time that the Caucus split from the SP in November, the majority had prepared to revoke the charter of all the left-wing locals.
After the September national convention, leading right-wingers began a new campaign of slander against the Debs Caucus. They claimed that we were agents of other left groups and that in any case we were politically ignorant and irresponsible. This is the answer of these "non-sectarians" to an attempt to clarify certain political differences within their "non-sectarian" party. The right-wingers were upset in particular by the entry of a small group in New York called the Communist Cadre-Marxist (CTCM), a tiny 1972 split from the Workers World Party of Sam Marcy. CTCM had drifted in the political wilds of New York City for a number of years before coming to rest in the SP.
Despite all their faults, the Communist Cadre were opposed by the social-democratic right wing precisely on the issues on which one could say they were right. It was because they claimed to be revolutionaries. The CTCM, for example, proposed a motion to expel chairman Zeidler for having crossed a picket line several months before in order to speak on the same platform as Henry Hyde (the well-known sponsor of an amendment to cut off Medicaid funding for abortions). This of course threw the SP right wing into a frenzy, and they attempted to throw the CTCM out.
Additionally, the Spartacist League exposed the fact in Workers Vanguard that Zeidler had helped break a bitter strike in Wisconsin in 1954 by using his power as mayor to allow scab goods to be unloaded at the harbor. On seeing this revelation the Milwaukee local of the SP also proposed the expulsion of Zeidler. This more or less forced the hand of the right-wingers who immediately summoned the National Committee and prepared to decharter the left-wing locals. When the Debs Caucus stood up at this meeting, 15 of us, the response of the right-wing majority was to call the police! This is what social democracy means: calling in the bourgeois state against the revolutionaries. This is how the majority bureaucratically dealt with the political challenge they were confronting.
Needed: A Program For Revolutionary Leadership
Under the blows of the right wing the Debs Caucus had to reassess its "family-of-the-left" conception. How could we coexist in the same party with people that called the cops on us? We carefully studied the basic writings of Lenin and Trotsky on the question of the organization of the revolutionary party, and we in the process made the transition to Leninism. The primary thing for a party is its program, which describes the basic tasks of a revolutionary party for making a socialist revolution. One needs a party committed programmatically to the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism—a disciplined party capable of mobilizing the working class and seizing state power.
The fight for leadership of the working class, betrayed by the social democrats and their brothers under the skin, the Stalinists, is the fight against the other tendencies on the left. There is one party and one program only is revolutionary. All the misleaders must be exposed in action before the workers and politically defeated. The "multi-tendency" party subverts this struggle for leadership.
This struggle for revolutionary leadership governs the relations not only within the party, but between other left groups as well. This is the question of the united front. It's often necessary to form blocs between different tendencies for the defense of the working class, especially when the revolutionary party is not the sole or main party of the workers. Thus, in Germany in 1933 it was objectively vitally necessary for the Communist Party to actively seek out a united front with the social democrats to fight the fascists. Even in such blocs, however, the struggle to expose the misleadership of the other parties must go on. There must be merciless criticism of their program, the program of defeats, and the constant counterposition of the revolutionary program to theirs. The workers can then see each program tested in action. They can see which program wins gains.
Another question that divides social democrats from revolutionaries is the Russian question: do you defend the USSR against capitalist attack or not? If not, you are in alignment with the world bourgeoisie; there is no "third camp." The USSR represents a great gain, even under the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy which must be overthrown by the Russian workers themselves. The same follows for the deformed workers states: China, and so on. The Russian question is the critical question for the world left movement. It defines one's attitude towards the world bourgeoisie. Take for example Maoism in China, where anti-Sovietism has led the Chinese bureaucracy to make a bloc with the U.S. against Russia. If they succeed in destroying the Soviet Union, they will only thereby set themselves up for decimation by the U.S. bourgeoisie.
The Russian question also has immediate importance because of the present reactionary campaign by the U.S. government for "human rights" in the Soviet Union. This is nothing but a cover for cold war hysteria—which most of the left has tailed. For example the Communist Party itself calls on Jimmy Carter and his government to "enforce human rights" at home. The Socialist Workers Party raises the call for "human rights" all the time in the context of calling on the bourgeois government to make good on its promises. But this is the same government that fought, -the .Vietnam war for 10, 20 years, that oppresses people throughout the world. Groups like these build illusions in the ability of this government to be "even-handed."
Program and Style
The party question in a sense comes down to "style." The reaction that most of the Debs Caucus members had early on in their exploration of other left groups was that they like the politics of the Spartacist League on questions such , as the Russian question, the party—but the "style" of the Spartacist League was "divisive." The majority of the left in general doesn't want to hear what the Spartacist League has to say. They don't want to confront communist politics, and they take refuge in criticizing what they call the "style" of the SL.
The Spartacist League is like Lenin's Bolsheviks, who only became a hard fighting party capable of leading the October Revolution through constant polemics against the misleaders: the Mensheviks, the social democrats. These were "destructive, divisive" polemics, that shattered parties, disgraced opponents and lined up the workers for the revolution. For 15 years Lenin fought to make a party by counterpoising his strategy for revolution in Russia to that of the reformists. And for this Lenin was insulted by social democrats throughout Europe. He was called sectarian, divisive, abrasive and so on. Communist politics, however, are abrasive in bourgeois society. There is no way to escape that. Anyone who wishes to practice communist politics should be resigned to incurring the anger of all the different species of misleaders who bring bourgeois consciousness into the workers movement.
Let me read you a description of Lenin's "abrasiveness" which was written by Trotsky. Speaking of Lenin talking at a public meeting, he says: "[Lenin's] answers are entirely unexpected and annihilating in their simplicity. Point-blank, he lays bare a situation which, according to all expectations, he should have sought to camouflage. The Mensheviks went through this experience more than once during the initial period of the revolution when charges of violations of democracy still had a ring of novelty. 'Our newspapers have been shut down!' [the Mensheviks cried.] 'Of course! But unfortunately not all of them as yet. They will all be shut down presently. The dictatorship of the proletariat will destroy at its very roots this shameful traffic in bourgeois opium!' [Lenin] has straightened up [on the podium]. Both hands are in [his] pockets. There is not even a hint of posing, in the voice not [even] a trace of oratorical modulation — instead the entire figure, the angle of the head, the compressed lips, the cheekbones, the slightly hoarse timbre of the voice all radiate an indomitable confidence in his correctness and his truth. 'If you want to fight, then come on, let's really fight.'" — Leon Trotsky, Portraits: Political & Personal (1977)
It's the same with us. The rest of the left can't stand our bluntness. The rest of the left is "nice." They don't raise the hard truths. The Socialist Workers Party is a very nice party. It calls for free speech for fascists, people who are for the destruction of the workers movement, for genocide. That's nicer. It's less abrasive in bourgeois society.
The Bolshevik Leninist Group [a tiny clot in Ann Arbor] which some of you saw tonight, is also very "nice." They crossed a picket line and helped break a strike. To them things like picket lines are intellectual abstractions to be debated learnedly in 60-page documents. The fact that a picket line is the living embodiment of the class struggle means nothing for these people, because after all it's "abrasive" to call for honoring picket lines.
So that's it for the style question. Yes, the Spartacist League's politics are abrasive in bourgeois society. The reformists don't like our style because they can't stand our politics. They can't stand the truth. They take the line of least resistance to bourgeois ideology. It was this that the ex-social democrats of the Debs Caucus broke with when they broke with the "family of the left" and with Kautskyism.
Their Party Wasn't Our Party
Even before it split from the SP the Debs Caucus began investigating other groups in the light of what it had learned in its own factional struggle. We oriented from the start towards fusion with another group. There was a felt inadequacy among its members for finding an independent political path.
The Debs Caucus rejected Stalinism and Maoism and the so-called "state-capitalist" tendencies out of hand. These tendencies have historically proven time and again to be betrayers of the proletariat wherever they have had a chance.
So, taking the lessons of history, the Debs Caucus members turned to Trotskyism, confronting first of all the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)—the natural choice, one would think, for social democrats. Precisely—it's too much like the social democracy we just left. On all the key questions the Socialist Workers Party has no differences with the SP.
On the question of the party, their slogan "Our Party is Your Party," says it all. Join the SWP, no matter what your political position is. We even heard the Socialist Workers Party people openly proclaim that it's not necessary that you believe in Trotskyism to join the SWP!
On the Russian question the SWP very pointedly held up its fusion with the Revolutionary Marxist Committee, a small state-capitalist Shachtmanite group, as a model of a fusion. In other words they were saying: "Look, you may all be third camp, but come on in anyway. We don't care enough about defense of the gains of October to even ask you about it."
The SWP's attitude towards the bourgeois state is classically social-democratic. It sees the state as a neutral mediator between classes, not as an armed fist of bourgeois rule. Thus the SWP called for federal troops to Boston during the busing crisis there in 1974. They called on the bourgeois state which wrote slavery into its constitution, which for decade after decade institutionalized racism throughout the country; they called on this government to defend black people against racist mobs!
The SWP's trade-union work is a record of lackeyism to the bureaucracy. They play the role of a left cover for traitors like Arnold Miller of the Mineworkers. In 1972 when Miller was elected, the bought-and-paid-for candidate of the Labor Department, the SWP supported him uncritically. Even in 1978 when the rest of the left (which supported Miller previously) had at least enough embarrassment to say nothing favorable about Miller's despicable role in the great coal strike, the SWP stood alone in covering for Miller until the very end of the strike. Then, they finally introduced a few mild criticisms of the way he had sold out thousands of militant mineworkers.
Then there were the little groups that hang around the left. The chief of those we investigated was the Bolshevik-Leninist Group (BLG). In a way our investigation of the BLG shows the naiveté of Debs Caucus members. Why should anyone look into the revolutionary, pretensions of a group that has no press, no documents stating its political positions and no public face? However, it also shows that the Debs Caucus explored every avenue of ostensible Trotskyism in its search for a revolutionary party.
Now the BLG simply ignored the question of building a revolutionary party. It is not interested in it. For the BLG, politics is an abstraction. Tonight, for instance, despite the fact that a number of their supporters stood at the door for 30 minutes, they refused to come in and participate in the discussion. They had nothing to say, and they knew it.
The first real 'test of the BLG's politics—given its restriction to the Ann Arbor milieu—was a very small test. And they flunked. It was the question of picket lines, which I spoke about earlier.
For the Spartacist League!
Let me conclude by stepping back a bit from this relatively small struggle on the left,
involving a relative handful of people, to the larger tasks that face revolutionaries in the world today. The job of the Leninist vanguard is to wrest leadership from the rest of the left. The revolutionary party can't ignore or abstain from struggle with other tendencies or with the labor bureaucracy. The only way the Bolsheviks in this country, the Spartacist League, can win this leadership is by politically defeating in action the left fakers.
The struggle to build a revolutionary party in this country, and a revolutionary world party—to reforge the Fourth International—is the key task that faces revolutionaries today. Only the Sparta cist League participates in this task. Every other tendency in the left capitulates in one way or another to bourgeois consciousness. That is why comrades of the Debs Caucus, after investigating the claims of the various tendencies in the left to be revolutionary, came to the Spartacist League.
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-Revolutionary Regroupment:Spartacists Win Leftists From Social Democracy (March 1979)
Young Spartacus is pleased to present the following condensed version of a February 8 forum given in Ann Arbor by Bruce Richard. Comrade Richard was a leader of a heterogeneous left-critical/activist grouping in the Socialist Party. USA (SP) called the Debs Caucus. When the Caucus declared it self pro- Leninist, they stirred considerable attention on the left. The soft-Maoist Guardian and the ex-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in particular scurried after the Caucus' members, but the serious elements in the grouping recognized that neither of these reformist outfits represented an authentic revolutionary Marxist program. Comrade Richard, who joined the SP in 1976 and was its Michigan state secretary, is now a member of the Spartacist League/Spartacus Youth League.
To preserve the verbal character of the original presentation, we have introduced only stylistic alterations and deletions.
******
What we're really talking about is a fairly important question for the left: why would anybody in 1978-1979 go from the Socialist Party (SP), the extreme right wing of anything we would call ostensibly socialist in this country, to the revolutionary communism of the Spartacist League? How is a group of militant, but raw, social democrats recruited, turned into communists, by the SL?
Those of us who came from the SP had a chance to test in action revolutionary politics in the workers movement. We had a lesson in what revolutionary politics are throughout our fight in the SP and our process of coming to the SL. Now why is it, first of all, that anyone would go to the Socialist Party in the first place? Many people who come to left politics go through a stage of thinking—some of them never leave it— that all who oppose capitalism should be organizationally united, despite their different programs. There is an illusion that there is a "family of the left" which can join together to fight the capitalists despite the fact that they have many different programs and strategies for doing so. Now the Socialist Party of today holds itself out as a "non-sectarian, multi-tendency" party, open to ill who sign an application which says, in effect,
"Relieving that socialism should be brought about by democratic means, 1 hereby apply to the SP." To politically raw youth, ignorant of the historic divisions in the workers movement, this seems only sensible.
The SP's History of Betrayal
Most of the people who later formed the Debs Caucus in the SP and split to the left were in fact ignorant of the political history of the SP, as well as of the history of the whole left movement. What we discovered, after joining the SP, was an unfolding series of revelations about the SP's history. We found out, more or less by accident—an accident which led to considerable research on our part as we grew more interested and appalled—that the SP during the whole of the Vietnam war had opposed military victory for the National Liberation Front. Under the slogan "Negotiate Now for a Neutralized South Vietnam," the SP basically supported the U.S. war effort. Leading members of the SP, such as Max Shachtman, furthermore had supported the imperialist adventure of the Bay of •Pigs invasion against the Cuban revolution—on the grounds that "totalitarian communism" had to be smashed by any means necessary.
The SP leadership for 60 years consistently fought any revolutionary tendencies that arose within the SP. In 1919 they expelled tens of thousands of people—many of whom later became the Communist Party—for adherence to the ideals of the Russian Revolution. I n 1937 they threw out a large Trotskyist cadre, which later became the Socialist Workers Party. In 1953 they basically threw their youth organization out, the Young People's Socialist League, the YPSLs, which later went to join Max Shachtman's group, which was at the time somewhat to the left. And in 1964, when the reconstituted YPSLs called for "Vote No for President" instead of endorsing Lyndon B. Johnson as the party itself did, again the youth organization was simply dissolved, the locks on its office padlocked and its membership thrown out.
The SP through most of its history was tied to the crustiest section of the labor bureaucracy—people like Albert Shanker, George Meany people who under the guise of some form of socialism had been bitterly anti-communist and had been the most consistent betrayers of working-class struggles. What we found out in fact was the historical role of the social democracy in America: to be the bourgeoisie's own anti-communist cover in the labor movement. The SP's ties with the right-wing section of the labor bureaucracy allowed it to be a transmission belt for bourgeois ideas into the labor movement.
The social democracy has had this role internationally since 1914, when the parties of the Second International supported their own bourgeois governments against the workers of other countries at the start of World War 1. Ever since then the social democrats have played the role of fighting the communists on behalf of the bourgeoisies under the guise of "democratic socialism."
A "Non-Sectarian" Swamp
Furthermore, we had a series of corresponding revelations about the present state of the organization we had joined, the product of this rotten history. We saw what the "non-sectarian party" looked like in practice. Torpid functioning. Half the membership hadn't paid its 1978 $4 dues by September of last year. The SP newspaper, % Socialist Tribune, was infrequent and •irregular. Its political content was determined erratically by a volunteer collective, which led to wild swings in political line. Because of the SP's erratic notions of discipline, individual members would put forward their own motions in the name of the party. For instance, the National Chairman, Frank Zeidler, would often issue press releases without clearing it with anyone. Although a quarter of the membership has trade-union experience, there was not a single SP trade-union fraction anywhere in the country. Many of the locals existed primarily on paper; and did absolutely nothing at all. This is basically what this "multi--tendency, non-sectarian" party looks like in .practice, it's a swamp in which nothing gets done and in; which the formal politics, such as they are, are the politics of class betrayal.
Now, the activist youth recruited over-the last two or three years realized that a concerted effort would be necessary if fife would ever be breathed into the SP's political corpse. Oppositional activity formally began at the May 1978 Wisconsin Socialist Party state convention, where there was an unsuccessful, but aggressive, challenge to the extreme right wing of the Wisconsin party led by a group of young comrades from Milwaukee. Between this May convention and the September National Convention, the left-wing activists in the SP, primarily located in Michigan and Wisconsin, coalesced into the Debs Caucus. This was to be the main organizational vehicle for left-wing opposition in the SP. The Caucus came together formally just prior to the September Convention after a series of rather vague and formless discussions.
The name. Debs Caucus, was not an acronym. It reflected, first of all, oppositional history in the SP. The Zeidlerites had been organized as the Debs Caucus when they were antiwar and against liquidation into the Democratic Party in 1973. More importantly, the name reflected a concept of the Socialist Party as it was in the time of Eugene V. Debs, before World War 1—an all-inclusive party in which revolutionaries like Big Bill Haywood, James P. Cannon and others coexisted with reformists such as Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger. This concept of the party reflected the Caucus' own political heterogeneity. It contained self-proclaimed Maoists, Trotskyists, "non-Leninist Marxists" and so on.
The basic programmatic document of the Debs Caucus set forward our philosophy: "We prefer to emphasize the commonality among socialists rather than the differences." This concept of the party, called "Kautsky-ist" after the leading theoretician of the pre-World War 1 Second International is that of the "party of the whole class." All the working-class tendencies were factions of a common organization. These "parties of the whole class" everywhere in the world split in 1914 when one section of them, the reformists, supported their own bourgeoisie in World War I. This was a historic betrayal of the workers of the world, precisely when there was a need for militant opposition to the ruling class.
Like the Kautskyists, the Debs Caucus had programmatically vague statements about the need for unity, and ignored or slid over key questions such as the Russian question. The main document of the Caucus contained not one word on the Russian question. The call for the Debs Caucus, distributed at the 1978 convention, evaded the question by simply stating that we don't believe that the USSR is the main threat in the world today. Incorrect and temporizing as this attitude was, the social-democratic majority in the SP would have none of it. We were met with red-baiting hysteria and crude anti-communist slander. One National Committee member summed up the right-wing opposition's stance with the simple statement that "Lenin was a murderer."
SP's Right Wing Calls the Cops
Furthermore, the SP majority was not about to engage in political debate with a group of potential revolutionaries. It relied instead on bureaucratic maneuverings to crush the Caucus' opposition. When it looked like the Caucus would get a significant proportional representation on the National Committee of the SP at the Convention, the majority simply canceled the elections. The national secretary, Tom Spiro (a member of the Debs Caucus), was summarily fired, and at the time that the Caucus split from the SP in November, the majority had prepared to revoke the charter of all the left-wing locals.
After the September national convention, leading right-wingers began a new campaign of slander against the Debs Caucus. They claimed that we were agents of other left groups and that in any case we were politically ignorant and irresponsible. This is the answer of these "non-sectarians" to an attempt to clarify certain political differences within their "non-sectarian" party. The right-wingers were upset in particular by the entry of a small group in New York called the Communist Cadre-Marxist (CTCM), a tiny 1972 split from the Workers World Party of Sam Marcy. CTCM had drifted in the political wilds of New York City for a number of years before coming to rest in the SP.
Despite all their faults, the Communist Cadre were opposed by the social-democratic right wing precisely on the issues on which one could say they were right. It was because they claimed to be revolutionaries. The CTCM, for example, proposed a motion to expel chairman Zeidler for having crossed a picket line several months before in order to speak on the same platform as Henry Hyde (the well-known sponsor of an amendment to cut off Medicaid funding for abortions). This of course threw the SP right wing into a frenzy, and they attempted to throw the CTCM out.
Additionally, the Spartacist League exposed the fact in Workers Vanguard that Zeidler had helped break a bitter strike in Wisconsin in 1954 by using his power as mayor to allow scab goods to be unloaded at the harbor. On seeing this revelation the Milwaukee local of the SP also proposed the expulsion of Zeidler. This more or less forced the hand of the right-wingers who immediately summoned the National Committee and prepared to decharter the left-wing locals. When the Debs Caucus stood up at this meeting, 15 of us, the response of the right-wing majority was to call the police! This is what social democracy means: calling in the bourgeois state against the revolutionaries. This is how the majority bureaucratically dealt with the political challenge they were confronting.
Needed: A Program For Revolutionary Leadership
Under the blows of the right wing the Debs Caucus had to reassess its "family-of-the-left" conception. How could we coexist in the same party with people that called the cops on us? We carefully studied the basic writings of Lenin and Trotsky on the question of the organization of the revolutionary party, and we in the process made the transition to Leninism. The primary thing for a party is its program, which describes the basic tasks of a revolutionary party for making a socialist revolution. One needs a party committed programmatically to the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism—a disciplined party capable of mobilizing the working class and seizing state power.
The fight for leadership of the working class, betrayed by the social democrats and their brothers under the skin, the Stalinists, is the fight against the other tendencies on the left. There is one party and one program only is revolutionary. All the misleaders must be exposed in action before the workers and politically defeated. The "multi-tendency" party subverts this struggle for leadership.
This struggle for revolutionary leadership governs the relations not only within the party, but between other left groups as well. This is the question of the united front. It's often necessary to form blocs between different tendencies for the defense of the working class, especially when the revolutionary party is not the sole or main party of the workers. Thus, in Germany in 1933 it was objectively vitally necessary for the Communist Party to actively seek out a united front with the social democrats to fight the fascists. Even in such blocs, however, the struggle to expose the misleadership of the other parties must go on. There must be merciless criticism of their program, the program of defeats, and the constant counterposition of the revolutionary program to theirs. The workers can then see each program tested in action. They can see which program wins gains.
Another question that divides social democrats from revolutionaries is the Russian question: do you defend the USSR against capitalist attack or not? If not, you are in alignment with the world bourgeoisie; there is no "third camp." The USSR represents a great gain, even under the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy which must be overthrown by the Russian workers themselves. The same follows for the deformed workers states: China, and so on. The Russian question is the critical question for the world left movement. It defines one's attitude towards the world bourgeoisie. Take for example Maoism in China, where anti-Sovietism has led the Chinese bureaucracy to make a bloc with the U.S. against Russia. If they succeed in destroying the Soviet Union, they will only thereby set themselves up for decimation by the U.S. bourgeoisie.
The Russian question also has immediate importance because of the present reactionary campaign by the U.S. government for "human rights" in the Soviet Union. This is nothing but a cover for cold war hysteria—which most of the left has tailed. For example the Communist Party itself calls on Jimmy Carter and his government to "enforce human rights" at home. The Socialist Workers Party raises the call for "human rights" all the time in the context of calling on the bourgeois government to make good on its promises. But this is the same government that fought, -the .Vietnam war for 10, 20 years, that oppresses people throughout the world. Groups like these build illusions in the ability of this government to be "even-handed."
Program and Style
The party question in a sense comes down to "style." The reaction that most of the Debs Caucus members had early on in their exploration of other left groups was that they like the politics of the Spartacist League on questions such , as the Russian question, the party—but the "style" of the Spartacist League was "divisive." The majority of the left in general doesn't want to hear what the Spartacist League has to say. They don't want to confront communist politics, and they take refuge in criticizing what they call the "style" of the SL.
The Spartacist League is like Lenin's Bolsheviks, who only became a hard fighting party capable of leading the October Revolution through constant polemics against the misleaders: the Mensheviks, the social democrats. These were "destructive, divisive" polemics, that shattered parties, disgraced opponents and lined up the workers for the revolution. For 15 years Lenin fought to make a party by counterpoising his strategy for revolution in Russia to that of the reformists. And for this Lenin was insulted by social democrats throughout Europe. He was called sectarian, divisive, abrasive and so on. Communist politics, however, are abrasive in bourgeois society. There is no way to escape that. Anyone who wishes to practice communist politics should be resigned to incurring the anger of all the different species of misleaders who bring bourgeois consciousness into the workers movement.
Let me read you a description of Lenin's "abrasiveness" which was written by Trotsky. Speaking of Lenin talking at a public meeting, he says: "[Lenin's] answers are entirely unexpected and annihilating in their simplicity. Point-blank, he lays bare a situation which, according to all expectations, he should have sought to camouflage. The Mensheviks went through this experience more than once during the initial period of the revolution when charges of violations of democracy still had a ring of novelty. 'Our newspapers have been shut down!' [the Mensheviks cried.] 'Of course! But unfortunately not all of them as yet. They will all be shut down presently. The dictatorship of the proletariat will destroy at its very roots this shameful traffic in bourgeois opium!' [Lenin] has straightened up [on the podium]. Both hands are in [his] pockets. There is not even a hint of posing, in the voice not [even] a trace of oratorical modulation — instead the entire figure, the angle of the head, the compressed lips, the cheekbones, the slightly hoarse timbre of the voice all radiate an indomitable confidence in his correctness and his truth. 'If you want to fight, then come on, let's really fight.'" — Leon Trotsky, Portraits: Political & Personal (1977)
It's the same with us. The rest of the left can't stand our bluntness. The rest of the left is "nice." They don't raise the hard truths. The Socialist Workers Party is a very nice party. It calls for free speech for fascists, people who are for the destruction of the workers movement, for genocide. That's nicer. It's less abrasive in bourgeois society.
The Bolshevik Leninist Group [a tiny clot in Ann Arbor] which some of you saw tonight, is also very "nice." They crossed a picket line and helped break a strike. To them things like picket lines are intellectual abstractions to be debated learnedly in 60-page documents. The fact that a picket line is the living embodiment of the class struggle means nothing for these people, because after all it's "abrasive" to call for honoring picket lines.
So that's it for the style question. Yes, the Spartacist League's politics are abrasive in bourgeois society. The reformists don't like our style because they can't stand our politics. They can't stand the truth. They take the line of least resistance to bourgeois ideology. It was this that the ex-social democrats of the Debs Caucus broke with when they broke with the "family of the left" and with Kautskyism.
Their Party Wasn't Our Party
Even before it split from the SP the Debs Caucus began investigating other groups in the light of what it had learned in its own factional struggle. We oriented from the start towards fusion with another group. There was a felt inadequacy among its members for finding an independent political path.
The Debs Caucus rejected Stalinism and Maoism and the so-called "state-capitalist" tendencies out of hand. These tendencies have historically proven time and again to be betrayers of the proletariat wherever they have had a chance.
So, taking the lessons of history, the Debs Caucus members turned to Trotskyism, confronting first of all the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)—the natural choice, one would think, for social democrats. Precisely—it's too much like the social democracy we just left. On all the key questions the Socialist Workers Party has no differences with the SP.
On the question of the party, their slogan "Our Party is Your Party," says it all. Join the SWP, no matter what your political position is. We even heard the Socialist Workers Party people openly proclaim that it's not necessary that you believe in Trotskyism to join the SWP!
On the Russian question the SWP very pointedly held up its fusion with the Revolutionary Marxist Committee, a small state-capitalist Shachtmanite group, as a model of a fusion. In other words they were saying: "Look, you may all be third camp, but come on in anyway. We don't care enough about defense of the gains of October to even ask you about it."
The SWP's attitude towards the bourgeois state is classically social-democratic. It sees the state as a neutral mediator between classes, not as an armed fist of bourgeois rule. Thus the SWP called for federal troops to Boston during the busing crisis there in 1974. They called on the bourgeois state which wrote slavery into its constitution, which for decade after decade institutionalized racism throughout the country; they called on this government to defend black people against racist mobs!
The SWP's trade-union work is a record of lackeyism to the bureaucracy. They play the role of a left cover for traitors like Arnold Miller of the Mineworkers. In 1972 when Miller was elected, the bought-and-paid-for candidate of the Labor Department, the SWP supported him uncritically. Even in 1978 when the rest of the left (which supported Miller previously) had at least enough embarrassment to say nothing favorable about Miller's despicable role in the great coal strike, the SWP stood alone in covering for Miller until the very end of the strike. Then, they finally introduced a few mild criticisms of the way he had sold out thousands of militant mineworkers.
Then there were the little groups that hang around the left. The chief of those we investigated was the Bolshevik-Leninist Group (BLG). In a way our investigation of the BLG shows the naiveté of Debs Caucus members. Why should anyone look into the revolutionary, pretensions of a group that has no press, no documents stating its political positions and no public face? However, it also shows that the Debs Caucus explored every avenue of ostensible Trotskyism in its search for a revolutionary party.
Now the BLG simply ignored the question of building a revolutionary party. It is not interested in it. For the BLG, politics is an abstraction. Tonight, for instance, despite the fact that a number of their supporters stood at the door for 30 minutes, they refused to come in and participate in the discussion. They had nothing to say, and they knew it.
The first real 'test of the BLG's politics—given its restriction to the Ann Arbor milieu—was a very small test. And they flunked. It was the question of picket lines, which I spoke about earlier.
For the Spartacist League!
Let me conclude by stepping back a bit from this relatively small struggle on the left,
involving a relative handful of people, to the larger tasks that face revolutionaries in the world today. The job of the Leninist vanguard is to wrest leadership from the rest of the left. The revolutionary party can't ignore or abstain from struggle with other tendencies or with the labor bureaucracy. The only way the Bolsheviks in this country, the Spartacist League, can win this leadership is by politically defeating in action the left fakers.
The struggle to build a revolutionary party in this country, and a revolutionary world party—to reforge the Fourth International—is the key task that faces revolutionaries today. Only the Sparta cist League participates in this task. Every other tendency in the left capitulates in one way or another to bourgeois consciousness. That is why comrades of the Debs Caucus, after investigating the claims of the various tendencies in the left to be revolutionary, came to the Spartacist League.
Sunday, January 01, 2012
The Latest From “The Rag Blog”-Simone de Beauvoir: A philosophy of liberation
Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
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Simone de Beauvoir: A philosophy of liberation
Exercising our own freedom requires that others be free.
By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / November 3, 2011
I was pleased recently to find the full text of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity freely available on line. De Beauvoir was one of a cadre of post-World-War-II French existentialists that also included Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others. Her work provides a fascinating window into a unique point of view on what it is to be human and how that pertains to the struggle for political and spiritual liberty.
The starting point to understanding de Beauvoir is human freedom. Philosophers have had quite a debate about whether human beings have free will.[1] The French existentialists not only assume we do but make it the center point of their view of human nature.
They do this because of what is revealed by their methodology. The existentialists describe the human condition from a radically first-person point of view, the point of view of a free agent; and in doing so they try to avoid all preconceptions and presuppositions. De Beauvoir says “... let man put his will ‘in parentheses’ and he will thereby be brought to the consciousness of his true condition.”[2]
By “in parentheses” she means that we set aside all theories from psychology, history, sociology, biology, and similar sciences and we also set aside, as much as we can, all our taken-for-granted assumptions about who we are. Instead we describe our life purely as we experience it. Immersed in the first-person point of view and trying to avoid terminology from other disciplines, the existentialists employ cryptically evocative terms intended to lead us to new realizations about ourselves and our lives.
From this point of view there are three categories of stuff we find in our world.[3] The first is “I myself,” the self or person as each of us experiences himself or herself; the second is the world of non-human things; and the third is other people.
Each of us -- each self, each person -- has two fundamental characteristics. One is that we can be conscious of ourselves; we have self-awareness and can mentally step back from our engagement in life and examine, not just what we are engaged with but ourselves as engaged beings as well. The human is “... a being who … questions himself in his being, a being who is at a distance from himself ....”
This ability is the root of the famous nothingness that both de Beauvoir and Sartre claim to be foundational: “... the nothingness which is at the heart of man is also the consciousness that he has of himself.” When you are observing yourself, the you that is doing the observing is not the you that is being observed. In all the elements of experience that you are observing, you the observer are not present. That’s the nothingness.
And this nothingness is free to choose, free to act, undetermined by any of what it is conscious of. The existentialists do not engage in the standard arguments about hard determinism, incompatibilism, and so forth that have populated the historical debate about free will. They just recognize that our activity -- as observed in this impartial, presuppositionless way -- just happens, springing forth from the same nothingness that underlies our experience. Just as you the observer cannot be observed, neither can you the agent be observed.
You could say that human freedom is a premise of her whole argument, not a result of any logical deduction, but certainly not unexamined either. She does not use the term, but she is asserting agent causality; the human being, she says, is “a cause of itself.” She uses the term “existence” for this kind of being, the kind of being that can transcend itself to become more than what it already has been.
The second category is everything that is not human, that does not have self-awareness and freedom. She calls this “facticity” or “brute fact.” This includes all physical objects, such as tables and chairs, rocks and trees, as well as animals and plants that may be conscious of their world but are not conscious of themselves. The factical is just there; it does not act and cannot transcend itself.
But the factical depends on the human for its being. The nothingness that we each fundamentally are “discloses being.” This does not make any sense from an objective, scientific point of view, but from the existential point of view it does, because by “being” she means what is just there as an element in our experience.
Consider a beautiful sunset. Without our experience of the beauty, would there be beauty? Without our experience of the colors would there even be color? From a scientific point of view we can say that there would be light waves of a certain frequency and intensity. But there is only color and beauty if someone is there to experience them.
If we understand this distinction between existence -- what we are -- and being -- what only exists (for us) as disclosed to us in our experience --, then we can begin to make some sense of enigmatic passages such as these:
My freedom must not seek to trap being but to disclose it. The disclosure is the transition from being to existence. The goal which my freedom aims at is conquering existence across the always inadequate density of being.
The trick of tyrants is to enclose a man in the immanence of his facticity and to try to forget that man is always, as Heidegger puts it, ‘infinitely more than what he would be if he were reduced to being what he is’ ....
The third category is other people, disclosed through what Heidegger called Mitsein, or being-with. We recognize that others are like us, that each of them is an existence, a freedom, that can transcend itself just as we can. But they are also objects, factical things, that can get in our way or that can be useful to us. And, as they regard us, we become factical and thing-like for them.
The ambiguity that de Beauvoir refers to in the title of her work is just this: that each of us is both an existence, a freedom, “a pure internality against which no external power can take hold” and simultaneously a facticity, “a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things.” (Existentialists, unlike, say, analytic philosophers, can be quite dramatic.) And the ethical question is how to comport ourselves while being true to both aspects of our existence.
She rejects any notion of an absolute goodness or moral imperative that exists on its own. There are no goals or ends to which we are obliged to devote ourselves outside of what we ourselves choose as our projects. “It is desire which creates the desirable, and the project which sets up the end. It is human existence which makes values spring up in the world on the basis of which it will be able to judge the enterprise in which it will be engaged.”
Once you have a project -- to accomplish something at work, or to raise healthy children, or to create a work of art, or to pursue a hobby -- then values spring up in relation to it. There are activities that will promote or hinder your accomplishment of it. But what justifies the project itself?
It is a common complaint about existentialism that it provides no basis for ethics. “[I]f man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes?” But, de Beauvoir responds, there is one goal that comes with being human: the exercise of freedom itself. “[H]uman freedom is the ultimate, the unique end to which man should destine himself,” she says. Freedom is the “universal, absolute end.”
In this she is quite Aristotelian, although she does not acknowledge it. The goal or end of being human, says Aristotle, is to do well what humans uniquely do. When you are exercising your function -- which, for de Beauvoir, is to exercise freedom -- then you are fulfilled and experience happiness.
Happiness as such is not a goal for the existentialists, but the exercise of the uniquely human function is: “If man wishes to save his existence, as only he himself can do, his original spontaneity must be raised to the height of moral freedom by taking itself as an end through the disclosure of a particular content.” By “disclosure of a particular content” she means the projects that we freely choose. You can’t just choose freedom in the abstract; it is always freedom to pursue a particular goal.
The point is to choose our projects knowingly rather than blindly or habitually, and to choose projects that will enable us to expand our powers and to exercise our creativity in ever more satisfying ways so that we may “feel the joy of existing.”
And in order to do this, we must allow others their freedom as well. And not only allow it, but actively promote it. Exercising our own freedom requires that others be free. The goal is to “become conscious of the real requirements of [our] own freedom, which can will itself only by destining itself to an open future, by seeking to extend itself by means of the freedom of others. … [T]he freedom of other men must be respected and they must be helped to free themselves. Such a law imposes limits upon action and at the same time immediately gives it a content.”
She does not demonstrate that this concern for the freedom of others is required, in the sense of deriving it logically. We could say that she merely asserts it, but that would be missing the point of the existentialist program. She examines her own experience of being in the world and finds it disclosed to her, part of her existence itself: “I concern others and they concern me,” she says. “There we have an irreducible truth. The me-others relationship is as indissoluble as the subject-object relationship.” “[T]he existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom.”
Philosophically, we can get at the injunction to have concern for others in many ways. With Kant we could derive it from principles of pure reason. With the Utilitarians we could derive it from the mandate to maximize happiness or pleasure. Perhaps closer to de Beauvoir’s view, we could say that rational self-interest requires it.
But de Beauvoir finds it in an essential part of human existence: the impulse to be generous. “There is vitality only by means of free generosity,” she says. “Contrary to the formal strictness of Kantianism for whom the more abstract the act is the more virtuous it is, generosity seems to us to be better grounded and therefore more valid the less distinction there is between the other and ourself and the more we fulfill ourself in taking the other as an end. That is what happens if I am engaged in relation to others.”
So if you are radically free to choose at any moment, how do you figure out what to do? What projects would be suitable for a free existent such as yourself? Art, scientific inquiry, technological innovation and philosophy are all good candidates in so far as they are open-ended, aiming at “an indefinite disclosure of being.”
Science is at its best when it keeps opening the possibilities for new discoveries; technological innovation, when it frees us from drudgery and enables more creativity. And certainly art is high on the list. Not only does the best art flow from the creativity of the artist, but it inspires the audience -- the viewer, listener, reader or participant -- to find new potentialities, new avenues for self-expression, as well. “Art reveals the transitory as an absolute; and as the transitory existence is perpetuated through the centuries, art too, through the centuries, must perpetuate this never-to-be-finished revelation.”
But the paradigmatic case of an authentic project is the struggle for liberation, politically, socially, and economically, a topic that recurs throughout her work. She published The Ethics of Ambiguity in 1947, and the struggle to liberate France from the Nazis was undoubtedly fresh in her mind. And she was on the editorial board of the left-leaning literary journal Les Temps modernes. A good portion of the third chapter of her book concerns the intricacies and nuances of political action.
The connection between existentialism and politics is obvious. We are all inherently free; hence the slave is always free to rebel against the master. The negro, the woman, the colonized native, the worker in a capitalist enterprise: all are free to rise up against their oppressors.
“[T]he oppressed,” says de Beauvoir, “can fulfill his freedom as a man only in revolt, since the essential characteristic of the situation against which he is rebelling is precisely its prohibiting him from any positive development; it is only in social and political struggle that his transcendence passes beyond to the infinite.” She would, I am confident, quite approve of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
We would be ill advised to swallow the existentialist program whole hog. The radical first-person point of view is, after all, just one person’s opinion. It is up to each of us to examine our own experience of life to see how much of de Beauvoir’s description resonates with us as true. (The ability to do that is another expression of our freedom, she would say.)
If you did so you would notice that you are, in addition to your radical freedom and nothingness, an animal body, an organism. You would find yourself, not floating in empty space, but situated, embedded in the world. You would understand that at the very least you need to choose strategies for being in your world that enhance your ability to survive and stay free.
You would find your world shot through and through with other people, some of whom indeed seem to limit and constrain you, but others of whom thrill to your existence as you thrill to theirs, and with whom you find mutual comfort and joy, or at least pleasant conversation. You would see that, far from being something alien, some heavy density that limits your soaring freedom, your environment in fact supports and sustains you, and it makes sense to support and sustain it in turn.
And you would find, with de Beauvoir, that a strategy of being generous, of being cooperative, of being -- she does not use the word, but I will -- compassionate, is a strategy that enhances your life.
Right now you are breathing a new breath. Right now is a new moment. What will you do with it?
Notes
[1] My own view is that we certainly do have free will. See my “Do Humans Have Free Will?” at http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/FreeWill.html and “Beyond the Causal Veil” at http://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=424 .
[2] De Beauvoir, Simone, The Ethics of Ambiguity. All quotations are from this work, which is on line and has no page numbers, so I won’t footnote each one. By “man” she means human beings generally, male or female. She wrote before the feminist movement – which took inspiration, in part, from her own The Second Sex-- brought to our attention the inherent unfairness and bias of such language.
[3] I’m describing an ontology, but I can’t say three categories of “being” or of “existence,” as both these terms have special meanings for de Beauvoir. And I can’t say categories of “things” because some of them are not things.
References
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Ethics of Ambiguity. On-line publication, URL = http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/ambiguity/index.htm as of 6 October 2011. Another version, not as well proof-read, is here: http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/existentialism/debeauvoir/ambiguity.html as of 6 October 2011.
The Information Philosopher. “Agent-Causality.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/agent-causality.html as of 27 October 2011.
Wikipedia. “Free will.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will as of 27 October 2011.
[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's 60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at bmeacham.com, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
******
Simone de Beauvoir: A philosophy of liberation
Exercising our own freedom requires that others be free.
By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / November 3, 2011
I was pleased recently to find the full text of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity freely available on line. De Beauvoir was one of a cadre of post-World-War-II French existentialists that also included Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others. Her work provides a fascinating window into a unique point of view on what it is to be human and how that pertains to the struggle for political and spiritual liberty.
The starting point to understanding de Beauvoir is human freedom. Philosophers have had quite a debate about whether human beings have free will.[1] The French existentialists not only assume we do but make it the center point of their view of human nature.
They do this because of what is revealed by their methodology. The existentialists describe the human condition from a radically first-person point of view, the point of view of a free agent; and in doing so they try to avoid all preconceptions and presuppositions. De Beauvoir says “... let man put his will ‘in parentheses’ and he will thereby be brought to the consciousness of his true condition.”[2]
By “in parentheses” she means that we set aside all theories from psychology, history, sociology, biology, and similar sciences and we also set aside, as much as we can, all our taken-for-granted assumptions about who we are. Instead we describe our life purely as we experience it. Immersed in the first-person point of view and trying to avoid terminology from other disciplines, the existentialists employ cryptically evocative terms intended to lead us to new realizations about ourselves and our lives.
From this point of view there are three categories of stuff we find in our world.[3] The first is “I myself,” the self or person as each of us experiences himself or herself; the second is the world of non-human things; and the third is other people.
Each of us -- each self, each person -- has two fundamental characteristics. One is that we can be conscious of ourselves; we have self-awareness and can mentally step back from our engagement in life and examine, not just what we are engaged with but ourselves as engaged beings as well. The human is “... a being who … questions himself in his being, a being who is at a distance from himself ....”
This ability is the root of the famous nothingness that both de Beauvoir and Sartre claim to be foundational: “... the nothingness which is at the heart of man is also the consciousness that he has of himself.” When you are observing yourself, the you that is doing the observing is not the you that is being observed. In all the elements of experience that you are observing, you the observer are not present. That’s the nothingness.
And this nothingness is free to choose, free to act, undetermined by any of what it is conscious of. The existentialists do not engage in the standard arguments about hard determinism, incompatibilism, and so forth that have populated the historical debate about free will. They just recognize that our activity -- as observed in this impartial, presuppositionless way -- just happens, springing forth from the same nothingness that underlies our experience. Just as you the observer cannot be observed, neither can you the agent be observed.
You could say that human freedom is a premise of her whole argument, not a result of any logical deduction, but certainly not unexamined either. She does not use the term, but she is asserting agent causality; the human being, she says, is “a cause of itself.” She uses the term “existence” for this kind of being, the kind of being that can transcend itself to become more than what it already has been.
The second category is everything that is not human, that does not have self-awareness and freedom. She calls this “facticity” or “brute fact.” This includes all physical objects, such as tables and chairs, rocks and trees, as well as animals and plants that may be conscious of their world but are not conscious of themselves. The factical is just there; it does not act and cannot transcend itself.
But the factical depends on the human for its being. The nothingness that we each fundamentally are “discloses being.” This does not make any sense from an objective, scientific point of view, but from the existential point of view it does, because by “being” she means what is just there as an element in our experience.
Consider a beautiful sunset. Without our experience of the beauty, would there be beauty? Without our experience of the colors would there even be color? From a scientific point of view we can say that there would be light waves of a certain frequency and intensity. But there is only color and beauty if someone is there to experience them.
If we understand this distinction between existence -- what we are -- and being -- what only exists (for us) as disclosed to us in our experience --, then we can begin to make some sense of enigmatic passages such as these:
My freedom must not seek to trap being but to disclose it. The disclosure is the transition from being to existence. The goal which my freedom aims at is conquering existence across the always inadequate density of being.
The trick of tyrants is to enclose a man in the immanence of his facticity and to try to forget that man is always, as Heidegger puts it, ‘infinitely more than what he would be if he were reduced to being what he is’ ....
The third category is other people, disclosed through what Heidegger called Mitsein, or being-with. We recognize that others are like us, that each of them is an existence, a freedom, that can transcend itself just as we can. But they are also objects, factical things, that can get in our way or that can be useful to us. And, as they regard us, we become factical and thing-like for them.
The ambiguity that de Beauvoir refers to in the title of her work is just this: that each of us is both an existence, a freedom, “a pure internality against which no external power can take hold” and simultaneously a facticity, “a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things.” (Existentialists, unlike, say, analytic philosophers, can be quite dramatic.) And the ethical question is how to comport ourselves while being true to both aspects of our existence.
She rejects any notion of an absolute goodness or moral imperative that exists on its own. There are no goals or ends to which we are obliged to devote ourselves outside of what we ourselves choose as our projects. “It is desire which creates the desirable, and the project which sets up the end. It is human existence which makes values spring up in the world on the basis of which it will be able to judge the enterprise in which it will be engaged.”
Once you have a project -- to accomplish something at work, or to raise healthy children, or to create a work of art, or to pursue a hobby -- then values spring up in relation to it. There are activities that will promote or hinder your accomplishment of it. But what justifies the project itself?
It is a common complaint about existentialism that it provides no basis for ethics. “[I]f man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes?” But, de Beauvoir responds, there is one goal that comes with being human: the exercise of freedom itself. “[H]uman freedom is the ultimate, the unique end to which man should destine himself,” she says. Freedom is the “universal, absolute end.”
In this she is quite Aristotelian, although she does not acknowledge it. The goal or end of being human, says Aristotle, is to do well what humans uniquely do. When you are exercising your function -- which, for de Beauvoir, is to exercise freedom -- then you are fulfilled and experience happiness.
Happiness as such is not a goal for the existentialists, but the exercise of the uniquely human function is: “If man wishes to save his existence, as only he himself can do, his original spontaneity must be raised to the height of moral freedom by taking itself as an end through the disclosure of a particular content.” By “disclosure of a particular content” she means the projects that we freely choose. You can’t just choose freedom in the abstract; it is always freedom to pursue a particular goal.
The point is to choose our projects knowingly rather than blindly or habitually, and to choose projects that will enable us to expand our powers and to exercise our creativity in ever more satisfying ways so that we may “feel the joy of existing.”
And in order to do this, we must allow others their freedom as well. And not only allow it, but actively promote it. Exercising our own freedom requires that others be free. The goal is to “become conscious of the real requirements of [our] own freedom, which can will itself only by destining itself to an open future, by seeking to extend itself by means of the freedom of others. … [T]he freedom of other men must be respected and they must be helped to free themselves. Such a law imposes limits upon action and at the same time immediately gives it a content.”
She does not demonstrate that this concern for the freedom of others is required, in the sense of deriving it logically. We could say that she merely asserts it, but that would be missing the point of the existentialist program. She examines her own experience of being in the world and finds it disclosed to her, part of her existence itself: “I concern others and they concern me,” she says. “There we have an irreducible truth. The me-others relationship is as indissoluble as the subject-object relationship.” “[T]he existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom.”
Philosophically, we can get at the injunction to have concern for others in many ways. With Kant we could derive it from principles of pure reason. With the Utilitarians we could derive it from the mandate to maximize happiness or pleasure. Perhaps closer to de Beauvoir’s view, we could say that rational self-interest requires it.
But de Beauvoir finds it in an essential part of human existence: the impulse to be generous. “There is vitality only by means of free generosity,” she says. “Contrary to the formal strictness of Kantianism for whom the more abstract the act is the more virtuous it is, generosity seems to us to be better grounded and therefore more valid the less distinction there is between the other and ourself and the more we fulfill ourself in taking the other as an end. That is what happens if I am engaged in relation to others.”
So if you are radically free to choose at any moment, how do you figure out what to do? What projects would be suitable for a free existent such as yourself? Art, scientific inquiry, technological innovation and philosophy are all good candidates in so far as they are open-ended, aiming at “an indefinite disclosure of being.”
Science is at its best when it keeps opening the possibilities for new discoveries; technological innovation, when it frees us from drudgery and enables more creativity. And certainly art is high on the list. Not only does the best art flow from the creativity of the artist, but it inspires the audience -- the viewer, listener, reader or participant -- to find new potentialities, new avenues for self-expression, as well. “Art reveals the transitory as an absolute; and as the transitory existence is perpetuated through the centuries, art too, through the centuries, must perpetuate this never-to-be-finished revelation.”
But the paradigmatic case of an authentic project is the struggle for liberation, politically, socially, and economically, a topic that recurs throughout her work. She published The Ethics of Ambiguity in 1947, and the struggle to liberate France from the Nazis was undoubtedly fresh in her mind. And she was on the editorial board of the left-leaning literary journal Les Temps modernes. A good portion of the third chapter of her book concerns the intricacies and nuances of political action.
The connection between existentialism and politics is obvious. We are all inherently free; hence the slave is always free to rebel against the master. The negro, the woman, the colonized native, the worker in a capitalist enterprise: all are free to rise up against their oppressors.
“[T]he oppressed,” says de Beauvoir, “can fulfill his freedom as a man only in revolt, since the essential characteristic of the situation against which he is rebelling is precisely its prohibiting him from any positive development; it is only in social and political struggle that his transcendence passes beyond to the infinite.” She would, I am confident, quite approve of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
We would be ill advised to swallow the existentialist program whole hog. The radical first-person point of view is, after all, just one person’s opinion. It is up to each of us to examine our own experience of life to see how much of de Beauvoir’s description resonates with us as true. (The ability to do that is another expression of our freedom, she would say.)
If you did so you would notice that you are, in addition to your radical freedom and nothingness, an animal body, an organism. You would find yourself, not floating in empty space, but situated, embedded in the world. You would understand that at the very least you need to choose strategies for being in your world that enhance your ability to survive and stay free.
You would find your world shot through and through with other people, some of whom indeed seem to limit and constrain you, but others of whom thrill to your existence as you thrill to theirs, and with whom you find mutual comfort and joy, or at least pleasant conversation. You would see that, far from being something alien, some heavy density that limits your soaring freedom, your environment in fact supports and sustains you, and it makes sense to support and sustain it in turn.
And you would find, with de Beauvoir, that a strategy of being generous, of being cooperative, of being -- she does not use the word, but I will -- compassionate, is a strategy that enhances your life.
Right now you are breathing a new breath. Right now is a new moment. What will you do with it?
Notes
[1] My own view is that we certainly do have free will. See my “Do Humans Have Free Will?” at http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/FreeWill.html and “Beyond the Causal Veil” at http://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=424 .
[2] De Beauvoir, Simone, The Ethics of Ambiguity. All quotations are from this work, which is on line and has no page numbers, so I won’t footnote each one. By “man” she means human beings generally, male or female. She wrote before the feminist movement – which took inspiration, in part, from her own The Second Sex-- brought to our attention the inherent unfairness and bias of such language.
[3] I’m describing an ontology, but I can’t say three categories of “being” or of “existence,” as both these terms have special meanings for de Beauvoir. And I can’t say categories of “things” because some of them are not things.
References
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Ethics of Ambiguity. On-line publication, URL = http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/ambiguity/index.htm as of 6 October 2011. Another version, not as well proof-read, is here: http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/existentialism/debeauvoir/ambiguity.html as of 6 October 2011.
The Information Philosopher. “Agent-Causality.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/agent-causality.html as of 27 October 2011.
Wikipedia. “Free will.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will as of 27 October 2011.
[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's 60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at bmeacham.com, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]
The Latest From “The Rag Blog”-Never the 'good girl,' not then, not now:A Rag Blog interview with Bernardine Dohrn
Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
Never the 'good girl,' not then, not now:A Rag Blog interview with Bernardine Dohrn
By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / October 20, 2011
Bernardine Dohrn will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin (and streamed live on the Internet), Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CDT). Also, go here to listen to Thorne Dreyer's Oct. 7, 2011, Rag Radio interview with journalist/activist Jonah Raskin.
Who doesn’t have a reaction to the name and the reputation of Bernadine Dohrn? Is there anyone over the age of 60 who doesn’t remember her role at the outrageous Days of Rage demonstrations, her picture on FBI “wanted posters,” or her dramatic surrender to law enforcement officials in Chicago after a decade as a fugitive?
To former members of SDS, anti-war activists, Yippies, Black Panthers, White Panthers, women’s liberationists, along with students and scholars of Weatherman and the Weather Underground, she probably needs no introduction.
Sam Green featured her in his award-winning 2002 film, The Weather Underground. Todd Gitlin added to her iconic stature in his benchmark cultural history, The Sixties, though he was never on her side of the ideological splits or she on his. Dozens of books about the long decade of defiance have documented and mythologized Dohrn’s role as an American radical. Of course, her flamboyant husband and long-time partner, Bill Ayers, has been at her side for decades, aiding and abetting her much of the time, and adding to her legendary renown and notoriety.
Born in 1942, and a diligent student at the University of Chicago, she attended law school there and in the late 1960s “stepped out of the role of the good girl," as she once put it. She has never really stepped back into it again, though she’s been a wife, a mother, and a professional woman for more years than she was a street fighting woman.
Since 1991, she has served as the director of the Children and Family Justice Center at the Northwestern University School of Law. At the same time, she has never been admitted to the bar in any state in the United States and has never practiced law. Her past might not haunt her, but it certainly has haunted character committees established by the legal profession to keep lawyers in line.
I first met Dohrn in the late 1960s when she worked for the National Lawyers Guild, and from afar began to follow her radical activities as reported in underground newspapers. It wasn’t until she was on the lam, a fugitive, and went by the name Molly that I spent days with her in discussion and debate about all the global and local issues of the 1970s, and began to see the woman behind the image.
She turned out to be much more vulnerable, nuanced, and sensitive than I had been led to believe. Since then, I have heard her speak at conferences, visited her in Chicago, and continued our conversation that began more than 40-years ago.
I don’t know any other woman of her generation who has been as controversial, as optimistic and hopeful, and as committed to what I’d have to call “political struggle” as she. The word alacrity fits her better than any other single word in my vocabulary.
While many of the men around her -- her husband, Bill Ayers, her former Weatherman comrade, Mark Rudd, and her own son, Zayd -- have written accounts of their experiences in, around, and after the revolution, Dohrn never has and perhaps never will. Probably someday someone will write her biography and attempt to reconcile what The New York Times described, in an article about her published in 1993, as “the seeming contradictions” in her life.
That author might also attempt to show how her own personal contradictions have reflected the larger contradictions of the society to which she belongs and at the same time has opposed, confronted, and aimed to reform as well as overturn. On the cusp of her 70th birthday, I asked her if she’d be willing to be interviewed. “Sure,” she said without missing a beat. “Love to have a reason to be in touch with you."
A Rag Blog interview with Bernardine Dohrn
What would you say is the predominant thread that runs through your life?
The great good fortune to have come of age at a time of revolutionary upheaval at home and abroad, which opened a path to lifelong justice and antiwar activism. The equally predominant thread is the joy and challenge of raising our children and now, grandchildren.
Why is 2011 not 1968?
U.S. economic and social domination of the world is now obviously declining, although fierce military dominance continues to exercise a cruel grip. We now know that the damage done to the planet from unlimited plunder and exhaustion of oil, coal, and non-renewable resources may not be reversible. That reality weighs more heavily, perhaps, than the bomb in our childhood. As Dr. King said in 1967 -- "the greatest purveyor of violence on this earth is my own country." That gives us all a great responsibility.
How do you think living and working in Chicago has shaped you?
I'm such a Midwest gal, summer lightening over the lake, city-stopping snowstorms, the spirits of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Terkel -- all the real deal, unpretentious and intrepid. Always an immigrant city but characterized by Black and white, and now Chicago has one million Mexican-Americans, plus newcomers from everywhere. Here, you can make a difference. Visiting the coasts and the south is essential but this is home.
What are your main impressions of Occupy Wall Street?
Smart, savvy, horizontal, participatory, resisting leaders, spokespeople, and demands, growing, listening, innovative and zesty. I'm in!
How have your feelings about Obama changed over the past four years?
The President was and remains a centrist, intelligent, compromising politician, first in Illinois and since in DC. As the highly financed hard right, finance titans, and the military machine have gained influence and consolidated power, politicians who try to occupy the center move right. Howard Zinn explains it perfectly, writing about JFK.
In what ways does this generation of protesters remind you of yourself and the young rebels of the 1960s?
They are smarter, more global, curious, courageous, and diverse, and open to elders at the get-go. But yes, they do remind me of our generation in their determination to act, to make meaning, to be smitten and inspired by Tunisia and Egypt, Madison and Greece, but to be local, to make art by shifting the frame of the possible.
Once upon a time we read Che, Mao, Marx, and Malcolm. Who do you read now that gives you insights and inspiration?
Vijay Prashad, Barbara Ransby, Adam Green, Martha Biondi, Grace Lee Boggs, Rashid Khalidi, James Bell, Charles Dickens. Lots of murder mysteries and spy novels.
What lessons about an underground organization do you think are worth remembering now?
I have no idea. Maybe that what looks invincible and dominant can be also vulnerable.
Sexism, racism, imperialism seem awfully powerful today. What differences, if any did we make on the society?
We helped remind people that white supremacy is tenacious, takes new forms, and has not been uprooted. The big "we" could not end the Vietnam War, but our resistance helped limit U.S. military intervention options from 1975-1990. Ditto modest constraints on the FBI and CIA, totally unleashed since 9/11. And our progeny have transformed the world we know: women, LGBTQ, Native Americans, the disabled, environmental activists, new stirrings among labor.
Why do you think Americans are so docile and so deferential to the 1% that owns 99% of the wealth?
Not docile, I don't think. Mad, cheated, scared, self-doubting, and envious. But also poking fun, using humor to ridicule the 1%, savvy about the naked theft. The trick is to avoid cynicism. Ordinary people have the wisdom but they don't know they have the power.
You’re about to celebrate your 70th birthday. How has aging surprised you?
Are we really still on our feet? Aren't you 35 Jonah?
I never understood why so many 1960s radicals became lawyers and judges. Can you explain that for me?
Lawyers, teachers, and midwives, I thought. Because we needed great lawyers and we cared about justice. Law's a great place from which to fight the power. I still love our work of representing individual youth accused of crime and delinquency and working to downsize, close, and abolish the mass incarceration/prison system.
What is your most vivid memory of the 1960s?
Meeting with the Vietnamese in Budapest and Cuba. Grasping the gravity of our location and our responsibility.
[Jonah Raskin is a regular contributor to the Rag Blog and a professor at Sonoma State University. He was active in SDS and the Yippies in the Sixties. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]
• Find articles by and about Bernardine Dohrn on The Rag Blog
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
Never the 'good girl,' not then, not now:A Rag Blog interview with Bernardine Dohrn
By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / October 20, 2011
Bernardine Dohrn will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin (and streamed live on the Internet), Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, 2-3 p.m. (CDT). Also, go here to listen to Thorne Dreyer's Oct. 7, 2011, Rag Radio interview with journalist/activist Jonah Raskin.
Who doesn’t have a reaction to the name and the reputation of Bernadine Dohrn? Is there anyone over the age of 60 who doesn’t remember her role at the outrageous Days of Rage demonstrations, her picture on FBI “wanted posters,” or her dramatic surrender to law enforcement officials in Chicago after a decade as a fugitive?
To former members of SDS, anti-war activists, Yippies, Black Panthers, White Panthers, women’s liberationists, along with students and scholars of Weatherman and the Weather Underground, she probably needs no introduction.
Sam Green featured her in his award-winning 2002 film, The Weather Underground. Todd Gitlin added to her iconic stature in his benchmark cultural history, The Sixties, though he was never on her side of the ideological splits or she on his. Dozens of books about the long decade of defiance have documented and mythologized Dohrn’s role as an American radical. Of course, her flamboyant husband and long-time partner, Bill Ayers, has been at her side for decades, aiding and abetting her much of the time, and adding to her legendary renown and notoriety.
Born in 1942, and a diligent student at the University of Chicago, she attended law school there and in the late 1960s “stepped out of the role of the good girl," as she once put it. She has never really stepped back into it again, though she’s been a wife, a mother, and a professional woman for more years than she was a street fighting woman.
Since 1991, she has served as the director of the Children and Family Justice Center at the Northwestern University School of Law. At the same time, she has never been admitted to the bar in any state in the United States and has never practiced law. Her past might not haunt her, but it certainly has haunted character committees established by the legal profession to keep lawyers in line.
I first met Dohrn in the late 1960s when she worked for the National Lawyers Guild, and from afar began to follow her radical activities as reported in underground newspapers. It wasn’t until she was on the lam, a fugitive, and went by the name Molly that I spent days with her in discussion and debate about all the global and local issues of the 1970s, and began to see the woman behind the image.
She turned out to be much more vulnerable, nuanced, and sensitive than I had been led to believe. Since then, I have heard her speak at conferences, visited her in Chicago, and continued our conversation that began more than 40-years ago.
I don’t know any other woman of her generation who has been as controversial, as optimistic and hopeful, and as committed to what I’d have to call “political struggle” as she. The word alacrity fits her better than any other single word in my vocabulary.
While many of the men around her -- her husband, Bill Ayers, her former Weatherman comrade, Mark Rudd, and her own son, Zayd -- have written accounts of their experiences in, around, and after the revolution, Dohrn never has and perhaps never will. Probably someday someone will write her biography and attempt to reconcile what The New York Times described, in an article about her published in 1993, as “the seeming contradictions” in her life.
That author might also attempt to show how her own personal contradictions have reflected the larger contradictions of the society to which she belongs and at the same time has opposed, confronted, and aimed to reform as well as overturn. On the cusp of her 70th birthday, I asked her if she’d be willing to be interviewed. “Sure,” she said without missing a beat. “Love to have a reason to be in touch with you."
A Rag Blog interview with Bernardine Dohrn
What would you say is the predominant thread that runs through your life?
The great good fortune to have come of age at a time of revolutionary upheaval at home and abroad, which opened a path to lifelong justice and antiwar activism. The equally predominant thread is the joy and challenge of raising our children and now, grandchildren.
Why is 2011 not 1968?
U.S. economic and social domination of the world is now obviously declining, although fierce military dominance continues to exercise a cruel grip. We now know that the damage done to the planet from unlimited plunder and exhaustion of oil, coal, and non-renewable resources may not be reversible. That reality weighs more heavily, perhaps, than the bomb in our childhood. As Dr. King said in 1967 -- "the greatest purveyor of violence on this earth is my own country." That gives us all a great responsibility.
How do you think living and working in Chicago has shaped you?
I'm such a Midwest gal, summer lightening over the lake, city-stopping snowstorms, the spirits of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Terkel -- all the real deal, unpretentious and intrepid. Always an immigrant city but characterized by Black and white, and now Chicago has one million Mexican-Americans, plus newcomers from everywhere. Here, you can make a difference. Visiting the coasts and the south is essential but this is home.
What are your main impressions of Occupy Wall Street?
Smart, savvy, horizontal, participatory, resisting leaders, spokespeople, and demands, growing, listening, innovative and zesty. I'm in!
How have your feelings about Obama changed over the past four years?
The President was and remains a centrist, intelligent, compromising politician, first in Illinois and since in DC. As the highly financed hard right, finance titans, and the military machine have gained influence and consolidated power, politicians who try to occupy the center move right. Howard Zinn explains it perfectly, writing about JFK.
In what ways does this generation of protesters remind you of yourself and the young rebels of the 1960s?
They are smarter, more global, curious, courageous, and diverse, and open to elders at the get-go. But yes, they do remind me of our generation in their determination to act, to make meaning, to be smitten and inspired by Tunisia and Egypt, Madison and Greece, but to be local, to make art by shifting the frame of the possible.
Once upon a time we read Che, Mao, Marx, and Malcolm. Who do you read now that gives you insights and inspiration?
Vijay Prashad, Barbara Ransby, Adam Green, Martha Biondi, Grace Lee Boggs, Rashid Khalidi, James Bell, Charles Dickens. Lots of murder mysteries and spy novels.
What lessons about an underground organization do you think are worth remembering now?
I have no idea. Maybe that what looks invincible and dominant can be also vulnerable.
Sexism, racism, imperialism seem awfully powerful today. What differences, if any did we make on the society?
We helped remind people that white supremacy is tenacious, takes new forms, and has not been uprooted. The big "we" could not end the Vietnam War, but our resistance helped limit U.S. military intervention options from 1975-1990. Ditto modest constraints on the FBI and CIA, totally unleashed since 9/11. And our progeny have transformed the world we know: women, LGBTQ, Native Americans, the disabled, environmental activists, new stirrings among labor.
Why do you think Americans are so docile and so deferential to the 1% that owns 99% of the wealth?
Not docile, I don't think. Mad, cheated, scared, self-doubting, and envious. But also poking fun, using humor to ridicule the 1%, savvy about the naked theft. The trick is to avoid cynicism. Ordinary people have the wisdom but they don't know they have the power.
You’re about to celebrate your 70th birthday. How has aging surprised you?
Are we really still on our feet? Aren't you 35 Jonah?
I never understood why so many 1960s radicals became lawyers and judges. Can you explain that for me?
Lawyers, teachers, and midwives, I thought. Because we needed great lawyers and we cared about justice. Law's a great place from which to fight the power. I still love our work of representing individual youth accused of crime and delinquency and working to downsize, close, and abolish the mass incarceration/prison system.
What is your most vivid memory of the 1960s?
Meeting with the Vietnamese in Budapest and Cuba. Grasping the gravity of our location and our responsibility.
[Jonah Raskin is a regular contributor to the Rag Blog and a professor at Sonoma State University. He was active in SDS and the Yippies in the Sixties. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]
• Find articles by and about Bernardine Dohrn on The Rag Blog
The Latest From “The Rag Blog”-We shall not be moved!A report from occupied Wall Street:A new popular front against finance capital, encompassing a progressive majority of the country, is beginning to take shape.(A Slice Of History On OWS)
Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
We shall not be moved!A report from occupied Wall Street:A new popular front against finance capital, encompassing a progressive majority of the country, is beginning to take shape.
By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / October 19, 2011
NEW YORK -- Riding the New York City subways in a rush hour is always an adventure. But experiencing the crowds of people on the downtown train to Wall St at 5:30 a.m., Friday Oct 14, 2011, was a special treat. The closer we got to the financial district, the more workers with union jackets poured into the cars, in a militant and upbeat mood, ready to assert their power.
I was in town for a speaking engagement at a union hall the night before, when our small group got the word of an email blast from the national AFL-CIO, saying, "Everyone who can, get down to Wall Street by 6 a.m. We're going to block Mayor Bloomberg's attempt to evict the protestors with the police." The after-meeting chatter ended quickly, since we knew we needed to get some sleep for a long day ahead.
It was still pitch dark as we climbed out of the Wall Street station. We could hear the noise from Zuccotti Park, but batches of cops were everywhere, putting up barricades as a kind of obstacle course. I was with Pat Fry and Anne Mitchell, both SEIU staffers and leaders of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
"Goodness, look at all the media," said Pat, noting the hundreds of reporters, together with vans and cranes erecting their cameras. When we got to the park it was jam-packed with more than 1,000 young people, mostly sitting in the dark with arms linked. The incoming thousands of supporters from labor and the general public began encircling the park until they were about three deep in front of the wall all around it.
Anne spotted an open space on the wall. "Let's get up here," she said, as we each got a hand lifting us into position.
From our vantage point, even in the darkness, we could see an inspiring but intense scene unfolding. The police had paddy wagons and empty buses for mass arrests trying to find positions, but getting blocked by traffic. Every few minutes, hundreds more emerged from the subway stations as additional trains rolled in. You could tell who was there from the jackets, caps, and t-shirts -- Teamsters, SEIU, the Transit Workers Union, and many more.
"No way there's going to be an eviction," I said to my partners. "The cops are way outnumbered and outmaneuvered. All they can do is teargas the entire plaza, but then what? That would create a fight shutting down the entire financial district. They're not ready for it yet."
Inside the park, an amazingly ordered but still spontaneous "General Assembly" was underway. The "human microphone" was in play, a technique developed to counter situations where amplified sound equipment was banned. A speaker would shout out a relatively short statement, and then it would be re-shouted in turn by the dozens around him or her, and re-shouted again by much of the crowd, aiming their voices out into the streets. The only limitation is that you have to speak and pause as if you're being translated, but it's English-to-louder-English.
The speeches were intermixed with call-and-response chants. "Tell me what democracy looks like?" was met with the return roar, "This is what democracy looks like!" When someone wants to speak from different part of the park, they yell out "Mike check!" and when it gets repeated loudly enough by 20 or so people, they get their turn, and at any given spot, there will be a "stack" of people lined up with something to say, managed by a "stack-keeper." For this dramatic period at least, it worked beautifully.
Finally one speaker yelled out, "We've finally got the official word. At a meeting just a few hours ago, the city agreed to postpone the eviction. We've won!" The occupiers were jubilant -- and even a good number of cops seem relieved. Soon after the announcement, one speaker was a member of New York's City Council. "You need to hear that you have more friends than you know about inside the council!" In other words, the mass pressure from below forced a split, and now there was a crack in the ceiling to be taken advantage of by the occupiers.
We stood on the wall for another hour or so, listening to a few speeches but mainly talking with friends and comrades who spotted us on our perch. Jay and Judith Schaffner, retired unionists, had driven in from the Poconos, and reported on what was happening even in the small towns of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Many activists with New York City's Labor Left Project stopped by, as did people we knew from the Democratic Socialists of America and the Communist Party, USA.
A good number of veterans from the old SDS of the 1960s came up and said hello. "We're everywhere!" I noted with a smile. I also had a surprising number of young people I've never met come up and say, "Hi! I'm one of your Facebook Friends!" The new media seemed to be working well.
By this time the gray light of dawn arrived. Some people were leaving the square to go to work while more were still arriving. "I don't know about you guys, but I need some coffee and a serious breakfast," said Anne. We agreed, jumped down, made our way through the police lines to one of New York's ubiquitous coffee shops. Over our eggs and sausage, we discussed the meaning of it all before Pat and Anne had to get to work.
In choosing Wall Street as their target, and taking direct action defined by moral clarity against a range of injustices, the young occupiers had opened up a new public sphere. It was a dynamic and flexible political space open to all whose issues, demands, hopes and dreams had been swept "off the table."
An arrogant and dismissive ruling class, determined to impose more neoliberal austerity and longer wars, was in for a rude awakening. If those at the top thought the bottled up frustration and rage of millions at the bottom "had nowhere to go," they were now facing this new insurgency in the streets.
Young people in the 1960s had acted as a critical force, holding up a mirror to the rest of society, prodding it to respond. The Black student sit-ins in the Deep South were a prime example, as were the anti-war students on the campuses and the young alienated GIs returning from Vietnam.
But this new insurgency was different in important ways. First, the "long wars" had fed a deep crisis abroad, feeding both the Arab Spring "square" occupations and a long-frustrated antiwar majority at home. Second, the financial crisis had alienated millions in the working class and other strata in a deep way.
The labor upsurges in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio revealed an angry discontent in the U.S. heartland. So instead of taking years of "critical force" protests to create and awaken a progressive majority, the young occupiers rather quickly found that they had large and important allies.
That was evident in the rapid support they received from Leo Gerard of the Steelworkers, from Richard Trumka speaking for the AFL-CIO, from the 20,000 workers mobilized by New York's unions in a solidarity march a week ago, and finally, from this morning's dramatic intervention blocking the eviction. An important new alliance between a radicalizing youth movement and the more progressive wing of organized labor has been forged in the streets -- and it was ongoing and open-ended.
It also didn't stop with labor. A number of city councils across the country, themselves suffering at the hands of Wall Street-imposed neoliberal cutback policies, passed resolutions and spoke up in defense of the occupiers. Others equivocated, and tried to restrict and disperse the actions, resulting in nearly 1,000 arrests across the country.
Electoral groups like the Progressive Democrats of America urged its members to go 'all out' in support of the occupations, and PDA's allies -- Bernie Sanders in the Senate and the Progressive Caucus in the House -- also spoke up. Even Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the House, gave her support. And while President Obama didn't go that far, he tipped his hat to the effort, acknowledging the validity of "their concerns."
A new popular front emerging
The implications of all this are deep, complex, and strategic. A new popular front against finance capital, encompassing a progressive majority of the country, is beginning to take shape. It is emerging against the neoliberal intransigence on Wall Street, against the GOP-dominated Congress, and against a White House that too frequently conciliates with the right wing of both parties. It brings together many demands, many voices, and several contending platforms, but all aimed against a common adversary -- the "99 percent versus the one percent," the most popular theme in the protests that sums it up.
After breakfast, I headed back to the park to spend a few hours talking to people and taking it all in. There was a lot of activity reassembling the different facilities of the occupiers that had been taken down the day before to sweep and scrub the occupied zone. The Mayor had been using the sham excuse of "unsanitary conditions" as to why he was going to clear the area. "If the Mayor was serious about this," said one young guy with a broom, "he'd give us the porta-johns and dumpsters we've been asking for since we started. But they're still refusing, so we do the best we can."
The cleanup was actually very good. A large number of young people were also by now sleeping in the various sections of the park. They had covered their spaces with tarps and folded cardboard signs that doubled as sleeping pads for their sleeping bags. They had been up all night and were exhausted. All the sleeping was out in the open since the city had banned tents in the area, as well as amplified sound.
Not that the sound restriction mattered all that much. On the west end on the square was a huge drummer's circle with about a dozen people beating out a constant background of rhythms. The styles changed as one cultural grouping took over the drums from another -- African American, Puerto Rican, Jamaican, women, white rockers, and various mixtures of all sorts. The drone was actually a pleasant background, creating an energized atmosphere.
You could tell that many protestors were from a new and fresh layer of young activists. The reason? Four huge American flags were constantly being waved over the drummers. There were also a few red flags, an Earth flag, and several rainbow flags -- but in a more seasoned left event, especially with a large proportion of anarchists, the American flags would not likely be there.
The youth also seemed quite diverse. There was one small "Class War" corner with several dozen kids dressed mainly in black, other areas with kids mainly in tie-dyed shirts, and even one young man, very busily engaged in cleaning up the area, was dressed in his full Eagle Scout uniform, complete with all his merit badges.
The matter of ‘demands’
The media pundits had been criticizing Occupy Wall Street (OWS) for not having a set of specific demands. Rather the occupiers were simply underscoring vast inequalities and demanding a new world.
What the pundits ignored was the fact that one reason the movement was resonating so deeply with wider circles of people was that all decent demands made over the last few years -- ending the wars, Medicare for all, full employment legislation, and especially the demand to fund all reforms with a financial transaction tax on Wall Street speculators -- had all been rejected, declared "off the table," and not even allowed to come to a vote in Congress and other government bodies.
In any case, OWS actually had come up with a long list of indictments, which were widely circulated on the internet, even if they were ignored in the higher circles of power.
I spotted two students standing on the wall holding up a cardboard sign -- "Education with Debt Is Not Justice! It Never Will Be!" -- and struck up a conversation. They were burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and weren't nearly finished with school yet.
"What’s the difference between then and now?" one asked me, about being a student in the 1960s. My tuition at Penn State, I explained, was about $1,500 a year and I could survive for a term on $500 for room and board, which I could make with my campus job as a janitor. If I took off to run around the country organizing against the war, no one's mortgage was at stake.
Today's students have to deal with $15-20,000 per year, a severe hardship for many, and a strong motivator behind the "Occupy!" movement.
But the occupiers were interested in everything, not just their own situation. There were several discussion circles of a dozen or so people going on simultaneously. Stopping by one, the topic was radical movements in Latin America. At another, the subject of militarism and the defense budget was being dissected. At still another, a small group of Ron Paul libertarians were trying to hold up under a barrage of friendly criticism.
Once you had an overview, it was clear that everything was fairly well organized. Right in the middle of the park were two long black chalkboards, propping each other up back to back. On one side was the entire schedule for housekeeping tasks -- cleanup, food, dealing with the media, medical issues, and so on. On the other side was a timetable for various events and speakers, workshop times and topics, and the times of the daily General Assembly.
Next to the schedule blackboards was the food pantry. At the center was a can for money donations, along with a suggestion to bring canned goods and fresh fruit. One might get an odd variety of things to make up a meal, but if you were broke, the price was right. All along one side of the park was a line of lunch wagon trucks selling a variety of things. "What's best?," I asked someone who looked like he had been there a while. "The guy with the falafel truck. Awesome!"
The cleanup section, logically, was next to the food. Here were four large plastic bins with soapy and clear water to keep utensils and dishes sanitary. Lugging the water in and out was a chore, but it otherwise worked fairly well. Finally, next to that, was the first aid station, with a variety of bandages and such. "What's been your most serious medical problem?" I queried. "Pepper spray burns by far, after the confrontation with the cops last week."
The struggle continues
In the days ahead, the flexible plan seems to be to send out forays of marching demonstrators, of varying sizes, to assorted targets around the city, while keeping Zuccotti Park as a more secure base area. Today one relatively small group headed further south toward Battery Park, taking over the center of a street, but they got dispersed by the cops, and a few were arrested.
The following day, Saturday, saw a huge victory rally of tens of thousands in Times Square. One group, trapped on a side street by irate cops who wanted the street cleared, ended up with about 70 being arrested. But the kids are becoming more streetwise, now avoiding situations like last week where about 700 got trapped in a police net on the Brooklyn Bridge and were carted off to jail.
What happens next will depend a lot on vigilance, organizing skill, and the relation of forces. One ominous report in the news revealed the gradual buildup of a huge encampment of militarized police, with different sub zones encircling the entire Wall Street area. But through their determination, planning and audacity, fanning the flames of discontent, OWS has already scored a tremendous victory.
Similar actions are now taking place in over 500 cities around the world, and in nearly every major city and state capital in the U.S. In one month, they have changed the political conversation in all sectors, putting finance capital on the defensive at least tactically.
The latest opinion polls show a majority of Americans are supporting them to one degree or another, revealing the deep class divide between Main Street and Wall Street. If there's any attempt to shut down any of the hundreds of occupations by force, a much wider and deeper solidarity effort is likely to emerge.
[Carl Davidson is a national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, a writer for Beaver County Blue, the website of PA’s 4th CD Progressive Democrats of America, and a member of Steelworkers Associates. He is the author of several books, including New Paths to Socialism, available online. In the 1960s, he was a national leader of SDS and a writer and editor for the Guardian newsweekly. This article was also published on Carl's blog, Keep On Keepin' On. Read more articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog.]
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
We shall not be moved!A report from occupied Wall Street:A new popular front against finance capital, encompassing a progressive majority of the country, is beginning to take shape.
By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / October 19, 2011
NEW YORK -- Riding the New York City subways in a rush hour is always an adventure. But experiencing the crowds of people on the downtown train to Wall St at 5:30 a.m., Friday Oct 14, 2011, was a special treat. The closer we got to the financial district, the more workers with union jackets poured into the cars, in a militant and upbeat mood, ready to assert their power.
I was in town for a speaking engagement at a union hall the night before, when our small group got the word of an email blast from the national AFL-CIO, saying, "Everyone who can, get down to Wall Street by 6 a.m. We're going to block Mayor Bloomberg's attempt to evict the protestors with the police." The after-meeting chatter ended quickly, since we knew we needed to get some sleep for a long day ahead.
It was still pitch dark as we climbed out of the Wall Street station. We could hear the noise from Zuccotti Park, but batches of cops were everywhere, putting up barricades as a kind of obstacle course. I was with Pat Fry and Anne Mitchell, both SEIU staffers and leaders of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
"Goodness, look at all the media," said Pat, noting the hundreds of reporters, together with vans and cranes erecting their cameras. When we got to the park it was jam-packed with more than 1,000 young people, mostly sitting in the dark with arms linked. The incoming thousands of supporters from labor and the general public began encircling the park until they were about three deep in front of the wall all around it.
Anne spotted an open space on the wall. "Let's get up here," she said, as we each got a hand lifting us into position.
From our vantage point, even in the darkness, we could see an inspiring but intense scene unfolding. The police had paddy wagons and empty buses for mass arrests trying to find positions, but getting blocked by traffic. Every few minutes, hundreds more emerged from the subway stations as additional trains rolled in. You could tell who was there from the jackets, caps, and t-shirts -- Teamsters, SEIU, the Transit Workers Union, and many more.
"No way there's going to be an eviction," I said to my partners. "The cops are way outnumbered and outmaneuvered. All they can do is teargas the entire plaza, but then what? That would create a fight shutting down the entire financial district. They're not ready for it yet."
Inside the park, an amazingly ordered but still spontaneous "General Assembly" was underway. The "human microphone" was in play, a technique developed to counter situations where amplified sound equipment was banned. A speaker would shout out a relatively short statement, and then it would be re-shouted in turn by the dozens around him or her, and re-shouted again by much of the crowd, aiming their voices out into the streets. The only limitation is that you have to speak and pause as if you're being translated, but it's English-to-louder-English.
The speeches were intermixed with call-and-response chants. "Tell me what democracy looks like?" was met with the return roar, "This is what democracy looks like!" When someone wants to speak from different part of the park, they yell out "Mike check!" and when it gets repeated loudly enough by 20 or so people, they get their turn, and at any given spot, there will be a "stack" of people lined up with something to say, managed by a "stack-keeper." For this dramatic period at least, it worked beautifully.
Finally one speaker yelled out, "We've finally got the official word. At a meeting just a few hours ago, the city agreed to postpone the eviction. We've won!" The occupiers were jubilant -- and even a good number of cops seem relieved. Soon after the announcement, one speaker was a member of New York's City Council. "You need to hear that you have more friends than you know about inside the council!" In other words, the mass pressure from below forced a split, and now there was a crack in the ceiling to be taken advantage of by the occupiers.
We stood on the wall for another hour or so, listening to a few speeches but mainly talking with friends and comrades who spotted us on our perch. Jay and Judith Schaffner, retired unionists, had driven in from the Poconos, and reported on what was happening even in the small towns of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Many activists with New York City's Labor Left Project stopped by, as did people we knew from the Democratic Socialists of America and the Communist Party, USA.
A good number of veterans from the old SDS of the 1960s came up and said hello. "We're everywhere!" I noted with a smile. I also had a surprising number of young people I've never met come up and say, "Hi! I'm one of your Facebook Friends!" The new media seemed to be working well.
By this time the gray light of dawn arrived. Some people were leaving the square to go to work while more were still arriving. "I don't know about you guys, but I need some coffee and a serious breakfast," said Anne. We agreed, jumped down, made our way through the police lines to one of New York's ubiquitous coffee shops. Over our eggs and sausage, we discussed the meaning of it all before Pat and Anne had to get to work.
In choosing Wall Street as their target, and taking direct action defined by moral clarity against a range of injustices, the young occupiers had opened up a new public sphere. It was a dynamic and flexible political space open to all whose issues, demands, hopes and dreams had been swept "off the table."
An arrogant and dismissive ruling class, determined to impose more neoliberal austerity and longer wars, was in for a rude awakening. If those at the top thought the bottled up frustration and rage of millions at the bottom "had nowhere to go," they were now facing this new insurgency in the streets.
Young people in the 1960s had acted as a critical force, holding up a mirror to the rest of society, prodding it to respond. The Black student sit-ins in the Deep South were a prime example, as were the anti-war students on the campuses and the young alienated GIs returning from Vietnam.
But this new insurgency was different in important ways. First, the "long wars" had fed a deep crisis abroad, feeding both the Arab Spring "square" occupations and a long-frustrated antiwar majority at home. Second, the financial crisis had alienated millions in the working class and other strata in a deep way.
The labor upsurges in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio revealed an angry discontent in the U.S. heartland. So instead of taking years of "critical force" protests to create and awaken a progressive majority, the young occupiers rather quickly found that they had large and important allies.
That was evident in the rapid support they received from Leo Gerard of the Steelworkers, from Richard Trumka speaking for the AFL-CIO, from the 20,000 workers mobilized by New York's unions in a solidarity march a week ago, and finally, from this morning's dramatic intervention blocking the eviction. An important new alliance between a radicalizing youth movement and the more progressive wing of organized labor has been forged in the streets -- and it was ongoing and open-ended.
It also didn't stop with labor. A number of city councils across the country, themselves suffering at the hands of Wall Street-imposed neoliberal cutback policies, passed resolutions and spoke up in defense of the occupiers. Others equivocated, and tried to restrict and disperse the actions, resulting in nearly 1,000 arrests across the country.
Electoral groups like the Progressive Democrats of America urged its members to go 'all out' in support of the occupations, and PDA's allies -- Bernie Sanders in the Senate and the Progressive Caucus in the House -- also spoke up. Even Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the House, gave her support. And while President Obama didn't go that far, he tipped his hat to the effort, acknowledging the validity of "their concerns."
A new popular front emerging
The implications of all this are deep, complex, and strategic. A new popular front against finance capital, encompassing a progressive majority of the country, is beginning to take shape. It is emerging against the neoliberal intransigence on Wall Street, against the GOP-dominated Congress, and against a White House that too frequently conciliates with the right wing of both parties. It brings together many demands, many voices, and several contending platforms, but all aimed against a common adversary -- the "99 percent versus the one percent," the most popular theme in the protests that sums it up.
After breakfast, I headed back to the park to spend a few hours talking to people and taking it all in. There was a lot of activity reassembling the different facilities of the occupiers that had been taken down the day before to sweep and scrub the occupied zone. The Mayor had been using the sham excuse of "unsanitary conditions" as to why he was going to clear the area. "If the Mayor was serious about this," said one young guy with a broom, "he'd give us the porta-johns and dumpsters we've been asking for since we started. But they're still refusing, so we do the best we can."
The cleanup was actually very good. A large number of young people were also by now sleeping in the various sections of the park. They had covered their spaces with tarps and folded cardboard signs that doubled as sleeping pads for their sleeping bags. They had been up all night and were exhausted. All the sleeping was out in the open since the city had banned tents in the area, as well as amplified sound.
Not that the sound restriction mattered all that much. On the west end on the square was a huge drummer's circle with about a dozen people beating out a constant background of rhythms. The styles changed as one cultural grouping took over the drums from another -- African American, Puerto Rican, Jamaican, women, white rockers, and various mixtures of all sorts. The drone was actually a pleasant background, creating an energized atmosphere.
You could tell that many protestors were from a new and fresh layer of young activists. The reason? Four huge American flags were constantly being waved over the drummers. There were also a few red flags, an Earth flag, and several rainbow flags -- but in a more seasoned left event, especially with a large proportion of anarchists, the American flags would not likely be there.
The youth also seemed quite diverse. There was one small "Class War" corner with several dozen kids dressed mainly in black, other areas with kids mainly in tie-dyed shirts, and even one young man, very busily engaged in cleaning up the area, was dressed in his full Eagle Scout uniform, complete with all his merit badges.
The matter of ‘demands’
The media pundits had been criticizing Occupy Wall Street (OWS) for not having a set of specific demands. Rather the occupiers were simply underscoring vast inequalities and demanding a new world.
What the pundits ignored was the fact that one reason the movement was resonating so deeply with wider circles of people was that all decent demands made over the last few years -- ending the wars, Medicare for all, full employment legislation, and especially the demand to fund all reforms with a financial transaction tax on Wall Street speculators -- had all been rejected, declared "off the table," and not even allowed to come to a vote in Congress and other government bodies.
In any case, OWS actually had come up with a long list of indictments, which were widely circulated on the internet, even if they were ignored in the higher circles of power.
I spotted two students standing on the wall holding up a cardboard sign -- "Education with Debt Is Not Justice! It Never Will Be!" -- and struck up a conversation. They were burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and weren't nearly finished with school yet.
"What’s the difference between then and now?" one asked me, about being a student in the 1960s. My tuition at Penn State, I explained, was about $1,500 a year and I could survive for a term on $500 for room and board, which I could make with my campus job as a janitor. If I took off to run around the country organizing against the war, no one's mortgage was at stake.
Today's students have to deal with $15-20,000 per year, a severe hardship for many, and a strong motivator behind the "Occupy!" movement.
But the occupiers were interested in everything, not just their own situation. There were several discussion circles of a dozen or so people going on simultaneously. Stopping by one, the topic was radical movements in Latin America. At another, the subject of militarism and the defense budget was being dissected. At still another, a small group of Ron Paul libertarians were trying to hold up under a barrage of friendly criticism.
Once you had an overview, it was clear that everything was fairly well organized. Right in the middle of the park were two long black chalkboards, propping each other up back to back. On one side was the entire schedule for housekeeping tasks -- cleanup, food, dealing with the media, medical issues, and so on. On the other side was a timetable for various events and speakers, workshop times and topics, and the times of the daily General Assembly.
Next to the schedule blackboards was the food pantry. At the center was a can for money donations, along with a suggestion to bring canned goods and fresh fruit. One might get an odd variety of things to make up a meal, but if you were broke, the price was right. All along one side of the park was a line of lunch wagon trucks selling a variety of things. "What's best?," I asked someone who looked like he had been there a while. "The guy with the falafel truck. Awesome!"
The cleanup section, logically, was next to the food. Here were four large plastic bins with soapy and clear water to keep utensils and dishes sanitary. Lugging the water in and out was a chore, but it otherwise worked fairly well. Finally, next to that, was the first aid station, with a variety of bandages and such. "What's been your most serious medical problem?" I queried. "Pepper spray burns by far, after the confrontation with the cops last week."
The struggle continues
In the days ahead, the flexible plan seems to be to send out forays of marching demonstrators, of varying sizes, to assorted targets around the city, while keeping Zuccotti Park as a more secure base area. Today one relatively small group headed further south toward Battery Park, taking over the center of a street, but they got dispersed by the cops, and a few were arrested.
The following day, Saturday, saw a huge victory rally of tens of thousands in Times Square. One group, trapped on a side street by irate cops who wanted the street cleared, ended up with about 70 being arrested. But the kids are becoming more streetwise, now avoiding situations like last week where about 700 got trapped in a police net on the Brooklyn Bridge and were carted off to jail.
What happens next will depend a lot on vigilance, organizing skill, and the relation of forces. One ominous report in the news revealed the gradual buildup of a huge encampment of militarized police, with different sub zones encircling the entire Wall Street area. But through their determination, planning and audacity, fanning the flames of discontent, OWS has already scored a tremendous victory.
Similar actions are now taking place in over 500 cities around the world, and in nearly every major city and state capital in the U.S. In one month, they have changed the political conversation in all sectors, putting finance capital on the defensive at least tactically.
The latest opinion polls show a majority of Americans are supporting them to one degree or another, revealing the deep class divide between Main Street and Wall Street. If there's any attempt to shut down any of the hundreds of occupations by force, a much wider and deeper solidarity effort is likely to emerge.
[Carl Davidson is a national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, a writer for Beaver County Blue, the website of PA’s 4th CD Progressive Democrats of America, and a member of Steelworkers Associates. He is the author of several books, including New Paths to Socialism, available online. In the 1960s, he was a national leader of SDS and a writer and editor for the Guardian newsweekly. This article was also published on Carl's blog, Keep On Keepin' On. Read more articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog.]
The Latest From “The Rag Blog”-Troy Davis, John Carlos, and the moment that still matters
Click on the headline to link to The Rag Blog website.
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
Troy Davis, John Carlos, and the moment that still matters
By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / September 28, 2011
On September 21st, the day that Troy Davis was executed in Georgia, 200 very angry Howard University students pumped their fists in front of Barack Obama’s White House and chanted “No Justice, No Vote.” At that moment, I understood why an image from 1968 still resonates today.
It was 43 years ago this week when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists on the Olympic Medal Stand and, along with supportive silver-medalist Peter Norman, created a moment seared for all-time in the American consciousness.
This week also marks the release of John Carlos’s autobiography, The John Carlos Story, which I co-wrote. When John asked me to write the book, I felt compelled to do it because I’ve long wondered, “why?” Not why did Smith and Carlos sacrifice fame, fortune, and glory in one medal-stand moment, but why that moment has stood the test of time.
Of course, much of the book details why John Carlos took his stand. It was 1968. Dr. King had been assassinated. The Black freedom struggle had become a fixture of American life. In the world of Olympic sports, apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia were regulars at the games. There were scant black coaches. Avery Brundage, an avowed white supremacist, ran the International Olympic Committee.
John Carlos in particular, in the 1960s, went from being a Harlem high school track star -- walking down the street talking both smack and politics with neighborhood regulars like Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell -- to being a scholarship athlete at segregated East Texas State. The gap between his sense of himself as a man and going to the South and being treated like a boy drove him politically toward his medal stand moment.
The answer to “why do so many of us still care” was tougher to decipher. In 2010, I appeared on a panel on the history of sports and resistance with Carlos, after which a long line of young people born years -- even decades -- after 1968 patiently waited for his signature on everything from posters and t-shirts to hastily procured pieces of notebook paper. Why? And why have I seen street-corner merchants from Harlem to Johannesburg sell t-shirts emblazoned with that image?
The most obvious is that people love a good redemption song. Smith and Carlos have been proven correct by history. They were reviled for taking a stand and using the Olympic podium to do it. A young sportswriter named Brent Musberger called them “Black-skinned storm troopers.” But their “radical” demands have since proved to be prescient.
Today, the idea of standing up to apartheid South Africa, racism, and Avery Brundage seems a matter of common decency rather than radical rabble-rousing. After years of death threats, poverty, and being treated as pariahs in the world of athletics, Smith and Carlos attend ceremonial unveilings of statues erected in their honor. America, like no other country on earth, loves remarking on its own progress.
But it was the Howard students, chanting, “No Justice, No Vote” to an African American President on the night of a Georgia execution, who truly unveiled for me why the image of black-gloved fists thrust in the air has retained its power. Smith and Carlos sacrificed privilege and glory, fame and fortune, for a larger cause.
As Carlos says,
A lot of the [black] athletes thought that winning [Olympic] medals would protect them from racism. But even if you won a medal, it ain’t going to save your momma. It ain’t going to save your sister or children. It might give you 15 minutes of fame, but what about the rest of your life?
Carlos’ attitude resonates because for all the blather about us living in a “post-racial society," there are reservoirs of anger about the realities of racism in the United States. The latest poverty statistics show that the black poverty rate of 27.4% is nearly double the overall U.S. rate. Black children living in poverty has reached 39.1 percent. Then there’s the criminal justice system, where 33% of African American men are either in jail or on parole.
The image of Carlos and Smith evokes a degree of principle, fearlessness, and freedom that I believe many people find sorely lacking today. They stood at the Olympics unencumbered by doubt, as brazenly Free Men. We are still grappling with the fact that they had to do it and the fact that it still needs to be done.
[Dave Zirin is the author of The John Carlos Story (Haymarket) and just made the new documentary Not Just a Game. Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com This article was also posted at The Nation blogs. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]
Markin comment:
I find this The Rag Blog very useful to monitor for the latest in what is happening with past tense radical activists and activities. Anybody, with some kind of name, who is still around from the 1960s has found a home here. So the remembrances and recollections are helpful for today’s activists. Strangely the politics are almost non-existent, as least ones that would help today, except to kind of retroactively “bless” those old-time left politics that did nothing (well, almost nothing) but get us on the losing end of the class (and cultural) wars of the last forty plus years. Still this is a must read blog for today’s left militants.
*******
Troy Davis, John Carlos, and the moment that still matters
By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / September 28, 2011
On September 21st, the day that Troy Davis was executed in Georgia, 200 very angry Howard University students pumped their fists in front of Barack Obama’s White House and chanted “No Justice, No Vote.” At that moment, I understood why an image from 1968 still resonates today.
It was 43 years ago this week when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists on the Olympic Medal Stand and, along with supportive silver-medalist Peter Norman, created a moment seared for all-time in the American consciousness.
This week also marks the release of John Carlos’s autobiography, The John Carlos Story, which I co-wrote. When John asked me to write the book, I felt compelled to do it because I’ve long wondered, “why?” Not why did Smith and Carlos sacrifice fame, fortune, and glory in one medal-stand moment, but why that moment has stood the test of time.
Of course, much of the book details why John Carlos took his stand. It was 1968. Dr. King had been assassinated. The Black freedom struggle had become a fixture of American life. In the world of Olympic sports, apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia were regulars at the games. There were scant black coaches. Avery Brundage, an avowed white supremacist, ran the International Olympic Committee.
John Carlos in particular, in the 1960s, went from being a Harlem high school track star -- walking down the street talking both smack and politics with neighborhood regulars like Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell -- to being a scholarship athlete at segregated East Texas State. The gap between his sense of himself as a man and going to the South and being treated like a boy drove him politically toward his medal stand moment.
The answer to “why do so many of us still care” was tougher to decipher. In 2010, I appeared on a panel on the history of sports and resistance with Carlos, after which a long line of young people born years -- even decades -- after 1968 patiently waited for his signature on everything from posters and t-shirts to hastily procured pieces of notebook paper. Why? And why have I seen street-corner merchants from Harlem to Johannesburg sell t-shirts emblazoned with that image?
The most obvious is that people love a good redemption song. Smith and Carlos have been proven correct by history. They were reviled for taking a stand and using the Olympic podium to do it. A young sportswriter named Brent Musberger called them “Black-skinned storm troopers.” But their “radical” demands have since proved to be prescient.
Today, the idea of standing up to apartheid South Africa, racism, and Avery Brundage seems a matter of common decency rather than radical rabble-rousing. After years of death threats, poverty, and being treated as pariahs in the world of athletics, Smith and Carlos attend ceremonial unveilings of statues erected in their honor. America, like no other country on earth, loves remarking on its own progress.
But it was the Howard students, chanting, “No Justice, No Vote” to an African American President on the night of a Georgia execution, who truly unveiled for me why the image of black-gloved fists thrust in the air has retained its power. Smith and Carlos sacrificed privilege and glory, fame and fortune, for a larger cause.
As Carlos says,
A lot of the [black] athletes thought that winning [Olympic] medals would protect them from racism. But even if you won a medal, it ain’t going to save your momma. It ain’t going to save your sister or children. It might give you 15 minutes of fame, but what about the rest of your life?
Carlos’ attitude resonates because for all the blather about us living in a “post-racial society," there are reservoirs of anger about the realities of racism in the United States. The latest poverty statistics show that the black poverty rate of 27.4% is nearly double the overall U.S. rate. Black children living in poverty has reached 39.1 percent. Then there’s the criminal justice system, where 33% of African American men are either in jail or on parole.
The image of Carlos and Smith evokes a degree of principle, fearlessness, and freedom that I believe many people find sorely lacking today. They stood at the Olympics unencumbered by doubt, as brazenly Free Men. We are still grappling with the fact that they had to do it and the fact that it still needs to be done.
[Dave Zirin is the author of The John Carlos Story (Haymarket) and just made the new documentary Not Just a Game. Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com This article was also posted at The Nation blogs. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]
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