Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
************
Partisan Defense Committee Letter
5 March 2012
Partisan Defense Committee P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013
email: partisandefense@earthlink.net www.partisandefense.org
Contact: Kevin Gilroy (212) 406-4252
Free the MOVE 9!
On March 5, the Partisan Defense Committee sent the following letter calling for parole for the MOVE 9.
Dear Chairman Potteiger:
The Partisan Defense Committee once again joins with those supporting the release of the eight surviving political prisoners who have been collectively known as the MOVE 9. By any standard, such as ties to the community and a support network outside to “ease their transition,” there is absolutely no reason that any one of these men and women should be denied parole.
The main pretext for keeping the MOVE members incarcerated is their supposed "minimization/denial of the nature and circumstances of the offense(s) committed." But it is clear that these men and women are innocent of the charges related to the death of police officer James Ramp. Even the presiding judge Edwin Malmed who was asked after the trial, “Who shot James Ramp?” replied, “I haven’t the faintest idea.” Evidence released over time has clearly shown that Officer Ramp was killed in the massive crossfire by nearly 600 police officers who besieged the MOVE home on 8 August 1978.
The continued refusal to release these prisoners effectively denies parole to those who have been imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. It is an injustice that these men and women were ever incarcerated at all. Their continued confinement compounds that injustice on a daily basis. We call once more for the immediate, unconditional release of Debbie Africa, Janine Africa, Janet Africa, Chuck Africa, Eddie Africa, Phil Africa, Delbert Africa and Mike Africa.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee- The Struggle Continues- Hands Off ILWU Local 21!
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
************
Partisan Defense Committee Letter
10 March 2012
Partisan Defense Committee P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013
email: partisandefense@earthlink.net www.partisandefense.org
Contact: Kevin Gilroy (212) 406-4252
Hands Off ILWU Local 21!
The following letter, protesting ongoing repression in Longview, WA, was sent on 10 March to the Cowlitz County Prosecuting Attorney:
The Partisan Defense Committee protests the vindictive, anti-union prosecution of ILWU members and their supporters for their efforts to defend their jobs and their union representation at the EGT terminal in Longview. For months ILWU Local 21 members and their allies were targeted by a campaign of police violence, detentions and surveillance with more than 200 arrests made. These workers are being dragged through the courts with many being pressured to plead guilty to misdemeanors or face more serious felony charges. Now, even after a settlement has been reached between EGT and the ILWU, your office continues to escalate this vendetta with new charges, including felonies, being manufactured months later against longshore workers and others who rallied to the union’s defense.
We demand an end to this persecution and that all charges against ILWU members and their supporters be dropped immediately.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
************
Partisan Defense Committee Letter
10 March 2012
Partisan Defense Committee P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013
email: partisandefense@earthlink.net www.partisandefense.org
Contact: Kevin Gilroy (212) 406-4252
Hands Off ILWU Local 21!
The following letter, protesting ongoing repression in Longview, WA, was sent on 10 March to the Cowlitz County Prosecuting Attorney:
The Partisan Defense Committee protests the vindictive, anti-union prosecution of ILWU members and their supporters for their efforts to defend their jobs and their union representation at the EGT terminal in Longview. For months ILWU Local 21 members and their allies were targeted by a campaign of police violence, detentions and surveillance with more than 200 arrests made. These workers are being dragged through the courts with many being pressured to plead guilty to misdemeanors or face more serious felony charges. Now, even after a settlement has been reached between EGT and the ILWU, your office continues to escalate this vendetta with new charges, including felonies, being manufactured months later against longshore workers and others who rallied to the union’s defense.
We demand an end to this persecution and that all charges against ILWU members and their supporters be dropped immediately.
The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Protest State Vendetta Against Longview ILWU and Its Allies!
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
***********
16 March 2012
Protest State Vendetta Against Longview ILWU and Its Allies!
In our article “Lessons of the Battle of Longview” (WV No. 996, 17 February), we addressed the fight by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21 against an all-out union-busting attack by the giant multinational grain conglomerate EGT in Longview, Washington. Backed by forces ranging from the local police to the federal courts and the armed might of the U.S. Coast Guard, EGT’s aim was to drive ILWU Local 21 out of jobs at the port the union has worked for 80 years. The union held the line against this union-busting offensive. But the struggle is far from over. ILWU members and their supporters continue to be subjected to a relentless campaign of persecution by the courts, cops and Cowlitz County District Attorney’s office. The union itself is facing more than $300,000 in fines leveled at the behest of the National Labor Relations Board.
In the course of their battle against EGT, ILWU members and their allies engaged in the kind of militant labor struggle not seen in this country in years. In retaliation, leaders and members of ILWU Local 21 were met by a campaign of police violence, detentions and surveillance. More than 200 arrests were made, including several on felony counts. These workers are being dragged through the courts with many being pressured to plead guilty to misdemeanors or face more serious felony charges.
Even now, after a settlement has been reached between the ILWU and EGT, Cowlitz County prosecutor Susan Baur, working hand in glove with the county sheriff’s department and local police, continues to escalate the anti-union vendetta. New charges, including felonies, are being manufactured over events that occurred many months ago. This vindictive prosecution is a shot at all of labor, aimed at creating a chilling effect on trade unionists who were inspired by the power ILWU members brought to bear during their fight against EGT’s union-busting in Longview.
These longshoremen and their supporters fought with courage and determination. Now we must fight for them! The Partisan Defense Committee, a non-sectarian, class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, has written a protest letter to the Cowlitz County prosecutor demanding that all charges be dropped immediately. We urge unions, both nationally and internationally, as well as all opponents of the bosses’ war against the unions, to do the same.
Letters demanding that all charges be dropped and fines and other penalties rescinded should be sent to:
Susan Baur
Cowlitz County Prosecuting Attorney
Hall of Justice, Room 105
312 SW 1st Avenue
Kelso, WA 98626
Fax: (360) 414-9121
Copies should be sent to:
Governor Christine Gregoire
P.O. Box 40002
Olympia, WA 98504-0002
Fax: (360) 753-4110
Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna
1125 Washington Street SE
P.O. Box 40100
Olympia, WA 98504-0100
Fax: (360) 664-0228
Additional copies should be sent to:
President Dan Coffman, Executive Board and Members of ILWU Local 21
617 14th Avenue
Longview, WA 98632
Fax: (360) 423-0642
E-mail: ilwu21@iinet.com
President Robert McEllrath, IEB and Coast Committeemen
ILWU International
1188 Franklin Street, 4th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94109-6800
Fax: (415) 775-1302
E-mail: Info@ilwu.org
Partisan Defense Committee
P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station
New York, NY 10013-0099
Fax: (212) 406-2210
E-mail: partisandefense@earthlink.net
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 998, 16 March 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.
Markin comment:
I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).
That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.
That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.
And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeois decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
***********
16 March 2012
Protest State Vendetta Against Longview ILWU and Its Allies!
In our article “Lessons of the Battle of Longview” (WV No. 996, 17 February), we addressed the fight by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21 against an all-out union-busting attack by the giant multinational grain conglomerate EGT in Longview, Washington. Backed by forces ranging from the local police to the federal courts and the armed might of the U.S. Coast Guard, EGT’s aim was to drive ILWU Local 21 out of jobs at the port the union has worked for 80 years. The union held the line against this union-busting offensive. But the struggle is far from over. ILWU members and their supporters continue to be subjected to a relentless campaign of persecution by the courts, cops and Cowlitz County District Attorney’s office. The union itself is facing more than $300,000 in fines leveled at the behest of the National Labor Relations Board.
In the course of their battle against EGT, ILWU members and their allies engaged in the kind of militant labor struggle not seen in this country in years. In retaliation, leaders and members of ILWU Local 21 were met by a campaign of police violence, detentions and surveillance. More than 200 arrests were made, including several on felony counts. These workers are being dragged through the courts with many being pressured to plead guilty to misdemeanors or face more serious felony charges.
Even now, after a settlement has been reached between the ILWU and EGT, Cowlitz County prosecutor Susan Baur, working hand in glove with the county sheriff’s department and local police, continues to escalate the anti-union vendetta. New charges, including felonies, are being manufactured over events that occurred many months ago. This vindictive prosecution is a shot at all of labor, aimed at creating a chilling effect on trade unionists who were inspired by the power ILWU members brought to bear during their fight against EGT’s union-busting in Longview.
These longshoremen and their supporters fought with courage and determination. Now we must fight for them! The Partisan Defense Committee, a non-sectarian, class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League, has written a protest letter to the Cowlitz County prosecutor demanding that all charges be dropped immediately. We urge unions, both nationally and internationally, as well as all opponents of the bosses’ war against the unions, to do the same.
Letters demanding that all charges be dropped and fines and other penalties rescinded should be sent to:
Susan Baur
Cowlitz County Prosecuting Attorney
Hall of Justice, Room 105
312 SW 1st Avenue
Kelso, WA 98626
Fax: (360) 414-9121
Copies should be sent to:
Governor Christine Gregoire
P.O. Box 40002
Olympia, WA 98504-0002
Fax: (360) 753-4110
Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna
1125 Washington Street SE
P.O. Box 40100
Olympia, WA 98504-0100
Fax: (360) 664-0228
Additional copies should be sent to:
President Dan Coffman, Executive Board and Members of ILWU Local 21
617 14th Avenue
Longview, WA 98632
Fax: (360) 423-0642
E-mail: ilwu21@iinet.com
President Robert McEllrath, IEB and Coast Committeemen
ILWU International
1188 Franklin Street, 4th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94109-6800
Fax: (415) 775-1302
E-mail: Info@ilwu.org
Partisan Defense Committee
P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station
New York, NY 10013-0099
Fax: (212) 406-2210
E-mail: partisandefense@earthlink.net
* * *
(reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 998, 16 March 2012)
Workers Vanguard is the newspaper of the Spartacist League with which the Partisan Defense Committee is affiliated.
In Boston-An Open Call from "Camp Charlie"-Rescind The Fare Hikes And Service Cuts Now!
An Open Call from Camp Charlie
Dear Fellow T-Riders:
On April 4, 2012, Occupy MBTA launched a ten-day occupation at the State House. This occupation is a direct response to the approval of the draconian MBTA FY 2013 budget by the Mass DOT Board of Directors on April 4. They plan to cut services, to raise fares by 23%, and to jack up the price of the RIDE service by 125% or more! To make you pay more for less.
This is an unjust tax on the 99%, at a time when the 1%, the corporations, the millionaires and billionaires are getting their taxes cut! Indeed,'Big Banks are getting rich off the interest on the very debt that caused the T's budget crisis; they profit from our suffering.
In alliance with T-riders across Boston, we call for a "People's Veto" over the MBTA's budget. We are occupying at the State House to rally state residents to help us to stop these fare hikes, service cuts, and layoffs of transit workers before they start. We are asking you to help us!
We Demand: "No Hikes! No Cuts! No Worker Layoffs!" & a Fully-Funded, Sustainable, Transportation Plan that Works for the 99% of All Massachusetts, (not just the 1%)!
We believe that Public Transportation is a right, and must be defended as such. Join us in the fight to Defend Public Transportation. For the sake of workers, the poor, the elderly, the youth, and the l disabled. For the sake of city, the air we breathe, and the climate -we depend on. Come support Occupation on the Statehouse Steps.
People's needs must be put before the Profits of a Few!
We call our State House occupation "Camp Charlie," in honor of the famous character in the "Charlie on the MTA," who is forever trapped underground on the subway because he—like many of us—cannot afford a fare increase. Help us to "Free Charlie!" from the bonds of state deprivation and big bank profiteering. Let's Free Charlie from the chains of debt! Visit www.occupymbta.orj more information.
Dear Fellow T-Riders:
On April 4, 2012, Occupy MBTA launched a ten-day occupation at the State House. This occupation is a direct response to the approval of the draconian MBTA FY 2013 budget by the Mass DOT Board of Directors on April 4. They plan to cut services, to raise fares by 23%, and to jack up the price of the RIDE service by 125% or more! To make you pay more for less.
This is an unjust tax on the 99%, at a time when the 1%, the corporations, the millionaires and billionaires are getting their taxes cut! Indeed,'Big Banks are getting rich off the interest on the very debt that caused the T's budget crisis; they profit from our suffering.
In alliance with T-riders across Boston, we call for a "People's Veto" over the MBTA's budget. We are occupying at the State House to rally state residents to help us to stop these fare hikes, service cuts, and layoffs of transit workers before they start. We are asking you to help us!
We Demand: "No Hikes! No Cuts! No Worker Layoffs!" & a Fully-Funded, Sustainable, Transportation Plan that Works for the 99% of All Massachusetts, (not just the 1%)!
We believe that Public Transportation is a right, and must be defended as such. Join us in the fight to Defend Public Transportation. For the sake of workers, the poor, the elderly, the youth, and the l disabled. For the sake of city, the air we breathe, and the climate -we depend on. Come support Occupation on the Statehouse Steps.
People's needs must be put before the Profits of a Few!
We call our State House occupation "Camp Charlie," in honor of the famous character in the "Charlie on the MTA," who is forever trapped underground on the subway because he—like many of us—cannot afford a fare increase. Help us to "Free Charlie!" from the bonds of state deprivation and big bank profiteering. Let's Free Charlie from the chains of debt! Visit www.occupymbta.orj more information.
All Out In Solidarity With The Farmworkers-OB Stands in Solidarity with Coalition of Immokalee Workers In Quincy (Ma) On Thursday April 12th At 12 Noon
Markin comment:
An injury to one is an injury to all applies with special force with the beleaguered farmworkers.
OB Stands in Solidarity with Coalition of Immokalee Workers
April 10th, 2012 · mhacker · Passed ResolutionsNo comments
The following proposal was passed at the General Assembly of Occupy Boston on April 7, 2012:
To continue the success of groundbreaking agreements with food retailers, Occupy Boston stands with the Decolonize to Liberate Working Group, in solidarity with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in their quest for adoption of the Fair Food Program by “Giant Supermarkets” to eliminate modern day slavery in the daily violation of basic human rights, including physical and sexual abuse, and exposure to pesticides, in order to harvest the food on our plates. Occupy Boston will utilize its resources to spread the word and get people to Stop and Shop headquarters on April 12, 2012 at 12:00 PM to join in the action to demonstrate our commitment to human and worker rights.
***********
Upcoming Events:
•
Justice for Farmworkers! Picket, Delegation and Theater at Stop & Shop Headquarters, Thursday, April 12 at 12pm, Stop & Shop Corporate Office Headquarters, 1385 Hancock St., Quincy.
Just days before the Ahold (parent company of Stop & Shop) Shareholder Meeting, please join farmworkers and Fair Food allies in calling on Stop and Shop to join the Fair Food Program!
For decades, Florida’s farmworkers faced poverty wages and daily violations of their basic rights — including physical abuse, sexual harassment, and in the most extreme cases, modern-day slavery — in order to harvest the food on our plates. Today, however, a new day is dawning in the fields. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) — an internationally-recognized farmworker organization — has reached groundbreaking agreements with ten of the world’s leading food retailers, including McDonald’s, Subway and Trader Joe’s. Hailed by the New York Times as “possibly the most successful labor action in the US in twenty years,” the Fair Food Program establishes a worker-designed code of conduct in the fields and requires retailers to pay one more penny per pound for the tomatoes they buy to go directly to the workers who picked them—all of which is monitored and enforced by the independent Fair Food Standards Council. Supermarkets like Ahold leverage their high-volume purchasing power to demand the ever-lower prices that result in farmworker exploitation. By refusing to partner with the CIW, the steps the company has taken fall far short of the substantive, verifiable and enforceable standards that the situation requires, consumers expect, and others within the industry have embraced.
Join farmworkers and Fair Food advocates in demanding that Ahold uphold human rights and join the Fair Food Program! More information: www.ciw-online.org, Contact: elena@interfaithact.org; 650.678.9127
An injury to one is an injury to all applies with special force with the beleaguered farmworkers.
OB Stands in Solidarity with Coalition of Immokalee Workers
April 10th, 2012 · mhacker · Passed ResolutionsNo comments
The following proposal was passed at the General Assembly of Occupy Boston on April 7, 2012:
To continue the success of groundbreaking agreements with food retailers, Occupy Boston stands with the Decolonize to Liberate Working Group, in solidarity with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in their quest for adoption of the Fair Food Program by “Giant Supermarkets” to eliminate modern day slavery in the daily violation of basic human rights, including physical and sexual abuse, and exposure to pesticides, in order to harvest the food on our plates. Occupy Boston will utilize its resources to spread the word and get people to Stop and Shop headquarters on April 12, 2012 at 12:00 PM to join in the action to demonstrate our commitment to human and worker rights.
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Upcoming Events:
•
Justice for Farmworkers! Picket, Delegation and Theater at Stop & Shop Headquarters, Thursday, April 12 at 12pm, Stop & Shop Corporate Office Headquarters, 1385 Hancock St., Quincy.
Just days before the Ahold (parent company of Stop & Shop) Shareholder Meeting, please join farmworkers and Fair Food allies in calling on Stop and Shop to join the Fair Food Program!
For decades, Florida’s farmworkers faced poverty wages and daily violations of their basic rights — including physical abuse, sexual harassment, and in the most extreme cases, modern-day slavery — in order to harvest the food on our plates. Today, however, a new day is dawning in the fields. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) — an internationally-recognized farmworker organization — has reached groundbreaking agreements with ten of the world’s leading food retailers, including McDonald’s, Subway and Trader Joe’s. Hailed by the New York Times as “possibly the most successful labor action in the US in twenty years,” the Fair Food Program establishes a worker-designed code of conduct in the fields and requires retailers to pay one more penny per pound for the tomatoes they buy to go directly to the workers who picked them—all of which is monitored and enforced by the independent Fair Food Standards Council. Supermarkets like Ahold leverage their high-volume purchasing power to demand the ever-lower prices that result in farmworker exploitation. By refusing to partner with the CIW, the steps the company has taken fall far short of the substantive, verifiable and enforceable standards that the situation requires, consumers expect, and others within the industry have embraced.
Join farmworkers and Fair Food advocates in demanding that Ahold uphold human rights and join the Fair Food Program! More information: www.ciw-online.org, Contact: elena@interfaithact.org; 650.678.9127
All Out May Day 2012: A Day Without the 99% -General Strike Occupy Boston Working Group
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
This draft statement by GSOB was passed on to me for your information.
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other issues such as political transparency and horizontal democracy that have become associated with the Occupy movement are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a time for the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America to join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy.
Some political activists here in Boston, mainly connected with Occupy Boston (OB), decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). GSOB has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan its own May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 8, 2012.
Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and some did close down in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its lack of a recent militant labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. GSOB also came to a realization that successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 would not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Our focus will be actions and activities that respond and reflect the Boston political situation as we attempt to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive immigration actions in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national actions this year. One of the first steps GSOB took as a working group was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. After making such efforts GSOB has joined forces with BMDC in order to coordinate the over-all May Day actions.
Taking its cue from the developing Occupy May Day movement, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of Occupy Wall Street, GSOB has centered its slogans on the theme of “Occupy May First - A Day Without the 99%.” GSOB wishes to highlight the fact that in capitalist America labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Also to highlight the increasing economic gap between rich and poor, the increasing political voicelessness of the 99%, and the social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions faced under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated by Occupy Boston last fall.
On May Day GSOB is calling on the 99% to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement that general slogan. We encourage working people to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the 99% in the streets.
For students at all levels GSOB is calling for a walk-out of classes. Further we call on college students to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward left-wing think tank should plan its own strike actions and GSOB suggests at some point in the day that all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
In the early hours on May 1st members of the 99% are urged to converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a city permit-approved May Day rally at Boston City Hall Plaza jointly sponsored by BMDC and GSOB. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
The GSOB is urging the following slogans for May 1st. - No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the 1% that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without the 99% really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. GSOB says -All Out For May Day 2012!
GSOB meets every Thursday at Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison Avenue, Boston (Chinatown) from 5:15-6:45 PM. April 26th will be an all-inclusive final planning meeting sponsored by BMDC-GSOB. Check us out on Facebook and the Facebook event page- http://www.facebook.com/#!/Occupy.May1.Boston
This draft statement by GSOB was passed on to me for your information.
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other issues such as political transparency and horizontal democracy that have become associated with the Occupy movement are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a time for the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America to join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy.
Some political activists here in Boston, mainly connected with Occupy Boston (OB), decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). GSOB has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan its own May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 8, 2012.
Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and some did close down in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its lack of a recent militant labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. GSOB also came to a realization that successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 would not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Our focus will be actions and activities that respond and reflect the Boston political situation as we attempt to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive immigration actions in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national actions this year. One of the first steps GSOB took as a working group was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. After making such efforts GSOB has joined forces with BMDC in order to coordinate the over-all May Day actions.
Taking its cue from the developing Occupy May Day movement, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of Occupy Wall Street, GSOB has centered its slogans on the theme of “Occupy May First - A Day Without the 99%.” GSOB wishes to highlight the fact that in capitalist America labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Also to highlight the increasing economic gap between rich and poor, the increasing political voicelessness of the 99%, and the social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions faced under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated by Occupy Boston last fall.
On May Day GSOB is calling on the 99% to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement that general slogan. We encourage working people to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the 99% in the streets.
For students at all levels GSOB is calling for a walk-out of classes. Further we call on college students to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward left-wing think tank should plan its own strike actions and GSOB suggests at some point in the day that all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
In the early hours on May 1st members of the 99% are urged to converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a city permit-approved May Day rally at Boston City Hall Plaza jointly sponsored by BMDC and GSOB. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
The GSOB is urging the following slogans for May 1st. - No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the 1% that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without the 99% really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. GSOB says -All Out For May Day 2012!
GSOB meets every Thursday at Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison Avenue, Boston (Chinatown) from 5:15-6:45 PM. April 26th will be an all-inclusive final planning meeting sponsored by BMDC-GSOB. Check us out on Facebook and the Facebook event page- http://www.facebook.com/#!/Occupy.May1.Boston
On The 150th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The Second Year Of The American Civil War – Karl Marx On The American Civil War-In Honor Of The Union Side
Markin comment:
I am always amazed when I run into some younger leftists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. In the age of advanced imperialism, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we are almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in our eyes. Read on.
*******
Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1862
[The Election Results in the Northern States]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: MECW Volume 19, p. 263;
Written: on November 18, 1862;
First published: in Die Presse, November 23, 1862.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The elections have in fact been a defeat for the Washington government. The old leaders of the Democratic Party have skilfully exploited the dissatisfaction over the financial clumsiness and military ineptitude, and there is no doubt that the State of New York, officially in the hands of the Seymours, Woods and Bennetts, can become the centre of dangerous intrigues. At the same time, the practical importance of this reaction should not be exaggerated. The existing Republican House of Representatives continues, and its recently elected successors will not replace it until December 1863. For the time being, therefore, the elections are nothing more than a demonstration, so far as the Congress in Washington is concerned. No gubernatorial elections have been held except in New York. The Republican Party thus retains the leadership in the individual states. The electoral victories of the Republicans in Massachusetts, Iowa, Illinois and Michigan more or less balance the losses in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.
A closer analysis of the “Democratic” gains leads to an entirely different result than the one trumpeted by the English papers. New York City, strongly corrupted by Irish rabble, actively engaged in the slave trade until recently, the seat of the American money market and full of holders of mortgages on Southern plantations, has always been decidedly “Democratic”, just as Liverpool is still Tory. The rural districts of New York State voted Republican this time, as they have since 1856, but not with the same fiery enthusiasm as in 1860. Moreover, a large part of their men entitled to vote is in the field. Reckoning the urban and rural districts together, the Democratic majority in New York State comes to only 8,000-10,000 votes.
In Pennsylvania, which has long wavered, first between Whigs... and Democrats, and later between Democrats and Republicans, the Democratic majority was only 3,500 votes. In Indiana it is still smaller, and in Ohio, where it numbers 8,000, the Democratic leaders known to sympathise with the South, such as the notorious Vallandigham, have lost their seats in Congress. The Irishman sees the Negro as a dangerous competitor. The efficient farmers in Indiana and Ohio hate the Negro almost as much as the slaveholder. He is a symbol, for them, of slavery and the humiliation of the working class, and the Democratic press threatens them daily with a flooding of their territories by “niggers.” In addition, the dissatisfaction with the miserable way the war in Virginia is being waged was strongest in those states which had provided the largest contingents of volunteers.
All this, however, is by no means the main thing. At the time Lincoln was elected (1860) there was no civil war, nor was the question of Negro emancipation on the order of the day. The Republican Party, then quite independent of the Abolitionist Party, aimed its 1860 electoral campaign solely at protesting against the extension of slavery into the Territories, but, at the same time, it proclaimed non-interference with the institution in the states where it already existed legally. If Lincoln had had Emancipation of the Slaves as his motto at that time, there can be no doubt that he would have been defeated. Any such slogan was vigorously rejected.
Matters were quite different in the latest election. The Republicans made common cause with the Abolitionists. They came out emphatically for immediate emancipation, whether for its own sake or as a means of ending the rebellion. If this circumstance is taken into account, the majority in favour of the government in Michigan, Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa and Delaware, and the very significant minority vote it obtained in the states of New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, are equally surprising. Before the war such a result would have been impossible, even in Massachusetts. All that is needed now is energy, on the part of the government and of the Congress that meets next month, for the Abolitionists, now identical with the Republicans, to have the tipper hand everywhere, both morally and numerically. Louis Bonaparte’s hankering to intervene strengthens the Abolitionists’ case “from abroad”. The only danger lies in the retention of such generals as McClellan, who are, apart from their incompetence, avowed pro-slavery men.”
I am always amazed when I run into some younger leftists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. In the age of advanced imperialism, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we are almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in our eyes. Read on.
*******
Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1862
[The Election Results in the Northern States]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: MECW Volume 19, p. 263;
Written: on November 18, 1862;
First published: in Die Presse, November 23, 1862.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The elections have in fact been a defeat for the Washington government. The old leaders of the Democratic Party have skilfully exploited the dissatisfaction over the financial clumsiness and military ineptitude, and there is no doubt that the State of New York, officially in the hands of the Seymours, Woods and Bennetts, can become the centre of dangerous intrigues. At the same time, the practical importance of this reaction should not be exaggerated. The existing Republican House of Representatives continues, and its recently elected successors will not replace it until December 1863. For the time being, therefore, the elections are nothing more than a demonstration, so far as the Congress in Washington is concerned. No gubernatorial elections have been held except in New York. The Republican Party thus retains the leadership in the individual states. The electoral victories of the Republicans in Massachusetts, Iowa, Illinois and Michigan more or less balance the losses in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.
A closer analysis of the “Democratic” gains leads to an entirely different result than the one trumpeted by the English papers. New York City, strongly corrupted by Irish rabble, actively engaged in the slave trade until recently, the seat of the American money market and full of holders of mortgages on Southern plantations, has always been decidedly “Democratic”, just as Liverpool is still Tory. The rural districts of New York State voted Republican this time, as they have since 1856, but not with the same fiery enthusiasm as in 1860. Moreover, a large part of their men entitled to vote is in the field. Reckoning the urban and rural districts together, the Democratic majority in New York State comes to only 8,000-10,000 votes.
In Pennsylvania, which has long wavered, first between Whigs... and Democrats, and later between Democrats and Republicans, the Democratic majority was only 3,500 votes. In Indiana it is still smaller, and in Ohio, where it numbers 8,000, the Democratic leaders known to sympathise with the South, such as the notorious Vallandigham, have lost their seats in Congress. The Irishman sees the Negro as a dangerous competitor. The efficient farmers in Indiana and Ohio hate the Negro almost as much as the slaveholder. He is a symbol, for them, of slavery and the humiliation of the working class, and the Democratic press threatens them daily with a flooding of their territories by “niggers.” In addition, the dissatisfaction with the miserable way the war in Virginia is being waged was strongest in those states which had provided the largest contingents of volunteers.
All this, however, is by no means the main thing. At the time Lincoln was elected (1860) there was no civil war, nor was the question of Negro emancipation on the order of the day. The Republican Party, then quite independent of the Abolitionist Party, aimed its 1860 electoral campaign solely at protesting against the extension of slavery into the Territories, but, at the same time, it proclaimed non-interference with the institution in the states where it already existed legally. If Lincoln had had Emancipation of the Slaves as his motto at that time, there can be no doubt that he would have been defeated. Any such slogan was vigorously rejected.
Matters were quite different in the latest election. The Republicans made common cause with the Abolitionists. They came out emphatically for immediate emancipation, whether for its own sake or as a means of ending the rebellion. If this circumstance is taken into account, the majority in favour of the government in Michigan, Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa and Delaware, and the very significant minority vote it obtained in the states of New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, are equally surprising. Before the war such a result would have been impossible, even in Massachusetts. All that is needed now is energy, on the part of the government and of the Congress that meets next month, for the Abolitionists, now identical with the Republicans, to have the tipper hand everywhere, both morally and numerically. Louis Bonaparte’s hankering to intervene strengthens the Abolitionists’ case “from abroad”. The only danger lies in the retention of such generals as McClellan, who are, apart from their incompetence, avowed pro-slavery men.”
From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Walter Daum, The Life and Death of Stalinism: A Resurrection of Marxist Theory
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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Reviews
Walter Daum, The Life and Death of Stalinism: A Resurrection of Marxist Theory, Socialist Voice, New York, 1990, pp.380, $15.00
The rapidity and extent of the political, social and economic changes now taking place in Eastern Europe, and the fact that they are clearly the outcome of a very long process, make it all the more urgent for revolutionaries to grasp the meaning of what is happening, a task that cannot even be started without an appreciation of the class character of these states and of their laws of motion and development. The reaction of the international Trotskyist movement to this most fundamental of ideological challenges has been most disappointing, and what has so far appeared can be placed in two clearly defined categories, those that are works of apologetic, of the ‘we-were-right-all-the-time’ kind of argument, where the organisation had failed to foresee a single thing, and those that continue to hedge their bets, of the ‘confused-situation-that-can-go-either-way’ variety, where the group which publishes them clearly does not have a clue. A disappointing feature of both types is the lack of any attempt to trace the development of Soviet and Eastern European society as a whole since 1917.
It is one of the many strengths of this book that its author has not only seen that this is the main problem, but has done his utmost to address it. It is a thoughtful, and indeed in many ways, an ideologically exciting book. Whether you accept its main thesis or not, and it will emerge from what is written below that this reviewer does not, it will still challenge your presuppositions and force you to rethink your ideas from top to bottom in the most rigorous way. And unlike most would-be Marxist texts these days, it is written in intelligible English, which is no small gain as well.
The most arresting part of it is that it reminds us of Lenin’s basic definition in State and Revolution, so long ignored or forgotten by those who regard themselves as revolutionaries, of what a workers’ state really is, a “bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” (p.119). This workers’ state, he points out, “in effect creates a single capital” (p.132). There was thus no question of the immediate abolition of wage labour, that essential component of capitalism, in the Soviet Union: “... the workers’ state inherits a capitalist economy and must therefore live with it at the same time that it transforms it – it is indeed a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” (p.125). “It would not be incorrect”, he concludes, “to call the post 1917 Soviet Union a ‘deformed workers’ state’ almost from the start, a workers’ state whose transition was disastrously hampered by its backwardness and isolation” (pp.142-3).
Here he comes close to the heart of the matter, that the very term ‘workers’ state’ is a dialectical contradiction. It remains bourgeois in the sense that, like any other state, it defends property, but with this proviso, that the property in question is public rather than private. But since the historic task of this state is its own abolition, its withering away, although the workers have created it by means of a revolution, and the state is thus ‘owned’ by them, it still remains a bourgeois instrument and rests upon the exploitation of wage labour, thereby having a high bourgeois content from the start. The author has thus stumbled on a truth that few Trotskyists have ever even noticed, that there is not, and never could be, any such thing as a ‘healthy’ workers’ state, “a grotesque label, if ever there was one, given the reality”, notes Daum carefully (p.143), even when applied to that of Lenin and Trotsky. Thus, if instead of withering away this state power strengthens itself – and in the conditions of the Soviet Union following 1917 there was no question of any other development – its bourgeois content must increase, and it ceases by slow and imperceptible degrees to represent much of the interests of the working class.
Another highly successful part of this exercise is Daum’s destruction, down to the last brick, of the theory of ‘structural assimilation’ created by the International Secretariat to explain the establishment of the ‘peoples’ democracies’ in Eastern Europe after 1945 (pp.310-5). If the nationalisation of the majority of the economy is really the touchstone of what a workers’ state is, he points out, the Soviet Union itself did not become one until the end of 1918; and the idea that a bourgeois state can become a workers’ state by ‘structural assimilation’ really amounts to saying that “Socialist transformation can be achieved without overthrowing the bourgeois state” (p.313). “Such a theory echoes the revisionist method of Bernstein”, he rightly points out (p.312), describing it as “the hallmark of reformism” (p.313). But whilst successfully highlighting Mandel’s dilemma, we shall see that Daum abandons his own methodology when it comes to the Soviet Union, which he believes was a workers’ state until 1936-39, when it was replaced by a bourgeois state, created not as a result of the smashing of the state by armed conquest or internal counterrevolution.
It is precisely in his attempt to apply his own real insights to Eastern Europe that he halts halfway. He correctly draws our attention to that elementary proposition of Marxism, so long and so often forgotten by its would-be practitioners, that the working class revolution is qualitatively different from the revolutions of all other classes by its conscious character; “the creation of a workers’ state”, he points out, “is not just a matter of economic forms; it is the result of a social revolution that places state power in the hands of the working class. Since it inaugurates the period of transition it is in fact the Socialist revolution. And it must be the conscious achievement of the masses.” (p.311) Since he believes that in seizing state power from the Nazis and their puppets, the Stalinists carried out political, not social, revolutions (p.315), he argues that “the proletarian label for the Stalinist states amounts to a cynical rejection of the Marxist conclusion that a workers’ state can be established only through the workers’ conscious activity” (p.13). He is thus obliged to argue that the only feasible theory, that of Haston and Vern/Ryan, is impossible per se: “if the date of the Eastern European revolution is put at 1944-45, then the Stalinist forces became the agent of proletarian revolution at the very moment when they were crushing the movement of workers’ revolt“ (pp.322-3). But in stressing the conscious factor to the exclusion of everything else, he forgets his previous insight, that the workers’ state, being a bourgeois state, also has features in common with all other states, one of which is that it consists of armed men standing in defence of property. Social overturns can take place by armed conquest from abroad, and the possibility of this arose within the lifetime of Lenin in Poland, and its realisation actually took place in the case of Georgia. In the light of the development of Eastern Europe we can surely now affirm that if the Soviet army had indeed conquered Poland in 1919, without the involvement of the Polish working class, and, indeed, in contradiction with their wishes, we would have had a ‘Stalinist’ state in Poland nearly a decade before we got one in the Soviet Union, which actually happened in the case of Georgia, a couple or so years later. For it was Marx himself who explained a long time ago, with reference to the imperialism of the nineteenth century, that the victor in a war involving states of a different socio-economic character imposes its property forms upon the vanquished, that in effect a war between states of a different class nature partakes of the character of an international civil war.
We might add, incidentally, that those who believe that it requires individual, separate revolutions to form new states have certainly got a lot of explaining to do, as the spread of the bourgeois revolution in Europe after 1789 in the first instance took place on the bayonet points of Napoleon’s troops rather than by separate insurrections of the bourgeois class in each country. Daum thus signally fails to grasp what was really at issue in Trotsky’s analysis of the changes in the property forms of Eastern Poland in 1939 as set forth in In Defence of Marxism. “Trotsky seems torn between crediting a revolutionary overturn to the masses and denying the revolutionary character of the Stalinists’ acts”, he concludes (p.318). Yet he himself has already supplied the answer to this conundrum. If a workers’ state really is “a bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie”, and if the workers subject to wage labour within it are simultaneously a ruling and an oppressed class, then the operations of this counter-revolutionary workers’ state are bound to take on precisely this character. Daum contradicts his own theory by stating that “the Stalinist social overturn came only later” (p.313), when, in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, “the old bourgeoisies were overthrown” (p.310). He is evidently oblivious of the fact that it was Hitler, not Stalin, who destroyed the embryo capitalist classes in Eastern Europe, and that the complete annihilation of capitalist property forms in the region, by then dominated by German imperialism, came upon Hitler’s defeat. In fact, the truth is that Stalin tried to recreate a native capitalist class in these areas, an attempt he had to abandon when it was obvious that Marshall Aid could well succeed where he was failing, and recreate these classes as clients of American finance capital.
There is far more to this book, however, than can be restricted to these considerations. On the purely historical side Daum provides a devastating picture of the ideological degeneration of the Fourth International, that is, if you accept that there still was one, which this reviewer would not. He shows how the postwar theory of the Trotskyists did not even explain what was happening at the time, still less being able to predict anything, and certainly being utterly useless as a guide to any action of any sort. It began as a complete failure to understand the nature of the postwar world (pp.292ff), continued happily on its way in the ridiculous somersaulting over the nature of the Eastern European states in 1948 (p.311), and when it finally settled down – if it ever did – it left them with an outlook that would not allow them to identify which were workers’ states and which were not (p.313), when this crucial class transformation was supposed to have taken place (p.314), and even with the view that it was possible to have states that had no class characterisation at all (p.314). In terms of activity Daum rightly highlights the importance of the betrayal of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 (pp.325-6), whilst strangely neglecting the lack of reaction to the behaviour of the LSSP during the Great Hartal a year later (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 2 no.1, Spring 1989, pp.38-43). But whilst it may be true that Bolivia 1952 was the ‘Fourth of August’ of the Fourth International, to use Trotsky's phrase of Germany in 1933, Daum’s analysis leads him to look for the roots of this Stalinist-type degeneration after the end of the war and in the confusion over Eastern Europe. He is thus obliged to accept the myth of ‘Pabloite revisionism’, that it is a creation of the European leadership of the mid- and later 1940s. This is contrary to the clear evidence that adaptation to Stalinism originates with the SWP during the war (as Natalia Trotsky and Grandizo Munis pointed out), and indeed with James P. Cannon himself, in his support for the activity of the Red Army in Eastern Europe in 1944-45, and in the contention that it was still “Trotsky’s army” and not Stalin’s (cf. Max Shachtman, From the Bureaucratic Jungle, part 2, in The New International, Volume 11 no.2, March 1945, pp.48-9).
It is no coincidence that the SWP dropped transitional politics at exactly the same time, and Daum shows that, coming from the same American milieu with the lack of an autonomous working class political movement of any sort, he has no real grasp of them eithcr. “In Britain”, he notes solemnly, “instead of exposing a Labour Party that helped bury the British miners’ strike of 1984-85, the left dug itself ever more deeply into it” (p.22). He thus belongs to that school of idealist ‘Marxism’ that thinks that you can destroy the Labour Party by ‘exposing’ it, i.e. by mere name-calling from outside. Perhaps a bit more reading might come up with the information that it was Engels who urged the trade unions to set up such a party, and that it was Lenin and Trotsky who advised us to “dig more deeply” into it. The “leftward motion of the workers” (p.295), for example, that Daum seems to think is a necessary condition for it, was far from taking place in the British Labour Party when Trotsky advised entry in 1936, and indeed did not take place until 1944. In fact, he shows on more than one occasion that he does not understand the ‘workers’ government’ slogan of the Transitional Programme at all. According to him, when the Bolsheviks raised the slogan of ‘All power to the Soviets’, “the purpose of Lenin’s tactic was to place the Mensheviks in office so that their subservience to capitalism would be made visible to all” (p.316). But that is the whole point; the slogan means exactly what it says – power, not ‘office’, for part of the time the Bolsheviks were using that slogan the Mensheviks were already in ‘office’, in Kerensky’s government! If it were possible for a reformist party to break with the bourgeoisie and take power, the result would be a workers’ revolution, not a government that “could only have a fleeting existence”, which could either lead “to the workers’ revolution, or it is defeated” (p.316). The whole point of this slogan as a practical, non-sectarian, united front method of demonstrating the class character of the reformists, of really ‘exposing’ them, is to show to their followers that they do not want power for their party at all, but office in a bourgeois state.
There are other indications that Daum’s grasp of Marxism is not as sure as it could be. At one point he argues against Lenin’s concept that revolutionary consciousness had to be brought to the working class from outside, from the declassed bourgeois intelligentsia, in other words (pp.105ff). Apart from the argument about conditions determining consciousness, he has clearly forgotten from which class Marx, Engels, Trotsky, etc., really originated. A very strained argument (pp.274-6) tries to prove that the Soviet Union can still be imperialist, even if it does not export capital in the Leninist sense, giving as its clinching argument that “Czardom had little capital to export” (p.275). Now this really is playing with words, for however penetrated Czarist Russia was becoming by capital, and however ‘feudal’ some of its institutions appeared to be, its ‘imperial’ character was that of an Asiatic Empire, a state form that long predates capitalist society, and indeed every other form of class society as well. He also indulges in over generalisations, categorically denying what Engels treats as a possibility in Anti-Dühring when he states that “no bourgeoisie has gone so far as to abolish private property completely by entrusting its ownership function to the state” (pp.80-1), an assumption that may well need modification if we look at short periods in the history of Israel just after its foundation and of Chiang’s China as it tottered to its doom in 1945-49.
But it is a measure of the power of the author’s reasoning that it supplies the main refutation to the thesis defended by his own book. A major part of his argument against the theory of ‘structural assimilation’ is that by molecular change a state that was once a bourgeois state cannot become a workers’ state without a smashing and recreation of the state apparatus. Such a theory, he argues, leaves us with no guidelines for deciding when a state ceases to be a bourgeois state and becomes one ruled by the workers. But these same arguments are equally valid when applied to the reverse process – counter-revolution. Despite the claim that “this book’s political standpoint is Trotskyist” (p.7), this is demonstrably not the case. It is, in fact, a ‘state capitalist’ analysis of Russia that places the period of the erection of a bourgeois state in 1936-39. Yet the state had the same structure, and even the same personal dictator, before and after this period. This argumentation (pp.170ff) is quite the least convincing part of the book. All sorts of elaborate rationalisations are indulged in to prove the point, as regards both domestic and foreign policy. A quite extraordinary juridical significance is ascribed to the Stalin Constitution of 1936, in spite of the fact that both its author and reviser were shot within two years. In going over the work methods, the exploitation, the labour code, the purges and the terror, he is unable to surmount the problem that the state that implemented them was the same state before and after, which had developed by uninterrupted stages from 1917 onwards. He even tries to pretend that the outright class collaboration of the Popular Front was qualitatively different from previous betrayals, such as Pilsudski’s accession to power in Poland, Chiang’s smashing of the Second Revolution in China in 1927-28, or Hitler’s rise in Germany.
In fact, the same disarray exists amongst state capitalist analyses of the Soviet Union as Daum identifies among the Trotskyists with regard to Stalinism after 1945. When did it become a bourgeois state? Along the way he supplies a pretty effective demolition job on the views of Tony Cliff, that the crucial counter-revolution in class terms came about in the period of 1928-29, but in so doing supplies the ammunition for destroying his own dating of this alleged change. State capitalism as a concept turns out to be quite as unscientific as the ‘Pabloism’ he so roundly castigates, since unless it becomes part of the totality of what a ‘workers’ state’ really is, it comes into head-on collision with the class theory of the state. The truth is that the only state capitalist theories that can lay claim to any scientific basis at all are those of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and of some of the Mensheviks, who would place Russia’s bourgeois revolution in the setting up of this very state form in 1917.
But the basic thesis of this very fine book, that what we have since 1917 is a continued degeneration of a workers’ revolution in the direction of pure capitalist forms, becoming ever more alienated in structures (Pol Pot’s Cambodia!) and in methods (military bureaucratic conquest and peasant insurrection) cannot be faulted. Comrade Daum is of the opinion – and he argues his case with vigour and imagination – that the crucial change from quantity into quality took place in the Soviet Union in 1936-39. I would argue that we are on the point of witnessing it now, but that it will still require a break at the level of state power, in spite of the ever more warped and degenerated forms through which workers’ power is still expressed.
Al Richardson
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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Reviews
Walter Daum, The Life and Death of Stalinism: A Resurrection of Marxist Theory, Socialist Voice, New York, 1990, pp.380, $15.00
The rapidity and extent of the political, social and economic changes now taking place in Eastern Europe, and the fact that they are clearly the outcome of a very long process, make it all the more urgent for revolutionaries to grasp the meaning of what is happening, a task that cannot even be started without an appreciation of the class character of these states and of their laws of motion and development. The reaction of the international Trotskyist movement to this most fundamental of ideological challenges has been most disappointing, and what has so far appeared can be placed in two clearly defined categories, those that are works of apologetic, of the ‘we-were-right-all-the-time’ kind of argument, where the organisation had failed to foresee a single thing, and those that continue to hedge their bets, of the ‘confused-situation-that-can-go-either-way’ variety, where the group which publishes them clearly does not have a clue. A disappointing feature of both types is the lack of any attempt to trace the development of Soviet and Eastern European society as a whole since 1917.
It is one of the many strengths of this book that its author has not only seen that this is the main problem, but has done his utmost to address it. It is a thoughtful, and indeed in many ways, an ideologically exciting book. Whether you accept its main thesis or not, and it will emerge from what is written below that this reviewer does not, it will still challenge your presuppositions and force you to rethink your ideas from top to bottom in the most rigorous way. And unlike most would-be Marxist texts these days, it is written in intelligible English, which is no small gain as well.
The most arresting part of it is that it reminds us of Lenin’s basic definition in State and Revolution, so long ignored or forgotten by those who regard themselves as revolutionaries, of what a workers’ state really is, a “bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” (p.119). This workers’ state, he points out, “in effect creates a single capital” (p.132). There was thus no question of the immediate abolition of wage labour, that essential component of capitalism, in the Soviet Union: “... the workers’ state inherits a capitalist economy and must therefore live with it at the same time that it transforms it – it is indeed a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” (p.125). “It would not be incorrect”, he concludes, “to call the post 1917 Soviet Union a ‘deformed workers’ state’ almost from the start, a workers’ state whose transition was disastrously hampered by its backwardness and isolation” (pp.142-3).
Here he comes close to the heart of the matter, that the very term ‘workers’ state’ is a dialectical contradiction. It remains bourgeois in the sense that, like any other state, it defends property, but with this proviso, that the property in question is public rather than private. But since the historic task of this state is its own abolition, its withering away, although the workers have created it by means of a revolution, and the state is thus ‘owned’ by them, it still remains a bourgeois instrument and rests upon the exploitation of wage labour, thereby having a high bourgeois content from the start. The author has thus stumbled on a truth that few Trotskyists have ever even noticed, that there is not, and never could be, any such thing as a ‘healthy’ workers’ state, “a grotesque label, if ever there was one, given the reality”, notes Daum carefully (p.143), even when applied to that of Lenin and Trotsky. Thus, if instead of withering away this state power strengthens itself – and in the conditions of the Soviet Union following 1917 there was no question of any other development – its bourgeois content must increase, and it ceases by slow and imperceptible degrees to represent much of the interests of the working class.
Another highly successful part of this exercise is Daum’s destruction, down to the last brick, of the theory of ‘structural assimilation’ created by the International Secretariat to explain the establishment of the ‘peoples’ democracies’ in Eastern Europe after 1945 (pp.310-5). If the nationalisation of the majority of the economy is really the touchstone of what a workers’ state is, he points out, the Soviet Union itself did not become one until the end of 1918; and the idea that a bourgeois state can become a workers’ state by ‘structural assimilation’ really amounts to saying that “Socialist transformation can be achieved without overthrowing the bourgeois state” (p.313). “Such a theory echoes the revisionist method of Bernstein”, he rightly points out (p.312), describing it as “the hallmark of reformism” (p.313). But whilst successfully highlighting Mandel’s dilemma, we shall see that Daum abandons his own methodology when it comes to the Soviet Union, which he believes was a workers’ state until 1936-39, when it was replaced by a bourgeois state, created not as a result of the smashing of the state by armed conquest or internal counterrevolution.
It is precisely in his attempt to apply his own real insights to Eastern Europe that he halts halfway. He correctly draws our attention to that elementary proposition of Marxism, so long and so often forgotten by its would-be practitioners, that the working class revolution is qualitatively different from the revolutions of all other classes by its conscious character; “the creation of a workers’ state”, he points out, “is not just a matter of economic forms; it is the result of a social revolution that places state power in the hands of the working class. Since it inaugurates the period of transition it is in fact the Socialist revolution. And it must be the conscious achievement of the masses.” (p.311) Since he believes that in seizing state power from the Nazis and their puppets, the Stalinists carried out political, not social, revolutions (p.315), he argues that “the proletarian label for the Stalinist states amounts to a cynical rejection of the Marxist conclusion that a workers’ state can be established only through the workers’ conscious activity” (p.13). He is thus obliged to argue that the only feasible theory, that of Haston and Vern/Ryan, is impossible per se: “if the date of the Eastern European revolution is put at 1944-45, then the Stalinist forces became the agent of proletarian revolution at the very moment when they were crushing the movement of workers’ revolt“ (pp.322-3). But in stressing the conscious factor to the exclusion of everything else, he forgets his previous insight, that the workers’ state, being a bourgeois state, also has features in common with all other states, one of which is that it consists of armed men standing in defence of property. Social overturns can take place by armed conquest from abroad, and the possibility of this arose within the lifetime of Lenin in Poland, and its realisation actually took place in the case of Georgia. In the light of the development of Eastern Europe we can surely now affirm that if the Soviet army had indeed conquered Poland in 1919, without the involvement of the Polish working class, and, indeed, in contradiction with their wishes, we would have had a ‘Stalinist’ state in Poland nearly a decade before we got one in the Soviet Union, which actually happened in the case of Georgia, a couple or so years later. For it was Marx himself who explained a long time ago, with reference to the imperialism of the nineteenth century, that the victor in a war involving states of a different socio-economic character imposes its property forms upon the vanquished, that in effect a war between states of a different class nature partakes of the character of an international civil war.
We might add, incidentally, that those who believe that it requires individual, separate revolutions to form new states have certainly got a lot of explaining to do, as the spread of the bourgeois revolution in Europe after 1789 in the first instance took place on the bayonet points of Napoleon’s troops rather than by separate insurrections of the bourgeois class in each country. Daum thus signally fails to grasp what was really at issue in Trotsky’s analysis of the changes in the property forms of Eastern Poland in 1939 as set forth in In Defence of Marxism. “Trotsky seems torn between crediting a revolutionary overturn to the masses and denying the revolutionary character of the Stalinists’ acts”, he concludes (p.318). Yet he himself has already supplied the answer to this conundrum. If a workers’ state really is “a bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie”, and if the workers subject to wage labour within it are simultaneously a ruling and an oppressed class, then the operations of this counter-revolutionary workers’ state are bound to take on precisely this character. Daum contradicts his own theory by stating that “the Stalinist social overturn came only later” (p.313), when, in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, “the old bourgeoisies were overthrown” (p.310). He is evidently oblivious of the fact that it was Hitler, not Stalin, who destroyed the embryo capitalist classes in Eastern Europe, and that the complete annihilation of capitalist property forms in the region, by then dominated by German imperialism, came upon Hitler’s defeat. In fact, the truth is that Stalin tried to recreate a native capitalist class in these areas, an attempt he had to abandon when it was obvious that Marshall Aid could well succeed where he was failing, and recreate these classes as clients of American finance capital.
There is far more to this book, however, than can be restricted to these considerations. On the purely historical side Daum provides a devastating picture of the ideological degeneration of the Fourth International, that is, if you accept that there still was one, which this reviewer would not. He shows how the postwar theory of the Trotskyists did not even explain what was happening at the time, still less being able to predict anything, and certainly being utterly useless as a guide to any action of any sort. It began as a complete failure to understand the nature of the postwar world (pp.292ff), continued happily on its way in the ridiculous somersaulting over the nature of the Eastern European states in 1948 (p.311), and when it finally settled down – if it ever did – it left them with an outlook that would not allow them to identify which were workers’ states and which were not (p.313), when this crucial class transformation was supposed to have taken place (p.314), and even with the view that it was possible to have states that had no class characterisation at all (p.314). In terms of activity Daum rightly highlights the importance of the betrayal of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 (pp.325-6), whilst strangely neglecting the lack of reaction to the behaviour of the LSSP during the Great Hartal a year later (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 2 no.1, Spring 1989, pp.38-43). But whilst it may be true that Bolivia 1952 was the ‘Fourth of August’ of the Fourth International, to use Trotsky's phrase of Germany in 1933, Daum’s analysis leads him to look for the roots of this Stalinist-type degeneration after the end of the war and in the confusion over Eastern Europe. He is thus obliged to accept the myth of ‘Pabloite revisionism’, that it is a creation of the European leadership of the mid- and later 1940s. This is contrary to the clear evidence that adaptation to Stalinism originates with the SWP during the war (as Natalia Trotsky and Grandizo Munis pointed out), and indeed with James P. Cannon himself, in his support for the activity of the Red Army in Eastern Europe in 1944-45, and in the contention that it was still “Trotsky’s army” and not Stalin’s (cf. Max Shachtman, From the Bureaucratic Jungle, part 2, in The New International, Volume 11 no.2, March 1945, pp.48-9).
It is no coincidence that the SWP dropped transitional politics at exactly the same time, and Daum shows that, coming from the same American milieu with the lack of an autonomous working class political movement of any sort, he has no real grasp of them eithcr. “In Britain”, he notes solemnly, “instead of exposing a Labour Party that helped bury the British miners’ strike of 1984-85, the left dug itself ever more deeply into it” (p.22). He thus belongs to that school of idealist ‘Marxism’ that thinks that you can destroy the Labour Party by ‘exposing’ it, i.e. by mere name-calling from outside. Perhaps a bit more reading might come up with the information that it was Engels who urged the trade unions to set up such a party, and that it was Lenin and Trotsky who advised us to “dig more deeply” into it. The “leftward motion of the workers” (p.295), for example, that Daum seems to think is a necessary condition for it, was far from taking place in the British Labour Party when Trotsky advised entry in 1936, and indeed did not take place until 1944. In fact, he shows on more than one occasion that he does not understand the ‘workers’ government’ slogan of the Transitional Programme at all. According to him, when the Bolsheviks raised the slogan of ‘All power to the Soviets’, “the purpose of Lenin’s tactic was to place the Mensheviks in office so that their subservience to capitalism would be made visible to all” (p.316). But that is the whole point; the slogan means exactly what it says – power, not ‘office’, for part of the time the Bolsheviks were using that slogan the Mensheviks were already in ‘office’, in Kerensky’s government! If it were possible for a reformist party to break with the bourgeoisie and take power, the result would be a workers’ revolution, not a government that “could only have a fleeting existence”, which could either lead “to the workers’ revolution, or it is defeated” (p.316). The whole point of this slogan as a practical, non-sectarian, united front method of demonstrating the class character of the reformists, of really ‘exposing’ them, is to show to their followers that they do not want power for their party at all, but office in a bourgeois state.
There are other indications that Daum’s grasp of Marxism is not as sure as it could be. At one point he argues against Lenin’s concept that revolutionary consciousness had to be brought to the working class from outside, from the declassed bourgeois intelligentsia, in other words (pp.105ff). Apart from the argument about conditions determining consciousness, he has clearly forgotten from which class Marx, Engels, Trotsky, etc., really originated. A very strained argument (pp.274-6) tries to prove that the Soviet Union can still be imperialist, even if it does not export capital in the Leninist sense, giving as its clinching argument that “Czardom had little capital to export” (p.275). Now this really is playing with words, for however penetrated Czarist Russia was becoming by capital, and however ‘feudal’ some of its institutions appeared to be, its ‘imperial’ character was that of an Asiatic Empire, a state form that long predates capitalist society, and indeed every other form of class society as well. He also indulges in over generalisations, categorically denying what Engels treats as a possibility in Anti-Dühring when he states that “no bourgeoisie has gone so far as to abolish private property completely by entrusting its ownership function to the state” (pp.80-1), an assumption that may well need modification if we look at short periods in the history of Israel just after its foundation and of Chiang’s China as it tottered to its doom in 1945-49.
But it is a measure of the power of the author’s reasoning that it supplies the main refutation to the thesis defended by his own book. A major part of his argument against the theory of ‘structural assimilation’ is that by molecular change a state that was once a bourgeois state cannot become a workers’ state without a smashing and recreation of the state apparatus. Such a theory, he argues, leaves us with no guidelines for deciding when a state ceases to be a bourgeois state and becomes one ruled by the workers. But these same arguments are equally valid when applied to the reverse process – counter-revolution. Despite the claim that “this book’s political standpoint is Trotskyist” (p.7), this is demonstrably not the case. It is, in fact, a ‘state capitalist’ analysis of Russia that places the period of the erection of a bourgeois state in 1936-39. Yet the state had the same structure, and even the same personal dictator, before and after this period. This argumentation (pp.170ff) is quite the least convincing part of the book. All sorts of elaborate rationalisations are indulged in to prove the point, as regards both domestic and foreign policy. A quite extraordinary juridical significance is ascribed to the Stalin Constitution of 1936, in spite of the fact that both its author and reviser were shot within two years. In going over the work methods, the exploitation, the labour code, the purges and the terror, he is unable to surmount the problem that the state that implemented them was the same state before and after, which had developed by uninterrupted stages from 1917 onwards. He even tries to pretend that the outright class collaboration of the Popular Front was qualitatively different from previous betrayals, such as Pilsudski’s accession to power in Poland, Chiang’s smashing of the Second Revolution in China in 1927-28, or Hitler’s rise in Germany.
In fact, the same disarray exists amongst state capitalist analyses of the Soviet Union as Daum identifies among the Trotskyists with regard to Stalinism after 1945. When did it become a bourgeois state? Along the way he supplies a pretty effective demolition job on the views of Tony Cliff, that the crucial counter-revolution in class terms came about in the period of 1928-29, but in so doing supplies the ammunition for destroying his own dating of this alleged change. State capitalism as a concept turns out to be quite as unscientific as the ‘Pabloism’ he so roundly castigates, since unless it becomes part of the totality of what a ‘workers’ state’ really is, it comes into head-on collision with the class theory of the state. The truth is that the only state capitalist theories that can lay claim to any scientific basis at all are those of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and of some of the Mensheviks, who would place Russia’s bourgeois revolution in the setting up of this very state form in 1917.
But the basic thesis of this very fine book, that what we have since 1917 is a continued degeneration of a workers’ revolution in the direction of pure capitalist forms, becoming ever more alienated in structures (Pol Pot’s Cambodia!) and in methods (military bureaucratic conquest and peasant insurrection) cannot be faulted. Comrade Daum is of the opinion – and he argues his case with vigour and imagination – that the crucial change from quantity into quality took place in the Soviet Union in 1936-39. I would argue that we are on the point of witnessing it now, but that it will still require a break at the level of state power, in spite of the ever more warped and degenerated forms through which workers’ power is still expressed.
Al Richardson
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-The Embryo Of An Alternate Government-Learn The Lessons Of History-Lessons From The Utopian Socialists- Charles Fourier and The Phalanx Movement-The Phalanstery
Click on the headline to link to the archives of the Occupy Boston General Assembly minutes from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. The General Assembly is the core political institution of the Occupy movement. Some of the minutes will reflect the growing pains of that movement and its concepts of political organization. Note that I used the word embryo in the headline and I believe that gives a fair estimate of its status, and its possibilities.
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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, It’s Ours! 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 (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) 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 ourselves "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.
**********
In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries 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 lately 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 of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-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 of the "one percent" 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.
Previous historical models readily 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.
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 this Lessons Of History 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.
********
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!
***********
Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
The Phalanstery
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: The History Guide;
Translated: by Julia Franklin, and published as Selections from the Works of Fourier. Published in the Manuscrits de Fourier (1851).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The announcement does, I acknowledge, sound very improbable, of a method for combining three hundred families unequal in fortune, and rewarding each person – man. woman, child – according to the three properties, capital, labor, talent. More than one reader will credit himself with humor when he remarks: “Let the author try to associate but three families, to reconcile three households in the same dwelling to social union, to arrangements of purchases and expenses, to perfect harmony in passions, character, and authority; when he shall have succeeded in reconciling three mistresses of associated households, we shall believe that he can succeed with thirty and with three hundred.”
I have already replied to an argument which it is well to reproduce (for repetition will frequently be necessary here); I have observed that as economy can spring only from large combinations, God had to create a social theory applicable to large masses and not to three or four families.
An objection seemingly more reasonable, and which needs to be refuted more than once, is that of social discords. How conciliate the passions, the conflicting interests, the incompatible characters, in short, the innumerable disparities which engender so much discord?
It may easily have been surmised that I shall make use of a lever entirely unknown, and whose properties cannot be judged until I shall have explained them. The passional contrasted Series draws its nourishment solely from those disparities which bewilder civilized policy; it acts like the husbandman who from a mass of filth draws the germs of abundance; the refuse, the dirt, and impure matter which would serve only to defile and infect our dwellings, are for him the sources of wealth.
If social experiments have miscarried, it is because some fatality has impelled all speculators to work with bodies of poor people whom they subjected to a monastic-industrial discipline, chief obstacle to the working of the series. Here, as in everything else, it is ever SIMPLISM (simplisme) which misleads the civilized, obstinately sticking to experiments with combinations of the poor; they cannot elevate themselves to the conception of a trial with combinations of the rich. They are veritable Lemming rats (migrating rats of Lapland), preferring drowning in a pond to deviating from the route which they have decided upon.
It is necessary for a company of 1,500 to 1,600 persons to have a stretch of land comprising a good square league, say a surface of six million square toises (do not let us forget that a third of that would suffice for the simple mode).
The land should be provided with a fine stream of water; it should be intersected by hills, and adapted to varied cultivation; it should be contiguous to a forest, and not far removed from a large city, but sufficiently so to escape intruders.
The experimental Phalanx standing alone, and without the support of neighboring phalanxes, will, in consequence of this isolation, have so many gaps in attraction, and so many passional calms to dread in its workings, that it will be necessary to provide it with the aid of a good location fitted for a variety of functions. A flat country such as Antwerp, Leipzig, Orleans, would be totally unsuitable, and would cause many Series to fail, owing to the uniformity of the land surface. It will, therefore, be necessary to select a diversified region, like the surroundings of Lausanne, or, at the very least, a fine valley provided with a stream of water and a forest, like the valley of Brussels or of Halle. A fine location near Paris would be the stretch of country lying between Poissy and Confleurs, Poissy and Meulan.
A company will be collected consisting of from 1,500 to 1,600 persons of graduated degrees of fortune, age, character, of theoretical and practical knowledge; care will be taken to secure the greatest amount of variety possible, for the greater the number of variations either in the passions or the faculties of the members, the easier will it be to make them harmonize in a short space of time.
In this district devoted to experiment, there ought to be combined every species of practicable cultivation, including that in conservatories and hot-houses; in addition, there ought to be at least three accessory factories, to be used in winter and on rainy days; furthermore, various practical branches of science and the arts, independent of the schools.
Above all, it will be necessary to fix the valuation of the capital invested in shares; lands, materials, flocks, implements, etc. This point ought, it seems, to be among the first to receive attention; I think it best to dismiss it here. I shall limit myself to remarking that all these investments in transferable shares and stock-coupons will be represented.
A great difficulty to be overcome in the experimental Phalanx will be the formation of the ties of high mechanism or collective bonds of the Series, before the close of the first season. It will be necessary to accomplish the passional union of the mass of the members; to lead them to collective and individual devotion to the maintenance of the Phalanx, and, especially, to perfect harmony regarding the division of the profits, according to the three factors, Capital, Labor, Talent.
This difficulty will be greater in northern than in southern countries, owing to the difference between devoting eight months and five months to agricultural labor.
An experimental Phalanx, being obliged to start out with agricultural labor, will not be in full operation until the month of May (in a climate of 50 degrees, say in the region around London or Paris); and, since it will be necessary to form the bonds of general union, the harmonious ties of the Series, be fore the suspension of field labor, before the month of October, there will be barely five months of full practice in a region of 50 degrees: the work will have to be accomplished in that short space.
The trial would, therefore, be much more conveniently made in a temperate legion, like Florence, Naples, Valencia, Lisbon, where they would have eight to nine months of full cultivation and a far better opportunity to consolidate the bonds of union, since there would be but two or three months of passional calm remaining to tide over till the advent of the second spring, a time when the Phalanx, resuming agricultural labor, would form its ties and cabals anew with much greater zeal, imbuing them with a degree of intensity far above that of the first year; it would thenceforth be in a state of complete consolidation, and strong enough to weather the passional calm of the second winter.
We shall see in the chapter on hiatuses of attraction, that the first Phalanx will, in consequence of its social isolation and other impediments inherent to the experimental canton, have twelve special obstacles to overcome, obstacles which the Phalanxes subsequently founded would not have to contend with. That is why it is so important that the experimental canton should have the assistance coming from field-work prolonged eight or nine months, like that in Naples and Lisbon.
Let us proceed with the details of composition.
At least seven-eighths of the members ought to be cultivators and manufacturers; the remainder will consist of capitalists, scholars, and artists.
The Phalanx would be badly graded and difficult to balance, if among its capitalists there were several having 100,000 francs, several 50,000 francs, without intermediate fortunes. In such a case it would be necessary to seek to procure intermediate fortunes of 60,000, 70,000, 80,000, 90,000 francs. The Phalanx best graduated in every respect raises social harmony and profits to the highest degree.
One is tempted to believe that our sybarites would not wish to be associated with Grosjean and Margot: they are so even now (as I believe I have already pointed out). Is not the rich man obliged to discuss his affairs with twenty peasants who occupy his farms, and who are all agreed in taking illegal advantage of him? He is, therefore, the peasant’s associate, obliged to make inquiries about the good and the bad farmers, their character, morals, solvency, and industry; he does associate in a very direct and a very tiresome way with Grosjean and Margot. In Harmony, he will be their indirect associate, being relieved of accounts regarding the management, which will be regulated by the regents, proctors, and special officers, without its being necessary for the capitalist to intervene or to run any risk of fraud. He will, therefore, be freed from the disagreeable features of his present association with the peasantry; he will form a new one, where he will not furnish them anything, and where they will only be his obliging and devoted friends, in accordance with the details given regarding the management of the Series and of reunions. If he takes the lead at festivals, it is because he has agreed to accept the rank of captain. If he gives them a feast, it is because he takes pleasure in acknowledging their continual kind attentions.
Thus the argument urged about the repugnance to association between Mondor and Grosjean, already associated in fact, is only, like all the others, a quibble devoid of sense.
The edifice occupied by a Phalanx does not in any way resemble our constructions, whether of the city or country; and none of our buildings could be used to establish a large Harmony of 1,600 persons – not even a seat palace like Versailles, nor a great monastery like the Escurial. If, for the purposes of experiment, only an inconsiderable Harmony of 200 or 300 members, or a hongrée of 400 members is organized, a monastery or a palace (Meudon) could be used for it.
The lodgings, plantations, and stables of a Society conducted on the plan of Series of groups, must differ vastly from our villages and country towns, which are intended for families having no social connection, and which act in a perverse manner; in place of that class of little houses which rival each other in filth and ungainliness in our little towns, a Phalanx constructs an edifice for itself which is as regular as the ground permits: here is a sketch of distribution for a location favorable to development.
The central part of the Palace or Phalanstery ought to be appropriated to peaceful uses, and contain the dining-halls, halls for finance, libraries, study, etc. In this central portion are located the place of worship, the tour d’ordre, the telegraph, the post-office boxes, the chimes for ceremonials, the observatory, the winter court adorned with resinous plants, and situated in the rear of the parade-court.
One of the wings ought to combine all the noisy workshops, such as the carpenter-shop, the forge, all hammer-work; it ought to contain also all the industrial gatherings of children, who are generally very noisy in industry and even in music. This combination will obviate a great annoyance of our civilized cities, where we find some man working with a hammer in every street, some dealer in iron or tyro on the clarionet, who shatter the tympanum of fifty families in the vicinity.
The other wing ought to contain the caravansary with its ballrooms and its halls appropriated to intercourse with outsiders, so that these may not encumber the central portion of the palace and embarrass the domestic relations of the Phalanx.
****
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!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
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.
*******
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 (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) 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 ourselves "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.
**********
In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries 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 lately 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 of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-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 of the "one percent" 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.
Previous historical models readily 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.
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 this Lessons Of History 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.
********
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!
***********
Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
The Phalanstery
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: The History Guide;
Translated: by Julia Franklin, and published as Selections from the Works of Fourier. Published in the Manuscrits de Fourier (1851).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The announcement does, I acknowledge, sound very improbable, of a method for combining three hundred families unequal in fortune, and rewarding each person – man. woman, child – according to the three properties, capital, labor, talent. More than one reader will credit himself with humor when he remarks: “Let the author try to associate but three families, to reconcile three households in the same dwelling to social union, to arrangements of purchases and expenses, to perfect harmony in passions, character, and authority; when he shall have succeeded in reconciling three mistresses of associated households, we shall believe that he can succeed with thirty and with three hundred.”
I have already replied to an argument which it is well to reproduce (for repetition will frequently be necessary here); I have observed that as economy can spring only from large combinations, God had to create a social theory applicable to large masses and not to three or four families.
An objection seemingly more reasonable, and which needs to be refuted more than once, is that of social discords. How conciliate the passions, the conflicting interests, the incompatible characters, in short, the innumerable disparities which engender so much discord?
It may easily have been surmised that I shall make use of a lever entirely unknown, and whose properties cannot be judged until I shall have explained them. The passional contrasted Series draws its nourishment solely from those disparities which bewilder civilized policy; it acts like the husbandman who from a mass of filth draws the germs of abundance; the refuse, the dirt, and impure matter which would serve only to defile and infect our dwellings, are for him the sources of wealth.
If social experiments have miscarried, it is because some fatality has impelled all speculators to work with bodies of poor people whom they subjected to a monastic-industrial discipline, chief obstacle to the working of the series. Here, as in everything else, it is ever SIMPLISM (simplisme) which misleads the civilized, obstinately sticking to experiments with combinations of the poor; they cannot elevate themselves to the conception of a trial with combinations of the rich. They are veritable Lemming rats (migrating rats of Lapland), preferring drowning in a pond to deviating from the route which they have decided upon.
It is necessary for a company of 1,500 to 1,600 persons to have a stretch of land comprising a good square league, say a surface of six million square toises (do not let us forget that a third of that would suffice for the simple mode).
The land should be provided with a fine stream of water; it should be intersected by hills, and adapted to varied cultivation; it should be contiguous to a forest, and not far removed from a large city, but sufficiently so to escape intruders.
The experimental Phalanx standing alone, and without the support of neighboring phalanxes, will, in consequence of this isolation, have so many gaps in attraction, and so many passional calms to dread in its workings, that it will be necessary to provide it with the aid of a good location fitted for a variety of functions. A flat country such as Antwerp, Leipzig, Orleans, would be totally unsuitable, and would cause many Series to fail, owing to the uniformity of the land surface. It will, therefore, be necessary to select a diversified region, like the surroundings of Lausanne, or, at the very least, a fine valley provided with a stream of water and a forest, like the valley of Brussels or of Halle. A fine location near Paris would be the stretch of country lying between Poissy and Confleurs, Poissy and Meulan.
A company will be collected consisting of from 1,500 to 1,600 persons of graduated degrees of fortune, age, character, of theoretical and practical knowledge; care will be taken to secure the greatest amount of variety possible, for the greater the number of variations either in the passions or the faculties of the members, the easier will it be to make them harmonize in a short space of time.
In this district devoted to experiment, there ought to be combined every species of practicable cultivation, including that in conservatories and hot-houses; in addition, there ought to be at least three accessory factories, to be used in winter and on rainy days; furthermore, various practical branches of science and the arts, independent of the schools.
Above all, it will be necessary to fix the valuation of the capital invested in shares; lands, materials, flocks, implements, etc. This point ought, it seems, to be among the first to receive attention; I think it best to dismiss it here. I shall limit myself to remarking that all these investments in transferable shares and stock-coupons will be represented.
A great difficulty to be overcome in the experimental Phalanx will be the formation of the ties of high mechanism or collective bonds of the Series, before the close of the first season. It will be necessary to accomplish the passional union of the mass of the members; to lead them to collective and individual devotion to the maintenance of the Phalanx, and, especially, to perfect harmony regarding the division of the profits, according to the three factors, Capital, Labor, Talent.
This difficulty will be greater in northern than in southern countries, owing to the difference between devoting eight months and five months to agricultural labor.
An experimental Phalanx, being obliged to start out with agricultural labor, will not be in full operation until the month of May (in a climate of 50 degrees, say in the region around London or Paris); and, since it will be necessary to form the bonds of general union, the harmonious ties of the Series, be fore the suspension of field labor, before the month of October, there will be barely five months of full practice in a region of 50 degrees: the work will have to be accomplished in that short space.
The trial would, therefore, be much more conveniently made in a temperate legion, like Florence, Naples, Valencia, Lisbon, where they would have eight to nine months of full cultivation and a far better opportunity to consolidate the bonds of union, since there would be but two or three months of passional calm remaining to tide over till the advent of the second spring, a time when the Phalanx, resuming agricultural labor, would form its ties and cabals anew with much greater zeal, imbuing them with a degree of intensity far above that of the first year; it would thenceforth be in a state of complete consolidation, and strong enough to weather the passional calm of the second winter.
We shall see in the chapter on hiatuses of attraction, that the first Phalanx will, in consequence of its social isolation and other impediments inherent to the experimental canton, have twelve special obstacles to overcome, obstacles which the Phalanxes subsequently founded would not have to contend with. That is why it is so important that the experimental canton should have the assistance coming from field-work prolonged eight or nine months, like that in Naples and Lisbon.
Let us proceed with the details of composition.
At least seven-eighths of the members ought to be cultivators and manufacturers; the remainder will consist of capitalists, scholars, and artists.
The Phalanx would be badly graded and difficult to balance, if among its capitalists there were several having 100,000 francs, several 50,000 francs, without intermediate fortunes. In such a case it would be necessary to seek to procure intermediate fortunes of 60,000, 70,000, 80,000, 90,000 francs. The Phalanx best graduated in every respect raises social harmony and profits to the highest degree.
One is tempted to believe that our sybarites would not wish to be associated with Grosjean and Margot: they are so even now (as I believe I have already pointed out). Is not the rich man obliged to discuss his affairs with twenty peasants who occupy his farms, and who are all agreed in taking illegal advantage of him? He is, therefore, the peasant’s associate, obliged to make inquiries about the good and the bad farmers, their character, morals, solvency, and industry; he does associate in a very direct and a very tiresome way with Grosjean and Margot. In Harmony, he will be their indirect associate, being relieved of accounts regarding the management, which will be regulated by the regents, proctors, and special officers, without its being necessary for the capitalist to intervene or to run any risk of fraud. He will, therefore, be freed from the disagreeable features of his present association with the peasantry; he will form a new one, where he will not furnish them anything, and where they will only be his obliging and devoted friends, in accordance with the details given regarding the management of the Series and of reunions. If he takes the lead at festivals, it is because he has agreed to accept the rank of captain. If he gives them a feast, it is because he takes pleasure in acknowledging their continual kind attentions.
Thus the argument urged about the repugnance to association between Mondor and Grosjean, already associated in fact, is only, like all the others, a quibble devoid of sense.
The edifice occupied by a Phalanx does not in any way resemble our constructions, whether of the city or country; and none of our buildings could be used to establish a large Harmony of 1,600 persons – not even a seat palace like Versailles, nor a great monastery like the Escurial. If, for the purposes of experiment, only an inconsiderable Harmony of 200 or 300 members, or a hongrée of 400 members is organized, a monastery or a palace (Meudon) could be used for it.
The lodgings, plantations, and stables of a Society conducted on the plan of Series of groups, must differ vastly from our villages and country towns, which are intended for families having no social connection, and which act in a perverse manner; in place of that class of little houses which rival each other in filth and ungainliness in our little towns, a Phalanx constructs an edifice for itself which is as regular as the ground permits: here is a sketch of distribution for a location favorable to development.
The central part of the Palace or Phalanstery ought to be appropriated to peaceful uses, and contain the dining-halls, halls for finance, libraries, study, etc. In this central portion are located the place of worship, the tour d’ordre, the telegraph, the post-office boxes, the chimes for ceremonials, the observatory, the winter court adorned with resinous plants, and situated in the rear of the parade-court.
One of the wings ought to combine all the noisy workshops, such as the carpenter-shop, the forge, all hammer-work; it ought to contain also all the industrial gatherings of children, who are generally very noisy in industry and even in music. This combination will obviate a great annoyance of our civilized cities, where we find some man working with a hammer in every street, some dealer in iron or tyro on the clarionet, who shatter the tympanum of fifty families in the vicinity.
The other wing ought to contain the caravansary with its ballrooms and its halls appropriated to intercourse with outsiders, so that these may not encumber the central portion of the palace and embarrass the domestic relations of the Phalanx.
Monday, April 09, 2012
All Out May Day 2012: A Day Without the 99% -General Strike Occupy Boston Working Group
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other issues such as political transparency and horizontal democracy that have become associated with the Occupy movement are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a time for the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America to join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy.
Some political activists here in Boston, mainly connected with Occupy Boston (OB), decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). GSOB has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan its own May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 8, 2012.
Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and some did close down in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its lack of a recent militant labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. GSOB also came to a realization that successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 would not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Our focus will be actions and activities that respond and reflect the Boston political situation as we attempt to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive immigration actions in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national actions this year. One of the first steps GSOB took as a working group was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. After making such efforts GSOB has joined forces with BMDC in order to coordinate the over-all May Day actions.
Taking its cue from the developing Occupy May Day movement, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of Occupy Wall Street, GSOB has centered its slogans on the theme of “Occupy May First - A Day Without the 99%.” GSOB wishes to highlight the fact that in capitalist America labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Also to highlight the increasing economic gap between rich and poor, the increasing political voicelessness of the 99%, and the social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions faced under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated by Occupy Boston last fall.
On May Day GSOB is calling on the 99% to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement that general slogan. We encourage working people to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the 99% in the streets.
For students at all levels GSOB is calling for a walk-out of classes. Further we call on college students to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward left-wing think tank should plan its own strike actions and GSOB suggests at some point in the day that all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
In the early hours on May 1st members of the 99% are urged to converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a city permit-approved May Day rally at Boston City Hall Plaza jointly sponsored by BMDC and GSOB. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
The GSOB is urging the following slogans for May 1st. - No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the 1% that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without the 99% really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. GSOB says -All Out For May Day 2012!
GSOB meets every Thursday at Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison Avenue, Boston (Chinatown) from 5:15-6:45 PM. April 26th will be an all-inclusive final planning meeting sponsored by BMDC-GSOB. Check us out on Facebook and the Facebook event page- http://www.facebook.com/#!/Occupy.May1.Boston
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a time for the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America to join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy.
Some political activists here in Boston, mainly connected with Occupy Boston (OB), decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). GSOB has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan its own May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 8, 2012.
Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and some did close down in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its lack of a recent militant labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. GSOB also came to a realization that successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 would not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Our focus will be actions and activities that respond and reflect the Boston political situation as we attempt to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive immigration actions in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national actions this year. One of the first steps GSOB took as a working group was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. After making such efforts GSOB has joined forces with BMDC in order to coordinate the over-all May Day actions.
Taking its cue from the developing Occupy May Day movement, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of Occupy Wall Street, GSOB has centered its slogans on the theme of “Occupy May First - A Day Without the 99%.” GSOB wishes to highlight the fact that in capitalist America labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Also to highlight the increasing economic gap between rich and poor, the increasing political voicelessness of the 99%, and the social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions faced under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated by Occupy Boston last fall.
On May Day GSOB is calling on the 99% to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement that general slogan. We encourage working people to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the 99% in the streets.
For students at all levels GSOB is calling for a walk-out of classes. Further we call on college students to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward left-wing think tank should plan its own strike actions and GSOB suggests at some point in the day that all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
In the early hours on May 1st members of the 99% are urged to converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a city permit-approved May Day rally at Boston City Hall Plaza jointly sponsored by BMDC and GSOB. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
The GSOB is urging the following slogans for May 1st. - No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the 1% that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without the 99% really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. GSOB says -All Out For May Day 2012!
GSOB meets every Thursday at Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison Avenue, Boston (Chinatown) from 5:15-6:45 PM. April 26th will be an all-inclusive final planning meeting sponsored by BMDC-GSOB. Check us out on Facebook and the Facebook event page- http://www.facebook.com/#!/Occupy.May1.Boston
From The United National Anti-War Coalition-All Out On May Day!
Click on the headline to link to The United National Anti-War Coalition-All Out On May Day!
Markin comment:
This message is from 2011 but applies this year as well-maybe more so.
Markin comment:
This message is from 2011 but applies this year as well-maybe more so.
Out In The Be-Bop Night- The Baby-Boomer Birth Of The Search For The Blue-Pink American Western Night- “American Graffiti”-Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of a segment of American Graffiti, featuring the lead-up to the hot rod duel.
DVD Review
American Graffiti, starring Richard Dreyfus, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford, Paul LeMat, directed by George Lucas, 1973
Recently in this space I have been deep in remembrances of the influences, great and small, of the 1950s “beats” on my own sorry teen-aged alienation and teen-aged angst (sometimes they were separate anguishes, sometimes tied together like inseparable twins, mostly the latter) and the struggle to find my place in the sun, to write in bright lights my own beat plainsong. Of course, that influence was blown over me second-hand as I was just a little too young, or too wide-world unconscious, to be there at the creation, on those first roads west, those first fitfully car-driven, gas-fuelled, thumb hanging-out, sore-footed, free exploration west, in body and mind. That first great rush of the adrenal in trying to discover, eternally discover as it has turned out, the search for the meaning of the great blue-pink American West night. Ah, pioneer-boys, thanks.
I just got a whiff, a passing whiff of that electric-charged air, the sweet “be-bop”, bop-bop, real gone daddy, cooled-out, pipe-filled with whatever, jazz-sexed, high white note blown, howling in the wind plainsong afterglow. Moreover, somewhat tarnished, a little sullen and withdrawn, and media-used up by my time. More than one faux black chino-wearing, black beret’d, stringy-bearded, nightshade sun-glassed, pseudo-poetic-pounding, television-derived fakir crossed my path in Harvard Square in those high stakes early 1960s high school days. And a few real ones, as well. (A couple, whom I still pass occasionally, giving a quick nod to, have never given up the ghost and still haunt the old square looking for the long-gone, storied Hayes-Bickford, a place where the serious and the fakirs gathered in the late night before dawn hour to pour out their souls, via mouth or on paper). More to the point, I came too late to be able to settle comfortably into that anti-political world that the “beats” thrived in. Great political and social events were unfolding and I wanted in, feverishly wanted in, with both hands.
You know some of the beat leaders, the real ones, don’t you? Remembered, seemingly profusely remembered now, by every passing acquaintance with some specimen to present. Now merely photo-plastered, book wrote, college english department deconstruction’d , academic journal-debated, but then in full glory plaid shirt, white shirt, tee shirt, dungarees, chinos, sturdy foot-sore cosmic traveler shoes, visuals of heaven’s own angel bums, if there was a heaven and if there were angels and if that locale needed bums.
Jack, million hungry word man-child sanctified, Lowell mills-etched and trapped and mother-fed, Jack Kerouac. Allen, om-om-om, bop, bop, mantra-man, mad Paterson-trapped, modern plainsong-poet-in-chief, Allen Ginsberg. William, sweet opium dream (or, maybe, not so sweet when the supply ran out), needle-driven, sardonic, ironic, chronic, Tangiers-trapped, Harvard man (finally, a useful one, oops, sorry), Williams S. Burroughs. Neal, wild word, wild gesture, out of ashcan all-America dream man, tire-kicking, oil-checking, gas-filling, zen master wheelman gluing the enterprise together, Neal Cassady. And a whirling crowd of others, including mad, street-wise, saint-gunsel, Gregory Corso. I am a little fuzzy these days on the genesis of my relationship to this crowd (although a reading of Ginsberg’s Howl was probably first in those frantic, high school, Harvard Square, poetry-pounding, guitar-strummed, existential word space, coffee, no sugar, I’ll have a refill, please, fugitive dream’d, coffeehouse-anchored days). This I know. I qualified, in triplicate, teen angst, teen alienation, teen luddite as a card-carrying member in those days.
That brings us to the film under review, American Graffiti, and its relationship to the birth of the search for the blue-pink great American West night promised to be discussed in the headline. Well, let me run through the plot line for those who are not familiar with idea behind the film, or are too young to have a clue as to such goings-on but might want to know what the old fogies, their parents or (ouch) grandparents were up to (or thought they were up to) back in the days, or are the peers of those 1960s baby-boomers enshrined in the film, but have forgotten a thing or two since they watched the thing in 1973 (another ouch).
The opening scene sets the whole film up. A very spiffy, well-dressed, well-scrubbed, well-mannered (mostly), middle class crew of 1962-era Southern California suburban valley kids with plenty of disposable income at hand, are gathering for one last tribal meeting before they go their separate ways in the great adult grind-it-out, eyes-straight-forward, shoulder-to-the-wheel, little boxes world at their main club house, Mel’s fast food drive-in (already I have lost the younger set on that last point, on the non-mall food court, drive-in thing, right?). How did they get to said gathering spot, you might ask? Come on now, this is wide open-spaced California suburban valley how else would they get there other that in their own personal “teen mobiles.” Jesus, do I have to tell you everything.
They come in one and twos, mainly, in some of the best-looking “boss” cars (excuse my reversion to an old-time term for excellence, automobile division) that you will see these days outside of an automobile museum. And besides that, many of them, the cars that is, are “souped-up” (look that one up yourself), especially valley hot-rod-king of the hill, John (played by Paul LeMat), and his yellow (mustard yellow, wow, can you believe that?) little deuce coupe (ditto on the look up). Here is the point though, the main point even in this pre-1960s rebellion period, none of the cars look anything like any parent would drive, or could drive (except the few dweeby cars borrowed for the evening from some plaint, or beaten-down, beaten down by teen argument, parent). Yes indeed, this is a gathering of the California branch of “youth nation” in all their tribal finery.
As is to be expected of a teen-centered (amazingly teen-centered, adults get merely cameo appearances in this one, and that seems about right) drama the plot line thins out considerably after the flash at Mel’s. Mainly, it is about a single night’s search for the 1962 version of the California blue-pink night (more on this below). And what drives that search? Cruising, natch. Why spend the time and expense involved in a “boss” car (you know that word now, right?) if you don’t create a stir up and down the main drag boulevard looking for…. , you can easily fill in that blank yourself. The rest of the plot centers on such eternal questions as the young leaving home and hearth to face the great wide world (here to be or not to be a college freshman by stars Ron Howard, as Steve, and Richard Dreyfus, as Curt), the usual boy looking for girl thing (including by oldster hot-rod king, Johnny) that I have endlessly reported on elsewhere in this space and that is not worthy of further comment in a teen film. That IS a teen film. What else could such a film be about? Teen break-ups (Howard and Cindy Williams, as Laurie), cruising, stopping at Mel’s for some car-hopped fast food, cruising, a little hot- rod duel ( between Johnny and, ah, one Harrison Ford) on those open California highways (what else are they for?), and then daylight and the rude old work-a-day world intrudes, even on sanctified teen life.
This is one time though that I do not do justice to a film with a summary because this thing is well-directed, well-produced, and well-acted by a crew of then very young unknowns (mostly) that would go on to all kinds of other cinematic successes (including hot-rod runner-up, ah, Ford). The sense of déjà vu for this Eastern U.S.-born baby-boomer, including a great high school dance segment and a soundtrack that reads out of every classic Oldies But Goodies compilation that I have ever reviewed, was palpable, without being maudlin. Kudos
So what connection can be drawn, one might rightly ask in a review of American Graffiti, a film that depicts a snapshot of a then respectable early 1960s coming-of-age teen-driven culture and the search for now respectably beatified “beat” culture great blue-pink American West night? One with, by then, a respectable post-birth of rock and roll (cleaned up of the “bad boys” like Jerry Lee Lewis) soundtrack. That also pays homage to a then very respectable post-Great Depression Okie-Akie invasion middle class-driven suburban valley life-style, and its respectable (mostly) California teen “boss” car culture. And highlights a then respectable superficial teen angst (“Do you like my finger nails painted in crimson red or rose red?”, “Do you want Pepsi or Coke with your hamburger, hold the onions?”, or something along those lines) A film which, moreover, has not the slightest reference to, nor can in any way be taken to have been produced under the under the sign of, the “beats.” Hell, not even a Maynard G. Krebs (from the old time media image of beatniks television show, Dobey Gillis) beatnik caricature in the lot. Nada.
The closest that any character comes is my boy John, “greaser”, deuce coupe, hot rod-king-of- the-hill, and working class poet (limited lyric car poet, okay)/ existential philosopher. And he doesn’t count because he has been around since Hector was a pup, is seen as an eternal “townie” by his middle class brethren, and is a throwback to James Dean and Marlon Brando 1950s California cool. And those guys (I mean the characters they played in Rebel Without A Cause and The Wild One not them as personalities, they were cool, no question) weren’t beat, no way. Beside John’s angst, important but kind of universal as it is, for some dewy-eyed female teeny-bopper to sit next to him in that old jalopy as he cruises those great California valley night highways is not the stuff of tragedy. Not in my book anyway, and I also had more than my share of that kind of teen angst.
No, what this film connects to, and connects to visually in the first instance, is that great big old search for that pink-blue American Western night that the “beats”, at least what I think the beats were searching for when they were doing their breakout from the post- World War II American crank-out death machine night. The shift from the Eastern American dark night westward (mainly, although some of beats were already vanguard- hovering around San Francisco waiting for the boys to come off the roads from the east and establish what was what) serves as a metaphor for much of what they were up to, if only to breakout, a little, from the nine-to-five, waiting for the bomb (atomic bomb) to drop world. That visual sense is most dramatically highlighted in the very first opening shots of this film where the pink-blue sky forms the backdrop to the activity starting up at California teen-hang-out (and elsewhere as well, even stuffy old Boston), fast food drive-in, Mel’s drive-in (A&W, Adventure Car-Hop, Dairy Queen, fill in your own named spot), central committee headquarters for valley California teen night. .
Wait, let me detail this a little more so there is no mistake. The film opens with the first few anxious California “boss” cars (you remember what that word means, right?), almost tear-provoking in this reviewer, because I rode in teen cars just like those, rolling into neon-sign lighted Mel’s(lights just turned on against the kitchen-backdrop dark night) just as the sun is going down. There is a big old sun-devouring red devil of a cloud flaming up in the background. That is NOT the part of the pink-blue night I am talking about. Below, just below, nearer the horizon is the one I am talking about, the symbol of the search, and the stuff of dreams, the great American blue-pink dream escape.
I can hear great yawns and see rolled eyes piercing through cyberspace as you say so what is the big deal about some foolish ephemeral passing cloud, blue-pink, pink-blue, or hell, blue-blue. Philistines! Go back now to Mel’s, or wherever the blue-pink sky announces the nights doings, the night’s promises or disappointments. Those promises or those disappointments, great or small, went to make up the birth of the search for the great American Western night, the night of our own circumscribed teen, kiddish break-outs, great or small.
Make no mistake it was not the morning, the morning of school or toil, paid or unpaid. It was not the lazy afternoon, the time of study or of the self-same toil, paid or unpaid (the unpaid kind thanked for or not, or to quote the universal parent god of the time done because “we keep a roof over your head”). It was the night, no the approach, the blue-pink approach of night that drove our maddened dreams, hopefully signaling good omens for the night’s work. The day was mere preclude to that tiny feverishly sought breakout (now a small thing seen, but not then). The telephoned arrangements, the groomed preparations, the gathering of the odd dollar here or there, in order to first cruise that teen empty highway and then on second pass the filling teen night.
Now do you see how the “beats”, those unnamed, unnamable, sub-consciously-embedded beats drove our bust-out dreams for travel, for adventure, for wine (later, dope), for women (or men) and for song, for shaking off the dust of the old town, great or small, as long as it moving elsewhere, and on a thumb pulled-out, hard-driven, shoe leather-beaten shod foot if need be.
American Graffiti is a snapshot of just exactly that minute, just that historic minute before the great shake-out of the 1960s for the baby-boomer generation, after that minute some of us went left politically and became social activists. We made just about every political, social, and cultural mistake along the way and lost, no, were defeated, no again, were mauled, in the end in our dreams of “seeking that newer world.” (And have spent the past forty or so years having to fight a rear-guard against the straightjacket, death machine-loving yahoos and their consorts). Ya, but hear me out. The search for the blue-pink Great American Western night was not one of those mistakes.
DVD Review
American Graffiti, starring Richard Dreyfus, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford, Paul LeMat, directed by George Lucas, 1973
Recently in this space I have been deep in remembrances of the influences, great and small, of the 1950s “beats” on my own sorry teen-aged alienation and teen-aged angst (sometimes they were separate anguishes, sometimes tied together like inseparable twins, mostly the latter) and the struggle to find my place in the sun, to write in bright lights my own beat plainsong. Of course, that influence was blown over me second-hand as I was just a little too young, or too wide-world unconscious, to be there at the creation, on those first roads west, those first fitfully car-driven, gas-fuelled, thumb hanging-out, sore-footed, free exploration west, in body and mind. That first great rush of the adrenal in trying to discover, eternally discover as it has turned out, the search for the meaning of the great blue-pink American West night. Ah, pioneer-boys, thanks.
I just got a whiff, a passing whiff of that electric-charged air, the sweet “be-bop”, bop-bop, real gone daddy, cooled-out, pipe-filled with whatever, jazz-sexed, high white note blown, howling in the wind plainsong afterglow. Moreover, somewhat tarnished, a little sullen and withdrawn, and media-used up by my time. More than one faux black chino-wearing, black beret’d, stringy-bearded, nightshade sun-glassed, pseudo-poetic-pounding, television-derived fakir crossed my path in Harvard Square in those high stakes early 1960s high school days. And a few real ones, as well. (A couple, whom I still pass occasionally, giving a quick nod to, have never given up the ghost and still haunt the old square looking for the long-gone, storied Hayes-Bickford, a place where the serious and the fakirs gathered in the late night before dawn hour to pour out their souls, via mouth or on paper). More to the point, I came too late to be able to settle comfortably into that anti-political world that the “beats” thrived in. Great political and social events were unfolding and I wanted in, feverishly wanted in, with both hands.
You know some of the beat leaders, the real ones, don’t you? Remembered, seemingly profusely remembered now, by every passing acquaintance with some specimen to present. Now merely photo-plastered, book wrote, college english department deconstruction’d , academic journal-debated, but then in full glory plaid shirt, white shirt, tee shirt, dungarees, chinos, sturdy foot-sore cosmic traveler shoes, visuals of heaven’s own angel bums, if there was a heaven and if there were angels and if that locale needed bums.
Jack, million hungry word man-child sanctified, Lowell mills-etched and trapped and mother-fed, Jack Kerouac. Allen, om-om-om, bop, bop, mantra-man, mad Paterson-trapped, modern plainsong-poet-in-chief, Allen Ginsberg. William, sweet opium dream (or, maybe, not so sweet when the supply ran out), needle-driven, sardonic, ironic, chronic, Tangiers-trapped, Harvard man (finally, a useful one, oops, sorry), Williams S. Burroughs. Neal, wild word, wild gesture, out of ashcan all-America dream man, tire-kicking, oil-checking, gas-filling, zen master wheelman gluing the enterprise together, Neal Cassady. And a whirling crowd of others, including mad, street-wise, saint-gunsel, Gregory Corso. I am a little fuzzy these days on the genesis of my relationship to this crowd (although a reading of Ginsberg’s Howl was probably first in those frantic, high school, Harvard Square, poetry-pounding, guitar-strummed, existential word space, coffee, no sugar, I’ll have a refill, please, fugitive dream’d, coffeehouse-anchored days). This I know. I qualified, in triplicate, teen angst, teen alienation, teen luddite as a card-carrying member in those days.
That brings us to the film under review, American Graffiti, and its relationship to the birth of the search for the blue-pink great American West night promised to be discussed in the headline. Well, let me run through the plot line for those who are not familiar with idea behind the film, or are too young to have a clue as to such goings-on but might want to know what the old fogies, their parents or (ouch) grandparents were up to (or thought they were up to) back in the days, or are the peers of those 1960s baby-boomers enshrined in the film, but have forgotten a thing or two since they watched the thing in 1973 (another ouch).
The opening scene sets the whole film up. A very spiffy, well-dressed, well-scrubbed, well-mannered (mostly), middle class crew of 1962-era Southern California suburban valley kids with plenty of disposable income at hand, are gathering for one last tribal meeting before they go their separate ways in the great adult grind-it-out, eyes-straight-forward, shoulder-to-the-wheel, little boxes world at their main club house, Mel’s fast food drive-in (already I have lost the younger set on that last point, on the non-mall food court, drive-in thing, right?). How did they get to said gathering spot, you might ask? Come on now, this is wide open-spaced California suburban valley how else would they get there other that in their own personal “teen mobiles.” Jesus, do I have to tell you everything.
They come in one and twos, mainly, in some of the best-looking “boss” cars (excuse my reversion to an old-time term for excellence, automobile division) that you will see these days outside of an automobile museum. And besides that, many of them, the cars that is, are “souped-up” (look that one up yourself), especially valley hot-rod-king of the hill, John (played by Paul LeMat), and his yellow (mustard yellow, wow, can you believe that?) little deuce coupe (ditto on the look up). Here is the point though, the main point even in this pre-1960s rebellion period, none of the cars look anything like any parent would drive, or could drive (except the few dweeby cars borrowed for the evening from some plaint, or beaten-down, beaten down by teen argument, parent). Yes indeed, this is a gathering of the California branch of “youth nation” in all their tribal finery.
As is to be expected of a teen-centered (amazingly teen-centered, adults get merely cameo appearances in this one, and that seems about right) drama the plot line thins out considerably after the flash at Mel’s. Mainly, it is about a single night’s search for the 1962 version of the California blue-pink night (more on this below). And what drives that search? Cruising, natch. Why spend the time and expense involved in a “boss” car (you know that word now, right?) if you don’t create a stir up and down the main drag boulevard looking for…. , you can easily fill in that blank yourself. The rest of the plot centers on such eternal questions as the young leaving home and hearth to face the great wide world (here to be or not to be a college freshman by stars Ron Howard, as Steve, and Richard Dreyfus, as Curt), the usual boy looking for girl thing (including by oldster hot-rod king, Johnny) that I have endlessly reported on elsewhere in this space and that is not worthy of further comment in a teen film. That IS a teen film. What else could such a film be about? Teen break-ups (Howard and Cindy Williams, as Laurie), cruising, stopping at Mel’s for some car-hopped fast food, cruising, a little hot- rod duel ( between Johnny and, ah, one Harrison Ford) on those open California highways (what else are they for?), and then daylight and the rude old work-a-day world intrudes, even on sanctified teen life.
This is one time though that I do not do justice to a film with a summary because this thing is well-directed, well-produced, and well-acted by a crew of then very young unknowns (mostly) that would go on to all kinds of other cinematic successes (including hot-rod runner-up, ah, Ford). The sense of déjà vu for this Eastern U.S.-born baby-boomer, including a great high school dance segment and a soundtrack that reads out of every classic Oldies But Goodies compilation that I have ever reviewed, was palpable, without being maudlin. Kudos
So what connection can be drawn, one might rightly ask in a review of American Graffiti, a film that depicts a snapshot of a then respectable early 1960s coming-of-age teen-driven culture and the search for now respectably beatified “beat” culture great blue-pink American West night? One with, by then, a respectable post-birth of rock and roll (cleaned up of the “bad boys” like Jerry Lee Lewis) soundtrack. That also pays homage to a then very respectable post-Great Depression Okie-Akie invasion middle class-driven suburban valley life-style, and its respectable (mostly) California teen “boss” car culture. And highlights a then respectable superficial teen angst (“Do you like my finger nails painted in crimson red or rose red?”, “Do you want Pepsi or Coke with your hamburger, hold the onions?”, or something along those lines) A film which, moreover, has not the slightest reference to, nor can in any way be taken to have been produced under the under the sign of, the “beats.” Hell, not even a Maynard G. Krebs (from the old time media image of beatniks television show, Dobey Gillis) beatnik caricature in the lot. Nada.
The closest that any character comes is my boy John, “greaser”, deuce coupe, hot rod-king-of- the-hill, and working class poet (limited lyric car poet, okay)/ existential philosopher. And he doesn’t count because he has been around since Hector was a pup, is seen as an eternal “townie” by his middle class brethren, and is a throwback to James Dean and Marlon Brando 1950s California cool. And those guys (I mean the characters they played in Rebel Without A Cause and The Wild One not them as personalities, they were cool, no question) weren’t beat, no way. Beside John’s angst, important but kind of universal as it is, for some dewy-eyed female teeny-bopper to sit next to him in that old jalopy as he cruises those great California valley night highways is not the stuff of tragedy. Not in my book anyway, and I also had more than my share of that kind of teen angst.
No, what this film connects to, and connects to visually in the first instance, is that great big old search for that pink-blue American Western night that the “beats”, at least what I think the beats were searching for when they were doing their breakout from the post- World War II American crank-out death machine night. The shift from the Eastern American dark night westward (mainly, although some of beats were already vanguard- hovering around San Francisco waiting for the boys to come off the roads from the east and establish what was what) serves as a metaphor for much of what they were up to, if only to breakout, a little, from the nine-to-five, waiting for the bomb (atomic bomb) to drop world. That visual sense is most dramatically highlighted in the very first opening shots of this film where the pink-blue sky forms the backdrop to the activity starting up at California teen-hang-out (and elsewhere as well, even stuffy old Boston), fast food drive-in, Mel’s drive-in (A&W, Adventure Car-Hop, Dairy Queen, fill in your own named spot), central committee headquarters for valley California teen night. .
Wait, let me detail this a little more so there is no mistake. The film opens with the first few anxious California “boss” cars (you remember what that word means, right?), almost tear-provoking in this reviewer, because I rode in teen cars just like those, rolling into neon-sign lighted Mel’s(lights just turned on against the kitchen-backdrop dark night) just as the sun is going down. There is a big old sun-devouring red devil of a cloud flaming up in the background. That is NOT the part of the pink-blue night I am talking about. Below, just below, nearer the horizon is the one I am talking about, the symbol of the search, and the stuff of dreams, the great American blue-pink dream escape.
I can hear great yawns and see rolled eyes piercing through cyberspace as you say so what is the big deal about some foolish ephemeral passing cloud, blue-pink, pink-blue, or hell, blue-blue. Philistines! Go back now to Mel’s, or wherever the blue-pink sky announces the nights doings, the night’s promises or disappointments. Those promises or those disappointments, great or small, went to make up the birth of the search for the great American Western night, the night of our own circumscribed teen, kiddish break-outs, great or small.
Make no mistake it was not the morning, the morning of school or toil, paid or unpaid. It was not the lazy afternoon, the time of study or of the self-same toil, paid or unpaid (the unpaid kind thanked for or not, or to quote the universal parent god of the time done because “we keep a roof over your head”). It was the night, no the approach, the blue-pink approach of night that drove our maddened dreams, hopefully signaling good omens for the night’s work. The day was mere preclude to that tiny feverishly sought breakout (now a small thing seen, but not then). The telephoned arrangements, the groomed preparations, the gathering of the odd dollar here or there, in order to first cruise that teen empty highway and then on second pass the filling teen night.
Now do you see how the “beats”, those unnamed, unnamable, sub-consciously-embedded beats drove our bust-out dreams for travel, for adventure, for wine (later, dope), for women (or men) and for song, for shaking off the dust of the old town, great or small, as long as it moving elsewhere, and on a thumb pulled-out, hard-driven, shoe leather-beaten shod foot if need be.
American Graffiti is a snapshot of just exactly that minute, just that historic minute before the great shake-out of the 1960s for the baby-boomer generation, after that minute some of us went left politically and became social activists. We made just about every political, social, and cultural mistake along the way and lost, no, were defeated, no again, were mauled, in the end in our dreams of “seeking that newer world.” (And have spent the past forty or so years having to fight a rear-guard against the straightjacket, death machine-loving yahoos and their consorts). Ya, but hear me out. The search for the blue-pink Great American Western night was not one of those mistakes.
Ancient dreams, dreamed-Save The Last Dance For Me- Magical Realism 101
A tow-headed boy walks, endless forget waiting for erratic Eastern Mass. bus-stop non-stop walks, up named streets, Captain’s Walk (evoking New England Captain Ahab madnesses, a kindred spirit, and land-bound searches for the great blue-pink American west night drive the frenzy instead of holy death-seeking sea drifts, although that is unnamed just now), Snug Harbor Avenue (evoking, well, just evoking home, or the theory of home, or some happy black and white television version of home), and Sextant Circle (like such a useful nautical instrument could guide some lonely, lonesome boy out of the fetid bog-fed marshes and visions of pirates seeking booty, or death). On to Taffrail Road, ah, Taffrail Road evoking ship-wreaked damsels, young, waiting for swashbuckling sailor boys risen from local old tar graveyards to restore their honor, their freedom, or just to share their bed. That last is the rub and that is the heart of the matter along those endless non-stop streets where erratic buses serve as the only way out of those clinched fist streets. That tow-headed boy is enthralled, no better, enraged and engorged with his first stirring of interest in damsel time, thus the time of his time. Yes, clinch those fists very tightly and take the ride.
Unnamed streets abound too, up crooked cheap, low-rent, fifty-year rutted pavement streets, deeply-gouged, one-lane snow-drift hassles streets impassable in winter hard glare and summer sweated heat. A Street cutting off the flow to that old tar cemetery seeking exotic writ names deep-etched in granite slab washed now by birdsong, and dung, rather than damsel sweet smell perfumes. B Street the same, C Street the same, same like some alphabet conspiracy against the boyhood night, against the boyhood dream night when he dreams of manhood, or better feelings of manhood but is clueless, utterly clueless, about what those feelings portent, ominously portent. But what knows he of ominous, or portents for that matter. He confesses, and no church confession either but etched, gravestone old tar etched, no mortal, not even hangmen evil brothers or harassing cousins, boy or girl, should ever have to face the fifth-grade night rudderless, compass-less and with the mark of cain upon his neck.
After walking, endless walking through named and unnamed streets, he heads home, not the home of home but his dream home with her, her house home. After all who in hteri right mind could curse and rail against the fifth grade-night, and why, if not for budding portentous romance with some green tree-coded she. He dare not speak her name for fear of jinx, or unrequitedness. The year before, that innocent last fourth-grade year, they, the shes of his enflamed imagination, were all just sticks, hardly distinguishable from boys but except perhaps a little smaller, just sticks to be avoided, or ignored, but this year a few, and she among the few, suddenly got interesting and he was stuck, struck really, by that ironic fact, or would have been if he had known what ironic travails he would go through before the end.
But here, watch him from afar, as he crosses for the fifth, or fifteenth time, or fifteen hundredth time past trees are green, coded, coded fifty years coded, endless trees are green secret-coded waiting, waiting against boyish infinite time, infinite first blush of innocent manhood, boyhood times, gone now, for one look, one look, that would elude him, elude him forever such is life in lowly spots, lowly, lowly spots. She some fair Rosamund and he a mere serf, and they knew it, or he knew it although it did not stop him from wanting, or waiting for that one glance, and that dancing blue-eyed smile.
The dance of all damn things, the upcoming one-size-fits-all school dance, parent-approved, headmaster-approved, hell, bishop-approved when you came right down to it, and, hell, blessed too from what he had heard, maybe jesus, blessed, is what has him in a mental whirl. Such tow-headed fifth-grade boy whirls made an existence, a walked streets existence, possible just as well as reds under every bed scare, russkie atomic-bomb-dropping, get out of the stinking projects and get a new shirt at all costs that disturbed his other nights. But, christ, a two bit dance, some later laughable Podunk gym fiesta, crepe-hanging, some surly drafted, imprisoned teacher to “spin platters” from some RCA music box, and her with the dancing blue-eyes and rounding shape. Yes, that thing drove him crazy, or the possibility of it in the fragrant perfume-soap, some girlish bath soap for all he knew or heard from girl cousins, american bandstand night,
And dreams of private dances in dark shadow corners while that silly hung crepe begins to droop above their spot and he first, and then she, laughs about how some fourth-grader must have hung it, their private laugh. And dance too, no Fred Astaire waltz old-time fox trot (except maybe that slow one at the end of the night although that was mere planned dream echo in walked streets), but full-blossomed be-bop wild hands and ass gyrating to some Elvis good night rocking or Chuck driving some car over the cliff for love, or something, something unspoken, or ask the older kids who know, know through their well-tuned grapevine, what “it” is. If they will tell you.
All a dream, a street-walked dream until, and when, really when he got up the nerve, the endless streets walking nerve, to ask her. But no dance floor numbness would slake that footsore walking thirst not then, and no high school confidential dance either (hell elementary school was tough enough, man), handy man, breathless, Jerry Lee freak-out blaring off some truck-bed bandstand. Too improbable for words. So Rosamund fate, young damsel sighted off the sea-side taffrail slid by, and with time the footsoreness turned into dust, or some other psychic pain whirl. But here and now when it counted, at least, no all the rage potato sack stick-turning-into-shape dance with coded name, trees are green, brunette. That will come, that will come. But when?
Unnamed streets abound too, up crooked cheap, low-rent, fifty-year rutted pavement streets, deeply-gouged, one-lane snow-drift hassles streets impassable in winter hard glare and summer sweated heat. A Street cutting off the flow to that old tar cemetery seeking exotic writ names deep-etched in granite slab washed now by birdsong, and dung, rather than damsel sweet smell perfumes. B Street the same, C Street the same, same like some alphabet conspiracy against the boyhood night, against the boyhood dream night when he dreams of manhood, or better feelings of manhood but is clueless, utterly clueless, about what those feelings portent, ominously portent. But what knows he of ominous, or portents for that matter. He confesses, and no church confession either but etched, gravestone old tar etched, no mortal, not even hangmen evil brothers or harassing cousins, boy or girl, should ever have to face the fifth-grade night rudderless, compass-less and with the mark of cain upon his neck.
After walking, endless walking through named and unnamed streets, he heads home, not the home of home but his dream home with her, her house home. After all who in hteri right mind could curse and rail against the fifth grade-night, and why, if not for budding portentous romance with some green tree-coded she. He dare not speak her name for fear of jinx, or unrequitedness. The year before, that innocent last fourth-grade year, they, the shes of his enflamed imagination, were all just sticks, hardly distinguishable from boys but except perhaps a little smaller, just sticks to be avoided, or ignored, but this year a few, and she among the few, suddenly got interesting and he was stuck, struck really, by that ironic fact, or would have been if he had known what ironic travails he would go through before the end.
But here, watch him from afar, as he crosses for the fifth, or fifteenth time, or fifteen hundredth time past trees are green, coded, coded fifty years coded, endless trees are green secret-coded waiting, waiting against boyish infinite time, infinite first blush of innocent manhood, boyhood times, gone now, for one look, one look, that would elude him, elude him forever such is life in lowly spots, lowly, lowly spots. She some fair Rosamund and he a mere serf, and they knew it, or he knew it although it did not stop him from wanting, or waiting for that one glance, and that dancing blue-eyed smile.
The dance of all damn things, the upcoming one-size-fits-all school dance, parent-approved, headmaster-approved, hell, bishop-approved when you came right down to it, and, hell, blessed too from what he had heard, maybe jesus, blessed, is what has him in a mental whirl. Such tow-headed fifth-grade boy whirls made an existence, a walked streets existence, possible just as well as reds under every bed scare, russkie atomic-bomb-dropping, get out of the stinking projects and get a new shirt at all costs that disturbed his other nights. But, christ, a two bit dance, some later laughable Podunk gym fiesta, crepe-hanging, some surly drafted, imprisoned teacher to “spin platters” from some RCA music box, and her with the dancing blue-eyes and rounding shape. Yes, that thing drove him crazy, or the possibility of it in the fragrant perfume-soap, some girlish bath soap for all he knew or heard from girl cousins, american bandstand night,
And dreams of private dances in dark shadow corners while that silly hung crepe begins to droop above their spot and he first, and then she, laughs about how some fourth-grader must have hung it, their private laugh. And dance too, no Fred Astaire waltz old-time fox trot (except maybe that slow one at the end of the night although that was mere planned dream echo in walked streets), but full-blossomed be-bop wild hands and ass gyrating to some Elvis good night rocking or Chuck driving some car over the cliff for love, or something, something unspoken, or ask the older kids who know, know through their well-tuned grapevine, what “it” is. If they will tell you.
All a dream, a street-walked dream until, and when, really when he got up the nerve, the endless streets walking nerve, to ask her. But no dance floor numbness would slake that footsore walking thirst not then, and no high school confidential dance either (hell elementary school was tough enough, man), handy man, breathless, Jerry Lee freak-out blaring off some truck-bed bandstand. Too improbable for words. So Rosamund fate, young damsel sighted off the sea-side taffrail slid by, and with time the footsoreness turned into dust, or some other psychic pain whirl. But here and now when it counted, at least, no all the rage potato sack stick-turning-into-shape dance with coded name, trees are green, brunette. That will come, that will come. But when?
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