Click on the headline to link to the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) Website for more information about various anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist actions around the country.
Markin comment:
Every once in a while it is necessary, if for not other reason than to proclaim from the public square that we are alive, and fighting, to show “the colors,” our anti-war colors. While, as I have mentioned many times in this space, endless marches are not going to end any war the street opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as protests against other imperialist adventures has been under the radar of late. It is time for anti-warriors to get back where we belong in the struggle against Obama’s wars. The UNAC appears to be the umbrella clearing house these days for many anti-war, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist actions. Not all the demands of this coalition are ones that I would raise but the key one is enough to take to the streets. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops, Mercenaries, Contractors, Etc, From Afghanistan and Iraq!
BostonUNAC.org | 781-285-8622 | BostonUNAC(S)gmail.com
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Books To While Away The Class Struggle By-Up Close And Personal- John Reed and The Russian Revolution Of 1917
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin
Book Review
This is the 95th Anniversary of the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution. It is fitting that I review a book that did much to give Westerners a bird's-eye view of what happened during that tumultuous year. Forward To New Octobers!
Ten Days That Shook The World, John Reed, New American Library Edition, New York, 1967
I, on more than one occasion, have mentioned that for a detailed history of the ebb and flow of the Russian Revolution of 1917 from February to October of that year your man is the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky’s "History of the Russian Revolution" is partisan history at its best. One does not and should not, at least in this day in age, ask historians to be ‘objective’. One simply asks that the historian present his or her narrative and analysis and get out of the way. Trotsky meets that criterion. I have also mentioned in that same context that there are other excellent sources on this subject, depending on your needs. If you are looking for a general history of the revolution or want an analysis of what the revolution meant for the fate of various nations after World War I or its affect on world geopolitics look elsewhere. E.H. Carr’s "History of the Bolshevik Revolution" offers an excellent multi-volume set that tells that story through the 1920’s. Or if you want to know what the various parliamentary leaders, both bourgeois and Soviet, were thinking and doing from a moderately leftist viewpoint read Sukhanov’s "Notes on the Russian Revolution". If you need a more journalistic account for the period of the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks and the immediate aftermath, the book under review, John Reed’s classic "Ten Days That Shook the World" is invaluable.
If we do not, as mentioned above, expect our historians to be ‘objective’ then we have a lesser expectation of those journalists who write the ‘first draft of history’. Reed makes no bones about the fact that that he is a partisan of the Bolshevik-led social revolution that he was witnessing. He, nevertheless, tells his story reasonably well for those who are not partisans. Moreover, Reed seems to have been everywhere in Petersburg during those days. He is as likely to have been reporting from Petersburg’s Winter Palace, the seat of the Kerensky's Provisional Government, as Smolny, the seat of the insurgent Soviets. We can find him among the bourgeois politicians of the City Duma or at the Russian Army General Staff headquarters. Hell, he was also in Moscow when things were hot there as the Soviet forces tried to seize the Kremlin. He is at meetings large-Peasant Soviet size- or in some back room at Smolny with Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee that directed the uprising. To that extent, as a free lancer on the move, he covers physically during this period much more territory than Trotsky could as central director of the action and thus has more first hand observations.
Reed’s style tends toward straight forward reportage with little obvious sense of irony in the various situations that he is witnessing. Of course, against Trotsky’s masterly ironic sense he is bound to suffer by comparison. Nevertheless Reed gets us into places like the City Duma and into the heads of various characters like the Mayor of Petersburg that Trotsky, frankly, displayed no interest in dealing with. Probably the greatest compliment that one could pay Reed is that he is widely quoted as a reliable source in many historical accounts from Trotsky on the winning side to someone like Kerensky on the losing side. For those who want a quick but serious overview of the dynamic of the October Revolution then here is your man. Add in his companion Louise Bryant’s separate account, "Six Month In Red Russia" (if you can find it), and some very good primary source poster, pamphlet and newspaper material in the appendices of Reed’s book and you are on your way.
Book Review
This is the 95th Anniversary of the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution. It is fitting that I review a book that did much to give Westerners a bird's-eye view of what happened during that tumultuous year. Forward To New Octobers!
Ten Days That Shook The World, John Reed, New American Library Edition, New York, 1967
I, on more than one occasion, have mentioned that for a detailed history of the ebb and flow of the Russian Revolution of 1917 from February to October of that year your man is the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky’s "History of the Russian Revolution" is partisan history at its best. One does not and should not, at least in this day in age, ask historians to be ‘objective’. One simply asks that the historian present his or her narrative and analysis and get out of the way. Trotsky meets that criterion. I have also mentioned in that same context that there are other excellent sources on this subject, depending on your needs. If you are looking for a general history of the revolution or want an analysis of what the revolution meant for the fate of various nations after World War I or its affect on world geopolitics look elsewhere. E.H. Carr’s "History of the Bolshevik Revolution" offers an excellent multi-volume set that tells that story through the 1920’s. Or if you want to know what the various parliamentary leaders, both bourgeois and Soviet, were thinking and doing from a moderately leftist viewpoint read Sukhanov’s "Notes on the Russian Revolution". If you need a more journalistic account for the period of the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks and the immediate aftermath, the book under review, John Reed’s classic "Ten Days That Shook the World" is invaluable.
If we do not, as mentioned above, expect our historians to be ‘objective’ then we have a lesser expectation of those journalists who write the ‘first draft of history’. Reed makes no bones about the fact that that he is a partisan of the Bolshevik-led social revolution that he was witnessing. He, nevertheless, tells his story reasonably well for those who are not partisans. Moreover, Reed seems to have been everywhere in Petersburg during those days. He is as likely to have been reporting from Petersburg’s Winter Palace, the seat of the Kerensky's Provisional Government, as Smolny, the seat of the insurgent Soviets. We can find him among the bourgeois politicians of the City Duma or at the Russian Army General Staff headquarters. Hell, he was also in Moscow when things were hot there as the Soviet forces tried to seize the Kremlin. He is at meetings large-Peasant Soviet size- or in some back room at Smolny with Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee that directed the uprising. To that extent, as a free lancer on the move, he covers physically during this period much more territory than Trotsky could as central director of the action and thus has more first hand observations.
Reed’s style tends toward straight forward reportage with little obvious sense of irony in the various situations that he is witnessing. Of course, against Trotsky’s masterly ironic sense he is bound to suffer by comparison. Nevertheless Reed gets us into places like the City Duma and into the heads of various characters like the Mayor of Petersburg that Trotsky, frankly, displayed no interest in dealing with. Probably the greatest compliment that one could pay Reed is that he is widely quoted as a reliable source in many historical accounts from Trotsky on the winning side to someone like Kerensky on the losing side. For those who want a quick but serious overview of the dynamic of the October Revolution then here is your man. Add in his companion Louise Bryant’s separate account, "Six Month In Red Russia" (if you can find it), and some very good primary source poster, pamphlet and newspaper material in the appendices of Reed’s book and you are on your way.
"REDS"-The Movie-"Radical Chic"-The John Reed-Louise Bryant Romance
Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of a trailer on "Reds"
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
DVD REVIEW
REDS, THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION (ORIGINALLY RELEASED IN 1981), starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton
The important contribution of John Reed to the revolutionary movement here in America before World War I and later during the Russian revolution and its aftermath has never been fully appreciated. Thus, Warren Beatty, whatever his personal motives, has done a great service in filming the life of this “traitor to his class” (and his Harvard Class of 1910) and partisan of the international working class.
As usual with such commercial enterprises the order of things gets switched in the wrong direction. The love affair between Reed (played by Beatty) and budding writer and early feminist Louise Bryant (played by Diane Keaton)(and a little third party intervention by playwright Eugene O’Neill, played by Jack Nicholson) is set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution not the other way around, but such is cinematic license. More than most film depictions this one mainly gets the story straight; Reed's early free-lance journalism tied to the Mexican Revolution; the bohemian life of pre-World War I Greenwich Village in New York City including it patronage by socialites like Mabel Dodge; the socialist fight against American participation in World War I; the fight among socialists (and anarchists) over support to the Russian Revolution; and, an interesting segment on the seemingly bewildering in-fighting in the early communist movement between the foreign-language federations and the Reed-led “Natives” (which included James P. Cannon,later a founder of American Trotskyism)that that ultimately had to be 'resolved' at Communist International headquarters in Moscow.
Those ‘natives’, the likes of Earl Browder, James Cannon and William Z. Foster, in the course of events would form the leadership of the party through most of the twenties when the cadre still wanted to make a revolution here and not just cheer on the Russian Revolution from afar. A nice touch in the film is the interweaving of commentaries by those, friend and foe, who knew or knew of Reed or were around during this time. See this movie.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
DVD REVIEW
REDS, THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION (ORIGINALLY RELEASED IN 1981), starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton
The important contribution of John Reed to the revolutionary movement here in America before World War I and later during the Russian revolution and its aftermath has never been fully appreciated. Thus, Warren Beatty, whatever his personal motives, has done a great service in filming the life of this “traitor to his class” (and his Harvard Class of 1910) and partisan of the international working class.
As usual with such commercial enterprises the order of things gets switched in the wrong direction. The love affair between Reed (played by Beatty) and budding writer and early feminist Louise Bryant (played by Diane Keaton)(and a little third party intervention by playwright Eugene O’Neill, played by Jack Nicholson) is set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution not the other way around, but such is cinematic license. More than most film depictions this one mainly gets the story straight; Reed's early free-lance journalism tied to the Mexican Revolution; the bohemian life of pre-World War I Greenwich Village in New York City including it patronage by socialites like Mabel Dodge; the socialist fight against American participation in World War I; the fight among socialists (and anarchists) over support to the Russian Revolution; and, an interesting segment on the seemingly bewildering in-fighting in the early communist movement between the foreign-language federations and the Reed-led “Natives” (which included James P. Cannon,later a founder of American Trotskyism)that that ultimately had to be 'resolved' at Communist International headquarters in Moscow.
Those ‘natives’, the likes of Earl Browder, James Cannon and William Z. Foster, in the course of events would form the leadership of the party through most of the twenties when the cadre still wanted to make a revolution here and not just cheer on the Russian Revolution from afar. A nice touch in the film is the interweaving of commentaries by those, friend and foe, who knew or knew of Reed or were around during this time. See this movie.
From The Archives Of "Common Struggle" Number 7-General Strike Shuts Down Port Of Oakland (En Espanol) La Huelga General Cierra l Puerto de Oakland!
El intento de una huelga general organizado por "Occupy Oakland" para el 2 de Noviembre de 2011, hubieron muchos momentos de inspiracion que demostraron lo que un grupo de trabajadores comunes y corrientes, de desempleados, de personas sin hogar, y estudiantes—en un 99°/o-pueden lograr juntos. Uno de los eventos mas poderosos fue el cierre del Puerto de Oakland. Los trabajadores del sindicato ILWU (La Union Internacional de Estibadores) tienen antecedentes anteriores de respetar piquetes organizados
por la comunidad y a rehusar el cruce de tales huelgas. Gomo resultado, tienen un historial de la gente de Oakland en reunirse en el puerto, formando una linea con el intento de cerrar el puerto.
El 2 de Noviembre, Occupy Oakland planeo cerrar el 3er mas grande puerto de la costa del oeste de Estados Unidos, el cual es tambien una localidad estrategicamente importante para el ingreso de mercancias y donde salen al extranjero los productos agricolas del Valle Central de California. El puerto es como una conexion muy extensa de la circularon de mercancias y, por lo tanto, un factor critico para el 1% que obtiene sus ganancias del duro trabajo del 99%.
Nosotros fuimos al puerto a traves de dos marchas que salieron a las cuatro y cinco de la tarde en la que participaron miles de personas, sin incluir a la gente que fue directamente desde la Estacion Oeste del metro BART hacia el Puerto de Oakland. Se estima que el numero total de personas que estuvieron en el puerto fue de 50,000.
Este autor marcho a las cinco de la tarde hacia el puerto de Oakland como parte del bloque feminista. La marcha hacia el puerto fue la primera vez que vimos a la policfa, quienes sirven para mantener el poder del 1% aunque, el grupo mas grande de policfas que vimos fueron 9 oflciales de las Garreteras de California en motocicletas, sin interferir con los miles de personas marchando en frente de ellos. Esto demuestra que un grupo grande de este tipo puede motivar a los policfas para que se hagan a un lado. Era de vital importancia en organizar y promover nuestra lucha para demostrar nuestro poder unido—si el grupo hubiese sido mas pequeno, es muy posible que la policfa hubiese tratado de pararnos.
Mientras que ha existido durante el dfa un ambiente tipo fiesta y entusiasmo en la Plaza Oscar Grant, nosotros llegamos al puerto en un ambiente aun mas festive—con un mar de gente que, al igual que en otros eventos, eran tan diversos como la ciudad de Oakland (o sea, una magniflca representacidn). El complejo del Puerto de Oakland estaba literalmente lleno de gente, que a cualquiera que conoce que grande es este puerto, le hubiera causado mucha impresion. El numero de personas que habfan sido motivadas a marchar hacia el puerto mismo emanaban mucha'inspiracion.
El ambiente del puerto no era un ambiente tfpico de activismo puesto que allf se encontraron amigos, companeros de trabajo, companeros de escuela y vecinos sino que un encuentro masivo de todo tipo de personas. A traves de todo el puerto, la gente se vefa amistosa y estaban con muchas ganas de hablar; los amigos y vecinos se saludaron y se hicieron de nuevos amigos solamente hablandoles a las personas que estaban caminando, bailando o sentadosjunto a ellos. Entendimos que algunas de las limitaciones de la polftica, de las profesiones, de los barrios o vecindades, la edad, la raza, el estado migratorio, el genero y la sexualidad no nos permiten trabajar juntos y por lo tanto, comenzaron a desvanecerse y nuevas amistades fueron hechos que quizas nunca hubiesen conocido y se hablaba acerca de la manera en que nosotros podrfamos mejorar todas nuestras vidas. Asf, de este modo, el cierre del puerto no solo fue una muestra de poder en contra del 1% que tendrfa ganancias por medio de nuestra labor ese dfa, sino tambien ayudo a formar una base solida para las acciones futuras en contra del 1%.
por la comunidad y a rehusar el cruce de tales huelgas. Gomo resultado, tienen un historial de la gente de Oakland en reunirse en el puerto, formando una linea con el intento de cerrar el puerto.
El 2 de Noviembre, Occupy Oakland planeo cerrar el 3er mas grande puerto de la costa del oeste de Estados Unidos, el cual es tambien una localidad estrategicamente importante para el ingreso de mercancias y donde salen al extranjero los productos agricolas del Valle Central de California. El puerto es como una conexion muy extensa de la circularon de mercancias y, por lo tanto, un factor critico para el 1% que obtiene sus ganancias del duro trabajo del 99%.
Nosotros fuimos al puerto a traves de dos marchas que salieron a las cuatro y cinco de la tarde en la que participaron miles de personas, sin incluir a la gente que fue directamente desde la Estacion Oeste del metro BART hacia el Puerto de Oakland. Se estima que el numero total de personas que estuvieron en el puerto fue de 50,000.
Este autor marcho a las cinco de la tarde hacia el puerto de Oakland como parte del bloque feminista. La marcha hacia el puerto fue la primera vez que vimos a la policfa, quienes sirven para mantener el poder del 1% aunque, el grupo mas grande de policfas que vimos fueron 9 oflciales de las Garreteras de California en motocicletas, sin interferir con los miles de personas marchando en frente de ellos. Esto demuestra que un grupo grande de este tipo puede motivar a los policfas para que se hagan a un lado. Era de vital importancia en organizar y promover nuestra lucha para demostrar nuestro poder unido—si el grupo hubiese sido mas pequeno, es muy posible que la policfa hubiese tratado de pararnos.
Mientras que ha existido durante el dfa un ambiente tipo fiesta y entusiasmo en la Plaza Oscar Grant, nosotros llegamos al puerto en un ambiente aun mas festive—con un mar de gente que, al igual que en otros eventos, eran tan diversos como la ciudad de Oakland (o sea, una magniflca representacidn). El complejo del Puerto de Oakland estaba literalmente lleno de gente, que a cualquiera que conoce que grande es este puerto, le hubiera causado mucha impresion. El numero de personas que habfan sido motivadas a marchar hacia el puerto mismo emanaban mucha'inspiracion.
El ambiente del puerto no era un ambiente tfpico de activismo puesto que allf se encontraron amigos, companeros de trabajo, companeros de escuela y vecinos sino que un encuentro masivo de todo tipo de personas. A traves de todo el puerto, la gente se vefa amistosa y estaban con muchas ganas de hablar; los amigos y vecinos se saludaron y se hicieron de nuevos amigos solamente hablandoles a las personas que estaban caminando, bailando o sentadosjunto a ellos. Entendimos que algunas de las limitaciones de la polftica, de las profesiones, de los barrios o vecindades, la edad, la raza, el estado migratorio, el genero y la sexualidad no nos permiten trabajar juntos y por lo tanto, comenzaron a desvanecerse y nuevas amistades fueron hechos que quizas nunca hubiesen conocido y se hablaba acerca de la manera en que nosotros podrfamos mejorar todas nuestras vidas. Asf, de este modo, el cierre del puerto no solo fue una muestra de poder en contra del 1% que tendrfa ganancias por medio de nuestra labor ese dfa, sino tambien ayudo a formar una base solida para las acciones futuras en contra del 1%.
From The Archives Of "Common Struggle" Number 7-General Strike Shuts Down Port Of Oakland
The Occupy Oakland attempt at a general strike on November 2nd of 2011 had many inspiring moments demonstrating what average working people, the unemployed, homeless people, and students— the 99%— can achieve when we work together. One of the most powerful events of the day was the shutdown of the Port of Oakland. The workers of the ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union) have a history of honoring community pickets and refusing to cross them, resulting in a history of people in Oakland gathering at the port, forming a picket line, and shutting down the port. On November 2nd, Occupy Oakland planned to shutdown the third largest port on the West Coast of the US, which is both a critical entry point for goods and the location where many of the crops grown in California's Central Valley are loaded onto ships and sent around the world. The port is a major bottleneck in the circulation of goods— and thus critical to the 1% who make their living off the hard work of the 99%.
We went to the port in two marches which left at 4 and 5 pm, and totaled tens of thousands of people, not including the people who went directly from the West Oakland BART Station to the Port of Oakland. Reasonable estimates for the total number of people who were at the port aim as high as 50,000.
The author marched at 5 pm to the port as part of the feminist block. The march to the port was the first time we saw the cops, who serve to maintain the power of the 1%, although the largest gathering of police we saw were nine California Highway Patrol officers on motorcycles, not interfering with the thousands of people marching past them. This demonstrates that a large enough group of people can motivate the cops to step back. Outreach and organizing ourselves to show our power together was crucial to this outcome—had a much smaller group marched on the port it's likely the police would have tried to stop us.
While there had been an excited, party-like atmosphere at Oscar Grant Plaza during the day, we arrived at the port to an atmosphere even more festive—with a sea of people that, like every other event that day, was as diverse as Oakland. The Oakland port complex was literally full of people, which, for anyone who knows how big a port Oakland is, is very impressive. The number of people who had been motivated to march on the port in itself was inspiring.
At the port, people ran into friends, coworkers, classmates, and neighbors. It was not the typical activist scene, but rather a massive outpouring
of all different sorts of people. All around the port, people were friendly and eager to talk. Friends and neighbors checked in with each other, and people made new friends, just by talking to the person dancing, walking, or sitting next to them. Some of the borders that politics, professions, neighborhoods, age, race, immigration status, gender, and sexuality put up to try and stopus from working together started to crumble as new friendships were made and people who might have otherwise never met came together and started talking about how we can improve all of our lives. Thus, the shutdown of the port I was not just a major blow against how the
1% would profit off of us that day, it also helped form a solid
foundation for future actions against the 1%.
We went to the port in two marches which left at 4 and 5 pm, and totaled tens of thousands of people, not including the people who went directly from the West Oakland BART Station to the Port of Oakland. Reasonable estimates for the total number of people who were at the port aim as high as 50,000.
The author marched at 5 pm to the port as part of the feminist block. The march to the port was the first time we saw the cops, who serve to maintain the power of the 1%, although the largest gathering of police we saw were nine California Highway Patrol officers on motorcycles, not interfering with the thousands of people marching past them. This demonstrates that a large enough group of people can motivate the cops to step back. Outreach and organizing ourselves to show our power together was crucial to this outcome—had a much smaller group marched on the port it's likely the police would have tried to stop us.
While there had been an excited, party-like atmosphere at Oscar Grant Plaza during the day, we arrived at the port to an atmosphere even more festive—with a sea of people that, like every other event that day, was as diverse as Oakland. The Oakland port complex was literally full of people, which, for anyone who knows how big a port Oakland is, is very impressive. The number of people who had been motivated to march on the port in itself was inspiring.
At the port, people ran into friends, coworkers, classmates, and neighbors. It was not the typical activist scene, but rather a massive outpouring
of all different sorts of people. All around the port, people were friendly and eager to talk. Friends and neighbors checked in with each other, and people made new friends, just by talking to the person dancing, walking, or sitting next to them. Some of the borders that politics, professions, neighborhoods, age, race, immigration status, gender, and sexuality put up to try and stopus from working together started to crumble as new friendships were made and people who might have otherwise never met came together and started talking about how we can improve all of our lives. Thus, the shutdown of the port I was not just a major blow against how the
1% would profit off of us that day, it also helped form a solid
foundation for future actions against the 1%.
From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-For A Workers' United Front Against Fascism (1931)
Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives.
Markin comment:
Blame it on Leon Trotsky, Blame it on Lenin. Blame it on the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Or, maybe, just blame it on my reaction to the residue from the bourgeois holiday celebrations. Today I am, in any case, in a mood for “high Trotskyism.” That is always a good way to readjust the political compass, and read some very literate political writing as well. With all due respect to black author James Baldwin and his great work, Another Country, that I have just finished reading Jimmy you have to share the stage today. Okay?
********
Leon Trotsky
For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism
(December 1931)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written in exile in Turkey, December 8, 1931.
Bulletin of the Opposition, No.27, March 1932
Translation by Morris Lewitt in The Militant, January 9, 1932.
Trotsky’s own title was What’s Wrong With the Current Policy of the German Communist Party?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Germany is now passing through one of those great historic hours upon which the fate of the German people, the fate of Europe, and in significant measure the fate of all humanity, will depend for decades. If you place a ball on top of a pyramid, the slightest impact can cause it to roll down either to the left or to the right. That is the situation approaching with every hour in Germany today. There are forces which would like the bail to roll down towards the right and break the back of the working class. There are forces which would like the ball to remain at the top. That is a utopia. The ball cannot remain at the top of the pyramid. The Communists want the ball to roll down toward the left and break the back of capitalism. But it is not enough to want; one must know how. Let us calmly reflect once more: is the policy carried on at present by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany correct or incorrect?
What Does Hitler Want?
The fascists are growing very rapidly. The Communists are also growing but much more slowly. The growth at the extreme poles shows that the ball cannot maintain itself at the top of the pyramid. The rapid growth of the fascists signifies the danger that the ball may roll down toward the right. Therein lies an enormous danger.
Hitler emphasizes that he is against a coup d’état. In order to strangle democracy once and for all, he wants to come to power by no other route than the democratic road. Can we seriously believe this?
Of course, if the fascists could figure on obtaining an absolute majority of the votes at the next elections in a peaceful way, then they would perhaps even prefer this road. In reality, however, this road is unthinkable for them. It is stupid to believe that the Nazis would grow uninterruptedly, as they do now, for an unlimited period of time. Sooner or later they will drain their social reservoir. Fascism has introduced into its own ranks such terrific contradictions, that the moment must come in which the flow ceases to replace the ebb. This moment can arrive long before the fascists have united about them even half of the votes. They will not be able to halt for they will have nothing more to look for here. They will be forced to resort to an overturn.
But even apart from all this, the fascists are cut off from the democratic road. The immense growth of the political contradictions in the country, the stark brigands’ agitation of the fascists, will inevitably lead to a situation in which the closer the fascists approach a majority, the more heated the atmosphere will become and the more extensive the unfolding of the conflicts and struggles will be. With this perspective, civil war is absolutely inevitable. Consequently, the question of the seizure of power by the fascists will not be decided by vote, but by civil war, which the fascists are preparing and provoking.
Can we assume even for one minute that Hitler and his counselors do not realize and foresee this? That would mean to consider them blockheads. There is no greater crime in politics than that of hoping for stupidities on the part of a strong enemy. But if Hitler is not unaware that the road to power leads through the most gruesome civil war, then it means that his speeches about the peaceful democratic road are only a cloak, that is, a stratagem. In that case, it is all the more necessary to keep one’s eyes open.
What Is Concealed Behind Hitler’s Stratagem?
His calculations are quite simple and obvious: he wants to lull his antagonists with the long-run perspective of the parliamentary growth of the Nazis in order to catch them napping and to deal them a deathblow at the right moment It is quite possible that Hitler’s courtesies to democratic parliamentarism may, moreover, help to set up some sort of coalition in the immediate future in which the fascists will obtain the most important posts and employ them in turn for their coup d’état. For it is entirely clear that the coalition, let us assume, between the Center and the fascists will not be a stage in the democratic solution of the question, but a step closer to the coup d’etat under conditions most favorable to the fascists.
We Must Plan According to the Shorter Perspective
All this means that even independently of the desires of the fascist general staff, the solution can intervene in the course Of the next few months, if not weeks. This circumstance is of tremendous importance in elaborating a correct policy. If we allow the fascists to seize power in two or three months, then the struggle against them next year will be much harder than in this. All revolutionary plans laid out for two, three, or five years in advance will prove to be only wretched and disgraceful twaddle, if the working class allows the fascists to gain power in the course of the next two, three, or five months. In the polity of revolutionary crises, the calculation of time is of just as decisive importance as it is in war operations.
Let us take another, more remote example for the clarification of our idea. Hugo Urbahns, who considers himself a “Left Communist” declares the German party bankrup , politically done for, and proposes to create a new party. If Urbahns were right, it would mean that the victory of the fascists is certain. For, in order to create a new party, years are required (and there has been nothing to prove that the party of Urbahns would in any sense be better than Thälmann’s party: when Urbahns was at the head of the party, there were by no means fewer mistakes).
Yes, should the fascists really conquer power, that would mean not only the physical destruction of the Communist Party, but veritable political bankruptcy for it. An ignominious defeat in a struggle against bands of human rubbish – would never be forgiven the Communist International and its German section by the many-millioned German proletariat. The seizure of power by the fascists would therefore most probably signify the necessity of creating a new revolutionary party, and in all likelihood also a new International. That would be a frightful historical catastrophe. But to assume today that all this is unavoidable can be done only by genuine liquidators, those who under the mantle of hollow phrases are really hastening to capitulate like cravens in the face of the struggle and without a struggle. With this conception we Bolshevik-Leninists, who are called “Trotskyists” by the Stalinists, have nothing in common.
We are unshakably convinced that the victory over the fascists is possible – not after their coming to power, not after five, ten, or twenty years of their rule, but now, under the given conditions, in the coming months and weeks.
Thälmann Considers the Victory of Fascism Inevitable
A correct policy is necessary in order to achieve victory. That is, we need a policy appropriate to the present situation, to the present relationship of forces, and not to the situation that may develop in one, two, or three years, when the question of power will already have been decided for a long time.
The whole misfortune lies in the fact that the policy of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party, in part consciously and in part unconsciously, proceeds from the recognition of the inevitability of a fascist victory. In fact, in the appeal for the “Red United Front” published on November 29, 1931, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany proceeds from the idea that it is impossible to defeat fascism without first defeating the Social Democracy. The same idea is repeated in all possible shades in Thälmann’s article. Is this idea correct? On the historical scale it is unconditionally correct. But that does not at all mean that with its aid, that is, by simple repetition, one can solve the questions of the day. An idea, correct from the point of view of revolutionary strategy as a whole, is converted into a lie and at that into a reactionary lie, if it is not translated into the language of tactics. Is it correct that in order to destroy unemployment and misery it is first necessary to destroy capitalism? It is correct. But only the biggest blockhead can conclude from all this, that we do not have to fight this very day, with all of our forces, against the measures with whose aid capitalism is increasing the misery of the workers.
Can we expect that in the course of the next few months the Communist Party will defeat both the Social Democracy and fascism? No normal-thinking person who can read and calculate would risk such a contention. Politically, the question stands like this: Can we successfully repel fascism now, in the course of the next few months, that is, with the existence of a greatly weakened, but still (unfortunately) very strong Social Democracy? The Central Committee replies in the negative. In other words, Thälmann considers the victory of fascism inevitable.
Once Again: The Russian Experience
In order to express my thought as clearly and as concretely as possible I will come back once more to the experience with the Kornilov uprising. On August 26 (old style), 1917, General Kornilov led his Cossack corps and one irregular division against Petrograd. At the helm of power stood Kerensky, lackey of the bourgeoisie and three-quarters a confederate of Kornilov. Lenin was still in hiding because of the accusation that he was in the service of the Hohenzollerns. For the same accusation, I was at that time incarcerated in solitary confinement in Kresty Prison. How did the Bolsheviks proceed in this question? They also had a right to say: “In order to defeat the Korniloviad – we must first defeat the Kerenskiad.” They said this more than once, for it was correct and necessary for all the subsequent propaganda. But that was entirely inadequate for offering resistance to Kornilov on August 26, and on the days that followed, and for preventing him from butchering the Petrograd proletariat. That is why the Bolsheviks did not content themselves with a general appeal to the workers and soldiers to break with the conciliators and to support the red united front of the Bolsheviks. No, the Bolsheviks proposed the united front struggle to the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries and created together with them joint organizations of struggle. Was this correct or incorrect? Let Thälmann answer that. In order to show even more vividly how matters stood with the united front, I will cite the following incident: immediately upon my release after the trade unions had put up bail for me, I went directly to the Committee for National Defense, where I discussed and adopted decisions regarding the struggle against Kornilov with the Menshevik Dan and the Social Revolutionary Gotz [2], allies of Kerensky who had kept me in prison. Was this right or wrong? Let Remmele answer that.
Is Brüning the “Lesser Evil”?
The Social Democracy supports Brüning, votes for him, assumes responsibility for him before the masses-on the grounds that the Brüning government is the “lesser evil.” Die Rote Fahne attempts to ascribe the same view to me – on the grounds that I expressed myself against the stupid and shameful participation of the Communists in the Hitler referendum. But have the German Left Opposition and myself in particular demanded that the Communists vote for and support Brüning? We Marxists regard Brüning and Hitler, Braun included, as component parts of one and the same system. The question as to which one of them is the “lesser evil” has no sense, for the system we are fighting against needs all these elements. But these elements are momentarily involved in conflicts with one another and the party of the proletariat must take advantage of these conflicts in the interest of the revolution.
There are seven keys in the musical scale. The question as to which of these keys is “better” – do, re, or sol – is a nonsensical question. But the musician must know when to strike and what keys to strike. The abstract question of who is the lesser evil – Brüning or Hitler – is just as nonsensical. It is necessary to know which of these keys to strike. Is that clear? For the feeble-minded let us cite another example. When one of my enemies sets before me small daily portions of poison and the second, on the other hand, is about to shoot straight at me, then I will first knock the revolver out of the hand of my second enemy, for this gives me an opportunity to get rid of my first enemy. But that does not at all mean that the poison is a “lesser evil” in comparison with the revolver.
The misfortune consists precisely of the fact that the leaders of the German Communist Party have placed themselves on the same ground as the Social Democracy, only with inverted prefixes: the Social Democracy votes for Brüning, recognizing in him the lesser evil. The Communists, on the other hand, who refuse to trust either Braun or Brüning in any way (and that is absolutely the right way to act), go into the streets to support Hitler’s referendum, that is, the attempt of the fascists to overthrow Brüning. But by this they themselves have recognized in Hitler the lesser evil, for the victory of the referendum would not have brought the proletariat into power, but Hitler. To be sure, it is painful to have to argue over such ABC questions. It is sad, very sad indeed, when musicians like Remmele, instead of distinguishing between the keys, stamp with their boots on the keyboard.
It is Not a Question of the Workers Who Have Already Left the Social Democracy, But of Those Who Still Remain With It
The thousands upon thousands of Noskes, Welses, and Hilferdings prefer, in the last analysis, fascism to Communism. [3] But for that they must once and for all tear themselves loose from the workers. Today this is not yet the case. Today the Social Democracy as a whole, with all its internal antagonisms, is forced into sharp conflict with the fascists. It is our task to take advantage of this conflict and not to unite the antagonists against us.
The front must now be directed against fascism. And this common front of direct struggle against fascism, embracing the entire proletariat, must be utilized in the struggle against the Social Democracy, directed as a flank attack, but no less effective for all that.
It is necessary to show by deeds a complete readiness to make a bloc with the Social Democrats against the fascists in all cases in which they will accept a bloc. To say to the Social Democratic workers: “Cast your leaders aside and join our “nonparty” united front” means to add just one more hollow phrase to a thousand others. We must understand how to tear the workers away from their leaders in reality. But reality today is-the struggle against fascism. There are and doubtless will be Social Democratic workers who are prepared to fight hand in hand with the Communist workers against the fascists, regardless of the desires or even against the desires of the Social Democratic organizations. With such progressive elements it is obviously necessary to establish the closest possible contact. At the present time, however, they are not great in number. The German worker has been raised in the spirit of organization and of discipline. This has its strong as well as its weak sides. The overwhelming majority of the Social Democratic workers will fight against the fascists, but – for the present at least – only together with their organizations. This stage cannot be skipped. We must help the Social Democratic workers in action – in this new and extraordinary situation – to test the value of their organizations and leaders at this time, when it is a matter of life and death for the working class.
We Must Force the Social Docracy into a Bloc Against the Fascists
The trouble is that in the Central Committee of the Communist Party there are many frightened opportunists. They have heard that opportunism consists of a love for blocs, and that is why they are against blocs. They do not understand the difference between, let us say, a parliamentary agreement and an ever-so-modest agreement for struggle in a strike or in defense of workers’ printshops against fascist bands.
Election agreements, parliamentary compromises concluded between the revolutionary party and the Social Democracy serve, as a rule, to the advantage of the Social Democracy. Practical agreements for mass action, for purposes of struggle, are always useful to the revolutionary party. The Anglo-Russian Committee was an impermissible type of bloc of two leaderships on one common political platform, vague, deceptive, binding no one to any action at all. The maintenance of this bloc at the time of the British General Strike, when the General Council assumed the role of strikebreaker, signified, on the part of the Stalinists, a policy of betrayal. [4]
No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! March separately, but strike together! Agree only how to strike, whom to strike, and when to strike! Such an agreement can be concluded even with the devil himself, with his grandmother, and even with Noske and Grezesinsky. [5] On one condition, not to bind one’s hands.
It is necessary, without any delay, finally to elaborate a practical system of measures – not with the aim of merely “exposing” the Social Democracy (before the Communists), but with the aim of actual struggle against fascism. The question of factory defense organizations, of unhampered activity on the part of the factory councils, the inviolability of the workers’ organizations and institutions, the question of arsenals that may be seized by the fascists, the question of measures in the case of an emergency, that is, of the coordination of the actions of the Communist and the Social Democratic divisions in the struggle, etc., etc., must be dealt with in this program.
In the struggle against fascism, the factory councils occupy a tremendously important position. Here a particularly precise program of action is necessary. Every factory must become an anti-fascist bulwark, with its own commandants and its own battalions. It is necessary to have a map of the fascist barracks and all other fascist strongholds, in every city and in every district The fascists are attempting to encircle the revolutionary strongholds. The encirclers must be encircled. On this basis, an agreement with the Social Democratic and trade-union organizations is not only permissible, but a duty. To reject this for reasons of “principle” (in reality because of bureaucratic stupidity, or what is still worse, because of cowardice) is to give direct and immediate aid to fascism.
A practical program of agreements with the Social Democratic workers was proposed by us as far back as September 1930 (The Turn in the Comintern and the German Situation), that is, a year and a quarter ago. What has the leadership undertaken in this direction? Next to nothing. The Central Committee of the Communist Party has taken up everything except that which constitutes its direct task. How much valuable, irretrievable time has been lost! As a matter of fact, not much time is left. The program of action must be strictly practical, strictly objective, to the point, without any of those artificial “claims,” without any reservations, so that every average Social Democratic worker can say to himself. what the Communists propose is completely indispensable for the struggle against fascism. On this basis, we must pull the Social Democratic workers along with us by our example, and criticize their leaders who will inevitably serve as a check and a brake. Only in this way is victory possible.
A Good Quotation From Lenin
The present-day epigones, that is, the thoroughly bad disciples of Lenin, like to cover up their shortcomings on every occasion that offers itself with quotations – often entirely irrelevant. For Marxists, the question is not decided by a quotation, but by means of the correct method. If one is guided by correct methods, it is not hard also to find suitable quotations. After I had drawn the above analogy with the Kornilov insurrection, I said to myself: We can probably find a theoretical elucidation of our bloc with the conciliators in the struggle against Kornilov, in Lenin. And here is what I actually found in the second part of Volume XIV of the Russian edition, in a letter from Lenin to the Central Committee, written at the beginning of September 1917:
“Even at the present time, we are not duty-bound to support the Kerensky government That would be unprincipled. It is asked: then we are not to fight against Kornilov? Of course we are. But that is not one and the same thing. There is a limit to this; it is being transgressed by many Bolsheviks who fail into ‘conciliationism’ and allow themselves to be driven by the current of events.
“We shall fight, we are fighting against Kornilov, but we do not support Kerensky; we are uncovering his weaknesses. The distinction is rather delicate, but highly important and must not be forgotten.
“What does the change of our tactics consist of after the Kornilov insurrection?
“In this, that we are varying the forms of struggle against Kerensky. Without diminishing our hostility to him even by one single note, without taking back one word from what we have said against him, without giving up the task of overthrowing Kerensky, we say: we must calculate the moment. We will not overthrow Kerensky at present. We approach the question of the struggle against him differently: by explaining the weaknesses and vacillations of Kerensky to the people (who are fighting against Kornilov).”
We are proposing nothing different. Complete independence of the Communist organization and press, complete freedom of Communist criticism, the same for the Social Democracy and the trade unions. Only contemptible opportunists can allow the freedom of the Communist Party to be limited (for example, as in the entrance into the Kuomintang). We are not of their number.
No retraction of our criticism of the Social Democracy. No forgetting of all that has been. The whole historical reckoning, including the reckoning for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg [6], will be presented at the proper time, just as the Russian Bolsheviks finally presented a general reckoning to the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries for the baiting, calumny, imprisonment and murder of workers, soldiers, and peasants.
But we presented our general reckoning to them two months after we had utilized the partial reckoning between Kerensky and Kornilov, between the “democrats” and the fascists – in order to drive back the fascists all the more certainly. Only thanks to this circumstance were we victorious.
When the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany adopts the position expressed in the quotation from Lenin cited above, the entire approach to the Social Democratic masses and the trade-union organizations will change at once: instead of the articles and speeches which are convincing only to those people who are already convinced without them, the agitators will find a common language with new hundreds of thousands and millions of workers. The differentiation within the Social Democracy will proceed at an increased pace. The fascists will soon feel that their task does not at all consist merely of defeating Brüning, Braun, and Wels, but of taking up the open struggle against the whole working class. On this plane, a profound differentiation win inevitably be produced within fascism. Only by this road is victory possible.
But it is necessary to desire this victory. In the meantime, there are among the Communist officials not a few cowardly careerists and fakers whose little posts, whose incomes, and more than that, whose hides, are dear to them. These creatures are very much inclined to spout ultraradical phrases beneath which is concealed a wretched and contemptible fatalism. “Without a victory over the Social Democracy, we cannot battle against fascism!” say such terrible revolutionists, and for this reason ... they get their passports ready.
Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time left!
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Markin comment:
Blame it on Leon Trotsky, Blame it on Lenin. Blame it on the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Or, maybe, just blame it on my reaction to the residue from the bourgeois holiday celebrations. Today I am, in any case, in a mood for “high Trotskyism.” That is always a good way to readjust the political compass, and read some very literate political writing as well. With all due respect to black author James Baldwin and his great work, Another Country, that I have just finished reading Jimmy you have to share the stage today. Okay?
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Leon Trotsky
For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism
(December 1931)
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Written in exile in Turkey, December 8, 1931.
Bulletin of the Opposition, No.27, March 1932
Translation by Morris Lewitt in The Militant, January 9, 1932.
Trotsky’s own title was What’s Wrong With the Current Policy of the German Communist Party?
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Germany is now passing through one of those great historic hours upon which the fate of the German people, the fate of Europe, and in significant measure the fate of all humanity, will depend for decades. If you place a ball on top of a pyramid, the slightest impact can cause it to roll down either to the left or to the right. That is the situation approaching with every hour in Germany today. There are forces which would like the bail to roll down towards the right and break the back of the working class. There are forces which would like the ball to remain at the top. That is a utopia. The ball cannot remain at the top of the pyramid. The Communists want the ball to roll down toward the left and break the back of capitalism. But it is not enough to want; one must know how. Let us calmly reflect once more: is the policy carried on at present by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany correct or incorrect?
What Does Hitler Want?
The fascists are growing very rapidly. The Communists are also growing but much more slowly. The growth at the extreme poles shows that the ball cannot maintain itself at the top of the pyramid. The rapid growth of the fascists signifies the danger that the ball may roll down toward the right. Therein lies an enormous danger.
Hitler emphasizes that he is against a coup d’état. In order to strangle democracy once and for all, he wants to come to power by no other route than the democratic road. Can we seriously believe this?
Of course, if the fascists could figure on obtaining an absolute majority of the votes at the next elections in a peaceful way, then they would perhaps even prefer this road. In reality, however, this road is unthinkable for them. It is stupid to believe that the Nazis would grow uninterruptedly, as they do now, for an unlimited period of time. Sooner or later they will drain their social reservoir. Fascism has introduced into its own ranks such terrific contradictions, that the moment must come in which the flow ceases to replace the ebb. This moment can arrive long before the fascists have united about them even half of the votes. They will not be able to halt for they will have nothing more to look for here. They will be forced to resort to an overturn.
But even apart from all this, the fascists are cut off from the democratic road. The immense growth of the political contradictions in the country, the stark brigands’ agitation of the fascists, will inevitably lead to a situation in which the closer the fascists approach a majority, the more heated the atmosphere will become and the more extensive the unfolding of the conflicts and struggles will be. With this perspective, civil war is absolutely inevitable. Consequently, the question of the seizure of power by the fascists will not be decided by vote, but by civil war, which the fascists are preparing and provoking.
Can we assume even for one minute that Hitler and his counselors do not realize and foresee this? That would mean to consider them blockheads. There is no greater crime in politics than that of hoping for stupidities on the part of a strong enemy. But if Hitler is not unaware that the road to power leads through the most gruesome civil war, then it means that his speeches about the peaceful democratic road are only a cloak, that is, a stratagem. In that case, it is all the more necessary to keep one’s eyes open.
What Is Concealed Behind Hitler’s Stratagem?
His calculations are quite simple and obvious: he wants to lull his antagonists with the long-run perspective of the parliamentary growth of the Nazis in order to catch them napping and to deal them a deathblow at the right moment It is quite possible that Hitler’s courtesies to democratic parliamentarism may, moreover, help to set up some sort of coalition in the immediate future in which the fascists will obtain the most important posts and employ them in turn for their coup d’état. For it is entirely clear that the coalition, let us assume, between the Center and the fascists will not be a stage in the democratic solution of the question, but a step closer to the coup d’etat under conditions most favorable to the fascists.
We Must Plan According to the Shorter Perspective
All this means that even independently of the desires of the fascist general staff, the solution can intervene in the course Of the next few months, if not weeks. This circumstance is of tremendous importance in elaborating a correct policy. If we allow the fascists to seize power in two or three months, then the struggle against them next year will be much harder than in this. All revolutionary plans laid out for two, three, or five years in advance will prove to be only wretched and disgraceful twaddle, if the working class allows the fascists to gain power in the course of the next two, three, or five months. In the polity of revolutionary crises, the calculation of time is of just as decisive importance as it is in war operations.
Let us take another, more remote example for the clarification of our idea. Hugo Urbahns, who considers himself a “Left Communist” declares the German party bankrup , politically done for, and proposes to create a new party. If Urbahns were right, it would mean that the victory of the fascists is certain. For, in order to create a new party, years are required (and there has been nothing to prove that the party of Urbahns would in any sense be better than Thälmann’s party: when Urbahns was at the head of the party, there were by no means fewer mistakes).
Yes, should the fascists really conquer power, that would mean not only the physical destruction of the Communist Party, but veritable political bankruptcy for it. An ignominious defeat in a struggle against bands of human rubbish – would never be forgiven the Communist International and its German section by the many-millioned German proletariat. The seizure of power by the fascists would therefore most probably signify the necessity of creating a new revolutionary party, and in all likelihood also a new International. That would be a frightful historical catastrophe. But to assume today that all this is unavoidable can be done only by genuine liquidators, those who under the mantle of hollow phrases are really hastening to capitulate like cravens in the face of the struggle and without a struggle. With this conception we Bolshevik-Leninists, who are called “Trotskyists” by the Stalinists, have nothing in common.
We are unshakably convinced that the victory over the fascists is possible – not after their coming to power, not after five, ten, or twenty years of their rule, but now, under the given conditions, in the coming months and weeks.
Thälmann Considers the Victory of Fascism Inevitable
A correct policy is necessary in order to achieve victory. That is, we need a policy appropriate to the present situation, to the present relationship of forces, and not to the situation that may develop in one, two, or three years, when the question of power will already have been decided for a long time.
The whole misfortune lies in the fact that the policy of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party, in part consciously and in part unconsciously, proceeds from the recognition of the inevitability of a fascist victory. In fact, in the appeal for the “Red United Front” published on November 29, 1931, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany proceeds from the idea that it is impossible to defeat fascism without first defeating the Social Democracy. The same idea is repeated in all possible shades in Thälmann’s article. Is this idea correct? On the historical scale it is unconditionally correct. But that does not at all mean that with its aid, that is, by simple repetition, one can solve the questions of the day. An idea, correct from the point of view of revolutionary strategy as a whole, is converted into a lie and at that into a reactionary lie, if it is not translated into the language of tactics. Is it correct that in order to destroy unemployment and misery it is first necessary to destroy capitalism? It is correct. But only the biggest blockhead can conclude from all this, that we do not have to fight this very day, with all of our forces, against the measures with whose aid capitalism is increasing the misery of the workers.
Can we expect that in the course of the next few months the Communist Party will defeat both the Social Democracy and fascism? No normal-thinking person who can read and calculate would risk such a contention. Politically, the question stands like this: Can we successfully repel fascism now, in the course of the next few months, that is, with the existence of a greatly weakened, but still (unfortunately) very strong Social Democracy? The Central Committee replies in the negative. In other words, Thälmann considers the victory of fascism inevitable.
Once Again: The Russian Experience
In order to express my thought as clearly and as concretely as possible I will come back once more to the experience with the Kornilov uprising. On August 26 (old style), 1917, General Kornilov led his Cossack corps and one irregular division against Petrograd. At the helm of power stood Kerensky, lackey of the bourgeoisie and three-quarters a confederate of Kornilov. Lenin was still in hiding because of the accusation that he was in the service of the Hohenzollerns. For the same accusation, I was at that time incarcerated in solitary confinement in Kresty Prison. How did the Bolsheviks proceed in this question? They also had a right to say: “In order to defeat the Korniloviad – we must first defeat the Kerenskiad.” They said this more than once, for it was correct and necessary for all the subsequent propaganda. But that was entirely inadequate for offering resistance to Kornilov on August 26, and on the days that followed, and for preventing him from butchering the Petrograd proletariat. That is why the Bolsheviks did not content themselves with a general appeal to the workers and soldiers to break with the conciliators and to support the red united front of the Bolsheviks. No, the Bolsheviks proposed the united front struggle to the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries and created together with them joint organizations of struggle. Was this correct or incorrect? Let Thälmann answer that. In order to show even more vividly how matters stood with the united front, I will cite the following incident: immediately upon my release after the trade unions had put up bail for me, I went directly to the Committee for National Defense, where I discussed and adopted decisions regarding the struggle against Kornilov with the Menshevik Dan and the Social Revolutionary Gotz [2], allies of Kerensky who had kept me in prison. Was this right or wrong? Let Remmele answer that.
Is Brüning the “Lesser Evil”?
The Social Democracy supports Brüning, votes for him, assumes responsibility for him before the masses-on the grounds that the Brüning government is the “lesser evil.” Die Rote Fahne attempts to ascribe the same view to me – on the grounds that I expressed myself against the stupid and shameful participation of the Communists in the Hitler referendum. But have the German Left Opposition and myself in particular demanded that the Communists vote for and support Brüning? We Marxists regard Brüning and Hitler, Braun included, as component parts of one and the same system. The question as to which one of them is the “lesser evil” has no sense, for the system we are fighting against needs all these elements. But these elements are momentarily involved in conflicts with one another and the party of the proletariat must take advantage of these conflicts in the interest of the revolution.
There are seven keys in the musical scale. The question as to which of these keys is “better” – do, re, or sol – is a nonsensical question. But the musician must know when to strike and what keys to strike. The abstract question of who is the lesser evil – Brüning or Hitler – is just as nonsensical. It is necessary to know which of these keys to strike. Is that clear? For the feeble-minded let us cite another example. When one of my enemies sets before me small daily portions of poison and the second, on the other hand, is about to shoot straight at me, then I will first knock the revolver out of the hand of my second enemy, for this gives me an opportunity to get rid of my first enemy. But that does not at all mean that the poison is a “lesser evil” in comparison with the revolver.
The misfortune consists precisely of the fact that the leaders of the German Communist Party have placed themselves on the same ground as the Social Democracy, only with inverted prefixes: the Social Democracy votes for Brüning, recognizing in him the lesser evil. The Communists, on the other hand, who refuse to trust either Braun or Brüning in any way (and that is absolutely the right way to act), go into the streets to support Hitler’s referendum, that is, the attempt of the fascists to overthrow Brüning. But by this they themselves have recognized in Hitler the lesser evil, for the victory of the referendum would not have brought the proletariat into power, but Hitler. To be sure, it is painful to have to argue over such ABC questions. It is sad, very sad indeed, when musicians like Remmele, instead of distinguishing between the keys, stamp with their boots on the keyboard.
It is Not a Question of the Workers Who Have Already Left the Social Democracy, But of Those Who Still Remain With It
The thousands upon thousands of Noskes, Welses, and Hilferdings prefer, in the last analysis, fascism to Communism. [3] But for that they must once and for all tear themselves loose from the workers. Today this is not yet the case. Today the Social Democracy as a whole, with all its internal antagonisms, is forced into sharp conflict with the fascists. It is our task to take advantage of this conflict and not to unite the antagonists against us.
The front must now be directed against fascism. And this common front of direct struggle against fascism, embracing the entire proletariat, must be utilized in the struggle against the Social Democracy, directed as a flank attack, but no less effective for all that.
It is necessary to show by deeds a complete readiness to make a bloc with the Social Democrats against the fascists in all cases in which they will accept a bloc. To say to the Social Democratic workers: “Cast your leaders aside and join our “nonparty” united front” means to add just one more hollow phrase to a thousand others. We must understand how to tear the workers away from their leaders in reality. But reality today is-the struggle against fascism. There are and doubtless will be Social Democratic workers who are prepared to fight hand in hand with the Communist workers against the fascists, regardless of the desires or even against the desires of the Social Democratic organizations. With such progressive elements it is obviously necessary to establish the closest possible contact. At the present time, however, they are not great in number. The German worker has been raised in the spirit of organization and of discipline. This has its strong as well as its weak sides. The overwhelming majority of the Social Democratic workers will fight against the fascists, but – for the present at least – only together with their organizations. This stage cannot be skipped. We must help the Social Democratic workers in action – in this new and extraordinary situation – to test the value of their organizations and leaders at this time, when it is a matter of life and death for the working class.
We Must Force the Social Docracy into a Bloc Against the Fascists
The trouble is that in the Central Committee of the Communist Party there are many frightened opportunists. They have heard that opportunism consists of a love for blocs, and that is why they are against blocs. They do not understand the difference between, let us say, a parliamentary agreement and an ever-so-modest agreement for struggle in a strike or in defense of workers’ printshops against fascist bands.
Election agreements, parliamentary compromises concluded between the revolutionary party and the Social Democracy serve, as a rule, to the advantage of the Social Democracy. Practical agreements for mass action, for purposes of struggle, are always useful to the revolutionary party. The Anglo-Russian Committee was an impermissible type of bloc of two leaderships on one common political platform, vague, deceptive, binding no one to any action at all. The maintenance of this bloc at the time of the British General Strike, when the General Council assumed the role of strikebreaker, signified, on the part of the Stalinists, a policy of betrayal. [4]
No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! March separately, but strike together! Agree only how to strike, whom to strike, and when to strike! Such an agreement can be concluded even with the devil himself, with his grandmother, and even with Noske and Grezesinsky. [5] On one condition, not to bind one’s hands.
It is necessary, without any delay, finally to elaborate a practical system of measures – not with the aim of merely “exposing” the Social Democracy (before the Communists), but with the aim of actual struggle against fascism. The question of factory defense organizations, of unhampered activity on the part of the factory councils, the inviolability of the workers’ organizations and institutions, the question of arsenals that may be seized by the fascists, the question of measures in the case of an emergency, that is, of the coordination of the actions of the Communist and the Social Democratic divisions in the struggle, etc., etc., must be dealt with in this program.
In the struggle against fascism, the factory councils occupy a tremendously important position. Here a particularly precise program of action is necessary. Every factory must become an anti-fascist bulwark, with its own commandants and its own battalions. It is necessary to have a map of the fascist barracks and all other fascist strongholds, in every city and in every district The fascists are attempting to encircle the revolutionary strongholds. The encirclers must be encircled. On this basis, an agreement with the Social Democratic and trade-union organizations is not only permissible, but a duty. To reject this for reasons of “principle” (in reality because of bureaucratic stupidity, or what is still worse, because of cowardice) is to give direct and immediate aid to fascism.
A practical program of agreements with the Social Democratic workers was proposed by us as far back as September 1930 (The Turn in the Comintern and the German Situation), that is, a year and a quarter ago. What has the leadership undertaken in this direction? Next to nothing. The Central Committee of the Communist Party has taken up everything except that which constitutes its direct task. How much valuable, irretrievable time has been lost! As a matter of fact, not much time is left. The program of action must be strictly practical, strictly objective, to the point, without any of those artificial “claims,” without any reservations, so that every average Social Democratic worker can say to himself. what the Communists propose is completely indispensable for the struggle against fascism. On this basis, we must pull the Social Democratic workers along with us by our example, and criticize their leaders who will inevitably serve as a check and a brake. Only in this way is victory possible.
A Good Quotation From Lenin
The present-day epigones, that is, the thoroughly bad disciples of Lenin, like to cover up their shortcomings on every occasion that offers itself with quotations – often entirely irrelevant. For Marxists, the question is not decided by a quotation, but by means of the correct method. If one is guided by correct methods, it is not hard also to find suitable quotations. After I had drawn the above analogy with the Kornilov insurrection, I said to myself: We can probably find a theoretical elucidation of our bloc with the conciliators in the struggle against Kornilov, in Lenin. And here is what I actually found in the second part of Volume XIV of the Russian edition, in a letter from Lenin to the Central Committee, written at the beginning of September 1917:
“Even at the present time, we are not duty-bound to support the Kerensky government That would be unprincipled. It is asked: then we are not to fight against Kornilov? Of course we are. But that is not one and the same thing. There is a limit to this; it is being transgressed by many Bolsheviks who fail into ‘conciliationism’ and allow themselves to be driven by the current of events.
“We shall fight, we are fighting against Kornilov, but we do not support Kerensky; we are uncovering his weaknesses. The distinction is rather delicate, but highly important and must not be forgotten.
“What does the change of our tactics consist of after the Kornilov insurrection?
“In this, that we are varying the forms of struggle against Kerensky. Without diminishing our hostility to him even by one single note, without taking back one word from what we have said against him, without giving up the task of overthrowing Kerensky, we say: we must calculate the moment. We will not overthrow Kerensky at present. We approach the question of the struggle against him differently: by explaining the weaknesses and vacillations of Kerensky to the people (who are fighting against Kornilov).”
We are proposing nothing different. Complete independence of the Communist organization and press, complete freedom of Communist criticism, the same for the Social Democracy and the trade unions. Only contemptible opportunists can allow the freedom of the Communist Party to be limited (for example, as in the entrance into the Kuomintang). We are not of their number.
No retraction of our criticism of the Social Democracy. No forgetting of all that has been. The whole historical reckoning, including the reckoning for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg [6], will be presented at the proper time, just as the Russian Bolsheviks finally presented a general reckoning to the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries for the baiting, calumny, imprisonment and murder of workers, soldiers, and peasants.
But we presented our general reckoning to them two months after we had utilized the partial reckoning between Kerensky and Kornilov, between the “democrats” and the fascists – in order to drive back the fascists all the more certainly. Only thanks to this circumstance were we victorious.
When the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany adopts the position expressed in the quotation from Lenin cited above, the entire approach to the Social Democratic masses and the trade-union organizations will change at once: instead of the articles and speeches which are convincing only to those people who are already convinced without them, the agitators will find a common language with new hundreds of thousands and millions of workers. The differentiation within the Social Democracy will proceed at an increased pace. The fascists will soon feel that their task does not at all consist merely of defeating Brüning, Braun, and Wels, but of taking up the open struggle against the whole working class. On this plane, a profound differentiation win inevitably be produced within fascism. Only by this road is victory possible.
But it is necessary to desire this victory. In the meantime, there are among the Communist officials not a few cowardly careerists and fakers whose little posts, whose incomes, and more than that, whose hides, are dear to them. These creatures are very much inclined to spout ultraradical phrases beneath which is concealed a wretched and contemptible fatalism. “Without a victory over the Social Democracy, we cannot battle against fascism!” say such terrible revolutionists, and for this reason ... they get their passports ready.
Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time left!
**********
For The Folkies From Muskogee And Elsewhere- The Bob Feldman Music Blog On "My Space"-Richard Farina Is Gone
Click on the headline to link to the Bob Feldman Music Blog( for lack of a better name) on My Space.
Markin comment:
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
Markin comment:
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-The Civil War in the United States
Click on the headline to link to the Marx-Engels Internet Archives.
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
*************
Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1861
The Civil War in the United States
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: Late October, 1861;
Source: Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 19;
Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964;
First Published: Die Presse No. 306, November 7, 1861;
Online Version: Marxists.org 1999;
Transcription: Bob Schwarz and Tim Delaney;
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Let him go, he is not worth thine ire!” Again and again English statesmanship cries - recently through the mouth of Lord John Russell-to the North of the United States this advice of Leporello to Don Juan's deserted love. If the North lets the South go, it then frees itself from any admixture of slavery, from its historical original sin, and creates the basis of a new and higher development.
In reality, if North and South formed two autonomous countries, like, for example, England and Hanover, their separation would be no more difficult than was the separation of England and Hanover. "The South," however, is neither a territory closely sealed off from the North geographically, nor a moral unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan.
The advice of an amicable separation presupposes that the Southern Confederacy, although it assumed the offensive in the Civil War, at least wages it for defensive purposes. It is believed that the issue for the slaveholders' party is merely one of uniting the territories it has hitherto dominated into an autonomous group of states and withdrawing them from the supreme authority of the Union. Nothing could be more false: “The South needs its entire territory. It will and must have it.” With this battle-cry the secessionists fell upon Kentucky. By their “entire territory” they understand in the first place all the so-called border states-Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas. Besides, they lay claim to the entire territory south of the line that runs from the north-west corner of Missouri to the Pacific Ocean. What the slaveholders, therefore, call the South, embraces more than three-quarters of the territory hitherto comprised by the Union. A large part of the territory thus claimed is still in the possession of the Union and would first have to be conquered from it. None of the so-called border states, however, not even those in the possession of the Confederacy, were ever actual slave states. Rather, they constitute the area of the United States in which the system of slavery and the system of free labour exist side by side and contend for mastery, the actual field of battle between South and North, between slavery and freedom. The war of the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a war of defence, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery.
The chain of mountains that begins in Alabama and stretches northwards to the Hudson River-the spinal column, as it were, of the United States-cuts the so-called South into three parts. The mountainous country formed by the Allegheny Mountains with their two parallel ranges, the Cumberland Range to the west and the Blue Mountains to the east, divides wedge-like the lowlands along the western coast of the Atlantic Ocean from the lowlands in the southern valleys of the Mississippi. The two lowlands separated by the mountainous country, with their vast rice swamps and far-flung cotton plantations, are the actual area of slavery. The long wedge of mountainous country driven into the heart of slavery, with its correspondingly clear atmosphere, an invigorating climate and a soil rich in coal, salt, limestone, iron ore, gold, in short, every raw material necessary for a many-sided industrial development, is already for the most part free country. In accordance with its physical constitution, the soil here can only be cultivated with success by free small farmers. Here the slave system vegetates only sporadically and has never struck root. In the largest part of the so-called border states, the dwellers of these highlands comprise the core of the free population, which sides with the Northern party if only for the sake of self-preservation.
Let us consider the contested territory in detail.
Delaware, the most north-eastern of the border states, is factually and morally in the possession of the Union. All the attempts of the secessionists at forming even one faction favourable to them have since the beginning of the war suffered shipwreck on the unanimity of the population. The slave element of this state has long been in process of dying out. From 1850 to 1860 alone the number of slaves diminished by half, so that with a total population of 112,218 Delaware now numbers only 1,798 slaves. Nevertheless, Delaware is demanded by the Southern Confederacy and would in fact be militarily untenable for the North as soon as the South possessed itself of Maryland.
In Maryland itself the above-mentioned conflict between highlands and lowlands takes place. Out of a total population of 687,034 there are here 87,188 slaves. That the overwhelming majority of the population is on the side of the Union has again been strikingly proved by the recent general elections to the Congress in Washington. The army of 30,000 Union troops, which holds Maryland at the moment, is intended not only to serve the army on the Potomac as a reserve, but, in particular, also to hold in check the rebellious slaveowners in the interior of the country. For here we observe a phenomenon similar to what we see in other border states where the great mass of the people stands for the North and a numerically insignificant slaveholders' party for the South. What it lacks in numbers, the slaveholders' party makes up in the means of power that many years' possession of all state offices, hereditary engagement in political intrigue and concentration of great wealth in few hands have secured for it.
Virginia now forms the great cantonment where the main army of secession and the main army of the Union confront each other. In the north-west highlands of Virginia the number of slaves is 15,000, whilst the twenty times as large free population consists mostly of free farmers. The eastern lowlands of Virginia, on the other hand, count well-nigh half a million slaves. Raising Negroes and the sale of the Negroes to the Southern states form the principal source of income of these lowlands. As soon as the ringleaders of the lowlands had carried through the secession ordinance by intrigues in the state legislature at Richmond and had in all haste opened the gates of Virginia to the Southern army, north-west Virginia seceded from the secession, formed a new state, and under the banner of the Union now defends its territory arms in hand against the Southern invaders.
Tennessee, with 1,109,847 inhabitants, 275,784 of whom are slaves, finds itself in the hands of the Southern Confederacy, which has placed the whole state under martial law and under a system of proscription which recalls the days of the Roman Triumvirates. When in the winter of 1861 the slaveholders proposed a general convention of the people which was to vote for secession or non-secession, the majority of the people rejected any convention, in order to remove any pretext for the secession movement. Later, when Tennessee was already militarily over-run and subjected to a system of terror by the Southern Confederacy, more than a third of the voters at the elections still declared themselves for the Union. Here, as in most of the border states, the mountainous country, east Tennessee, forms the real centre of resistance to the slaveholders' party. On June 17, 1861, a General Convention of the people of east Tennessee assembled in Greenville, declared itself for the Union, deputed the former governor of the state, Andrew Johnson, one of the most ardent Unionists, to the Senate in Washington and published a “declaration of grievances,” which lays bare all the means of deception, intrigue and terror by which Tennessee was “voted out” of the Union. Since then the secessionists have held east Tennessee in check by force of arms.
Similar relationships to those in West Virginia and east Tennessee are found in the north of Alabama, in north-west Georgia and in the north of North Carolina.
Further west, in the border state of Missouri, with 1,173,317 inhabitants and 114,965 slaves-the latter mostly concentrated in the north-west of the state-the people's convention of August 1861 decided for the Union. Jackson, the governor of the state and the tool of the slaveholders' party, rebelled against the legislature of Missouri, was outlawed and took the lead of the armed hordes that fell upon Missouri from Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee, in order to bring it to its knees before the Confederacy and sever its bond with the Union by the sword. Next to Virginia, Missouri is at the present moment the main theatre of the Civil War.
New Mexico-not a state, but merely a Territory, into which twenty-five slaves were imported during Buchanan's presidency in order to send a slave constitution after them from Washington-had no craving for the South, as even the latter concedes. But the South has a craving for New Mexico and accordingly spewed an armed band of adventurers from Texas over the border. New Mexico has implored the protection of the Union government against these liberators.
It will have been observed that we lay particular emphasis on the numerical proportion of slaves to free men in the individual border states. This proportion is in fact decisive. It is the thermometer with which the vital fire of the slave system must be measured. The soul of the whole secession movement is South Carolina. It has 402,541 slaves and 301,271 free men. Mississippi, which has given the Southern Confederacy its dictator, Jefferson Davis, comes second. It has 436,696 slaves and 354,699 free men. Alabama comes third, with 435,132 slaves and 529,164 free men.
The last of the contested border states, which we have still to mention, is Kentucky. Its recent history is particularly characteristic of the policy of the Southern Confederacy. Among its 1,135,713 inhabitants Kentucky has 225,490 slaves. In three successive general elections by the people-in the winter of 1861, when elections to a congress of the border states were held; in June 1861, when elections to the Congress in Washington took place; finally, in August 1861, in elections to the legislature of the State of Kentucky-an ever increasing majority decided for the Union. On the other hand, Magoffin, the Governor of Kentucky, and all the high officials of the state are fanatical supporters of the slaveholders' party, as is Breckinridge, Kentucky's representative in the Senate in Washington, Vice-President of the United States under Buchanan, and candidate of the slaveholders' party in the presidential election of 1860. Too weak to win over Kentucky for secession, the influence of the slaveholders' party was strong enough to make this state amenable to a declaration of neutrality on the outbreak of war. The Confederacy recognised the neutrality as long as it served its purposes, as long as the Confederacy itself was engaged in crushing the resistance in east Tennessee. Hardly was this end attained when it knocked at the gates of Kentucky with the butt of a gun to the cry of: “The South needs its entire territory. It will and must have it!"
From the south-west and south-east its corps of free-booters simultaneously invaded the “neutral” state. Kentucky awoke from its dream of neutrality, its legislature openly took sides with the Union, surrounded the traitorous Governor with a committee of public safety, called the people to arms, outlawed Breckinridge and ordered the secessionists to evacuate the invaded territory immediately. This was the signal for war. An army of the Southern Confederacy is moving on Louisville, while volunteers from Illinois, Indiana and Ohio flock hither to save Kentucky from the armed missionaries of slavery.
The attempts of the Confederacy to annex Missouri and Kentucky, for example, against the will of these states, prove the hollowness of the pretext that it is fighting for the rights of the individual states against the encroachments of the Union. On the individual states that it considers to belong to the “South” it confers, to be sure, the right to separate from the Union, but by no means the right to remain in the Union.
Even the actual slave states, however much external war, internal military dictatorship and slavery give them everywhere for the moment a semblance of harmony, are nevertheless not without oppositional elements. A striking example is Texas, with 180,388 slaves out of 601,039 inhabitants. The law of 1845, by virtue of which Texas became a State of the Union as a slave state, entitled it to form not merely one, but five states out of its territory. The South would thereby have gained ten new votes instead of two in the American Senate, and an increase in the number of its votes in the Senate was a major object of its policy at that time. From 1845 to 1860, however, the slaveholders found it impracticable to cut up Texas, where the German population plays an important part, into even two states without giving the party of free labour the upper hand over the party of slavery in the second state. This furnishes the best proof of the strength of the opposition to the slaveholding oligarchy in Texas itself.
Georgia is the largest and most populous of the slave states. It has 462,230 slaves out of a total of 1,057,327 inhabitants, therefore nearly half the population. Nevertheless, the slaveholders' party has not so far succeeded in getting the Constitution imposed on the South at Montgomery sanctioned by a general vote of the people in Georgia.
In the State Convention of Louisiana, meeting on March 21, 1861, at New Orleans, Roselius, the political veteran of the state, declared:
“The Montgomery Constitution is not a constitution, but a conspiracy. It does not inaugurate a government of the people, but a detestable and unrestricted oligarchy. The people were not permitted to have any say in this matter. The Convention of Montgomery has dug the grave of political liberty, and now we are summoned to attend its burial."
Indeed, the oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders utilised the Congress of Montgomery not only to proclaim the separation of the South from the North. It exploited it at the same time to reshape the internal constitutions of the slave states, to subjugate completely the section of the white population that had still preserved some independence under the protection and the democratic Constitution of the Union. Between 1856 to 1860 the political spokesmen, jurists, moralists and theologians of the slaveholders' party had already sought to prove, not so much that Negro slavery is justified, but rather that colour is a matter of indifference and the working class is everywhere born to slavery.
One sees, therefore, that the war of the Southern Confederacy is in the true sense of the word a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery. The greater part of the border states and Territories are still in the possession of the Union, whose side they have taken first through the ballot-box and then with arms. The Confederacy, however, counts them for the "South" and seeks to conquer them from the Union. In the border states which the Confederacy has occupied for the time being, it is holding the relatively free highlands in check by martial law. Within the actual slave states themselves it is supplanting the hitherto existing democracy by the unrestricted oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders.
Were it to relinquish its plans of conquest, the Southern Confederacy would relinquish its capacity to live and the purpose of secession. Secession, indeed, only took place because within the Union the transformation of the border states and Territories into slave states seemed no longer attainable. On the other hand, were it to cede the contested territory peacefully to the Southern Confederacy, the North would surrender to the slave republic more than three-quarters of the entire territory of the United States. The North would lose the whole of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, except the narrow strip from Penobscot Bay to Delaware Bay, and would even cut itself off from the Pacific Ocean. Missouri, Kansas, New Mexico, Arkansas and Texas would draw California after them. Incapable of wresting the mouth of the Mississippi from the hands of the strong, hostile slave republic in the South, the great agricultural states in the basin between the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghenies, in the valleys of the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Ohio, would be compelled by their economic interests to secede from the North and enter the Southern Confederacy. These north-western states, in their turn, would draw after them into the same whirlpool of secession all the Northern states lying further east, with perhaps the exception of the states of New England.
What would in fact take place would be not a dissolution of the Union, but a reorganisation of it, a reorganisation on the basis of slavery, under the recognised control of the slaveholding oligarchy. The plan of such a reorganisation has been openly proclaimed by the principal speakers of the South at the Congress of Montgomery and explains the paragraph of the new Constitution which leaves it open to every state of the old Union to join the new Confederacy. The slave system would infect the whole Union. In the Northern states, where Negro slavery is in practice unworkable, the white working class would gradually be forced down to the level of helotry. This would fully accord with the loudly proclaimed principle that only certain races are capable of freedom, and as the actual labour is the lot of the Negro in the South, so in the North it is the lot of the German and the Irishman, or their direct descendants.
The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.
If the border states, the disputed areas in which the two systems have hitherto contended for domination, are a thorn in the flesh of the South, there can, on the other hand, be no mistake that, in the course of the war up to now, they have constituted the chief weakness of the North. One section of the slaveholders in these districts simulated loyalty to the North at the bidding of the conspirators in the South; another section found that in fact it was in accordance with their real interests and traditional ideas to go with the Union. Both sections have equally crippled the North. Anxiety to keep the “loyal” slaveholders of the border states in good humour, fear of throwing them into the arms of secession, in a word, tender regard for the interests, prejudices and sensibilities of these ambiguous allies, has smitten the Union government with incurable weakness since the beginning of the war, driven it to half measures, forced it to dissemble away the principle of the war and to spare the foe's most vulnerable spot, the root of the evil-slavery itself.
When, only recently, Lincoln pusillanimously revoked Frémont's Missouri proclamation on the emancipation of Negroes belonging to the rebels, this was done solely out of regard for the loud protest of the “loyal” slaveholders of Kentucky. However, a turning point has already been reached. With Kentucky, the last border state has been pushed into the series of battlefields between South and North. With the real war for the border states in the border states themselves, the question of winning or losing them is withdrawn from the sphere of diplomatic and parliamentary discussions. One section of slaveholders will throw off the mask of loyalty; the other will content itself with the prospect of a financial compensation such as Great Britain gave the West Indian planters. Events themselves drive to the promulgation of the decisive slogan-emancipation of the slaves.
That even the most hardened Democrats and diplomats of the North feel themselves drawn to this point, is shown by some announcements of very recent date. In an open letter, General Cass, Secretary of State for War under Buchanan and hitherto one of the most ardent allies of the South, declares emancipation of the slaves the conditio sine qua non of the Union's salvation. In his last Review for October, Dr. Brownson, the spokesman of the Catholic party of the North, on his own admission the most energetic adversary of the emancipation movement from 1836 to 1860, publishes an article for Abolition.
“If we have opposed Abolition heretofore,” he says among other things, “because we would preserve the Union, we must a fortiori now oppose slavery whenever, in our judgment, its continuance becomes incompatible with the maintenance of the Union, or of the nation as a free republican state."
Finally, the World, a New York organ of the diplomats of the Washington Cabinet, concludes one of its latest blustering articles against the Abolitionists with the words:
“On the day when it shall be decided that either slavery or the Union must go down, on that day sentence of death is passed on slavery. If the North cannot triumph without emancipation, it will triumph with emancipation."
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
*************
Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1861
The Civil War in the United States
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: Late October, 1861;
Source: Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 19;
Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964;
First Published: Die Presse No. 306, November 7, 1861;
Online Version: Marxists.org 1999;
Transcription: Bob Schwarz and Tim Delaney;
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Let him go, he is not worth thine ire!” Again and again English statesmanship cries - recently through the mouth of Lord John Russell-to the North of the United States this advice of Leporello to Don Juan's deserted love. If the North lets the South go, it then frees itself from any admixture of slavery, from its historical original sin, and creates the basis of a new and higher development.
In reality, if North and South formed two autonomous countries, like, for example, England and Hanover, their separation would be no more difficult than was the separation of England and Hanover. "The South," however, is neither a territory closely sealed off from the North geographically, nor a moral unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan.
The advice of an amicable separation presupposes that the Southern Confederacy, although it assumed the offensive in the Civil War, at least wages it for defensive purposes. It is believed that the issue for the slaveholders' party is merely one of uniting the territories it has hitherto dominated into an autonomous group of states and withdrawing them from the supreme authority of the Union. Nothing could be more false: “The South needs its entire territory. It will and must have it.” With this battle-cry the secessionists fell upon Kentucky. By their “entire territory” they understand in the first place all the so-called border states-Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas. Besides, they lay claim to the entire territory south of the line that runs from the north-west corner of Missouri to the Pacific Ocean. What the slaveholders, therefore, call the South, embraces more than three-quarters of the territory hitherto comprised by the Union. A large part of the territory thus claimed is still in the possession of the Union and would first have to be conquered from it. None of the so-called border states, however, not even those in the possession of the Confederacy, were ever actual slave states. Rather, they constitute the area of the United States in which the system of slavery and the system of free labour exist side by side and contend for mastery, the actual field of battle between South and North, between slavery and freedom. The war of the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a war of defence, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery.
The chain of mountains that begins in Alabama and stretches northwards to the Hudson River-the spinal column, as it were, of the United States-cuts the so-called South into three parts. The mountainous country formed by the Allegheny Mountains with their two parallel ranges, the Cumberland Range to the west and the Blue Mountains to the east, divides wedge-like the lowlands along the western coast of the Atlantic Ocean from the lowlands in the southern valleys of the Mississippi. The two lowlands separated by the mountainous country, with their vast rice swamps and far-flung cotton plantations, are the actual area of slavery. The long wedge of mountainous country driven into the heart of slavery, with its correspondingly clear atmosphere, an invigorating climate and a soil rich in coal, salt, limestone, iron ore, gold, in short, every raw material necessary for a many-sided industrial development, is already for the most part free country. In accordance with its physical constitution, the soil here can only be cultivated with success by free small farmers. Here the slave system vegetates only sporadically and has never struck root. In the largest part of the so-called border states, the dwellers of these highlands comprise the core of the free population, which sides with the Northern party if only for the sake of self-preservation.
Let us consider the contested territory in detail.
Delaware, the most north-eastern of the border states, is factually and morally in the possession of the Union. All the attempts of the secessionists at forming even one faction favourable to them have since the beginning of the war suffered shipwreck on the unanimity of the population. The slave element of this state has long been in process of dying out. From 1850 to 1860 alone the number of slaves diminished by half, so that with a total population of 112,218 Delaware now numbers only 1,798 slaves. Nevertheless, Delaware is demanded by the Southern Confederacy and would in fact be militarily untenable for the North as soon as the South possessed itself of Maryland.
In Maryland itself the above-mentioned conflict between highlands and lowlands takes place. Out of a total population of 687,034 there are here 87,188 slaves. That the overwhelming majority of the population is on the side of the Union has again been strikingly proved by the recent general elections to the Congress in Washington. The army of 30,000 Union troops, which holds Maryland at the moment, is intended not only to serve the army on the Potomac as a reserve, but, in particular, also to hold in check the rebellious slaveowners in the interior of the country. For here we observe a phenomenon similar to what we see in other border states where the great mass of the people stands for the North and a numerically insignificant slaveholders' party for the South. What it lacks in numbers, the slaveholders' party makes up in the means of power that many years' possession of all state offices, hereditary engagement in political intrigue and concentration of great wealth in few hands have secured for it.
Virginia now forms the great cantonment where the main army of secession and the main army of the Union confront each other. In the north-west highlands of Virginia the number of slaves is 15,000, whilst the twenty times as large free population consists mostly of free farmers. The eastern lowlands of Virginia, on the other hand, count well-nigh half a million slaves. Raising Negroes and the sale of the Negroes to the Southern states form the principal source of income of these lowlands. As soon as the ringleaders of the lowlands had carried through the secession ordinance by intrigues in the state legislature at Richmond and had in all haste opened the gates of Virginia to the Southern army, north-west Virginia seceded from the secession, formed a new state, and under the banner of the Union now defends its territory arms in hand against the Southern invaders.
Tennessee, with 1,109,847 inhabitants, 275,784 of whom are slaves, finds itself in the hands of the Southern Confederacy, which has placed the whole state under martial law and under a system of proscription which recalls the days of the Roman Triumvirates. When in the winter of 1861 the slaveholders proposed a general convention of the people which was to vote for secession or non-secession, the majority of the people rejected any convention, in order to remove any pretext for the secession movement. Later, when Tennessee was already militarily over-run and subjected to a system of terror by the Southern Confederacy, more than a third of the voters at the elections still declared themselves for the Union. Here, as in most of the border states, the mountainous country, east Tennessee, forms the real centre of resistance to the slaveholders' party. On June 17, 1861, a General Convention of the people of east Tennessee assembled in Greenville, declared itself for the Union, deputed the former governor of the state, Andrew Johnson, one of the most ardent Unionists, to the Senate in Washington and published a “declaration of grievances,” which lays bare all the means of deception, intrigue and terror by which Tennessee was “voted out” of the Union. Since then the secessionists have held east Tennessee in check by force of arms.
Similar relationships to those in West Virginia and east Tennessee are found in the north of Alabama, in north-west Georgia and in the north of North Carolina.
Further west, in the border state of Missouri, with 1,173,317 inhabitants and 114,965 slaves-the latter mostly concentrated in the north-west of the state-the people's convention of August 1861 decided for the Union. Jackson, the governor of the state and the tool of the slaveholders' party, rebelled against the legislature of Missouri, was outlawed and took the lead of the armed hordes that fell upon Missouri from Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee, in order to bring it to its knees before the Confederacy and sever its bond with the Union by the sword. Next to Virginia, Missouri is at the present moment the main theatre of the Civil War.
New Mexico-not a state, but merely a Territory, into which twenty-five slaves were imported during Buchanan's presidency in order to send a slave constitution after them from Washington-had no craving for the South, as even the latter concedes. But the South has a craving for New Mexico and accordingly spewed an armed band of adventurers from Texas over the border. New Mexico has implored the protection of the Union government against these liberators.
It will have been observed that we lay particular emphasis on the numerical proportion of slaves to free men in the individual border states. This proportion is in fact decisive. It is the thermometer with which the vital fire of the slave system must be measured. The soul of the whole secession movement is South Carolina. It has 402,541 slaves and 301,271 free men. Mississippi, which has given the Southern Confederacy its dictator, Jefferson Davis, comes second. It has 436,696 slaves and 354,699 free men. Alabama comes third, with 435,132 slaves and 529,164 free men.
The last of the contested border states, which we have still to mention, is Kentucky. Its recent history is particularly characteristic of the policy of the Southern Confederacy. Among its 1,135,713 inhabitants Kentucky has 225,490 slaves. In three successive general elections by the people-in the winter of 1861, when elections to a congress of the border states were held; in June 1861, when elections to the Congress in Washington took place; finally, in August 1861, in elections to the legislature of the State of Kentucky-an ever increasing majority decided for the Union. On the other hand, Magoffin, the Governor of Kentucky, and all the high officials of the state are fanatical supporters of the slaveholders' party, as is Breckinridge, Kentucky's representative in the Senate in Washington, Vice-President of the United States under Buchanan, and candidate of the slaveholders' party in the presidential election of 1860. Too weak to win over Kentucky for secession, the influence of the slaveholders' party was strong enough to make this state amenable to a declaration of neutrality on the outbreak of war. The Confederacy recognised the neutrality as long as it served its purposes, as long as the Confederacy itself was engaged in crushing the resistance in east Tennessee. Hardly was this end attained when it knocked at the gates of Kentucky with the butt of a gun to the cry of: “The South needs its entire territory. It will and must have it!"
From the south-west and south-east its corps of free-booters simultaneously invaded the “neutral” state. Kentucky awoke from its dream of neutrality, its legislature openly took sides with the Union, surrounded the traitorous Governor with a committee of public safety, called the people to arms, outlawed Breckinridge and ordered the secessionists to evacuate the invaded territory immediately. This was the signal for war. An army of the Southern Confederacy is moving on Louisville, while volunteers from Illinois, Indiana and Ohio flock hither to save Kentucky from the armed missionaries of slavery.
The attempts of the Confederacy to annex Missouri and Kentucky, for example, against the will of these states, prove the hollowness of the pretext that it is fighting for the rights of the individual states against the encroachments of the Union. On the individual states that it considers to belong to the “South” it confers, to be sure, the right to separate from the Union, but by no means the right to remain in the Union.
Even the actual slave states, however much external war, internal military dictatorship and slavery give them everywhere for the moment a semblance of harmony, are nevertheless not without oppositional elements. A striking example is Texas, with 180,388 slaves out of 601,039 inhabitants. The law of 1845, by virtue of which Texas became a State of the Union as a slave state, entitled it to form not merely one, but five states out of its territory. The South would thereby have gained ten new votes instead of two in the American Senate, and an increase in the number of its votes in the Senate was a major object of its policy at that time. From 1845 to 1860, however, the slaveholders found it impracticable to cut up Texas, where the German population plays an important part, into even two states without giving the party of free labour the upper hand over the party of slavery in the second state. This furnishes the best proof of the strength of the opposition to the slaveholding oligarchy in Texas itself.
Georgia is the largest and most populous of the slave states. It has 462,230 slaves out of a total of 1,057,327 inhabitants, therefore nearly half the population. Nevertheless, the slaveholders' party has not so far succeeded in getting the Constitution imposed on the South at Montgomery sanctioned by a general vote of the people in Georgia.
In the State Convention of Louisiana, meeting on March 21, 1861, at New Orleans, Roselius, the political veteran of the state, declared:
“The Montgomery Constitution is not a constitution, but a conspiracy. It does not inaugurate a government of the people, but a detestable and unrestricted oligarchy. The people were not permitted to have any say in this matter. The Convention of Montgomery has dug the grave of political liberty, and now we are summoned to attend its burial."
Indeed, the oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders utilised the Congress of Montgomery not only to proclaim the separation of the South from the North. It exploited it at the same time to reshape the internal constitutions of the slave states, to subjugate completely the section of the white population that had still preserved some independence under the protection and the democratic Constitution of the Union. Between 1856 to 1860 the political spokesmen, jurists, moralists and theologians of the slaveholders' party had already sought to prove, not so much that Negro slavery is justified, but rather that colour is a matter of indifference and the working class is everywhere born to slavery.
One sees, therefore, that the war of the Southern Confederacy is in the true sense of the word a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery. The greater part of the border states and Territories are still in the possession of the Union, whose side they have taken first through the ballot-box and then with arms. The Confederacy, however, counts them for the "South" and seeks to conquer them from the Union. In the border states which the Confederacy has occupied for the time being, it is holding the relatively free highlands in check by martial law. Within the actual slave states themselves it is supplanting the hitherto existing democracy by the unrestricted oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders.
Were it to relinquish its plans of conquest, the Southern Confederacy would relinquish its capacity to live and the purpose of secession. Secession, indeed, only took place because within the Union the transformation of the border states and Territories into slave states seemed no longer attainable. On the other hand, were it to cede the contested territory peacefully to the Southern Confederacy, the North would surrender to the slave republic more than three-quarters of the entire territory of the United States. The North would lose the whole of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, except the narrow strip from Penobscot Bay to Delaware Bay, and would even cut itself off from the Pacific Ocean. Missouri, Kansas, New Mexico, Arkansas and Texas would draw California after them. Incapable of wresting the mouth of the Mississippi from the hands of the strong, hostile slave republic in the South, the great agricultural states in the basin between the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghenies, in the valleys of the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Ohio, would be compelled by their economic interests to secede from the North and enter the Southern Confederacy. These north-western states, in their turn, would draw after them into the same whirlpool of secession all the Northern states lying further east, with perhaps the exception of the states of New England.
What would in fact take place would be not a dissolution of the Union, but a reorganisation of it, a reorganisation on the basis of slavery, under the recognised control of the slaveholding oligarchy. The plan of such a reorganisation has been openly proclaimed by the principal speakers of the South at the Congress of Montgomery and explains the paragraph of the new Constitution which leaves it open to every state of the old Union to join the new Confederacy. The slave system would infect the whole Union. In the Northern states, where Negro slavery is in practice unworkable, the white working class would gradually be forced down to the level of helotry. This would fully accord with the loudly proclaimed principle that only certain races are capable of freedom, and as the actual labour is the lot of the Negro in the South, so in the North it is the lot of the German and the Irishman, or their direct descendants.
The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.
If the border states, the disputed areas in which the two systems have hitherto contended for domination, are a thorn in the flesh of the South, there can, on the other hand, be no mistake that, in the course of the war up to now, they have constituted the chief weakness of the North. One section of the slaveholders in these districts simulated loyalty to the North at the bidding of the conspirators in the South; another section found that in fact it was in accordance with their real interests and traditional ideas to go with the Union. Both sections have equally crippled the North. Anxiety to keep the “loyal” slaveholders of the border states in good humour, fear of throwing them into the arms of secession, in a word, tender regard for the interests, prejudices and sensibilities of these ambiguous allies, has smitten the Union government with incurable weakness since the beginning of the war, driven it to half measures, forced it to dissemble away the principle of the war and to spare the foe's most vulnerable spot, the root of the evil-slavery itself.
When, only recently, Lincoln pusillanimously revoked Frémont's Missouri proclamation on the emancipation of Negroes belonging to the rebels, this was done solely out of regard for the loud protest of the “loyal” slaveholders of Kentucky. However, a turning point has already been reached. With Kentucky, the last border state has been pushed into the series of battlefields between South and North. With the real war for the border states in the border states themselves, the question of winning or losing them is withdrawn from the sphere of diplomatic and parliamentary discussions. One section of slaveholders will throw off the mask of loyalty; the other will content itself with the prospect of a financial compensation such as Great Britain gave the West Indian planters. Events themselves drive to the promulgation of the decisive slogan-emancipation of the slaves.
That even the most hardened Democrats and diplomats of the North feel themselves drawn to this point, is shown by some announcements of very recent date. In an open letter, General Cass, Secretary of State for War under Buchanan and hitherto one of the most ardent allies of the South, declares emancipation of the slaves the conditio sine qua non of the Union's salvation. In his last Review for October, Dr. Brownson, the spokesman of the Catholic party of the North, on his own admission the most energetic adversary of the emancipation movement from 1836 to 1860, publishes an article for Abolition.
“If we have opposed Abolition heretofore,” he says among other things, “because we would preserve the Union, we must a fortiori now oppose slavery whenever, in our judgment, its continuance becomes incompatible with the maintenance of the Union, or of the nation as a free republican state."
Finally, the World, a New York organ of the diplomats of the Washington Cabinet, concludes one of its latest blustering articles against the Abolitionists with the words:
“On the day when it shall be decided that either slavery or the Union must go down, on that day sentence of death is passed on slavery. If the North cannot triumph without emancipation, it will triumph with emancipation."
From "The Boston Globe"-Smedley Butler Brigade-Memorial Day For Peace-May 28th 2012
Click on headline to link to story in the title.
Let Us Solemnly Commemorate OWS On September 17th Each Year- And Move On- Radical Writer Joshua Lawrence Breslin Pulls The Hammer Down On The Occupy Movement
Markin comment:
“…The Occupy movement has now declared unequivocally that it is a movement of generals without an army. And likes it that way ”- from an article, "Whither Occupy?”- by Joshua Lawrence Breslin in the East Bay Other, December 22, 2011.
Note that Brother Breslin ( I will explain that bond in a minute) did not say that the Occupy movement was an army without generals. Josh’s finely-tuned sense of which way a movement is heading and why picked that nugget out long before this writer in early spring had to concede the point, a sense he has developed, by the way, over forty years of writing for half the unread ( just kidding , Josh), and in some cases unlamented , radical and progressive journals and newspapers in this country. Brother Breslin always had shape antennae for the ebb and flow of social movements going back to the 1960s when he saw the ebb of those high heaven movements fall apart around the 1969 “Days Of Rage” at a time when I did not see the ebb until the 1971 May Day Tribe attempts in Washington, D.C. to shut the government down over the ever-continuing Vietnam War. So Josh Breslin is somebody I listen to.
Back in December I, as usual, dismissed his remarks as so much bad air as a result of having been burned by some of his experiences on the West Coast (his base for many years, although he resides now mostly near his old home town of Olde Saco up in Maine) and at the Occupy Boston site at Dewey Square. I, in what now seems like a fit of hubris, defended the movement as just about the best thing since sliced bread. Oh sure I had my fair share of criticisms, criticisms from a socialist perspective about the “no demands” demands and the like. However I saw most of the stuff that I disliked as “growing pains” and particularly held out hope for the General Assembly idea as the embryo of an alternative form of government in our new world a-borning .
Josh, if he is honest, will admit that he too shared some of my “generation of ‘68” hopes that this new movement would be the place where we passed on the torch the next generation (really the next next generation, there is a “missing generation (roughly the Occupy kids’ parents). Now those hopes have dissolved in the spring air and that son of a bitch proved right again.
Why have I spilled so much cyberspace “ink” on the august opinions of an old-time radical writer? Simply put because I recently was approached by a “true believer,” a self-described socialist ‘true believer” in the Occupy mission to answer some questions about my take on what socialists contributed (or didn’t ) to the movement and other questions along those lines. Naturally when such questions are raised I turn to my old comrade Josh for his opinions, suggestions, etc. Josh and I have shared many a picket line duty, many a lonely vigil, many a forlorn march for some underpublicized cause, and many a rally for some aspect of the world’s ills so our bonds of brotherhood run deep, even if we seldom agree on political perspectives. I have placed his answers to that true believer’s questions below. To finish up though let me quote his closing remark which has been telegraphed in the headline to this piece. “Let’s solemnly commemorate September 17th each year-and move on.” Pure Josh Breslin. But, damn him, he’s right-again.
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[Markin: I have deleted questions that Josh, for his own reasons, did not answer. My answers will form part of that true believer’s essay so I have not included them here. ]
Socialists in the Occupy Movement (Massachusetts)
I'm trying to keep this Massachusetts specific, but feel free to refer to national events when applicable.
Feel free to send this to other socialists who may be interested in answering questions.
Feel free to skip any questions that are not applicable by writing N/A.
Share links to relevant articles where appropriate.
1. Your name? Or if you prefer to use a pen-name for this interview, please write it down.
Joshua Lawrence Breslin (my by-line name but just Josh in mixed company, mixed being political and non-political)
2. What socialist organization are you a part of? Or if you are an independent socialist, do you have some other affiliation (journal, union, etc.)?
Independent Radical-East Bay Other , Real Paper, The Barb, Boston Phoenix, Rolling Stone, Green Weekly, and too many other papers and journals to mention
3. How would you describe yourself ideologically?
Traced from youth- Catholic Worker etched-liberalism (same as Markin except that his was Irish mine Gallic-derived) , Cold War social democracy, communist fellow traveler radical –League Of California Radicals, now for many years, an independent radical
4. When did either you or your organization get involved in the Occupy Movement (specifically in Massachusetts)?
I attended the pre-encampment meetings before September 30th, had a writing assignment at Occupy Oakland for most of October and early November, came back and worked at Dewey Square from then on.
5. Did you or anyone from organization camp out in an Occupy encampment?
Are you serious? No. Old men do not “camp out” on the highway. And young people shouldn’t either.
8. How would you characterize Occupy's relation/reception to socialists ideas? Good? Bad? Indifferent? –
Indifferent but a studied indifference to any ideas beyond the mush of “ideas” that held the camp together. I once commented that for a political movement that then held the public center of attention there was less political discussion at Occupy than I had run into off-handedly in various pre-Occupy rallies and marches in which I had participated. That observation has only gotten stronger as the movement has fallen apart.
11. Were you a part of any Occupy working groups? Which ones and your assessment?
Socialist Caucus-short-lived, not well-attended and mainly a “mail-drop” and endorsement vehicle for other actions, including those which I supported and sought endorsements for. The caucus I believe pretty accurately reflected the weaknesses of the non-academic socialist movement in Boston (and probably more generally the radical milieu) as far as numbers go, desire for an all-inclusive socialist organization where groups and individuals could fight out their politics while doing the necessary united front work that has to drive the movement in this period, and general post-Soviet demise indifferent and/or hostility to socialism beyond the endlessly prattled passive poll figure that the younger generations now have a more positive attitude toward socialist ideas and do not want to shoot every socialist on sight.
Action for Peace-mainly the same observations as for the Socialist Caucus except that it really was kind of redundant to Veterans for Peace and UNAC organizational efforts reflecting the composition of the members of the group. Most successful action was as part of the February Hands Off Iran rally but that event, a real united front rather than Occupy event, demonstrates the redundant nature of the group. As a general observation about the working groups I would note that pre-Occupy organizations, for a time, found it worthwhile, and rightly so, I think, to work under the Occupy umbrella. Of late I note that most groups now work under their previous individual organizational forms and not under the Occupy umbrella.
General Strike OB- planning for May Day 2012. The best group I worked with, again too small for the task, the general strike task that originally animated its formation. Made up of a core of anarchists who were very hard-working but who also (as I did) kept some distance from OB GA (except for dough). To the extent that it might help you I have placed my May 2012 reflections here.
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May Day 2012
I have noted on several previous occasions that due to the recent absence of serious left-wing political struggle (prior to the events at Occupy Boston in Dewey Square from October to December 2011anyway) that our tasks for May Day 2012 in Boston centered on reviving the international working class tradition beyond the limited observance by revolutionaries, radicals and, in recent years, immigrants. This effort would thus not be a one event, one year but require a number of years and that this year’s efforts was just a start. We have made that start.
The important thing this year was to bring Boston in line with the international movement, to have leftist militants and others see our struggles here as part of an international struggle even if our actions were, for now, more symbolic and educational than powerful blows at the imperial system. I believe, despite the bad weather and consequently smaller than anticipated numbers on May Day 2012, we achieved that aim. Through months of hard outreach, especially over the past several weeks as the day approached, we put out much propaganda and information about the events through the various media with which we have access. The message of this May Day, a day without the 99%, got a full hearing by people from the unions, immigrant communities, student milieu and other sectors like the women’s movement and GLBQT community. The connections and contacts made are valuable for our further efforts.
Some participants that spoke to me on May Day (and others who had expressed the same concerns on earlier occasions) believed that we had “bitten off more than we could chew,” by having an all-day series of events. While I am certainly open to hear criticism on the start time of the day’s events (7:00AM does stretch the imagination for night-owlish militants) the idea of several events starting with that early Financial District Block Party and continuing on with the 11:00 AM Anti-Capitalist March which fed into the noontime rally at Boston City Hall Plaza and then switching over to the immigrant community marches and rally capped off that evening by the sober, solemn and visually impression “Death Of Capitalism” funeral procession still seems right to me. Given our task –introducing (really re-introducing) May Day to a wider Boston audience we needed to provide a number of times and events where people could, consciously, contribute to the day’s celebration. Maybe some year our side will be able to call for a one event May Day mass rally (or better a general strike) but that is music for the future.
Needless to say, as occurs almost any time you have many events and a certain need to have them coordinated, there were some problems from technical stuff like mic set-ups to someone forgetting something important, or not showing at the right time, etc. Growing pains. Nevertheless all the scheduled events happened, we had minimum hassles from the police, and a couple of events really stick out as exemplars for future May Days. The Anti-Capitalist March from Copley Square, mainly in a downpour, led by many young militants and which fed into the noontime City Hall rally was spirited and gave me hope that someday (someday soon, I hope) we are going to bring this imperial monster down. The already mentioned funeral procession was an extremely creative (and oft-forgotten by us) alternative way to get our message across outside the “normal” ham-handed, jack-booted political screed.
Finally, a word or two on organization. The Occupy-May Day Coalition personnel base was too small, way too small even for our limited goals. We need outreach early (early next year) to get enough organizer-type people on board to push forward. More broadly on outreach I believe, and partially this was a function of being too small an organizing center, we spent too much time “preaching to the choir”-going to events, talking to people already politically convinced , talking among ourselves rather than get out into the broader political milieu. For next year (which will not be an election year) we really need union and community people (especially people of color) to “smooth” the way for us. We never got that one (although we want more than one ultimately) respected middle-level still militant union official or community organizer that people, working people, listen to and who would listen to us with his or her nod. Radical or bourgeois politics, down at the base, you still need the people that the people listen to. Forward to May Day 2013.
12. Did you or your organization bring any proposals to a General Assembly? How were those proposals received?
As noted the General Strike proposals, in line with the national and international thrust for May Day were well-received, including for money. I would note that during the post-encampment period GA served as more of a “mail drop” and endorsement vehicle similar to the working groups I was involved with. If couched in the right language and sufficiently genetic (read; noncontroversial) most proposals that I was associated with passed with a minimum of friction. The main point though is to trace the political demise of GA from an October “people’s voice” operation to a “rump” in the post encampment period. Its writ did not run very far (and maybe never did except in the political winds). That was highlighted by May Day where the central Occupy struggle event (the Financial District Block Party) fizzled, fizzled badly. As I said back in December “we are generals without an army.” People, including political genius Markin, thought I was crazy when I first said that, but as usual, my political antennae were very sharp.
13. What do you or your organization perceive as the weaknesses of Occupy? Please elaborate.
See most of above. I will just outline here as a summary. Too attached to the camp idea beyond its usefulness. Too caught up in camp details once it became a “homeless shelter” toward the end of October. A studied lack of serious political discussion beyond platitudes. No demands which ordinary people could organize around and fight for. And desperately need to fight for too. Too wedded to the almost politically infantile ideas that formed the movement (mic check, endless GA prattle, absolute consensus, non-representative assemblies, moral blocks). Too many marches and rallies without purpose other than to proclaim 99%-dom. Too wedded to a purely social media concept of revolution in the U.S. and not taking into consideration the differences between here and let’s say, in Egypt. No links, other than formal and those tenuous, to organized labor, blacks, Latinos, working women, non-radicalized students, ordinary working people, hard-pressed suburban home-owners, etc. Unwillingness, incapacity, or even awareness of political timing of the need to shift perspective as the movement fell apart in winter and spring. Too wedded to the “leaderless” leader concept. In short all the problems that one should have expected of a movement that “had” it for a political minute last fall and essentially squandered it. That is a hard thing to swallow for me. Harder still it is not something that can really be addressed (at least for Boston) at this late date.
14. Any campaigns that you/organization have been involved in? (ex. Occupy the T). In what way?
See above.
15. Where do you see the Occupy movement going from here?
As I said above -… “we are generals without an army.” From all appearances of late that looks like the situation for the future as well. I would note that from the declining number of active working groups, smaller size of those groups, and the rather cult-like actions of the remnant of OB GA it is not good. We should have a solemn commemoration for the OWS movement every September 17th- and move on.
“…The Occupy movement has now declared unequivocally that it is a movement of generals without an army. And likes it that way ”- from an article, "Whither Occupy?”- by Joshua Lawrence Breslin in the East Bay Other, December 22, 2011.
Note that Brother Breslin ( I will explain that bond in a minute) did not say that the Occupy movement was an army without generals. Josh’s finely-tuned sense of which way a movement is heading and why picked that nugget out long before this writer in early spring had to concede the point, a sense he has developed, by the way, over forty years of writing for half the unread ( just kidding , Josh), and in some cases unlamented , radical and progressive journals and newspapers in this country. Brother Breslin always had shape antennae for the ebb and flow of social movements going back to the 1960s when he saw the ebb of those high heaven movements fall apart around the 1969 “Days Of Rage” at a time when I did not see the ebb until the 1971 May Day Tribe attempts in Washington, D.C. to shut the government down over the ever-continuing Vietnam War. So Josh Breslin is somebody I listen to.
Back in December I, as usual, dismissed his remarks as so much bad air as a result of having been burned by some of his experiences on the West Coast (his base for many years, although he resides now mostly near his old home town of Olde Saco up in Maine) and at the Occupy Boston site at Dewey Square. I, in what now seems like a fit of hubris, defended the movement as just about the best thing since sliced bread. Oh sure I had my fair share of criticisms, criticisms from a socialist perspective about the “no demands” demands and the like. However I saw most of the stuff that I disliked as “growing pains” and particularly held out hope for the General Assembly idea as the embryo of an alternative form of government in our new world a-borning .
Josh, if he is honest, will admit that he too shared some of my “generation of ‘68” hopes that this new movement would be the place where we passed on the torch the next generation (really the next next generation, there is a “missing generation (roughly the Occupy kids’ parents). Now those hopes have dissolved in the spring air and that son of a bitch proved right again.
Why have I spilled so much cyberspace “ink” on the august opinions of an old-time radical writer? Simply put because I recently was approached by a “true believer,” a self-described socialist ‘true believer” in the Occupy mission to answer some questions about my take on what socialists contributed (or didn’t ) to the movement and other questions along those lines. Naturally when such questions are raised I turn to my old comrade Josh for his opinions, suggestions, etc. Josh and I have shared many a picket line duty, many a lonely vigil, many a forlorn march for some underpublicized cause, and many a rally for some aspect of the world’s ills so our bonds of brotherhood run deep, even if we seldom agree on political perspectives. I have placed his answers to that true believer’s questions below. To finish up though let me quote his closing remark which has been telegraphed in the headline to this piece. “Let’s solemnly commemorate September 17th each year-and move on.” Pure Josh Breslin. But, damn him, he’s right-again.
***********
[Markin: I have deleted questions that Josh, for his own reasons, did not answer. My answers will form part of that true believer’s essay so I have not included them here. ]
Socialists in the Occupy Movement (Massachusetts)
I'm trying to keep this Massachusetts specific, but feel free to refer to national events when applicable.
Feel free to send this to other socialists who may be interested in answering questions.
Feel free to skip any questions that are not applicable by writing N/A.
Share links to relevant articles where appropriate.
1. Your name? Or if you prefer to use a pen-name for this interview, please write it down.
Joshua Lawrence Breslin (my by-line name but just Josh in mixed company, mixed being political and non-political)
2. What socialist organization are you a part of? Or if you are an independent socialist, do you have some other affiliation (journal, union, etc.)?
Independent Radical-East Bay Other , Real Paper, The Barb, Boston Phoenix, Rolling Stone, Green Weekly, and too many other papers and journals to mention
3. How would you describe yourself ideologically?
Traced from youth- Catholic Worker etched-liberalism (same as Markin except that his was Irish mine Gallic-derived) , Cold War social democracy, communist fellow traveler radical –League Of California Radicals, now for many years, an independent radical
4. When did either you or your organization get involved in the Occupy Movement (specifically in Massachusetts)?
I attended the pre-encampment meetings before September 30th, had a writing assignment at Occupy Oakland for most of October and early November, came back and worked at Dewey Square from then on.
5. Did you or anyone from organization camp out in an Occupy encampment?
Are you serious? No. Old men do not “camp out” on the highway. And young people shouldn’t either.
8. How would you characterize Occupy's relation/reception to socialists ideas? Good? Bad? Indifferent? –
Indifferent but a studied indifference to any ideas beyond the mush of “ideas” that held the camp together. I once commented that for a political movement that then held the public center of attention there was less political discussion at Occupy than I had run into off-handedly in various pre-Occupy rallies and marches in which I had participated. That observation has only gotten stronger as the movement has fallen apart.
11. Were you a part of any Occupy working groups? Which ones and your assessment?
Socialist Caucus-short-lived, not well-attended and mainly a “mail-drop” and endorsement vehicle for other actions, including those which I supported and sought endorsements for. The caucus I believe pretty accurately reflected the weaknesses of the non-academic socialist movement in Boston (and probably more generally the radical milieu) as far as numbers go, desire for an all-inclusive socialist organization where groups and individuals could fight out their politics while doing the necessary united front work that has to drive the movement in this period, and general post-Soviet demise indifferent and/or hostility to socialism beyond the endlessly prattled passive poll figure that the younger generations now have a more positive attitude toward socialist ideas and do not want to shoot every socialist on sight.
Action for Peace-mainly the same observations as for the Socialist Caucus except that it really was kind of redundant to Veterans for Peace and UNAC organizational efforts reflecting the composition of the members of the group. Most successful action was as part of the February Hands Off Iran rally but that event, a real united front rather than Occupy event, demonstrates the redundant nature of the group. As a general observation about the working groups I would note that pre-Occupy organizations, for a time, found it worthwhile, and rightly so, I think, to work under the Occupy umbrella. Of late I note that most groups now work under their previous individual organizational forms and not under the Occupy umbrella.
General Strike OB- planning for May Day 2012. The best group I worked with, again too small for the task, the general strike task that originally animated its formation. Made up of a core of anarchists who were very hard-working but who also (as I did) kept some distance from OB GA (except for dough). To the extent that it might help you I have placed my May 2012 reflections here.
**********
May Day 2012
I have noted on several previous occasions that due to the recent absence of serious left-wing political struggle (prior to the events at Occupy Boston in Dewey Square from October to December 2011anyway) that our tasks for May Day 2012 in Boston centered on reviving the international working class tradition beyond the limited observance by revolutionaries, radicals and, in recent years, immigrants. This effort would thus not be a one event, one year but require a number of years and that this year’s efforts was just a start. We have made that start.
The important thing this year was to bring Boston in line with the international movement, to have leftist militants and others see our struggles here as part of an international struggle even if our actions were, for now, more symbolic and educational than powerful blows at the imperial system. I believe, despite the bad weather and consequently smaller than anticipated numbers on May Day 2012, we achieved that aim. Through months of hard outreach, especially over the past several weeks as the day approached, we put out much propaganda and information about the events through the various media with which we have access. The message of this May Day, a day without the 99%, got a full hearing by people from the unions, immigrant communities, student milieu and other sectors like the women’s movement and GLBQT community. The connections and contacts made are valuable for our further efforts.
Some participants that spoke to me on May Day (and others who had expressed the same concerns on earlier occasions) believed that we had “bitten off more than we could chew,” by having an all-day series of events. While I am certainly open to hear criticism on the start time of the day’s events (7:00AM does stretch the imagination for night-owlish militants) the idea of several events starting with that early Financial District Block Party and continuing on with the 11:00 AM Anti-Capitalist March which fed into the noontime rally at Boston City Hall Plaza and then switching over to the immigrant community marches and rally capped off that evening by the sober, solemn and visually impression “Death Of Capitalism” funeral procession still seems right to me. Given our task –introducing (really re-introducing) May Day to a wider Boston audience we needed to provide a number of times and events where people could, consciously, contribute to the day’s celebration. Maybe some year our side will be able to call for a one event May Day mass rally (or better a general strike) but that is music for the future.
Needless to say, as occurs almost any time you have many events and a certain need to have them coordinated, there were some problems from technical stuff like mic set-ups to someone forgetting something important, or not showing at the right time, etc. Growing pains. Nevertheless all the scheduled events happened, we had minimum hassles from the police, and a couple of events really stick out as exemplars for future May Days. The Anti-Capitalist March from Copley Square, mainly in a downpour, led by many young militants and which fed into the noontime City Hall rally was spirited and gave me hope that someday (someday soon, I hope) we are going to bring this imperial monster down. The already mentioned funeral procession was an extremely creative (and oft-forgotten by us) alternative way to get our message across outside the “normal” ham-handed, jack-booted political screed.
Finally, a word or two on organization. The Occupy-May Day Coalition personnel base was too small, way too small even for our limited goals. We need outreach early (early next year) to get enough organizer-type people on board to push forward. More broadly on outreach I believe, and partially this was a function of being too small an organizing center, we spent too much time “preaching to the choir”-going to events, talking to people already politically convinced , talking among ourselves rather than get out into the broader political milieu. For next year (which will not be an election year) we really need union and community people (especially people of color) to “smooth” the way for us. We never got that one (although we want more than one ultimately) respected middle-level still militant union official or community organizer that people, working people, listen to and who would listen to us with his or her nod. Radical or bourgeois politics, down at the base, you still need the people that the people listen to. Forward to May Day 2013.
12. Did you or your organization bring any proposals to a General Assembly? How were those proposals received?
As noted the General Strike proposals, in line with the national and international thrust for May Day were well-received, including for money. I would note that during the post-encampment period GA served as more of a “mail drop” and endorsement vehicle similar to the working groups I was involved with. If couched in the right language and sufficiently genetic (read; noncontroversial) most proposals that I was associated with passed with a minimum of friction. The main point though is to trace the political demise of GA from an October “people’s voice” operation to a “rump” in the post encampment period. Its writ did not run very far (and maybe never did except in the political winds). That was highlighted by May Day where the central Occupy struggle event (the Financial District Block Party) fizzled, fizzled badly. As I said back in December “we are generals without an army.” People, including political genius Markin, thought I was crazy when I first said that, but as usual, my political antennae were very sharp.
13. What do you or your organization perceive as the weaknesses of Occupy? Please elaborate.
See most of above. I will just outline here as a summary. Too attached to the camp idea beyond its usefulness. Too caught up in camp details once it became a “homeless shelter” toward the end of October. A studied lack of serious political discussion beyond platitudes. No demands which ordinary people could organize around and fight for. And desperately need to fight for too. Too wedded to the almost politically infantile ideas that formed the movement (mic check, endless GA prattle, absolute consensus, non-representative assemblies, moral blocks). Too many marches and rallies without purpose other than to proclaim 99%-dom. Too wedded to a purely social media concept of revolution in the U.S. and not taking into consideration the differences between here and let’s say, in Egypt. No links, other than formal and those tenuous, to organized labor, blacks, Latinos, working women, non-radicalized students, ordinary working people, hard-pressed suburban home-owners, etc. Unwillingness, incapacity, or even awareness of political timing of the need to shift perspective as the movement fell apart in winter and spring. Too wedded to the “leaderless” leader concept. In short all the problems that one should have expected of a movement that “had” it for a political minute last fall and essentially squandered it. That is a hard thing to swallow for me. Harder still it is not something that can really be addressed (at least for Boston) at this late date.
14. Any campaigns that you/organization have been involved in? (ex. Occupy the T). In what way?
See above.
15. Where do you see the Occupy movement going from here?
As I said above -… “we are generals without an army.” From all appearances of late that looks like the situation for the future as well. I would note that from the declining number of active working groups, smaller size of those groups, and the rather cult-like actions of the remnant of OB GA it is not good. We should have a solemn commemoration for the OWS movement every September 17th- and move on.
From The Archives (December 2011)#Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More!- Generals Without An Army?
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
*******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
Peter Paul Markin comment (re-post December, 2011):
Recently my long time friend, Josh Breslin (Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those old enough to recognize that name from half the alterative presses in this country, large and small, over the past forty years or so) sent me an e-mail the contents of which I have commented on in this space under the entry “General Assembly Blues- A Cautionary Tale.” (See post below.)The substance of the piece was that Josh felt that the Occupy idea was ripe for the picking by those bourgeois political forces that were hovering around the movement lately looking like wolves ready to feast on an easy meal. Without going into detail here he also argued that there were some very Potemkin Village-like aspects of the Occupy Boston movement since the police raid on December 10th scattered the tribe. The most remarkable statement though, or at least the one which stuck in my mind after reading his e-mail, was his characterization of Occupy as “generals without an army.’’ That little twist has haunted me not a little since after some thought and some further investigation I find that statement to have some truth in it.
Now some readers of this post will dismiss the whole notion of generals, or at least the free-wheeling use of any military terms when speaking of the movement, out of hand. That would be unfortunate because that expression was merely a short-hand way for Josh to say what many people I have spoke to already sense. This “leaderless” movement has leaders, there is nothing wrong with leaders emerging if based on doing hard political work and winning authority, and that in a very important sense those fairly small numbers whose lives are now entwined with the Occupy movement are de facto leaders and that is just hard political realty. Period
And an equally hard fact is that through the thick and thin of committee meetings, working groups, “rump” General Assemblies (Josh’s word but there is also truth in that characterization as well) and other forms of actions (mainly small, very small) over the past month or so (and thus a mood that pre-dates the demise of Dewey Square) is that the Occupy movement has lost much steam. Some of this was, and should have been, expected. And perhaps with a better political focus here in Boston that may be turned around come spring. But the hard-headed reality is that a lot of possibly very good cadres are spinning their wheels with no forces (or not many) behind them. Others are just doing what comes naturally content to attend endless meetings, discuss endlessly, and let other hostile forces come in and pick those very good cadres clean. Ya, sometime Josh Breslin is clueless on stuff but on this on he is preaching to the converted.
***********
General Assembly Blues- A Cautionary Tale
Peter Paul Markin comment:
I had never seen my old friend Josh Breslin so irate (Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those who know him under that moniker through his various commentary columns in all kind alternative press operations over the past forty years or so). Or rather more correctly I had never read anything of his that practically steamed off the page, the computer screen page that early Monday morning (December 19, 2011, let’s see the time stamp, oh yes, 5:14 AM, Ya early, definitely early for Josh) when I was casually perusing my daily e-mail delete slaughter-house. It seems that he had attended an Occupy Boston General Assembly (GA) meeting the night before over at the hallowed Community Church on Boylston Street (hallowed in leftist circles, I had first gone there long ago to attend a commemoration program for Sacco and Vanzetti). Since the police raid on the Occupy camp at Dewey Square in the early morning hours of December 11th the GAs have been assembling helter-skelter at various locations from the Parkman Bandstand on the Common to various sympathetic indoor as winter sets in locations, mainly churches, in order to keep some continuity during these unsettled times.
At that meeting the main order of business was a simple proposal submitted by the OB Socialist Caucus, a loose group of organizationally-affiliated and unaffiliated people who identify themselves with the socialist cause. The gist of the proposal was to make a forthright statement that Occupy Boston was to be clearly identified, more clearly identified than in any previous document, as independent of the main bourgeois parties, the Democrats in particular, and by implication was not to be a front or voting cattle bloc for any particular organized political operation ready to move in like hungry wolves looking for an easy meal. This proposal never reached a vote, a yea or nay vote, that night because it was “blocked” well before such a vote could be taken by, as Josh called it in his e-mail, the “Rump” assembly (see said e-mail posted below, well the gist of it anyway). The Rump being a minority of those eighty or so brethren in attendance that evening whose maneuver in the consensus-addled GA world stopped the proposal in its tracks. This series of events triggered in Josh some kind of previously well-hidden verbal explosion about the trends that he had witnessed developing in the movement, and that had disturbed him previously. Naturally he had to send his old compadre Peter Paul his bilious e-mail as the first step in his “campaign” to get things off his chest.
A little explanation is in order to gauge the seriousness of Josh’s maddened impulse and, as well, for why I have taken the time to write this little commentary up and pushed it forward. Josh and I go back a long way, back to the summer of love in San Francisco in 1967 when I was on Captain Crunch’s merry prankster magical mystery tour freedom bus and I met Josh, then going under the moniker “Prince Of Love,” on Russian Hill in that town. Ya, I know, we were just a little too self-important on changing the name changed the person thing but that was the way it was. I was, for a while, known as Be-Bop Benny, among other names. He had, after just graduating from high school up in Olde Saco, Maine hitch-hiked across the country to see “what was happening.” We hit it off right away, probably because my being from North Adamsville here in Massachusetts we were the only New Englanders “on the bus,” even though I was a few years older. In any case our friendship survived through thick and thin, even despite his “stealing” my girl, Butterfly Swirl (okay, okay I will stop with the a. k. a’s), from right under my nose during the first few days we knew each other. Part of that thick and thin has been involvement in a long series of left-wing political struggles where we have not always seen eye to eye but have generally been “on the right of the angels.”
And that, roughly, brings us to the present. Along the way, for a number of reason that shall not detain us here, I increasingly came to socialist conclusions abut the nature of American society and the ways to change it. Josh, while always on the cutting edge of those same conclusions, never crossed over and has maintained a studied non-socialist radical position very similar to many that I have run into as the Occupy movement has gathered steam. Although, as a paid political commentator for various publications, he has always kept a certain skeptical distance from going overboard every time there is the slightest left breeze coming in over Boston Harbor. Until now.
As I have written elsewhere Josh, now retired, still likes to keep his hand in the mix and so has been working on a project that may turn into a book about the Occupy Boston experience. When he first he crossed the river from the wilds of Cambridge he held himself pretty aloof from the doings but soon became totally enmeshed in what was going on. I was, and still am, a lot more skeptical about where the winds are heading. Josh though spent some nights at Dewey Square and got involved in the camp life. He marched up and down the streets of Boston in every possible cause. Brought food and other goods to the site when he came over. Donated money and other resources to the efforts. He even told me that he washed dishes (once) to help out in the kitchen one day. And believe me in the old prankster days the Prince of Love was, well, too “important” to bow down and get his hands wet doing anything as lowly as dishes. So this new experiment (or rather a chance to make up for those youthful mistakes) really energized him.
So when Joshua Lawrence Breslin, on a darkened Monday morning, signals that something is wrong, something is politically wrong with the direction of the movement I listen up. And, perhaps, you should too.
*******
Below I have placed the substance of the e-mail that Josh Breslin sent to me that fateful Monday December 19th morning. This is my summarization of the document which was written by him in our usual “code” and with his usual excessive use of expletives to normal ears so that it would be not understandable to “outsiders.” In short I have edited it as best I could while retaining the political direction. If Josh doesn’t like it then he can, well, sue me. Ha ha. Or better, write his own damn translation. Peter Paul Markin.
December 19, 2011, 5:14 AM to PeterPaulMarkin@yahoo.com:
Pee Pee, [The reader is hereby warned no to make anything out of this old-time nickname, old time going back to childhood North Adamsville working-class neighborhood days, or else.] You won’t believe what those arrogant airheads did last night at the so-called GA. I call it, and you can quote me on this, the “Rump” like back in Oliver Cromwell’s time when a bunch of cronies controlled everything, or else. They “blocked” the proposal to have a clear statement of independence from the damn Democrats (and Republicans too) but we know who really wants in on this movement.
What they did was get together enough people to block the thing even though with a simple majority it could have gotten through. So much for democracy. For once you are right on this blocking and consensus b.s. Now when Miss Betty [Elizabeth Warren] comes a-courting she will have a field day. You and I have disagreed on many things but keeping the bourgeois parties the hell away from our movement (except maybe to do “Jimmy Higgins” work putting up chairs or licking envelopes, stuff like that) has always been something that has united us ever since Chicago in 1968.
You should have heard the reasons given. Naturally the old chestnut- “we don’t want to alienate anyone” (anyone to the left of Genghis Khan, I guess). “It’s too negative.” Like the bourgeoisie gives a damn about negativity as long as they keep their moola and their power. “The statement we have already posted about transparency and independence is good enough” Like that flimsy one-size-fits-all statement has any political meaning at all. And it degenerated from there. I was so mad I had to walk out and get some fresh air.
I am far from giving up on this Occupy movement but in a lot of ways it really is like that guy, that homeless camper guy, I interviewed over at Dewey Square in early November when the weather got a little cold said. He said the place was a Potemkin Village. I thought he meant about people not staying there overnight. But now I think he meant the whole experiment. They, we, are generals without any army right now and nothing that is being done lately is calculated to break out from that situation. Were we this ruthlessly obtuse back in the days? I hope not- Josh
*******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
Peter Paul Markin comment (re-post December, 2011):
Recently my long time friend, Josh Breslin (Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those old enough to recognize that name from half the alterative presses in this country, large and small, over the past forty years or so) sent me an e-mail the contents of which I have commented on in this space under the entry “General Assembly Blues- A Cautionary Tale.” (See post below.)The substance of the piece was that Josh felt that the Occupy idea was ripe for the picking by those bourgeois political forces that were hovering around the movement lately looking like wolves ready to feast on an easy meal. Without going into detail here he also argued that there were some very Potemkin Village-like aspects of the Occupy Boston movement since the police raid on December 10th scattered the tribe. The most remarkable statement though, or at least the one which stuck in my mind after reading his e-mail, was his characterization of Occupy as “generals without an army.’’ That little twist has haunted me not a little since after some thought and some further investigation I find that statement to have some truth in it.
Now some readers of this post will dismiss the whole notion of generals, or at least the free-wheeling use of any military terms when speaking of the movement, out of hand. That would be unfortunate because that expression was merely a short-hand way for Josh to say what many people I have spoke to already sense. This “leaderless” movement has leaders, there is nothing wrong with leaders emerging if based on doing hard political work and winning authority, and that in a very important sense those fairly small numbers whose lives are now entwined with the Occupy movement are de facto leaders and that is just hard political realty. Period
And an equally hard fact is that through the thick and thin of committee meetings, working groups, “rump” General Assemblies (Josh’s word but there is also truth in that characterization as well) and other forms of actions (mainly small, very small) over the past month or so (and thus a mood that pre-dates the demise of Dewey Square) is that the Occupy movement has lost much steam. Some of this was, and should have been, expected. And perhaps with a better political focus here in Boston that may be turned around come spring. But the hard-headed reality is that a lot of possibly very good cadres are spinning their wheels with no forces (or not many) behind them. Others are just doing what comes naturally content to attend endless meetings, discuss endlessly, and let other hostile forces come in and pick those very good cadres clean. Ya, sometime Josh Breslin is clueless on stuff but on this on he is preaching to the converted.
***********
General Assembly Blues- A Cautionary Tale
Peter Paul Markin comment:
I had never seen my old friend Josh Breslin so irate (Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those who know him under that moniker through his various commentary columns in all kind alternative press operations over the past forty years or so). Or rather more correctly I had never read anything of his that practically steamed off the page, the computer screen page that early Monday morning (December 19, 2011, let’s see the time stamp, oh yes, 5:14 AM, Ya early, definitely early for Josh) when I was casually perusing my daily e-mail delete slaughter-house. It seems that he had attended an Occupy Boston General Assembly (GA) meeting the night before over at the hallowed Community Church on Boylston Street (hallowed in leftist circles, I had first gone there long ago to attend a commemoration program for Sacco and Vanzetti). Since the police raid on the Occupy camp at Dewey Square in the early morning hours of December 11th the GAs have been assembling helter-skelter at various locations from the Parkman Bandstand on the Common to various sympathetic indoor as winter sets in locations, mainly churches, in order to keep some continuity during these unsettled times.
At that meeting the main order of business was a simple proposal submitted by the OB Socialist Caucus, a loose group of organizationally-affiliated and unaffiliated people who identify themselves with the socialist cause. The gist of the proposal was to make a forthright statement that Occupy Boston was to be clearly identified, more clearly identified than in any previous document, as independent of the main bourgeois parties, the Democrats in particular, and by implication was not to be a front or voting cattle bloc for any particular organized political operation ready to move in like hungry wolves looking for an easy meal. This proposal never reached a vote, a yea or nay vote, that night because it was “blocked” well before such a vote could be taken by, as Josh called it in his e-mail, the “Rump” assembly (see said e-mail posted below, well the gist of it anyway). The Rump being a minority of those eighty or so brethren in attendance that evening whose maneuver in the consensus-addled GA world stopped the proposal in its tracks. This series of events triggered in Josh some kind of previously well-hidden verbal explosion about the trends that he had witnessed developing in the movement, and that had disturbed him previously. Naturally he had to send his old compadre Peter Paul his bilious e-mail as the first step in his “campaign” to get things off his chest.
A little explanation is in order to gauge the seriousness of Josh’s maddened impulse and, as well, for why I have taken the time to write this little commentary up and pushed it forward. Josh and I go back a long way, back to the summer of love in San Francisco in 1967 when I was on Captain Crunch’s merry prankster magical mystery tour freedom bus and I met Josh, then going under the moniker “Prince Of Love,” on Russian Hill in that town. Ya, I know, we were just a little too self-important on changing the name changed the person thing but that was the way it was. I was, for a while, known as Be-Bop Benny, among other names. He had, after just graduating from high school up in Olde Saco, Maine hitch-hiked across the country to see “what was happening.” We hit it off right away, probably because my being from North Adamsville here in Massachusetts we were the only New Englanders “on the bus,” even though I was a few years older. In any case our friendship survived through thick and thin, even despite his “stealing” my girl, Butterfly Swirl (okay, okay I will stop with the a. k. a’s), from right under my nose during the first few days we knew each other. Part of that thick and thin has been involvement in a long series of left-wing political struggles where we have not always seen eye to eye but have generally been “on the right of the angels.”
And that, roughly, brings us to the present. Along the way, for a number of reason that shall not detain us here, I increasingly came to socialist conclusions abut the nature of American society and the ways to change it. Josh, while always on the cutting edge of those same conclusions, never crossed over and has maintained a studied non-socialist radical position very similar to many that I have run into as the Occupy movement has gathered steam. Although, as a paid political commentator for various publications, he has always kept a certain skeptical distance from going overboard every time there is the slightest left breeze coming in over Boston Harbor. Until now.
As I have written elsewhere Josh, now retired, still likes to keep his hand in the mix and so has been working on a project that may turn into a book about the Occupy Boston experience. When he first he crossed the river from the wilds of Cambridge he held himself pretty aloof from the doings but soon became totally enmeshed in what was going on. I was, and still am, a lot more skeptical about where the winds are heading. Josh though spent some nights at Dewey Square and got involved in the camp life. He marched up and down the streets of Boston in every possible cause. Brought food and other goods to the site when he came over. Donated money and other resources to the efforts. He even told me that he washed dishes (once) to help out in the kitchen one day. And believe me in the old prankster days the Prince of Love was, well, too “important” to bow down and get his hands wet doing anything as lowly as dishes. So this new experiment (or rather a chance to make up for those youthful mistakes) really energized him.
So when Joshua Lawrence Breslin, on a darkened Monday morning, signals that something is wrong, something is politically wrong with the direction of the movement I listen up. And, perhaps, you should too.
*******
Below I have placed the substance of the e-mail that Josh Breslin sent to me that fateful Monday December 19th morning. This is my summarization of the document which was written by him in our usual “code” and with his usual excessive use of expletives to normal ears so that it would be not understandable to “outsiders.” In short I have edited it as best I could while retaining the political direction. If Josh doesn’t like it then he can, well, sue me. Ha ha. Or better, write his own damn translation. Peter Paul Markin.
December 19, 2011, 5:14 AM to PeterPaulMarkin@yahoo.com:
Pee Pee, [The reader is hereby warned no to make anything out of this old-time nickname, old time going back to childhood North Adamsville working-class neighborhood days, or else.] You won’t believe what those arrogant airheads did last night at the so-called GA. I call it, and you can quote me on this, the “Rump” like back in Oliver Cromwell’s time when a bunch of cronies controlled everything, or else. They “blocked” the proposal to have a clear statement of independence from the damn Democrats (and Republicans too) but we know who really wants in on this movement.
What they did was get together enough people to block the thing even though with a simple majority it could have gotten through. So much for democracy. For once you are right on this blocking and consensus b.s. Now when Miss Betty [Elizabeth Warren] comes a-courting she will have a field day. You and I have disagreed on many things but keeping the bourgeois parties the hell away from our movement (except maybe to do “Jimmy Higgins” work putting up chairs or licking envelopes, stuff like that) has always been something that has united us ever since Chicago in 1968.
You should have heard the reasons given. Naturally the old chestnut- “we don’t want to alienate anyone” (anyone to the left of Genghis Khan, I guess). “It’s too negative.” Like the bourgeoisie gives a damn about negativity as long as they keep their moola and their power. “The statement we have already posted about transparency and independence is good enough” Like that flimsy one-size-fits-all statement has any political meaning at all. And it degenerated from there. I was so mad I had to walk out and get some fresh air.
I am far from giving up on this Occupy movement but in a lot of ways it really is like that guy, that homeless camper guy, I interviewed over at Dewey Square in early November when the weather got a little cold said. He said the place was a Potemkin Village. I thought he meant about people not staying there overnight. But now I think he meant the whole experiment. They, we, are generals without any army right now and nothing that is being done lately is calculated to break out from that situation. Were we this ruthlessly obtuse back in the days? I hope not- Josh
Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- "America, Where Are You Now...."-Stepphenwolf's "Monster" –For The Quebec Student Movement Struggle
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Steppenwolf performing their classic anti-war song (and plaintive plea)Monster.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
********
Markin comment on the lyrics here:
Steppenwolf was one of the most political of the rock groups brought forth by the new musical sensibility of the counter-cultural movement in the mid to late 1960s. The narrative here in Monster reads like a capsule history of the American experience up until the 1960s. And a powerful call, a call that should resonate today, for the older generation (now us) to come and help the young fight against the monster of American (and today Canadian) imperialistic capitalism that is driving us all to the bottom. A theme song for all the struggle movements springing up around this good, green earth.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
********
Markin comment on the lyrics here:
Steppenwolf was one of the most political of the rock groups brought forth by the new musical sensibility of the counter-cultural movement in the mid to late 1960s. The narrative here in Monster reads like a capsule history of the American experience up until the 1960s. And a powerful call, a call that should resonate today, for the older generation (now us) to come and help the young fight against the monster of American (and today Canadian) imperialistic capitalism that is driving us all to the bottom. A theme song for all the struggle movements springing up around this good, green earth.
If The Frame Fits- Susan Hayward’s “I Want To Live!”-A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Susan Hayward’s “I Want To Live!"
DVD Review
I Want To Live!, starring Susan Hayward, directed by Robert Wise, 1959
Normally one would not expect an actress like Susan Hayward, whose roles were mostly romantic , demure leading ladies in some mixed- up love affair to shine in the film under review, I Want To Live!, but it is just enough against type to have been Oscar-worthy. Here Ms. Hayward plays Barbara Graham, a party girl (nice, right) who gets mixed up, mixed up big time, in a heist that went wrong, badly wrong, leading to the murder of an elderly woman.
Life had not dealt bout a square hand to Barbara so she wound up, like many another guy or gal from the wrong side of the tracks doing as she said “the best she could.” She got mixed up with some wrong gees and as mentioned above got mixed up with a murder. And as if, once again, to prove that there is no honor among thieves, they set out to place the frame on her.
And with her devil take the hinter post attitude she worms her way into the death penalty, the death penalty in a time when that act was carried out quite frequently including to women.
That is where the acting part of the film really takes off and Ms. Hayward earns her Oscar. From that wayward party girl she turns thoughtful and then terrified at the state-imposed death that stares her right in the face. There is some controversy over the details; the guilt or innocence of Barbara Graham, of the actual case that the film is based on but Ms. Hayward’s performance should make one think twice about the question of the death penalty as state policy.
DVD Review
I Want To Live!, starring Susan Hayward, directed by Robert Wise, 1959
Normally one would not expect an actress like Susan Hayward, whose roles were mostly romantic , demure leading ladies in some mixed- up love affair to shine in the film under review, I Want To Live!, but it is just enough against type to have been Oscar-worthy. Here Ms. Hayward plays Barbara Graham, a party girl (nice, right) who gets mixed up, mixed up big time, in a heist that went wrong, badly wrong, leading to the murder of an elderly woman.
Life had not dealt bout a square hand to Barbara so she wound up, like many another guy or gal from the wrong side of the tracks doing as she said “the best she could.” She got mixed up with some wrong gees and as mentioned above got mixed up with a murder. And as if, once again, to prove that there is no honor among thieves, they set out to place the frame on her.
And with her devil take the hinter post attitude she worms her way into the death penalty, the death penalty in a time when that act was carried out quite frequently including to women.
That is where the acting part of the film really takes off and Ms. Hayward earns her Oscar. From that wayward party girl she turns thoughtful and then terrified at the state-imposed death that stares her right in the face. There is some controversy over the details; the guilt or innocence of Barbara Graham, of the actual case that the film is based on but Ms. Hayward’s performance should make one think twice about the question of the death penalty as state policy.
Out In The 1950s Crime Noir Night-French-Style- Jean Gabin’s Touchez Pas au Grisbi
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Jean Gabin’s Touches Pas au Grisbi
DVD Review
Touchez Pas au Grisbi, starring Jean Gabin, 1954
Hey, I have been touting crime noir films for the past couple of years so why not review, as here with Jean Gabin’s 1954 Touchez Pas au Grisbi, a French crime noir in honor of, well, the name of the genre. And a later generation of French directors who went crazy for Hollywood gangster epics in such films as “Breathless” and Don’t Shoot The Piano Player. Especially when said this crime noir stars Jean Gabin, last reviewed here in a very different film, Children Of Paradise.
Well, let’s cut to the chase (literally, as this plot unfolds). It seems that long- time crime boss Max (Gabin) has pulled a caper (heist, okay) to set himself and his confederate Riton up for a well-deserved retirement from the rackets. And everything was going along just fine until old buddy Riton got a loose tongue over some show girl (played by a very young Jean Moreau) and spilled his guts out to her about how he could keep her in clover. Problem is that young showgirls are as fickle and calculating as any other woman mixed up with bad actuarial table criminals and she has another crime boss on the hook, one Angelo. Naturally she mentions the loot to Angelo and sets off an explosion of maneuvers by him to get the kale, and by Max to keep it.
The cat and mouse of this pair drives the rest of the movie with old Max showing one and all why he was (and is) the king of the hill, even if he may have lost a step or two. Angelo’s big mistake (besides thinking that Max was over the hill and easy pickings) was kidnapping Riton, an act that set Max on a fight to the finish. See the film to get the details of that fight to the finish. What is important though is the use by the director here of the many tough guy moves made by Hollywood gangsters in the heyday 1930s including a few off-hand beatings of opponent gangsters to get information, a few off-hand slaps at show girls (by Gabin of all people but that is part of being a boss and no chump), and a car chase, natch complete with machine guns ta-ta-ta-ing. Ya, the French picked up the genre very nicely. Gabin might be a little too suave (except for those off-hand girl slaps) to be an American 1930s gangster but he fit the more demure 1950s just right.
DVD Review
Touchez Pas au Grisbi, starring Jean Gabin, 1954
Hey, I have been touting crime noir films for the past couple of years so why not review, as here with Jean Gabin’s 1954 Touchez Pas au Grisbi, a French crime noir in honor of, well, the name of the genre. And a later generation of French directors who went crazy for Hollywood gangster epics in such films as “Breathless” and Don’t Shoot The Piano Player. Especially when said this crime noir stars Jean Gabin, last reviewed here in a very different film, Children Of Paradise.
Well, let’s cut to the chase (literally, as this plot unfolds). It seems that long- time crime boss Max (Gabin) has pulled a caper (heist, okay) to set himself and his confederate Riton up for a well-deserved retirement from the rackets. And everything was going along just fine until old buddy Riton got a loose tongue over some show girl (played by a very young Jean Moreau) and spilled his guts out to her about how he could keep her in clover. Problem is that young showgirls are as fickle and calculating as any other woman mixed up with bad actuarial table criminals and she has another crime boss on the hook, one Angelo. Naturally she mentions the loot to Angelo and sets off an explosion of maneuvers by him to get the kale, and by Max to keep it.
The cat and mouse of this pair drives the rest of the movie with old Max showing one and all why he was (and is) the king of the hill, even if he may have lost a step or two. Angelo’s big mistake (besides thinking that Max was over the hill and easy pickings) was kidnapping Riton, an act that set Max on a fight to the finish. See the film to get the details of that fight to the finish. What is important though is the use by the director here of the many tough guy moves made by Hollywood gangsters in the heyday 1930s including a few off-hand beatings of opponent gangsters to get information, a few off-hand slaps at show girls (by Gabin of all people but that is part of being a boss and no chump), and a car chase, natch complete with machine guns ta-ta-ta-ing. Ya, the French picked up the genre very nicely. Gabin might be a little too suave (except for those off-hand girl slaps) to be an American 1930s gangster but he fit the more demure 1950s just right.
Monday, May 28, 2012
A Remembrance Worthy Of The Day- A Memorial Day for Peace-Join The Smedley Butler Brigade-Veterans For Peace In Boston-Today May 28, 2012, 1:00 - 3:00 pm
Click on the headline to link to the Smedley Butler Brigade VFP Facebookpage.
To The Fallen-In Lieu Of A Letter
The mere mention of the name Veterans For Peace evokes images of hard-bitten ex-servicemen and women, many old, ramrod straight holding their beloved black and white peace dove-emblazoned banners flying proudly in all weathers. Of urgent and militant calls for withdrawal of American military personnel from conflicts somewhere in the bewildering number of places that this government has planted its forces. And of relentless exposure of the thousand and one ways that this government (and not just this government) tries to hide its atrocities against overwhelmed opponents and the innocent civilians who get caught up in the juggernaut. Those exercises of our democratic and moral obligations are what drive us most days but I want to put politics aside this day, or put them aside at least long enough to speak of another role that we have taken on over the past several years here in Boston on Memorial Day, a day of remembrance for our fallen.
Others can address, and eloquently, the origins and purposes of the day, a task that usually would come easily to this writer. Others will throw symbolic flowers into our beloved homeland the sea to give somber recognition to the fallen of current conflicts. Still others in other commemorations can, and will, speak of valor, honor, duty and unquestioned obedience to orders accompanied by the far-away tattoo of drums, the echo of the distant roar of cannon, cannon headed to some unmarked destination, and the whish and whirl as an unseen overhead airplane unloads it sacrilegious payload.
Today I choose though to speak of long ago but not forgotten personal remembrance, and to give name to that remembrance. To give name, James Earl Jenkins, old North Quincy rough-house Irish neighborhoods friend and fellow of many boyhood adventures not all fit for public mention, a name now blood-stone etched in black marble down in Washington, D.C. To give name, Kenneth Edward Johnson, my brother and James’ friend also, a name not etched in black stone but a causality of war nevertheless who, despite his fervent desire, “never made it back to the real world” and spent his shortened lonely life reliving the past.
James and Kenneth, what happened to each of them and why, take on special meaning today as I utter their names publicly from the misty past for the first time in a long time because those names link to those we remember today. Not just those, like James, who served under whatever conditions and for whatever personal reasons, those seem beside the point just now, or like my brother, those who do not show up in any official casuality report but all those nevertheless damaged by the close-hand experience of war.
But enough of this, as it only brings another saddened tear. But, as well, enough of war.
****************
Memorial Day for Peace
Monday, May 28, 2012.
1:00pm until 3:00pm.
Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park, Boston
Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and Samantha Smith, Chapter 45, Military Families Speak Out, Mass Peace Action, United for Justice with Peace as we commemorate Memorial Day on Monday May 28, 2012, 1-3 p.m.
Location: Christopher Columbus Park, 105 Atlantic Ave., Boston, Massachusetts
(near the Long Wharf Marriott on the waterfront - Aquarium stop on the MBTA Blue Line and a short walk from Haymarket on the Orange Line).
Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and There will be no parade, no marching band, no military equipment, no guns and drums, no Air Force fly-overs.
There will be veterans and supporters who have lost friends and loved ones. Veterans who know the horrors of war and the pain and anguish of loss. There will be friends and families of soldiers, remembering their loved ones. There will be Iraqi Refugees who have suffered terrible losses and will join with us as we remember and show respect for their loss.
There will be flowers dropped into the harbor for each fallen U.S. soldier from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Flowers will also be also be dropped into the harbor remembering the loss of Iraqi family and friends.
PROGRAM
Memorial Day for Peace
May 28, 2012 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Christopher Columbus Park, 105 Atlantic Ave., Boston, Massachusetts
Program
Brian Quirk, Scottish Bag Pipes
Merrimack Valley People for Peace
Rev. Lara Hoke, Opening
Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Andover
Secretary VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Pat Scanlon, Welcome
Coordinator, VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Lee VanderLann, In memory of our friend Capt. Paul Brailsford
Executive Committee VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
VFP Samantha Smith Chapter
Bradford Adams, A short rememberance of my friend Zalmai
VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Afghanistan Veteran (2002-2003)
Kevin Lucey, Return to Hell
Parent of Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey USMC
Si Kahn, Song – Hunter –(Music from CD)
Bob Funke, What Memorial Day Means to Me
Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Bonnie Gorman, Suicide: The hidden wounds of war
Military Families Speak Out,
Gold Star Families Vietnam
VFP Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Nancy Wrenn, Are we finished with war yet?
Mass Peace Action
Webb Nichols, Poet
Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Ahmad & Leyla AlZubaydi
Babylon Restaurant, Lowell
Iraqi Refugees
Farouq Ali
Arab Spring and Hypocrisy of the West
Iraqi Refugee
Brian Quirk, Scottish Bag Pipes
Flower Ceremony
Rev. Ralph Galen, Closing
Community Church of Lawrence
Jesse Perrier, Taps
Executive Committee Smedley D. Butler Brigade
To The Fallen-In Lieu Of A Letter
The mere mention of the name Veterans For Peace evokes images of hard-bitten ex-servicemen and women, many old, ramrod straight holding their beloved black and white peace dove-emblazoned banners flying proudly in all weathers. Of urgent and militant calls for withdrawal of American military personnel from conflicts somewhere in the bewildering number of places that this government has planted its forces. And of relentless exposure of the thousand and one ways that this government (and not just this government) tries to hide its atrocities against overwhelmed opponents and the innocent civilians who get caught up in the juggernaut. Those exercises of our democratic and moral obligations are what drive us most days but I want to put politics aside this day, or put them aside at least long enough to speak of another role that we have taken on over the past several years here in Boston on Memorial Day, a day of remembrance for our fallen.
Others can address, and eloquently, the origins and purposes of the day, a task that usually would come easily to this writer. Others will throw symbolic flowers into our beloved homeland the sea to give somber recognition to the fallen of current conflicts. Still others in other commemorations can, and will, speak of valor, honor, duty and unquestioned obedience to orders accompanied by the far-away tattoo of drums, the echo of the distant roar of cannon, cannon headed to some unmarked destination, and the whish and whirl as an unseen overhead airplane unloads it sacrilegious payload.
Today I choose though to speak of long ago but not forgotten personal remembrance, and to give name to that remembrance. To give name, James Earl Jenkins, old North Quincy rough-house Irish neighborhoods friend and fellow of many boyhood adventures not all fit for public mention, a name now blood-stone etched in black marble down in Washington, D.C. To give name, Kenneth Edward Johnson, my brother and James’ friend also, a name not etched in black stone but a causality of war nevertheless who, despite his fervent desire, “never made it back to the real world” and spent his shortened lonely life reliving the past.
James and Kenneth, what happened to each of them and why, take on special meaning today as I utter their names publicly from the misty past for the first time in a long time because those names link to those we remember today. Not just those, like James, who served under whatever conditions and for whatever personal reasons, those seem beside the point just now, or like my brother, those who do not show up in any official casuality report but all those nevertheless damaged by the close-hand experience of war.
But enough of this, as it only brings another saddened tear. But, as well, enough of war.
****************
Memorial Day for Peace
Monday, May 28, 2012.
1:00pm until 3:00pm.
Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park, Boston
Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and Samantha Smith, Chapter 45, Military Families Speak Out, Mass Peace Action, United for Justice with Peace as we commemorate Memorial Day on Monday May 28, 2012, 1-3 p.m.
Location: Christopher Columbus Park, 105 Atlantic Ave., Boston, Massachusetts
(near the Long Wharf Marriott on the waterfront - Aquarium stop on the MBTA Blue Line and a short walk from Haymarket on the Orange Line).
Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and There will be no parade, no marching band, no military equipment, no guns and drums, no Air Force fly-overs.
There will be veterans and supporters who have lost friends and loved ones. Veterans who know the horrors of war and the pain and anguish of loss. There will be friends and families of soldiers, remembering their loved ones. There will be Iraqi Refugees who have suffered terrible losses and will join with us as we remember and show respect for their loss.
There will be flowers dropped into the harbor for each fallen U.S. soldier from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Flowers will also be also be dropped into the harbor remembering the loss of Iraqi family and friends.
PROGRAM
Memorial Day for Peace
May 28, 2012 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Christopher Columbus Park, 105 Atlantic Ave., Boston, Massachusetts
Program
Brian Quirk, Scottish Bag Pipes
Merrimack Valley People for Peace
Rev. Lara Hoke, Opening
Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Andover
Secretary VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Pat Scanlon, Welcome
Coordinator, VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Lee VanderLann, In memory of our friend Capt. Paul Brailsford
Executive Committee VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
VFP Samantha Smith Chapter
Bradford Adams, A short rememberance of my friend Zalmai
VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Afghanistan Veteran (2002-2003)
Kevin Lucey, Return to Hell
Parent of Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey USMC
Si Kahn, Song – Hunter –(Music from CD)
Bob Funke, What Memorial Day Means to Me
Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Bonnie Gorman, Suicide: The hidden wounds of war
Military Families Speak Out,
Gold Star Families Vietnam
VFP Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Nancy Wrenn, Are we finished with war yet?
Mass Peace Action
Webb Nichols, Poet
Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Ahmad & Leyla AlZubaydi
Babylon Restaurant, Lowell
Iraqi Refugees
Farouq Ali
Arab Spring and Hypocrisy of the West
Iraqi Refugee
Brian Quirk, Scottish Bag Pipes
Flower Ceremony
Rev. Ralph Galen, Closing
Community Church of Lawrence
Jesse Perrier, Taps
Executive Committee Smedley D. Butler Brigade
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