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Saturday, March 08, 2014
WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Calls on Computer Hackers to Unite Against NSAÂ Surveillance DemocracyNow:WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange addressed a major gathering of computer experts Monday at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, calling on them to join forces in resisting government intrusions on internet freedom and privacy. We play highlights from Assange's speech, as well as the one given by Sarah Harrison, the WikiLeaks member who accompanied Edward Snowden to Russia. We also hear from independent journalist and security expert Jacob Appelbaum, who reveals a spying tool used by the National Security Agency known as a "portable continuous wave generator." The remote-controlled device works in tandem with tiny electronic implants to bounce invisible waves of energy off keyboards and monitors to see what is being typed. It works even if the target computer is not connected to the Internet. |
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Let the sun shine! The Fair Food spirit brings the sun out
with joyful action in Asheville, NC… Now is the Time Tour met with warm welcome in Western North Carolina!  
Don't miss the full photo update from Asheville -- and not one, but
two videos from the Now is the Time Tour over at the CIW
website!
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In
Honor Of Women’s History Month- The 50th Anniversary Of Betty
Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique-In The Time Of Not Her Time
From
The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Delores Reilly had to laugh, chuckle really, with a
little sourness around the edges, as she listened to her daily kids at school
show on the radio The Sammy Williams Show,
the two hour morning talk on the Boston station WMXY. This morning Sammy had a panel, a panel of women, mostly from
the sound of it, professional women, who were discussing this latest bombshell
book by a woman named Betty Freidman, a book entitled The Feminine Mystique. What Betty had written about was the vast
number of women, women from her generation or a little younger, who were now
fed up with their little suburban white picket fence manicured lawn ranch house-
all spic and span modern appliances- have a martini ready for hubby at five,
maybe a roll in the hay later after the kids went to bed, missionary-style-
five days a week house-bound routine and weekends not much better, hubby tired
after gouging somebody all week-over-educated under-loved, under-appreciated
and under-utilized lives. After listening in some disbelief, and in some hidden
sorrow, for a while and Delores Reilly (nee Kelly) got a little wistful when
she thought about her own life, her own not suburban Valhalla life.
Funny she had
been somewhat educated herself, her father the distant old Daniel who
nevertheless was practical and insisted that she get more education after high
school, to learn a skill, although maybe not like those panel women, not like
Betty’s complaining suburbanite women from Wellesley, Sarah Lawrence or
Barnard, having gone to Fisher Secretarial School over in Boston and having
worked down at the North Adamsville Shipyard before she got married, married to
her love, Kenneth Reilly. But that is where the breaks kind of stopped, that
marriage point. She had met Kenneth at a USO dance down at the Hingham Naval
Depot toward the end of World War II when many soldiers and sailors were being
processed for demobilization. Kenneth had been a Marine, had seen some tough
battles in the Pacific, including Guadalcanal (although he like many men of his
generation did not talk about it, about the hellish war, all that much) and had
been stationed at the Depot. He sure looked devilishly handsome in his Marine dress
uniform and that was that. They were married shortly after that, moved to the
other side of North Adamsville in an apartment her father found for them, and
then in quick succession within a little over three they had produced three sons,
three hungry sons, as it turned out.
Not an unusual start, certainly not for the
generation who had withstood the Great Depression of the 1930s and fought the
devils in World War II. However, Kenneth, dear sweet Kenneth, might have been a
great Marine, and might too have been a great coalminer down where he came from
in Prestonsburg down in coal country Harlan and Hazard, Kentucky before he
joined up to fight but he had no skills, no serious money skills that could be
used around Boston. So they had lived in that run- down apartment for many
years even after the three boys had outgrown the place. Kenny’s work history,
last hired usually, first fired always meant too that Delores had to work, not
work in her skilled profession but mother’s hours (really any hours she could
get, including nights) at Mister Dee’s Donut Shop filling jelly donuts and
other assorted menial tasks. And that was that for a number of years.
For a while in the late 1950s Kenny had a steady
job, with good pay, and with her filling donuts (the poor kids had many a
snack, too many, of day-old left over donuts she would bring home), they were
able to purchase a small shack of a house on the wrong side of the tracks, though
at least a house of their own. Not a ranch house with a manicured lawn like
Betty’s women were complaining of, but a bungalow with a postage stamp- sized lawn
filled when they arrived with the flotsam and jetsam of a million years’ worth
of junk left by the previous owners. Something out of a Walker Evans photograph
like ones she would see in Life magazine
now that Jack Kennedy was doing something for her husband’s kindred down in
Appalachia. A place with no hook-up for
a washing machine and dryer so she had to every week or so trudge down to the
local Laundromat to do the family washing. A place with just enough room to fit
a table in the kitchen if the kids ate in shifts. A place where, well why go on
she thought, those were the breaks and while things had been tough, money
tight, other kids making fun of her kids when they were younger and having
fights over it, those three boy starting to get old enough to get in some
trouble, or close to it, she had her man, she had her stalwart Kenny who never
complained about his lack of breaks. Still, still Delores dreamed, wistful
dreamed that she had had a few things those women were getting all hot and
bothered about being stuck with…
And hence this Women’s History Month commemoration.
Friday, March 07, 2014
From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Trotsky and the Second World War- (Part 2)
In a funny way this American Left History blog probably never have come into existence if it was not for the Vietnam War, the primary radicalizing agent of my generation, the generation of ’68, and of my personal radicalization by military service during that period. I was, like many working class youth, especially from the urban Irish neighborhoods, drawn to politics as a career, bourgeois politics that is, liberal or not so liberal. Radicalism, or parts of it, was attractive but the “main chance” for political advancement in this country was found elsewhere. I, also like many working class youth then, was drafted into the military, although I, unlike most, balked, and balked hard at such service one I had been inducted. That event is the key experience that has left me still, some forty years later, with an overarching hatred of war, of American imperialist wars in particular, and with an overweening desire to spend my time fighting, fighting to the end against the “monster.”
Needless to say, in the late 1960s, although there was plenty of turmoil over the war on American (and world-wide) campuses and other student-influenced hang-outs and enclaves and that turmoil was starting to be picked among American soldiers, especially drafted soldiers, once they knew the score there was an incredible dearth of information flowing back and forth between those two movements. I, personally, had connections with the civilian ant-war movement, but most anti-war GIs were groping in the dark, groping in the dark on isolated military bases (not accidentally placed in such areas) or worst, in the heat of the battle zone in Vietnam. We could have used a ton more anti-war propaganda geared to our needs, legal, political, and social. That said, after my “retirement” from military service I worked, for a while, with the anti-war GI movement through the coffeehouse network based around various military bases.
During that time (very late 1960s and first few years of the 1970s) we put out, as did other more organized radical and revolutionary organizations, much literature about the war, imperialism, capitalism, etc., some good, some, in retrospect, bad or ill-put for the audience we were trying to target. What we didn’t do, or I didn’t do, either through carelessness or some later vagabond existence forgetfulness was save this material for future reference. Thus, when I happened upon this Riazanov Library material I jumped at the opportunity of posting it. That it happens to be Spartacist League/International Communist League material is not accidental, as I find myself in sympathy with their political positions, especially on war issues, more often than not. I, however, plan to scour the Internet for other material, most notably from the U. S. Socialist Workers Party and Progressive Labor Party, both of whom did some anti-war GI work at that time. There are others, I am sure. If the reader has any such anti-war GI material, from any war, just pass it along.
*******
Markin comment on this issue:
Individual action vs., collective action? Most of the time, while I respect individual heroic efforts (or just great individual achievement), collective action turns the tides of history, and for lots of people not just a few. As far as my own military service time, which included heavy, heavy for the military, anti-war work one of my great regrets is that I did not spend more time arguing against those politicized and radicalized soldiers that I ran into by the handfuls on the issue of staying in and fighting the brass. No re-ups, christ no, but just finishing their tours of duty. More importantly, to stay in and raise anti-war hell (oops!), I mean “serve” in Vietnam if the fates played out that way. A few more radicals over there and who knows what could have been done especially in the very late 1960s and very early 1970s when the American Army even by important elements of its own brass was declared “unreliable.” That “unreliable” mass needed us to help figure things out. And to act on that figuring out.
Alas I was not Bolshevik then, although I was working my way, blindly, fitfully, and haphazardly to that understanding of the struggle. Moreover, I had not access to those who were arguing for a Bolshevik position on anti-war GI work, although I did have a few vicarious links to the U.S. Socialist Workers Party that organization was not strongly committed to keeping anti-war soldiers in to fight the brass but rather was more interested in having such GIs stand at the head of their eternal, infernal, paternal “mass marches.” My thinking, and those around me civilian and military, in any case, was dictated more by the “hell no, we won’t go” strategy of the anti-draft movement extended intact to the military theater than any well thought out notion of “turning the guns the other way.”
Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
Our initial item, which sparked off the discussion in the first place, is Daniel Guérin’s preface to Léon Trotsky – Sur la deuxième guerre mondiale, a collection of Trotsky’s writings on the war first published by Éditions la Taupe in Brussels in 1970. The second and third pieces are reviews of this work, by André Frankin in the Belgian Socialist weekly La Gauche, 28 March 1970, and by an anonymous reviewer in the French weekly Informations Ouvrières, no.485, 29 July-5 August 1970, the journal of the OCI. The final document is Guérin’s reply to his critics, which took the form of a postscript added to the French edition of Trotsky’s writings on the war, publish by Seuil (Bibliothèque politique) in 1974.
They have all been rendered into English by Ted Crawford. All emphasis is as in the original, but citations of Trotsky’s writing have been altered from the French texts to the standard English ones, generally those of the Pathfinder corpus.
These writings deal with a particularly dramatic slice of history. They start with the period of agonising international tension which culminated in the Munich agreement of 30 September 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini for the Axis, and Neville Chamberlain and Eduard Daladier for the so-called Western ‘democracies’. This agreement, which anxious peoples believed had really given them peace, was only a short respite, as we now know, and what is more it helped to isolate dangerously the USSR by creating the possibility of a future coalition of these four great powers against the Socialist state.
The following sequence helps us understand the period which preceded the start of the war, after Munich, and despite Munich. It is then marked by the dramatic German-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939, which was a complete reversal of previous Stalinist foreign policy, which had been more or less aligned with the Western ‘democracies’ until then, in a common defence against the menace of Hitler. The prolonged negotiations which had taken place with them until then collapsed at the last moment as the Western powers dragged things out while Poland opposed the passage of the Red Armies across its territory.
The unnatural alliance between ‘Bolshevism’ (or what was left of it) and National Socialism simultaneously struck a heavy moral blow against the revolutionary movements in many countries, while leaving Hitler’s hands free for warlike enterprises. Then came the lightning aggression against the reactionary Poland of the colonels, the pretext invoked by Hitler being the Danzig corridor, which had, in fact, scandalously cut Germany into two since the Treaty of Versailles. In a few weeks, because of his superior military might and crushing technical superiority, Hitler finished with Poland, which was then divided between the two German and Russian gangsters.
Then there was that strange period called the ‘Phoney War’, where the Western powers, who had done nothing, or hardly anything, to help their ally Poland, passively faced the Wehrmacht, itself immobilised behind the Siegfried line.
But Stalin was not content with absorbing that portion of Poland and the Baltic states that Hitler was happy to leave him. His appetite whetted, he suddenly demanded a cession of territory from Finland and, being refused, just as Hitler had smashed down Poland, his armed forces fell on Finland, but with much less success. Thus started the particularly stressful Winter War, in the course of which, to the surprise of the whole world, and of Hitler in particular, the giant Red Army, weakened and demoralised by a previous series of purges of its generals and officer corps, did not succeed in finishing off the Finnish dwarf for several months. The soldiers on the Soviet side did not understand the legitimacy of an aggressive war waged by a Socialist country against a small people. In this situation the Finns fought with the energy of despair to preserve their national independence. Finally, in March 1940, a sort of compromise peace put an end to this disastrous adventure.
The World War had still not really started. Hitler, with economic help from Stalin, finally decided to commit himself. On 11 May 1940 the Wehrmacht first invaded Holland and then Belgium: by the beginning of June, after a shattering armoured breakthrough, France was routed and, on 2 June, Marshal Petain, the new head of state, signed the surrender.
As we shall see, Trotsky was an attentive and passionate observer of this succession of changing scenes. Unhappily, was not able to see how things finally turned out, because the blow of the pick which penetrated his skull on August 1940 put an end to the activity of his brain. The present compilation therefore, has the appearance of an unfinished work.
But his material is so rich and so powerful, and his predictions as to the eventual evolution of the war are always so lucid, that the writings of Trotsky on the Second World War go further than the moment when their author was forced to put down his pen on his blood-stained desk. While they interpreted the warlike events of which Leon Davidovich, in a masterly fashion, did not lose the thread for an instant, they throw no less light on the of the world conflict – which the author did not live to see – and by that they help us to understand it better.
For today’s reader the collection has a double interest:
A unique occurence in the war of 1914-18, which has never happened since, was surely the presence of Lenin, a superhuman and supernational mind, placed above the conflict in a neutral country both as an observer and interpreter, who watched the unfolding of the conflict, whereas those who managed it were as blind as they were deaf. Trotsky, in the same way, did not allow himself to give advice to governments, however useful he might have been to the leaders of the countries at war, who, if they had wished, could well have betaken themselves to the new Delphi at Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico, to listen to the oracle whose eye pierced the shadows of world politics, and who so clearly read the contradictions which made up the diplomatic alliances and conduct of the war.
It is true that the United States was still then ‘neutral’, that is to say, less caught up in the conflagration, and was thus less blinded by it, while the President, Franklin Roosevelt, had an infinitely more subtle and astute mind than the wild men urging their people on at the head of the belligerents.
Leon Davidovich was all the time aware of his vocation as a professional soothsayer. The word ‘prediction’ appears more than once in these articles. However, he has the modesty and honesty to doubt the accuracy of his forecasts himself. “Reality”, he wrote, “is worse than all the predictions that I have made.” “It would be hopeless to foresee the result of the War.”
Before allowing Trotsky himself to speak, we would like to make a short list of his numerous predictions for the benefit of the reader.
However, Leon Davidovich did not hide the fact that if the USSR were attacked, the war against the foreigner would undoubtedly strengthen the position of the bureaucracy. That happened.
Once more, in spite of his savage struggle against Stalinism, Trotsky affirmed his unconditional defence of the Soviet Union. If the country was invaded, he stated that his supporters would fight against Hitler’s troops, and he congratulated the Russian people on their understanding that a defeat of the USSR would signify the destruction of the nationalised and planned economy.
Trotsky was full of optimism for the future of the Germany that had been subjugated by Hitler. If National Socialism had been able to triumph, it was only because the working class no longer had any confidence in its old parties and its old slogans, and it had not yet found a new way out. But on 11 September 1939 Leon Davidovich was convinced that Hitler would continue to slide into catastrophe. He saw that Hitler was walking to the abyss with the infallibility of a sleep-walker. He thought that Nazi rule, proclaimed as lasting for a thousand years, was not likely to last for even 10.
Shortly before his death, Trotsky had not the slightest doubt as to the resistance of the occupied peoples conquered by German imperialism, and he compared the occupied countries to powder-barrels.
Trotsky did not hesitate to proclaim that America must not stay neutral. According to him, it was necessary to give Hitler such a decisive blow that Stalin would cease to fear him. And he encouraged the American workers to engage in intensive military preparation. For him, at any rate, American intervention was absolutely inevitable. The real war would be between Germany and the USA.
From the beginning of September 1939, Trotsky never ceased to warn the Soviet Union against future German aggression. For him the Russo-German pact was only a “scrap of paper”. If Hitler was unfortunately victorious on the Western front, he would then turn his arms against the USSR.
As a corollary Trotsky predicted an alliance between the USSR and the imperialist ‘democracies’.
From 4 September 1939 onwards Trotsky said that Japan would launch an offensive towards the south in the direction of the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Borneo, French Indochina and Burma, rather than attack the USSR. But while he foresaw the extension of Japanese rule over the greater part of the Asiatic continent, he reckoned that Japan was incapable of maintaining a war of great intensity.
From the years 1937-38, at the start of the coming world conflict, it is clear that for Trotsky, domination of our planet would fall to the United States, which would proceed into an explosion of imperialism, the like of which the world had never seen before.
Finally, Trotsky envisaged the perspective of a Third World War which would be waged by entire continents against one another, and which would become the tomb of civilisation.
Whatever happened, Trotsky kept an intransigent faith in proletarian internationalism. He cried out that in aiding the democracies against the Fascists, the workers in the western countries could only assist and accelerate the victory of Fascism inside their own countries. The war between the two adversaries could bring nothing but oppression and reaction in both camps.
However, one point on which his perspicacious mind was mistaken was his scepticism about the possibility of an eventual outcome by a secret weapon held in reserve by one of the combatants. He said that no army could hold chemical or electronic miracles in reserve. In August 1937 Leon Davidovich was unable to guess at the military use of nuclear physics.
Another erroneous point was his ardent conviction that the Second World War would end in the victory of the world revolution, and in consequence, in the triumph of the Fourth International, in which he showed the utmost confidence. But is it possible to be a revolutionary and a guide to other revolutionaries unless, in addition to an incisive Marxist analysis, there is faith and fire in one’s belly?
The reader can perceive from the foregoing that Trotsky was two men, on the one hand a revolutionary internationalist, the spokesman of the Fourth International, and on the other, a leader who was still very much a Soviet militant, staying faithful to the revolution he had himself led and the military power that he had created.
It is natural that in Against the Stream, the first Trotsky looked at the Second Imperialist War with similar eyes to those of Lenin, that is to say a totally revolutionary point of view demanding the defeat of all the imperialist countries. But the other Trotsky, the Soviet Trotsky, we repeat, is above all concerned with the unconditional defence of the USSR, a position from which he never deviated. The result is an alternating series of texts, the one inspired by the most burning Soviet patriotism, while in others he shows himself implacably opposed to the Stalinist bureaucracy, which he accuses of inadequately defending the Soviet homeland. This second Trotsky allows himself to be led into taking up positions that seem to contradict those of the first Trotsky – the internationalist.
It is thus that, foreseeing or even calling for the entry of the United States into the war on the side of the Western Allies, Trotsky was led into lambasting the American pacifists, considered as ‘Enemy No.1’ by him, and to encouraging the United States to accelerate its military preparations. He insisted on several occasions that Stalin had cooperated with Hitler, above all out of fear of him, and that the only way to help him out of the clutches of the Nazi dictator was for the Allies to show themselves strong.
One might think that day-to-day articles about events of long ago, now 30 years, would lose something of their immediacy. This is by no means the case for the articles that we publish. To us they do not appear to have aged. They keep their freshness and sharpness. No doubt this is because each of them raises itself above the situation of the moment to exhibit an interpretation, a philosophy, a global orientation, which is based on a coherent and durable system of thought, that of revolutionary Marxism.
The central piece in this collection, both by length and by content, is the admirable Manifesto of the Fourth International of May 1940 which was written in Trotsky's own hand. If he needs to, the reader can verify this with his own eyes, since, thanks to the Houghton Library of Harvard, we reproduce the handwritten manuscript. I do not believe that anyone else has dared to publish a text of such quality on the Second World War, which expresses with so much force and conviction the fundamentals of proletarian internationalism. I am the better able to judge since I myself inserted, as an appendix to my book, Front Populaire: la Révolution Perdu, the appeals published during the war by the Front Ouvrier International contre La Guerre, the international rival to the Fourth International, and by the French Parti Socialist Ouvrier et Paysan, both inspired by Marceau Pivert.
Far be it for me to belittle the value of texts from the organisations of which I have just spoken and about which, in my opinion, Trotsky was rather too severe. For Marceau Pivert also had the great virtue that he stayed faithful above all to proletarian internationalism throughout the war. But I believe Trotsky expresses far better than he does, with much greater sharpness, greater weight, and a greater genius, an obstinately internationalist position which left him, like Marceau Pivert and we, his friends, isolated souls preaching to the desert, submerged by the depth of the wave of the world conflagration in which, in one way or another, all the nationalist passions were unleashed.
Trotsky’s Manifesto, which would also be his testament, saved the honour of the world working class in these accursed years.
Daniel Guérin
In a funny way this American Left History blog probably never have come into existence if it was not for the Vietnam War, the primary radicalizing agent of my generation, the generation of ’68, and of my personal radicalization by military service during that period. I was, like many working class youth, especially from the urban Irish neighborhoods, drawn to politics as a career, bourgeois politics that is, liberal or not so liberal. Radicalism, or parts of it, was attractive but the “main chance” for political advancement in this country was found elsewhere. I, also like many working class youth then, was drafted into the military, although I, unlike most, balked, and balked hard at such service one I had been inducted. That event is the key experience that has left me still, some forty years later, with an overarching hatred of war, of American imperialist wars in particular, and with an overweening desire to spend my time fighting, fighting to the end against the “monster.”
Needless to say, in the late 1960s, although there was plenty of turmoil over the war on American (and world-wide) campuses and other student-influenced hang-outs and enclaves and that turmoil was starting to be picked among American soldiers, especially drafted soldiers, once they knew the score there was an incredible dearth of information flowing back and forth between those two movements. I, personally, had connections with the civilian ant-war movement, but most anti-war GIs were groping in the dark, groping in the dark on isolated military bases (not accidentally placed in such areas) or worst, in the heat of the battle zone in Vietnam. We could have used a ton more anti-war propaganda geared to our needs, legal, political, and social. That said, after my “retirement” from military service I worked, for a while, with the anti-war GI movement through the coffeehouse network based around various military bases.
During that time (very late 1960s and first few years of the 1970s) we put out, as did other more organized radical and revolutionary organizations, much literature about the war, imperialism, capitalism, etc., some good, some, in retrospect, bad or ill-put for the audience we were trying to target. What we didn’t do, or I didn’t do, either through carelessness or some later vagabond existence forgetfulness was save this material for future reference. Thus, when I happened upon this Riazanov Library material I jumped at the opportunity of posting it. That it happens to be Spartacist League/International Communist League material is not accidental, as I find myself in sympathy with their political positions, especially on war issues, more often than not. I, however, plan to scour the Internet for other material, most notably from the U. S. Socialist Workers Party and Progressive Labor Party, both of whom did some anti-war GI work at that time. There are others, I am sure. If the reader has any such anti-war GI material, from any war, just pass it along.
*******
Markin comment on this issue:
Individual action vs., collective action? Most of the time, while I respect individual heroic efforts (or just great individual achievement), collective action turns the tides of history, and for lots of people not just a few. As far as my own military service time, which included heavy, heavy for the military, anti-war work one of my great regrets is that I did not spend more time arguing against those politicized and radicalized soldiers that I ran into by the handfuls on the issue of staying in and fighting the brass. No re-ups, christ no, but just finishing their tours of duty. More importantly, to stay in and raise anti-war hell (oops!), I mean “serve” in Vietnam if the fates played out that way. A few more radicals over there and who knows what could have been done especially in the very late 1960s and very early 1970s when the American Army even by important elements of its own brass was declared “unreliable.” That “unreliable” mass needed us to help figure things out. And to act on that figuring out.
Alas I was not Bolshevik then, although I was working my way, blindly, fitfully, and haphazardly to that understanding of the struggle. Moreover, I had not access to those who were arguing for a Bolshevik position on anti-war GI work, although I did have a few vicarious links to the U.S. Socialist Workers Party that organization was not strongly committed to keeping anti-war soldiers in to fight the brass but rather was more interested in having such GIs stand at the head of their eternal, infernal, paternal “mass marches.” My thinking, and those around me civilian and military, in any case, was dictated more by the “hell no, we won’t go” strategy of the anti-draft movement extended intact to the military theater than any well thought out notion of “turning the guns the other way.”
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff.
********
Trotsky and the Second World War- (Part 2)
What appears below for the first time in English is the second instalment, much delayed, of a controversy carried on in the French language press about the attitude of Leon Trotsky to the Second World War. Chronologically it takes in the first and final contributions, the part we selected for publishing two years ago (Lutte Ouvrière/Daniel Guérin, Trotsky and the Second World War, Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.3, Autumn 1988, pp.38-40) making up the central part of it.Our initial item, which sparked off the discussion in the first place, is Daniel Guérin’s preface to Léon Trotsky – Sur la deuxième guerre mondiale, a collection of Trotsky’s writings on the war first published by Éditions la Taupe in Brussels in 1970. The second and third pieces are reviews of this work, by André Frankin in the Belgian Socialist weekly La Gauche, 28 March 1970, and by an anonymous reviewer in the French weekly Informations Ouvrières, no.485, 29 July-5 August 1970, the journal of the OCI. The final document is Guérin’s reply to his critics, which took the form of a postscript added to the French edition of Trotsky’s writings on the war, publish by Seuil (Bibliothèque politique) in 1974.
They have all been rendered into English by Ted Crawford. All emphasis is as in the original, but citations of Trotsky’s writing have been altered from the French texts to the standard English ones, generally those of the Pathfinder corpus.
1. Daniel Guérin’s Preface
The articles reprinted here consist of pieces by Trotsky and interviews which he gave to a number of publications in the last years of his life from August 1937 to August 1940, when he was murdered by an assassin on the orders of Stalin. These articles are exclusively concerned with the forecasts, the outbreak and the first year of the Second World War. In order to provide them with more homogeneity and to concentrate the thought of Leon Davidovich better on one and the same subject, we have deliberately left passages out of certain texts that have no connection with the question.These writings deal with a particularly dramatic slice of history. They start with the period of agonising international tension which culminated in the Munich agreement of 30 September 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini for the Axis, and Neville Chamberlain and Eduard Daladier for the so-called Western ‘democracies’. This agreement, which anxious peoples believed had really given them peace, was only a short respite, as we now know, and what is more it helped to isolate dangerously the USSR by creating the possibility of a future coalition of these four great powers against the Socialist state.
The following sequence helps us understand the period which preceded the start of the war, after Munich, and despite Munich. It is then marked by the dramatic German-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939, which was a complete reversal of previous Stalinist foreign policy, which had been more or less aligned with the Western ‘democracies’ until then, in a common defence against the menace of Hitler. The prolonged negotiations which had taken place with them until then collapsed at the last moment as the Western powers dragged things out while Poland opposed the passage of the Red Armies across its territory.
The unnatural alliance between ‘Bolshevism’ (or what was left of it) and National Socialism simultaneously struck a heavy moral blow against the revolutionary movements in many countries, while leaving Hitler’s hands free for warlike enterprises. Then came the lightning aggression against the reactionary Poland of the colonels, the pretext invoked by Hitler being the Danzig corridor, which had, in fact, scandalously cut Germany into two since the Treaty of Versailles. In a few weeks, because of his superior military might and crushing technical superiority, Hitler finished with Poland, which was then divided between the two German and Russian gangsters.
Then there was that strange period called the ‘Phoney War’, where the Western powers, who had done nothing, or hardly anything, to help their ally Poland, passively faced the Wehrmacht, itself immobilised behind the Siegfried line.
But Stalin was not content with absorbing that portion of Poland and the Baltic states that Hitler was happy to leave him. His appetite whetted, he suddenly demanded a cession of territory from Finland and, being refused, just as Hitler had smashed down Poland, his armed forces fell on Finland, but with much less success. Thus started the particularly stressful Winter War, in the course of which, to the surprise of the whole world, and of Hitler in particular, the giant Red Army, weakened and demoralised by a previous series of purges of its generals and officer corps, did not succeed in finishing off the Finnish dwarf for several months. The soldiers on the Soviet side did not understand the legitimacy of an aggressive war waged by a Socialist country against a small people. In this situation the Finns fought with the energy of despair to preserve their national independence. Finally, in March 1940, a sort of compromise peace put an end to this disastrous adventure.
The World War had still not really started. Hitler, with economic help from Stalin, finally decided to commit himself. On 11 May 1940 the Wehrmacht first invaded Holland and then Belgium: by the beginning of June, after a shattering armoured breakthrough, France was routed and, on 2 June, Marshal Petain, the new head of state, signed the surrender.
As we shall see, Trotsky was an attentive and passionate observer of this succession of changing scenes. Unhappily, was not able to see how things finally turned out, because the blow of the pick which penetrated his skull on August 1940 put an end to the activity of his brain. The present compilation therefore, has the appearance of an unfinished work.
But his material is so rich and so powerful, and his predictions as to the eventual evolution of the war are always so lucid, that the writings of Trotsky on the Second World War go further than the moment when their author was forced to put down his pen on his blood-stained desk. While they interpreted the warlike events of which Leon Davidovich, in a masterly fashion, did not lose the thread for an instant, they throw no less light on the of the world conflict – which the author did not live to see – and by that they help us to understand it better.
For today’s reader the collection has a double interest:
- We all know the lively curiosity that is growing about every aspect of the Second World War. Trotsky’s analyses, unknown in France until today, are even more precious since they emanate from a man who was not only a great Marxist theoretician, but a leading governmental and military figure in his own country. What is more, he had been able to follow the Balkan Wars as a journalist, and he had observed the First World War as a perceptive witness before creating the Red Army during the Civil War. He was therefore better able than most others to understand what lay behind the start of the Second World War.
- In addition these writings will not fail to arouse great interest amongst those who are familiar with the rest of Trotsky’s written work from the period just before his tragic death. The reader will note that until the very last moment, Trotsky, the multinational specialist, followed the internal evolution of the belligerent countries in a manner that was both incisive and detailed, as can be seen in the two short fragments, which were left unfinished by his death, on France, Pétain and the foreseeable moral deterioration of the occupying forces.
A unique occurence in the war of 1914-18, which has never happened since, was surely the presence of Lenin, a superhuman and supernational mind, placed above the conflict in a neutral country both as an observer and interpreter, who watched the unfolding of the conflict, whereas those who managed it were as blind as they were deaf. Trotsky, in the same way, did not allow himself to give advice to governments, however useful he might have been to the leaders of the countries at war, who, if they had wished, could well have betaken themselves to the new Delphi at Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico, to listen to the oracle whose eye pierced the shadows of world politics, and who so clearly read the contradictions which made up the diplomatic alliances and conduct of the war.
Private
In fact, the articles by Trotsky on the Second World War were only read by a small minority of initiates, and their private character is accentuated by the war censorship and counter-revolutionary prejudice towards a man like him, which were international obstacles to the spread of his written thought, along with the call-up of so many revolutionary activists into the imperialist armies. An exception must be made for the articles and interviews that Leon Davidovich gave to the American press. One cannot exclude the fact – what a paradox! – that, against his wishes and though he would not have counselled them, the only great power which was to some extent able to use the profound analyses and audacious anticipations of Trotsky, was American imperialism.It is true that the United States was still then ‘neutral’, that is to say, less caught up in the conflagration, and was thus less blinded by it, while the President, Franklin Roosevelt, had an infinitely more subtle and astute mind than the wild men urging their people on at the head of the belligerents.
Leon Davidovich was all the time aware of his vocation as a professional soothsayer. The word ‘prediction’ appears more than once in these articles. However, he has the modesty and honesty to doubt the accuracy of his forecasts himself. “Reality”, he wrote, “is worse than all the predictions that I have made.” “It would be hopeless to foresee the result of the War.”
Before allowing Trotsky himself to speak, we would like to make a short list of his numerous predictions for the benefit of the reader.
- Trotsky immediately understood, 10 days after the event, that the Munich Quadrumvirate was incapable of maintaining peace and that war was inevitable, after a more or less brief delay. With great precision he fixed a delay of two years in August 1937.
- Trotsky guessed that the Second World War would be a total one, and that only a very few small countries would be able to avoid the fighting.
- Trotsky denounced the misdeeds of the Stalinist Popular Front policy, which deluded the masses by mobilising them merely against Hitler and diverting them from opposing their own imperialist war. Furthermore, he saw that the seizure of power in France by Marshal Pétain was a direct consequence of the bankruptcy of the Popular Front in that country.
- Trotsky saw that the negotiations undertaken by the Kremlin with the Western powers in the spring of 1939 had an element of sincerity: because of the possible alternatives, Stalin was obliged to put forward the proposal of a ‘United Front of the Democracies’ in good faith. But in the opposite sense Leon Davidovich was right, on the one hand, to think that the negotiations gave Stalin a most important source of information on the military potential of the Allies, and, on the other, that they camouflaged the secret negotiations in which he was already engaged with Hitler.
- Trotsky thought that it was Hitler’s Germany which had treacherously pushed the USSR into attacking Finland. In his opinion it was the Franco-British threats that finally forced Stalin, as a result of his military reverses at the beginning of the campaign, to give up the idea of annexing Finland. In his opinion the humiliating check inflicted by this Nordic country was the start of the fall of Stalin.
- From 9 August 1937 Trotsky predicted that the German army would start by gaining great victories in the West, but correctly excluded the possibility of a complete victory over Britain. He saw France cut up, partitioned and reduced to the rank of a second-rate power, even to that of an oppressed nation. In September 1939 he foresaw the possibility that the French government, together with the governments of Belgium, Holland, Poland and Czechoslovakia, would have to take refuge in Great Britain. From 1937-38 he waited for the growth of French Fascism, which would be capable of replacing democracy. He foresaw Vichy.
- On 1 October 1939 Trotsky clearly saw the reason for the ‘Phoney War’ on the Western front: he knew that France and Britain hesitated to start a real war without an assurance of American help.
- On the morrow of Munich Trotsky predicted the Hitler-Stalin pact, a shameful collusion which arose out of a double fear, of a German attack on Russia and of a revolution. He reminded us that from the seizure of power by National Socialism Stalin went on his hands and knees to become Hitler’s ally. But at first he had been rebuffed. Trotsky reckoned that the Moscow Trials, among other things, had been a cover for the preparation of the Russo-German pact. Unlike others, however, he did not think that Stalin deliberately wished to provoke a world war by his alliance with Hitler, the outcome of which he, above all, doubted.
- Trotsky insisted on pointing to the considerable economic aid that Stalin gave to Hitler up to the moment of the break between the two countries in June 1941. He estimated that this made the Western blockade of Hitler’s Germany at least 25 per cent less effective.
Test
From 1937, in spite of his hatred of Stalin, Trotsky had an unshakeable confidence in the future of collective property in the USSR. For him the social basis of the Soviet regime (the new forms of property and the planned economy) would pass the test of war and would come out of it strengthened. In his opinion it would take merely a dozen or so years for Soviet industry to catch up with that of the capitalists.However, Leon Davidovich did not hide the fact that if the USSR were attacked, the war against the foreigner would undoubtedly strengthen the position of the bureaucracy. That happened.
Once more, in spite of his savage struggle against Stalinism, Trotsky affirmed his unconditional defence of the Soviet Union. If the country was invaded, he stated that his supporters would fight against Hitler’s troops, and he congratulated the Russian people on their understanding that a defeat of the USSR would signify the destruction of the nationalised and planned economy.
Trotsky was full of optimism for the future of the Germany that had been subjugated by Hitler. If National Socialism had been able to triumph, it was only because the working class no longer had any confidence in its old parties and its old slogans, and it had not yet found a new way out. But on 11 September 1939 Leon Davidovich was convinced that Hitler would continue to slide into catastrophe. He saw that Hitler was walking to the abyss with the infallibility of a sleep-walker. He thought that Nazi rule, proclaimed as lasting for a thousand years, was not likely to last for even 10.
Shortly before his death, Trotsky had not the slightest doubt as to the resistance of the occupied peoples conquered by German imperialism, and he compared the occupied countries to powder-barrels.
Trotsky did not hesitate to proclaim that America must not stay neutral. According to him, it was necessary to give Hitler such a decisive blow that Stalin would cease to fear him. And he encouraged the American workers to engage in intensive military preparation. For him, at any rate, American intervention was absolutely inevitable. The real war would be between Germany and the USA.
From the beginning of September 1939, Trotsky never ceased to warn the Soviet Union against future German aggression. For him the Russo-German pact was only a “scrap of paper”. If Hitler was unfortunately victorious on the Western front, he would then turn his arms against the USSR.
As a corollary Trotsky predicted an alliance between the USSR and the imperialist ‘democracies’.
From 4 September 1939 onwards Trotsky said that Japan would launch an offensive towards the south in the direction of the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Borneo, French Indochina and Burma, rather than attack the USSR. But while he foresaw the extension of Japanese rule over the greater part of the Asiatic continent, he reckoned that Japan was incapable of maintaining a war of great intensity.
From the years 1937-38, at the start of the coming world conflict, it is clear that for Trotsky, domination of our planet would fall to the United States, which would proceed into an explosion of imperialism, the like of which the world had never seen before.
Finally, Trotsky envisaged the perspective of a Third World War which would be waged by entire continents against one another, and which would become the tomb of civilisation.
Whatever happened, Trotsky kept an intransigent faith in proletarian internationalism. He cried out that in aiding the democracies against the Fascists, the workers in the western countries could only assist and accelerate the victory of Fascism inside their own countries. The war between the two adversaries could bring nothing but oppression and reaction in both camps.
However, one point on which his perspicacious mind was mistaken was his scepticism about the possibility of an eventual outcome by a secret weapon held in reserve by one of the combatants. He said that no army could hold chemical or electronic miracles in reserve. In August 1937 Leon Davidovich was unable to guess at the military use of nuclear physics.
Another erroneous point was his ardent conviction that the Second World War would end in the victory of the world revolution, and in consequence, in the triumph of the Fourth International, in which he showed the utmost confidence. But is it possible to be a revolutionary and a guide to other revolutionaries unless, in addition to an incisive Marxist analysis, there is faith and fire in one’s belly?
The reader can perceive from the foregoing that Trotsky was two men, on the one hand a revolutionary internationalist, the spokesman of the Fourth International, and on the other, a leader who was still very much a Soviet militant, staying faithful to the revolution he had himself led and the military power that he had created.
It is natural that in Against the Stream, the first Trotsky looked at the Second Imperialist War with similar eyes to those of Lenin, that is to say a totally revolutionary point of view demanding the defeat of all the imperialist countries. But the other Trotsky, the Soviet Trotsky, we repeat, is above all concerned with the unconditional defence of the USSR, a position from which he never deviated. The result is an alternating series of texts, the one inspired by the most burning Soviet patriotism, while in others he shows himself implacably opposed to the Stalinist bureaucracy, which he accuses of inadequately defending the Soviet homeland. This second Trotsky allows himself to be led into taking up positions that seem to contradict those of the first Trotsky – the internationalist.
It is thus that, foreseeing or even calling for the entry of the United States into the war on the side of the Western Allies, Trotsky was led into lambasting the American pacifists, considered as ‘Enemy No.1’ by him, and to encouraging the United States to accelerate its military preparations. He insisted on several occasions that Stalin had cooperated with Hitler, above all out of fear of him, and that the only way to help him out of the clutches of the Nazi dictator was for the Allies to show themselves strong.
One might think that day-to-day articles about events of long ago, now 30 years, would lose something of their immediacy. This is by no means the case for the articles that we publish. To us they do not appear to have aged. They keep their freshness and sharpness. No doubt this is because each of them raises itself above the situation of the moment to exhibit an interpretation, a philosophy, a global orientation, which is based on a coherent and durable system of thought, that of revolutionary Marxism.
The central piece in this collection, both by length and by content, is the admirable Manifesto of the Fourth International of May 1940 which was written in Trotsky's own hand. If he needs to, the reader can verify this with his own eyes, since, thanks to the Houghton Library of Harvard, we reproduce the handwritten manuscript. I do not believe that anyone else has dared to publish a text of such quality on the Second World War, which expresses with so much force and conviction the fundamentals of proletarian internationalism. I am the better able to judge since I myself inserted, as an appendix to my book, Front Populaire: la Révolution Perdu, the appeals published during the war by the Front Ouvrier International contre La Guerre, the international rival to the Fourth International, and by the French Parti Socialist Ouvrier et Paysan, both inspired by Marceau Pivert.
Far be it for me to belittle the value of texts from the organisations of which I have just spoken and about which, in my opinion, Trotsky was rather too severe. For Marceau Pivert also had the great virtue that he stayed faithful above all to proletarian internationalism throughout the war. But I believe Trotsky expresses far better than he does, with much greater sharpness, greater weight, and a greater genius, an obstinately internationalist position which left him, like Marceau Pivert and we, his friends, isolated souls preaching to the desert, submerged by the depth of the wave of the world conflagration in which, in one way or another, all the nationalist passions were unleashed.
Trotsky’s Manifesto, which would also be his testament, saved the honour of the world working class in these accursed years.
Daniel Guérin
In Honor Of The 95th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Seven-The Long Road Home
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Jack Smithfield (party name, real
name James Gladstone, originally from old Chi town) sat in his little closet of
an office, a cubbyhole really with papers, booklets, and stray paraphernalia
strewn all over the place left by some wayward party neophytes meeting until
all hours the night before and leaving the place a mess in disregard of
all security precautions, at American Communist Party headquarters just outside
of Union Square in old haunted New York City. Jack on seeing the mess, on
seeing, more importantly, the breach of security, had just declared
himself tired of this whole situation. That declared part was something of an
inside joke with the old-timers around the office what with all the internal
party squabbles of late and everybody declaring, or being forced to declare,
for or against something, so he was declaring himself tired. Not that
Jack would publicly declare such a condition, not these days, not being
sure which way the winds were blowing in the party. Who knows maybe being
tired, or the declaration of such tiredness, was in fact creating an
unauthorized faction and thus anathema to good party functioning or one of the
twenty-one conditions, or something and no paycheck. And no paycheck
would put him back on cheap street where he had been resident long enough
to not want another stay.
All Jack knew was that he was
beginning to rue, rue to it to himself as usual, the day ten years
before that he had taken up a friend’s friendly offer to come to New York City
and become a trade-union organizer for the party (and the just-formed
Communist International that was providing the funding, indirectly and through
third parties at that point). At that time, in association with the
big-time organizer William Z. Foster, they had lost some Chi town strikes, most
famously the meatpackers strike broken under the pressure of the racial divide
that separate joint struggle more than any other obstacle, as the bosses
dug in their heels (using the race card as their forward position), dug them in
deep and he was in need, desperately in need of a job. Funny that friend, Jake
Armor (party name), had subsequently left the party a couple of years later
when the big to-do over whether to be an underground or aboveground party was a
big deal. Jake had sided with the under-grounders and headed to
Mexico. (Jack had heard later that that Jake had surfaced around Diego
Rivera and his arty crowd a couple of years before, some much for underground
conspiracies around those flamboyant Mexico flame-throwers).
Moreover Jack had grabbed that
train to New York and a job with the specific idea of making enough dough to
marry Anna, his hometown high school sweetheart from back in the Division
Street cold-water flat tenements. And he had. She had come to New York with him
as he began to organize the New York garment workers. Moreover she had fallen
in love with New York, the Village (Greenwich Village for those not in the
know), and subsequently with some foul Trotskyite painter a couple of years
back, had taken little Sarah and left him high and dry in order to “find
herself.” (The last he had heard, via Sarah, was that she was with some
Dadaist, whatever that was, poet, and at least not a known Trotskyite which,
who knows might have gotten him into trouble with Moscow since they just
expelled Jim Cannon and his counter-revolutionary crowd).
Yes, Jack was beginning to rue that
day as he sat in that cubbyhole office trying to figure out what had happened
to Jim Gladstone turned Jack Smithfield since that fateful day in 1919 when the
red flame of revolution beat in his breast, that of his kindred and many of
those that he worked with. Some of it was fun, at least at first anyway,
the travelling part, going here and there for the party up and down the East
Coast. That Paterson textile strike was a beauty, great guns blazing, although
he was not really sure whether they had won or lost it in the long haul (in the
short haul, yes, they had won). And getting to go to the first international
conference of the Red International of Trade Unions in Moscow where he met lots
of other trade union organizers and found out that they all had the same basic
problems as he did in organizing the masses. Even some of the whacky party
fights around that previously mentioned underground-aboveground battle, the
fight over the labor party and who to endorse, sending the party headquarters
to Chicago to get out of stuffy New York (ho, ho, what a laugh) and even the
name of the party (there had actually been two parties at one point, with crazy
factions lined up to decide who was king of the hill. The Comintern had to
figure it out for them, jesus). But lately, the last couple years the thing had
kind of spiraled out of control.
Here’s the funny part. When Jack had
mentioned his job offer to William Z. (nobody ever called him Bill, not even
his drinking buddies) back in 1919 he had nixed it for himself saying that he
publicly didn’t want to get mixed up with radicals and reds. Well that was just
a ruse. William Z. had already been in contact with the party discreetly and
had been using Jack as a “stalking horse.” When William Z. did finally come out
and join the party Jack and others became part of his faction, gladly. And
things went along okay for a while, especially when Jim Cannon and his old
Wobblie boys came along with the faction (factions made necessary by all those
fights in the party mentioned before).
But then, Jack was not sure when,
things changed. Maybe when Lenin died and Stalin took over in Russia and more
Russian emissaries were showing up at party headquarters with directions on
what to do, or not to do. Maybe when the old-time leaders like Trotsky,
Zinoviev, and Kamenev started wilting and falling out of favor. Or maybe it was
more recently when Jim Cannon and his crowd got booted out for being damn
Trotskyites (and good riddance since one of them was that bastard painter who
“stole” Anna from him) and then the next thing you knew Jay Lovestone and his
crowd were taking the same boot leaving Earl Browder, Christ, Earl Browder,
William Z.’s assistant who had been made party leader. All Jack knew was
that he was tired, undeclared tired in case anybody from the party was asking,
but he also knew times were tough and that he needed that damn paycheck …
In Honor Of The 95th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Five- A Worker’s Dread
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
They, the murky union leadership, the dockers’ leadership, if that was what you could call it, wanted to call the whole thing off, call all hands back to work just when they, the rank and file, had shut everything on the waterfront down, and shut it down tight. Just because Lloyd George, that bloody Liberal Party Welshman, called their bluff, called their number and they came up short. They didn’t have the guts to take things into their own hands and so they were parlaying what do next. Hell, not a damn ship was moving, not a damn ship was being unloaded, nothing. Tom Jackson could see as he looked out on the Thames that in the year of our lord 1919 that there were more ships, ships from every port of call, than he had ever seen filling up each and every estuary. And with a certain pride he looked out just then because he had been the delegate in his area that had responsible for closing most of the port down, and having those beautiful ships, ships from each port of call as he liked to say to the boys over a pint at the Black Swan after a hard day of unloading those damn cargoes, sitting idle, sitting idle upon a workingman’s decision that they stay idle. And now the damn leadership wanted to give up the game.
Tom Jackson had been a union man, a dockers’ union man, for all of his twenty –seven years, or at least since he knew what a union was, and his father before him (that was how he got the job as a casual that started his career) and the Jackson clan had been working men since, since he reckoned Chartist times when old Ben Jackson led his clan out of Scotland to raise hell about the working man’s right to vote, something like that, Tom wasn’t always clear on the particulars of that history although he knew for certain that it involved the Chartists of blessed memory.
Most of the time he had been content to be a union man, pay his dues, and support any actions that the leadership proposed. And have a pint or two with the boys at his beloved Black Swan and then go home to Anne and the two little ones. But the damn war of unblessed memory had changed things. He had been lucky enough to be exempt since the government desperately needed men to unload the massive loads of materials to be eaten up by the war. They had worked twelve, fourteen, sixteen hour shifts to whittle down the backlog. At the same pay. And no one, no one least of all Tom Jackson, complained while the war was on. They, he, saw the work as their patriotic duty. But now, now that war was over the dock owners, the shipping companies, and their agents wanted to keep all the dough for themselves and keep the steady dockers working at that same damn rate. And hence the strike.
Tom Jackson was also a Labor Party man, although unlike in the union he held not office nor was he active in his local branch. He just voted Labor, like his father before him (and before that Liberal when Gladstone of blessed memory was alive). The party was also ready to call it quits, call all hands back. Tom Jackson was in a quandary. His assistant steward (and pint or two companion in sunnier times), Bill Armstrong, was a headstrong younger man who had been a member of the Social-Democratic Federation before the war and since had been tinkering with the small groups of communists that were running around London of late. Bill had told him that the Labor Party would sell them out, the union leaders would sell them out but that a new group, a group headed by the Bolsheviks over in Russia, the same ones they, the dockers, had previously helped by not loading military equipment the government wanted to send the White Guards that were fighting a civil war against those same Bolsheviks, a grouping called the Communist International would not sell the out.
Tom listened to what Bill had to say but dismissed it out of hand. He was not going to get involved, get Anne and the two kids involved in international intrigue. No, something would happen and things would work out. Something did happen a couple of days later. The strike was officially called off with nothing won. Tom was angry for a time but then, with a shrug of his shoulders, he said he could not abandon his union, his Labor Party or his Black Swan for some new adventure…
***The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Out In Jukebox Night-Ben E. King's Spanish Harlem
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Recently I, seemingly, have endlessly gone back to my early musical roots in reviewing various compilations of a Time-Life classic rock series that goes under the general title The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era. And while time and ear have eroded the sparkle of some of the lesser tunes it still seems obvious that those years, say 1955-62, really did form the musical jail break-out for my generation, the generation of ’68, who had just started to tune into music. And we had our own little world, or as some hip sociologist trying to explain that Zeitgeist today might say, our own sub-group cultural expression. I have already talked about the pre 7/11 mom and pop corner variety store hangout with the tee-shirted, engineered-booted, cigarette (unfiltered) hanging from the lips, Coke, big sized glass Coke bottle at the side, pinball wizard guys thing. And about the pizza parlor juke box coin devouring, playing some “hot” song for the nth time that night, hold the onions I might get lucky tonight, dreamy girl might come in the door thing. Of course, the soda fountain, and…ditto, dreamy girl coming through the door thing, merely to share a sundae, please. And the same for the teen dance club, keep the kids off the streets even if we parents hate their damn rock music, the now eternal hope dreamy girl coming in the door, save the last dance for me thing.
Whee! That’s maybe enough memory lane stuff for a lifetime, especially for those with weak hearts. But, no, your intrepid messenger feels the need to go back again and take a little different look at that be-bop jukebox Saturday night scene as it unfolded in the early 1960s. Hey, you could have found the old jukebox in lots of places in those days. Bowling alleys, drugstores, pizza parlors, drive-in restaurants, and as shown in the cover art here at the daytime beach. While boy or girl watching. Basically any place where kids were hot for some special song and wanted to play it until the cows came home. And had the coins to satisfy their hunger.
A lot of it was to kill time waiting for this or that, although the basic reason was these were all places where you could show off your stuff, and maybe, strike up a conversation with someone who attracted your attention as they came in the door. The cover artwork on this compilation shows a dreamy girl waiting for her platters (records, okay) to work their way up the mechanism that took them from the stack and laid them out on the player. And tee-shirted sullen guy (could have been you, right?) just hanging around the machine waiting for just such a well-shaped brunette (or blond, but I favored brunettes in those days), maybe chatting idly was worth at least a date (or, more often, a telephone number to call). Not after nine at night though or before eight because that was when she was talking to her boy friend. Lucky guy, maybe.
But here is where the real skill came in, and where that white-tee-shirted guy on the cover seemed to be clueless. Just hanging casually around the old box, especially on a no, or low, dough day waiting on a twist (slang for girl in our old working class neighborhood) to come by and put her quarter in (giving three or five selections depending what kind of place the jukebox was located in) talking, usually to girlfriends, as she made those selections. Usually the first couple were easy, some old boy friend memory, or some wistful tryst remembrance, but then she got contemplative, or fidgety, over what to pick next.
Then you made your move-“Have you heard Spanish Harlem. NO! Well, you just have to hear that thing and it will cheer you right up. Or some such line. Of course, you wanted to hear the damn thing. But see, a song like that (as opposed to Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Rock and Roller, let’s say) showed you were a sensitive guy, and maybe worth talking to... for just a minute, I got to get back to my girlfriends, etc, etc. Oh, jukebox you baby. And guess what. On that self-same jukebox you were very, very likely to hear some of the following songs. Here’s the list and there are some stick-outs (and a few that worked some of that “magic” just mentioned above on tough nights):
1)My Boyfriend's Back - The Angels; 2)Nadine (Is It You?) - Chuck Berry; 3)Spanish Harlem - Ben E. King; 4)Come & Get These Memories - Martha & the Vandellas; 5)Perfidia - The Ventures; 6)Lover's Island - The Blue Jays; 7)Playboy - The Marvelettes; 8)Little Latin Lupe Lu - The Righteous Brothers; 9)It's Gonna Work Out Fine - Ike & Tina Turner; 10)When We Get Married - The Dreamlovers; 11)The One Who Really Loves You - Mary Wells; 12)Little Diane - Dion; 13)Dear Lady Twist - Gary "U.S." Bonds; 14)Heartaches - The Marcels; 15)Feel So Fine (Feel So Good) - Johnny Preston; 16)If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody - James Ray; 17)All in My Mind - Maxine Brown; 18)Maybe I know - Lesley Gore; 19)Heart & Soul - The Cleftones; 20)Peanut Butter - The Marathons; 21)I Count the Tears - The Drifters; 22)Everybody Loves a Lover - The Shirelles
In Honor Of The 95th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Six- Chicago 1919
In Honor Of The 95th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Six- Chicago 1919
In Honor Of The 95th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Six- Chicago 1919
William Z. Foster (nobody ever called him Bill, not even his closest drinking companions) was his angel idol. Yes, ever since Jim Gladstone had started working for William Z. he had hung on his every word, whether that word was right, or wrong. And he had to pinch himself because there he was sitting in same room as William Z. planning out strategy for the next steps in the strike struggles that William Z. was organizing in Chicago just that 1919 year, just that year when the hellish war over in Europe was over and working men could go back to work, and go back to work for better pay now that everybody had done his or her patriotic duty by not squawking when the bosses keep piling up the dough and the workingman had barely enough to live on. But William Z., one smart cookie, and one hell of an organizer would put things straight. Hell he had even got the white guys down the steel plants and meat butchery places to stick up for the “colored” workers, for a while anyway.
Yes, one smart cookie and Jim Gladstone was glad that he had hitched his star to William Z’s. Moreover William Z. had been smart, smart as hell, to keep clear of guys like that Socialist Debs and their ranting and raving about President Wilson getting America all gummed up in that European war. All it got Debs was some serious jail time and no chance to work the tide sweeping working man America looking for a little more in their pot and some respect. Yes, Jim Gladstone had it all figured, workingman figured. Out of the nasty Chicago cold water tenements, out of that twenty languages yakking ethnic squalor and onto easy street with a nice cushy job in some union office and who knows maybe more. His mother, mother of nine, and without a rolling stone father’s help (father last heard from out in Eureka in California looking for gold or something, more likely women and whiskey from his track record), was proud of him, proud that he was making something of himself although she would have been just as happy if he had steady work over at the steel mill. Jesus, mothers sometimes. No sweat and grime for him, him and Anna whom he intended to marry just as soon as the strike was settled and he became a permanent union official.
Then something happened, something that not even the smart as a cookie William Z. could have figured on. The bosses dug in their heels, dug them deep, started to call everybody reds and anarchists, started bringing the coppers in, and before long the rank and file, those squawking twenty languages, were ready to throw in the towel and the deal went down, went down badly. William Z. thereafter went about his business without one Jim Gladstone.
But here is the funny part, although there was nothing funny about the circumstances. Jim had in the aftermath of the strike defeat done a certain amount of soul-searching since he, ah, had plenty of time to walk Division Street and other haunts of the Windy City. He contacted a friend, a friend who had left from Chicago and gone to New York and had joined up with some radicals in Greenwich Village.
His friend and his radical friends were all huffed up about what had been going on in Russia since the war was over and the Bolsheviks were still fighting a civil war against the White Guards and needed help, and about the new organization that the Bolsheviks, the government in Russia was forming with kindred spirits throughout the world, a new international they called it (although truth to tell Jim didn’t know there was an old one needing replacement), the Communist International. And they were going to need trade union organizers to help organize the unions to fight for power everywhere. Jim perked up when he heard this news and got in direct contain with William Z. (or rather his assistant) to tell him of this new opportunity. William Z. nixed the idea, didn’t want to publicly get involved with reds and that was that. But Jim Gladstone still in need of a job, still in need of showing his love for his Anna by a little marriage and a white picket fence house got himself a train ticket for New York…
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