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Rodney
Reed is innocent!
Stop
his execution
on
5 March!
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Rodney Reed, on Texas’
death row since 1998, is facing wrongful execution on 5 March 2015. He was
convicted by an all white jury of murdering Stacey Stites in the small town of Bastrop, Texas. Rodney Reed is
Black, Stacey Stites was white, and her fiancé Jimmy
Fennel was a white police officer. There is some evidence to suggest that Fennel
murdered Ms Stites.
Mr Reed's case is a
troubling mix of prosecutorial misconduct, police corruption, poor defence, and
institutional racism. Evidence of Rodney’s innocence is overwhelming and the
need for a new trial is indisputable. DNA on some crucial pieces of evidence has
never been tested. Three leading forensic experts doubt the reliability of his
conviction. More than a dozen relatives of Stacey Stites have also stated that they do not believe Rodney Reed
is guilty of her murder.
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CALL
FOR INTERNATIONAL ACTIONS
So far there will be a
gathering in PARIS (Place de la Concorde 6-8pm) and in LONDON on Wednesday 4
March (US Embassy, Grovesnor Square, W1A 2LQ, 5-6pm),
in BERLIN on 1st March. (US embassy 3pm)
If you organise an
action in your city please let us and the
Justice for Rodney Reed Campaign know so we can publicise it. | ||
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Rally at the Bastrop
Co. Courthouse
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There has been a lot of support for
Rodney as well as national media attention
for his case. But more is needed.
We must demand that Gov. Abbott and
the State of Texas stop the execution, ensure the DNA
is tested and that Rodney has the day in court that he deserves.
Test the DNA! Drop the
Date!
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More
info on Rodney Reed case here
Watch a
5 min video "I'm not giving up" – Rodney
Reed
A
conversation with Rodney's mother
and brother
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·
Sign the online petition here
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Write to Rodney
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Read Amnesty International's action
alert and send a letter
for clemency.
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More
information and actions at
Justice
for Rodney Reed website
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Issued
by Payday a network of men
working with the Global Women's Strike | ||
Wednesday, March 04, 2015
Out Of The Hills And
Hollows- With The Bluegrass Band The Lally
Brothers In Mind
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
You know sometimes what goes around
comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s
youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it crashed out of
exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North
Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like
Sam, who were looking for something different, something that they were not
sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, looked like difference from a kind of
one-size-fits-all vanilla existence. Oh sure, every generation in their youth
since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood
and have it count has tried to draw its own symbolic beat but this was
different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political,
social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would
not be settled until the end of the decade, maybe the first part of the next.
But what Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south
of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until
later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed.
The way Sam told it one night at his
bi-weekly book club where the topic selected for that meeting had been the
musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to
speak since he had just read a book, The
Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a
better term, in the American songbook was that he had been looking for roots as
a kid. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of his
generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in
music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree. Their parents’
generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration
wave was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously
ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So his
generation had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree
but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.
Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy
rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations
were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their
beloved transistor radios he started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for
something different. And like a lot of young people, as he would find out later
when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley
he had been looking for that something different at just that moment when
something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select
stations for short periods of time each week.
His lucky station had been a small
station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out
later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request
of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the
Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too,
thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like
roots music.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez,
Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear
in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he
would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were
proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music, well, cheaply alone or on
a date (basically as he related to his listeners for a couple of bucks at most
admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your
place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share
the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers
perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs).
He listened to it all, liked some of
it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the
performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on
radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills
and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds.
Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping
Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots
of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Charles River
Boys, and some bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.
This is where it all got jumbled up
for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm
boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high
school and had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of
thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some
kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down,
certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the
full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement of
Jimmy Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in
the wind-swept hills and hollows.
As Sam warmed up to his subject he
told his audience two things that might help explain his interest when he
started to delve into the reasons why fifty years later the sound of that
finely-tuned fiddle still beckons him home. The first was that when he began
his freshman year at Boston University he befriended a guy, Everett Lally, the
first day of orientation since he seemed to be a little uncomfortable with what
was going on. See Everett was from a small town outside of Wheeling, West
Virginia and this Boston trip was only the second time, the first time being
when he came up for an interview, he had been to a city larger than Wheeling.
So they became friends, not close, not roommate type friends, but they had some
shared classes and lived in the same dorm on Bay State Road.
One night they had been studying together
for an Western History exam and Everett asked Sam whether he knew anything
about bluegrass music, about mountain music (Sam’s term for it Everett was Bill
Monroe-like committed to call it bluegrass). Sam said sure, and ran off the
litany of his experiences at Harvard Square, the Village, listening on the
radio. Everett, still a little shy, asked if Sam had ever heard of the Lally
Brothers and of course Sam said yes, that he had heard them on the radio
playing the Orange Blossom Express, Rocky Mountain Shakedown as well as
their classic instrumentation version of The
Hills of Home. Everett perked up and
admitted that he was one of the Lally Brothers, the mandolin player. Sam was
flabbergasted. After he got over his shock Everett told him that his brothers
were coming up to play at the New England Bluegrass Festival to be held at
Brandeis on the first weekend of October.
Everett invited Sam as his guest. He
accepted and when the event occurred he was not disappointed as the Lally
Brothers brought the house down. For the rest of that school year Sam and
Everett on occasion hung out together in Harvard Square and other haunts where folk
music was played since Everett was interested in hearing other kinds of songs
in the genre. After freshman year Everett did not return to BU, said his brothers
needed him on the road while people were paying to hear their stuff and that he
could finish school later when things died down and they lost touch but Sam
always considered that experience especially having access to Everett’s huge
mountain music record collection as the lynchpin to his interest.
But there is something deeper at play
in the Sam mountain music story as he also told the gathering that night. It
was in his genes, his DNA he said. This was something that he had only found
out a few years before. On his father’s side, his grandfather, Homer, whom he
had never met since after his wife, Sam’s grandmother, Sara died he had left
his family, all grown in any case, without leaving a forwarding address, had
actually been born and lived his childhood down in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, down
near the fabled Hazard of song and labor legend before moving to the North
after World War I. Here is the funny part though when his father and mother
Laura were young after World War II and at wits end about where his grandfather
might be they travelled down to Prestonsburg in search of him. While they stayed
there for a few months looking Sam had been conceived although they left after
getting no results on their search, money was getting low, and there were no
father jobs around so he had been born in the South Shore Hospital in
Massachusetts. So yes, that mountain music just did not happen one fine night
but was etched in his body, the whirlwind sounds on Saturday night down amount
the hills and hollows with that sad fiddle playing one last waltz to end the
evening.
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(please forward widely)
On March 21, the antiwar movement will return to
Washington, DC for a massive rally against U.S. Wars
On January 10, UNAC joined many other major antiwar
organizations at a meeting in Washington, DC where we planned for several days
of action around the date of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is time that
we are back in the streets in a big way. Please plan to join us, organize buses
and car pools and save the date. For areas that are too far from Washington,
DC, plan your own action in your area. End all Wars at Home and Abroad! Join
us!
Here's the schedule so far:
Wednesday, March 18: Peace gathering and fellowship.
Thursday, March 19th: Lobbying on Capitol Hill, followed by a tour of the war machine: homes and offices of war criminals.
Friday, March 20th: Afternoon and evening teach-in: Ending Current Wars, Ending the Institution of War.
This event will examine ISIS and U.S. warmaking in Western Asia and elsewhere; the damage militarism does to the natural environment, economies, and civil rights; and how the war system can be replaced with a peace system.
Saturday, March 21st: Protest at the White House, followed by march.
To join the Facebook event for Spring Rising: https://www.facebook.com/events/430232700485435
For more information, click here
Here's the schedule so far:
Wednesday, March 18: Peace gathering and fellowship.
Thursday, March 19th: Lobbying on Capitol Hill, followed by a tour of the war machine: homes and offices of war criminals.
Friday, March 20th: Afternoon and evening teach-in: Ending Current Wars, Ending the Institution of War.
This event will examine ISIS and U.S. warmaking in Western Asia and elsewhere; the damage militarism does to the natural environment, economies, and civil rights; and how the war system can be replaced with a peace system.
Saturday, March 21st: Protest at the White House, followed by march.
To join the Facebook event for Spring Rising: https://www.facebook.com/events/430232700485435
For more information, click here
Save the Date - UNAC National Conference, May 8 - 10, 2015
Join the Facebook event at: https://www.facebook.com/events/1426863107605812/. Invite your Facebook friends to join the event.
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In
Honor Of The 96th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist
International-Take Four-For Rosa
Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht
The cops, the hated Federals, and their allies the
Freikorps, were hunting down every Red, hell every leftist or trade union
militant that would not bow his head they could find in all of stinking Bavaria
after they crushed the Commune. It was awful, savage, something out of what
Otto Schmidt thought it must have been like when Thiers and his hatchet men
pulled the hammer down on the Paris Commune. He had read plenty, plenty as a
schoolboy, as a proud member of the Socialist Youth, about those heroic events
back in 1871 so he knew that if they, they the working people did not win, then
the blood would flow in the streets. And it had after some bloody street
fighting. Worse those Whites (every counter-revolutionary force in the world
since the Bolshevik Revolution and the damn civil war there was now called
White, and rightly so since they were all kindred of the Russian Whites) they
had grabbed their leader, Eugene Levine, and who knows what had happened to him
(executed). Hell, Otto had just barely gotten out of Munich himself and had
been hiding in a small apartment of a sympathizer in the outer suburbs of
Munich now had a chance to think about the events of the past several months
since the damn Kaiser had abdicated, the war had come to a crashing halt, and
working people like him, honest socialists trying to figure out a way to change
this rotten old world, had unbowed their heads for once and taken some action.
Otto knew, although he was not theoretician, not even really
a leader, not a big leader anyway, although he was respected among the youth
for his militancy and his willingness to stick his neck out, that they, the
revolutionaries, the real revolutionaries had made mistakes, made bad mistakes
about what to do, and with whom. Sure they were young, mostly, hot-headed, mad
and hell had never before, unlike the Russians they were trying to emulate,
ever had a part in a revolution. Their leaders, their Social-Democratic leaders
mostly, had told them organize, organize, organize and vote, vote, vote, and
when they had done enough of both then they would just ease into the socialist
republic of their dreams, his dreams.
Then when the chance actually came those leaders, those
august bootblack leaders, just filled the governmental seats and left everybody
else standing high and dry. Worse those bastards had done the bosses’ work for them;
they had suppressed everything, every armed attempt to get some worker justice.
Those damn leaders were just as bad as Thiers and his French companions in
suppressing the Commune. Otto burned with an inner rage when he thought about
what they, Ebert, that fat pig, and Noske, that goddam hangman, had done, done
with glee from what he had heard, to Rosa, Rosa Luxemburg, the rose of the
revolution, and courageous Karl Liebknecht, bright shining Karl who had in the
flames of war stood up and called down every kind of damnation on the German
war aims (and the other side too but he aimed at his own fellow Germans first).
And had paid the price. Poor Levine, poor beautiful Levine with the soul of a
poet probably was slated for that same fate, a martyr’s fate.
Yes, Otto could see where the big mistakes lie, trusting
those parlor socialists gotten fat and lazy off of hard-earned workingmen’ dues
once they took over the bourgeois government. Somebody, he forgot who it was
and some of the details but a comrade who had been to Russia or had talked to a
Russian Bolshevik while he was in Germany, one night in Munich when it looked like
they would win, had said when the revolution was at its hottest then the
struggle against the reform socialists (in Russia the Mensheviks and Social
Revolutionaries and here the Social-Democrats) has to most merciless. They had
forgotten that, forgotten that to their regret.
He had heard that same night that in Moscow earlier in the spring the
Bolsheviks and their international allies had formed a new International, a
Communist International to fight against the Social –Democrats tooth and nail
for the allegiance of the working masses. He had had not had time to
investigate that more since all hell had broken out a week or so after that, to
sign up or anything but he knew this, knew it deep in his young bones, that he
wished the effort well. He also wished that they, and he, could find some way,
some righteous way to avenge those deaths of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. And now probably Levine too.
As The 100th
Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars)
Continues ... Some Remembrances-Writers’ Corner
In say 1912, 1913,
hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war
clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed
their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing
business in the world. Yes the artists of every school the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists,
Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements (hell even the
Academy spoke the pious words when there was sunny weather), those who saw the
disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint,
sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that
building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems;
writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish
theory of progress, humankind had moved
beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty
would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling
cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes
and hidden gazebo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing
words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to
denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin,
neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose
muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress
and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets,
ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing
on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before
touching the hair of another man, putting another man to ground or lying their
own heads down for some imperial mission. They all professed loudly (and those
few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting
their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war
drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish,
Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in
quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the
course.
And then the war
drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out
their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets,
beautiful poets like Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed
leaving a beautiful damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and
dreams, and the idiots who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e.
cummings who drove through sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors
sprayed with blood, man blood, angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones,
and broken dreams, like Rupert Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as
the marched in formation leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly
mown grass in their thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of
them, in those freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all
sputtering in his words confused about what had happened, suppressing, always
suppressing that instinct to cry out against the hatred night, like old school,
old Thomas Hardy writing beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the
war and then full-blown into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England
right or wrong, like old stuffed shirt himself T.S. Eliot speaking of hollow
loves, hollow men, wastelands, and such in the high club rooms on the home front,
and like old brother Yeats speaking of terrible beauties born in the colonies
and maybe at the home front too as long as Eliot does not miss hi shigh tea.
Jesus what a blasted nigh that Great War time was.
And do not forget
when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and
buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary
human clay as it turned out artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not,
musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for,
well, for humankind, of course, their always fate ….
Because You Died: Poetry and Prose of the First World War and After
Bringing together a selection of Vera Brittain's poetry and prose, some of it never published before, this collection commemorates the men she loved--fiance, brother, and two close friends--who served and died in World War I. It draws on her experiences as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in London, Malta, and France, and illustrates her growing conviction of the wickednes ...more
Hardcover, 233 pages
Published November 3rd 2008 by Virago Press (UK)
In The Beginning Was The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band
Who knows how it happened maybe somebody in the band looked up some songs in the album archives, or found some gem in some record store, an institution that sustained many for hours back then in the cusp of the 1960s folk revival when there were record stores on almost every corner in places like Harvard Square and you could find some gems if you searched long enough and found Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (although sometimes the search was barren or, maybe worse, something by Miss Patti Page or Tennessee Ernie Ford stared you in the face). From there they found, maybe Cannon’s Stompers, the Mississippi Sheiks or the Memphis Jug Band, saw they could prosper going back to those days if they kept the arrangements simple, and that was that.
See, everybody then was looking for roots, American music roots, old country roots, roots of some ancient thoughts of a democratic America before the robber barons and their progeny grabbed everything with every hand. And that search was no accident, at least from the oral history evidence having grown up with rock and roll and found in that minute that genre wanting. Some went reaching South to the homeland of much roots music and found some grizzled old geezers who had made a small name for themselves in the 1920s when labels like RCA and Paramount went out looking for talent in the hinterlands.
So there was history there, certainly for the individual members of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Jim, Geoff Mulduar, Mel Lymon, Maria Muldaur, Fritz Richmond , all well-versed in many aspects of the American Songbook (hell, I would say so, even old tacky Irving Berlin got a hearing), history there for the taking. All they needed was a jug, a good old boy homemade corn liquor jug giving the best sound and so they were off, off to conquer places like Harvard Square, like the Village, like almost any place in the Bay area. And for a while they did, picking up chimes, kazoos, harmonicas, what the heck, even standard guitars and they made great music, great entertainment music, not heavy with social messages but just evoking those long lost spirits from the 1920s when jug music would sustain a crowd on a Saturday night. Yeah, in the beginning was the jug…
Victory To The Fast-Food Workers The Vanguard Of The Fight For $15......Fight For $15 Is Just A Beginning-All Labor Must Support Our Sisters And Brothers-Join The Actions April 15th
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
Frank Jackman had always ever since he was a kid down in Carver, a working class town formerly a shoe factory mecca about thirty miles south of Boston and later dotted with assorted small shops related to the shipbuilding trade, a very strong supporters of anything involving organized labor and organizing labor, anything that might push working people ahead. While it had taken it a long time, and some serious military service during the Vietnam War, his generation’s war, to get on the right side of the angels on the war issue and even more painfully and slowly on the woman’s liberation and gay rights issues, and he was still having a tough time with the transgender thing although the plight of heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower Army soldier Chelsea Manning had made it easier to express solidarity, he had always been a stand-up guy for unions and for working people. Maybe it was because his late father, Lawrence Jackman, had been born and raised in coal country down in Harlan County, Kentucky where knowing which side you were on, knowing that picket lines mean don’t cross, knowing that every scrap given by the bosses had been paid for in blood and so it was in his blood. Maybe though it was closer to the nub, closer to home, that the closing of the heavily unionized shoe factories which either headed down south or off-shore left slim leaving for those who did not follow them south, slim pickings for an uneducated man like his father trying to raise four daughters and son on hopes and dreams and not much else. Those hopes and dreams leaving his mother to work in the “mother’s don’t work” 1950s at a local donut shop filling donuts for chrissakes to help make ends meet so his was always aware of how close the different between work and no work was, and decent pay for decent work too. How ever he got “religion” on the question as a kid, and he suspected the answer was in the DNA, Frank was always at the ready when the latest labor struggles erupted, the latest recently being the sporadic uprisings amount fast-food workers and lowly-paid Walmart workers to earn a living wage.
One day in the late summer of 2014 he had picked up a leaflet from a young guy, a young guy who later identified himself as a field organizer for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a union filled to the brim with low-end workers like janitors, nurses assistants, salespeople, and the like, passing them out at an anti-war rally (against the American escalations in Syria and Iraq) in downtown Boston. The leaflet after giving some useful information about how poorly fast-food worker were paid and how paltry the benefits, especially the lack of health insurance announced an upcoming “Fight for $15” action in Downtown Boston on September 4, 2014 at noon as part of a national struggle for economic justice and dignity for the our hard working sisters and brothers. He told the young organizer after expressing solidarity with the upcoming efforts that he would try to bring others to the event although being held during a workday would be hard for some to make the time.
In the event Frank brought about a dozen others with him. They and maybe fifty to one hundred others during the course of the event stood in solidarity for a couple of hours while a cohort of fast-food workers told their stories. And while another cohort of fast-food workers were sitting on the ground in protest prepared to commit civil disobedience by blocking the street to make their point. Several of them would eventually be arrested and taken away by the police later to be fined and released.
Frank, when he reflected on the day’s events later, was pretty elated as he told his old friend Josh Breslin whom he had called up in Maine to tell him what had happened that day. Josh had also grown up in a factory town, a textile town, Olde Saco, and had been to many such support events himself and before he retired had as a free-lance writer written up lots of labor stories. The key ingredient that impressed Josh in Frank’s description had been how many young serious black and Latino workers had participated in the actions. Later than night when Frank reflected further on the situation he broke out in a smile as he was writing up his summary of his take on the events. There would be people pass off the torch to when guys like him and Josh were no longer around. He had been afraid that would not happen after the long drought doldrums in the class struggle of the previous few decades. Here is what else he had to say:
No question in this wicked old world that those at the bottom are “the forgotten ones,” “los olvidados,” those who a writer who had worked among them had long ago correctly described as the world fellahin, the ones who never get ahead. This day we are talking about working people, people working and working hard for eight, nine, ten dollars an hour. Maybe working two jobs to make ends meet since a lot of times these McJobs, these Wal-Mart jobs do not come with forty hours of work attached but whatever some cost-cutting manager deems right to keep them on a string and keep them from qualifying for certain benefits that do not kick in with “part-time” work. And lately taking advantage of cover from Obamacare keeping the hours below the threshold necessary to kick in health insurance and other benefits. Yes, the forgotten people.
But let’s do the math here figuring on forty hours and figuring on say ten dollars an hour. That‘s four hundred a week times fifty weeks (okay so I am rounding off for estimate purposes here too since most of these jobs do not have vacation time figured in).That’s twenty thousand a year. Okay so just figure any kind of decent apartment in the Boston area where I am writing this-say one thousand a month. That’s twelve thousand a year. So the other eight thousand is for everything else. No way can that be done. And if you had listened to the young and not so young fast-food workers, the working mothers, the working older brothers taking care of younger siblings, workers trying to go to school to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty you would understand the truth of that statement. And the stories went on and on along that line all during the action.
Confession: it has been a very long time since I have had to scrimp and scrim to make ends meet, to get the rent in, to keep those damn bill-collectors away from my door, to beg the utility companies to not shut off those necessary services. But I have been there, no question. Growing up working class town poor, the only difference on the economic question was that it was all poor whites unlike today’s crowd. Also for many years living from hand to mouth before things got steady. I did not like it then and I do not like the idea of it now. I am here to say even the “Fight for $15” is not enough, but it is a start. And I whole-heartedly support the struggle of my sisters and brothers for a little economic justice in this wicked old world. And any reader who might read this-would you work for these slave wages? I think not. So show your solidarity and get out and support the fast-food and Wal-Mart workers in their just struggles.
Organize Wal-Mart! Organize the fast food workers! Union! Union!
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2014/09/04/boston-fast-food-workers-rally-for-wages-unions/bc1ZqZIgwsVcOw0QHIV74M/story.html
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Geoff Ellen on the Attlee Government and strike-breaking
Clement Attlee, July 26, 1945.
2015 marks among other things the 70th anniversary of the election of the 1945 Labour Government under Clement Attlee - considered the high point of British socialism by many in the Labour Party - and even by socialists outside the Labour Party - the zeitgeist of collectivism which led to the victory of the 1945 election for example was celebrated recently in the documentary 'The Spirit of '45' by the socialist film-director Ken Loach. Yet as Geoff Ellen showed in a classic 1984 article in International Socialism journal, Labour and strike-breaking 1945-51, the 'socialism' of this Labour government was highly questionable, to put it mildly:
At the hands of what many workers believed to be ‘their’ government, striking dockers, gas workers, miners and lorry drivers were denounced, spied upon and prosecuted. Two States of Emergency were proclaimed against them and two more were narrowly averted. Above all, the government used blacklegs against these strikes, often with the connivance of the strikers’ own trade union leaders. On 18 different occasions between 1945 and 1951, the government sent troops, sometimes 20,000 of them, across picket lines to take over strikers’ jobs. By 1948 ... ‘strike-breaking had become almost second nature to the Cabinet’...
This year there are lots of conferences and events being held to discuss the legacy of the Attlee Government, such as the one being organised by the London Socialist Historians Group on 28 February - and Ellen's article remains relevant and repays re-reading today. As Ellen concluded,
Attlee’s government has left its mark ... Nuclear weapons, NATO, American bases such as Greenham Common, peace-time wage controls, even attacks on the National Health Service – most of our current nightmares, in fact – can be traced back to the 1945 Labour government. Are these the legacies of a socialist government? Even its record of full employment, a Welfare State, improving standards of living and nationalisation, on which its claim to socialism rested, continued throughout the 1950s under the Tories. No-one has yet claimed that Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan were socialists!
Attlee’s Cabinet did what all Labour governments have done – it managed capitalism while using the rhetoric in a way that made reforms both possible and even desirable. But once the post-war boom petered out, the bottom fell out of this strategy. Under the Wilson and Callaghan governments, the carrot gave way to the stick: theirs was reformism without reforms.
In other words, the difference between the Labour Party in Attlee’s day and in the 1980s is not one of policies but of circumstances. Capitalism’s greatest boom had given way to its present, protracted slump, but Labour’s commitment to managing the capitalist system is as strong as ever. So is its commitment to parliament, and its hostility to working class struggle as a means of change. The strikebreaking record of the 1945 Labour government shows what Labour’s politics meant when capitalism was relatively healthy. With recession making working class struggle more crucial than ever, we can imagine what it will mean in the future.
Incidentally, who was Geoff Ellen, one might ask? Well, in the preface to what was to be his last work, The Vote: How it was won and how it was undermined (2005) Paul Foot gave us some sense of this socialist activist:
In 1972, I joined the staff of Socialist Worker and worked there full-time until 1978. It was, and is, sold as widely as possible by a small handful of agitators. The few full-time journalists on the paper were all my friends, all exceptionally able and engaging people.
The gentlest and most dedicated of them was a professional sub-editor called Geoff Ellen. He came from Chelmsford in Essex and was, among other things, an absurdly devoted West Ham supporter. He spent pretty well all his spare time organising for socialism. There was not a trade unionist in Essex he had not tried to push or pull into some form of revolt. On Tuesday nights we were kept late at work by the printing of the last few pages, and indulged ourselves in takeaway kebabs and long, heart-searching conversations.
As the great industrial climax of the early 1970s, to our astonishment, fell back, I began privately to worry that the entire revolutionary project, and the ideas that gave rise to it, were misconceived. One evening, as we waited for the proofs, I blurted out my apprehensions to Geoff. I had joined the staff in the autumn of 1972, at a time of huge convulsions and great hope for the future. If anyone had asked me, I would have said at once that I was hoping for, and confidently expecting, a revolution. By late 1975, however, I complained to Geoff, that change had not come. It was obviously not going to come from Harold Wilson or Dennis Healey, but we had always known that. In the decline of the movement, the issue seemed to have changed. Was the revolution going to come at all? And if not, what was to become of us if our grand aim in life was to be frustrated and even ridiculed?
To my enormous relief, Geoff cheered me up with his speciality: a huge all-enveloping grin. "If the revolution doesn't come," he said, "there is nothing much we can do about that. Whether it comes or not, there is nothing for us to do but what we are doing now: fight for it, fight for the workers and the poor."
Some years later, Geoff, still a young man, went to bed one night with a headache and died from a brain haemorrhage. All his adult life, he stuck firmly by his advice to me that dark winter evening in 1975. And so, I hope, have I.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
C.L.R. James on Winston Churchill - Tory War-dog
Winston Churchill - a reactionary prize-fighter for the British ruling class
...Long before 1939, when the outbreak of war saved his career, Winston Churchill had established himself as the most discredited, the most untrustworthy, and the most irresponsible of all the senior politicians in England. The rulers of Britain did not take him seriously on the politics of war because, except for his capabilities as a war minister, they did not take him seriously on anything except his capacity to make a serious nuisance of himself.
Churchill was born the son of Lord Randolph Churchill, a brilliant young nobleman who reached the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer and seemed headed for the premiership but wrecked his career by his erratic political behavior. His character was adequately summed up in the phrase “the boy who would not grow up.” It was the kind of heritage that a careful politician would take care to live down. It is characteristic of Winston Churchill that he lived up to it.
He joined the army as a cavalry officer and thus began his lifelong and passionate interest in war. He became a war correspondent, was captured by the Boers and escaped. When he lectured in New York in 1906, at the age of twenty-six, he was billed as “the hero of five wars.” He was already actively interested in politics. In the early years of the century, liberalism seemed in the ascendancy in Britain. Churchill made a spectacular break with the Tory Party and joined the Liberals.
He became Home Secretary and distinguished himself by what is derisively known as the Battle of Sidney Street. A group of foreign anarchists well supplied with arms refused to give themselves up to the police. Churchill converted a police operation into a battle. He went down himself to take charge of the “struggle” (or as privileged observer), was nearly killed and created a scandal among his colleagues and the sober-minded British people. In 1911 he went over to the Admiralty and there did his best work, preparing the fleet for 1914.
But the war of 1914 had no sooner begun than Churchill was at it again. A critical situation at Antwerp found Churchill, still head of the Admiralty, persuading the reluctant Sir Edward Grey to let him go to Belgium in person. He found himself as usual under fire. The battle stimulated him to offer, from Antwerp, his resignation from the Admiralty to take command of the British land forces at Antwerp. The transfer was not made but as one of his biographers (Philip Guedalla) says of the unsatisfactory outcome: “There was a vague feeling that Mr. Churchill’s restlessness might be to blame ... that it was Sidney Street over again ...”
By 1915, despite his competence, he had lost his post at the Admiralty. He held other posts, but it is related of him that at one time while a minister in London he did most of the work in a chateau in France so as to be near the firing line. After World War I he was the moving spirit in the military intervention against Russia. It is known that in 1944 to keep Churchill from joining the cross-channel expedition the present king had to threaten that he would also join it if Churchill insisted on going; baffled here, nevertheless Churchill turned up with the invading army in the last stages of the victory against Germany.
That is the man. Every British politician knew him and his Napoleonic complex, his preoccupation with war and war preparations, his extraordinary capacity for making a fool of himself on critical occasions. Asquith, Prime Minister in 1914, wrote of him “Winston, who has got on all his war-paint, is longing for a sea-fight in the early hours of the morning to result in the sinking of the Goeben.” Someone who saw him at the beginning of the 1914 war remarked on his “happy face”...
In the cabinet reshuffle of 1936, everyone expected him to be included because of his audacity as a war minister. Baldwin left him out. Churchill writes: "He thought no doubt, that he had given me a politically fatal stroke, and I felt he might well be right.” He says too, “There was much mockery in the press about my exclusion.” Exactly. His career was always in danger. His adventures were the subject of perpetual mockery. We can now judge with a little more sense of proportion Churchill’s claim that on a question vital to the world he was the purveyor of wisdom to fatuous idiots and fouls. If the words idiot and fatuity, etc., were to be applied up to 1936, the chief candidate would have been Churchill himself.
Never at any time did he behave like a man who had a serious point of view, knew what was at stake and fought seriously for it. These erratic habits of his were intimately connected with the failure of his supposedly correct policy on the war. It was precisely during the time that he was supposed to be fighting this life-and-death struggle to prevent the unnecessary war, that Churchill showed that age had not withered nor custom staled the infinite variety of what the novelist, Arnold Bennett, called his “incurable foolishness” ... it is clear that to this day he is not fully aware of the folly of his procedure in relation to his war policy...
In 1931, British imperialism began the colossal, and as it has proved, the impossible task of reconciling India to British rule by binding the Indian bourgeoisie and the feudal lords to the British system. After Hitler’s accession to power in Germany this was an urgent task precisely because of the uncertain world situation. Churchill, however, for years rallied the worst of the Daily Mail type of Conservatives and led a struggle against Baldwin which for intemperance and unscrupulousness even he has rarely surpassed. He was ignominiously defeated as he was bound to be ... any level-headed capitalist politician could not but see that some sort of settlement and pacification of India was necessary for any British government that contemplated war.
By the end of his battle of India, the Conservative Party had no use whatever for him. However by 1936 he had built around himself a little group around a policy he called “Arms and the Covenant,” the Covenant being the League of Nations. The sharpening international situation was giving weight to their attacks upon the policy of the Baldwin government. Nothing is more illuminating of what Britain’s rulers thought of Churchill than his account of how, all through his years of political exile, every British Prime Minister saw to it that he was well informed of the latest military and scientific developments; he was even placed on some of the most secret war committees. This explains his place in British politics. He was a kind of national strong-arm man who was kept well trained and in shape, for the day when blows were needed. Until then nobody wanted to have anything to do with him. And this book shows that no one had worked more assiduously to build this reputation than himself.
But perhaps, it may be said, that despite all his follies Churchill was right in his consistent opposition on the war issue. His book explodes that fable. Churchill’s opposition on the actual issue of the war was no different from his shrill opposition on other issues. He spoke with more authority perhaps on this, and he certainly impressed outsiders and the general public. But he did not impress the politicians and for one very good reason. They knew that they could have shut up his mouth at any time by giving him office. The measure of their contempt for him can be judged by the fact that eloquent and active as he was they refused to do this.
History is full of men who felt that a certain policy was essential to the life of their country or their class and fought for it to the end, reckless of victory, defeat or their personal fate. Such for instance was the uncompromising struggle of Clemenceau for leadership of France in the days of 1914-18 when the government was in such a crisis that at one lime his attacks upon the government sounded like treason to the bourgeoisie. No such mantle can be hung on Winston Churchill despite all the assiduous tailoring of Henry Luce. Churchill knows better than to make any great claims for himself on this matter. There are too many men alive who could tear him to bits if he tried to do this. It was not principled opposition which kept him out of the ministry in 1936 and thus saved him from getting himself as thoroughly compromised as Baldwin and Chamberlain. It was his bad reputation and habits...
Until the war came Churchill was nobody, played no heroic role, opposed the government but was always ready to enter it...But maybe Churchill did have the correct policy, if even he did not make any heroic battle for it. Now this is precisely what was in dispute all the time and is still in dispute. And here, above all, Churchill’s policy, in so far as he had a policy, seemed to his colleagues the quintessence and crown of his irresponsibility.
Let us try to get clear exactly what Churchill’s policy was not. First of all Churchill was not and today is no enemy of either dictatorship or fascism. He is an enemy of all who threaten the British Empire and the “pleasant life” he leads and refers to so often. That is all.
On January 30, 1939, this stern opponent of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing the dictators wrote as follows:
“Up till a few years ago many people in Britain admired the work which the extraordinary man Signor Mussolini had done for his country. He had brought it out of incipient anarchy into a position of dignity and order which was admired even by those who regretted the suspension of Italian freedom.” (Step by Step, 1936-1939, by Winston Churchill, p. 285.)
On February 23, 1939 he wrote of Franco:
“He now has the opportunity of becoming a great Spaniard of whom it may be written a hundred years hence: ‘He united his country and rebuilt its greatness. Apart from that he reconciled the past with the present, and broadened the life of the working people while preserving the faith and structure of the Spanish nation.’ Such an achievement would rank in history with the work of Ferdinand and Isabella and the glories of Charles V.”(Ibid, p.285.)
As far as the record goes in this book he makes an extraordinarily good case for himself on the question of the air-race with Germany. But that is not enough to build the pedestal for his statue. And beyond this it is difficult to find out exactly what at any precise moment, he concretely stood for....
From all this it must not be considered that Churchill is a negligible person. That would be stupidity. Put him in a war department, or give him a war to lead, and from all the evidence he is far above his colleagues, in energy, in knowledge, in attention to business and curiously enough, in tempering his audacity with sobriety of judgment. He has also developed another valuable gift. His famous sense of history is famous nonsense. He has none, as I shall show in a moment. What he does have in his head is the writings of the great British historians and the speeches of the great British orators. This and his single-mindedness, his operatic consciousness of playing a great role in historic conflicts, enable him at times to rise to great heights of rhetoric.
At times his words can be singularly effective, especially when people are frightened and bewildered by the complex class, national and international currents of modern war. Churchill has no doubts, as a bull in a China shop has no doubts. He has a great gift of phrase, and long training as a journalist gives him an eye for the salient facts in a military or political situation. At all points he is equipped for war, to shout for war, to glamorize past wars, to explain a war that is going on, to make new ones look like a defense of civilization.
Politically he is as stupid a reactionary as ever. The war was no sooner over than he aroused universal execration in Britain by saying on the radio that the victory of the Labour Party would mean a Gestapo for Britain. He himself lost thousands of votes in his own constituency.... It is a measure of the degeneration of our society that such a man should be its most notable spokesman; above all it is a scandal that he should be represented ... as a defender of democracy and civilization. In reality the evidence is thick ... that Churchill is not merely a conservative, but is today as ever a vicious reactionary.
A few examples will suffice... writing about Hitler in 1932 he uses these sentences: “I admire men who stand up for their country in defeat, even though I am on the other side. He had a perfect right, to be a patriotic German if he chose. I always wanted England, Germany, and France to be friends.” Hitler attacked Britain. That is all that concerned Churchill. But for that he would have admired him to this day...
Admiration for dictatorship and military and feudal elements, racial arrogance, anti-Semitism, these and much more stare you in the face as soon as you shake yourself free of bourgeois propaganda ... It is one of the urgent tasks of the struggle against war to expose ... the pretensions of this reactionary prize-fighter to be a defender of democracy and civilization.
C.L.R. James, 'Winston Churchill - Tory war-dog', Fourth International, 10, no. 2 (February 1949), pp.41-46
See also this poem, Great Britain's Greatest Beast by Heathcote Williams and this piece - Winston Churchill: The Imperial Monster
Karl Marx in London: The Walking Tour
Friday, February 06, 2015
Karl Marx in London: The Walking Tour
In London, or planning a visit to London, and interested in Karl Marx's life and work? - as well as paying a visit to Bookmarks, the only bookshop in London named (in part) in honour of him, why not check out Karl Marx Walks...
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