In Honor Of The 144^th Anniversary Of The Paris Commune -Jean Jacques Paget’s Dream

 

 

Jean Jacques Paget, all of age fourteen, son of Francois Paget the journeyman tinsmith and a known radical thinker, a follower of Proudhon, around the neighborhood, had not slept a wink the past twenty-four hours. Well, maybe a couple of winks after they, he and his comrades, had erected the barricade at the corner of Saint Catherine’s, and he had rested his eyes for a few minutes. But like the bulletin from the Central Committee of the National Guard stated every citizen of Paris, every honest democrat, every person who stood against the depredations of the Theirs government that had fled to Versailles in panic needed to be vigilant, needed to defend the Commune with his or her life. And young Paget, leaning for support against some chairs that had hastily been thrown on the pile was willing, young as he was, to defend the Commune with his life (and he thought his father too although he was away at the Hotel de Ville attending to Committee of Public Safety business and so not at the barricade). He was sure of that, just as sure as he was of the dream he had of what would come of all this when the dust settled, when they could take down the barricades and begin life, a people’s  commune life, like his father kept  arguing with one and all about.

Young Paget, if he had been asked the finer points of  political doctrine would have had to confess that he was unaware of what the programs of Blanqui  and Proudhon and like were about  but he  knew, knew in a mind’s eye way, what he wanted. First and foremost he wanted cheap bread for the table; bread so he did not allows feel hungry like now with bread dear in his growing bones, bones suffering all the suffering a fourteen year old suffers. He wanted free education so he could learn to read better, and maybe become a printer or a skilled tradesman and not have to drudge away in some crummy old factory like the ones that were starting to foul up the air of the neighborhood. He wanted an end to military service for the state, the state that had taken his older brother Leon away, Leon who was now a prisoner of the bloody Germans who were howling at the outer walls of his dear Paris. Let the Central Committee of the National Guard provide for the defense, they could do better than that fool Louis Bonaparte had done. He wanted the banks abolished, or at least controlled some so Paget, Senior, Papa, could finally end his journeymanship and open his own shop. He wanted the streets cleaned up too so every time it rained he didn’t get his shoes all mucked up and smelly for a week. He wanted a house that where the roof didn’t leak and there were not about eight people to each room. He wanted a room of his own, if possible, no more than two though. He wanted free boat rides on the Seine although he would not insist on that demand. Mainly though he wanted the government to leave him and family alone, stop taking their money for never-ending taxes and keeping Paget, Senior away from his dream. And he thought he was right, right in the sense that he was feeling that his father and his friends and comrades could figure out how to run the government without a lot of muss and fuss, and that was what he really was willing to defend, defend to the death if necessary if it came to that…        

I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind

 

 

 

 

They say that the blues, you know, the quintessential black musical contribution to the American songbook along with first cousin jazz that breaks you out of your depression about whatever ails you or the world, was formed down in the Mississippi muds, down in some sweat-drenched bayou, down in some woody hollow all near Mister’s plantation, mill, or store. Well they might be right in a way about how it all started in America as a coded response to Mister’s, Master’s, Captain’s wicked perverse ways back in slavery times, later back in Mister James Crow times. I do believe however they are off by several maybe more generations and off by a few thousand miles from its origins in hell-bent Africa, hell-bent when Mister’s forbears took what he thought was the measure of some poor grimy “natives” and shipped them in death slave boats and brought them to the Mississippi muds, bayous and hollows. Took peoples, proud Nubians who had created very sharp civilizations when Mister’s forbears were wondering what the hell a spoon was when placed in their dirty clenched fingers seemed, still wondered later how the heck to use the damn thing, and why and uprooted them whole.          

Uprooted you hear but somehow that beat, that tah, tat, tah, tah, tat, tah played on some stretched string tightened against some cabin post by young black boys kept Africa home alive. Kept it alive while women, mothers, grandmothers and once in a while despite the hard conditions some great-grandmother who nursed and taught the little ones the old home beat, made them keep the thing alive. Kept alive too Mister’s forced on them religion strange as it was, kept the low branch spirituals that mixed with blues alive in plain wood churches but kept it alive. So a few generations back black men took all that sweat, anger, angst, humiliation, and among themselves “spoke” blues on juke joint no electricity Saturday nights and sang high collar blues come Sunday morning plain wood church time.  Son House, Charley Patton, Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt and a lot of guy who went to their graves undiscovered in the sweat sultry Delta night carried on, and some sisters too, some younger sisters who heard the beat and heard the high collar Sunday spirituals. Some sisters like Odetta, big-voiced, who made lots of funny duck searching for roots white college students mainly marvel that they had heard some ancient Nubian Queen, some deep-voiced Mother Africa calling them back to the cradle of civilization.           

 

 

 

  (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

 

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. 

 

In Honor Of The 144^th Anniversary Of The Paris Commune-All Honor To The Communards

 

Some events can be honorably commemorated every five, ten, twenty-five years or so like the French Revolution. Other events, and here I include the uprising which formed the Paris Commune, established on March 18, 1871, the first time the working class as such took power if only for a short time and only in one city, need to be honorably commemorated yearly because we can, those of us who still fight for such things, draw lessons from the experience. Draw lessons that might help in the fight against the human logjam that the international capitalist system, complete with its imperial coterie at the top, has bequeathed us almost a century and one half later and that is ripe, no overripe to be replaced by a more human scale way of producing the good of this wicked world (and making sure everybody gets a big share in the plenty) Hence the commemoration in this the 144^th anniversary year.

Some commentator I heard recently on a television talk show, reflecting the same sentiment I have heard elsewhere from other academic and ideological sources, had declared the French Revolution dead. By that he meant that the lessons to be learned from that experience has been exhausted, that in the post-modern world that event over two hundred years ago had become passé, passé in the whirlwind of the American century now in full bloom. While not arguing here with the validity of that statement on the French revolution, a classic bourgeois revolution when the bourgeoisie was a progressive movement in human history, there are still lessons to be drawn from the Commune. We still await that international working class society that such luminaries as the communist Karl Marx expanded upon in the 19^th century.          

Obviously like the subsequent Russian revolutions, the Chinese revolution, the Vietnamese, and others the Paris Commune was formed in the crucible of war, or threat of war. Karl Marx, among others, had noted that war is the mother of revolution and the defeat of the French armies and the virtual occupation by the victorious German armies around Paris certainly conformed to that idea that the then current government was in disarray and the social fabric after a near starvation situation required more. Moreover the Commune had been thrust upon the working masses of Paris by the usual treachery of the bourgeois government thrown up after Louis Bonaparte lost control. That is not the most promising start to any new society. But you work with what you have to work with and defend as Marx and precious few others did the best you can despite the odds, and the disarray. So no hard and fast blueprint on revolutionary upheavals could come ready-made from that experience.  

To my mind, and this is influenced by the subsequent Russian revolutions of 1905 and February and October 1917, no question the decisive problem of the Commune was what later became to be known as the crisis of revolutionary leadership. No serious party or parties were available to take charge and create a strong government to defend against the Thiers counter-attack.   It is problematic whether given the small weight of the industrial proletariat (mass factory workers rather than small shop artisans), the lack of weaponry to fend off both the Germans and the Versailles armies, and food supply whether even if such a revolutionary leadership had existed that the Commune could have continued but the contours for the future of working class revolution would have been much different. That is the bitter lesson we still before us today.   

A View From The Left-From the Archives of Young Spartacus-Malcolm X: Courageous Fighter for Black Liberation Workers Vanguard No. 1063	6 March 2015

From the Archives of Young Spartacus-Malcolm X: Courageous Fighter for Black Liberation

 

February 21 marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. We honor Malcolm for his intransigent fight for black freedom, which inspired young militants for years to come. Imprisoned as a petty street hustler in 1946, Malcolm converted to the Nation of Islam (NOI) behind bars and after his release in 1952 became its most visible and effective spokesman. The NOI under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad had been a small sect combining religious superstition and black separatism. It was Malcolm’s eloquence in giving voice to the suffering black masses and his denunciations of the sellout liberal civil rights leaders that propelled the NOI into national prominence. He was also an anti-colonialist as he understood it, drawing inspiration from struggles against Western rule in Africa and Asia.

Despite its verbal militancy, the NOI stood aside from the struggle for civil rights. For Malcolm, who deeply believed its religious ideology, the NOI’s abstention increasingly collided with his passionate commitment to fighting white supremacy, racial injustice and hypocrisy. Malcolm was suspended from speaking in public and then purged from the NOI after famously declaring that the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy was a case of the “chickens coming home to roost.” Malcolm was relentlessly denounced by NOI leaders, including his former protégé, Louis X (today the reactionary demagogue Louis Farrakhan), who proclaimed Malcolm “worthy of death.”

Following his break with the NOI, Malcolm lived barely a year before his murder. Much of this time was spent abroad, including a pilgrimage to Mecca. Although he founded two organizations in rapid succession—Muslim Mosque Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity—they had no real program beyond the eclectic views expressed in his speeches. Our obituary of Malcolm, written by a founding member of the Spartacist tendency, noted:

“When you heard Malcolm speak, even when you heard him say things that were wrong and confusing, you wanted to believe. Malcolm could move men deeply. He was the stuff of which mass leaders are made. Commencing his public life in the context of the apolitical, irrational religiosity and racial mysticism of the Muslim movement, his break toward politicalness and rationality was slow, painful, and terribly incomplete.”

We reprint below excerpts of our article “Malcolm X: Courageous Fighter for Black Liberation,” which first appeared in Young Spartacus Nos. 115 and 116 (February and March 1984) and was reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 2.

*   *   *

“Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves....”

—Ossie Davis, 27 February 1965

Nineteen years ago the most admired and respected, the most hated and feared black man of his generation was assassinated while speaking at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. Lenin once observed that while a revolutionist is alive and fighting, the oppressor class persecutes him, hounds him, vilifies him, circulates the most vile slanders about him. But after he’s dead sometimes an effort is made to co-opt his memory, to portray him as a well-meaning, if misguided, do-gooder. The same people who savagely attacked him when alive now mourn him as a “great loss to the movement.” Something like this has happened to Malcolm X.

The white rulers of this country hated Malcolm X and responded with undisguised malicious glee to his violent death. The director of the official United States Information Agency, Carl Rowan (who is black) dismissed Malcolm X contemptuously as “an ex-convict, ex-dope peddler who became a racial fanatic.” The obituary editorial in the liberal New York Times (22 February 1965) vilified him as “an extraordinary and twisted man, turning many true gifts to evil purpose”:

“...his ruthless and fanatical belief in violence not only set him apart from the responsible leaders of the civil rights movement and the overwhelming majority of Negroes. It also marked him for notoriety, and for a violent end.”

In other words, they think he got what he deserved.

The “responsible” civil rights leaders, needless to say, fed into the ruling class hysteria against Malcolm and the Black Muslims. Martin Luther King declared their views “bordered on a new kind of race hatred and an unconscious advocacy of violence.” Malcolm returned the compliment, denouncing King as a “twentieth-century Uncle Tom” whose “primary concern is defending the white man.”

Now and for some time past, however, an effort has been made to identify Malcolm with the “respectable” black leaders whom he despised. One of the most despicable of the whole lot is Bayard Rustin, the kind of “socialist” who’s apt to be funded by the CIA. In 1963 Rustin was chief organizer for the March on Washington, which Malcolm dubbed “the farce on Washington.” Yet not long after Malcolm was killed Rustin claimed, “Malcolm was moving toward the mainstream of the civil rights movement when his life was cut short” (Down the Line [1970]). Corpses can’t protest. Rustin’s line has been taken up by other reformist fakers. At the rally last August 27 (actually a pray-in for the Democratic Party) to commemorate the 1963 March on Washington, Sam Marcy’s Workers World Party carried a banner depicting King and Malcolm together. And Jack Barnes’ Socialist Workers Party ran speeches by Malcolm and MLK in the Militant, but not Malcolm’s scathing attack on the ’63 March and King’s rose-colored “dreams.” Today the name of Malcolm X is being prostituted in the service of Democratic Party liberalism, which the real Malcolm X fought to the end with all the force of his extraordinary personality.

At a critical moment in contemporary American history Malcolm X was the voice of black militancy. His importance and appeal lay, in particular, in his intransigent opposition to the “white man’s puppet Negro ‘leaders’,” as he called them. Martin Luther King told the world that black people loved the white oppressor and would answer the racists’ bombings and beatings with Christian forgiveness. He hoped in this way to shame the Northern white liberal establishment into moving against Southern Jim Crow by demonstrating the moral superiority of black people to the KKK killers and their confederates like George Wallace and Bull Connor. The idea that blacks had to prove to the “good white massa” that they were peaceable folk and god-fearing Christians enraged Malcolm to the depths of his being. It was degrading. Like the sheep reminding the wolf when it’s time for dinner. Malcolm X cut through the sanctimonious claptrap and foot-shuffling hypocrisy of the “respectable” black leaders like a sharp knife going through a tub of butter:

“Just as Uncle Tom, back during slavery, used to keep Negroes from resisting the bloodhound or resisting the Ku Klux Klan by teaching them to love their enemies or pray for those who use them spitefully, today Martin Luther King is just a twentieth-century or modern Uncle Tom, or religious Uncle Tom, who is doing the same thing today to keep Negroes defenseless....

“...but the masses of black people today don’t go for what Martin Luther King is putting down.”

— Interview in Louis E. Lomax, When the Word Is Given... (1963)

Within months after Malcolm spoke these words, Harlem erupted in the first of a series of ghetto explosions which shook white racist America.

Malcolm X was the voice of that angry black ghetto. He spoke for the desperate and angry ghetto masses because he had been one of them. When he spoke of the hell the white oppressor had made for black people in America, of the torments-psychological as well as material—they suffered every day, he had been there....

American Workers Revolution Needs Black Leadership

Here we come to the heart of Malcolm X’s political weakness, after as well as before he split from the Muslims: his failure to recognize class struggle as the progressive motor force of history. Malcolm is often spoken of as a genuine representative of the black masses. This is only partially true. The social world of the unionized black auto worker, steel worker or docker, who recognized common interests and had engaged in common struggles with their white class brothers, was alien to Malcolm’s experience and knowledge. He had been a ghetto hustler, then a convict, and then the minister of a separatist religious sect. For Malcolm, the fundamental and overriding division in American society was black and white, not workers and capitalists. He consistently emphasized that blacks in America were outnumbered ten to one. That’s why he sought his main allies outside of American society.

True, in the last period of his life he came to recognize there were genuinely anti-racist whites and he welcomed their efforts. But such whites that he encountered were predominantly liberal or radical student-youth, often motivated by guilt over their privileged social position. Clearly reflecting his experiences with these white students (almost all of his speeches to white audiences were on campuses), he viewed overcoming racism among whites primarily in terms of individual enlightenment, not social struggle. Thus, in one of his last interviews (18 January 1965) he stated:

“If the entire American population were properly educated—by properly educated, I mean given a true picture of the history and contributions of the black man—I think many whites would be less racist in their feelings.”

—By Any Means Necessary

The struggle against racism in this society is not basically one of proper education but of class conflict. Or rather the proper education comes through class conflict. The labor movement stands as the one racially integrated and powerful force in this society. It is the strategic weight of black workers in the labor movement which gives them the potential leverage to topple the entire racist, capitalist system. Black workers, armed with a revolutionary socialist program and organized by a communist vanguard party, can lead backward, even racist white workers in battles against the ruling class.

No one expressed the anger and the anguish of the oppressed black masses better than Malcolm X. As revolutionary socialists committed to the fight for black freedom, to finishing the Civil War once and for all through a third American revolution, we solidarize with Malcolm’s stand against the sick racism and racists permeating this society. He was the man who told it like it is: that this system is maintained by and enforces the brutal oppression of 20 million black people, that its so-called democracy is a lie, that the politicians of both parties are con men and enemies of black freedom. His refusal to play the liberals’ game, to beg for a little, hat-in-hand and his demand for freedom now inspired a generation of black militants. His call upon black America to stand up to the racist powers-that-be and his scathing denunciation of the strategy of nonviolence earned him the enmity of the rulers and their kept “respectable” black leaders. But for us who see the fight for black liberation as strategic to a workers revolution against the whole hideous and irrational profit system, it is precisely his intransigent penchant for the truth and his uncompromising opposition to racist America that makes Malcolm X a hero. But he did not understand the potential power of American blacks as workers to liberate not only themselves but oppressed peoples throughout the world. What is needed to release and direct that power is the construction of a racially integrated communist vanguard. Shortly after Malcolm was killed we wrote:

“...such a leadership will eventually be forthcoming. This is a statistical as well as a social certainty. This leadership, building on the experience of others such as Malcolm, and emancipated from his religiosity, will build a movement in which the black masses and their allies can lead the third great American revolution. Then Malcolm X will be remembered by black and white alike as a heroic and tragic figure in a dark period of our common history.”

—Spartacist No. 4, May-June 1965

In Honor Of The 144^th Anniversary Of The Paris Commune -Jean Jacques Paget’s Dream

 

 

Jean Jacques Paget, all of age fourteen, son of Francois Paget the journeyman tinsmith and a known radical thinker, a follower of Proudhon, around the neighborhood, had not slept a wink the past twenty-four hours. Well, maybe a couple of winks after they, he and his comrades, had erected the barricade at the corner of Saint Catherine’s, and he had rested his eyes for a few minutes. But like the bulletin from the Central Committee of the National Guard stated every citizen of Paris, every honest democrat, every person who stood against the depredations of the Thiers government that had fled to Versailles in panic needed to be vigilant, needed to defend the Commune with his or her life. And young Paget, leaning for support against some chairs that had hastily been thrown on the pile was willing, young as he was, to defend the Commune with his life (and he thought his father too although he was away at the Hotel de Ville attending to Committee of Public Safety business and so not at the barricade). He was sure of that, just as sure as he was of the dream he had of what would come of all this when the dust settled, when they could take down the barricades and begin life, a people’s  commune life, like his father kept  arguing with one and all about.

Young Paget, if he had been asked the finer points of  political doctrine would have had to confess that he was unaware of what the programs of Blanqui  and Proudhon and like were about  but he  knew, knew in a mind’s eye way, what he wanted. First and foremost he wanted cheap bread for the table; bread so he did not allows feel hungry like now with bread dear in his growing bones, bones suffering all the suffering a fourteen year old suffers. He wanted free education so he could learn to read better, and maybe become a printer or a skilled tradesman and not have to drudge away in some crummy old factory like the ones that were starting to foul up the air of the neighborhood. He wanted an end to military service for the state, the state that had taken his older brother Leon away, Leon who was now a prisoner of the bloody Germans who were howling at the outer walls of his dear Paris. Let the Central Committee of the National Guard provide for the defense, they could do better than that fool Louis Bonaparte had done. He wanted the banks abolished, or at least controlled some so Paget, Senior, Papa, could finally end his journeymanship and open his own shop. He wanted the streets cleaned up too so every time it rained he didn’t get his shoes all mucked up and smelly for a week. He wanted a house where the roof didn’t leak and there were not about eight people to each room. He wanted a room of his own, if possible, no more than two though. He wanted free boat rides on the Seine although he would not insist on that demand. Mainly though he wanted the government to leave him and family alone, stop taking their money for never-ending taxes and keeping Paget, Senior away from his dream. And he thought he was right, right in the sense that he was feeling that his father and his friends and comrades could figure out how to run the government without a lot of muss and fuss, and that was what he really was willing to defend, defend to the death if necessary if it came to that…        

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 ….            

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This Wretched Splendour

by Rebecca Wilby

This Wretched Splendour 5.0 of 5 stars 5.00  ·  rating details  ·  2 ratings  ·  0 reviews

 

A full-length stageplay in two acts. Seven bored and demoralised survivors in a Flanders trench in 1916 find their lives transformed by the arrival of a new officer, David Cartwright. With his bright charisma and subversive approach to authority he inspires them to face their seemingly inevitable fate with courage, high-spirited stoicism and a sanguine sense of humour - th A full-length stageplay in two acts. Seven bored and demoralised survivors in a Flanders trench in 1916 find their lives transformed by the arrival of a new officer, David Cartwright. With his bright charisma and subversive approach to authority he inspires them to face their seemingly inevitable fate with courage, high-spirited stoicism and a sanguine sense of humour - the only defence against a bleak and mindless war. An engaging, affectionate foray into an alien world. - Time Out ...more

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         

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

 

 

 

 

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         

The Latest From The Justice For Lynne Stewart Website

 

 Click below to link to the Justice For Lynne Stewart website

http://lynnestewart.org/

Although Lynne Stewart has been released by “Uncle” on medical grounds since last winter (2014) after an international campaign to get her adequate medical attention her case should still be looked at as an especially vindictive ploy on the part of the American government in post-9/11 America to tamp down on attorneys (and others concerned about the fate of "los olvidados," the forgotten ones, the forgotten political prisoners)  who  have been zealously defending their unpopular clients (and political prisoners). A very chilling effect on the legal profession and elsewhere as I have witnessed on too many occasions when legal assistance is desperately needed. As a person who is committed to doing political prisoner defense work I have noted how few such “people’s lawyers” there around to defend the voiceless, the framed and “the forgotten ones.” There are not enough, there are never enough such lawyers around and her disbarment by the New York bar is an added travesty of justice surrounding the case. 

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s there were, relatively speaking, many Lynne Stewarts. Some of this reflecting the radicalization of some old-time lawyers who hated what was going in America with its prison camp mentality and it’s seeking out of every radical, black or white but as usual especially black revolutionaries, it could get its hands on.  Hell, who hated that in many cases their sons and daughters were being sent to the bastinado. But mostly it was younger lawyers, lawyers like Lynne Stewart, who took on the Panther cases, the Chicago cases, the Washington cases, the military cases (which is where I came to respect such “people’s lawyers” as I was working with anti-war GIs at the time and we needed, desperately needed, legal help to work our way in the arcane military “justice” system then, and now witness Chelsea Manning) who learned about the class-based nature of the justice system. And then like a puff those hearty lawyers headed for careers and such and it was left for the few Lynne Stewarts to shoulder on. Probably the clearest case of that shift was with the Ohio Seven (two, Jann Laamann and Tom Manning, who are still imprisoned) in the 1980s, working-class radicals who would have been left out to dry without Lynne Stewart. Guys and gals who a few years before would have been heralded as front-line anti-imperialist fighters like thousands of others were then left out to dry. Damn.      
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The following paragraph is a short description of the Lynne Stewart case from the 2013 Holiday Appeal  when she was a recipient of a stipend by the class-war prisoners’ defense organization, the Partisan Defense Committee, as part of their solicitation for funds to continue their work of seeing those of our people behind bars are not forgotten.

“Lynne Stewart is a lawyer imprisoned in 2009 for defending her client, a blind Egyptian cleric convicted for an alleged plot to blow up New York City landmarks in the early 1990s. Stewart is a well-known advocate who defended Black Panthers, radical leftists and others reviled by the capitalist state. She was originally sentenced to 28 months; a resentencing pursued by the Obama administration more than quadrupled her prison time to ten years. As she is 74 years old and suffers from Stage IV breast cancer that has spread to her lungs and back, this may well be a death sentence. Stewart qualifies for immediate compassionate release, but Obama’s Justice Department refuses to make such a motion before the resentencing judge, who has all but stated that he would grant her release!”

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Lynne Stewart’s pressing continuing medical needs and the need for funds to get that attention is also of continuing concern so click on to the link on the site where you can help defray her medical expenses.