Howling At The Moon-When Howlin’ Wolf Held Forth  

 

 

Some music you acquired naturally, you know like kids’ songs learned in school (The Farmer in the Dell, Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill and their ill-fated hill adventure, etc. in case you have forgotten) and embedded in the back of your mind even fifty years later. Or as in the case of junior high, with Mr. Dasher, the mad monk music teacher, who wanted his charges to have a well-versed knowledge of the American and world songbook you were forced to remember such songs as The Mexican Hat Dance and Home On The Range under penalty of being sent up to the front of the room songbook in hand and sing the damn things. Yes, you will remember such songs unto death. (We found out later that he was in a desperate rear-guard action to wean us away from rock and roll, a struggle in which he was both woefully overmatched by Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Bo, and the crowd and wasting his breathe as we lived for rock and roll at Doc’s Drugstore after school where he had a jukebox at his soda fountain.)  

Some reflected the time period when you were growing up but were too young to call the music your own like the music that ran around in the background of your growing up house on the mother housewife radio or evening record player which in my case was the music that got my parents through my father’s slogging on unpronounceable Pacific islands kicking ass and mother anxiously waiting at home for the other shoe to fall or the dreaded military officer coming up to your door telling you the bad news World War II. You know, Frank (Sinatra, the chairman of the board, that all the bobbysoxer girls, the future mothers of my generation swooned over), The Andrew Sisters  and their rums and coca colas, Peggy Lee fronting for Benny Goodman and looking, looking hard for some Johnny to do right, finally do right by her, etc. Other music, the music of my generation, classic rock and rock came more naturally since that is what I wanted to hear when I had my transistor radio to my ear up in my bedroom. This transistor thing for the young was small enough to put in your pocket and put up to your ear like iPod except you couldn’t download or anything like that. Just flip the dial although the only station that mattered was WJDA, the local rock station (which had previously before the rock break-out played the music that got our parents through their war). Oh yeah, and the beauty of the transistor you could take it up to your bedroom and shut out that aforementioned parents’ music without hassles. Nice, right. So yeah, we could hear Elvis sounding all sexy according to one girl I knew even over the radio and who drove all the girls crazy once they got a look at him on television, Chuck telling our parents’ world that Mr. Beethoven and his crowd, Frank’s too, that they all had to roll over, Bo asking a very candid question about who put the rock in rock and roll and offering himself up as a candidate, Buddy crooning against all hope for his Peggy Sue (or was it Betty Lou), Jerry Lee inflaming us with his raucous High School Confidential  from the back of a flatbed truck, etc. again.

The blues though, the rarified country and electric urban blues of the likes of Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, and Howlin’ Wolf was an acquired taste. Acquired through listening to folk music programs on that very same transistor radio in the early 1960s after flipping the dial one Sunday night once I got tired of what they claimed was rock music on WJDA and caught a Boston station. The main focus was on other types of roots music but when the show would take a break from down home mountain music, western swing ballads, and urban protest music the DJ would play some cuts of country or electric blues. See all the big folkies, Dylan, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, people like that were wild to cover the blues in the search for serious roots music from the American songbook. So somebody, I don’t know who, figured if everybody who was anybody was covering the blues in that folk minute then it made sense to play the real stuff.

The real stuff having been around for a while, having been produced by the likes of Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf going back to the 1940s big time black migration to the industrial plants of the Midwest during World War II when there were plenty of jobs just waiting. But also having been pushed to the background, way to the background with the rise of rock and roll (although parts of rock make no sense, don’t without kudos to blues chords, check it out). So it took that combination of folk minute and that well-hidden from view electric blues some time to filter through my brain.

What did not take a long time once I got “religion” was going crazy over Howlin’ Wolf when I saw him perform. Once I saw him practically eat that harmonica when he was playing that instrument on How Many More Years. There he was all sweating, running to high form and serious professionalism (just ask the Stones about that when he showed them how to really play Little Red Rooster which they had covered as they had many Chess Records blues numbers) and moving that big body to and fro to beat the band and playing like god’s own angel, if those angels played the harmonica, and if they could play as well as he did. Yes, that blues calling is an acquired taste and a lasting one.    
 

On The 150^th Anniversary Of Lee’s Surrender To Grant Ending The American Civil War-Robert Lowell's "For The Union Dead"  

For the Union Dead

Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam.

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the crowded, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sign still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half of the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is a lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die-
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic

The stone statutes of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year-
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns…

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his 'niggers.'

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statutes for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the 'Rock of Ages'
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
when I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

Robert Lowell

On The 150^th Anniversary Of Lee’s Surrender To Grant Ending The American Civil War- “We Are Coming Father Abraham 200, 000 Strong”-In Honor Of The Massachusetts 54^th (Black Volunteer) Regiment

… “make way, make way, give way, the Massachusetts 54^th Honor Guard is coming through, make way," yelled a grizzled veteran, a grizzled veteran of his generation’s own unloved war, the Vietnam War, who had turned a strange corner for peace as he waited to form up to march on Armistice Day 2012 with the brethren against maddened war news, and talk of war. His mind swirled back not to unloved war fights and streets fights against war but to what meant his automatic call of a moment before at the sight of that honor guard.

Thoughts of long gone snickers and barbs in Richmond town (and not just Richmond town but cotton greedy commercial whigs of Boston, those who spoke only to Cabots and to god) when Andrews declared for a regiment (and Lincoln, hell, old cracker Lincoln to hear it told, called for chain break), snicker thoughts that three-fifth of a man, hah, are you kidding, would not, could not (lacking manly presence, and stinking to high heaven of humid, moist bellum cotton suns) fight to break chains to recover that missing two-fifth, thoughts of rebel snicker that no white johnnie from some desolate Ohio River town or farm for love nor money would move one foot, move one inch, to break those chains, thoughts too of manly courage (nervous, hell, yes, nervous as every man is before bullet fights, jesus, what do you think ) before Wagner front, and tear-eyed thoughts of Captain Brown and his band of brothers before hellish Harpers Ferry fight, no rebel snickers that night.

And thoughts too of still lonely Shiloh graveyards (or you name your hundred graveyards) solid blue bled in a grey land, a foreign grey land, simple gravestones, maybe a hasty wooden cross when the dead piled up too high, names now getting harder to read for ancient eyes, and forgetful minds, thoughts of childhood postage stamps commemorations of such and such Grand Army of the Republic encampment, and then none, as time took its toll, thoughts of sturdy yeoman southern mountain men, kindred, who fought for the union, fought for Mister Lincoln, if not for his nigras, thoughts too of stirring sights at Memorial Hall of scented wood-etched names , some class years decimated, of Harvard union fallen in the hundred battlefield graveyards, but thoughts too, immense thoughts, back to that childhood time desecrated statehouse Saint Gaudens relief and proud men, proud union men marching to hell, or glory.

Yah, some things are worth fighting for, and as his finished his thoughts and readied himself to march one more time against the monsters of war he wished, wished to high heaven, that his war, his unloved war, could have produced anything but cold black marble down in D.C. …

 

The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War –In Honor Of The Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side- The  Hard Years Of War-A Sketch- Wilhelm Sorge’s War-Take Five  

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

I would not expect any average American citizen today to be familiar with the positions of the communist intellectuals and international working-class party organizers (First International) Karl Mark and Friedrich Engels on the events of the American Civil War. There is only so much one can expect of people to know off the top of their heads about what for several generations now has been ancient history.  I am, however, always amazed when I run into some younger leftists and socialists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. I, in the past, have placed a number of the Marx-Engels newspaper articles from the period in this space to show the avidity of their interest and partisanship in order to refresh some memories and enlighten others. As is my wont I like to supplement such efforts with little fictional sketches to illustrate points that I try to make and do so below with my take on a Union soldier from Boston, a rank and file soldier, Wilhelm Sorge.  

 

Since Marx and Engels have always been identified with a strong anti-capitalist bias for the unknowing it may seem counter-intuitive that the two men would have such a positive position on events that had as one of its outcomes an expanding unified American capitalist state. A unified capitalist state which ultimately led the vanguard political and military actions against the followers of Marx and Engels in the 20^th century in such places as Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam. The pair were however driven in their views on revolutionary politics by a theory of historical materialism which placed support of any particular actions in the context of whether they drove the class struggle toward human emancipation forward. So while the task of a unified capitalist state was supportable alone on historical grounds in the United States of the 1860s (as was their qualified support for German unification later in the decade) the key to their support was the overthrow of the more backward slave labor system in one part of the country (aided by those who thrived on the results of that system like the Cotton Whigs in the North) in order to allow the new then progressive capitalist system to thrive.       

 

In the age of advanced imperialist society today, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we find that we are, unlike Marx and Engels, almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And we are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to be a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in the eyes of our forebears, and our eyes too.

 

Furthermore few know about the fact that the small number of Marxist supporters in the United States during that Civil period, and the greater German immigrant communities here that where spawned when radicals were force to flee Europe with the failure of the German revolutions of 1848 were mostly fervent supporters of the Union side in the conflict. Some of them called the “Red Republicans” and “Red 48ers” formed an early experienced military cadre in the then fledgling Union armies. Below is a short sketch drawn on the effect that these hardened foreign –born abolitionists had on some of the raw recruits who showed up in their regiments and brigades during those hard four years of fighting, the last year of which we are commemorating this month.

*****

Corporal Wilhelm Sorge had been glad, glad as hell, that the victor of Vicksburg, General Ulysses S. Grant, had just been made commander-in-chief of all the Union armies and that finally they were going to move out and finish with these damn rebels (he had heard that in taking Vicksburg by siege Grant had practically dug up the who damn Confederate state of Mississippi and that include old “secesh” President Jefferson Davis who Wilhelm now wished he could get his hands on personally when they entered Richmond which was only a matter of time as even an enlisted man could see as the weapons they were receiving, the uniforms, hell, even the silly rations were improving day by day while an sighting of Johnny showed that he might still have pluck but he was down to fowling rifles for Christ sake.  As he thought about the words “damn rebels” he had to laugh. He had certainly come a long way since the early days of the war when he had provoked his father, Friedrich Sorge a well-known Boston “high abolitionist” in the German-American community there (and later in the Midwest enclaves of Wisconsin and Ohio and down among the Unionist settlers in Texas who were holding  out the best they could) and one who in his youth had fought honorably on the barricades in Cologne in 1848, with his stubborn defense of the South’s right to their own nation and their own economic system even if it was slavery. He had even defended the huge profits that the firm he had worked for as a scales clerk, Franklin Sanborne and Son now long out of business once the cotton bales did not come north and the British had held to a hands off policy of breaking the Lincoln naval blockade, had derived from the sweated slave labor cotton trade with the South. Dreaming then of becoming a factor, a position which would have given him a percentage of the bales he contracted for down among the plantation owners. That lost dream meant nothing now except he wanted to see every cotton plantation owner lose his land and have it given to those who toiled on it. Yes, he was becoming his father’s son.

Since then moreover Wilhelm had come under the tutelage of many anti-slavery advocates and unionists around many an army camp fire at night talking endlessly of the next battle to be waged to smash that damn slave system. No one was more instrumental in that development than an old German-American sergeant, Heinz Grosz, a comrade of his father’s in the old Cologne barricade days who had straightened him out (Wilhelm’s words) about what was right and wrong and who was right and who was wrong, in the battles in front of them. So when Grosz said that slavery’s days were numbered now that Grant was in charge, now that President Lincoln had a man who wanted to win Wilhelm had no reason to not believe him. There would still be bloody battles ahead but a corner had turned in that spring of 1864 and there was no turning back.

 

But some nights, many nights now that Grant was ready for total war, Wilhelm would toss in his bunk and wonder if he would survive to see the end. Whether he would see his old father and tell him that he had been right all along that this land needed to be freed from blooded slavery’s hand. More importantly whether he would get back to Boston to see that dear sweet Miss Lucinda Mason, to ask for her favors once again, who had prodded him into this desperate fight (by withdrawing those same favors). See her, get married as she had promised if he survived, and be able to raise his head and tell his children, hell his grandchildren, what a righteous fight was all about. About honest toil and sweat in a righteous fight.

 

As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Artists’ Corner-Umberto Boccioni

 

 

 

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 they 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 his high tea. Jesus what a blasted night 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

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, artists, beautiful artists like Fernand Leger who could no longer push the envelope of representative art because it had been twisted by the rubble of war, by the crashing big guns, by the hubris of commanders and commanded and he turned to new form, tubes, cubes, prisms, anything but battered humankind in its every rusts and lusts, all bright and intersecting once he got the mustard gas out of his system, once he had done his patria duty, like speaking of mustard gas old worn out John Singer Sargent of the three name WASPs forgetting Boston Brahmin society ladies in decollage, forgetting ancient world religious murals hanging atop Boston museum and spewing trench warfare and the blind leading the blind out of no man’s land, out of the devil’s claws, and like Umberto Boccioni, all swirls, curves, dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges endlessly charge.        

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 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 ….            

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         

Reforge the Fourth International- An International Party That Leon Trotsky Would Recognize As Something He Would Belong To Workers Vanguard No. 1064	20 March 2015

TROTSKY

LENIN

Reforge the Fourth International

(Quote of the Week)

 

Under the leadership of Leon Trotsky, the Fourth International was founded in 1938 as a proletarian vanguard in opposition to the social-democratic Second and Stalinized Third Internationals. With much of its best cadre wiped out during the World War II period, the Fourth International was destroyed in the early 1950s under its then-leader, Michel Pablo, who had impressionistically responded to the postwar social overturns and expansion of Stalinism. The Pabloites liquidated, wherever they could, into the Stalinist Communist Parties (and elsewhere into social-democratic or petty-bourgeois nationalist organizations), renouncing the need to build Trotskyist parties. Albeit belatedly and partially, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the U.S. joined the fight against this revisionist current.

 

Our forebears, the Revolutionary Tendency, waged a struggle within the SWP as it was succumbing to Pabloite revisionism in the early 1960s. Today, the International Communist League remains dedicated to the fight to reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution. We reprint below excerpts from an article anticipating the Fourth International’s founding, which appeared as the lead in the first issue of the New International, theoretical organ of the American Trotskyists in the 1930s.

 

The whole history of the modern proletarian movement has only served to underscore the all-importance and indispensability of that most highly perfected of all its instruments: the political party. Especially in our time has it become the master key to all problems. The class war is fought by class armies. The working class as a whole—to say nothing of its necessary allies in other sections of the population—is not characterized by firm homogeneity, it is stratified at different levels of consciousness, it is divided by conflicting ideologies, by separatist interests of caste, religion, nationality, sex, age. Emerging from its ranks—but transcending these differences and consequently able to overcome them—is its vanguard, the revolutionary political party. The party embodies the accumulated experiences of the proletariat distilled into its revolutionary theory. It is the repository of the consciousness of the class. It embraces the most advanced, the most militant, the most devoted, unites them firmly on the basis of tested principles and welds them together in rigorous discipline....

The day of national revolutionary parties ended long ago, as did the day of national party programs. In the period when world politics and world economy exist as distinct entities, there can be only one revolutionary party—the International, with sections in every country....

 

The Fourth International? This is no meaningless phrase. It is a fighting program! It means a fight to the death against Fascism, imperialism, war. It means an intransigeant struggle against treacherous social reformism, bureaucratic Stalinism, cowardly compromising centrism of all species. It means the unconditional struggle to defend the Soviet Union which social democrats and Stalinists left in the lurch in Germany when they permitted the arch-anti-Sovietist Hitler to come to power without a battle. It means the militant struggle for revolutionary Marxism, for the final victory of the working class.

 

For the Fourth International! For revolutionary Marxism!

 

That is the unsullied banner our periodical will defend. In periods such as the one we are passing through now, it becomes fashionable in certain quarters to seek the reasons for defeat and reaction in all corners except where they are to be found, to trace the causes everywhere except to their roots. Not the traducers of internationalism are at fault; perhaps it is internationalism itself. Not the traducers of Marxism; perhaps it is Marxism itself which requires revision or “re-interpretation.” As yesterday, so today, we shall continue to work with all our strength for all the fundamental theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, which have been tested through and through and confirmed a thousand times over and from every angle.

 

—“For the Fourth International!” New International (July 1934)

 

A View From The Left-Ferguson, Madison, Nationwide Capitalist Rule Means Racist Cop Terror
 

Workers Vanguard No. 1064	20 March 2015

Ferguson, Madison, Nationwide

Capitalist Rule Means Racist Cop Terror

In front of a crowd commemorating the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, President Barack Obama offered a rehash of the bald-faced lie that racism is no longer “endemic” to America. This tune is to be expected from the black overseer of a system that criminalizes young black men as part of maintaining the racial oppression that is woven into the fabric of American capitalist society.

Obama declared that “what happened in Ferguson” is “no longer sanctioned by law or custom,” as it was before the 1950s-’60s civil rights movement. In fact, under its liberal leadership, that struggle, while leading to the dismantling of legal segregation in the South, could not challenge the systemic police violence, poverty and misery that define life for the black masses. Within days of Obama’s speech, killer cops had taken the lives of more unarmed black men, including Tony Robinson, a 19-year-old recent high school graduate in Madison, Wisconsin, who viewed himself as biracial, and Anthony Hill, a mentally ill Air Force veteran gunned down outside Atlanta, Georgia.

Each new killing by the police, as usual, comes with an official stamp of approval. The city of Cleveland pointed the finger at 12-year-old Tamir Rice for failing to “avoid” being blown away, while a Justice Department investigation gave a free pass to Michael Brown’s killer, Darren Wilson. Such is par for the course in, to use Obama’s phrase, “fair America,” where a filthy rich elite lord it over working people, the black masses and the rest of the downtrodden. Indeed, terrorizing the poor and oppressed, as well as violently suppressing workers struggle and social protest, is what the capitalist rulers pay the cops to do. The thugs in blue have not resorted to planting “throwaway guns” on these victims; the law sanctions deadly force by police against any threat they perceive—and in this racist society black youth are widely perceived, especially by the cops, as lawbreakers. Harassment, or worse, for driving/walking/breathing while black is a daily reality.

Ferguson’s black residents and anti-police brutality activists were back in the crosshairs after two cops standing guard were shot and wounded during a protest outside police headquarters the night of March 11. City authorities and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder blamed protesters for the “ambush,” paving the way for heightened repression as county and state police again descended on the small community. After a huge manhunt, a 20-year-old black man was arrested. Whatever happened the night of the protest, the ongoing violence-baiting of protesters is a clear message: they deserve whatever they get from the marauding cops.

Some observers have found solace in the Feds’ second Ferguson report, which knocked the aggressive ticketing and other “unconstitutional” practices of its police as well as their pervasive harassment of black people. In an online Atlantic article (5 March), black journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates lauds the “due process” extended to Wilson while remarking: “The lack of faith among black people in Ferguson’s governance, or in America’s governance, is not something that should be bragged about. One cannot feel good about living under gangsters, and that is the reality of Ferguson right now.”

Since the report was released, several local officials, including the widely reviled police chief, have submitted their resignations. We say good riddance. But changing who fills these positions does nothing to address the material reality of racist oppression in this country or the cop terror that is one of its starkest expressions. The aim of the federal investigation, as always in such cases, was never to rein in the police, but to neutralize fury over their crimes, thwart unrest and paint a gloss on the “justice” system. In fact, Ferguson is hardly the worst case, as even the liberal bourgeoisie’s main mouthpiece, the New York Times, felt compelled to document in the article “Ferguson Became a Symbol, but Bias Knows No Border” (7 March).

As many of those around the Black Lives Matter movement proclaim, state violence is endemic to a society that has written off the lives of black ghetto youth, who are deemed unworthy of education and cast aside into the ranks of the jobless and/or locked up. But in faulting a “broken system,” these activists are criticizing social and legal institutions, not the economic foundations on which those institutions stand. The entrenched oppression of black people in this country, a legacy of chattel slavery, is rooted in the capitalist profit system. Under capitalism, a handful of exploiters who own industry, the banks and large farms—that is, the capitalist class—amass huge wealth off the labor of the working class. The police, as the frontline defense of that system, are at the core of the repressive capitalist state machinery, along with the courts and prisons. This system cannot be fixed by tweaking laws or cleaning out corruption, which is the content of the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Black people are an integral part of American class society while at the same time forcibly segregated at its bottom as a race-color caste. Bearing the brunt of cutbacks and job losses, they are the last hired (if at all) and first fired. Even so, black workers continue to form a strategic core of the multiracial working class—the only force, based on its role in production, with the social power and historic interest to sweep away the capitalist system, paving the way for black liberation in an egalitarian socialist society.

The Illusion of Police Accountability

On March 11, over a thousand people marched in Madison to demand justice for Tony Robinson, who was shot in the head by a cop in his own apartment in this mostly white college town. One of the protest organizers was the Young Gifted and Black Coalition (YGBC), which formed after the killing of Michael Brown. In January correspondence with the Madison police chief, the YGBC sought “open and honest dialogue” with the city’s top cop, offering specific recommendations for reforming local law enforcement and the county jail. Politically linking arms with the YGBC, the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO) posted this correspondence approvingly on its website with the headline: “Time to Hold the Police Accountable” (socialistworker.org, 22 January).

The YGBC imbibes in the widespread illusion, peddled by the ISO, that the police can be made answerable to the public. The letter calls on the Madison Police Department to “address racial disparities,” which is like imploring a viper to ease up on its bite. In fact, the capitalist state apparatus can never be made to “protect and serve” the interests of workers and minorities.

The cops are not “accountable” to anyone other than to the capitalist masters they serve. Madison is proof positive. A petri dish for police reform schemes, the city is known as a liberal haven in a state with a long history of supposedly progressive police chiefs. Still, as the YGBC itself attests, black people are arrested and incarcerated there at much higher rates than whites. Matters will not change with more diversity training and more black cops, who are no less devoted to the job than their white counterparts. A black officer was involved in killing Charly Leundeu Keunang in Los Angeles earlier this month (see article on page 1).

The YGBC also embraces “the values of community control and self-determination.” The black nationalists who raised “community control” in the late 1960s were drawn from a layer of the black petty bourgeoisie seeking its own piece of the pie by making a virtue of the ingrained segregation that was seen as unchangeable. They also often opposed organized labor. The actual content of the “community control” slogan was an appeal for more black Democratic Party politicians, cops, judges and administrators. Since then, black mayors have been installed in one major city after another to help contain the discontent of the black masses while presiding over cop terror and pushing through attacks on labor and social programs.

Cops Are Not Workers

Drawing a link between the interests of the besieged black masses and those of the working class does not take a Marxist analysis. In an article titled “Black Lives Matter to Labor” (27 February), Terry Melvin, secretary-treasurer of the New York State AFL-CIO and president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, observes how “the fate of Black workers is the fate of American workers,” with black workers playing a central role in the unions. So why hasn’t anti-black repression been met with massive, militant protest by organized labor, with its ability to bring production to a halt and stop the flow of profits?

Melvin’s conclusion that black lives matter “because the American Dream matters” is indicative. This patriotic myth holds that working people can “make it” if they work hard to help maximize the bosses’ profits. The union bureaucracy, of which Melvin is a part, has long shackled the workers to their class enemies, largely through support to the capitalist Democratic Party, falsely portrayed as a friend of labor and black people. The “American Dream” is in fact a nightmare for the untold millions who daily scramble to get by.

Emblematic of the labor tops’ allegiance to the capitalist system is their opening of the unions’ doors to the police and security guards. Of the 16 million people covered by a union contract today, around 7 percent are in so-called “protective service occupations.” This embrace of the racist killer cops and strikebreakers as class brothers and sisters is just one more noose around the neck of organized labor, further sapping the fighting strength of the unions. Cops, prison guards and security guards have no place in the union movement.

Separate associations representing cops and prison guards, referred to by the misnomer “unions,” have grown in recent years, right along with mass incarceration. Above and beyond defending the capitalists’ hired guns, the role of these organizations is to advance an agenda of more weapons, manpower and leeway for cop savagery. Witness the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association in New York City, which seized on the killing of two Brooklyn cops last year to spin a tale of a “war on police” in order to better squelch protest. In Albuquerque, New Mexico—with one of the country’s highest rates of fatal shootings by cops, eight times that of the NYPD—the police fraternity routinely has rewarded trigger-happy cops with $500 to help them “decompress” after they shoot someone.

Pseudo-Marxist groups like Socialist Alternative (SAlt) regurgitate the union bureaucracy’s filth that cops are “fellow workers.” Such a view makes a mockery of the entire history of workers struggle. When miners used to sing the old labor anthem “Which Side Are You On?” they were not addressing the strikebreaking cops or Pinkertons.

In documents posted on SAlt’s website under the title “Marxism and the State: An Exchange” from a 2006 debate within their British affiliate, the Socialist Party, these reformists’ longstanding position that cops are “workers in uniform” is given a theoretical wrapping. The reader is told that “a revolutionary policy” involves supporting the police ranks’ “democratic rights, including the right to organise in a trade union.” SAlt goes on to say that unionizing the cops will create “more favourable conditions of struggle for the working class” by bringing them closer to the workers movement (yes, close enough to land a baton). The mere fact that these thugs are paid for their dirty work does not make them workers. If reformists like SAlt truly had the courage of their convictions, they should split off from the protests, go inside police stations—say in Ferguson, for example—and appeal for solidarity from these agents of state repression. Then see what happens.

For a Proletarian Orientation

Notably, in Madison the March 11 march and rally sparked by Tony Robinson’s killing was appended to a protest in opposition to an anti-union “right to work” bill signed two days earlier by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Some protesters also expressed sympathy with fast-food workers engaged in the “Fight for $15” campaign to raise the minimum wage and win union recognition, including by marching to a Burger King and a Papa John’s after rallying at the Department of Corrections.

The cause of these heavily black, immigrant and female workers has become a focal point for the struggle against poverty wages and tenuous employment, with the campaign attracting fast-food workers who want to make a fight of it. But labor officials like those of the SEIU service workers union use the “15” rhetoric to pressure the Democratic Party into supporting minimum wage increases as a substitute for waging a class-struggle fight to obtain increased pay from the bosses. Ditto the reformists of SAlt, who in tailing behind the union bureaucracy have focused their efforts on legislative wheeling and dealing and petitioning to raise the minimum wage.

As we wrote in “Fight Poverty Wages Through Class Struggle!” (WV No. 1052, 19 September 2014), “The organization of the atomized fast-food workforce poses the need to mobilize the power of unionized workers along the supply lines of the fast-food chains, where once-strong union concentrations, such as in trucking and meatpacking, have been eroded by the craven policies of the union bureaucrats. A hard struggle to organize fast-food workers would rapidly fuel a resurgence of union strength in those industries.”

The millennials of today’s Black Lives Matter protests have not witnessed much by way of strike action. Many activists wrongly associate the working class as a whole with the sellout leaders atop the unions. What is necessary to transform the unions into battalions of class struggle and champions of the oppressed is a new labor leadership willing to fight it out class against class.

There is plenty of raw anger among working people over smaller paychecks, among black youth over cop terror, among immigrants over mass deportations. That anger must be turned into class struggle against the common enemy, the capitalist ruling class, which thrives on promoting racial antagonisms in order to keep working people divided. Such struggle could provide a springboard for working-class consciousness and organization. Crucially, the political ties of the unions and the black masses to the Democratic Party must be severed. And that requires revolutionary leadership. To militant activists unwilling to be led down the path of the same dead-end liberal politics that have buried black struggle for decades, we offer the perspective of building a multiracial workers party in which black workers will be in the front ranks. Such a party would be dedicated to putting an end to the brutal capitalist order once and for all and establishing a socialist America. iew

No medical execution of Mumia!

 

Click HERE to view in browser     PLEASE SHARE WIDELY    

URGENT!  URGENT!  URGENT!

Mon. April 6 national call in: No medical execution of Mumia!

SAVE THE LIFE OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!
STOP HIS EXECUTION BY MEDICAL NEGLECT!
DON’T LET THE STATE MURDER ANOTHER BLACK LEADER!
SHUT IT DOWN FOR MUMIA!
Stopped from carrying out the death penalty against Mumia Abu-Jamal by a worldwide movement that spanned three decades, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections has been attempting over the past three months to execute him by medical neglect.
On March 30, Abu-Jamal was rushed, unconscious, to the Schuylkill Medical Center in Pottsville, Pa., suffering from diabetic shock, with a dangerously high blood sugar level of 779.   After just two days of treatment in the hospital’s ICU, on April 1, Abu-Jamal was returned to the prison infirmary at SCI Mahanoy in Frackville, Pa., into the hands of the very same doctors whose medical neglect and mistreatment nearly killed him.
Prison officials initially denied visits by family members, supporters and Abu-Jamal’s attorneys and only backed down after receiving thousands of calls. Those able to visit Mumia on April 3 reported he was extremely weak, had lost 80 pounds, and still had elevated blood sugar levels over 300. For lunch that day the prison fed him spaghetti, one of the worst foods to give a diabetic patient.
The murder of aging political prisoners by denying them inadequate health care has happened before. Earlier this year, MOVE 9 member Phil Africa died under suspicious circumstances at SCI Dallas. The lack of standard medical treatment impacts all prisoners, particularly those over 55.
We are demanding that the state of Pennsylvania cease and desist in their attempts to murder political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal:

●Allow daily visits by Mumia’s family, friends and attorneys. Their support and protection at this time of vulnerability should not be restricted.

●Allow Mumia’s choice of specialist doctors to examine and schedule treatment for him -- NOW. Neither the prison staff at SCI Mahanoy nor the Schuylkill Medical Center has a diabetes specialist. There is precedent in Pennsylvania for this. Prisoner John E. du Pont, an heir to the du Pont chemical fortune, was allowed care by private doctors during imprisonment. Mumia deserves the same.

●Release Mumia’s medical records to his attorneys.

●Release from prison all the elderly age 55 and over. Mumia will turn 61 on April 24.

●Allowa full investigation of prison health care in Pennsylvania.

●Mumia is innocent and should never have been incarcerated. We demand his immediate release.

We are calling on everyone to participate in the following actions over the next few days:

●Twitter widely using the hashtags #mumiamustlive,  #saveMumia and #Blacklivesmatter.

●Call, fax and email the following state officials to raise the above demands:

~ DOC Secretary John Wetzel: 717-728-4109; crpadocsecretary@pa.gov.
~ Gov. Tom Wolf: 717-772-5000; fax 717-772-8284; governor@pa.gov.
~ Prison Superintendent John Kerestes: 570-773-2158; contact.doc@pa.gov.

●MONDAY, APRIL 6: A car caravan will demand to see Pennsylvania Department of Corrections Superintendent John Wetzel at the DOC office: 1920 Technology Parkway, Mechanicsburg, PA 17050 at 11 a.m. Cars leaving Philadelphia will gather at 7 a.m. on JFK Boulevard between 30th and 31st Streets (across from Bolt and Mega buses). If you can offer rides or need a ride, call or text Joe Piette at 610-931-2615 or email jpiette660@hotmail.com.

●TUESDAY, APRIL 7: Press conference in Philadelphia at 11 a.m. outside

District Attorney Seth Williams’ office at Juniper Street & South Penn Square (across from City Hall, near Macy’s).

●FRIDAY, APRIL 10: Organize a demonstration in your city, on your campus, wherever you can get out word to stop this attempt to murder Mumia. We need to SHUT IT DOWN FOR MUMIA!

---

Mumia's family and supporters present demands to the Dept. of Corrections, Mechanicsburg, PA 4/3/2015  
  https://youtu.be/1VSYaj9Ab8U

Video link by Power to the People Radio Program

April 3 NYC emergency protest: No medical execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal!

https://youtu.be/-kAkhjJsNXQ
Video link by Peoples Video Network

---

Column written by Mumia Abu-Jamal 3/5/15 

“Ferguson, USA”

With breathless news reports, the U.S. Deptartment of Justice’s Pattern and Practice Study paints a damning picture of a long, cruel and bitter train of maltreatment, mass profiling, police targeting and brutality against Black people in the Missouri town of Ferguson.
What may be even worse, however, is how the town’s police, judges and political leaders conspired to loot the community -- by fining them into more poverty, fines which today account for some 25 percent of the county’s budget.
Correctly, cops have been criticized for their juvenile emails and texts of racism and contempt against the local Black community and even Black leaders in Washington, D.C.
There is largely silence, however, over the role of judges, who used their robes to squeeze money from the community, with unfair fines and fees -- even using their jails as an illegal kind of debtor’s prison.
In 1869, during the reign of England’s Queen Victoria, a statute known as the Debtors Act was passed, which forever abolished imprisonment as punishment for debt.
In today’s Missouri, it’s still used to punish and exploit the poor. But, truth be told, it ain’t just Missouri.
Famed Rolling Stone writer, Matt Taibbi, in his 2014 book, The Divide, tells a similar tale, but from points all across America -- Brooklyn, Bed-Stuy, Gainesville, Georgia, Los Angeles, San Diego and beyond -- [where] poor people are being squeezed and squeezed by cops, by judges, by local governments -- to part with their last dime -- to support a system corrupt to the core.
Taibbi’s full title might give us some insight: The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.
It’s the system -- one of exploitation or predation, ultimately of capitalism.
© ‘15maj

 

IAC Solidarity Center action alerts.
Our mailing address is:
IAC Solidarity Center
147 W 24th St
2nd FL
New York, NY 10011

Join Hatem Abudayyeh, Susan Abulhawa, Pam Africa, Abayomi Azikiwe, Ajamu Baraka, Medea Benjamin, The Cuban 5, Lamis Deek, Steve Downs, Bernadette Ellorin, Glen Ford, Sara Flounders, Bruce Gagnon, Teresa Gutierrez, Lawrence Hamm, Chris Hedges, Joe Iosbaker, Charles Jenkins, Antonia Juhasz, Chuck Kaufman, Kathy Kelly, Jeff Mackler, Christine Marie, Ray McGovern, Cynthia McKinney, Michael McPhearson, Malik Mujahid, Lucy Pagoada, Lynne Stewart, David Swanson, Clarence Thomas, Ann Wright, Kevin Zeese & many more at ...   A national conference to connect all the issues:   “Stop the Wars at Home & Abroad!” (to register now, click the link below)   The United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) invites you to attend the “Stop the Wars at Home & Abroad!” conference, to be held May 8-10, 2015, in Secaucus, N.J, just outside New York City.   More and more, we can see how all the problems of the world are connected. The trillions of dollars being spent on wars-for-profit abroad could be used here at home to rebuild our cities, educate our youth, employ our jobless, repair damage to the environment – and try to make up for the endless suffering the Pentagon is inflicting on people around the world, most of them people of color, the vast majority of whom have nothing to do with threatening us or anyone else.   Some of the connections are even more striking. Some of the very same kinds of military equipment used in Iraq was seen this past summer on the streets of Ferguson, Mo. Surveillance drones developed for use by the military are now being used by domestic police departments. The endless “war on terror” is being used to justify taking away our civil liberties here at home. Wars for oil in the Middle East keep fossil fuels flowing, accelerating the climate change that threatens all humanity.   This conference will be an opportunity to meet and network with activists from across the country and learn about the many struggles going on today, both at home and around the world. Speakers with decades of experience will be joined by members of the new generations of activists who are bringing fresh energy and ideas into the movement. Together, we will learn from and inspire each other.   Most conferences cost many hundreds of dollars to attend, but UNAC organizers are doing their best to keep this one affordable for young activists and working people. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to expand your knowledge, make many new progressive friends and build the movement for fundamental social change.      Stop the Wars at Home & Abroad! For more information and to register for the conference, see:  www.unacconference2015.org   To place an ad in the conference journal, see: http://www.unacconference2015.org/p/endorsers.html   UNITED NATIONAL ANTIWAR COALITION (UNAC) P.O. Box 123, Delmar, NY 12054  ●  Ph:  518-227-6947 Email:  UNACpeace@gmail.com  ●  Web:  www.UNACpeace.org   To view this email in your browser, please go to: http://nepajac.org/blast.html     Join the Facebook event for the conference: https://www.facebook.com/events/1426863107605812/