Friday, May 29, 2015
From The Pages Of The Communist International- In Honor Of The 96th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (1919) -Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Now, And Then
http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/index.htm
Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Now, And Then
Commentary
No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon the founder of The Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined.
The conclusion that I drew from that observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders to lead the fight for state power.
In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. That basically carries us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spend a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. That position stands in need of some amendment now.
Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolution continues to hold true. That said, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.
It is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working class specific questions play in world politics (the national question, religion, special racial and gender oppressions) and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.
Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.
As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960’s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the ‘new’ working class or a ‘new’ vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle an ideas that goes back to the days of Marx himself.
And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem is that he was the problem with his impressionistic theories based on , frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray ( in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion that the countryside would defeat the cities that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960’s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?
BOOK REVIEW
‘LEFT-WING’ COMMUNISM-AN INFANTILE DISORDER, V.I. LENIN, UNIVERSITY PRESS OF THE PACIFIC, CALIFORNIA, 2001
An underlying premise of the Lenin-led Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 was that success there would be the first episode in a world-wide socialist revolution. While a specific timetable was not placed on the order of the day the early Bolshevik leaders, principally Lenin and Trotsky, both assumed that those events would occur in the immediate post-World War I period, or shortly thereafter. Alas, such was not the case, although not from lack of trying on the part of an internationalist-minded section of the Bolshevik leadership.
Another underlying premise, developed by the Leninists as part of their opposition to the imperialist First World War, was the need for a new revolutionary labor international to replace the compromised and moribund Socialist International (also known as the Second International) which had turned out to be useless as an instrument for revolution or even of opposition to the European war. The Bolsheviks took that step after seizing power and established the Communist International (also known as the Comintern or Third International) in 1919. As part of the process of arming that international with a revolutionary strategy (and practice) Lenin produced this polemic to address certain confusions, some willful, that had arisen in the European left and also attempted to instill some of the hard-learned lessons of the Russian revolutionary experience in them.
The Russian Revolution, and after it the Comintern in the early heroic days, for the most part, drew the best and most militant layers of the working-class and radical intellectuals to their defense. However, that is not the same as drawing experienced Bolsheviks to that defense. Many militants were anti-parliamentarian or anti-electoral in principle after the sorry experiences with the European social democracy. Others wanted to emulate the old heroic days of the Bolshevik underground party or create a minority, exclusive conspiratorial party.
Still others wanted to abandon the reformist bureaucratically-led trade unions to their then current leaderships, and so on. Lenin’s polemic, and it nothing but a flat-out polemic against all kinds of misconceptions of the Bolshevik experience, cut across these erroneous ideas like a knife. His literary style may not appeal to today’s audience but the political message still has considerable application today. At the time that it was written no less a figure than James P. Cannon, a central leader of the American Communist Party, credited the pamphlet with straightening out that badly confused movement (Indeed, it seems every possible political problem Lenin argued against in that pamphlet had some following in the American Party-in triplicate!). That alone makes it worth a look at.
I would like to highlight one point made by Lenin that has currency for leftists today, particularly American leftists. At the time it was written many (most) of the communist organizations adhering to the Comintern were little more than propaganda groups (including the American party). Lenin suggested one of the ways to break out of that isolation was a tactic of critical support to the still large and influential social-democratic organizations at election time. In his apt expression- to support those organizations "like a rope supports a hanging man".
However, as part of my political experiences in America around election time I have run into any number of ‘socialists’ and ‘communists’ who have turned Lenin’s concept on its head. How? By arguing that militants needed to ‘critically support’ the Democratic Party (who else, right?) as an application of the Leninist criterion for critical support. No, a thousand times no. Lenin’s specific example was the reformist British Labor Party, a party at that time (and to a lesser extent today) solidly based on the trade unions- organizations of the working class and no other. The Democratic Party in America was then, is now, and will always be a capitalist party. Yes, the labor bureaucrats and ordinary workers support it, finance it, drool over it but in no way is it a labor party. That is the class difference which even sincere militants have broken their teeth on for at least the last seventy years. And that, dear reader, is another reason why it worthwhile to take a peek at this book.
Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Now, And Then
Commentary
No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon the founder of The Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined.
The conclusion that I drew from that observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders to lead the fight for state power.
In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. That basically carries us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spend a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. That position stands in need of some amendment now.
Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolution continues to hold true. That said, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.
It is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working class specific questions play in world politics (the national question, religion, special racial and gender oppressions) and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.
Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.
As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960’s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the ‘new’ working class or a ‘new’ vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle an ideas that goes back to the days of Marx himself.
And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem is that he was the problem with his impressionistic theories based on , frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray ( in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion that the countryside would defeat the cities that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960’s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?
Out In The
Be-Bop 1940s Night-I’ll Get By As Long As I Have You-For Prescott And Delores
Breslin
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
Probably anytime was, is, a tough time for a kid, an American kid, to grow in what with his or her outlandish share of expectations about what the world had, or had not, to offer but Josh Breslin, Joshua Lawrence Breslin to give his full moniker although Josh sufficed among his friends seemed to have had more his share growing up in the hardscrabble Olde Saco, Maine 1950s while all around him others were partaking of the “Golden Age” of the American good time night. It wasn’t that others, other kids, and that was all that counted in Josh’s world then (or any kid’s when the deal went down) at least in Olde Saco, had more of the world’s goods that he did, although some did like his cousins, his mother’s sister’s children, whose father, Rene Dubois, an engineer who had taken serious advantage of the GI Bill that gave a leg up to many returning veterans in order to piggyback on the engineering skills he had first picked up in the Army’s 18th Engineers in the European Theater, had gotten in early on the big electronics boom in the post-World War II period had shaken the dust of the old town off and lived like Mayfair swells in Kennebunk with the old Yankees, swamp Yankees who controlled the power structure of the state. That status meaning the Dubois family had arrived complete with small but homey house, the latest automobile from out of Detroit traded in every three years to show that the owners had the wherewithal to do so, and a television all paid for or close to it.
No, at least among his friends, at least among those who resided in the streets of Frenchtown, almost all who could trace their roots back to the old country, Quebec, who were various generations of French-Canadians, bound together by religion, Roman Catholic (although as filtered through the Gallic sauce of that religion which could be more conservative that other national churches and strangely by turn more heretical and socially progressive than Rome itself in those days), by the small villages and rural agricultural values along the blessed Saint Lawrence River from which they fled to hug the factories of upper New England where they could make a living, a decent living, and the French which united them with Mother France and all the history, arrogance and hubris that entailed, that sense that they should be showered with the plenty of the Golden Age seemed to have passed them by. A lot of it had to do with a studied indifference to getting
too far ahead in the American lot they thrived in, a lot had to do with a studied indifference to seeing their children get ahead like their Yankee neighbors who seemed hell-bent on their kids getting more than they who grew up in the benighted Great Depression of the 1930s where their work ethos had been first fired-up and later survived the hell-fires of wanting and waiting in the rationed wartime 1940s and a studied indifference to their fate once the great textile mills that had provided much work for many during the war began their ugly trek south and out of country in search of cheaper labor. Not every French-Canadian family had succumbed to such downward mobility but enough had to have affected Josh and plenty of other Joshes growing up in the Olde Sacos of that time.
Josh who would later claim, not without some truth, that the 1960s counter-cultural “revolution” (we will not quibble over what that social explosion’s effect was but putting the term revolution in quotation marks accurately reflects the ambiguity of what happened, what lasted, and what the people involved in that brief movement’s moment thought happened) was the only thing that had saved him from winding up like Jean, Sean, Jacques, Lenny, Pierre La Rue, Pierre D’Amboise, and Henri LaCroix, guys who he knew in the 1950s who went off to war, to the factories in town and later down south and to the jails had been a restless feeling, something he could not put his finger on but which gnawed at him to shake the dust from his own shoes and get out of town. That has happened one day in the summer after high school when Josh decided he would head west before he went up to State U, the first in his whole frisking family going back generations who would go as far as Freshman year in college, in the fall and met up with the late Peter Paul Markin out in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 and never looked back (went west and in the process driving his father, Prescott, to one of his few rages, public rages anyway, since he had procured a job for him not without calling in a few favors in the MacAdams Textile Mills where he worked).
That fateful trip which actually lasted two or three years provided much literary fodder for the aspiring writer in Josh, although it alienated him from parents for about a decade until he won his first journalism award (the coveted Globe for outstanding social commentary in 1979). He would go on to write in many of the small alterative journal and magazines of the time, mostly free-lancing, before settling in to the East Bay Gazette from which he had recently retired after some thirty years on the editorial staff including several years as chief editor. That retirement had allowed him to reflect on what had happened to his crowd, his family, back in the 1950s, allowed him time to reflect on how important his late parents were in making a decent human being out of him, and of how their own dreams had been severely thwarted trying to raise five children on air. The direct catalyst for those reflections had been a trip up into his attic in his house in Cambridge where he was searching for old photographs of him and his friend Markin for a sketch he was doing on that mad man saint bastard when he found a photograph of his late mother Delores and late father Prescott at some dance they attended at the Stardust Ballroom in Old Orchard Beach during World War II, the time of their time, the sunny times before the whole world fell in on them.
That photograph brought back to mind how much his older brother Prescott, Junior, had hated to have to listen to their music as a youngster, almost like he had to hate it to create his own space, his own way in the world. That stubborn thought brought back to Josh the one day when the whole musical conflict reached a fever pitch when Prescott had exploded. Prescott not around to now to tell his part in the story having gone off the deep end and committed himself to a life on the wild side as a career criminal, armed robbery division, serving a nickel to a dime up in Shawshank just now. Josh blushed as he thought about those other recent reflections which outweighed a confused soul’s nervousness about his place, his or his damn brother’s, in the world. Oddly he could remember the episode almost word for word in his memory’s eye:
“Prescott James Breslin get your dirty hands off that wall this minute, yelled Delores Breslin (nee Leclerc), Mother Breslin to some, including the yelled at Prescott, honey, to Prescott Breslin, Senior, Father Breslin to the junior one being yelled at just this minute. Just as Mother Breslin, hell, let’s call her Delores, was getting ready for cascade rant number two aimed in Prescott, Junior’s direction wafting through the air, the radio WJDA air, came the melodious voice of Bing Crosby singing in that sweet, nuanced voice of his, Far Away Places. Their song. Their Delores and Prescott, Senior forever memory song.
Delores in a quick turn began to talk almost trance-like as she flashed back to the night in 1943 over at the Stardust Ballroom on East Grand in Old Orchard Beach that she, then a typist for the State Insurance Company right there in Olde Saco (and making good money for a single, no high maintenance girl, never a high maintenance girl, women, mother, grandmother, not in hard-nosed working class make your own way or else Olde Saco’s French Town) and Marine PFC Prescott Breslin, stationed after serious service in the Pacific wars (Guadalcanal, etc.) at the Portsmouth Naval Base met while they were playing that song on the jukebox between sets. Sets being performed by the Be-Bop Sextet, a hot, well, be-bop band that was making a national tour to boost civilian morale while the boys were off fighting. They hit it off right away, made Far Away Places their song, and prepared for a future, a joint future, once the war was over, and they could get their dream, shared dream, little white house, with or without picket fence, maybe a dog, and definitely kids, a few although they never specified a number. The perfect dream to chase the old Great Depression no dough blues and World War II fighting dust away, far away. And to be able to breath a decent breathe, a breathe drawn without fear of the jack boots of the world knocking at the doors once the dirty bastards had been vanquished, a not from hunger breathe too if anybody was asking.
Just then Delores snapped back into the reality, the two by four reality, of their made due, temporary veterans’ housing set up by the Olde Saco Housing Authority (at the request of and funded by the War Department) to house the housing-hungry returning vets and give them a leg up. Add on the further reality that Prescott’s job at the Macadam’s Textile Mill was none too sure now that rumors were circulating around town that the mill-owners were thinking of relocating to North Carolina. And the biggest reality of all: well, Prescott, Junior, Kendrick, Lawrence, Jean Paul and lastly Joshua. And five is enough, more than enough thank you (that sentiment directed toward Prescott although not picked up by the boys at the time only later when they too saw that seven could not live as cheaply as two, that modern society’s hand dealt to the Breslin could not sustain such weight. But as that terrific tenor of Dick Haymes singing Little White Lies was making its way into her air space she fell back to thinking about that now old dream of the little white house, with or without picket fence, a dog and a few kids (exactly three, thank you) that was coming just around next corner. And just as she was winding up to blast young Prescott, his dirty hands, and that wall, maybe a little less furiously that she intended before, her thoughts returned to her Prince Charming, Starlight Ballroom1943, and their song. Their forever memory song. Yes, she would get by.
From The Pen Of Sam Lowell
Probably anytime was, is, a tough time for a kid, an American kid, to grow in what with his or her outlandish share of expectations about what the world had, or had not, to offer but Josh Breslin, Joshua Lawrence Breslin to give his full moniker although Josh sufficed among his friends seemed to have had more his share growing up in the hardscrabble Olde Saco, Maine 1950s while all around him others were partaking of the “Golden Age” of the American good time night. It wasn’t that others, other kids, and that was all that counted in Josh’s world then (or any kid’s when the deal went down) at least in Olde Saco, had more of the world’s goods that he did, although some did like his cousins, his mother’s sister’s children, whose father, Rene Dubois, an engineer who had taken serious advantage of the GI Bill that gave a leg up to many returning veterans in order to piggyback on the engineering skills he had first picked up in the Army’s 18th Engineers in the European Theater, had gotten in early on the big electronics boom in the post-World War II period had shaken the dust of the old town off and lived like Mayfair swells in Kennebunk with the old Yankees, swamp Yankees who controlled the power structure of the state. That status meaning the Dubois family had arrived complete with small but homey house, the latest automobile from out of Detroit traded in every three years to show that the owners had the wherewithal to do so, and a television all paid for or close to it.
No, at least among his friends, at least among those who resided in the streets of Frenchtown, almost all who could trace their roots back to the old country, Quebec, who were various generations of French-Canadians, bound together by religion, Roman Catholic (although as filtered through the Gallic sauce of that religion which could be more conservative that other national churches and strangely by turn more heretical and socially progressive than Rome itself in those days), by the small villages and rural agricultural values along the blessed Saint Lawrence River from which they fled to hug the factories of upper New England where they could make a living, a decent living, and the French which united them with Mother France and all the history, arrogance and hubris that entailed, that sense that they should be showered with the plenty of the Golden Age seemed to have passed them by. A lot of it had to do with a studied indifference to getting
too far ahead in the American lot they thrived in, a lot had to do with a studied indifference to seeing their children get ahead like their Yankee neighbors who seemed hell-bent on their kids getting more than they who grew up in the benighted Great Depression of the 1930s where their work ethos had been first fired-up and later survived the hell-fires of wanting and waiting in the rationed wartime 1940s and a studied indifference to their fate once the great textile mills that had provided much work for many during the war began their ugly trek south and out of country in search of cheaper labor. Not every French-Canadian family had succumbed to such downward mobility but enough had to have affected Josh and plenty of other Joshes growing up in the Olde Sacos of that time.
Josh who would later claim, not without some truth, that the 1960s counter-cultural “revolution” (we will not quibble over what that social explosion’s effect was but putting the term revolution in quotation marks accurately reflects the ambiguity of what happened, what lasted, and what the people involved in that brief movement’s moment thought happened) was the only thing that had saved him from winding up like Jean, Sean, Jacques, Lenny, Pierre La Rue, Pierre D’Amboise, and Henri LaCroix, guys who he knew in the 1950s who went off to war, to the factories in town and later down south and to the jails had been a restless feeling, something he could not put his finger on but which gnawed at him to shake the dust from his own shoes and get out of town. That has happened one day in the summer after high school when Josh decided he would head west before he went up to State U, the first in his whole frisking family going back generations who would go as far as Freshman year in college, in the fall and met up with the late Peter Paul Markin out in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 and never looked back (went west and in the process driving his father, Prescott, to one of his few rages, public rages anyway, since he had procured a job for him not without calling in a few favors in the MacAdams Textile Mills where he worked).
That fateful trip which actually lasted two or three years provided much literary fodder for the aspiring writer in Josh, although it alienated him from parents for about a decade until he won his first journalism award (the coveted Globe for outstanding social commentary in 1979). He would go on to write in many of the small alterative journal and magazines of the time, mostly free-lancing, before settling in to the East Bay Gazette from which he had recently retired after some thirty years on the editorial staff including several years as chief editor. That retirement had allowed him to reflect on what had happened to his crowd, his family, back in the 1950s, allowed him time to reflect on how important his late parents were in making a decent human being out of him, and of how their own dreams had been severely thwarted trying to raise five children on air. The direct catalyst for those reflections had been a trip up into his attic in his house in Cambridge where he was searching for old photographs of him and his friend Markin for a sketch he was doing on that mad man saint bastard when he found a photograph of his late mother Delores and late father Prescott at some dance they attended at the Stardust Ballroom in Old Orchard Beach during World War II, the time of their time, the sunny times before the whole world fell in on them.
That photograph brought back to mind how much his older brother Prescott, Junior, had hated to have to listen to their music as a youngster, almost like he had to hate it to create his own space, his own way in the world. That stubborn thought brought back to Josh the one day when the whole musical conflict reached a fever pitch when Prescott had exploded. Prescott not around to now to tell his part in the story having gone off the deep end and committed himself to a life on the wild side as a career criminal, armed robbery division, serving a nickel to a dime up in Shawshank just now. Josh blushed as he thought about those other recent reflections which outweighed a confused soul’s nervousness about his place, his or his damn brother’s, in the world. Oddly he could remember the episode almost word for word in his memory’s eye:
“Prescott James Breslin get your dirty hands off that wall this minute, yelled Delores Breslin (nee Leclerc), Mother Breslin to some, including the yelled at Prescott, honey, to Prescott Breslin, Senior, Father Breslin to the junior one being yelled at just this minute. Just as Mother Breslin, hell, let’s call her Delores, was getting ready for cascade rant number two aimed in Prescott, Junior’s direction wafting through the air, the radio WJDA air, came the melodious voice of Bing Crosby singing in that sweet, nuanced voice of his, Far Away Places. Their song. Their Delores and Prescott, Senior forever memory song.
Delores in a quick turn began to talk almost trance-like as she flashed back to the night in 1943 over at the Stardust Ballroom on East Grand in Old Orchard Beach that she, then a typist for the State Insurance Company right there in Olde Saco (and making good money for a single, no high maintenance girl, never a high maintenance girl, women, mother, grandmother, not in hard-nosed working class make your own way or else Olde Saco’s French Town) and Marine PFC Prescott Breslin, stationed after serious service in the Pacific wars (Guadalcanal, etc.) at the Portsmouth Naval Base met while they were playing that song on the jukebox between sets. Sets being performed by the Be-Bop Sextet, a hot, well, be-bop band that was making a national tour to boost civilian morale while the boys were off fighting. They hit it off right away, made Far Away Places their song, and prepared for a future, a joint future, once the war was over, and they could get their dream, shared dream, little white house, with or without picket fence, maybe a dog, and definitely kids, a few although they never specified a number. The perfect dream to chase the old Great Depression no dough blues and World War II fighting dust away, far away. And to be able to breath a decent breathe, a breathe drawn without fear of the jack boots of the world knocking at the doors once the dirty bastards had been vanquished, a not from hunger breathe too if anybody was asking.
Just then Delores snapped back into the reality, the two by four reality, of their made due, temporary veterans’ housing set up by the Olde Saco Housing Authority (at the request of and funded by the War Department) to house the housing-hungry returning vets and give them a leg up. Add on the further reality that Prescott’s job at the Macadam’s Textile Mill was none too sure now that rumors were circulating around town that the mill-owners were thinking of relocating to North Carolina. And the biggest reality of all: well, Prescott, Junior, Kendrick, Lawrence, Jean Paul and lastly Joshua. And five is enough, more than enough thank you (that sentiment directed toward Prescott although not picked up by the boys at the time only later when they too saw that seven could not live as cheaply as two, that modern society’s hand dealt to the Breslin could not sustain such weight. But as that terrific tenor of Dick Haymes singing Little White Lies was making its way into her air space she fell back to thinking about that now old dream of the little white house, with or without picket fence, a dog and a few kids (exactly three, thank you) that was coming just around next corner. And just as she was winding up to blast young Prescott, his dirty hands, and that wall, maybe a little less furiously that she intended before, her thoughts returned to her Prince Charming, Starlight Ballroom1943, and their song. Their forever memory song. Yes, she would get by.
The
United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC)
invites
you to two panels at the Left Forum
May
30-31, 2015, New York City
John
Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New
York
524
W. 59th St at Amsterdam Ave.
WHY WE FOCUS ON U.S. IMPERIALIST
WARS
Saturday, May 30
Session 1, 10:00-11:50 am, Room 1.83
Joe
Lombardo, Co-Coordinator, UNAC
Sara
Flounders, Co-Director, International Action Center
Additional speaker tba
THE WARS COME HOME
Sunday, May 31
Session 6, 12:00-1:50 pm, Room 1.85
Margaret Kimberley, Editor and Senior Columnist,
Black Agenda Report
Abayomi Azikiwe, Editor, Pan-African News Wire and
a
Co-founder of the Michigan Emergency Committee Against
War and Injustice
Marilyn Levin, Co-Coordinator, UNAC
FREE OSCAR LOPEZ RIVERA!
EAST COAST MARCH 2015
Saturday, May 30, NYC
West Harlem – El Barrio
Now age 72, Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar López Rivera has served more than 30 years in prison, convicted of seditious conspiracy for his commitment to the independence of Puerto Rico, though he was not accused or convicted of causing harm or taking a life. Serving a sentence of 70 years, he is among the longest held political prisoners in the history of Puerto Rico and in the world. Route & Rally: Assemble at 11:00 am 125th & Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd. March east to Lexington, then south to 106th & Lexington St. rally site. (Excerpts taken from report of U.S. resident Caleb Maupin of the International Action Committee who was on the ship delivering humanitarian aid, writing from Djibouti on May 23, 2015.)
I Have
Witnessed A Crime Against Humanity! - A Message from Caleb Maupin in the Port of
Djibouti
From the
Port of Djibouti in North Africa, it is with great sadness and burning outrage
that I announce that the voyage of the Iran Shahed Rescue Ship has concluded. We
will not reach our destination at the Port of Hodiedah in Yemen to deliver
humanitarian aid. The unsuccessful conclusion of our mission is the result of
only one thing: US-backed Saudi Terrorism. Yesterday, as it appeared our
arrival was imminent, the Saudi forces bombed the port of Hodiedah. They didn’t
just bomb the port once, or even twice. The Saudi forces bombed the port of
Hodiedah a total of eight times in a single day! The total number of innocent
dock workers, sailors, longshoremen, and bystanders killed by these eight
airstrikes is still being calculated.With its so many criminal threats and actions, the Saudi regime was sending a message to the crew of doctors, medical technicians, anesthesiologists, and other Red Crescent Society volunteers onboard the ship. The message was “If you try to help the hungry children of Yemen we will kill you.” These actions, designed to terrorize and intimidate those seeking to deliver humanitarian aid, are a clear violation of international law. I can say, without any hesitation, that I have witnessed a crime against humanity. In the context of the extreme Saudi threats, after lengthy negotiations which have been taking place around the clock in Tehran, it has been determined that the Red Crescent Society cannot complete this mission. The 2,500 tons of medical supplies, food, and water are being unloaded, and handed over to the World Food Program, who has agreed to distribute them on our behalf by June 5th. ……….
Remove
U.S. Drone Relay Stations from German Soil
At the UNAC Convention, May 8-10, American German activist Elsa Rassbach spoke powerfully about the need to stand in solidarity with German activists who are protesting the use of the U.S. Base in Ramstein, Germany to host a satellite relay necessary to the military drone program. All targeted killings and surveillance by US drones in Africa, the Middle East and Southwest Asia require the use of this relay, which sends data received overland from domestic U.S. bases to a satellite which then forwards the signals to individual drones. This is a gross violation of the sovereignty of Germany, just as the drone surveillance and strikes themselves are violations of the sovereignty of Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and the other countries where they are used, and targeted killings are a violation of the most basic human rights of the victims, all of whom are technically civilian. UNAC supports the campaign to remove the relay from German soil, and stands in solidarity with the people of Germany. On Wednesday, May 27, Faisal bin Ali Jaber will have his first hearing in a lawsuit against the German government's complicity in the deaths of his brother-in-law and nephew by a drone strike in Yemen. Jaber's brother-in-law was a cleric and a peacemaker. He was arranging a meeting to show the local Al Qaeda converts the error of their understanding when he ws killed. Drone strikes prohibit local solutions to local problems. The relay in Germany was installed in secrecy under the cover of the U.S. - German Status of Forces agreement. Now that it's existence is known, the German government must respond appropriately in light of German, EU and International Law. We support Faisal bin Ali Jaber's right to justice, and the rights of all the victims to a just hearing, and the right of the German people not to be made complicit in U.S. war crimes |
.
Veterans call for peace on Memorial Day
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KEITH
BEDFORD/GLOBE STAFF
At
Columbus Park in Boston, Linda Hickey and others tossed carnations representing
service members killed in war during a Veterans for Peace ceremony on Memorial
Day.
The
brass bell tolled as the name of each of the 124 service members from Massachusetts who died
in Iraq or Afghanistan was solemnly announced.
After
each name was called, a red, white, or blue carnation was dropped into the still
waters of Boston Harbor.
Army
Sergeant Jordan Shay of Amesbury was the first name called. He was killed on Sept. 3, 2009, in a combat vehicle
accident just weeks into his second tour of duty in Iraq. He was 22.
“It
was very thoughtful and moving,” said Louise Bruyn, 85, of Newton, who dropped
the flower in memory of Shay, whom she never met.
The
flower ceremony was the emotional high point of a Memorial Day tribute organized
by the Boston chapter of Veterans for
Peace, an international organization that promotes a nonviolent end to
war.
Carnations
were also dropped to honor the more than 1,300 servicemen and women from
Massachusetts who died in Vietnam.
The
90-minute ceremony, held under overcast skies at Christopher Columbus Park in
the North End, struck a different tone than traditional Memorial Day parades and
services held Monday in communities across the state.
Spectators
waved peace flags and wore T-shirts with the message, “War is a racket. A few
profit — the many pay,” printed on the back.
“I
think the current wars are a big mistake,” said Carolyn Whiting, 65, of Reading,
who held a rainbow-colored peace flag and wore strands of red-and-blue peace
symbol beads around her neck.
“Amazing
Grace” sounded from a harmonica. Poems penned by combat veterans were
read.
“It
was OK,” Patrick Doherty, 31, of Dorchester, an Army Iraq war veteran, said
after reading a poem. “It’s kind of a sad day.”
Vietnam
and Iraq war veterans remembered both their fallen comrades and civilians who
have lived through war.
“We
always remember those who wore the uniforms, but we never seem to recall those
civilians, the ones who did not want war . . . and who had nothing to do with
it,” said Bob Funke, 63, of Roslindale, an Army veteran who served two tours of
duty in Vietnam.
Funke
recalled the stark difference between his first tour as an infantryman and his
second tour as a medic.
“In
my first tour . . . I killed at least 21 people,” he said in a raspy voice. “In
the second tour, I was a medic and I saved over 200 people.
“I
can tell you right now, saving lives beats the hell out of taking them,” Funke
added, drawing applause from the crowd of about 50 gathered before him. “We
should be doing all we can to save lives, and bring home those who have gone to
war.”
Travis
Weiner, 29, an Army veteran who served two tours in Iraq, offered a moment of
silence for Army Corporal John M. Dawson of Northbridge, the state’s most recent
casualty, who was killed in Afghanistan on April 8, and for six men
from his platoon who died serving in Iraq.
“It
is good and fitting that we do this,” said Weiner, who works as an outreach
worker for Homebase Program, which provides support services to veterans.
But
Memorial Day should also be “a day in which people around this country take time
to contemplate some fundamental moral, ethical, and philosophical questions
related to our country’s wars,” Weiner said. “I believe, with all my heart, that
it is dishonoring to our fallen brothers and sisters to refuse to even consider
these questions.”
Thursday, May 28, 2015
As The 100th Anniversary Of The First
Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some
Remembrances-Musicians’ 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 hide-bound Academy filled with its
rules, or be damned, spoke the pious words of peace, brotherhood and the
affinity of all humankind when there was sunny weather), those who saw the
disjointedness of modern industrial society in its squalor, it creation of
generations of short, nasty, brutish lives just like the philosophers predicted
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 laying 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 as 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, like Umberto Boccioni, all swirls, curves,
dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges endlessly charge, like Gustav
Klimt and his endlessly detailed gold dust opulent Asiatic dreams filled with
lovely matrons and high symbolism and blessed Eve women to fill the night,
Adam’s night after they fled the garden, like Joan Miro and his infernal boxes,
circles, spats, eyes, dibs, dabs, vaginas, and blots forever suspended in deep
space for a candid world to fret through, fret through a long career, and like
poor maddened rising like a phoenix in the Spartacist uprising George Grosz
puncturing the nasty bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie the ones with the real
dough and their overfed dreams stuffed with sausage, and from the bloated
military and their fat-assed generals stuff with howitzers and rocket shells,
like Picasso, yeah, Picasso taking the shape out of recognized human existence
and reconfiguring the forms, the mesh of form to fit the new hard order, like,
Braque, if only because if you put the yolk on Picasso you have to tie him to
the tether too.
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 ….
Smokestack Lightning, Indeed- With Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf In Mind
Sometimes a picture really can be worth a thousand words, a thousand words and more as in the case Howlin’ Wolf doing his Midnight creep in the photograph above taken from an album of his work but nowadays with the advances in computer technology and someone’s desire to share also to be seen on sites such as YouTube where you can get a real flavor of what that mad man was about when he got his blues wanting habits on. In fact I am a little hesitate to use a bunch of words describing Howlin’ Wolf in high gear since maybe I would leave out that drop of perspiration dripping from his overworked forehead and that salted drop might be the very thing that drove him that night or describing his oneness with his harmonica because that might cause some karmic funk. So, no, I am not really going to go on and on about his midnight creep but when the big man got into high gear, when he went to a place where he sweating profusely, a little ragged in voice and eyes all shot to hell he roared for his version of the high white note. Funny, a lot of people, myself for a while included, used to think that the high white note business was strictly a jazz thing, maybe somebody like the “Prez” Lester Young or Duke’s Johnny Hodges after hours, after the paying customers had had their fill, or what they thought was all those men had in them, shutting the doors tight, putting up the tables leaving the chairs for whoever came by around dawn, grabbing a few guys from around the town as they finished their gigs and make the search, make a serious bid to blow the world to kingdom come.
Some nights they were on fire as they blew that big note out in to some heavy air and who knows where it landed, most nights though it was just “nice try.” One night I was out in Frisco when “Saps” McCoy blew a big sexy sax right out the door of Chez Benny’s over in North Beach when North Beach was just turning away from be-bop “beat” and that high white note, I swear, blew out into the bay and who knows maybe all the way to the Japan seas. Well see we were all a little high so I don’t know about that Japan seas stuff but I sure know that brother blew that high white one somewhere out the door. But see if I had, or anybody had, thought about it for a minute jazz and the blues are cousins, cousins no question so of course Howlin’ Wolf blew out that high white note more than once, plenty including a couple of shows I caught him at later when he was not in his prime.
The photograph (and now video) that I was thinking of is one where he is practically eating the harmonica as he performs How Many More Years (and now like I say thanks to some thoughtful archivist you can go on to YouTube and see him doing his devouring act in real time and in motion, wow, and also berating “father” preacher/sinner man Son House for showing up drunk). Yes, the Wolf could blast out the blues and on this one you get a real appreciation for how serious he was as a performer and as blues representative of the highest order.
Howlin’ Wolf like his near contemporary and rival Muddy Waters, like a whole generation of black bluesmen who learned their trade at the feet of old-time country blues masters like Charley Patton, the aforementioned Son House who had had his own personal fight with the devil, Robert Johnson who allegedly sold his soul to the devil out on Highway 61 so he could get his own version of that high white note, and the like down in Mississippi or other southern places in the first half of the twentieth century. They as part and parcel of that great black migration (even as exceptional musicians they would do stints in the sweated Northern factories before hitting Maxwell Street) took the road north, or rather the river north, an amazing number from the Delta and an even more amazing number from around Clarksville in Mississippi right by that Highway 61 and headed first maybe to Memphis and then on to sweet home Chicago.
They went where the jobs were, went where the ugliness of Mister James Crow telling them sit here not there, walk here but not there, drink the water here not there, don’t look at our women under any conditions and on and on did not haunt their every move (although they would find not racial Garden of Eden in the North, last hired, first fired, squeezed in cold water flats too many to a room, harassed, but they at least has some breathing space, some room to create a little something they could call their own and not Mister’s), went where the big black migration was heading after World War I. Went also to explore a new way of presenting the blues to an urban audience in need of a faster beat, in need of getting away from the Saturday juke joint acoustic country sound with some old timey guys ripping up three chord ditties to go with that jug of Jack Flash’s homemade corn liquor (or so he, Jack Flash called it).
So they, guys like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Magic Slim, Johnny Shines, and James Cotton prospered by doing what Elvis did for rock and rock and Bob Dylan did for folk and pulled the hammer down on the old electric guitar and made big, big sounds that reached all the way back of the room in the Red Hat and Tip Top clubs lining the black streets of blustered America and made the max daddies and max mamas jump, make some moves. And here is where all kinds of thing got intersected, as part of all the trends in post-World War II music up to the 1960s anyway from R&B, rock and roll, electric blues and folk the edges of the music hit all the way to then small white audiences too and they howled for the blues, which spoke to some sense of their own alienation. Hell, the Beatles and more particularly the Stones lived to hear Muddy and the Wolf. The Stones even went to Mecca, to Chess Records to be at one with Muddy. And they also took lessons from Howlin’ Wolf himself on the right way to play Little Red Rooster which they had covered and made famous in the early 1960s (or infamous depending on your point of view since many radio stations including some Boston stations had banned it from the air originally).Yes, Howlin’ Wolf and that big bad harmonica and that big bad voice that howled in the night did that for a new generation, did pretty good, right.
From The Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty Website
Click below to link to the Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty website.
http://www.mcadp.org/
Markin comment:
I have been an opponent of the death penalty for as long as I have been a political person, a long time. While I do not generally agree with the thrust of the Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty Committee’s strategy for eliminating the death penalty nation-wide almost solely through legislative and judicial means (think about the 2011 Troy Davis case down in Georgia for a practical example of the limits of that strategy) I am always willing to work with them when specific situations come up. In any case they have a long pedigree extending, one way or the other, back to Sacco and Vanzetti and that is always important to remember whatever our political differences.Here is another way to deal with both the question of the death penalty and of political prisoners from an old time socialist perspective taken from a book review of James P. Cannon's Notebooks Of An Agitator:
I note here that among socialists, particularly the non-Stalinist socialists of those days, there was controversy on what to do and, more importantly, what forces socialists should support. If you want to find a more profound response initiated by revolutionary socialists to the social and labor problems of those days than is evident in today’s leftist responses to such issues Cannon’s writings here will assist you. I draw your attention to the early part of the book when Cannon led the Communist-initiated International Labor Defense (ILD), most famously around the fight to save the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti here in Massachusetts. That campaign put the Communist Party on the map for many workers and others unfamiliar with the party’s work. For my perspective the early class-war prisoner defense work was exemplary.
The issue of class-war prisoners is one that is close to my heart. I support the work of the Partisan Defense Committee, Box 99 Canal Street Station, New York, N.Y 10013, an organization which traces its roots and policy to Cannon’s ILD. That policy is based on an old labor slogan- ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ therefore I would like to write a few words here on Cannon’s conception of the nature of the work. As noted above, Cannon (along with Max Shachtman and Martin Abern and Cannon’s long time companion Rose Karsner who would later be expelled from American Communist Party for Trotskyism with him and who helped him form what would eventually become the Socialist Workers Party) was assigned by the party in 1925 to set up the American section of the International Red Aid known here as the International Labor Defense.
It is important to note here that Cannon’s selection as leader of the ILD was insisted on by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) because of his pre-war association with that organization and with the prodding of “Big Bill’ Haywood, the famous labor organizer exiled in Moscow. Since many of the militants still languishing in prison were anarchists or syndicalists the selection of Cannon was important. The ILD’s most famous early case was that of the heroic anarchist workers, Sacco and Vanzetti. The lessons learned in that campaign show the way forward in class-war prisoner defense.
I believe that it was Trotsky who noted that, except in the immediate pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods, the tasks of militants revolve around the struggle to win democratic and other partial demands. The case of class-war legal defense falls in that category with the added impetus of getting the prisoners back into the class struggle as quickly as possible. The task then is to get them out of prison by mass action for their release. Without going into the details of the Sacco and Vanzetti case the two workers had been awaiting execution for a number of years and had been languishing in jail. As is the nature of death penalty cases various appeals on various grounds were tried and failed and they were then in imminent danger of execution.
Other forces outside the labor movement were also interested in the Sacco and Vanzetti case based on obtaining clemency, reduction of their sentences to life imprisonment or a new trial. The ILD’s position was to try to win their release by mass action- demonstrations, strikes and other forms of mass mobilization. This strategy obviously also included, in a subordinate position, any legal strategies that might be helpful to win their freedom. In this effort the stated goal of the organization was to organize non-sectarian class defense but also not to rely on the legal system alone portraying it as a simple miscarriage of justice. The organization publicized the case worldwide, held conferences, demonstrations and strikes on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. Although the campaign was not successful and the pair were executed in 1927 it stands as a model for class war prisoner defense. Needless to say, the names Sacco and Vanzetti continue to be honored to this day wherever militants fight against this system.
***************
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears."
last lines from The Lonseome Death Of Hattie Carroll, another case of an injustice against black people. - Bob Dylan
, 1963
Markin comment (posted September 22, 2011):
Look, after almost half a century of fighting every kind of progressive political struggle I have no Pollyanna-ish notion that in our fight for a “newer world” most of the time we are “tilting at windmills.” Even a cursory look at the history of our struggles brings that hard fact home. However some defeats in the class struggle, particularly the struggle to abolish the barbaric, racist death penalty in the United States, hit home harder than others. For some time now the fight to stop the execution of Troy Davis has galvanized this abolition movement into action. His callous execution by the State of Georgia, despite an international mobilization to stop the execution and grant him freedom, is such a defeat.
On the question of the death penalty, moreover, we do not grant the state the right to judicially murder the innocent or the guilty. But clearly Brother Davis was innocent. We will also not forget that hard fact. And we will not forget Brother Davis’ dignity and demeanor as he faced what he knew was a deck stacked against him. And, most importantly, we will not forgot to honor Brother Davis the best way we can by redoubling our efforts to abolition the racist, barbaric death penalty everywhere, for all time. Forward.
Additional Markin comment posted September 23, 2011:
No question the execution on September 21, 2011 by the State of Georgia of Troy Anthony Davis hit me, and not me alone, hard. For just a brief moment that night, when he was granted a temporary stay pending a last minute appeal before the United States Supreme Court just minutes before his 7:00PM execution, I thought that we might have achieved a thimbleful of justice in this wicked old world. But it was not to be and so we battle on. Troy Davis shall now be honored in our pantheon along with the Haymarket Martyrs, Sacco and Vanzetti, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and others. While Brother Davis may have not been a hard politico like the others just mentioned his fight to abolish the death penalty for himself and for future Troys places him in that company. Honor Troy Davis- Fight To The Finish Against The Barbaric Racist Death Penalty!
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