Saturday, August 22, 2015

The Latest From The "Jobs With Justice Blog"-The Seemingly One-Sided Struggle Continues-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 Is The Slogan Of The Day.

The Latest From The "Jobs With Justice Blog"-The Seemingly One-Sided Struggle Continues-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 Is The Slogan Of The Day.


Click below to link to the Jobs With Justice Blog for the latest national and international labor news, and of the efforts to counteract the massively one-sided class struggle against the international working class movement.

http://www.jwjblog.org/

Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton a couple of old-time radicals, old-time now in the early 2000s unlike in their youth not being the Great Depression labor radicals who had been their models after a fashion and who helped built the now seemingly moribund unions, (or unions now rather consciously led by union leaders who have no or only attenuated links to past militant labor actions like strikes, plant sit-downs, hot-cargoeing struck goods, general strikes and such and would go into a dead faint if such actions were forced upon them and are so weakened as to be merely dues paying organizations forwarding monies to the Democratic “friends of labor” Party). They had come of political age as anti-war radicals from the hell-bent street in-your-face 1960s confrontations with the American beast during the Vietnam War reign of hell. Ralph from the hard-shell experience of having fought for the beast in the Central Highlands in that benighted country and who became disgusted with what he had done, his buddies had done, and his government had done to make animals out of them destroying simple peasants catch in a vicious cross-fire and Sam, having lost his closest high school hang around guy, Jeff Mullin, blown away in some unnamed field near some hamlet that he could not pronounce or spell correctly. The glue that brought them together, brought them together for a lifetime friendship and political comity (with some periods of statutory neglect to bring up families in Carver, Massachusetts and Troy, New York respectively) the ill-fated actions on May Day 1971 In Washington when they attempted along with several thousand others to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. All those efforts got them a few days detention in RFK stadium where they had met almost accidently and steel-strong bonds of brotherhood from then on.      

They had seen high times and ebbs, mostly ebbs once the 1960s waves receded before the dramatic events of 9/11 and more particularly the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 called off what they had termed the “armed truce” with the United States government over the previous couple of decades. So Ralph and Sam were beside themselves when the powder-puff uprising of the Occupy movement brought a fresh breeze to the tiny American left-wing landscape in the latter part of 2011.  That term “powder puff” not expressing the heft of the movement which was not inconsiderable for a couple of months especially in hotbeds like New York, Boston, L.A. and above all the flagship home away from home of radical politics, San Francisco but the fact that it disappeared almost before it got started giving up the huge long-term fight it was expected to wage to break the banks, break the corporate grip on the world and, try to seek “newer world”). Ralph and Sam were not members in good standing of any labor unions, both having after their furtive anti-war street fights and the ebbing of the movement by about the mid-1970s returned to “normalcy,” Ralph having taken over his father’s electrical shop in Troy when his father retired and Sam had gone back to Carver to expand a print shop that he had started in the late 1960s that had been run by a hometown friend in his many absences. However having come from respectable working-class backgrounds in strictly working-class towns, Carver about thirty miles from Boston and the cranberry bog capital of the world and Ralph in Troy near where General Electric ruled the roost, had taken to heart the advice of their respective grandfathers about not forgetting those left behind, that an injury to one of their own in this wicked old world was an injury to all as the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) motto had it. Moreover despite their backing away from the street confrontations of their youth when that proved futile after a time as the Vietnam War finally wound down and yesterday’s big name radicals left for parts unknown they had always kept an inner longing for the “newer world,” the more equitable world where the people who actually made stuff and kept the wheels of society running and their down-pressed allies ruled.   

So Ralph and Sam would during most of the fall of 2011   travel down to the Wall Street “private” plaza (and site of many conflicts and stand-offs between the Occupy forces on the ground and then Mayor Blumberg and his itchy cops) which was the center of the movement on weekends, long weekends usually, to take part in the action after the long drought of such activity both for them personally and for their kind of politics. They were crestfallen to say the least when the thing exploded after Mayor Blumberg and the NYPD the police pulled down the hammer and forcibly disbanded the place (and other city administrations across the country and across the world and police departments doing likewise acting in some concert as it turned out once the dust settled and “freedom of information” acts were invoked to see what the bastards were up to).

Of more concern since they had already known about what the government could do when it decided to pull down the hammer having learned a painfully hard lesson on May Day 1971 and on a number of other occasions later when Ralph and Sam and their comrades decided to get “uppity” and been slapped down more than once although they at least had gone into those actions with their eyes wide open had been the reaction of the “leadership” in folding up the tents (literally and figuratively). Thereafter the movement had imploded from its own contradictions, caught up not wanting to step on toes, to let everybody do their own thing, do their own identity politics which as they also painfully knew had done   much to defang the old movements, refusing out of hand cohering a collective leadership that might give some direction to the damn thing but also earnestly wanting to bring the monster down.

Ralph and Sam in the aftermath, after things had settled down and they had time to think decided to put together a proposal, a program if you like, outlining some of the basic political tasks ahead to be led by somebody. Certainly not by them since radical politics, street politics is a young person’s game and they admittedly had gotten rather long in the tooth. Besides they had learned long ago, had talked about it over drinks at Jack Higgins’ Grille in Boston more than once in their periodic reunions when Ralph came to town, how each generation had to face its tasks in its own way so they would be content to be “elder” tribal leaders and provide whatever wisdom they could, if asked.  Working under the drumbeat of Bob Marley’s Get Up, Stand Up something of a “national anthem” for what went on among the better elements of Occupy are some points that any movement for social change has to address these days and fight for and about as well. Sam, more interested in writing than Ralph who liked to think more than write but who contributed his fair share of ideas to the “program,” wrote the material up and had it posted on various site which elicited a respectable amount of comment at the time:      

Originally posted on the American Politics Today  blog-Wednesday, June 17, 2012

 

A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force, although it is admittedly down from the Great Recession highs. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work.

The basic scheme, as was the case with the early days of the longshoremen’s and maritime unions, is that the work would be divided up through local representative workers’ councils that would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work.

Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as to implement “30 for 40” –with the no reduction in pay proviso, although many low –end employers are even now under the “cover” of the flawed Obamacare reducing hours WITH loss of pay-so that to establish this work system as a norm it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.

Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy. Support the recent militant efforts, including the old tactic of civil disobedience, by service unions and groups of fast-food workers to increase the minimum socially acceptable wage in their Fight For 15.

Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy.

Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of company-owned trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. The key here is to organize the truckers and distribution workers the place where the whole thing comes together. We have seen mostly unsuccessful organizing of retail stores. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.

Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more defeats like in Wisconsin in 2011, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, courts or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.

* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 and 2012 labor, organized labor, spent over 450 million dollars respectively trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The “no show, no go” results speak for themselves as the gap between the rich and poor has risen even more in this period. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea in those elections was that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the-back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.

The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example that I can recall- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks in the summer of 2011 when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.

This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go. And not on recall elections against individual reactionaries, like in Wisconsin, as substitutes for class struggle (and which was overwhelmingly unsuccessful to boot-while the number of unionized public workers has dwindled to a precious few).  

*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reached its final stages back in 2011, the draw- down of non-mercenary forces anyway, I argued that we must recognize that we anti-warriors had failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006).As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other proxy wars) continue now with a new stage against ISIS (Islamic State) in Iraq we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the U.S. troop escalation we know is coming before that fight is over. Not Another War In Iraq! No Intervention In Syria! Stop The Arms Shipments To The Middle East! Stop The Bombing Campaign! Defend The Palestinian People-End The Blockade of Gaza. And as always since 2001 Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan!  

U.S. Hands Off Iran! Hands Off Syria!- American (and world) imperialists have periodically ratcheted up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner on this issue, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in Iran in our own way in our own time.

U.S. Hands Off The World! And Keep Them Off!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.

Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that in 1915 in the heat of war and paid the price unlike other party leaders who were pledged to stop the war budgets by going to prison. The only play for an honest representative of the working class under those conditions. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now no new funding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.

*Fight for a social agenda for working people! Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs. Be clear Obamacare is not our program and has been shown to be totally inadequate and wasteful however we will defend that program against those who wish to dismantle it and leave millions once again uninsured and denied basic health benefits.  

Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!

This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle-class as well.

Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students from broken homes and minority homes in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money if you want to find the money quickly to do the job right), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.

Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while low-cost aid has not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!

Stop housing foreclosures and aid underwater mortgages now! Although the worst of the crunch has abated there are still plenty of problems and so this demand is still timely if not desperately timely like in the recent past. Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to beat down, beat down hard in all kinds of ways the mass of society for the benefit of the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.

Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.

Build a workers’ party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.

As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):

“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.” 

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

From The Archives-Well, No, From The Class Struggle- Montreal May Day [2015] Leaflet:Mobilize the Working Class Against Capitalist Austerity!

Workers Vanguard No. 1071
10 July 2015
 
Montreal May Day Leaflet:Mobilize the Working Class Against Capitalist Austerity!
 
Tens of thousands of Quebec students staged another round of mass strikes and demonstrations this spring against attacks by the Liberal Party government of that province. The protests did not reach the level of the 2012 student strike, which saw marches of up to a quarter million people and drew in layers of the working class. But once again, students and their allies faced brutal repression at the hands of the police. On May Day, the cops violently attacked a demonstration called by the Convergence des Luttes Anticapitalistes (Anti-Capitalist Convergence) after only ten minutes, firing tear gas at protesters and bystanders alike and arresting nearly 100 people.
Late last year, some Quebec union leaders threatened to organize a mass “social strike” against austerity for May Day. But in the end, the bureaucrats who head the CSN and FTQ union federations did not even hold the traditional union May Day demo in Montreal. Instead, working-class anger against austerity was dissipated in a series of symbolic occupations and picket lines, while relatively small marches were held in cities and towns around Quebec.
We reprint below an adaptation of a leaflet issued in Montreal on April 25 by the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste, Canadian section of the International Communist League, and distributed by our comrades at student, labor and other protests in the city, including on May Day. The leaflet was translated and adapted by Spartacist Canada, which published it in No. 185, Summer 2015.
*   *   *
The Liberal government of Philippe Couillard has unleashed its austerity campaign, attacking the workers’ gains in the name of “balancing the budget.” It is cutting salaries, pensions, social programs, health care, education, etc. While the 400,000 workers in the public-sector union Common Front get insulting offers from the government—a three percent raise over five years and a hike in the retirement age—the big corporations are raking in ever-growing profits and the latest government budget again offers them a plethora of gifts.
The union federations and other organizations have launched the Refusons l’Austérité [Refuse Austerity] collective. During March and April, tens of thousands of students went on strike to protest the austerity attacks. In response, the government has unleashed its guard dogs against student protesters. Police brutality and mass arrests are again common coin. Students at UQAM [Université du Québec à Montréal] face threats of expulsion for their political activities. On April 8 the administration brought the cops onto campus to prevent students from respecting strike votes. The cops then violently broke up the occupation of one of the campus buildings that evening. We demand: Drop the charges! Down with the UQAM administration’s persecution of student militants! Cops and security guards off campus!
The anger among the working class and among students is palpable, as shown by the many demonstrations that have brought out thousands of people. But the demands of their leaders are based on the false premise that capitalism is capable of serving the interests of everyone. The Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante [Association for Student Union Solidarity] (ASSÉ) calls on the government to “live up to its responsibilities and listen to the population” (ASSÉ, 12 November 2014). Meanwhile, the Refusons l’Austérité collective advises it to “spend more to boost the economy, and ensure the permanent continuation of public services and social programs” (“Solutions,” refusons.org, undated). In fact the Liberal government, like all capitalist governments, fulfills its responsibilities by serving the interests of the bourgeoisie. Public services will never meet the workers’ needs in an economic system characterized by periodic crises that block production, destroy wealth and inflict deep suffering on the working class and poor.
The capitalist class that owns the means of production—the factories, mines, transportation, etc.—has interests counterposed to those of the working class, which is forced to sell its labour power in order to survive. It is the workers who produce the goods and services that make society function, but a handful of capitalist parasites steals all the riches. To try and shore up its rate of profit, the bourgeoisie has to constantly cut wages, lay off workers and reduce public services. Since austerity is intrinsic to capitalism, the fight against it must be linked to a fight against the capitalist system.
Myth of the “Welfare State”
Internationally, workers and the oppressed face all-out austerity attacks. Europe has been shaken in recent years by many general strikes and impressive demonstrations against austerity. The desperate situation of millions of workers and the poor has fuelled the growing popularity of parties that present themselves as anti-austerity, such as Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. But these are bourgeois parties loyal to the capitalist system. The Syriza government, elected on January 25, has backtracked on most of its already limited promises, capitulating to the diktats of the imperialist European Union. Now Syriza has accepted the extension of the hated bailout plan, promising to impose even more austerity.
In Quebec, union leaders and the student left counterpose to austerity the myth of the “welfare state” or “social state” that supposedly existed in the 1960s and 1970s. This period, known as the Quiet Revolution, saw a massive erosion of the power of the church and some reforms necessary for the development of a modern capitalist society. Yet it also corresponded to the emergence of a Québécois bourgeoisie which sought to institute an autonomous political economy where it would be the centre and the main beneficiary. In criticizing the politics of austerity, various leftists are spreading an incredible number of illusions, suggesting that in the 1960s and ’70s the capitalist state cared about the situation of the working class and the oppressed.
According to the CSN bureaucrats, for example, the Liberal Party’s agenda is to dismantle “the social state in Quebec which was set up 50 years ago” (“Solutions,” refusons.org, undated). For ASSÉ, the role of the Quebec state at the time of the Quiet Revolution was to “guarantee citizens’ welfare and emancipation” (Summary of “Evolution of Public Services in Quebec: Challenges and Perspectives,” 1 October 2014). This jovial and idealized vision of the state denies the fact that capitalist society is divided into antagonistic classes. In Quebec as on the federal level, the capitalist state is a tool of the bourgeoisie to maintain its domination. In the words of Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 (the only victorious workers revolution in history), the state is “a machine for the domination of one class over another” (“The State,” 1919).
It is an illusion to think that a state which passes repressive laws like P-6 [used to ban leftist demonstrations], which breaks strikes with its police and “emergency laws,” which participates in imperialist wars in the Near East and constantly sends its armed forces to brutalize Native people can suddenly interest itself in the well-being of the working class and the fate of the oppressed. The true face and the heart of the bourgeois state is its apparatus of repression, composed of the police, standing army, prisons and courts. No matter which party runs it, the bourgeois state exists to defend the bosses’ interests.
Whatever gains Quebec’s workers and oppressed enjoy weren’t given to them in a spirit of kindness by the bourgeois state. They were taken from the ruling class in the course of hard struggles by the labour movement. For example, the greater access to education established during the Quiet Revolution had been one of the historic demands of the unions. Nurses, teachers and government employees had to wage hard battles against the “modernizing” governments of the 1960s to win the right to unionization, through which they won better working conditions. But in the framework of capitalism these gains, which must absolutely be defended, are always partial and constantly reversible. The only perspective for putting an end to wage slavery is to fight for socialist revolution, in the course of which the bourgeois state will be destroyed and replaced by a state based on workers councils—in other words, the replacement of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The Social Power of the Working Class
Up to now it has mainly been students who have mobilized against austerity. Even if large and frequent student demonstrations can at times annoy the government or disturb some economic activity, they cannot attack the nerve centre of the capitalist system. It is the workers who, when they strike and withdraw their labour power, stop the flow of production that generates the bourgeoisie’s profits. Students, a petty-bourgeois social layer with no direct relationship to the means of production, do not have that kind of social power. Student struggles can be the spark for more general social conflicts, but in the final analysis the only solution is to ally with the workers movement.
The exploited working class, which is paid only enough to support itself and produce the next generation of workers, has no interest in the survival of the capitalist system. On the contrary, it objectively has every interest in its overthrow. The workers possess enormous power because of their role in production, their numbers and their organization. It is this power that could, for example, be mobilized against the brutal repression of students who are challenging capitalist austerity.
The Quebec proletariat has a rich history of militant struggles whose peak was the 1972 general strike. Little known among young workers and leftists today, the strike demonstrated the social power of the working class. It posed the question of political power: whether the workers or the capitalists would run society.
This semi-insurrectionary class struggle began in April 1972 with a large strike by the Common Front of the three union federations amid negotiations over public sector contracts. After ten days, the union leaders called for a return to work against the will of the workers, who wanted to continue the strike. The three union leaders, who were nonetheless accused by the bourgeois state of having disobeyed injunctions, were imprisoned by Bourassa’s Liberal government, setting off a huge, spontaneous strike wave throughout Quebec in May. More than 300,000 workers in the mines, hospitals, airports, factories—in short, in all the key industrial sectors—went on strike. In cities such as Sept-ÃŽles, Sorel, Thetford Mines and Joliette the workers seized radio stations, barricaded streets—in a word, they took control of the cities.
Only an appeal for calm by the three jailed leaders brought an end to the conflict, under the pretext of a negotiated agreement with the government. As we wrote in an article assessing this struggle:
“In 1972 the determined militancy and combativity of the Québécois proletariat was pushed to the limit, to the point that what became brutally clear was the need for a proletarian internationalist program and leadership.... But where the nationalist Quebec labor bureaucrats used 1972 to build labor support for the bourgeois-nationalist PQ [Parti Québécois], the Maple Leaf jingoists heading up the English-Canadian labor movement attempted to keep the general strike from spilling over into their own ranks through orgies of chauvinism.”
— “Lessons of the 1972 Quebec General Strike: From the Barricades to the Parti Québécois,” Spartacist Canada No. 57, March 1983
For a Class-Struggle Leadership in the Unions!
The union leaderships in the 1960s and 1970s were pushed to lead more militant actions by a base that was more combative than today. However this militancy was channelled into the bourgeois nationalism of the PQ. Today the union tops are completely locked into the framework of bourgeois legalism, very reluctant to unleash strikes and, as in the past, remain an obstacle to mobilizing the social power of the proletariat against capitalism. They are committed to the smooth functioning of the bourgeois economy and seek collaboration with the ruling class and its government.
The example of the Coalition pour la Libre Négotiation [Coalition for Free Negotiations]—set up to fight against Bill 3, which attacks the pensions of municipal workers—shows clearly how the union bureaucrats refuse to unleash class struggles to defend the workers’ interests. After having vaguely raised the spectre of a strike in October, the Coalition leadership chose to refer the issue to the Superior Court, a process that will take months, if not years. The Coalition’s strategy is reduced to challenging the constitutionality of Bill 3 before the very courts that regularly impose injunctions against striking workers and impose penalties on youth who demonstrate against austerity.
But the worst crime of the Coalition leadership is surely to have included the cops. The police, like prison guards and security guards, are not workers. Their job is to preserve the system of capitalist exploitation through organized violence. When workers go on strike, the bourgeoisie sends the cops to break up picket lines and arrest strikers. The workers movement must fight independently of the forces of the bourgeois state. That is why we say: cops, security guards, prison guards out of the unions!
In addition, almost all the union leaders give open or tacit support to the PQ. Daniel Roy, Quebec director of the Steelworkers union, has publicly supported Martine Ouellet’s candidacy for PQ leader, presenting the PQ as the party of the “middle class” and calling to “rebuild bridges” with it (Le Devoir, 22 January). The PQ is a bourgeois party, dedicated to safeguarding the interests of the Québécois capitalists. At the beginning of the 1980s, René Lévesque broke the strike of the Common Front unions. Then in the 1990s, Lucien Bouchard slashed public services with his “zero deficit” campaign. More recently, it was the government of Pauline Marois that broke the construction strike by passing an emergency law. The fact that Pierre Karl Péladeau, the big bourgeois “lockout king,” is the leading candidate to become the PQ’s new leader [and has subsequently become such] makes its anti-working-class character crystal clear. It’s the same story every time: a Liberal government attacks the workers and the most impoverished; the union leaders channel widespread anger into support to the PQ; the PQ takes over and mounts its own attacks.
The heart of the matter is the nationalism pushed by the union leaderships. Nationalism is a bourgeois ideology that serves to tie the oppressed to their oppressors by claiming that they have common “national interests.” The Canadian working class has long been deeply divided along national lines, reflecting the historic oppression of the Québécois nation within the Canadian state. Québécois nationalism is nourished by the “Canadian unity” chauvinism spread by the NDP [social-democratic New Democratic Party] and the union tops in English Canada. In response to this chauvinism, the Quebec union bureaucracy waves the [Quebec flag] fleur de lys and pushes the workers into the arms of the nationalists, especially the PQ. We advocate independence for Quebec in order to take the national question off the political agenda and show the workers of both nations that “their” respective bourgeoisies are not their ally against “the French” or “les Anglais,” but their class enemy.
We oppose any privileges granted to languages and to nations. We denounce the imposition of English as the language of work where the workers are French-speaking. In March, the majority francophone FTQ workers building the Université de Montréal Hospital Centre denounced the predominance of English in the construction blueprints and instructions that they receive. This puts their safety in danger and violates their right to work in their own language.
As adversaries of all nationalism, we equally oppose the Charter of the French Language (Law 101), which makes French the official language of Quebec and thus imposes discriminatory restrictions on English-speaking and immigrant minorities. Marxists oppose laws which impose “official languages,” as well as school systems based on language or religion. The unity of francophone, anglophone and immigrant workers can only be created on the basis of upholding the equality of languages.
It is necessary to forge oppositions inside the unions that will replace the union bureaucracy with a class-struggle leadership. Such a leadership will politically arm the workers to wage hard-fought battles against the capitalist exploiters. This task goes hand-in-hand with the fight to build a revolutionary workers party. Such a party is needed to arm the workers with the understanding of the need to struggle for a socialist revolution in order to put an end to austerity and capitalism once and for all.
The Workers Movement Must Defend the Muslim Minority!
One of the main tasks of the labour movement is the defense of immigrants and ethnic and religious minorities. The campaign of racist hysteria pushed by the state against Muslims has recently redoubled in intensity. Mosques have been shut down by some municipalities and a Court of Quebec judge even refused to hear the case of a Muslim woman on the pretext that she was wearing a veil. While the veil is a symbol and instrument of women’s oppression, it is necessary to oppose government attacks against the democratic rights of Muslims, including the right to wear the veil.
These attacks have given a boost to the racists who have stepped up their acts of vandalism against mosques (notably in Quebec City, Limoilou, Sainte-Foy and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu). Under the banner of Pegida Québec (a racist movement that started in Germany which opposes the so-called “Islamization of the West”), some people even tried to organize a reactionary anti-Muslim parade in the heart of Little Maghreb in Montreal in March. Hundreds of leftist and anti-racist militants mobilized and spiked this provocation.
Racism is intrinsic to the system of capitalist exploitation and the bourgeoisie ceaselessly resorts to such campaigns to divide the workers according to their different origins. The PQ hypocritically opposed the Pegida demonstration, even though they pushed their racist “Charter of Values” when they were in power. As for Québec Solidaire [QS], its denunciations of Pegida contrast with its desire to ban women who wear the full-face veil from receiving public services. Muslims and other ethnic and religious minorities constitute a growing part of the working class in the Montreal region. It is in the interest of the workers movement to defend the most vulnerable against racist anti-immigrant attacks. But the union bureaucracy renounces this fundamental task. Apart from an empty declaration against Pegida’s provocation issued by the leadership of the CSN’s Metropolitan Montreal Central Council (published the same day!), nothing was done to defend the Muslim minority. Down with anti-Muslim racism! An injury to one is an injury to all!
Québec Solidaire and the Fake Marxists
Practically the whole Quebec left looks to QS as an alternative to the PQ. QS is a party with a petty-bourgeois base and no links to the workers movement which proposes only a capitalism “of solidarity, ecology and democracy.” QS even agrees with getting back to a balanced budget, only a year later than what the Liberals propose. Since Couillard’s election it has multiplied its offers to collaborate with the Liberals to try and put a more “social” face on austerity. In fact QS is really no different than the PQ of the early 1970s. Just as nationalist, it is an obstacle to the perspective of workers revolution to overthrow capitalism.
Many self-described socialists have liquidated into QS including Alternative Socialiste (AS, associated with the Committee for a Workers International) and La Riposte [Fightback] (associated with the International Marxist Tendency). In addition to arguing that QS could be an anti-capitalist alternative, these two organizations betray the ABC of the Marxist conception of the state. AS claims that cops are “workers in uniform” (alternativesocialiste.org, 9 July 2014) and La Riposte says that including the police in the movement against Bill 3 “weakens the government’s capacity to use them to repress the coming movements of workers and youth” (marxiste.qc.ca, 29 August 2014). Thus these fake socialists want the workers to believe that the police force—a reservoir of racism, sexism and homophobia—could be on the side of the working class. Or that their “unions”—in reality, organizations of legal gangsters—are part of the labour movement. Nothing could be more dangerous for the working class, because the cops are the first line of defense of the bosses’ interests.
In addition to these reformists who nestle inside QS, we have the Maoist Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire (PCR) which counterposes itself to it. Don’t be taken in by their red flags! The PCR rejects the proletarian perspective which is essential to Marxism by upholding “protracted people’s war” as “the road to revolution in Canada.” As Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky always explained, the working class is central to a revolutionary struggle because it is the only class which has the social power to overthrow the bourgeois order. A perspective based on “people’s war” dissolves the workers into “the people” and necessarily leads to class collaboration.
The Revolutionary Student Movement (MER), created under the PCR’s auspices, denounces the unions as “a powerful factor in the allegiance of the workers to capitalism” (MER, 5 April). These Maoists wipe out any distinction between the working-class base of the unions and the union bureaucracy. The unions are organs of working-class defense against the capitalist exploiter. They should encompass as many workers as possible to strengthen unity in the economic struggle. The authentic Marxist program is to defend the unions against the bosses and the bourgeois state while fighting to forge a revolutionary leadership.
The workers of Quebec and English Canada need their own party to defend their interests. Such a party will fight for the unity of the working class and act as a tribune of the people, defending immigrants, Native people, women and all the victims of capitalist oppression. This rotting economic system—which produces crises, perpetual wars and, as a byproduct, austerity—must urgently be replaced by a planned economy where production will be run rationally according to the needs of all and not of profit. The International Communist League, whose Canadian section is the Ligue trotskyste/Trotskyist League, is dedicated to reforging the Fourth International, the party that is needed for the overthrow of capitalism in North America and throughout the planet.

Down At Duke’s Place-With Duke Ellington In Mind

Down At Duke’s Place-With Duke Ellington In Mind
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
No, this will not be a screed about how back in the day, back in the 1950s when be-bop jazz was the cat’s meow, when cool was listening to the Monk trip up a note and work it out from there or Dizzy burping then hitting the high white note all those guys were struggling against the limits of the instruments, high as hell, to get to. Frankly I was too, way too young to appreciate such work and I only got the tail end, you know when Hollywood or the popular prints messed the whole be-bop jazz “beat” thing up and we got spoon-fed Maynard G. Krebs and ten thousand guys hanging around the Village on Saturday night in full beret from the outreaches of Tenafly, New Jersey and another ten thousand gals, all in black from head to toe, maybe black underwear too so something to imagine at least from Norwalk, Connecticut milling around as well. Square, square cubed. No, this will not be some screed going back further in the hard times of the Great Depression and the slogging through World War II when “it did not mean a thing, if you ain’t got that swing” when our parents, the parents of the kids who caught the end of be-bop “swang,” did dips and twirls to counts, dukes, earls, princes, marquises even leading big band splashes to wash that generation clean. Come on now that was our parents and I wasn’t even born so no way I can “screed” about that. And, no, no, big time no, this will not be about some solitary figure in some dank, dusty, smoke-filled café, the booze flowing, the dope in the back alleys inflaming the night while some guy, probably a sexy sax player, blows some eternal high white note out against some bay, maybe Frisco Bay, and I was hooked, hooked for life on the be-bop jazz scene.

No, it never even came close to starting out like that, never even dreamed such scenes. Unlike rock and roll, the classic kind that was produced in my 1950s growing up time and which I have had a life-long devotion to or folk music which I came of age, political and social age to later in the early 1960s, jazz was a late, a very late acquisition to my understanding of the American songbook. Oh sure I would hear a phrase, a few bing, bang, bong  notes blowing out the window, out the door, sitting in some bar over drinks with some hot date, maybe hear it as backdrop in some Harvard Square bookstore when I went looking for books (and, once somebody hipped me to the scene, looking for bright young women who also were in the bookstore looking for books, and bright young men but that scene is best left for another time), or at some party when the host tired of playing old-time folk music and decided to kick out the jams and let the jazz boys wreak their havoc. But jazz was, and to a great extent still is, a side bar of my musical tastes.          

About a decade ago, a little more, I got seriously into jazz for a while. The reason: the centennial of the birth of Duke Ellington being celebrated when I was listening to some radio show which was commemorating that fact and I heard a few faint bars which required me to both turn up the volume and to listen to the rest of the one hour tribute. The show played a lot of Duke’s stuff from the early 1940s when he had Ben Webster, Harry Carney, and Johnny Hodges on board. The stuff blew me away and as is my wont when I get my enthusiasms up, when something blows me away, I grabbed everything by the Duke and his various groupings and marveled at how very good his work was, how his tonal poems reached deep, deep down and caught something in me that responded in kind. Especially when those sexy saxs, when Johnny or Cootie blew me away when they let it all hang out.

Funny though I thought at the time that I hadn’t picked up on this sound, this reaching for the soul, for the essence of the matter, before since there are very definitely elements of the blues in Brother Duke’s work. And I have been nothing but a stone blown blues freak since the early 1960s when I first heard Howlin’ Wolf hold forth practically eating that harmonica of his on Little Red Rooster and Smokestack Lightnin’. Moreover I had always been a Billie Holiday fan although I never drew the connection to the jazz in the background since it usually was muted to let her rip with that throaty sultry voice, the voice that chased the blues, my blues,  away.

So, yes, count me among the guys who are searching for the guys who are searching for the great big cloud puff high white note, guys who have been searching for a long time as the notes waft out into the deep blue sea night. Count me too among Duke’s boys, down at Duke’s place where he eternally searched for that elusive high white note.             


Boston-8/23/2015 – 2pm Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Day Event

8/23 – 2pm Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Day Event August 20th, 2015 · Steve · News and




Announcements No comments Sacco and Vanzetti Remembered in Boston, Sunday, August 23, 2015

PRESS RELEASE / PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT Sunday, August 23rd, in Boston, the
88th anniversary of the execution of Nicola Saccoand Bartolomeo Vanzetti will be remembered. Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants and committed anarchists whose trial is regarded as one of the great miscarriages of justice in American history. Calling attention to the continued repression of immigrants and radicals, the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Committee invites all to attend and participate in the ninth annual march and rally. We will begin by gathering at Visitors Center (Tremont and West, Boston) at 2PM, followed by a march to the North End at 3PM, and conclude with a rally at 4PM at the Paul Revere Mall at 416 Hanover Street and will feature a number of speakers and live music at both locations. For the last ten years, the SVCS and other organizations and individuals have sought to bring public attention to the wrongful execution of the two Italian immigrant workers and radicals in 1927. We invoke their tragedy and our local history not just to remember Sacco and Vanzetti, but also to demonstrate how little has changed in the 88 years following their execution. Nationalist fearmongering and the repression of dissidents are as prevalent today as it was during the Red Scare in the early 20th century. The way in which immigrant workers are rounded up, detained and deported today under the pretext of a War on Terror, a War on Drugs or securing our borders, is eerily similar to the Palmer Raids targeting immigrants in the 1920s. Furthermore, the repressive role of the state has been made evident by systematic of police force used in particular against people of color. And while the overwhelming majority of developed nations have abolished the death penalty, the retention of capital punishment in the United States puts the U.S.in the disgracefully bad company of countries notorious for their human rights abuses. The Boston City Council has declared August 23, Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Day in the City of Boston, for the last 8 years, under the initiative of former councilors Felix Arroyo, Chuck Turner, and currently, Charles Yancey. The organization sponsoring this year’s Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Day are the IWW, the Black Rose Collective, Encuentro 5, and the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society.

Contact: Sergio Reyes Email: info(AT)saccoandvanzetti.org Web: www.saccoandvanzetti.org Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/saccoandvanzetti - See more at: http://www.occupyboston.org/2015/08/20/sacco-and-vanzetti-commemoration/#sthash.9pGV2EnZ.dpuf

Boston 8/23 – 2pm Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Day Event

8/23 – 2pm Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Day Event August 20th, 2015 · Steve · News and

Announcements No comments Sacco and Vanzetti Remembered in Boston, Sunday, August 23, 2015

PRESS RELEASE / PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT Sunday, August 23rd, in Boston, the
88th anniversary of the execution of Nicola Saccoand Bartolomeo Vanzetti will be remembered. Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants and committed anarchists whose trial is regarded as one of the great miscarriages of justice in American history. Calling attention to the continued repression of immigrants and radicals, the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Committee invites all to attend and participate in the ninth annual march and rally. We will begin by gathering at Visitors Center (Tremont and West, Boston) at 2PM, followed by a march to the North End at 3PM, and conclude with a rally at 4PM at the Paul Revere Mall at 416 Hanover Street and will feature a number of speakers and live music at both locations. For the last ten years, the SVCS and other organizations and individuals have sought to bring public attention to the wrongful execution of the two Italian immigrant workers and radicals in 1927. We invoke their tragedy and our local history not just to remember Sacco and Vanzetti, but also to demonstrate how little has changed in the 88 years following their execution. Nationalist fearmongering and the repression of dissidents are as prevalent today as it was during the Red Scare in the early 20th century. The way in which immigrant workers are rounded up, detained and deported today under the pretext of a War on Terror, a War on Drugs or securing our borders, is eerily similar to the Palmer Raids targeting immigrants in the 1920s. Furthermore, the repressive role of the state has been made evident by systematic of police force used in particular against people of color. And while the overwhelming majority of developed nations have abolished the death penalty, the retention of capital punishment in the United States puts the U.S.in the disgracefully bad company of countries notorious for their human rights abuses. The Boston City Council has declared August 23, Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Day in the City of Boston, for the last 8 years, under the initiative of former councilors Felix Arroyo, Chuck Turner, and currently, Charles Yancey. The organization sponsoring this year’s Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Day are the IWW, the Black Rose Collective, Encuentro 5, and the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society.

Contact: Sergio Reyes Email: info(AT)saccoandvanzetti.org Web: www.saccoandvanzetti.org Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/saccoandvanzetti - See more at: http://www.occupyboston.org/2015/08/20/sacco-and-vanzetti-commemoration/#sthash.9pGV2EnZ.dpuf

Songs To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots-Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven

Songs To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots-Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven



A YouTube clip to give some flavor to this subject.

Over the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale (reflecting the necessarily international brother and sisterhood of the downtrodden and oppressed to get out from under the thumb of the now globalized economic royalists who run the show to their small benefit), Union Maid (reflecting the deep-seeded need to organize the unorganized and reorganize the previously organized sections of the labor movement in America), Which Side Are You On (reflecting, well, that is easy enough to figure out without further explanation, which side are you when the deal goes down), Viva La Quince Brigada (reflecting that at certain times and certain places we must take up arms like in the 1930s Spanish Civil War against the night-takers before they get out of their shells and wreak havoc on the world), Universal Soldier (reflecting the short-fall in the ability of humankind to step forward without going off the deep end of killing each other for no none reason), and such under the title Songs To While The Class Struggle By. And those songs have provided our movement with that combination entertainment/political message that is an art form that we use to draw the interested around us. Even though today those interested in struggling may be counted rather than among the countless that we need to take on the beasts and the class struggle to be “whiled away” is rather one-sidedly going against us at present. The bosses are using every means from firing militants to targeting and setting union organizing drives up for failure by every means possible to employing their paid propagandists to complain when the masses are not happy with having their plight groveled in their faces like they should be and are ready to do something about it while the rich, well, while away in luxury and comfort.  

Not all life however is political, or rather not all music lends itself to some kind of explicit political meaning but yet spoke to, let’s say, the poor sharecropper or planation worker on Mister’s land at the juke joint on Saturday listening to the country blues, unplugged, kids in the early 1950s at the jukebox listening to high be-bop swing heralding a new breeze to break out of the tired music of their parents, other kids listening, maybe at that same jukebox later in the decade now worn with play and coins listening to some guys from some Memphis record company rocking and rolling (okay, okay not just some record company but Sam Phillip’s Sun Records and not just some guys from the cornfields but Warren Smith, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis), or adults spending some dough to hear the latest from Tin Pan Alley (some Cole Porter, Irvin Berlin, Gershwin Brothers summertime and the living is easy tune)or some enchanted evening Broadway musical. And so they too while away to the various aspects of the American songbook and that rich tradition is which in honored here.   

This series which could include some modern protest songs as well like Pete Seeger’s Where Have All The Flowers Gone or Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ In The Wind, is centered on roots music as it has come down the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain amusing here. Listen up.

****************

And as if you needed more motivation to list up run through this sketch:

The Roots Is The Toots-The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven  

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 Sam Lowell thought it was funny how things worked out in such contrary fashion in this wicked old world, not his expression that “wicked old world” for he preferred of late the more elastic and ironic “sad old world” reflecting since we are in a reflecting mood the swift passage of time and of times not coming back but that of his old time North Adamsville corner boy Peter Markin, Markin, who seemingly was possessed by the demon fight in his brain against the night-takers whatever their guise and who will be more fully introduced in a moment. (Markin aka Peter Paul Markin although nobody ever called him that except his mother, as one would expect although he hated to be teased by every kid from elementary school on including girls, girls who liked him too as a result, and his first ill-advised wife, a scion of the Mayfair swells who tried, unsuccessfully, to impress her leafy suburban parents with the familiar waspy triple names inherited from the long ago Brahmin forbear stowaways on the good ship Mayflower.)

Neither of those expressions referred to above date back to their youth since neither Sam nor Markin back then, back in their 1960s youth, would have used such old-fashioned religious-drenched expressions to express their take on the world since as with all youth, or at least youth who expected to “turn the world upside down” (an expression that they both did use in very different contexts) they would have withheld such judgments or were too busy doing that “turning” business and they had no time for adjectives to express their worldly concerns. No that expression, that understanding about the wickedness of the world had been picked up by Sam from Markin when they had reconnected a number of years previously after they had not seen each other for decades to express the uphill battles of those who had expected humankind to exhibit the better angels of their nature on a more regular basis. Some might call this a nostalgic glancing back, especially by Markin since he had more at stake in a favorable result, on a world that did not turn upside down or did so in a way very different from those hazy days.   

The funny part (or ironic if you prefer) was that Sam had been in his youth the least political, the least culture-oriented, the least musically-oriented of those corner boys like Markin, Jack Dawson, Jimmy Jenkins and “max daddy” leader Fritz Fallon (that “max daddy” another expression coined by Markin so although he has not even been properly introduced we know plenty about his place in the corner boy life, his place as “flak,” for Fritz’s operation although Fritz always called him “the Scribe” when he wanted something written up about his latest exploit and needed to play on Markin’s vanity, Markin with his finger-tip two thousand arcane facts stored in that brain ready to be fired at a moment’s notice for his leader. His leader who kept the coins flowing into the jukebox at Phil’s House of Pizza (don’t ask how that “coins flowing” got going since Fritz like most of the corner boys came “from hunger” but just take on faith that they got there. That shop had been located down a couple of blocks from the choppy ocean waters of Adamsville Beach (and still is although under totally different management from the arch-Italian Rizzo family that ran the place for several generation to some immigrant Albanians named Hoxha).

That made it among other things a natural hang-out place for wayward but harmless poor teenage corner boys. (The serious “townie” professional corner boys, the rumblers, tumblers, drifters, grifters and midnight sifters hung around Harry’s Variety with leader Red Riley over on Sagamore far from beaches, daytime beaches although rumors had been of more than one nighttime orgy with “nice” girls looking for kicks with rough boys down among the briny rocks. Fritz and the boys would not have gone within three blocks of that place. Maybe more from fear, legitimate fear as Fritz’s older brother, Timmy, a serious tough guy himself, could testify to the one time he tried to wait outside Harry’s for some reason, a friend stopping to buy a soda on a hot summer day Fritz said, and got chain-whipped by Red for his indiscretion. Moreover Phil’s provided a beautiful vantage point for scanning the horizon for those wayward girls who also kept their coins flowing into Phil’s jukebox (or a stray “nice” girl passing by after Red and his corner boys threw her over).

Sam had recently thought about that funny story that Markin had told the crowd once on a hot night in the summer of 1965 when nobody had any money and were just holding up the wall at Phil’s about Johnny Callahan, the flashy and unstoppable halfback from the high school team (and a guy even Red respected having made plenty of money off of “sports” who bet with him on Johnny’s prowess any given Saturday although Johnny once confessed that he too, rightly, avoided Harry’s after what had happened to Timmy). See Johnny was pretty poor in those days even by the median working poor standard of the old neighborhoods (although now, courtesy of his incessant radio and television advertising which continues to make everyone within fifty miles of North Adamsville who knew Johnny back in the day aware of his new profession, he is a prosperous Toyota car dealer down across from the mall in Hull about twenty miles from North Adamsville, the town where their mutual friend Josh Breslin soon to be introduced came from). Johnny, a real music maniac who would do his football weight-lifting exercises to Jerry Lee’s Great Balls of Fire, Gene Vincent’s Be-Bop-A-Lula and stuff like that to get him hyped up, had this routine in order to get to hear songs that he was dying to hear, stuff he would hear late at night coming from a rock station out of Detroit and which would show up a few weeks later on Phil’s jukebox just waiting for Johnny and the kids to fill the coffers, with the girls who had some dough, enough dough anyway to put coins into that jukebox.

Johnny would go up all flirty to some young thing (a Fritz expression coped from Jerry Lee and not an invention of Markin as he would later try to claim to some “young thing” that he was trying to “score”) or depending on whatever intelligent he had on the girl, maybe she had just had a fight with her boyfriend or had broken up with him so Johnny would be all sympathy, maybe she was just down in the dumps for no articulable reason like every teen goes through every chance they get, whatever it took. Johnny, by the way, would have gotten that intelligence via Markin who whatever else anybody had to say about him, good or bad, was wired into, no, made himself consciously privy to, all kinds of boy-girl information almost like he had a hook into that Monday morning before school girls’ locker room talkfest (everybody already knew that he was hooked into the boys’ Monday morning version and had started more rumors and other unsavory deeds than any ten other guys).

Now here is what Johnny “knew” about almost every girl if they had the quarter which allowed them to play three selections. He would let them pick that first one on their own, maybe something to express interest in his flirtation, maybe her name, say Donna, was also being used as the title of a latest hit, or if broken up some boy sorrow thing. Brenda Lee’s I Want To Be Wanted, stuff like that. The second one he would “suggest” something everybody wanted to listen to no matter what but which was starting to get old. Maybe an Elvis, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee thing still on the jukebox playlist but getting wearisome. Then he would go in for the kill and “suggest” they play this new platter, you know, something like Martha and the Vandelas Dancing in the Streets or Roy’s Blue Bayou both of which he had heard on the midnight radio airwaves out of Detroit one night and were just getting play on the jukeboxes. And bingo before you know it she was playing the thing again, and again. Beautiful. And Johnny said that sometimes he would wind up with a date, especially if he had just scored about three touchdowns for the school, a date that is in the days before he and Kitty Kelly became an “item.” An item, although it is not germane to the story, who still is Johnny’s girl, wife, known as Mrs. Toyota now.

But enough of this downstream stuff Sam thought. The hell with Johnny and his cheapjack tricks (although not to those three beautiful touchdowns days, okay) this thing gnawing at him was about old age angst and not the corner boy glory days at Phil’s, although it was about old time corners boys and their current doings, some of them anyway. So yeah he had other things he wanted to think about (and besides he had already, with a good trade-in gotten his latest car from Mr. Toyota so enough there), to tell a candid world about how over the past few years with the country, the world, the universe had been going to hell in a hand-basket. In the old days, like he kept going back to he was not the least bit interested in anything in the big world outside of sports, and girls, of course. And endlessly working on plans to own his own business, a print shop, before he was twenty-five. Well, he did get that small business, although not until thirty and had prospered when he made connections to do printing for several big high-tech companies, notably IBM when they began outsourcing their work. He had prospered, had married (twice, and divorced twice), had the requisite tolerated children and adored grandchildren, and in his old age a woman companion to ease his time.

But there had been for a long time, through those failed marriages, through that business success something gnawing at him, something that Sam felt he had missed out on, or felt he had do something about. Then a few years ago when it was getting time for a high school class reunion he had Googled “North Adamsville Class of 1966” and came upon a class website for that year, his year, that had been set up by the reunion committee, and decided to join the site to keep up with what was going on, keep up with developments there (he would wind up not going to that reunion as he had planned to although that too is not germane to the story here except as one more thing that gnawed at him because in the end he could not face going home, believed in the end after a painful episode, a feud with a female fellow classmate that left bitter ashes in his mouth (hers too from what he had heard later) what Thomas Wolfe said in the title of one of his novels, you can’t go home again).

After he had registered on the site giving a brief resume of his interests and what he had been up to these past forty years or so years Sam looked at the class list, the entire list of class members alive and deceased (a rose beside their name signifying their passing, some seventy or so madding to his sad old world view) of who had joined and found the names of Peter Paul Markin and Jimmy Jenkins among those who had done so. (Sam had to laugh, listed as Peter Paul Markin since everybody was listed by their full names, revenge from the grave by his poor mother, and that leafy suburban first wife who tried to give him Mayflower credentials, he thought.) Jack Dawson had passed away a few years before, a broken man, broken after his son who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan had committed suicide, according to Markin, as had their corner boy leader, Fritz Fallon, homeless after going through a couple of fortunes, his own and a third wife’s.

Through the mechanism established on the site which allowed each class member who joined to have a private e-mail slot Sam contacted both men and the three of them started a rather vigorous on-line chat line for several weeks going through the alphabet of their experiences, good and bad, the time for sugar-coating was over unlike in their youth when all three would lie like crazy, especially about sex and with whom in order to keep their place in the pecking order, and in order to keep up with Fritz whom lied more than the three of them combined. Markin knew that, knew Fritz’s lying about his scorecard with under the satin sheets women, knew it better than anybody else but to keep his place as “scribe” in that crazy quill pecking order went along with such silly teenage stuff, stuff that in his other pursuits he would have laughed at but that is what made being a teenager back then, now too, from what Sam saw of his grandchildren’s trials and tribulation.

After a while, once the e-mail questions had worked their course, all three men met in Boston at the Sunnyvale Grille, a place where Markin had begun to hang out in after he had moved back to Boston from the West Coast (read “hang out”: did his daytime drinking) over by the waterfront, and spent a few hours discussing not so much old times per se but what was going on in the world now, and how the world had changed some much in the meantime. And since Markin, the political maniac of the tribe, was involved in the conversations maybe do something about it at least that is what Sam had hoped since he knew that is where he thought he needed to head in order to cut into that gnawing feeling at him. Sam was elated, and unlike in his youth he did not shut his ears down, when those two guys would talk politics, about the arts or about music. He had not listened back then since he was so strictly into girls and sports, not always in that order (which caused many problems later including one of the grounds for his one of his divorces, not the sports but the girls).

This is probably the place for Sam to introduce Peter Paul Markin although he had already given an earful (and what goes for Markin goes to a lesser extent for Jimmy who tended to follow in Pete’s wake on the issues back then, and still does). Markin as Sam already noted provided that noteworthy, national security agency-worthy service, that “intelligence” he provided all the guys (and not just his corner boys, although they had first dibs) about girls, who was “taken,” a very important factor if some frail (a Fritz term from watching too many 1940s gangster and detective movies and reading Dashiell Hammett too closely, especially The Maltese Falcon),was involved with some bruiser football player, some college joe who belonged to a fraternity and the brothers were sworn to avenge any brother’s indignities, or worse, worse of all, if she was involved with some outlaw biker who hung out in Adamsville and who if he hadn’t his monthly quota of  college boy wannabes red meat hanging out at Phil’s would not think twice about chain-whipping you just for the fuck of it (“for the fuck of it” a  term Jimmy constantly used so it was not always Markin or Fritz who led the verbal life around the corner), who was “unapproachable,”  probably more important than that social blunder of ‘hitting on” a taken woman since that snub by Miss Perfect-Turned-Up-Nose would make the rounds of that now legendary seminar, Monday morning before school girls’ locker room (and eventually work its way through Markin to the boys’ Monday morning version ruining whatever social standing the guy had spent since junior high trying to perfect in order to avoid the fatal nerd-dweeb-wallflower-square name your term).

Strangely Markin had made a serious mistake with Melinda Loring who blasted her freeze deep on him and he survived to tell the tale, or at least that is what he had the boys believe. Make of this what you will though he never after that Melinda Loring sting had a high school girlfriend from North Adamsville High, who, well, liked to “do the do” as they called it back then, that last part not always correct since everybody, girls and boys alike, were lying like crazy about whether they were “doing the do” or not, including Markin.

But beyond, well beyond, that schoolboy silliness Markin was made of sterner stuff (although Sam would not have bothered to use such a positive attribute about Markin back then) was super-political, super into art and what he called culture, you know going to poetry readings at coffeehouses, going over to Cambridge to watch foreign films with subtitles and themes that he would try to talk about and even Jimmy would turn his head, especially those French films by Jean Renoir, and super into music, fortunately he was not crazy for classical music (unlike some nerds in school then who were in the band and after practice you would hear Beethoven or somebody wafting through the halls after they had finished their sport’s practice)but serious about what is now called classic rock and roll and then in turn, the blues, and folk music (Sam still shuttered at that hillbilly stuff Markin tried to interest him in when he thought about it). That was how Markin had first met Josh Breslin, still a friend, whom he introduced to Sam at one of their meetings over at the Sunnyvale Grille.

Josh told the gathering that Markin had met him after high school, after he had graduated from Hull High (the same town where Johnny Callahan was burning up the Toyota sales records for New England) down at the Surf Ballroom (Sam had his own memories of the place, some good, some bad including one affair that almost wound up in marriage). Apparently Josh and Peter had had their wanting habits on the same girl at one Friday night dance when the great local cover band, the Rockin’ Ramrods held sway there, and had been successively her boyfriend for short periods both to be dumped for some stockbroker from New York. But their friendship remained and they had gone west together, gone on that Jack Kerouac On The Road trail for a number of years when they were trying their own version of turning the world upside down on. Josh also dabbled (his word) in the turning upside down politics of the time.

And that was the remarkable thing about Markin, not so much later in the 1960s in cahoots with Josh because half of youth nation, half the generation of ’68 was knee-deep in some movement, but in staid old North Adamsville High days, days when to just be conventionally political, wanting to run for office or something, was seen as kind of strange. See Peter was into the civil rights movement, nuclear disarmament, and social justice stuff that everybody thought he was crazy to be into, everybody from Ma to Fritz (and a few anonymous midnight phone-callers yelling n----r-lover and commie into the Markin home phone).  He had actually gone into Boston when he was a freshman and joined the picket-line in front of Woolworths’ protesting the fact that they would not let black people eat in their lunchrooms down south (and maybe Markin would say when he mentioned what he was up to Woolworth’s, or North Adamsville residents, were not that happy to have blacks in their northern lunchrooms either ), had joined a bunch of Quakers and little old ladies in tennis sneakers (a term then in use for airhead blue-haired lady do-gooders with nothing but time on their hands) calling on the government to stop building atomic bombs (not popular in the red scare Cold War “we were fighting against the Russians” North Adamsville, or most other American places either), running over to the art museum to check out the exhibits (including some funny stories about him and Jimmy busting up the place looking at the old Pharaoh times slave building Pyramids stuff uncovered by some Harvard guys way back), and going to coffeehouses in Harvard Square and listening to hokey folk music that was a drag. (Sam’s take on that subject then, and now.) So Markin was a walking contradiction, although that was probably not as strange now as it seemed back then when every new thing was looked at with suspicion and when kids like Peter were twisted in the wind between being corner boys and trying to figure out what that new wind was that was blowing though the land, when Sam and the other corner boys, except Jimmy and sometimes Jack would try to talk him out of stuff that would only upset everybody in town.

But here is the beauty, beauty for Sam now that he was all ears about what Peter had to say, he had kept at it, had kept the faith, while everybody else from their generation, or almost everybody, who protested war, protested around the social issues, had hung around coffeehouses and who had listened to folk music had long before given it up. Markin had, after his  Army time, spent a lot of time working with GIs around the war issues, protested the incessantly aggressive American foreign policy dipped internally into wars and coups at the drop of a hat and frequented off-beat coffeehouses set up in the basements of churches in order to hear the dwindling number of folk artists around. He had gotten and kept his “religion,” kept the faith in a sullen world. And like in the old days a new generation (added to that older North Adamsville generation which still, from the class website e-mail traffic had not gotten that much less hostile to what Markin had to say about this “wicked old world,” you already know the genesis of that term, right, was ready to curse him out, ready to curse the darkness against his small voice).

One night when Peter and Sam were alone at the Sunnyvale Grille, maybe both had had a few too many high-shelf scotches (now able to afford such liquor unlike in the old days when they both in their respective poverties, drank low-shelf Johnny Walker whiskey with a beer chaser when they had the dough, if not some cheapjack wine), Peter told Sam the story of how he had wanted to go to Alabama in high school, go to Selma, but his mother threatened to disown him if he did, threatened to disown him not for his desire to go but because she would not have been able to hold her head up in public if he had, and so although it ate at him not to go, go when his girlfriend, Helen Jackson, who lived in Gloversville, did go, he “took a dive” (Markin’s words).

Told Sam redemptive story too about his anti-war fight in the Army when he refused to go to Vietnam and wound up in an Army stockade for a couple of years altogether. (Sam thought that was a high price to pay for redemption but it may have been the scotch at work.) Told a number of stories about working with various veterans’ groups, throwing medals over Supreme Court barricades, chainings to the White House fence, sitting down in hostile honked traffic streets, blocking freeways complete with those same hostile honkings, a million walks for this and that, and some plain old ordinary handing out leaflets, working the polls and button-holing reluctant politicians to vote against the endless war budgets (this last the hardest task, harder than all the jailings, honkings, marches put together and seemingly the most fruitless).

Told too stories about the small coffeehouse places seeing retread folkies who had gone on to other things and then in a fit of anguish, or hubris, decided to go back on the trail. Told of many things that night not in feast of pride but to let Sam know that sometimes it was easier to act than to let that gnawing win the day. Told Sam that he too always had the “gnaw,” probably always would in this wicked old world. Sam was delighted by the whole talk, even if Markin was on his soapbox. 

That night too Peter mentioned in passing that he contributed to a number of blogs, a couple of political ones, including an anti-war veterans’ group, a couple of old time left-wing cultural sites and a folk music-oriented one. Sam confessed to Markin that although he had heard the word blog he did not know what a blog was. Peter told him that one of the virtues of the Internet was that it provided space (cyberspace, a term Sam had heard of and knew what it meant) for the average citizen to speak his or her mind via setting up a website or a blog. Blogs were simply a way to put your opinions and comments out there just like newspaper Op/Ed writers or news reporters and commentators although among professional reporters the average blog and blog writers were seen as too filled with opinions and sometimes rather loose with the facts. Peter said he was perfectly willing to allow the so-called “objective” reporters state the facts but he would be damned if the blog system was not a great way to get together with others interested in your areas of interest, yeah, stuff that interested you and that other like-minded spirits might respond to. Yeah that was worth the effort.

The actual process of blog creation (as opposed to the more complex website-creation which still takes a fair amount of expertise to create) had been made fairly simple over time, just follow a few simple prompts and you are in business. Also over time what was possible to do has been updated for ease, for example linking to other platforms to your site and be able to present multi-media works lashing up say your blog with YouTube or downloading photographs to add something to your presentation. Peter one afternoon after Sam had asked about his blog links showed him the most political one that he belonged to, one he had recently begun to share space with Josh Breslin, Frank Jackman and a couple of other guys that he had known since the 1960s on and who were familiar with the various social, political and cultural trends that floated out from that period. 

Sam was amazed at the various topics that those guys tackled, stuff that he vaguely remembered hearing about but which kind of passed him by as he had delved into the struggle to build his printing shop after high school and the marriage, first marriage, house, kids and dog bit.  He told Markin that as he scrolled through the site he got dizzy looking at the various titles from reviews of old time black and white movies that he remembered watching at the old Strand second run theater uptown, poetry from the “beat” generation, various political pieces on current stuff like the Middle East, the fight against war, political prisoners most of whom he had never heard of except the ones who had been Black Panther or guys like that who were on the news after they were killed or carted off to jail, all kinds of reviews of rock and roll complete with the songs via YouTube, too many reviews of folk music that he never really cared for, books that he knew Peter read like crazy but that Sam could not remember the titles of. The guys really had put a lot of stuff together, even stuff from other sites and announcements for every conceivable left-wing oriented event in Boston or the East Coast. He decided that he would become a Follower which was nothing sinister like some cult but just that you would receive notice when something was put on the blog.

Markin had also encouraged him to write some pieces about what interested him, maybe start out about the old days in North Adamsville since all the guys mined that vein for sketches (that is what Peter liked to call most of the material on site since they were usually too short to be considered short stories but too long to be human interest snapshots). Sam said he would think about the matter, think about it seriously once he read the caption below which was on a sidebar of the blog homepage:

“This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of our interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hardworking, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn our attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back in the day.”

Sam could relate to that, had something to say about some of those songs. Josh Breslin laughed when he heard that Sam was interested in doing old time rock and roll sketches. He then added, “If we can only get him to move off his butt and come out and do some street politics with us we would be getting somewhere.” Peter just replied, “one step at a time.” Yeah, that’s the ticket. 

 

The Babies - Jasiri X