Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- Ain’t Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Street Making All That Noise- Doc’s Drugstore-An Encore

Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- Ain’t Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Street Making All That Noise- Doc’s Drugstore-An Encore

 

From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin

With A 2015 Introduction By Sam Lowell

If you did not know what happened to the late Peter Paul Markin who used to write for some of the alternative newspaper and magazine publications that proliferated in the wake of the 1960s circus-war/bloodbath/all world together festival/new age aborning cloud puff dream, won a few awards too and was short-listed for the Globe Prize this is what is what. What is what before the ebb tide kind of knocked the wind out of everybody’s sails, everybody who was what I called “seeking a newer world,” a line I stole from some English poet (Robert Kennedy, Jack’s brother, or his writer “cribbed” the line too for some pre-1968 vision book before he ran for President in 1968 so I am in good company.) I will tell you in a minute what expression “the Scribe,” a named coined by our leader, Frankie Riley, which is what we always called Markin around the corner we hung out in together in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in our hometown of North Adamsville, used to describe that change he had sensed coming in the early 1960s. Saw coming long before any of the rest of us did, or gave a rat’s ass about in our serious pressing of the moment, you know our existential angst moment although we did not call it that until later when the Scribe went off to college and tried to impress us with his new found facts, his two thousand new found facts about guys like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, worries about girls (all of the existential problems angst including about bedding them, or rather getting them in back seats of cars mainly), dough (ditto the girl existential thing to keep them interested in you and not run off with the next guy who had ten bucks to spend freely on them to your deuce, Jesus) and cars (double ditto since that whole “bedding” thing usually hinged on having a car, or having a corner boy with some non-family car to as we used to say, again courtesy of the Scribe via scat bluesman Howlin’ Wolf, “doing the do.”

 

All I know is that ebb tide that caught Markin kind of flat-footed, kind of made him gravitate back toward his baser instincts honed by every breathe he took as a kid down in the projects where he learned the facts of life, the facts of fellaheen life which is what one of our junior high school teachers called us, called it right too although we were the urban versions of the downtrodden shanty peasants but they were kindred no doubt, is still with us. So maybe being, having been a “prophet, ” being a guy who worried about that social stuff while we were hung up on girls,  dough and cars (him too in his more sober moments especially around one Rosemond Goode), wasn’t so good after all. Maybe the late Markin was that kind of Catholic “martyr saint” that we all had drilled into us in those nasty nun run Sunday catechism classes, maybe he really was some doomed “n----r” to use a phrase he grabbed from some Black Panther guys he used to run around with when he (and Josh Breslin) lived in Oakland and the “shit was hitting the fan” from every law enforcement agency that could put two bullets in some greasy chamber to mow down anybody even remotely associated with the brothers and the ten point program (who am I kidding anybody who favored armed self-defense for black men and women).

 

Here is a quick run-down about the fate of our boy corner boy bastard saint and about why stuff that he wrote forty or fifty years ago now is seeing the light of day. I won’t bore you with the beginnings, the projects stuff because frankly I too came out of the projects, not the same one as he did but just as hopeless down in Carver where I grew up before heading to North Adamsville and Josh who was as close as anybody to Markin toward the end was raised in the Olde Saco projects up in Maine and we are both still here to tell the tale. The real start as far as what happened to unravel the Scribe happened after he, Markin, got out of the Army in late 1970 when he did two things that are important here. First, he continued, “re-connected” to use the word he used, on that journey that he had started before he was inducted in the Army in 1968 in search of what he called the Great Blue-Pink American West Night (he put the search in capitals when he wrote about the experiences so I will do so here), the search really for the promise that the “fresh breeze” he was always carping about was going to bring. That breeze which was going to get him out from under his baser instincts developed (in self-defense against the punks that were always bothering him something I too knew about and against his mother who was truly a dinosaur tyrant unlike my mother who tended to roll with the punches and maybe that helped break my own fall down that Markin fate ladder) in his grinding poverty childhood, get out from under the constant preoccupation with satisfying his “wanting habits” which would eventually do him in.

 

Markin had made a foolish decision, foolish in retrospect although he when I and others asked about whether he would have done things differently if he had known what the hell-hole of Vietnam was all about was ambivalent about the matter, to drop out of college (Boston University) after his sophomore year in 1967 in order to pursue his big cloud puff dream, a dream which by that time had him carrying us along with him on the hitchhike road west in the summer of love, 1967, and beyond. Of course 1967, 1968, 1969 and other years as well were the “hot” years of the war in Vietnam and all Uncle Sam and his local draft boards wanted, including in North Adamsville, was warm bodies to kill commies, kill them for good. As he would say to us after he had been inducted and had served his tour in ‘Nam as he called it (he and the other military personnel who fought the war could use the short-hand expression but the term was off-bounds for civilians in shortened form)  and came back to the “real” world he did what he did, wished he had not done so, wished that he had not gone, and most of all wished that the American government which made nothing but animals out of him and his war buddies would come tumbling down for what it had done to its sons for no good reasons.

 

And so Markin continued his search, maybe a little wiser, continued as well to drag some of his old corner boys like me on that hitchhike road dream of his before the wheels fell off. I stayed with him longest I think before even I could see we had been defeated by the night-takers and I left the road to go to law school and “normalcy.” (The signposts: Malcolm X’s, Robert Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King’s assassinations, hell maybe JFK’s set the who thing on a bad spiral which kind of took the political winds out of any idea that there would not be blow-back for messing with the guys in power at the time, the real guys not their front-men, the politicians; the rising tide of “drop out, drug out, live fast and die young” which took a lot of the best of our generation off giving up without a fight; the endless death spiral of Vietnam; the plotted killings of Black Panthers and any other radical or revolutionary of any color or sex who “bothered” them; and, the election of one master criminal, Richard Milhous Nixon, to be President of the United States which was not only a cruel joke but put paid to the notion that that great unwashed mass of Americans were on our side.) Markin stuck it out longer until at some point in 1974, 1975 a while after I had lost touch with him when even he could see the dreams of the 1960s had turned to dust, turned to ashes in his mouth and he took a wrong turn, or maybe not a wrong turn the way the wheel of his life had been set up but a back to his baser instincts turn which had been held in check when we were in the high tide of 1960s possibilities. (Josh Breslin, another corner boy, although from Olde Saco, Maine who had met Markin out in San Francisco in the summer of love in 1967 and who had also left the road earlier just before me was in contact until pretty near the end, pretty close to the last time in early 1975 anybody heard from Markin this side of the border, this side of paradise as it turned out since he lived out in California where Markin was living at the time confirmed that Markin was in pretty ragged mental and physical condition by then).           

 

Markin had a lot invested emotionally and psychological in the success of the 1960s “fresh breeze coming across the land” as he called it early on. Maybe it was that ebb tide, maybe it was the damage that military service in hell-hole Vietnam did to his psyche, maybe it was a whole bunch of bad karma things from his awful early childhood that he held in check when there were still sunnier days ahead but by the mid-1970s he had snapped. Got involved in using and dealing cocaine just starting to be a big time profitable drug of choice among rich gringos (and junkies ready to steal anything, anytime. anywhere in order to keep the habit going). Somehow down in Mexico, Sonora, we don’t know all the details to this day a big deal Markin brokered (kilos from what we heard so big then before the cartels organized everything and before the demand got so great they were shipping freighters full of cold cousin cocaine for the hipsters and the tricksters and big for Markin who had worked his way up the drug trade food chain probably the way he worked his way into everything by some “learned” dissertation about how his input could increase revenue, something along those lines) went awry, his old time term for something that went horribly wrong, and he wound up face down in a dusty back road with two slugs to the head and now resides in the town’s potter’s field in an unmarked grave. But know this; the bastard is still moaned over, moaned to high heaven.

 

The second thing Markin did, after he decided that going back to school after the shell-shock of Vietnam was out of the question, was to begin to write for many alternative publications (and I think if Josh is correct a couple of what he, Markin, called “bourgeois” publications for the dough). Wrote two kinds of stories, no three, first about his corner boy days with us at Salducci’s (and also some coming of age stories from his younger days growing up in the Adamsville Housing Authority “projects” with his best friend, Billie Bradley before he met us in junior high school). Second about that search for the Great Blue-Pink American Night which won him some prizes since he had a fair-sized audience who were either committed to the same vision, or who timidly wished they could have had that commitment (like a couple of our corner boys who could not make the leap to “drugs, sex, rock and roll, and raising bloody hell on the streets fighting the ‘monster’ government” and did the normal get a job, get married, get kids, get a house which made the world go round then). And thirdly, an award-winning series of stories under the by-line Going To The Jungle for the East Bay Other (published out of the other side of the bay San Francisco though) about his fellow Vietnam veterans who could not deal with the “real” world coming back and found themselves forming up in the arroyos, along the rivers, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges of Southern California around Los Angeles. Guys who needed their stories told and needed a voice to give life to those stories. Markin was their conduit.

 

Every once in a while somebody, in this case Bart Webber, from the old corner boy crowd of our youthful times, will see or hear something that will bring him thoughts about our long lost comrade who kept us going in high school times with his dreams and chatter (although Frankie Riley was our leader since he was an organizer-type whereas Markin could hardly organize his shoes, if that). Now with the speed and convenient of the Internet we can e-mail each other and get together at some convenient bar to talk over old times. And almost inevitably at some point in the evening the name of the Scribe will come up. Recently we decided, based on Bart’s idea, that we would, if only for ourselves, publish a collection of whatever we could find of old-time photographs and whatever stories Markin had written that were still sitting around somewhere to commemorate our old friend. We have done so with much help from Bart’s son Jeff who now runs the printing shop that Bart, now retired, started back in the 1960s.

 

This story is from that first category, the back in the day North Adamsville corner boy story, although this one is painting with a broader brush. It had been found in draft form up in Josh Breslin’s attic in Olde Saco, Maine where he had lived before meeting Markin in the great summer of love night in 1967 and where he had later stored his stuff in his parents’ house and which he had subsequently inherited. We have decided whatever we had to publish would be published as is, either published story or in draft form. Otherwise, moaning over our brother or not, Markin is liable to come after us from that forlorn unmarked grave and give us hell for touching a single word of the eight billion facts in his fallen head.     

Here is what he had to say:                        

Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- Ain’t Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Street Making All That Noise- Doc’s Drugstore

From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin:

It wasn’t all be-bop night, rock ‘n’ roll sock hop, midnight drifter, midnight sifter, low-rider, hard-boiled corner boy 1950s life in old down and out workingclass dregs North Adamsville. Not at all. But a lot of it was, a lot that working -class kid clamoring to find a place in the sun ethos bespoke of the early phases of American deindustrialization, although we would not have called that then, that came later, if we had been aware of it even, with the demise of the local mainstay ship- building and its associated industries (work, father work, father paycheck work, producing gears, machine tools, and tubes, endless tubes fitted out in some unexplained riggings), great world war ship a day warship shipbuilding and then later gigantic oil tankers that sail the known oceans, sailed with Popeye the skipper out in the Frisco and China and that came in low-riding, like some easy rider, and left sailing on top of the world, and then, then nothing, maybe a sailboat, or a row boat for all I know, I just don’t know more, or why so consult The Wall Street Journal archives to find out why the ships got built elsewhere when labor costs got too much for the shipping magnates and they took their flags of convenient and their dry-docks elsewhere, okay because I got corner boy remembrances on my mind not some damn coupon clipping.

All I know, or at least all that I know from what I heard my father, and other fathers say, was that that industry was the life’s blood of getting ahead, ahead in the 1950s life in that beat down, beat up, beat thirteen ways to Sunday town (yah, I know it is only six but it sure did seem like thirteen on some hard father unemployed days). And so that demise produced low-riders of  different sort, hard-boiled corner boys who got by anyway they could starting early with the “clip” and then working their way to every drifter, grafter, midnight sifter action they could think of short of jail and if it came to jail, well it came to jail and that was part of the “life” too, the overhead for that awful “wanting habits” thing that gnawed deep inside every wayward corner boy, the easy life of pinball wizardry (hanging around mom and pop variety stores, hanging heels against walls learning of the first mystified sexual feelings from watching the older guys pseudo-“pump” old heavy breasted come hither Madame LaRue urging them on to get enough points to win, well, win a free game was the ploy but we knew that really meant or the older boys did and half-assed passed it on to the younger boys), dime store lurid magazines (complete with deep-cleavage ravished blonde-headed women who got into trouble by being trouble for some young hormone-mad guys or else were hard party girls who gave no quarter and asked for none but a lot of decoding that difference came later, later when they, the party girls, would take you around the world, “do the do” and then grab your dough ah but what a ride when some Sally knew how to blow that whistle, knew how to do things that you would only find names for later when the Kama Sutra became your bible), slow-drinking Cokes (or Pepsis, but make mine local Robb’s Root Beer), draped around heavy mascara-eyed, sweater form-filled girls, cashmere the sweater material all sweet innocent curves-enhancing, and the occasional armed robbery to break up the day, and bring in some much needed dough which held a higher place that it might have, and almost certainly would in some new town West, some Flagstaff, Ogden, Irvine, Modesto town.

But what was a guy to do if to get out of the house, get away from Ma’s nagging (and it was almost always Ma, every Ma house in those days Pa needing his rest or out early looking for short pay work to tide over until rent day or to earn enough to short up the rent and pay the oil bill or some damn bill entire stories could be etched from the plain white envelope on pay day dodge to try to keep from the “county farm” which threatened if the eviction notice came to the door), siblings heckling (Jesus never enough room to breathe and to face those hand-me-down out of fashion big brothers clothes), and just breathe in some fresh air, some fresh be-bop rock corner boy air, if at all possible. See, this was well before mall rat-dom came into fashion, and hanging around food courts and zipping in and out of random stores became a teen urban folk legend pastime, since the nearest mall was way too far away to drag yourself to, and it also meant traveling through other corner boy, other maybe not friendly corner boy lands.

So if you didn’t want to tie yourself down to some heavy felony on some soft misty, foggy better, night by hanging around tough corner boy, Red Hickey-ruled Harry’s Variety as he stealthily rampaged through the neighborhood properties (and you as look-out if too young to pull the caper yourself), or your tastes did not run to trying to cadge some pinball games from those same toughs, or you were too young, too innocent, too poor, too car-less or too ragamuffiny (I’ll put in the sic for you on that last one) for those form-filled, Capri-panted girls with their haunting black mascara eyes then you had to hang somewhere else, and Doc’s, yah, Doc’s Drugstore was where you hung out in the more innocent section of that be-bop 1950s night.

Wait a minute I just realized that I had better explain, and do it fast before you get the wrong idea, I am not talking about some CVS, Rite-Aid, or Osco chain-linked, no soliciting, no trespassing, no loitering, police take notice, run in and run out with your fistful of drugs, legal drugs, places. Or run in for some notions or sundries, whatever they are. No way, no way in hell would you want to hang out where old-timers like your mothers and fathers and grandparents went to help them get well.

No this was Doc’s, Doc-owned (yah, Doc, Doc Adams, I think, I think somebody told me once that he was part of some branch of that Adams crowd, the presidential Adams crowd, I think the son, John Quincy, or maybe Charles, the grandson, the one who used to be an ambassador to Great Britain keeping them out of our Civil War with a firm hand  when that was important, yeah, I think that it was from that line of the family tree, the family that used to be big wheels in the town, and the country, America too I think), Doc-operated, and Doc-ruled. Doc of the friendly white jacket smile behind his counter distributing his kindly drugs to the afflicted, to those who got the bad word about some malady which laid them up or would break their hearts (although like I said we could have cared less about that except maybe aspirin or cough syrup of we had colds or the flu).

And Doc, pay attention here all those who have been CVS-sanitized just stopping by long enough to get what you need, maybe a Coke or candy bar or dropping off film to immortalize your “selfie” and then getting the hell out under penalty of some surly looking manager with no connection to your health or well-being except to stock the shelves with useless geegads, let, unless it got too crazy, kids, ordinary kids, not hard-boiled white tee-shirted corner boys but plaid-shirted, chino pant-wearing (no I am not going to go on and on about the cuffs, no cuffs controversy that animated many a youthful night, okay, so keep reading), maybe loafers (no, no inserted pennies, please, and no, no, no, Thom McAn’s, no controversy on those points ), a windbreaker against some ocean-blown windy night on such nights, put their mark on the side walls, the side brick walls of his establishment. And guys like Bri to be more fully mentioned in a moment kept things in check (or later from what I gathered from my younger brother Kenny who was one of his corner boys, Finn Riley, Frankie’s younger brother kept things in check for Doc with a swish of his hand which meant that the miscreant was banished from the bricks and no questions asked since Finn while not a tough guy like Red or a smoothie like Frankie had a look of menace that nobody wanted to mess with). And let the teen denizens of the Doc night, not too late night either, he closed by eleven, no later although one could see almost every night some hard up cop in full uniform with waiting partner in the motor-running cop car getting his pint of liquor, probably whiskey, Johnny Walker Red, if I went by my father’s choice, and probably, hah, on the cuff since Doc and every other merchant in town did not want his place ransacked by some heathen midnight shifters and on the cuff since almost every cop was an Irishman in that section of town, or the son of an Irishman, or a son of bitch those coppers were all the same once they began to do Mister’s business of harassing us kids let, as well, every self-respecting corner boy, tee-shirted or plaid, his mark by standing, one loafer-shod foot on the ground, and the other knee-bent against the brick wall holding Doc’s place together. True-corner boy-dom. Classic pose, classic memory pose.

And see, Doc, kindly, maybe slightly mad Doc, and now that I think about it slightly girl-crazy himself maybe, let girls, even girls hang against the wall. (In those days nobody thought about older guys, knew about older guys, real old guys taking advantage of younger girls with needs, maybe liquor, maybe some contraceptive if it came to that although in our neighborhood most girls who could be coaxed into sex used “Irish contraceptive,” gave oral sex to keep their Sunday rosary and novena books intact but at least one girl, now a woman at a class reunion told Jimmy Jenkins that Doc, for doing her some drug favor asked for something in return and she obliged but that still needs to be verified since she was known as the “town pump”). Old Harry’s Variety Red Hickey would have shot one of his girls in the foot if they ever tried that stunt. Girls were to be draped, preferably draped around Red not around Harry’s wall, brick or not.

Now, after what I just described you know that you’re into a new age night because no way Harry, and definitely not Red (real name Daniel, but don’t ever call him that though, not if you want to finish your sweet short life in one piece) Hickey, king hell king of the low-rider night that I told you about before, just a couple minutes ago, would let some blond, real or imagined, Capri-panted, cashmere sweater-wearing (tight, very tight cashmere sweater-wearing, if you didn’t know), boffed, bimbo (ouch, but that is what we called them, so be it) even stand around his corner. Dames (better, right) were for his hot-rod Chevy, hard-driving, low-riding sitting on the seat next to, and other stuff. But plaid-shirted guys (loafer-shod, no pennies and un-cuffed black chinos, got it) liked, do you hear me Red and Harry, liked having girls hanging with them to while away the be-bop hard night corner boy lands.

Before you even ask, Doc’s had not pinball machines and no pinball wizards (as far as I remember, although a couple of guys and a girl were crackerjack bowlers on the school’s teams but not together and I am still befuddled by the hard fact and you can look at the Magnet, the class yearbook if you don’t believe me, that in the age when black people were being hounded, killed, gassed and chain-whipped down in redneck police state south some state, probably goddam Mississippi or Alabama that nice boys and girls with good manners and an eye for the strike and spare were “segregated” did not do bowls, if that is how you say it together, not even in the same alleys at the same time). But see, Doc’s had the things that mattered, mattered for plaid-shirted guys with a little dough in their pockets, and lust, chaste lust maybe, in their hearts (their allowances, or maybe money made caddying for the Mayfair swells like I did until I learned about the virtues of the “clip” and the midnight creep orchestrated by that Frankie Riley whose brother I just gave you the skinny on or girls baby-sitting no guys allowed to keep company rule number one but I also heard that “town pump” girl with the dirty old man Doc story kept a few guys in company while minding the kiddies fast asleep upstairs but again that is urban legend stuff that needs to be verified by more than Jimmy Jenkins who was hot-to-trot for her whatever her lack of Sunday novena book and rosary virtues. In any case no snickering please for any hard-boiled readers, or poor ones). Doc’s had a soda fountain, one, and, two, a juke box. Where the heck do you think we heard a zillion times all those songs from back then that I keep telling you about? How we could con some lonely-heart girl into playing what we wanted her to play on the jukebox. How we got to hear Elvis, Buddy, Jerry Lee, Chuck, Chubby for nada when the deal went down. Come on now, smarten up.

And, of course if you have corner boys, even nice corner boys, you have to have a king hell king corner boy. Red, Red Hickey understood that instinctively, and acted on it, whip chain in hand. Other boys in other corners acted on it in that same spirit, although not that crudely. And corner boy king, Doc’s Drugstore corner boy king, Brian Pennington, plaid-shirted king of the soft-core corner boy night acted on that same Red premise. How Brian (“Bri” to most of us) came to be king corner boy is a good story, a good story about how a nowhere guy used a little influence to get ahead in this wicked old world (“nowhere” my characterization nowhere guy not compared to Frankie Riley who truly had a larcenous heart and who listened to my schemes once in a while, and better acted on them when we needed dough. Frankie was the ace “on-site” manager I will give him that much I would have had us in jail or reform school if I had led the capers but my plans were almost perfect except that one time we got nailed when I ‘forgot” to figure a house vacant for the summer would have a “house-sitter” and almost got probation for our efforts). Red did it by knocking heads around and was the last man standing, accepting his “crown” from his beaten, bashed and bloodied defeated cronies. Brian took a very different route.

Now I don’t know every detail of his conquest because I only touched the edges of his realm, and of his crowd, as I was moving out of the old neighborhood thralldom on to other things, heading uptown to Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, and Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, corner boy scribe things. Apparently Doc had a granddaughter, a nice but just then wild granddaughter whom Doc was very fond of as grandfathers will be. And of course he was concerned about the wildness, especially as she was coming of age, and would have been nothing but catnip (and bait) for Red and his corner boys if Doc didn’t step in and bring Brian into the mix. Now, no question, Brian was a sharp dresser of the faux-collegiate type that was just starting to come into its own in that 1960s first minute. This time of the plaid shirts was a wave that spread, and spread quickly, among those kids from working- class families that were still pushing forward on the American dream, and maybe encouraging their kids to take college courses at North Adamsville High, and maybe wind up in that burgeoning college scene that everybody kept talking about as the way out of dead ass working class existence.

Brian was no scholar, christ he was no scholar, although he wasn’t a dunce either. At least he had enough sense to see which way things were going, for public consumption anyway, and put on this serious schoolboy look. That look sold Doc, who had been having conversations with Brian every time he came into the drugstore with books in one arm, and a girl on the other. I’ll give you the real low-down sometime about how book-worthy, book-worshipping Brian really was. Let me just relate to you this tidbit for now. One day, one school vacation day, Brian purposefully knocked the books out of my hands that I had borrowed when I was coming out of the Thomas Crane Public Library branch over on Atlantic Avenue (before it moved to Norfolk Downs) and yelled all snarly at me, “bookworm.” Like I didn’t know that already.

But enough about that because this is about Brian's rise, not mine. Somehow Brian and Lucy, Doc’s granddaughter came together, and without going into all the details that like I said I don’t really know anyway, they hit it off. And see, this is where Brian’s luck really held out, from that point on not only did Brian get to hang his loafer-ed shoe on Doc’s brick wall but he was officially, no questions asked, the king of that corner boy night. That’s how I heard the story and that seems about right because nobody ever challenged Bri on it, not that I heard.

Here is the real Doc clincher though, the thing, that before our moving on to uptown pizza parlors made him a legend, and maybe one of the few sympathetic adult figures in that tough teen angst night.  Now like I mentioned before, Doc’s was a magnet for his juke box-filled soda fountain and that drew a big crowd at times, especially after school when any red-blooded kid, boy or girl, needed to unwind from the pressure-cooker of high school, especially we freshmen who not only had to put up with the carping teachers, but any upper classman who decided, he or she, wanted to prank a frosh. That’s my big connection with Doc’s, that after school minute freshman year, but, and here I am getting my recollections second-hand, Doc’s was also a coming-of-age place for more than music, soft ice cream, and milk shakes. This is also the place where a whole generation of neighborhood boys, and through them, the girls as well had their first taste of alcohol.

How you say? Well, Brian, remember Brian, now no longer with Lucy (she was sent off to some private finishing school, Miss Woodward’s or something, and drifted from the scene) but was still Doc’s boy, Doc’s savior boy, and somehow conned old Doc into giving him his first bottle of booze. Not straight up, after all Brian was underage but Bri said it was, wink, wink, for his grandmother. Now let me explain, in those days in the old neighborhood, and maybe all over, a druggist could, as medicine, sell small bottles of hard liquor out of his shop legally. The standard for getting the prescription wasn’t too high apparently, and it was a neighborhood drugstore and so you could (and this I know from personal experience) tell Doc it was for dear old grandma, and there you have it. Known grandma tee-totalers and their grandkids would be out of the loop on this one but every self-respecting grandma had a “script” with Doc.

Now Doc knew, had to know, about this con, no question, because he always had a chuckle on him when this came up. And he had his own Doc standards- no one under sixteen (and he was sharp on that) and no girls. So many a night the corner boys around Doc’s were probably more liquored up that Red and his boys ever were. And so passed a hard freshman year. Nice, right?

 




 

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.

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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-Îles, 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.