A View From The Left-Israel Out of East Jerusalem, West Bank!-Defend the Palestinians!

Workers Vanguard No. 1077	30 October 2015

Israel Out of East Jerusalem, West Bank!-Defend the Palestinians!

 

Over the past several weeks, Israel’s murderous military apparatus and its armed settler auxiliaries have killed at least 60 Palestinians—many of them teenagers—and wounded some 2,000. The Zionist overlords have unleashed an intensified crackdown in the Occupied Territories—imposing more checkpoints, placing Palestinian neighborhoods on lockdown, dispatching thousands more soldiers and police and inciting lynch mobs in the streets. Such routine tactics are aimed at terrorizing and demoralizing the already besieged Palestinian population. Expressing the sense of utter isolation and imprisonment among the 4.8 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, one 25-year-old student from Jenin remarked, “We must get out of this situation—even if it costs us everything.”

The latest onslaught was prepared when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moved to restrict Palestinian access to East Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque, the third-holiest site in the Muslim world and a religious and cultural gathering space for Palestinians in the city. Seizing on a handful of atomized attacks by Palestinian assailants armed with knives and screwdrivers, the Israeli government sealed off the 300,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem with concrete walls, demolished homes and revoked residency status for the families of alleged Palestinian attackers—essentially, as one commentator for the 972mag.com newsletter noted, “carving up and crushing the Palestinian expanse without any consideration for everyday life or for a possible future compromise.”

This is Netanyahu’s response to those who retain any remnant of hope that even the most constricted and peripheral sliver of East Jerusalem will ever be the capital of an “independent” Palestine. Since its conquest and annexation in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Jewish settlers have flooded into East Jerusalem and taken over more and more of the city from its original Palestinian residents, who are not even nominal citizens of Israel. This history of evictions has been repeatedly punctuated by acts of Zionist state and ultrarightist Jewish terror, aimed particularly at Al Aqsa (which is part of the complex that Israelis call the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism). Within months of first becoming prime minister in 1996, Netanyahu presided at the opening of a tunnel under the mosque, inciting a bloodbath in which 62 Palestinians were slaughtered. Four years later, the supposedly more liberal regime of Ehud Barak provided an armed escort for notorious racist butcher Ariel Sharon as he staged a provocative visit to the Al Aqsa compound, which helped spark the second Palestinian intifada (uprising). Now many are speculating about a “third intifada.”

The first intifada, launched in late 1987, was a deepgoing and popular organized rising by Palestinian youth who were fed up with decades of vacuous United Nations resolutions, cynical promises of Arab “solidarity” and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership’s passivity in the face of Zionist expansion. Yet despite several years of valorous and self-sacrificing struggle, the oppressed Palestinian masses ended up with only the miserable Oslo “peace” accords of 1993. Oslo gave birth to the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority, a national “leadership” tasked with policing its own people on behalf of the Israeli occupiers, thus acting as subcontractors for the Zionist state.

In the intervening years, the ghetto walls have grown insurmountable and the Palestinian people have been driven ever deeper into misery and national humiliation. Well over half of the West Bank has been confiscated from Palestinians or closed off to them, and 80 percent of the population of Gaza is dependent on humanitarian aid for its survival. Under the pretext of curbing Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist rulers of Gaza who accrued authority as a result of the PLO’s betrayals, Israel has repeatedly launched devastating attacks on the tiny Gaza Strip. Last year, nearly 2,200 largely defenseless Palestinians were slaughtered and 10,000 wounded. Gaza today is little more than a large detention camp with around 100,000 homeless residents, demolished buildings and wrecked infrastructure, all surrounded by an electrified fence.

The recent suicidal “lone wolf” stabbings are a reflection of the intense despair and frustration felt by the current generation of Palestinians. Some of the recent attacks by Palestinians have targeted Zionist agents of the occupying force: soldiers, police and their settler auxiliaries. But the indiscriminate killings of Israeli civilians are, from the standpoint of the proletariat, criminal acts of terror. Moreover, the stabbing attacks serve only to provide a further pretext for murderous Zionist repression. Such attacks reinforce the bunker state mentality that binds Israeli Jewish working people to their own exploiters and thus set back the cause of Palestinian emancipation.

The only salvation for the Palestinian people lies in the Marxist road of proletarian internationalism: the fight for workers revolutions and a socialist federation of the Near East in which Palestinian Arabs, Israeli Jews and all the other peoples of the region will find national and social justice. So long as the struggle remains on nationalist or religious terrain, the Palestinians can only lose out to the more technologically advanced Zionist state, which is heavily armed (including with hundreds of nuclear weapons) and bolstered by billions in U.S. military aid. For its part, U.S. imperialism just put a stamp of approval on the current Zionist offensive, pledging a $1 billion hike atop its already $3.1 billion in annual military aid. It is crucial for working people and the oppressed around the world to take a stand in defense of the Palestinian people. Down with U.S. aid to Israel! All Israeli troops and settlers out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem!

The Zionist State Must Be Shattered from Within

Israeli society has moved sharply to the right in the past several decades. Netanyahu won his fourth term in office last March through overt appeals to anti-Arab chauvinism, vowing to continue the occupation and screaming that Palestinian citizens of Israel would be going “in droves to the polls.” Netanyahu accused leaders of the opposition Joint List—a coalition of Arab parties that won the third-largest number of seats in the Knesset (parliament)—of “incitement,” insinuating that they, and indeed all Israeli Palestinians, constitute a traitorous “fifth column.” In the last few weeks, many of these Palestinians who have (nominal) Israeli citizenship have been among the more than 1,000 Palestinians arrested, either for joining protests or even planning to do so. Netanyahu reached a new level of racist demagogy when he recently asserted that it was a Palestinian, the pro-German Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and not Hitler, who instigated the genocide of European Jewry in World War II. This grotesque absurdity, an affront to all the victims of the Nazi murder machine, underlines the utter cynicism with which the Zionist rulers have wielded the Holocaust to amnesty their manifold crimes against the Palestinian people.

The reactionary mindset that was once on the periphery of Israeli society is now the common coin of many Zionist politicians. Advocates of “transfer”—the forcible expulsion of all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, and even from within Israel itself—have moved from fringe to familiar. In March, Israel’s then foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, openly demanded the beheading of supposedly disloyal Israeli Palestinians.

Today, the mayor of Jerusalem further emboldens the fascistic and ultra-Orthodox settlers to carry out pogroms and lynchings by urging Israeli Jews to arm themselves. On October 18, more than 200 settlers attacked two Palestinian villages near the West Bank town of Hebron, setting houses ablaze with firebombs. Days later, after four Palestinians were shot by Israeli soldiers, settlers provocatively marched through Palestinian areas of Hebron under Israeli military protection.

Amid a climate of racist hysteria, as the streets resound with cries of “Death to Arabs!” many fear being lynched by Zionist mobs. Mistaken for Arabs, some Israeli Jews have been attacked or shot dead by Zionist cops or fanatics. The daily terror to which black African immigrants in Israel are subjected was further underscored with the killing of Habtom Zarhum, a 29-year-old Eritrean asylum-seeker. Zarhum, whose only crime was that he was a black man in the vicinity of an attack at the Beersheba Central Bus Station, was shot by a security guard and then kicked and beaten by an Israeli mob as he lay dying in a pool of blood. An organizer of Zarhum’s memorial service lamented, “Israelis have a license for racism.”

The chauvinism rife throughout Israeli Jewish society was inherent in the Zionist project of creating a “Jewish homeland” in Arab Palestine. As the founding Zionists well knew, an exclusivist Jewish state could only be carved out through the dispossession and/or expulsion of the Palestinian people. And that is how the Israeli state was established: 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their land in 1948. The small armed camps set up by handfuls of Zionist and Orthodox diehards in the Occupied Territories seized in 1967 have since mushroomed into a population of some 650,000 Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The settler zealots serve the expansionist drive for a “Greater Israel” that, in turn, fuels an ever more virulent and widespread bigotry in the Israeli population.

The dismemberment and ghettoization of much of the Palestinian West Bank has led some Arab nationalists and liberal Zionists to abandon their former support for a “two-state solution.” Liberal Israeli journalist Gideon Levy recently remarked in a Haaretz column (17 October): “One state already exists here, and has done so for 48 years.” He went on to say that those “advocating the one-state solution are not thinking of this state—quite the opposite. They wish to undermine it and establish a different, more just and egalitarian regime. When that is established, the hatred and despair will most likely be forgotten.”

The truth of the matter is that within the framework of capitalism, there can be no just or egalitarian resolution for the Palestinian people. The Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab populations are interpenetrated, laying claim to the same land; under capitalism one state means one nation is dominant, i.e., the exercise of the right of national self-determination by one people necessarily comes at the expense of the other. Only in a socialist federation of the Near East can conflicting claims over land and resources be equitably resolved, and all discrimination on the basis of language, religion and nationality be eliminated. Viewed narrowly through the prism of that tiny plot of land called Israel/Palestine, this prospect appears impossible. The road to the liberation of the Palestinian masses lies in an internationalist class perspective that looks to the proletarian overthrow of bourgeois rule in Israel and also in Arab countries throughout the region (which are also home to several million Palestinians).

The stranglehold of Zionist chauvinism on the Israeli Jewish working class may today seem unbreakable. But Israel (like its Arab neighbors) is no exception to the Marxist understanding that capitalism creates its own gravedigger, the proletariat. Israel is a class-divided society, marked by huge income disparities and many political, national and ethnic fissures. In recent years, there have been protests by Jews against government austerity amid rising social discontent. The Israeli proletariat must be won to defend the Palestinian people against the Zionist ruling class, its own class enemy whose wealth is derived from the exploitation of the working class.

There is broad sympathy for the Palestinians among the well over one hundred million Arabs and many millions more Turks, Kurds, Iranians and others in the region, including significant concentrations of the industrial proletariat in Egypt, Iran and Turkey. These toilers are exploited and oppressed by their “own” ruling classes, who enforce imperialist domination. These bourgeois rulers channel justified anger against the subjugation of the Palestinians into anti-Jewish bigotry while themselves trampling on Palestinian refugees. In the course of intense class struggle and through the intervention of revolutionary Marxist parties, the workers of the Near East must be broken from all-sided bigotry and come to understand that they share a common historic interest in fighting to sweep away all the capitalist ruling classes of the region. The International Communist League, of which the Spartacist League is the U.S. section, fights to build Leninist vanguard parties to lead the struggle for a socialist federation of the Near East.

Down With U.S. Imperialism!

U.S. capitalist politicians, continuing their cynical talk about a “peace” deal, call for “calm” on both sides. In a piece in the New Yorker (12 October), Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, a prominent defender of Palestinian rights, aptly comments that Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’s recent acknowledgment of the failure of the Oslo process “was long overdue.” The 1993 Oslo accords were part of an effort by U.S. imperialism to impose a “Pax Americana” on the Near East in the wake of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, which had provided crucial diplomatic support and aid to the PLO and various Arab nationalist regimes. The accords were never intended to lead to a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories, as their leftist and nationalist promoters claimed. At the time, in an article headlined “Israel-PLO Deal for Palestinian Ghetto,” we pointed out that Oslo “does not offer even the most deformed expression of self-determination” and “would place the PLO’s seal on the national oppression of the long-suffering Palestinian Arab masses” (WV No. 583, 10 September 1993). We warned that the PLO’s political bankruptcy would allow anti-woman and anti-Jewish Islamic reactionaries such as Hamas to gain influence among the historically cosmopolitan Palestinian masses.

Khalidi concludes his piece by advising America’s imperialist rulers to “stop hiding behind the fictions of Oslo” and “act vigorously to end a system of military occupation and colonization that would crumble without their support.” Khalidi’s view is shared by many in the Palestinian solidarity milieu in the U.S., especially those around the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Their appeals, directed in the first instance at university administrations and other institutions of corporate America, are aimed at getting U.S. imperialism to pressure its Zionist junior partners to ameliorate the plight of the Palestinians. This is a deadly illusion. The U.S. imperialists, who are responsible for well over a century of mass murder and torture on a global scale, including the recent bloody wars and occupations in the Near East, are foursquare behind Israel as it commits atrocities against the Palestinians.

As Netanyahu’s freakout over the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran demonstrated, Israeli and American interests in the Near East do not always coincide. But the Zionist rulers know they can rely on bipartisan support from Washington. Those activists who hope against hope that the Democrats will some day do right by the Palestinians are oblivious to reality: historically, the Democrats have been even more fervent and bellicose than the Republicans in their support for Israel. After Obama’s Iran deal, Hillary Clinton assured wealthy Jewish donors that she would be a better friend to Israel than Obama has been. And while Bernie Sanders, touted as some kind of “socialist” by much of the fake left, recently intoned that the U.S. should play a more “even-handed” role in dealing with the Palestinians, he supported Israel’s blitzkrieg in Gaza last year and vows to continue military aid to the Zionist state. This is what pro-Palestinian activists can expect from the fraternal (i.e., not identical) twin parties of U.S. imperialism. No less misguided are the prevalent illusions in the United Nations, which is an instrument of the imperialist robber barons and butchers. Among its crimes, the UN presided over the Zionist partition in 1948 and set up the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon.

After decades of betrayals by their leadership and interminable imperialist-brokered sham “peace talks,” today the Palestinian people are more isolated than ever. We seek to convince youth and workers who side with the Palestinians that a just, egalitarian world can be realized only through the overturn of the global capitalist order. This goal requires painstaking effort to build Marxist parties—forged in uncompromising struggle against all the political agents of capitalism and against every manifestation of oppression based on race, nation, religion or sex—and to win to such parties the advanced layers of the working class and the oppressed, not least in the American bastion of imperialist reaction. This is the task to which the International Communist League is dedicated. There is no other way. Down with Zionist terror! Down with U.S. imperialism! Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution!

A View From The Left-LTF Statement on the Criminal Attacks in Paris

17 November 2015   LTF Statement on the Criminal Attacks in Paris   The following is a translation of a statement issued by our comrades of the Ligue Trotskyste de France on November 14.   We strongly condemn the criminal killing of some 120 people last night. Everything indicates that Islamic fundamentalists carried out the attacks in support of the Islamic State and particularly in response to French airstrikes, which have been extended in recent weeks to Syria. More than ever we demand the immediate withdrawal of French and U.S. troops from the entire Near East in particular, as well as from Mali and elsewhere in the world.   The perpetrators of these acts, in indiscriminately targeting just anyone, fundamentally share the same mentality as the imperialists in identifying the working masses with their capitalist exploiters and oppressors. Yet, regardless of the barbarism of the terrorists who coldbloodedly murdered dozens of innocent civilians in the streets of Paris and in a concert hall, the fact remains that the biggest terrorists in the world are the imperialists themselves, including the French imperialists.   It is their unspeakable crimes in the Near East that have provoked—and continue daily to heighten—the bloody chaos in Syria and Iraq, and which push youth into the arms of the Islamic reactionaries. Thus, any blow against the imperialist armies and their proxies in the Near East, even by such repugnant forces as the Islamic State, would serve the interests of the international working class. Marxists do not give the slightest political support to these reactionaries, whose horrible crimes we condemn, including those of last night.   That French youth raised in this country—over a thousand of whom have already gone to Syria to wage jihad—succumb to such a backward ideology indicates above all the level of desperation of a whole layer of young people from working-class families, many of them originally from the former French colonies in Africa. This is a reactionary consequence of chronic unemployment, as well as racist discrimination at school, at work, in the allocation of housing and across all aspects of life—a consequence of the racist demonization of Muslims. It is also the result of the endless betrayals by the reformist leaderships of the working class who have for so long been an obstacle to a revolutionary perspective.   We protest in advance the use of these crimes by [President François] Hollande's capitalist government to justify increasingly repressive measures against Muslims and dark-skinned people as well as to strengthen sweeping surveillance measures against the entire population. These police-state measures, as we have long insisted, are ultimately aimed at the working class, the only class with the historic interest and social power to lead all the oppressed in a struggle to overthrow the capitalist system that each day descends further into barbarism. We say: Down with the state of emergency! Down with Vigipirate and Sentinelle! French troops out of the Near East and Africa!

No Dejemos Que Usen Paris Como Excusa!

 

No Dejemos Que Usen Paris Como Excusa!

 

 

 

A View From The Left -Don't Let Them Use Paris As A Pretext For War!

 

A View From The Left -Don't Let Them Use Paris As A Pretext For War!

 

No U.S. Troops To Syria-No War

Black Lives Matter-Justice For Tamir Rice-In Boston Sunday November 22nd

The Life Of The Dharma-Kerouac-A Biography By Ann Charters

The Life Of The Dharma-Kerouac-A Biography By Ann Charters

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Kerouac: A Biography, Ann Charters, Straight Arrow Books, 1973

 

It is probably hard for today’s youthful generation (the so-called millennials) to grasp how important the jail break-out of the 1960s, of breaking free from old time Cold War red scare golden age of American working class prosperity dreams, for those who made the leap, of creating our own sense of space was to my generation, my generation of ’68 (so-called, so-called by me because of the tumultuous and decisive events of that years in America, Vietnam and Europe if not elsewhere and also because that year marked something of a high water mark for the times and things slowly ebbed from there).

That “generation of ’68” designation further delineated by the  hard fact that that seminal year of 1968, a year when the Tet offensive by the Viet Cong and their allies put in shambles the lie that we (meaning the United States government) were winning that vicious bloodstained honor-less war, to the results in New Hampshire which caused Lyndon Baines Johnson, the blood-stained sitting President to run for cover down in Texas somewhere after being beaten like a gong by a quirky Irish poet-king  from the Midwest named Gene McCarthy and a band of wayward troubadours from all over, mainly the seething college campuses, to the death of the post-racial society dream as advertised by the slain Doctor Martin Luther King, to the barricade days in Paris where for once and all the limits of what wayward students could do without substantial allies rom among  the work-a-day world  in bringing down a reactionary De Gaulle  government, to the death of the search for a “newer world” as advertised by the slain Robert F. Kennedy, to the deadly war-circus of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago which put paid to any notion that any newer world would come without the spilling of rivers of blood, to the election of Richard Milhous Nixon which meant that we had seen the high side go under, that the promise of the flamboyant 1960s was veering toward an ebb tide.

But we did not “invent” the era whole, especially in the cultural, personal ethos part (that searching for the newer world part I keep harking back to), the part about skipping for a while anyway the nine to five work routine, the white house and picket fence family routine, the hold your breath nose to the grindstone routine and discovering the lure of the road and of discovering ourselves, of our capacity to wonder (a not inconsequential loss in the modern age despite our triumphs over a snarling Nature which is only now coming to haunt us). No question that elements of the generation before us, the sullen West Coast hot-rodders (you know the guys, mostly displaced Okies and Arkies with the stained tee shirts from working over a cranky gear ratio and refitting something or other all with splattered with oils,greases, and other lubricants), the perfect wave surfers (blonde to make yellow weep and pruned after a day’s wave-gliding and their teeny bikini blonde to really weep for girlfriends waiting on shore in those days just looking beautiful until surfer boy comes a bonking), the teen-alienated midnight “chicken run” rebel James Dean and wild one mad hatter Johnny Badass Marlon Brando and above all the “beats” (beat down, beat around, beat six ways to Sunday, blessed beat) helped push the can down the road, especially the “beats” who wrote to the high heavens about what they did from sex to dope to the hitchhike highway and back again, how they did it (mostly with moxie, verve and a devil-may-care attitude, and what the hell it was they were running from (Moloch, the slumming streets, Moloch’s son, the blessed cry of the hard-boiled negro streets, Patti Page the daughter of Moloch).

Now the truth of the matter is that most generation of ‘68ers only caught the tail-end of the “beat” scene, the end where mainstream culture and commerce made it into just another “bummer” like they have done with any movement that has threatened to get out of hand (going back to Walt Whitman’s time the, the pre-World War I Village bohemian life, the post-war Jazz Age and such). So most of us who were affected by the be-bop sound and feel of the “beats” got what we knew from reading about them. And above all, above even Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem Howl which was a clarion call for rebellion, was Jack Kerouac’s On The Road which thrilled even those of our kindred who did not go out in the search the great blue-pink American West night (or went out for a few minutes before scampering back to the grind, that white picket fence house and all the rest).              

Here the odd thing, as the biography under review, Kerouac: A Biography, the first insightful one written shortly after his death in 1969, by Ann Charters who knew Kerouac pretty well and acted as a “recorder” of his life as well as literary associate, Kerouac except for that short burst in the late 1940s was almost the antithesis of what we of the generation of ’68 were striving to accomplish. He was living off a left behind reputation which as he himself noted was due to the fact that there was a ten plus year gap between the action of the book and the publication in 1957. He was almost a middle-aged man by then and no longer fit for hitchhike road which we increasingly closed to him.

As is fairly well known, or was by those who lived through the 1960s, he would eventually disown his “step-children.” Be that as it may his role, earned or not, wanted or not, as media-anointed “king of the beats” is worthy of investigation along with his obvious literary merits as a member in good standing of the American literary pantheon (many book forming a saga of his life but even if he only wrote On The Road like if Scott Fitzgerald had only written The Great Gatsby or Hemingway The Sun Also Rises he would stand worthy of inclusion in the pantheon.           

On the face of it a poor working-class kid from the textile mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, from a staunch Roman Catholic French-Canadian heritage of those who came south for Quebec in the North to “see if the streets of America really were paved with gold” would seem an unlikely person to be involved in a movement that in many ways was the opposite of what his generation, the parents of the generation of ’68 to put the matter in perspective, born in the 1920s, coming of age in the Great Depression and slogging through World War II was searching for in the post-World War II “golden age of America.”

Add to those factors his being a “jock,” a star football player and trackman, a corner boy (at least that is the feel from a read of Maggie Cassidy), and a guy who liked to goof off and that only adds fuel to the confusion about who and what Jack Kerouac was about. But here is the secret, the secret thread that runs through the Charter biography, he was a mad man to write, to write and to write about himself and his times. And had enough of an ego to think that his writing would carry out his task of making a legend of his own life. Yeah, a million word guy (probably much more than that and without a word processor to keep count, to make editing easier, despite his theory of spontaneous writing to the contrary, and to easily store his output).

So the value of this biography is the literary thread that the author and Kerouac shared. The material presented about his rough-hewn upbringing in down and out Lowell, the dramatic effect that the death of his older brother Gerard at a young age had on his psyche, his football prowess and disappointments, his coming of age problems with girls, that Maggie problem, his going off to New York to prep school and college, his eventual decision to “dig” the scene in the Village, his checkered military record during the war, his inability to deal with women, and marriage, his extreme sense of male bonding, his early and often drinking problems and other personal anecdotes offered by a host of people who knew, loved and hated him play second fiddle to this literary strand.       

Ms. Charters does her best work when she goes by the numbers and discusses, as she presumably had with him in person at a point in the 1960s close enough to his early death to be definitive estimate by and of him, his various troubles trying to be a published paid serious writer, and to be taken seriously by the literary establishment. The fate of On The Road which after all is about his and Neal Cassady’s various cross-country trips, drug and alcohol highs, partying, women grabbed in the late 1940s and not published until 1957 is indicative of the gap between what Kerouac thought was his due and what the finicky publishing world thought about him. Of course after he became a best-seller, had his “fifteen minutes of fame plus fifty plus years” getting his work published was the least of his problems.

While he was to write some more things after he became famous there is a real sense that he ran out of steam. And as Ms. Charter’s extended chapters on the creation of the short novel Big Sur about his increasing alcohol and drug problems and breakdowns highlight those problems and the problem of fame itself got the better of him. Although no way can you consider Jack Kerouac a one-note literary Johnny.          

My suggestion to the millennials-after you read On The Road - is to read this something of an early definitive biography (with lots of good notes at the end about Ms. Charter’s sources for various opinions and questions of fact) to get a feel for what it was like to be there at the creation of the big jail-break “beat” minute which spawned your parents, or ouch, grandparents “hippie” minute. While other later biographies have been produced, especially around the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On The Road in 2007, this is the one to check out first.   

 

Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty website.

Click below to link to the Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty website.

http://www.mcadp.org/

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Markin comment:

I have been an opponent of the death penalty for as long as I have been a political person, a long time. While I do not generally agree with the thrust of the Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty Committee’s strategy for eliminating the death penalty nation-wide almost solely through legislative and judicial means From The Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty Website

 

 

Click below to link to the Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty website.

http://www.mcadp.org/

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Markin comment:

I have been an opponent of the death penalty for as long as I have been a political person, a long time. While I do not generally agree with the thrust of the Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty Committee’s strategy for eliminating the death penalty nation-wide almost solely through legislative and judicial means I am always willing to work with them when specific situations come up. (Think about the 2011 Troy Davis case down in Georgia for a practical example of the limits of that strategy and think today in Massachusetts with the recent death sentence for the remaining Marathon bomber where some of us were down at the Moakley Federal Court House protesting the death penalty with seeing anybody from the MCADP anywhere near that scene.) In any case they have a long pedigree extending, one way or the other, back to Sacco and Vanzetti and that is always important to remember whatever our political differences.

Here is another way to deal with both the question of the death penalty and of political prisoners from an old time socialist perspective taken from a book review of James P. Cannon's Notebooks Of An Agitator:

I note here that among socialists, particularly the non-Stalinist socialists of those days, there was controversy on what to do and, more importantly, what forces socialists should support. If you want to find a more profound response initiated by revolutionary socialists to the social and labor problems of those days than is evident in today’s leftist responses to such issues Cannon’s writings here will assist you. I draw your attention to the early part of the book when Cannon led the Communist-initiated International Labor Defense (ILD), most famously around the fight to save the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti here in Massachusetts. That campaign put the Communist Party on the map for many workers and others unfamiliar with the party’s work. For my perspective the early class-war prisoner defense work was exemplary.

The issue of class-war prisoners is one that is close to my heart. I support the work of the Partisan Defense Committee, Box 99 Canal Street Station, New York, N.Y 10013, an organization which traces its roots and policy to Cannon’s ILD. That policy is based on an old labor slogan- ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ therefore I would like to write a few words here on Cannon’s conception of the nature of the work. As noted above, Cannon (along with Max Shachtman and Martin Abern and Cannon’s longtime companion Rose Karsner who would later be expelled from American Communist Party for Trotskyism with him and who helped him form what would eventually become the Socialist Workers Party) was assigned by the party in 1925 to set up the American section of the International Red Aid known here as the International Labor Defense.

It is important to note here that Cannon’s selection as leader of the ILD was insisted on by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) because of his pre-war association with that organization and with the prodding of “Big Bill’ Haywood, the famous labor organizer exiled in Moscow. Since many of the militants still languishing in prison were anarchists or syndicalists the selection of Cannon was important. The ILD’s most famous early case was that of the heroic anarchist workers, Sacco and Vanzetti. The lessons learned in that campaign show the way forward in class-war prisoner defense.

I believe that it was Trotsky who noted that, except in the immediate pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods, the tasks of militants revolve around the struggle to win democratic and other partial demands. The case of class-war legal defense falls in that category with the added impetus of getting the prisoners back into the class struggle as quickly as possible. The task then is to get them out of prison by mass action for their release. Without going into the details of the Sacco and Vanzetti case the two workers had been awaiting execution for a number of years and had been languishing in jail. As is the nature of death penalty cases various appeals on various grounds were tried and failed and they were then in imminent danger of execution.

Other forces outside the labor movement were also interested in the Sacco and Vanzetti case based on obtaining clemency, reduction of their sentences to life imprisonment, or a new trial. The ILD’s position was to try to win their release by mass action- demonstrations, strikes and other forms of mass mobilization. This strategy obviously also included, in a subordinate position, any legal strategies that might be helpful to win their freedom. In this effort the stated goal of the organization was to organize non-sectarian class defense but also not to rely on the legal system alone portraying it as a simple miscarriage of justice. The organization publicized the case worldwide, held conferences, demonstrations and strikes on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. Although the campaign was not successful and the pair were executed in 1927 it stands as a model for class-war prisoner defense. Needless to say, the names Sacco and Vanzetti continue to be honored to this day wherever militants fight against this American injustice system.

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Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears."

last lines from The Lonseome Death Of Hattie Carroll, another case of an injustice against black people. - Bob Dylan, 1963

Markin comment (posted September 22, 2011):

Look, after almost half a century of fighting every kind of progressive political struggle I have no Pollyanna-ish notion that in our fight for a “newer world” most of the time we are “tilting at windmills.” Even a cursory look at the history of our struggles brings that hard fact home. However some defeats in the class struggle, particularly the struggle to abolish the barbaric, racist death penalty in the United States, hit home harder than others. For some time now the fight to stop the execution of Troy Davis has galvanized this abolition movement into action. His callous execution by the State of Georgia, despite an international mobilization to stop the execution and grant him freedom, is such a defeat.

On the question of the death penalty, moreover, we do not grant the state the right to judicially murder the innocent or the guilty. But clearly Brother Davis was innocent. We will also not forget that hard fact. And we will not forget Brother Davis’ dignity and demeanor as he faced what he knew was a deck stacked against him. And, most importantly, we will not forgot to honor Brother Davis the best way we can by redoubling our efforts to abolition the racist, barbaric death penalty everywhere, for all time. Forward.

Additional Markin comment posted September 23, 2011:

No question the execution on September 21, 2011 by the State of Georgia of Troy Anthony Davis hit me, and not me alone, hard. For just a brief moment that night, when he was granted a temporary stay pending a last minute appeal before the United States Supreme Court just minutes before his 7:00 PM execution, I thought that we might have achieved a thimbleful of justice in this wicked old world. But it was not to be and so we battle on. Troy Davis shall now be honored in our pantheon along with the Haymarket Martyrs, Sacco and Vanzetti, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and others. While Brother Davis may have not been a hard politico like the others just mentioned his fight to abolish the death penalty for himself and for future Troys places him in that company. Honor Troy Davis- Fight To The Finish Against The Barbaric Racist Death Penalty!

Lady Day Is In The House-With Torch Singer Billie Holiday In Mind

Lady Day Is In The House-With Torch Singer Billie Holiday In Mind

 

 

 

 

 

I remember one day many years ago now, although it could have been any number of years before or since given who I want to talk about, talk about Lady Day. Talk about a woman who I never knew, never was that aware of as a performer although I believe I heard her one time on the Ed Sullivan Show but don’t quote me on that. Talk about how she chased away my blues, unlike a number of women who I have known who have given me endless heartache, more than once before that day and did so after. This particular day Lady Day came in very handy, it must have been a winter day for sure since I still can feel the frosty feeling, the snow whirling outside and inside my brain I had while the events were unfolding.

So add that to the depression I was feeling over the latest serious quarrel I had had with my wife, the chill and bluster had me down as well, as I entered a bookstore in Harvard Square (that wife soon to be my ex-wife, an ex-wife who had plenty to do with the particular depression I felt that time so don’t blame the winter for that, but don’t ask for the particulars of the dispute, that time, that is another story, a story already done and wrapped up in a bow. And don’t blame Billie for either the cold or subsequent divorce since people have blamed Billie enough for what ails them and I have come to honor that fresh flower lady day. I want to say that on that blustery day I was entering the old long gone Paperback Booksmith store but it might have been the still there Harvard Book Store up the street so don’t hold me to the particular bookstore just know that it was a bookstore, in Harvard Square, in the cold raw winter (and you know about the depression part so onward).

In any case that is the day and place where I heard this low sad torchy female voice coming out of the sound system most of those places had (have) to liven things up while you were (are) browsing (or “cruising” as I found out later when somebody told me bookstores were the “hot” spot if you were looking for a certain kind of woman [or man], needless to say my kind of woman, bookish, sassy and, well, a little neurotic but the dating circling ritual among the bookish, sassy whatever is also a story for another day). 

A smoky voice for smoky darkly lit rooms where the smoke hangs on the walls through daylight and where romances might burst open (or at least be an inexpensive cheap date at a couple of cups of coffee and a pasty or a couple of glasses of sweet red wine hopefully not just out of the press and more hopefully loosen her up for the night’s anticipations) reminding me of cafés and coffeehouses in place like New York, Boston, San Francisco, New York around the Village when smoking was “cool,” when cigarettes smokers like me (heavily at times especially whisky drinking or dope pulling times all now mercifully quieted) ruled the roost with regulation butt hanging out of side of mouth in the old con man or French gangster imitating Chicago gangster style (and now pity for French style smokers now banished, now desperate refugees in the outer edge of the outdoor café tables, rain or shine, destroying the whole noir cinema night). When smoky rooms lived and jazz (okay, okay jazz and some rarified urban blues too not the country bumpkin Delta kind every black person who could follow the northern star was fleeing to break Mister James Crow’s grip) was king and such a rasp-edged cut the air with a knife voice would be  swaying in the background amidst the cling of glasses, small wine glasses bulb-like with slender stems filled maybe one third of the way with some house blend (again hopefully not newly pressed) and sturdy whisky shot glasses which spoke of hard-edged ethnic enclaves, workingmen drowning themselves in sorrows to break the hunger sorrows of their lives and their sons taking right up where they left off except maybe since café prices unlike men’s taverns were dear sipping the edges of the glass more slowly. A voice to cut through the edge of the air around the small murmurs of collective voices (two, three, four but an uncomfortable fit to a table times whatever number Bob, Ray or Sam could squeeze into the space without the fire marshal raising hell about capacity or asking for a bigger extortionous pay-off)  talking of the news of the day (Jesus, that damn war is starting to heat up), the current hardship of life (Christ, the damn rent man was looking for his draw and I barely culled him out of the damn thing), the latest lost romance (divorces, two-timings, will write when I get a chance, waiting by the midnight phone the damn thing growing out of the ear waiting for that prisoner’s one call) or just cheesy chitchat. Yeah just the dross of daily life until the singer (you already know because I set it up that she is smoky-voiced, can cut the air with the damn thing), yeah, until she hits that high white note and for one second, maybe today the time a nanosecond but whatever the count the room is silent, no glasses tinkling (some slender dame almost ready to put the stem of the glass to her mouth, some guy, maybe Red Radley who was famous for the slow whisky sipping and all of the bartender in town dreaded his appearance at their doors because he would take up a table or a stool and the tip would be nada), no dishes clanging (that pastries with tow folks almost gone and the parties asking why they had bothered to order the damn thing since it tasted like last week’s stale remainders at some Salvation Army Harbor Lights retreat (which I can tell you is pretty stale), no voices chattering their hearts out (that midnight waiting suspended in the air) but stopped against that neck-turning sound. The hushed patrons searching the dark smoky night for the source finally fixing in on an ill-lit stage, a joke of a stage put together slap-dash, a few boards, a little varnish, raised just enough to see whoever was performing, hell, to see her performing she was practically indentured to the owner since he had advanced her seven weeks pay when she had to see the “fixer man” to get well, in order not to cut down on the number of café tables that could be squeezed into the space, a third-rate bass player strumming his beat message (that’s all Harry could afford he said then ranting about the musicians scale but what were you going to do  otherwise she would have to hoof it alone), likewise the pitter-patter of the second-rate drummer not playing too loudly in order avoid drowning out the voice in front of him (see he had been her lover before that “fixer man” became her true lover, gave her that smoky voice, let the night air be cut by her voice, and a first-rate big sexy sax man (a second cousin to Johnny Hodges and so had something in his genes) blowing his brains out and mentally taking note that amid the clutter of daily life, the insolvability of the hardships and the need to go on to find the next romance that for that one moment those concerns were suspended.

Yeah, a voice, now that he had been through his own troubles with sister cocaine (hence the knowledge of slow whisky sipping a la Red Radley, Salvation Army Harbor Light retreats, and if you could get through the “detox” then the screwy message they had to spread the gospel that you had to listen to and no Sky’s Miss Sarah Brown all pert, petite, and pious, and of waiting around midnight phones after the twelfth “cure” had not taken and your own Miss Sarah Brown has abandoned ship, has moved onto some other Eddie whose only virtue, and maybe no virtue was that he was not you, that his nose was clean [a pun] and that she would at least have a breather until whatever fatal weakness he was hiding took hold) having just an edge fortified by some back room dope (she was trying to ease off “boy”, H, heroin to the squares and so the “fixer man” was squeezing sweet cousin cocaine into her brain) to break the monotony of the day (and who knows maybe the life, maybe of everything that had led her to this dark, ill-lit stage filled with too many tables, no room to breathe, no drink in hand to get through the numbers until the break as her cousin was wearing off after that early rush) with its phrasing (strange how the phrasing separated out those who could reach that high white note, not every night like this night for she would know but the silence, by the absence of glass clanging, the shuffling of dishes, the small murmurs all in suspension except hose clouds of smoke rising to meet her, and her wishing to chase down that damn drink with a nice mellow cigarette to calm her fucking nerves), pleading with you like in some biblical battle between heaven’s angels and hell’s like something old revolutionary divine John Milton would think up but which she just the deliverer of high white notes not some literary light to take your blues away. Like in that second (okay to be all up to date nanosecond) aside from whatever the dope that was still running round her brain could do she had a space there in that frail shimmering body with its pit-marked skin could end that fucking war, could make that rent man disappear, could sent that guy a dime to drown that midnight phone madness, hell, could make the decision between red or white for the living room walls, to solve your pain, to take yours on, and get rid of hers.  

Not placing the alluring voice since my torch singers of choice then were the likes of Bessie Smith, Dinah Washington, Eartha Kitt, Helen Morgan, or Peggy Lee I asked one of the clerks who the person who was singing that song, the old Cole Porter tune, Night and Day with such sultry, swaying feeling on the PA sound system. She, looking like a smarmy college student, probably a senior ready to graduate and enlighten us, the heathens some way, and therefore wise to the worldly world who didn’t mind the job she was doing while waiting for her small change fame but was not in the habit of answering questions about who or what was being played over the loudspeaker since she had been hired to cater to help patrons find where such-and-such a best seller, academic, or guide book was located, looked at me like I was some rube from the sticks when she said Billie Holiday, of course (and she could have added stupid, which is what that look meant).      

Now that event was memorable for two things, listening to that song and a follow-up one, All of Me (which she did not hit the high white note on in that PA version), almost immediately thereafter got me out of my funk despite the fact that the subjects of the songs were about love, or romance anyway, something I was at odds with just that moment (remember the wife, ex-wife business). The other, as is my wont when I hear, see, read something that grabs my attention big time also was the start of my attempt to get every possible Billie Holiday album or tape (yeah, it’s been a while since this wintry day) I could get my hands on. So thereafter any time that I felt blue I would put on a Billie platter or tape and feel better, usually.

In my book, and I am hardly alone on this, Billie Holiday is the torch singer's torch singer. Maybe it is the phrasing on her best songs (like I heard in that first song that got me thinking back to old time cafes and coffeehouses). That well-placed hush, the dying gasp. The hinted fragrant pause which sets the next line up. Maybe it is the unbreakable link between her voice when she is on a roll and the arrangements which with few exceptions make me think whoever else might have been scheduled to cover the song the composer had Billie in the back of his or her mind when they were playing the melody in their heads. Hell, maybe in the end it was the dope that kept her edge up but, by Jesus, she could sing a modern ballad of love (Cole Porter show tunes, Irving Berlin goof stuff, Gershwin boys white boy soul), lost or both like no other.

And if in the end it was the dope that got her through the day and performance, let me say this- a “normal” nice singer could sing for a hundred years and never get it right, the way Billie could get it right when she was at her best. Dope or no dope. Was she always at her best? Hell no, as a review of all her recorded material makes clear. Some recordings, a compilation, for example, done between 1945 and her death in 1959 for Verve show the highs but also the lows as the voice faltered a little and the dope put the nerves over the edge toward the end.

Here is the funny thing though, no, the strange thing now that I think about the matter, the politically correct strange thing although those who insist on political correctness in everyday civil life should lay off anybody’s harmless cultural preferences and personal choices if you ask me. One time I was touting Billie’s virtues to a group of younger blacks, a mixed group, who I was working with on some education project and the talk came around to music, music that meant something other than background noise, other than a momentarily thrill and I mentioned how I had “met” Billie and the number of times and under what circumstances she had sung my blues away when times were tough. A few of these young blacks, smart kids who were aware of more than hip-hop nation and interested in roots music, old time blues, Skip James on the country end and Howlin’ Wolf on the city end, to an extend that I found somewhat surprising, when they heard me raving about Billie startled me when they wrote her off as an empty-headed junkie, a hophead, and so on. Some of their responses reflected, I think, the influence of the movie version of her life (Lady Sings the Blues with Diana Ross) or some unsympathetic black history ‘uplift,’ “you don’t want to wind up like her so keep your eyes on the prize and stay away from dopers, hustlers, corner boys and the like, or else” views on her life that have written her off as an “addled” doper.

I came back on them though, startled them when I said the following, “if Billie needed a little junk, a little something for the head, a little something to get through the night, to keep her spirits up I would have bought her whatever she needed just to hear her sing that low, sultry and sorrowful thing she did in some long lost edgy New York café that chased my blues away.” Enough said.     

From The Archives Of The International Labor Defense (1925-1946)-Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

From The Archives  Of The International Labor Defense (1925-1946)

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Introducing The Committee For International Labor Defense

Mission Statement

The Committee for International Labor Defense (CILD) is a legal and political defense organization working on behalf of the international working class and oppressed minorities providing aid and solidarity in legal cases. We stand today in the traditions of the working-class defense policies of the International Labor Defense (ILD) 1925-1946, the defense arm of the American Communist Party which won its authority as a defense organization in cases like Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys, defense of Black Sharecropper’ Union and Birmingham steelworkers union efforts in the South in the 1930s and 1940s, and garnering support in the United States for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. 

The ILD takes a side. In the struggles of working people to defend their unions and independent political organizations and to organize themselves we stand in solidarity against their exploiters. In the struggles of the oppressed and other socially marginalized peoples to defend their communities and to organize themselves we stand in solidarity with their efforts against their oppressors.  While favoring all possible legal proceedings for the cases we support, we recognize that the courts, prisons and police exist to maintain the ruling class’ dominance over all others. To paraphrase one of the founding members of the original ILD said “we place 100% of our faith in the power of the masses to mobilize to defend their own and zero faith, none, in the ‘justice’ of the courts or other tribunals.”

As we take the side of working people and oppressed minorities we also strive to be anti-sectarian. We will, according to our abilities, critically but unconditionally support movements and defend cases of organizations or individuals with whose political views we do not necessarily agree. We defend, to paraphrase the original statement of purpose of the old ILD, “any member of the workers and oppressed movement, regardless of their views, who has suffered persecution by the capitalist courts and other coercive institutions because of their activities or their opinions.” As the old labor slogan goes-“an injury to one is an injury to all.”

More information-  c_for_intl_labor_defense@lists.digitalexplorations.org

 

In the long arc, the now fifty years long arc of Sam Lowell’s left-wing political activism, the question of the plight of political prisoners, class-war prisoners to distinguish them from death squad Nazis and thugs and the commonality of other criminals has always played a central role in his work. Part of this was out of necessity in the old days when the American government was whipping away drafter resisters for their righteous opposition to the Vietnam War then raging and threatening to take a whole generation down with it both soldiers and civilians, military resisters who once a critical mass of soldiers started coming back and telling the real story of the war became more prevalent as the American Army was in near mutiny before the thing got closed down by the heroic Vietnamese resistance fighters, the civilly disobedient from little old ladies in tennis sneakers, Quakers, Shakers and later radicals and reds, rowdy according to them anti-war protesters, Black Panthers, at least the ones they did not try to just outright kill in their beds like Fred Hampton and Mark Clark or frame up almost to death like Geronimo Pratt (when he was going by that name before his conversion to a Muslim name he could not remember) or anybody else who got in their way when they pulled the hammer down and began the long “night of the long knives” that we have been subject to ever since without any apparent end in sight.

Since then through the vagaries of whatever small struggles he and what he calls the “remnant,” those who still hold the torch seeking the “newer world” and those too few who have joined those old new leftists political prisoner work has been the one constant when other struggles have failed like the now endless wars of the American government or situations that have been resolved at least partially like the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

(Sam by the way has this very big thing about not calling the government “our government” ever since those days, those days when his best friend from high school, Jeff Mullins, was killed in Vietnam and in letters home begged Sam to tell a candid world what the hell was going on over there and he saw what the hell it was doing to young kids, kids out of high school just like him making them nothing but animals and so unless you want, and I don’t, a ration of grief we will stick with his designation.)

So Sam Lowell in his time has defended, has tried to publicize the plight of political prisoners as they have come up starting back in the day with the various anti-war protestors rounded up on May Day, 1971 (including himself), the Panthers and other black nationalists when they were under the gun of the American government, the victims of the coup in Chile in 1973, the aforementioned anti-apartied fighters led by the later Nelson Mandela in South Africa, the British coal-miners in the 1980s, many anti-death penalty struggles including the Mumia Abu Jamal (now serving a “living death” life without parole sentence) Troy Davis (executed by the state of Georgia in 2011)cases (and lately the case of the surviving member of the Boston Marathon bombings now under death sentence when he stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the Federal Courthouse in Boston down by the waterfront with Catholic Workers and Veterans for Peace but not anybody from Amnesty International or Massachusetts Committee Against the Death Penalty), and lots of others. All done, whether Sam was conscience of it at the time or not under the old slogan from the Wobblie days (Industrial Workers of the World, IWW)-“an injury to one is an injury to all.”

Lately Sam has been thinking, as he has reduced his law practice work, let others run the day to day operations of his small practice down in Carver about thirty miles from Boston, about that slogan, about the history of that idea. On the face of it the proposition makes total sense but what Sam was looking at was how that proposition was made concrete at least since the high holy hell days when the Wobblies needed all the defense they could muster against the bosses and their state. Now Sam, and you need to know this about him as well, has some method to his madness when he is thinking along such lines and this is the case here as well. Back in August of 2015 he had been invited to a planning meeting of an ad hoc group of Boston left-wing political activists who were interested in setting up a Committee for International Labor Defense (CILD). That name was not accidentally picked since what the group was trying to do was revive the traditions of the International Labor Defense (ILD) which been set up under the aegis of the American Communist Party in 1925 to deal organizationally with the continuing struggle for freedom for left-wing and labor militants under ban from the American government by Jim Cannon, Bill Haywood and others. That organization in turn had been affiliated with the International Red Aid which had previously been set up by the Communist International shortly after its own establishment in 1919.

Sam’s first reaction to the invitation and afterward thinking about the meeting which he had attended that August was that you cannot go home again, that whatever virtues the old ILD had any they were many especially in the 1920s and 1930s well before the operation went out of business in1946, that was over and done with. Then one night he began to think about that “traditions” part, about what the ILD had actually done in its best days. Back then, back in the 1920s when it all started the Wobblies had been decimated by the American government in its vendetta against that organization for its opposition to the First World War and a goodly number were still languishing in jail. Bill Haywood, a Wobblie founder, contacted Jim Cannon then a big wheel in the leadership of the CP and former Wobblie himself about setting up a non-sectarian pro-labor, political prisoner defense group since despite the low level of struggle then the CP was the only organization with the political, financial and legal resources to put together an effective organization. The ILD first won its spurs as a labor defense organization in the unsuccessful fight to save the framed anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti who were executed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1927. The organization was critical in the 1930s in saving the lives of the Scottsboro boys, nine young black men who were accused of raping two white women and who were being railroaded to death row by the state of Alabama. All through the 1930s the ILD helped out labor militants in nasty strike actions and other social struggles like support for the Spanish Republican.

Sam had to admit that in its heyday the ILD did very good work and it would not be disrespectful to try to try to resurrect the traditions of such an organization. But know this about Sam as well he is a devout student of history  so he has to dig into the archives and find material that might be helpful in working through the logistics of “an injury ot one is an injury to all.” Hence this archival piece.