Monday, May 30, 2016

*The "Wang Dang Doodle" Lady Passes On- The Chicago Blues Queen Koko Taylor Is Gone

Click on the title to link to "The New York Times" obituary for legendary Chicago Blues Queen Koko Taylor.


Markin comment:

This is a belated tribute to Koko, although I have done a review of her work in thi space previously. The raw energy that she brought to a blues song probably will not be equaled again. She is also probably the last of that incredible crowd, like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, that headed north out of the South and gave Chicago, and Chess Records, that great 1950s blues sound. They will be crying on Maxwell Street on this one. Hell, I am crying too.

Wang Dang Doodle
Howlin' Wolf, Koko Taylor


Tell Automatic Slim , tell Razor Totin' Jim
Tell Butcher Knife Totin' Annie, tell Fast Talking Fanny
A we gonna pitch a ball, a down to that union hall
We gonna romp and tromp till midnight
We gonna fuss and fight till daylight
We gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long
All night long, All night long, All night long

Tell Kudu-Crawlin' Red, tell Abyssinian Ned
Tell ol' Pistol Pete, everybody gonna meet
Tonight we need no rest, we really gonna throw a mess
We gonna to break out all of the windows,
we gonna kick down all the doors
We gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long
All night long, All night long, All night long

Tell Fats and Washboard Sam, that everybody gonna to jam
Tell Shaky and Boxcar Joe, we got sawdust on the floor
Tell Peg and Caroline Dye, we gonna have a time
When the fish scent fill the air, there'll be snuff juice everywhere
We gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long
All night long, All night long etc.

by Willie Dixon

Sunday, May 29, 2016

The Snoop Scooped-Woody Allen’s Snoop- A Film Review


The Snoop Scooped-Woody Allen’s Snoop- A Film Review





DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Scoop, Woody Allen, Scarlett Johannsson, Hugh Jackman, 2006, written and directed of course by Woody Allen, 2006

 

Is there nothing, no subject matter Woody Allen will not sent up in the interest of telling a cinematic tale. We have seen him give us sent-ups of film noir in films like Play It Again, Sam, gangster mystique in Take the Money and Run, fuming Manhattan matrons and fussy debutantes in, well Manhattan, the cultural wars between New York City and La La Land in Annie Hall, unrequited love in about sixteen films, and pure old fashion Keystone Kop goofiness is as many others. Now via the cinematic genre of the parlor detective story we have in the 2006 version of Woody-ism, Scoop, a sent up of the British class system and its foibles. Well, that sent-up, a goof on the seamy side of death, and Woody’s usual three thousand lines of off-beat social commentary about subjects as varied as London wrong side of the road driving, the pssh of London upper-crust society and much else. But mostly in this lesser Allen vehicle we have a twice-told, hell, many-times told spoof of who-done-its.       

Of course when Woody gets in front of the camera you are going to see the traditional almost Alfred E. Newman Mad magazine nerdy guy with about six million neuroses, and seven million off-hand biting social comment in the service, perhaps, of advancing the plot. Here Woody plays handmaiden, oops hand-man to a budding (and fetching by the way) student journalist, Sandra, played by Scarlett Johansson, who has been forewarned onto a big scoop by a recently deceased newspaper journalist (that’s the spoof of death, spoof of the inevitable grim reaper as the captain of the hereafter death ship). The scoop. Well our Johnny on the spot news hound had it on good authority from a fellow death ship passenger who believed that she had been poisoned by her employer that young up and coming aristocrat Peter Lyman, played by beautiful Hugh Jackman, was none other than the Tarot Card serial killer who had been on a rampage killing short-haired brunette hookers.        

Naturally Sandra and Woody (going under the alias of Sid Waterman, a goof second-hand magician, this time but Woody suits this one just like the thousand and one other films he has appeared just fine) are in momentarily disbelief since why would a beautiful son and scion of the English aristocracy stoop to off-hand murder when his future looked so rosy. Apparently neither had read their Shakespeare or better Holinshed’s Chronicles to know that murder most foul, high or low, is something of a blood sport, something in the DNA for this inbreed crowd. But the clues, the circumstantial evidence keeps piling up once Sandra gets cozy, very cozy with young Lyman under the sheets. Sandra had thereafter in the process of getting under those satin sheets many qualms about her new beau’s guilt but as hers disappeared Woody’s increased until that final moment when Sandra having let her guard down tells her lover about the ruse she and Woody had been playing on him to get the “skinny” on the Tarot Card murderer theory. The theory ha-ha that he was the villain. Young Lyman flipped out, had to take matters in his own hands and attempt to drown her under the mistaken assumption that she could not swim. So long young Lyman and we all hope they do not flog you for your transgressions. Oh yeah, RIP, Woody as Sid, you were a funny guy in this one but we have seen you funnier, wittier in your earlier films. This one is just okay, okay.   

Shakespeare In Love-Or In Love With Shakespeare-With The 400th Anniversary Year Of The Bard’s Death In Mind

Shakespeare In Love-Or In Love With Shakespeare-With The 400th Anniversary Year Of The Bard’s Death In Mind

 




Who knows at this point how many expressions, terms, words, playwright ideas, throwaway ideas, mousy idea, idle chatter, barroom fisticuffs, flights of fancy, lost hours of imitative work, faded romance, ill-fated romance, bewitched love-craft, homages, just sayings, bon mots, revels, idle chatter, oops I already said that, murderous intentions, incestuous desires, kingly horses, betrothals, beheadings, beddings, binges, oops same as barroom fisticuffs, groundling up-swells, pixie midnight madnesses, rancorous reconnoiters, plough and stars séances, heterosexual dalliances, homosexual dalliances(remember all those boys in girls’ uniforms, philogists banter, etymological discoveries, runes, druid pithiness, and shear humbug can be laid at the Bard of Avon’s door after 400 plus years but no question plenty can. And in the next one hundred solemn years about ninety percent of the items expressed above things will continue to be thrown at that self-same door. So be it. We are richer by some nth magnitudes for the works.        

Adding their two pence worth is a series on Shakespeare’s influence on the development and neglect of language-the English language mainly but the not unimportant fact that at one time “the sun never set on the British Empire” makes that a much bigger historical fact than a simple national language the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) has been running an episodic year-long project about the Bard’s effects.

Here’s the link-and get ready for 2116 now.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/shakespeare/

*****Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-Elegy For Tom Waits

*****Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-Elegy For Tom Waits



From The Pen Of The Late Peter Paul Markin who fell by the wayside, fell to his notoriously monstrous “wanting habits” accumulated since childhood looking too hard, looking to hard in the wrong places down among the weeds in Mexico, looking for train smoke and dreams if you really thought about the matter, looking for his own heart of Saturday night-RIP, Brother-RIP.     

 

If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of today’s bourgeois-driven push, bourgeois a better term than capitalist or imperialist if you are in America since it gives a better view of the unhindered social norms, the ethos rather than the sheer grab for filthy lucre; you know grab goods, grab the dough, grab every cheap-jack convenience like it was God’s own gold, grab some shelter from the storm, the storm that these days comes down like a hard rain falling, to get ahead in this wicked old world have to step back and take stock, maybe listen to some words of wisdom, or words that help explain how you got into that mess then you have come to the right address, the address of Mister Tom Waits if you missed the headline or missed who is writing this thing (or better "wrote" since this piece is being edited posthumously by Zack James who found this and three companion pieces in the attic of Josh Breslin's Olde Saco family house in Olde Saco, Maine when they were looking to dispose of whatever could be disposed of in preparation for selling the place so Josh and Lana could move in smaller quarters and Josh told him the long and at the end the sad story about Josh's and Markin's meeting out in San Francisco in the summer of love 1960s times and about Markin's awful fate down in Mexico. That story drove Zack to the editing job in order that a genuine mad monk writer could some forty years after his death receive a small recognition of his ambitious talent.) 

Okay, okay on that bourgeois-driven today thing once I describe what was involved maybe it didn’t just start of late. Maybe the whole ill-starred rising went back to the time when this continent was, just like F. Scott Fitzgerald said way back in the 1920s when he made up the Jazz Age and reeled back in dismay once he saw how those coupon-clippers devoured all good sense and sober ethos, just a fresh green breast of land eyed by some hungry sailors some hungry Dutch sailors who took what they wanted back the homeland and made a grave attempt to fatten their own chests. Just check out any Dutch master painting to see what I mean.

Going back to Calvinist Puritan avenging angels times with John Winthrop and the Mayflower boys and their city on the hill but you best ask Max Weber about that since he tried to hook these world-wise and world weary boys no longer worrying about novenas and indulgences against some netherworld to the wheel of the capitalist profit. Profit (grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap) for "you at the expense of me" system with the new dispensation coming out like hellfire from Geneva and points east and west. The eternal story of the short end of the stick if you aren’t ready for sociological treatises and rely on guys like Tom Waits to wordsmith the lyrics to set you right about what is wrong. But you get the point.

If all that to-ing and fro-ing (nice touch, right) leaves you wondering where you fell off the edge, that edge city (edge city where you danced around with all the conventions of the days, danced around the get ahead world, grab the dough, grab the goods, grab stuff cheap,  with blinkers on before you got stuck in the human sink that you have still not been able to get out of) where big cloud outrageous youthful dreams were dreamt and you took risks, damn did you take risks, thought nothing of that fact either, landed on your ass more than a few times but just picked yourself up and dusted your knees off and done stick around and listen up. Yeah, so if you are wondering,  have been pushed off your saintly wheels, yeah, pushed off your sainted wheels, and gotten yourself  into some angst-ridden despair about where you went off that angel-driven dream of your youth, now faded, tattered, and half- forgotten(but only half, only half-forgotten, the wisp of the dream, the eternal peace dream, the figuring out how to contain that fire, that wanting habits fire in your belly dream sisters and brothers), and need some solace (need some way to stop the fret counting the coffee cups complete with spoons to measure that coffee out as the very modernist poet once said making his modern statement about the world created since the turn of the 19th century that while away your life). Need to reach back to roots, reach back to roots that the 1950s golden age of America, the vanilla red scare Cold War night that kicked the ass out of all the old to make us crave sameness, head down, run for cover, in order to forget about those old immigrant customs, made us forget those simple country blues, old country flames, Appalachia mountain breeze coming through the hills and hollows songs, lonely midnight by the fire cowboy ballads, Tex-Mex big ass brass sympatico squeezes Spanish is the loving tongue, Irish desperate struggles against John Bull  sorrows and cautionary tale Child ballads, plucked out early by a professor over on Brattle Street back when the Brahmins very publicly ruled the roost, or Cajun Saturday night stewed drunks that made the people feel good times), reach back to the primeval forest maybe, put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter [oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay-Zack James] and remember what it was like when men and women sang just to sing the truth of what they saw and heard.

If the norms of don’t rock the boat (not in these uncertain times like any times in human existence were certain, damn, there was always something scary coming up from the first man-eating beast to the human race-eating nuclear bombs, brother even I Iearned early that it was a dangerous world, yeah, learned very early in the Adamsville projects where you got a very real taste of danger before you got too much older than five or six), the norms of keep your head down (that’s right brother, that’s right sister keep looking down, no left or rights for your placid world), keeping your head down being an art form now with appropriate ritual (that ritual looking more and more like the firing squad that took old Juan Romero’s life when he did bad those days out in Utah country), and excuses, because, well, because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them,” usually dark, very dark-skinned like some deathless, starless night disturbing your sleep, begging, I swear, begging you to put that gun in full view on the table, speaking some unknown language, maybe A-rab or I-talian, maybe gibberish for all you know, moving furtively and stealthily against your good night) drive you crazy and you need, desperately need, to listen to those ancient drum beats, those primeval forest leave droppings maybe, that old time embedded DNA coda long lost to, oh yes, civilization, to some civilizing mission (think of that Mayflower gang and that fresh green breast of land  and that city on a hill that drove them cross-eyed and inflamed or ask Max Weber, he footnoted the whole thing, put paid to any idea of otherworldly virtue), that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams, half-forgotten but only half-forgotten remember, ruled your days. Turn up the volume up another notch or two on that Tom Waits selection, maybe Jersey Girl or Brother, Can You Spare A Dime (can you?), Hold On, or Gunn Street Girl.

If you need to hear things, just to sort things out, just to recapture that angel-edge, recapture the time when you did no fear, you and everybody else’s sisters and brothers, that thing you build and from which you now should run, recapture that child-like wonder that made you come alive, made you think about from whence you came and how a turn, a slight turn this way or that, could have landed you on the wrong side of the fence. And I have the list of brothers and sisters who took that wrong road, like that time Jack from Carver wound up face down in some dusty back road arroyo down Sonora way when the deal went bust or when she, maybe a little kinky for all I know, decided that she would try a needle and a spoon, I swear, or she swore just for kicks and she wound up in Madame LaRue’s whorehouse working that sagging bed to perdition and worse losing that thing she had for sex once she started selling it by the hour. Hey, sweet dreams baby I tried to tell you when you play with fire watch out.

So if you need to sort things out about boozers (and about titanic booze-crazed struggles in barrooms, on beaches, in the back seats of cars, lost in the mist of time down some crazed midnight, hell, four in the morning, penniless, cab fare-less night), losers (those who have lost their way, those who had gotten it taken away from them like some maiden virginity, those who just didn’t get it frankly in this fast old world taken in by some grifter’s bluster), those who never had anything but lost next to their names, those who never had a way to be lost, dopesters inhaling sweet dream snow in solitary hotel rooms among junkie brethren, gathering a needle and spoon in some subterranean dank cellar, down in dark alleys jack-rolling some poor drunk stiff out of his room rent for kicks (how uncool to drink low-shelf whiskeys or rotgut wines hell the guy deserved to be rolled, should feel lucky he got away with just a flipped wallet), out in nighttime canyons flame blaring off the walls, the seven seas of chemical dust, mainly blotter, maybe peyote (the sweet dreams of ten million years of ghost warriors working the layered canyon walls flickering against the campfire flames and the sight of two modern warriors shirtless, sweaty, in a trance, high as kites, dancing by themselves like whirling dervishes   ready to do justice for the white man's greed until the flames flickered out and they fell in a heap exhausted) if that earth angel connection comes through (Aunt Sally, always, some Aunt Sally coming up the stairs to ease the pain, to make one feel, no, not feel better than any AMA doctor without a prescription pad), creating visions of long lost tribes trying, trying like hell, to get “connected,” connected in the campfire shadow night, hipsters all dressed in black, mary mack dressed in black, speeding, speaking be-bop this and be-bop that to stay in fashion, hustling, always hustle, maybe pimping some street urchin, maybe cracking some guy’s head to create a “new world order” of the malignant, always moving, fallen sisters (sisters of mercy, sisters who need mercy, sisters who were mercifully made fallen in some mad dash night, merciful sister feed me, feed me good), midnight sifters (lifting in no particular order hubcaps, tires, wrenches, jacks, an occasional gem, some cheap jewelry in wrong neighborhoods, some paintings or whatever is not saleable left in some sneak back alley, it is the sifting that counts), grifters (hey, buddy watch this, now you see it, now you don’t, now you don’t see your long gone John dough, and Mister three card Monte long gone too ), drifters (here today gone tomorrow with or without dough, to Winnemucca, Ogden, Fresno, Frisco town, name your town, name your poison and the great big blue seas washing you clean out into the Japan seas), the drift-less (cramped into one room hovels, shelters, seedy rooming houses, hell, call them flop houses, afraid to stay in-doors or to go outside, afraid of the “them” too, afraid to be washed clean, angel clean), and small-time grafters (the ten-percent guys, failed insurance men, repo artists, bounty hunters, press agents, personal trainers, need I go on). You know where to look, right.

If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore–mentioned classes of brethren once told to me by a forlorn grand master hobo, a guy down on his luck moving downward to bum), out in the railroad jungles in some Los Angeles ravine, some Gallup, New Mexico Southern Pacific  trestle (the old SP the only way to travel out west if you want to get west), some Hoboken broken down pier (ha, shades of the last page of Jack Kerouac’s classic), the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, some gringa for a change of pace, maybe your girl but watch out for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books, big academic books with great pedigrees could be written on that subject so let’s just let that one pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely but not worthy of study, big book academic study anyway), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society, the whole fellahin world (the big mass of world sweated field braceros, sharecroppers, landless peasants and now cold-water flat urban dwellers fresh from the played out land, or taken land) then Tom Waits is your stop.

Tom Waits is, frankly, an acquired taste, one listen will not do, one song will not do, but listen to a whole record [CD or download okay-Zack] and you won’t want to turn the thing off, high praise in anyone’s book, so a taste well worth acquiring as he storms heaven in words, in thought-out words, in cribbed, cramped, crumbled words, to express the pain, angst and anguish of modern living, yes, modern living.

See he ain’t looking for all haloed saints out there, some Saint Jerome spreading the word out to the desert tribes, out on the American mean streets he has pawed around the edges, maybe doesn’t believe in saints for all I know, but is out looking for busted black-hearted angels all dressed in some slinky silk thing to make a man, a high-shelf whiskey man having hustled some dough better left unexplained that night going off his moorings feeding her drinks and she a liquor sponge (who left him short one night in some unnamed, maybe nameless, gin mill when she split, after she split her take with the bartender who watered her drinks, hell, the thing was sweet all she needed to do when he leaned into her was grab his sorry ass and get the damn wallet). Looking too, a child of the pin-up playboy 1950s, for girls with Monroe hips (hips swaying wickedly in the dead air night, and enflaming desire, hell lust, getting kicked out of proper small town hells by descendants of those aforementioned Mayflower boys for promising the world for one forbidden night), got real, and got left for dead with cigar wrapping rings. Yeah, looking for the desperate out there who went off the righteous path and wound up too young face down in some forsaken woods who said she needed to hold on to something, and for all the misbegotten. 


Tom Waits once you get the habit gives voice in song, a big task, to the kind of characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). The, frankly, white trash Okie/Arkie Dove Linkhorns and Frankie Machines of the world who had to keep moving just for the sake of moving something in the DNA driving that whirlwind, genetically broken before they begin, broken before they hit these shores (their forbears thrown out of Europe for venal crimes and lusts, pig-stealing, deer-pouching, working the commons without a license, highwaymen, ancient jack-rollers, the flotsam and jetsam of the old world, damn them, the master-less men and women, ask old Max about them too), having been chased out, cast out of Europe, or some such place. In short, the people who do not make revolutions, those revolutions we keep hearing and reading about, far from it, the wretched of the earth and their kin, the ones who the old blessed Paris communards were thinking of when they hanged a sign saying “Death to Thieves” from the Hotel de Ville balcony, but those who surely, and desperately could use one. If you want to hear about those desperate brethren then here is your stop as well.

If, additionally, you need a primordial grizzled gravelly voice to attune your ear to the scratchy earth and some occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Hey, let’s leave it at this- if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.

A View From The Left- Defend Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State!-Down With the Race and Class Purge of the Universities!-For Free, Quality, Integrated Education for All!

Workers Vanguard No. 1089
6 May 2016
 
Defend Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State!-Down With the Race and Class Purge of the Universities!-For Free, Quality, Integrated Education for All!

(Young Spartacus pages)

We reprint below a leaflet issued by the Bay Area Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Club on April 13.

For months, students at San Francisco State University (SFSU) have protested against plans to slash funding for the College of Ethnic Studies. The administration’s proposed cuts would bring funding down 17 percent since 2008, eliminating about half of the college’s class offerings. Work-study programs would be reduced and faculty jobs are on the chopping block since Ethnic Studies would not have enough money to replace retired faculty members or to even pay the salaries of half of its instructors. In response to students’ demands to restore funding to pre-2007 levels, expand work-study programs and add faculty positions, university president Leslie Wong has refused to address a single one of them. Instead, he tried to sweet-talk the students by proclaiming his “pride” in Ethnic Studies while blaming “consistent underfunding” of the university by the state government.
Targeting programs that have a high rate of black and Latino enrollment, Ethnic Studies cuts are part of the long-running racist purge of the universities—the reversal of affirmative action programs, the drastic rise in tuition and the underfunding of public campuses nationally. The racist rulers see little use in educating the majority of black and Latino youth because as capitalism decays it is no longer profitable to employ them. The lives of the ghetto and barrio poor have already been written off as expendable, leaving them to die on the streets or be thrown behind bars.
The door to higher education is being slammed shut for not just blacks and Latinos, but all poor and working-class youth. At the same time, workers’ living standards have been driven down. Funding for the entire California State University (CSU) system, which serves many low-income and minority students, has been slashed across the board. Nearly half of CSU students receive government financial aid and 40 percent come from homes where English is not the first language. Such students who do get in have to work to pay the soaring tuition while often unable to get the classes they need. The vast majority cannot hope to graduate in four years, and are likely to leave saddled with debt.
The same CSU board of trustees and administration that have raised tuition and cut campus budgets have cut faculty wages and hours so drastically that less than half of CSU faculty members earn over a paltry $38,000 annually. When the faculty union, the California Faculty Association (CFA), sought a minimal five percent salary increase, the CSU administration refused to budge until the union set a statewide strike date. Now a tentative settlement grants the teachers 10.5 percent in raises over three years—a grudging concession, but not nearly enough to make up lost ground. It is in the interests of students and other campus workers to support the faculty, just as teachers have an interest in supporting students in their fight against budget cuts. To its credit, the CFA at SFSU has called for full funding for Ethnic Studies and other colleges.
Speaking in defense of Ethnic Studies at a February 23 protest event, a supporter of the Spartacus Youth Club drew cheers when he denounced the U.S. imperialists’ bombardment of Syria and Libya and their support to the brutal Zionist rulers of Israel, declaring: “We need to link this [defense of Ethnic Studies] with the fight against imperialist warfare and with the fight to defend the Palestinians.” He went on to oppose voting for the Democrats—Wall Street’s other party of war, racism and deportations. He pointed out that “Bernie Sanders calls for more cops on the street and he supports the state of Israel. He is no friend of labor, of workers or of the oppressed.” Instead, our comrade counterposed the need to build a revolutionary workers party.
At a March 1 meeting to defend Ethnic Studies, the meeting’s organizers called on one of our comrades, but then tried to shout him down as soon as he began to speak against illusions in the administration. They despicably resorted to race-baiting our white comrade for speaking against black oppression. Some student activists also unsuccessfully tried to stop SYC supporters from distributing Workers Vanguard at a March 16 rally to defend Ethnic Studies. Such attempts at censorship in the name of liberal “identity” politics obstruct both the broadening of the fight to defend Ethnic Studies and the debate necessary for political clarity on the way forward.
The 1968-69 Student Strike
The College of Ethnic Studies was a hard-fought gain of the 1968-69 SF State student strike, the longest campus strike in American history. At issue was the opening up of the universities to long excluded or marginalized black, Asian and Latino students. The campus administration had blocked the demands of the Black Student Union (BSU) for a black studies department and for more admissions slots for blacks and other minorities. Student protests broke out when the Board of Trustees ordered the campus president to suspend George Mason Murray, an introductory English instructor and the Black Panther Minister of Education, at the end of October 1968. A spokesman for the black students, Murray was targeted for Panther politics, including their correct advocacy of armed self-defense of the black ghetto masses and of victory of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front.
The strike began on 6 November 1968, spearheaded by the BSU and the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition composed of various Asian and Latino student organizations. Six weeks later, the faculty union, then the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), walked out despite threats from the administration to dismiss any faculty member who did not show up to work for five consecutive days. The strike essentially shut down the campus and lasted almost five months, defying massive police repression. Among its gains were the creation of a school of ethnic studies and the admission of some 900 additional black and minority students for the fall 1969 term.
The 1968 strike reflected the mass social struggles of the 1960s. The civil rights movement and opposition to the U.S. imperialist war against Vietnam radicalized a broad layer of student youth. Concessions that the ruling class made in the face of these struggles came under attack as soon as these struggles started to ebb. Student activists at State today invoke the example of the ’68-69 strike. But after decades of rollback, in the absence of any significant social struggle, their perspective has been reduced to one of little more than moral suasion directed at the campus administration.
A letter on behalf of the student protest organizers expressed disappointment at Wong’s “lack of leadership” and his administration’s disregard for “the needs of students.” But the administration is not a neutral body nor is it accountable to students and faculty. Such illusions politically disarm those who want to fight.
College campuses are a reflection of the society around them. The capitalist rulers of this country require the universities to transmit ruling-class ideology and to train the administrators, technicians and other professionals they need to keep their system of production for profit running. The job of the administration is to oversee the campuses in line with the American bourgeoisie’s interests, including by implementing such budget cuts as their capitalist masters demand while keeping students under control. The SFSU administration has also served the government’s racist “war on terror” by funneling information on Near Eastern students to the FBI in 2001 and has repeatedly gone after Palestinian students who protest Israeli state repression.
The Black n’ Brown Liberation Coalition, an organization active in the current movement to defend Ethnic Studies, calls for racial sensitivity training for the University Police Department, as if the question of racist police violence were a matter of a few rogue cops with bad ideas. But why does a supposed institution of learning need an armed force with access to assault rifles? They are the arm of capitalist repression on campus, there to put down student revolts like that of 1968. Their off-campus cohorts in blue are paid to harass, jail and kill blacks and break workers’ strikes. The police, along with the courts, prisons and the army, are the core of the capitalist state, the armed defenders of the obscenely wealthy capitalist rulers against those they oppress and exploit. It is a liberal pipe dream to believe that the police can be reformed to act in the interests of the oppressed. A wolf in “sensitivity” clothing is still a wolf. That is why we say: Cops Off Campus!
Marxists raise the call: Abolish the Administration! The universities should be run by the students, teachers and workers who study and work there. But this democratic demand cannot in itself address the educational system’s glaring inequalities. We fight for open admissions and no tuition with a state-paid living stipend to make college accessible to poor and working-class students. The goal must be free, quality and integrated education for all. These demands inevitably conflict with the interests of the racist ruling class. The fight for such demands must be linked to the one force in this society that uniquely has the social power to win them—the multiracial working class.
Most students today have likely never seen a militant strike, given the decimation of the unions resulting from decades of sustained capitalist onslaught and the pro-capitalist union misleaders’ retreat before it. Nevertheless, the entire edifice of capitalism rests on the exploitation of the collective labor of the workers, who therefore have the power to shut down the flow of profits. As society’s collective producer, the working class alone has the power and the material interest as a class to rebuild the economy based on production for social need, which is absolutely necessary if all forms of inequality are to be done away with. This requires that workers seize the means of production from the bourgeoisie and establish a workers state.
Black Oppression and American Capitalism
Underlying the fight to defend Ethnic Studies is the fight against this country’s pervasive racism. But anti-racist campus protests have been hobbled by the widespread misconception that racist oppression stems from racist ideas. To the contrary, racism is materially rooted in American capitalism, which from its inception has been built upon the brutal racial oppression of black people. While slavery was abolished by the victory of the North in the Civil War, the Northern bourgeoisie eventually made peace with the white Southern propertied classes. Blacks in the South were forced into servitude as sharecroppers and tenant-farmers, subjected to Jim Crow and KKK lynch terror. Blacks who fled to the North were integrated into the workforce at the bottom, last hired, first fired, while forcibly segregated into deteriorating inner-city ghettos. Jim Crow segregation laws were abolished as a result of the civil rights movement. But the liberal program of the movement’s leadership, who looked to the capitalist government for redress, did not and could not address the reality that the racist cop terror, joblessness and poverty endured by blacks nationwide are rooted in the foundation of American capitalism. Just as it took the Civil War to destroy slavery, it will take a third, socialist, American revolution to achieve black liberation. We say: Finish the Civil War!
The bourgeoisie wields racial differences to divide and rule the working class. Anti-black racism is the American bourgeoisie’s ideological poison of choice, used to obscure the fundamental class divide between workers and their exploiters. The myth of “white skin privilege” holds that all whites, including workers, benefit from racism. To the contrary—the oppression of black people hurts white workers as well. The proletariat as a whole cannot liberate itself unless it champions black equality and the interests of all the oppressed. In order to do so, workers must organize politically in opposition to all the agencies of their class enemy. They cannot do so while bound by the union misleaders’ alliance with the Democratic Party. This points to the need to fight for a class-struggle leadership of the unions as an essential part of forging a revolutionary workers party.
The Third World nationalists and New Left radicals that led the ’68-69 SF State strike believed that each sector of the oppressed should organize independently, then ally with each other as the occasion demanded. This perspective was based on the dismissal of the working class as the decisive force for revolutionary change. Its end result therefore could never be a revolutionary transformation of society, but rather fragmentary struggles that, lacking the social power of the working class, are inevitably reduced to pressuring a section of the ruling class for reforms within the framework of capitalism. Sectoralism is a reincarnation, in another form, of the constituency politics of the Democratic Party, which ends up chaining the oppressed to their oppressors. Today this perspective has devolved into the identity politics pervasive among anti-racist campus activists.
The revolutionary alternative was proven in practice by the 1917 Russian October Revolution. Acting as a champion of all those oppressed in the tsarist “prison house of peoples,” the Bolsheviks were able to unite the working class, men and women, across national and ethnic lines in a successful struggle for power.
We communists seek to link the fight for reforms to the struggle for socialist revolution, which alone will clear the way for the abolition of all forms of oppression and exploitation. Freeing the creative power of social labor from the fetters of class society will make it possible to bring about a communist society based on material abundance where no one’s development will be limited by poverty, class, race or sex. To carry out such a revolution requires the forging of a multiracial revolutionary workers party. The Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), dedicates itself to this task. Join us!

As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues... Some Remembrances-The First Small Anti-War Cries Are Raised To Stop The Madness - Lenin's WAr Against WAr

As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues... Some Remembrances-The First Small Anti-War Cries Are Raised To Stop The Madness -

 
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman  





The events leading up to World War I (known as the Great War before the world got clogged up with expansive wars in need of other numbers and names and reflecting too in that period before World War II a certain sense of “pride” in having participated in such an adventure even if it did mow down the flower of European youth from all classes) from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources had all the earmarks of a bloodbath early on once the industrial-sized carnage set in with the stalemated fronts. Also clogged in the trenches, or rather thrown in the nearest bin were the supposedly eternal pledges not honored by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those imperialist capitalist powers and their hangers-on in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20th century history. Other than isolated groups and individuals mostly in the weaker lesser capitalistically developed countries of Europe the blood lust got the better of most of the working class and its allies as young men rushed to the recruiting stations to “do their duty” and prove their manhood.


Decisive as well as we head down the slope to the first months of the second year of the war although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business, that nom de guerre not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International under the sway of the powerful German party although not for long), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experiences in Russia and Europe in the 19th century), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the monopolizing tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of “progressive” capitalism (in the Marxist sense of the term progressive in a historical materialist sense that capitalism was progressive against feudalism and other older economic models which turned into its opposite at this dividing point in history), and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as 1914 turns to 1915 in the sinkhole trenches of Europe that are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.  


Lenin also has a "peace" plan, a peace plan of sorts, a way out of the stinking trench warfare stalemate eating up the youth of the Eurasian landmass. Do what should have been done from the beginning, do what all the proclamations from all the beautifully-worded socialist manifestos called on the international working-class to do. Not a simple task by any means especially in that first year when almost everybody on all sides thought a little blood-letting would be good for the soul, the individual national soul, and in any case the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everybody could start producing those beautifully worded-manifestos against war again. (That by Christmas peace “scare” turned out to be a minute “truce” from below by English and German soldiers hungry for the old certainties banning the barbed wire and stinking trenches for a short reprieve in the trench fronts in France and played soccer before returning to drawn guns-a story made into song and which is today used as an example of what the lower ranks could do-if they would only turn the guns around. Damn those English and German soldiers never did turn the damn things around until too late and with not enough resolve and the whole world has suffered from that lack of resolve.)


Lenin’s hard-headed proposition: turn the bloody world war among nations into a class war to drive out the war-mongers and bring some peace to the blood-soaked lands. But that advanced thinking is merely the wave of the future as the rat and rain-infested sinkhole trenches of Europe were already in the first year a death trap for the flower of the European youth.   


 


The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way as did the various German-induced wars attempting to create one nation-state out of various satraps almost could not be avoided in the early 20th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and range and the increased rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last wars. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.


The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began the damn thing among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.


A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s  prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time as being on “the planet without a passport” was then as now, dangerous to the lives of left-wing revolutionaries), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America the Big Bill Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war), many of his IWW (Industrial Workers Of the World) comrades and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “club fed” for speaking the truth about American war aims in a famous Cleveland speech and, fittingly, ran for president in 1920 out of his Atlanta Penitentiary jail cell),  were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.


Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well when the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. Even my old anti-war amigo from my hometown who after I got out of the American Army during the Vietnam War marched with me in countless rallies and parades trying to stop the madness (and plenty of other “wise” heads from our generation of ’68 made that sea-change turn with him).


At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. Be ready to fight the operative words.


So imagine in the hot summer of 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.                   


Over the next period as we continue the long night of the 100th anniversary of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before the first frenzied shots were fired, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in places like Russia, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the hodge-podge colonies all over the world map, in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.     

 






V. I.   Lenin

The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War


Published: Sotsial-Demorkrat No. 43, July 26, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demorkrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 275-280.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2003 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
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During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.
This is axiomatic, and disputed only by conscious partisans or helpless satellites of the social-chauvinists. Among the former, for instance, is Semkovsky of the Organising Committee (No. 2 of its Izvestia), and among the latter, Trotsky and Bukvoyed,[2] and Kautsky in Germany. To desire Russia’s defeat, Trotsky writes, is “an uncalled-for and absolutely unjustifiable concession to the political methodology of social-patriotism, which would replace the revolutionary struggle against the war and the conditions causing it, with an orientation—highly arbitrary in the present conditions—towards the lesser evil” (Nashe Slovo No. 105).
This is an instance of high-flown phraseology with which Trotsky always justifies opportunism. A “revolutionary struggle against the war” is merely an empty and meaning less exclamation, something at which the heroes of the Second International excel, unless it means revolutionary action against one’s own government even in wartime. One has only to do some thinking in order to understand this. Wartime revolutionary action against one’s own government indubitably means, not only desiring its defeat, but really facilitating such a defeat. ("Discerning reader”: note that this does not mean “blowing up bridges”, organising unsuccessful strikes in the war industries, and ·in general helping the government defeat the revolutionaries.)
The phrase-bandying Trotsky has completely lost his bearings on a simple issue. It seems to him that to desire   Russia’s defeat means desiring the victory of Germany. (Bukvoyed and Semkovsky give more direct expression to the “thought”, or rather want of thought, which they share with Trotsky.) But Trotsky regards this as the “methodology of social-patriotism"! To help people that are unable to think for themselves, the Berne resolution (Sotsial Demokrat No. 40)[1] made it clear, that in all imperialist countries the proletariat must now desire the defeat of its own government. Bukvoyed and Trotsky preferred to avoid this truth, while Semkovsky (an opportunist who is more useful to the working class than all the others, thanks to his naively frank reiteration of bourgeois wisdom) blurted out the following: “This is nonsense, because either Germany or Russia can win” (Izvestia No. 2).
Take the example of the Paris Commune. France was defeated by Germany but the workers were defeated by Bismarck and Thiers! Had Bukvoyed and Trotsky done a little thinking, they would have realised that they have adopted the viewpoint on the war held by governments and the bourgeoisie, i.e., that they cringe to the “political methodology of social-patriotism”, to use Trotsky’s pretentious language.
A revolution in wartime means civil war; the conversion of a war between governments into a civil war is, on the one hand, facilitated by military reverses ("defeats") of governments; on the other hand, one cannot actually strive for such a conversion without thereby facilitating defeat.
The reason why the chauvinists (including the Organising Committee and the Chkheidze group) repudiate the defeat “slogan” is that this slogan alone implies a consistent call for revolutionary action against one’s own government in wartime. Without such action, millions of ultra-revolutionary phrases such as a war against “the war and the conditions, etc." are not worth a brass farthing.
Anyone who would in all earnest refute the “slogan” of defeat for one’s own government in the imperialist war should prove one of three things: (1) that the war of 1914-15 is not reactionary, or (2) that a revolution stemming from that war is impossible, or (3) that co-ordination and mutual aid are possible between revolutionary movements in all the   belligerent countries. The third point is particularly important to Russia, a most backward country, where an immediate socialist revolution is impossible. That is why the Russian Social-Democrats had to be the first to advance the “theory and practice” of the defeat “slogan”. The tsarist government was perfectly right in asserting that the agitation conducted by the Russian Social-Democratic Labour group in the Duma—the sole instance in the International, not only of parliamentary opposition but of genuine revolutionary anti-government agitation among the masses—that this agitation has weakened Russia’s “military might” and is likely to lead to its defeat. This is a fact to which it is foolish to close one’s eyes.
The opponents of the defeat slogan are simply afraid of themselves when they refuse to recognise the very obvious fact of the inseparable link between revolutionary agitation against the government and helping bring about its defeat.
Are co-ordination and mutual aid possible between the Russian movement, which is revolutionary in the bourgeois- democratic sense, and th  socialist movement in the West? No socialist who has publicly spoken on the matter during the last decade has doubted this, the movement among the Austrian proletariat after October 17, 1905,[3] actually proving it possible.
Ask any Social-Democrat who calls himself an internationalist whether or not he approves of an understanding between the Social-Democrats of the various belligerent countries on joint revolutionary action against all belligerent governments. Many of them will reply that it is impossible, as Kautsky has done (Die Neue Zeit, October 2, 1914), thereby fully proving his social-chauvinism. This, on the one hand, is a deliberate and vicious lie, which clashes with the generally known facts and the Basle Manifesto. On the other hand, if it were true, the opportunists would be quite right in many respects!
Many will voice their approval of such an understanding. To this we shall say: if this approval is not hypocritical, it is ridiculous to think that, in wartime and for the conduct of a war, some “formal” understanding is necessary, such as the election of representatives, the arrangement of a meeting, the signing of an agreement, and the choice of the day   and hour! Only the Semkovskys are capable of thinking so. An understanding on revolutionary action even in a single country, to say nothing of a number of countries, can be achieved only by the force of the example of serious revolutionary action, by launching such action and developing it. However, such action cannot be launched without desiring the defeat of the government, and without contributing to such a defeat. The conversion of the imperialist war into a civil war cannot be “made”, any more than a revolution can be “made”. It develops out of a number of diverse phenomena, aspects, features, characteristics and consequences of the imperialist war. That development is impossible without a series of military reverses and defeats of governments that receive blows from their own oppressed classes.
To repudiate the defeat slogan means allowing one’s revolutionary ardour to degenerate into an empty phrase, or sheer hypocrisy.
What is the substitute proposed for the defeat slogan? It is that of “neither victory nor defeat” (Semkovsky in Izvestia No. 2; also the entire Organising Committee in No. 1). This, however, is nothing but a paraphrase of the “defence of the fatherland” slogan. It means shifting the issue to the level of a war between governments (who, according to the content of this slogan, are to keep to their old stand, “retain their positions"), and not to the level of the struggle of the oppressed classes against their governments! It means justifying the chauvinism of all the imperialist nations, whose bourgeoisie are always ready to say—and do say to the people—that they are “only” fighting “against defeat”. “The significance of our August 4 vote was that we are not for war but against defeat," David, a leader of the opportunists, writes in his book. The Organising Committee, together with Bukvoyed and Trotsky, stand on fully the same ground as David when they defend the “neither-victory nor-defeat” slogan.
On closer examination, this slogan will be found to mean a “class truce”, the renunciation of the class struggle by the oppressed classes in all belligerent countries, since the class struggle is impossible without dealing blows at one’s “own” bourgeoisie, one’s “own” government, whereas dealing a   blow at one’s own government in wartime is (for Bukvoyed’s information) high treason, means contributing to the defeat of one’s own country. Those who accept the “neither victory-nor-defeat” slogan can only be hypocritically in favour of the class struggle, of “disrupting the class truce”; in practice, such people are renouncing an independent proletarian policy because they subordinate the proletariat of all belligerent countries to the absolutely bourgeois task of safeguarding the imperialist governments against defeat. The only policy of actual, not verbal disruption of the “class truce”, of acceptance of the class struggle, is for the proletariat to take advantage of the difficulties experienced by its government and its bourgeoisie in order to overthrow them. This, however, cannot be achieved or striven for, without desiring the defeat of one’s own government and without contributing to that defeat.
When, before the war, the Italian Social-Democrats raised the question of a mass strike, the bourgeoisie replied, no doubt correctly from their own point of view, that this would be high treason, and that Social-Democrats would be dealt with as traitors. That is true, just as it is true that fraternisation in the trenches is high treason. Those who write against “high treason”, as Bukvoyed does, or against the “disintegration of Russia”, as Semkovsky does, are adopting the bourgeois, not the proletarian point of view. A proletarian cannot deal a class blow at his government or hold out (in fact) a hand to his brother, the proletarian of the “foreign” country which is at war with “our side”, without committing “high treason”, without contributing to the defeat, to the disintegration of his “own”, imperialist “Great” Power.
Whoever is in favour of the slogan of “neither victory nor defeat” is consciously or unconsciously a chauvinist; at best he is a conciliatory petty bourgeois but in any case he is an -enemy to proletarian policy, a partisan of the existing ·governments, of the present-day ruling classes.
Let us look at the question from yet another angle. The war cannot but evoke among the masses the most turbulent sentiments, which upset the usual sluggish state of mass mentality. Revolutionary tactics are impossible if they are not adjusted to these new turbulent sentiments.


What are the main currents of these turbulent sentiments? They are: (1) Horror and despair. Hence, a growth of religious feeling. Again the churches are crowded, the reactionaries joyfully declare. “Wherever there is suffering there is religion," says the arch-reactionary Barr s. He is right, too. (2) Hatred of the “enemy”, a sentiment that is carefully fostered by the bourgeoisie (not so much by the priests), arid is of economic and political value only to the bourgeoisie. (3) Hatred of one’s own government and one’s own bourgeoisie—the sentiment of all class-conscious workers who understand, on the one hand, that war is a “continuation of the politics” of imperialism, which they counter by a “continuation” of their hatred of their class enemy, and, on the other hand, that “a war against war” is a banal phrase unless it means a revolution against their own government. Hatred of one’s own government and one’s own bourgeoisie cannot be aroused unless their defeat is desired; one cannot be a sincere opponent of a civil (i.e., class) truce without arousing hatred of one’s own government and bourgeoisie!
Those who stand for the “neither-victory-nor-defeat” slogan are in fact on the side of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists, for they do not believe in the possibility of inter national revolutionary action by the working class against their own governments, and do not wish to help develop such action, which, though undoubtedly difficult, is the only task worthy of a proletarian, the only socialist task. It is the proletariat in the most backward of the belligerent. Great Powers which, through the medium of their party, have had to adopt—especially in view of the shameful treachery of the German and French Social-Democrats— revolutionary tactics that are quite unfeasible unless they “contribute to the defeat” of their own government, but which alone lead to a European revolution, to the permanent peace of socialism, to the liberation of humanity from the horrors, misery, savagery and brutality now prevailing.



Notes



[1] See p. 163 of this volume.—Ed.


[2] Bukvoyed-D. Ryazanov.


[3] This refers to the tsar’s manifesto promulgated on October 17 (30), 1905. It promised "civil liberties" and a “legislative Duma”. The manifesto was a concession wrested from the tsarist regime by the revolution, but that concession by no means decided the fate of the revolution as the liberals and Mensheviks claimed, The Bolsheviks exposed the real meaning of the Manifesto and called upon the masses to continue the struggle and overthrow the autocracy.
The first Russian revolution exerted a great revolutionising influence on the working-class movement in other countries, in particular in Austria-Hungary. Lenin pointed out that the news about the tsar’s concession and his manifesto, with its promise of “liberties”, “played a decisive part in the final victory of universal suffrage in Austria”.
Mass demonstrations took place in Vienna and other industrial cities in Austria-Hungary. In Prague barricades were put up. As a result, universal suffrage was introduced in Austria.

Poet's Corner- On Memorial Day For Peace-War And Remembrance


Poet's Corner- On Memorial Day For Peace-War And Remembrance 

 

Not all war poetry can stand the test of literary greatness or longevity but it is almost all very poignant and to the point

 


Fighting Slogans For Today's Militants- Bread, Land and Peace!

Commentary

Has Markin gone senile on us with the headline slogans? Has Markin been in a time warp and gone back to the spring and summer of 1917 in Russia to appropriate the day-to-day slogans that the Bolsheviks grafted onto their program and which led to their success in the October revolution? No, Markin is not senile nor has he gone back in a time machine to the glory days of 1917. Markin has just taken a glance at some recent daily headlines and ‘creatively’ encapsulated those stories. Hear me out.

Bread- In Russia in 1917 the initial spark for the February revolution that overthrew the Czar were the demonstrations of working women, housewives and soldiers’ wives for bread. Literally. A look, on any given day, today at the worldwide rise in prices of basic foodstuffs due to a myriad of factors brings that old fight against starvation in stark relief. Literally. Add to that the lunatic increase in the price of fossil fuels and other forms of energy needed to produce the world’s goods and the situation cries out today for a fundamental change in the way the world’s finite resources are apportioned. Conclusion: Fighting propaganda centered on the need for a rationalization of the world economy through centralized planning under workers control is on the order of the day.

Land- In Russia in 1917 the peasants cried out for resolution of their land hunger after centuries of near starvation tilling of their tiny plots and their serf-like subservience to the landed interests. Today that land hunger has taken a different form, at least in America- ownership of single family homes- and the current housing crisis with its foreclosures and declines of prices in the housing market have placed working people up against the wall. Whether working people were right or wrong in their desire for private home ownership they are the ones taking it in the neck today. Conclusion: An immediate moratorium on foreclosures and other financial remedies is called for. Again, fighting propaganda on the question of rationalization of the housing market under the planning principal through workers councils is called for.

Peace- In Russia in 1917 the slaughter of World War I had finally hit home and the peasant-based army was falling apart under the direct military thrust of German imperialism, the inane goading of Western imperialism and the sheer madness of continuing the war by a broken army. Today Iraq and Afghanistan, to speak nothing of a plethora of other localized wars and disputes like the Palestinian question, have made the world an extremely dangerous place where war-like conditions can set off an explosion in an instant. Conclusion: Short and sweet- it is time to make class war on the warmongers, and in the first instance, the American military goliath. The beginning of wisdom for today’s propaganda fight is the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all American/ Allied troops and their mercenaries from Iraq and Afghanistan!

These three slogans point to the more general conclusion implicit in their exposition. All of this is a pipe dream or a Markin delusion if the fight does not include the fight for an independent working class party of our own that fights for a workers government so we can fight like hell to turn things around. In short, and here is where the 1917 analogy really comes into focus- we have to start talking Russian, circa 1917, to the bosses, pronto.