*****On Passing Left-Wing Political “Wisdom” To The Next Generation-With The Lessons Of The 1960s In Mind

*****On Passing Left-Wing Political “Wisdom” To The Next Generation-With The Lessons Of The 1960s In Mind

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

One of the worst excesses, and there were many although made mostly from ignorance and immaturity and were moreover minuscule compared to the conscious policies of those in power who we were opposing, that we who came of political age in the 1960s were culpable of was our sense that we had to reinvent the wheel of left-wing political struggle. Mostly a very conscious denial and rejection of those thinkers, cadre and organization who had come before us and whom were disqualified from the discourse by having been worn out, old-timey, or just ideas and methods that we had not thought of and therefore irrelevant. The expression “throwing out the baby with the bath water” may seem a cliché but serves a purpose here. Most of the time back then until fairly late, maybe too late when the tide had begun to ebb toward the end of the 1960s and the then current and fashionable anticommunist theories proved to be ridiculously inadequate, we turned our noses up at Marxism, and at Marxist-Leninist ways of organizing the struggle against the American beast.

I can remember more than a few times when somebody identified him or herself as a Marxist that I and the others in the room would groan audibly. Occasionally, as well, taking part in some of the shouting down exercises when the political disputes became heated. Part of the problem was that those who organizationally claimed to be Marxists-the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party and to some extent the Progressive Labor Party were following political lines that were far to the right (right being relative here in the context of the left-wing movement in this country) of the politics of those who considered themselves radical and revolutionary youth. Those organizations far too eager to traffic with what we called respectable bourgeois forces who were part of the problem since they helped control the governmental apparatus. (I won’t even mention the moribund Socialist/Social Democratic organizations that only old laborites and “old ladies in tennis sneakers,” although that might be a slander against those nice do-gooder ladies, followed as the expression went at the time.) I know, and I know that many others at the time,  had no time for a look at the history books, had nothing but a conscious disregard for the lessons of history, good and bad, that we thought was irrelevant in seeking to build the “newer world.” (Strangely, later after all our empirical experiment proved futile and counter-productive, quoting, quoting loudly and vehemently  from this or that book, by this or that thinker, this or that revolutionary or radical became the rage. Ah, the excesses of youth.)               

Of course not everybody who came through the 1960s passed through any left-wing political school. Despite the nostalgia, despite the now puffed-up claims that we had this or that decisive effect on history, especially these days with the commemoration of the 40^th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the trotting out once again of the overblew claims that the American anti-war movement stopped the Vietnam War rather than the heroic struggles of the people of Vietnam, the number of the young who got catch up more than marginally was significantly smaller that the photographs, videos, and remembrances of the times would suggest. A case in point is my old friend Sam Lowell, from my growing in Carver times whose longtime political trajectory I want to highlight in this sketch.

Highlight to provide something, I am not sure what, perhaps a cautionary tale, to what appears to be the makings of the next “fresh breeze” coming through the land that another Carver corner boy, the late Peter Paul Markin, would harangue us with on lonely Friday nights was coming. The big turn in the environmental movement, the fight for better conditions for young workers (and old) epitomized by the “Fight for $15” movement and above all, the bedrock struggle of the “Black Lives Matter” movement portends some new awakening and we old-timers who have kept the political faith have something about all of that early experience which may push those struggles forward. Here’s Sam’s story and see what you think:   

 

Sam Lowell when he was young, when he was coming of age in the 1960s along with his hang around guys at Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street in Carver, did not give a “tinker’s damn” (Sam’s term which he would endlessly utter especially when the late Peter Paul Markin would start talking about what was going on outside of the Jimmy Jack corner world) about politics, about the fate of the world, about the burning and pressing issues of that day nuclear disarmament, black civil rights down South (he if anything had the Northern white working class prejudices inherited from his parents and relatives using the “n” word to refer to blacks for a very long time), and the exploding war in Vietnam. Sam’s world, like many guys of that time, like now too as far as anybody can see, was about girls or sex or name the gender combinations, above all about the music of the times, about what is now called the classic age of rock and roll (the folk music minute of that period which Bart Webber tried to get him interested in was, is, a book sealed with seven seals and he still grinds his teeth when any of us who hang with him still mention that genre).

Sam, declared by his local draft board exempt from military service as the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after he father had passed away suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1965, had pretty much kept his head in the sand about the war, probably supported the war against demon communism as much as anybody in town who was not directly involved in the escalation of the war. That is until one of his hang around guys, Freddie Callahan, Jack’s younger brother, had lain down his head in some rotted jungle in some unpronounceable hamlet in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in late 1967 and who would later have his name placed on that black granite down in Washington, D.C. which would bring a tear to Sam eye every time he visited it despite his complete change of heart about the war.

The war, the hellish flare-up and destructiveness of the war had not been Freddie’s fault, it had not been Freddie’s war as Sam was at pains to explain when he did get active in the anti-war movement and people around town thought that he was being disrespectful of Freddie’s memory and of the flag, actually probably more the flag until very late, maybe about 1972 when even the American Legion types in town saw the writing on the wall, some of them anyway.

Bart Webber was the first to take his slightly held anti-war feelings to the holding up the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner night but he was facing the draft himself in 1966 so Sam had not taken his plight to heart. It really had been Freddie’s death that got him thinking, Freddie whom he had known since fifth grade when his own family had moved to Carver from North Adamsville when the shipbuilding trade there bottomed out and his father sought work in the new electronics plant just built up the road from Carver. Got him thinking about lots of things that did not add up in the world, the world of people just trying to get by without being shot at, or shot up by friend or foe.

One day, maybe in early spring 1968 in any case sometime before summer of that year, Sam had gone to Boston about thirty miles up the road from Carver on some business when he was walking near the Park Street subway station and a young guy about his age in regulation long hair (Sam’s was short although long for Carver young adults just then and commented on at Jimmy Jack’s by the older crowd going in for the old-timers’ blue plate specials and gung-ho guys who had no truck with “fairies” and “hippies”), unkempt beard, blue jeans and sandals, a picture of heaven’s own high priest hippie who handed him a leaflet for an anti-war rally sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society that was going to take place on the Common later that afternoon. (That was the notorious SDS that every right-thinking American believed, including Sam a little before Freddie’s death, as they could not understand kids who seemed to have everything going for them including draft exemptions were so rebellious unless some unknown source was prodding them, as the agents, paid or unpaid, of Moscow or China or someplace antagonistic to the interests of the United States. Every time an SDS rally was broken up by the cops, or mass arrests occurred, those believers breathed a short sigh of relief).     

The guy in hippie garb pressed the issue, something Sam thought was odd since in his experience these hippie types were too laid back doing dope and sex and listening to acid rock to bother about politics usually saying that to get involved only “encouraged” those politicians who had depended on free-wheeling unpaid volunteer youth to campaign for them. That drug, sex and rock and roll were okay with him although he had not been into the dope scene then but rather the traditional Carver Friday and Saturday night down by the cranberry bogs drinking cheap whiskey scene, a scene that Carver guys had been doing since time immemorial at the bogs from what he had heard.

This dippy hippie started yelling at him that it that it was his “duty” to attend the rally and help “stop the fucking war.”  Something in that common language “speech” made Sam take notice and he asked the hippie where he was from. He answered from Lynn, a very working class town on the North Shore of Boston, and told Sam, who blushed a little at the information, that he had already been in the Army, had served in Vietnam and had had enough of seeing his buddies killed or otherwise “fucked up.” Sam then out of the blue mentioned the death of Freddie Callahan, something he had never talked about except with the guys at Jimmy Jack’s, and the hippie told him that he had better get his ass to the rally before half their generation went up in smoke.

Sam pleaded business but that afternoon and early evening as the sun went down in Boston Sam was no longer “not political.” And Lance Jones, the hippie who had “recruited” him was there that afternoon and many times later to make sure that he did not backslide, and to give him the “skinny” on what was really going on in Vietnam and whose interests that commitment was serving. Sam and Lance (and others) would do many things together, sit-in at draft boards (Sam uneasy about that given his own status as exempt but Lance said everybody counted in the struggle), rallies, blocking highways and every other kind of civil protest against the damn war.

The defining moment, the moment Sam saw that the movement was ebbing, was becoming ineffective as a way to stop the “fucking war” as even he was prone to express his outrage at the constant bombings and constant lies about the situation, was down in Washington D.C. on May Day 1971 where there was a separation in the movement between those who wanted to endlessly built, presumably, larger mass rallies to show the people’s war weariness and those who decided it was time for more militant in-your-face tactics when the proposal was to “stop the government, if the government did not stop the war.” Sam had gone with the militants, a decision he has since never regretted although not for the outcome of the event itself which was an unmitigated failure but because of the enormity of that failure he had to think through things a bit more carefully, think more strategically.

He had been manhandled and arrested by the cops the first day out as the governmental forces far outnumbered and were more effective in containing the mass than that mass of people had been in evading the waiting cops and troops. Sam had spent a week in detention in RFK Stadium, a goddam football field as he would always tell everybody afterward, for his troubles (although he tempered his remarks about the stadium after the coup in Chile in 1973 where those militants were not merely harassed and detained but jailed for long periods or shot death out of hand in many cases). 

Sam, Lance, Jack Callahan, Frankie Riley, me, maybe a couple of other guys did other things too, things like taking those continent-wide hitchhikes to the West Coast, the rock concerts, all of the stuff that those who had broken from the old expected cookie-cutter, if in Sam’s case only partially and slowly since he was not sure that the whole thing had not been a dream, and he had those family responsibilities although they lessened as his sisters came of age and left the house and his mother re-married to a good guy who ran a tool and die shop in town and had government contracts for high precision machine work. But it was funny thing about Sam, a thing that was not apparent when he hung around Carver in high school but once he was convinced that he needed to do something he stuck with it (he would later tell anybody who would listen that “sticking with it” included his two drawn out failed marriages beyond repair).

Sam, after that debacle in Washington, had settled in for the long haul, had listened to what Lance had to say about needing to organize better, get more substantial allies. Gave a glance at Marx and some other thinkers who knew what they were talking about if you wanted to  effect real change and not just play at the thing for kicks, or for something to do while you are in school or on the loose, had read some and while for a long time he had his misgivings about taking his political cues from around the edges of rational politics, politics that he and his family, his neighbors, his corner boys had dismissed or worse stigmatized as “commie” talk which still hovered over his thinking. But Sam had been the first in the group to sense in the mid-1970s, particularly after the fall of Saigon and the close of the Vietnam era which had almost split the country in two, that the Garden of Eden was going to be postponed for a long time, that the tide had ebbed just as Bart Webber had sensed the rising tide in the mid-1960s.

But Sam stayed with the commitment to serious political change, to right some wrongs, to be a stand-up guy when some egregious governmental decision reared its ugly head. Stayed with it far longer that Lance who wound up going to school and becoming a CPA, longer than Bart who decided writing law briefs was easier than sitting around with about twelve people dedicated to changing the world and projecting when the next great mass upsurge would occur. Stayed with longer than Frankie Riley who also was drawn to writing legal briefs although he made a comeback in the lead-up to the first Iraq war in 1991. Longer than even the late Peter Paul Markin who had totally lost his moorings, let that “wanting habits” hunger that all the Jimmy Jack’s hang out guys had near the surface of their lives get the best of him and got caught up in the down side of the dope trade and wound up in a back alley face down under mysterious conditions in Sonora down in Mexico after a dope deal went bad. Yeah, those were not good years

So Sam faced the next few decades doing his best to keep up the good fight, working mainly with ad hoc committees that would rise and fall over specific issues like the effects of the “Reagan revolution” in this country, the struggles in Central America throughout the 1980s, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, that first Iraq war in 1991, and a laundry list of other causes great and small which filled his political life in hard times. But always kept his eyes open and ears to the ground to see if some new version of that 1960s experience would get some wind in its sails as new generations got caught up in the whirlwind of trying to right the world’s wrongs. He knew that the 1960s experience could never be exactly replicated, that each new generation would come to understandings in its own ways and forms, did not believe that a lot of 1960s stuff should be replicated but he did believe that another wave would come, believed in that vision for a long time. But when, damn it.

One of Sam’s worries as he got older and got more concerned about the future, especially in the post 9/11 world of the early 2000s, got much more concerned about the possibilities of a socialist future if not for him then for later generations as the American body politic took one of its prolonged turning in and against itself was that there would be no one to pass on whatever accumulated political wisdom he and his dwindling band of aging 1960s sisters and brothers had been through. No one to make sense of the political battles won and lost, no one to pick up the skills necessary to organize any effective opposition to the fierce predatory appetites of the American imperium, or maybe better said, any opposition at all as the post-2003 anti-war landscape demonstrated. Most importantly no one to learn how to avoid the mistakes of the past, mistakes made, unlike the American government, mostly out of willful ignorance, foolhardiness and hubris but certainly avoidable. Avoidable since a great if fairly obvious lesson from his own experiences had been that uprisings against the government, against the social norms of the day are short and precious opportunities not to be squandered by willful ignorance, foolhardiness and hubris.       

Sam’s youthfully derived certitudes had taken a hammering in the process of the reactionary counter-offensive that erupting in the mid-1970s as the spirit of the 1960s rapidly dissipated, and took a decisive turn right under the auspices of the Reagan Revolution. The self-serving, self-promoting, social Darwinist view of society systematically laid out in that period has held a full head of steam since then as everyone almost daily has his or her nose rubbed in the hard fact that most people are not getting ahead while the bourgeoisie, the economic royalists, what did one wag call them, oh yeah, “the one-percent” with all the guns, prosper with no sweat.  That ethos had never really abated despite a couple of promising uprising blips around opposition to the second Iraq war in 2003 which evaporated after the hellish bombs began to fall in earnest in Baghdad and after the world financial meltdown in 2008 and the subsequent short-lived and anarchistic Occupy movement of late 2011.

So Sam had more recently begun to feel that feeling in the extreme,   the fear that there would be nobody to pass the torch to, nobody in the American body politic to learn a couple of things about past left-wing struggles and organizational efforts to attempt to “tame the monster.” Began to wonder if what he believed had not been an idle thought or some kind of self-induced paranoia.

Over the previous several years he had given the immediate reasons some thought as he began to realize that the generation after his which was the logical place to have passed that information onto never in the aggregate cared much about his kind of politics, had turn tail and gotten caught up in the “Reagan revolution” or after witnessing what happened to the ‘60s crowd ducked their heads, seriously ducked their heads when the deal went down. He had also become pretty sanguine about prospects for the generation after that, the grandkids, who seemed preoccupied with “Me” and with looking down toward the ground with their technological gadgetry and their ethereal “social networking” tweeter. But of late he was not so sure he should have been ready to throw in the towel but a new gathering storm, or what old Bart Webber, who he had run into recently in town for the funeral of a brother, had called “the fresh breeze” was still in its embryonic stage.

Sam had had to laugh at one point after a small demonstration of few hundred in Boston’s Park Street on the Common, the historic spot for such activities, against the escalation of the war in Afghanistan in the early days of the Obama administration  (one of the “surges” that was supposed to secure “victory” and which in the final analysis led to more doors in more villages being kicked in and the United States’ action acting, once again,  as a “recruiting sergeant” for ISIS-type organizations). That demonstration drew a cohort young people, people who had not previously been out in the public square but who were bewildered by a “peace” American President, a Nobel Peace Prize winner to boot, sending more boots on the ground after he had told the nation that the best American course was to withdraw from that benighted country. Of course the usual dwindling crew of AARP-worthy older types, the ones that his old friend Pete Markin had called when they were young the “little old ladies in tennis sneakers, Quakers up-tights, and assorted harmless do-gooders” back in the Carver days when he didn’t give a damn about politics and now here he was a “little old man in tennis sneakers” carrying on their seemingly utopian struggle.

An unusual combination indeed. The sly laugh part though was his realization that if there was any new action, any seeking of the “newer world” as that same Markin liked to called it comparable to the 1960s, that it would be the grandpas and grandmas and the grandkids linked up against the world. He was okay with that if that ever happened but after that initial burst of young energy faded he got increasingly more morose about that prospect, and the handing of that goddam torch.

Like with a lot of things in the world of politics, particularly left-wing politics where due to the smallness and isolation of those forces there is tendency to have to react to events not of your own making, the reaction by governments, particularly the United States, following 9/11 with its attempt to institutionalize the national security state and to seek vengeance at any target foreign or domestic that it considered dangerous. No question the scariest time of his political life, the only time he felt the full heat of physical threat from the average citizen whom he assumed usually view people demonstrating about anything as mere cranks and weirdoes was in the aftermath of the frenzied American bombing campaign and troop occupation in Afghanistan in 2001 right after 9/11 when he had with very few others had organized a small, a very small demonstration in opposition to the bombing campaign at Park Street and took more menacing guff from passers-by than he had ever encountered before. Those were dark days when some locally well-known committed peaceniks dependable in fair weather favored folding up the tent rather than face the hostile streets, and no question they were hostile, were suddenly not available to rally.

Like Sam said he hoped the later Occupy movement which arose phoenix-like out of the ashes of the world financial crisis but that fizzled fairly quickly and that sent Sam into another bout with what the hell, no who the hell was going to lead the struggle, who among the young who of necessity with their energy and sense of wonder drive all the great movements, was going to step forward. He felt at that time that he would have no problem taking a back sit in the struggle if the new blood came along.   

Here is a funny thing, a quirk of politics. Everybody Sam talked to, young and old, understood that the social tinder underlying American society only needed a little push to go wild. Knew that as a result of the vast increase in income inequality, knew the weight of the endless wars on the budget and human resources   was at a breaking point, knew that people, a lot of people, did not feel they were getting ahead in life always something that will steadily enflame people. So Sam, and they, the ones he talked to and talked to him knew something had to flare up. But didn’t, for a long time didn’t. Then in a rather quick succession the environment, the fight for a living wage and the fight against police brutality and the fight against the hard racism against black people were taken up by the young, or rather sections of the young from say late 2013 to now.

Not everything that has been proposed, not every action has made political sense but there is some motion toward upping the struggle, getting back into the street politics that Sam had been pushing for some time in various committee meetings since the portals of government seemed to be tone-deaf to what was going on down at the base of society. Here is the kicker though. The kicker for now as things are still in flux, still have a way to go before they are sifted out. Things may be in flux and need sifting out but Sam is starting to get and uneasy feeling already. Sam went to a meeting of those who wanted to respond to the various egregious police shootings of the past years around the country and tried to make some points, give some perspectives. He was rather unceremoniously dismissed by the young leaders there, both the young black and white leaders, as an old-timey too talkative guy.

The young, like in his generation, appear ready to seek to reinvent the wheel. Appear too as well to be as naïve about the enemies they are facing as they were in his generation. But what bothered Sam most of late has been that the young in their identity political way are “ageist” if such a term makes sense, are disrespectful of his right to have his say since when the deal goes down he will be on the barricades right beside them. Sam thought that even with the slights he could still say-“Ah, to young was very heaven” though as old Wordsworth had said in his sunnier days.    

In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Abdullah Ka'bah, (aka Jeff Fort)

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!- Abdullah Ka'bah, (aka Jeff Fort)

 

 

http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html

 

A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

KA'BAH, ABDULLAH MALIK (AKA JEFF FORT)

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners Former And Present!- Luis V. Rodríguez

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners Former And Present!- Luis V. Rodríguez

 

http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html

 

A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Sekou Monga,

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners Former And Present!-Sekou Monga,

 

http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html

 

A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

 

A View From The International Left-Smear Campaign in British Labour Party-Imperialism, Zionism and Anti-Jewish Bigotry

Workers Vanguard No. 1091	3 June 2016

Smear Campaign in British Labour Party-Imperialism, Zionism and Anti-Jewish Bigotry

The following was written by our comrades in the Spartacist League/Britain.

In the run-up to the 5 May local and Welsh and Scottish assembly elections, the left-wing leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, was subjected to a vicious smear campaign spearheaded by Labour’s right wing with the aid of the Tories (Conservatives) and the capitalist press. Corbyn was elected as party leader last September based on talk of socialism, trade-union rights and immigrant rights and is also a forthright defender of Palestinian rights. The get-Corbyn cabal, which reached all the way to Zionist New York Times columnist Roger Cohen and Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog, shrieked that the party under his leadership has become a haven for “leftist anti-Semites.” To hear Tory swine like Prime Minister David Cameron and then-mayor of London Boris Johnson sanctimoniously bemoaning racism in the Labour Party was truly sickening.

The right wingers of the Labour Party, successors to former prime minister Tony Blair, have been manoeuvering to oust him. Most recently they looked forward to removing him in the event of a Labour defeat in the elections. In the upshot, Labour pretty much held its own. Underlining the cynical character of the witch hunt, the “discovery” of ever more “anti-Semites” ceased even before the ballots had been counted, to be replaced by a new “scandal” that Corbyn’s Labour Party was supposedly rife with woman-haters. The latest smear was based on specious claims, quickly proven false, that many of the 35,000 signatories to a petition urging the BBC to remove Laura Kuenssberg as its political editor had made misogynist comments. Kuenssberg has consistently hounded Corbyn, seeing in him a representative of the working masses the establishment so loathes.

The supposed evidence of anti-Jewish bigotry ranged from the trivial to the stitched-up, much of it coming from the notorious right-wing bottom-feeding blogger who goes by the name “Guido Fawkes” and dating back to well before Corbyn became party leader last September. The witch hunters were joined by the successful Labour candidate for London mayor, Sadiq Khan, a Muslim who had himself been pilloried by the Tories for allegedly befriending “Muslim extremists.” Corbyn strenuously rejected charges that Labour was full of racists, but he did acquiesce to the suspension of a number of party members. Worse yet, his chief lieutenant John McDonnell volubly endorsed the crusade to hunt down “anti-Semites” in the party. Those suspended included Muslim MP Naz Shah, who was also forced to resign as McDonnell’s parliamentary private secretary, and sometime left-Labourite Ken Livingstone. These suspensions should be rescinded immediately.

Livingstone has much to answer for to the working class. As mayor of London he faithfully served the City bankers, he urged Tube [subway] workers to cross RMT picket lines and defended the role of the police in the cold-blooded execution of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005. As a Spartacist League placard at the London May Day rally read: “Ex-Mayor Livingstone: Pro-City, Pro-Police, Anti-Union, but NOT Anti-Jewish!” A second placard read: “No Vote to Blairite Stooge Sadiq Khan!”

To his credit, Livingstone rightly stated: “If you look at what this is all about, it’s not about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.... What this is all about is actually the struggle of the embittered old Blairite MPs to try to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn” (BBC News online, 30 April). Indeed, a spokesman for the Zionist Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) admitted as much when he ranted, “Save your pitch fork for Corbyn.”

As we documented in our article, “Britain: Banana Monarchy” (Workers Vanguard No. 1082, 29 January), since Corbyn’s election, the Tories, Blairites and the bourgeois media—especially the liberal Guardian—have waged an unrelenting class war aimed at removing him. Only days after Corbyn took over as Labour leader, the Sunday Times (20 September 2015) published a warning from an unnamed “senior serving general” that Corbyn would face a “mutiny” if he tried to act on his commitment to scrap the Trident submarine nuclear missile system or pull out of NATO. This coup threat was echoed two months later when the head of the armed forces, General Nicholas Houghton, in full military regalia, effectively declared on TV that Corbyn’s opposition to nuclear weapons made him unfit to be prime minister. Houghton was immediately backed up by Corbyn’s defence spokesman, the Blairite Maria Eagle. Barely a week has gone by without some overt attack on Corbyn by Blairite plotters. But as the outcome of the latest vendetta shows, every plot to remove him comes up against the stubborn fact that he is more popular than ever among the party membership, which has doubled in size since his campaign for party leader.

Corbyn is hardly a revolutionary; he is firmly committed to a parliamentary path to what would effectively be a new version of the old Labourite “welfare state.” Nonetheless, Corbyn’s election as Labour leader came as a nasty shock to the bourgeois establishment, and especially the right wing of the Labour Party. His campaign set in motion a process to restore the party’s historic links to its working-class base, reversing the direction the Blairites had taken towards becoming an overtly capitalist party. As we wrote in “Britain: Banana Monarchy”:

“Any move that weakens the grip of the Blairites within the party is in the interests of the working class in its struggles against the capitalist class. As the Spartacist League/Britain has stated from the beginning, we have a side in the class war raging in the Labour Party. Against the right-wing attempts to oust him, we say: Defend Jeremy Corbyn’s right to run the Labour Party, and in his way!”

Zionism: No Friend of the Jewish People

August Bebel, a central leader of the pre-World War I German Social Democracy, pithily described anti-Jewish bigotry, which whipped up populist venom by singling out “Jewish bankers,” as the “socialism of fools.” But those who today promiscuously toss around unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism are sinister enemies of all who solidarise with the Palestinian people and of the left and workers movement as a whole. The campaign to neutralise and silence international solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people is orchestrated from the highest levels of the Israeli state, with support from its imperialist patrons in Britain, the U.S. and Germany.

In 2011, the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu enacted a law that criminalised advocacy of a boycott of Israel. And at a March 28 conference in Jerusalem to plot strategy against the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz called for “targeted civil eliminations” of BDS “leaders.” Coming from a government that has killed some 200 Palestinians just since last October, and slaughtered more than 2,300 during its July 2014 onslaught on Gaza, this is not idle chatter.

Within the Labour Party, there is considerable overlap between Labour Friends of Israel and the Blairite Progress grouping. In early April, Progress head Richard Angell issued an “action plan” involving the Jewish Labour Movement to deal with “antisemitism within [Labour’s] ranks” (mirror.co.uk, 5 April). The Jewish Labour Movement is affiliated not only to the Labour Party but also to the World Zionist Organization, which finances the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

This provides some context for the recent raft of “anti-Semitism” smears in Britain. In February, Alex Chalmers, a BICOM intern, slandered the Oxford University Labour Club for having “some kind of problem with Jews” after they voted to endorse Israeli Apartheid Week on campus. When Malia Bouattia, a Muslim woman of Algerian origin who supports the Palestinian cause, subsequently ran successfully for the presidency of the National Union of Students, she, too, was accused of being anti-Jewish. Vicki Kirby, a Labour candidate in Woking [outside of London], was suspended for a 2011 tweet that Guido Fawkes dug up and doctored to make it look as if she promoted racist caricatures of Jews. As Jewish writer David Baddiel attested, Kirby had simply quoted some lines from his 2010 comedy film The Infidel.

Fawkes likewise “outed” Naz Shah for a 2014 Facebook post, before she became a Labour MP, that depicted a map of Israel superimposed on a map of the U.S. Ironically, those who maligned Shah for allegedly supporting the forced transfer of the Israeli Jewish population are the very people who apologise for an Israeli government filled with open proponents of the forced transfer of the Palestinian population from “Greater Israel.” It turned out that the map was originally posted by American Jewish academic Norman Finkelstein, who pointed to the obvious dark humour intended: “So, we have this joke: Why doesn’t Israel become the 51st state? Answer: Because then, it would only have two senators” (opendemocracy.net). The Zionists hate Finkelstein, the son of a concentration camp survivor, not least for his indictments of how they cynically wield the Nazi genocide of the Jews as a bludgeon against those who speak out against Israeli atrocities.

Ken Livingstone was accused of being anti-Jewish because, in defending Shah, he had the chutzpah to say that when “Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism. This was before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.” Sundry critics tried to dismiss Livingstone’s statement by pointing out how his facts were mangled (Hitler never won an election, etc., etc.). Despite his glib reduction of the Holocaust to a product of Hitler’s madness, his point about collaboration between Zionists and the Nazis is correct. Livingstone cited Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (1983), a book the Spartacist League/Britain drew on for the article “Zionist Big Lie targets Perdition” (Workers Hammer No. 88, May 1987). The Zionists prevented that play, written by Jim Allen and directed by Ken Loach, from being staged in London because it was based on the true story of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis in facilitating the deportation to the death camps of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews in 1944.

Hitler’s ultimate aim was the extermination of all Jews, Zionist and non-Zionist alike. But in its first years, the Third Reich frequently accepted the proffered assistance of the Zionists in helping make Germany “Judenrein” (cleansed of Jews). As documented by Yeshiva University historian Lucy Dawidowicz in The War Against the Jews 1933-1945 (1975), only months after Hitler came to power, the Zionist Federation of Germany (ZVfD) “proposed that the ‘new German state’ recognize the Zionist movement as the most suitable Jewish group in the new Germany with which to deal” and “that since emigration would provide a solution to the Jewish question, it should therefore receive government assistance.” The ZVfD welcomed “the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race.” Two months later, the Jewish Agency signed the secret August 1933 Ha’avara (Transfer) agreement with the Hitler regime, which allowed wealthy German Jews to move to Palestine (and only to Palestine) with part of their capital in order to provide an outlet for German exports.

In turn, the Nazi state granted special status to the Zionist movement, which was far smaller than the non-Zionist Jewish organisations. In January 1935, Nazi chief Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo and second-in-command of the SS, told the Bavarian political police that “the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organizations...lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership” because they were preparing Jews for emigration to Palestine (quoted in Dawidowicz). While active socialists and communists were thrown into Dachau, the Zionists were for some years the only non-Nazi political group allowed to function legally, the Zionist banner the only flag aside from the Nazi swastika to fly on German soil.

There was more to this than Zionist Realpolitik in the face of overwhelming Nazi repression, as latter-day apologists would have it. As the revolutionary workers movement grew towards the end of the 19th century, so did organised anti-Jewish bigotry. Overwhelmingly, the Jewish workers, and a significant layer of the Jewish intelligentsia, sought their salvation through the struggle, alongside their non-Jewish class brothers and sisters, for socialist revolution. It was to stanch this movement and to incite pogroms that the tsarist secret police propagated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a crude forgery that conjured up an international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. But when rumours of a pogrom spread through St. Petersburg at the height of the 1905 Revolution, the workers’ soviet mobilised some 12,000 armed workers to fight the reactionaries; likewise in Warsaw, integrated workers defence guards were set up to patrol Jewish areas and ward off pogromist mobs (see “Revolution, Counterrevolution and the Jewish Question,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 49-50, Winter 1993-94).

In his 1958 essay “The Non-Jewish Jew,” Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher accounted for the disproportionate role of Jews in the socialist movement:

“They were a priori exceptional in that as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures. They were born and brought up on the borderlines of various epochs. Their mind matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other....

“Like Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky strove, together with their non-Jewish comrades, for the universal, as against the particularist, and for the internationalist, as against the nationalist, solutions to the problems of their time.”

Zionist founding father Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) despised the assimilationist and pro-socialist Jewish proletariat. Rather than fight anti-Jewish bigotry and repression, Herzl and his fellow Zionists used it as an excuse to separate Europe’s Jews from their compatriots and mould them into a nation with its own homeland, in Palestine. Ideologically nurtured in the cradle of German national “awakening,” Zionism embraced the reactionary ideals of Blut (blood) and Volk (nation). Born long after the bourgeois nation-state had outlived its historically progressive role in the era of capitalist consolidation, Zionism distinguished itself in being a particularly venal and racialist brand of nationalism. The Zionist leaders raised the battle cry, “A land without people for a people without land,” knowing full well that to make Palestine a land without people would require the expulsion of much of its Arab population.

The Zionist project could only be realised with the support of a powerful imperialist patron—be it tsarist Russia, the Kaiser’s (or Hitler’s) Germany, Britain or the U.S. The Zionists peddled their wares with the claim that they could neutralise Jewish support for the revolutionary socialist movement. As Winston Churchill later ranted, the Zionists could help in defeating the “sinister confederacy” of “International Jews” who conspired “for the overthrow of civilization” (“Zionism versus Bolshevism, A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” Illustrated Sunday Herald, 8 February 1920). While Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann looked to the British or U.S. imperialists, the Revisionist right wing inspired by Vladimir Jabotinsky gravitated towards Mussolini’s Italy and even Hitler’s Germany. As late as 1941, a Revisionist splinter calling itself the National Military Organisation (NMO), better known as the Stern Gang, appealed to the Third Reich:

“Common interests could exist between the establishment of a New Order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.”

— quoted in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators

It was such “common interests” that led Herzl and his followers to find allies among the more reactionary elements of the bourgeoisie, who wanted to rid themselves of “their” Jews. Weizmann managed to secure the 1917 Balfour Declaration, with its vague promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The British imperialists aimed to establish a bulwark of support in the region, pitting Jews against Palestinians. They also hoped to undermine Jewish support for Bolshevism on the eve of the victorious October Revolution in Russia, then Britain’s ally in World War I.

In this latter aim they failed. In the course of the Russian Revolution and the civil war against imperialist and domestic counterrevolutionary forces, which carried out pogroms against Jews and reds wherever they went, the dispossessed Jewish masses flocked to the Bolshevik banner. The Jewish nationalist and pro-Zionist socialist groups in Russia and the Ukraine became empty shells. As the Third All-Russia Conference of the Jewish Communist Sections declared in 1920:

“The Jewish workers and the poorest of the Jewish people understand quite well that only the communist order will put an end to all pogroms, will root out all nationalist prejudices, will erase all national restrictions and install over the whole face of the earth a genuine brotherhood of peoples.”

— News of Central Bureau of the Jewish Sections (October 1920)

The Bolshevik Revolution and the early Soviet state under Lenin and Trotsky were a beacon to workers and the oppressed everywhere, including the Arab masses subjugated by British imperialism in the Near East, who suffered under the barbarity of capitalist “civilisation.” The overthrow of capitalism and the institution of a planned collectivised economy opened the road to the liberation and development of all the many Soviet peoples. Even after the reactionary and nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy usurped political power from the working class, it was the proletarian class character of the Soviet Union that allowed it to save well over two million Jews fleeing the Nazi murder machine and to smash Hitler’s Third Reich. In contrast, the imperialist “democracies” turned back all but a handful of Jewish refugees. Many of the Jewish refugees who were allowed into Britain were detained as so-called enemy aliens during World War II and thousands were deported. Most notorious was the ship Dunera, which was packed with 2,000 mostly Jewish refugees along with 450 Italian and German prisoners for the two-month voyage to Australia.

For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!

Young activists who solidarise with the cause of the Palestinian people in the face of Israeli state terror would do well to consider the words of the Jewish Communists in 1920. Revolutionary proletarian internationalism is the only road to the national and social emancipation of the Palestinian people. This may seem far-fetched in an age when the opportunist “far left” sneers at the Marxist goal of an egalitarian international communist order and even class struggle seems a thing of the past. However, if the past decade has demonstrated nothing else, it is that catastrophic crises are endemic to the capitalist profit system. The same holds true of the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, as the current strike wave in France and years of protests and strikes in Greece demonstrate, notwithstanding the stranglehold of the reformist, pro-capitalist trade union bureaucracies.

The capitalist state of Israel is no exception to this Marxist understanding. While Israeli society has moved steadily to the right in recent decades, the historic interests of the Israeli Jewish working class run counter to those of their capitalist rulers and exploiters. So long as the national rather than the class axis prevails, the Palestinians will lose out to the overwhelming military superiority of the Zionist state. It is only the working class of Israel that has the capacity and historic interest to shatter the Zionist state from within. In fighting for the creation of revolutionary internationalist workers parties in the Near East we struggle to win the Israeli Jewish workers away from their Zionist rulers, to recognise that their class allies are the working people of the Arab countries and to champion the national rights of the Palestinians. Likewise we seek to break the Arab toiling masses from Arab nationalism and Islamic reaction (see “Defend the Palestinian People!” Workers Vanguard No. 1089, 6 May).

The 2011 Egyptian protests did find an echo in the mass protests in Israel that summer, showing the potential to undermine the garrison mentality drummed into Israeli Jewish workers by the Zionist rulers, who tell them that they are surrounded by a “sea” of hostile Arabs. However, the uprising in Egypt did not present a challenge to capitalist rule by the proletariat; rather, it was dominated by bourgeois nationalists and Islamists. For their part, the Revolutionary Socialists (RS) in Egypt, associated with the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), simply capitulated to these forces. From pushing illusions in the army to backing the reactionary Muslim Brotherhood and, ultimately, the coup that brought the military to power, at every stage the RS helped to ensure that the Egyptian proletariat would remain tied to its class enemies.

In Britain, the reformists of the SWP prate that the liberal BDS movement is “the potentially most serious challenge to Israel’s position and to the continuance of its long-term policy of piecemeal and de facto annexation of the whole of Palestine” (Socialist Review, July/August 2013). The BDS campaign is based on the bankrupt assumption that the Israeli state can be pressured by its “democratic” imperialist paymasters to halt the oppression of the Palestinian people. The notion that the (admittedly well-funded and powerful) “Zionist lobby” is responsible for imperialist support to Israel is ludicrous. It is in pursuit of its own geopolitical interests that U.S. imperialism pumps some $3 billion a year in military aid to its Israeli gendarme.

According to the Palestine Solidarity Committee, the boycott strategy “exerts moral pressure on the British Government by giving expression to the desire to move towards a more ethical foreign policy.” “Democratic” Britain, as much as, if not more than, any other country, bears the burden of historical responsibility for making the Near East the slaughterhouse that it is today. At the start of World War I, Britain sought to encourage an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, then Britain’s enemy, by promising that the Arabs would be granted freedom at the war’s end. Two years later, the British imperialists and their French allies, in the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, carved up the Near East for themselves. This was followed by the pro-Zionist Balfour Declaration. Thirty years later, the Clement Attlee Labour government presided over the bloody partition of Palestine (and the far bloodier partition of India). Divide and rule—that is the “morality” of British imperialism.

While defending BDS activists when they come under attack by the state, we oppose this strategy, which looks to the supposed “humanitarian” instincts of capitalist governments, campus administrations and corporate giants to pressure Israel. Ongoing economic sanctions serve mainly to weaken and undermine the workers and oppressed of the targeted country, not its capitalist rulers. Particularly odious are academic and cultural boycotts, which equate Israeli scholars and artists—such as the integrated West-Eastern Divan Orchestra set up by Palestinian scholar Edward Said and Jewish musician Daniel Barenboim—with the chauvinist Zionist rulers. In contrast, Marxists assert the need for international working-class solidarity with the Palestinians. A standing boycott by British and U.S. dock workers, for example, refusing to handle military shipments to Israel, would strike a powerful blow against Zionist state terror.

Marxists reject the notion widely held on the left that an oppressor nation forfeits its right to self-determination. This is a species of nationalist moralism, which ends up mirroring the lie that equates Zionism with the Jewish people. As we explained in “Birth of the Zionist State: A Marxist Analysis” (WV No. 45, 24 May 1974):

“Out of the destruction of European Jewry by Hitler (without whose aid the Zionists would have gone the way of the Shakers and other utopian sects) and at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs, a settler colony was transformed into a nation....

“This Hebrew nation came into existence through force and violence, through the suppression, forced expulsion and genocide of other peoples. Communists must oppose this brutal national oppression. Yet once this historical fact is accomplished, we must certainly recognize that nation’s right to self-determination, unless we prefer the alternative, namely national genocide.”

We defend the Palestinian people against the Zionist state down the line, even when that means taking a military side with Islamic fundamentalists like Hamas in Gaza. But we recognise the right of the Israeli Jews as well as the Palestinians to national self-determination. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at bottom a situation of interpenetrated peoples. Both peoples lay claim to the same small sliver of land. Under capitalism, the exercise of national self-determination by one side necessarily comes at the expense of the other. There can and will be no just resolution to the conflicting national rights of the Palestinian and Israeli Jewish peoples short of the establishment of a socialist federation of the Near East, requiring the overthrow of all the bourgeois states of the region through proletarian revolutions.

For revolutionaries in Britain, solidarity with the oppressed in the neocolonial countries must start with opposing our “own” ruling class and fighting to bring down British imperialism through socialist revolution at home. Leftist youth who seek effective solidarity with the Palestinian people against Zionist terror need to study the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution, the greatest victory for the working class and the oppressed to date. Based on those lessons, the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League, fights to cohere a revolutionary workers party as part of a reforged Trotskyist Fourth International. It is only through the worldwide victory of the socialist proletariat that all manner of exploitation, oppression and imperialist barbarity will be overcome.

*****Victory To The Fast-Food Workers The Vanguard Of The Fight For $15......

*****Victory To The Fast-Food Workers The Vanguard Of The Fight For $15......Fight For $15 Is Just A Beginning-All Labor Must Support Our Sisters And Brothers

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

Frank Jackman had always ever since he was a kid down in Carver, a working class town formerly a shoe factory mecca about thirty miles south of Boston and later dotted with assorted small shops related to the shipbuilding trade, a very strong supporters of anything involving organized labor and organizing labor, anything that might push working people ahead. While it had taken it a long time, and some serious military service during the Vietnam War, his generation’s war, to get on the right side of the angels on the war issue and even more painfully and slowly on the woman’s liberation and gay rights issues, and he was still having a tough time with the transgender thing although the plight of heroic Wikileaks whistle-blower Army soldier Chelsea Manning had made it easier to express solidarity, he had always been a stand-up guy for unions and for working people. Maybe it was because his late father, Lawrence Jackman, had been born and raised in coal country down in Harlan County, Kentucky where knowing which side you were on, knowing that picket lines mean don’t cross, knowing that every scrap given by the bosses had been paid for in blood and so it was in his blood. Maybe though it was closer to the nub, closer to home, that the closing of the heavily unionized shoe factories which either headed down south or off-shore left slim leaving for those who did not follow them south, slim pickings for an uneducated man like his father trying to raise four daughters and son on hopes and dreams and not much else. Those hopes and dreams leaving his mother to work in the “mother’s don’t work” 1950s at a local donut shop filling donuts for chrissakes to help make ends meet so his was always aware of how close the different between work and no work was, and decent pay for decent work too. How ever he got “religion” on the question as a kid, and he suspected the answer was in the DNA, Frank was always at the ready when the latest labor struggles erupted, the latest recently being the sporadic uprisings amount fast-food workers and lowly-paid Walmart workers to earn a living wage.        

One day in the late summer of 2014 he had picked up a leaflet from a young guy, a young guy who later identified himself as a field organizer for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a union filled to the brim with low-end workers like janitors, nurses assistants, salespeople, and the like, passing them out at an anti-war rally (against the American escalations in Syria and Iraq) in downtown Boston. The leaflet after giving some useful information about how poorly fast-food worker were paid and how paltry the benefits, especially the lack of health insurance announced an upcoming “Fight for $15” action in Downtown Boston on September 4, 2014 at noon as part of a national struggle for economic justice and dignity for the our hard working sisters and brothers. He told the young organizer after expressing solidarity with the upcoming efforts that he would try to bring others to the event although being held during a workday would be hard for some to make the time.

In the event Frank brought about a dozen others with him. They and maybe fifty to one hundred others during the course of the event stood in solidarity for a couple of hours while a cohort of fast-food workers told their stories. And while another cohort of fast-food workers were sitting on the ground in protest prepared to commit civil disobedience by blocking the street to make their point. Several of them would eventually be arrested and taken away by the police later to be fined and released.

Frank, when he reflected on the day’s events later, was pretty elated as he told his old friend Josh Breslin whom he had called up in Maine to tell him what had happened that day. Josh had also grown up in a factory town, a textile town, Olde Saco, and had been to many such support events himself and before he retired had as a free-lance writer written up lots of labor stories. The key ingredient that impressed Josh in Frank’s description had been how many young serious black and Latino workers had participated in the actions. Later than night when Frank reflected further on the situation he broke out in a smile as he was writing up his summary of his take on the events. There would be people pass off the torch to when guys like him and Josh were no longer around. He had been afraid that would not happen after the long drought doldrums in the class struggle of the previous few decades. Here is what else he had to say:            

No question in this wicked old world that those at the bottom are “the forgotten ones,” “los olvidados,” those who a writer who had worked among them had long ago correctly described as the world fellahin, the ones who never get ahead. This day we are talking about working people, people working and working hard for eight, nine, ten dollars an hour. Maybe working two jobs to make ends meet since a lot of times these McJobs, these Wal-Mart jobs do not come with forty hours of work attached but whatever some cost-cutting manager deems right to keep them on a string and keep them from qualifying for certain benefits that do not kick in with “part-time” work. And lately taking advantage of cover from Obamacare keeping the hours below the threshold necessary to kick in health insurance and other benefits. Yes, the forgotten people.

But let’s do the math here figuring on forty hours and figuring on say ten dollars an hour. That‘s four hundred a week times fifty weeks (okay so I am rounding off for estimate purposes here too since most of these jobs do not have vacation time figured in).That’s twenty thousand a year. Okay so just figure any kind of decent apartment in the Boston area where I am writing this-say one thousand a month. That’s twelve thousand a year. So the other eight thousand is for everything else. No way can that be done. And if you had listened to the young and not so young fast-food workers, the working mothers, the working older brothers taking care of younger siblings, workers trying to go to school to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty you would understand the truth of that statement. And the stories went on and on along that line all during the action. 

Confession: it has been a very long time since I have had to scrimp and scrim to make ends meet, to get the rent in, to keep those damn bill-collectors away from my door, to beg the utility companies to not shut off those necessary services. But I have been there, no question. Growing up working class town poor, the only difference on the economic question was that it was all poor whites unlike today’s crowd. Also for many years living from hand to mouth before things got steady. I did not like it then and I do not like the idea of it now.  I am here to say even the “Fight for $15” is not enough, but it is a start. And I whole-heartedly support the struggle of my sisters and brothers for a little economic justice in this wicked old world. And any reader who might read this-would you work for these slave wages? I think not. So show your solidarity and get out and support the fast-food and Wal-Mart workers in their just struggles. 

Organize Wal-Mart! Organize the fast food workers! Union! Union!  

       http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2014/09/04/boston-fast-food-workers-rally-for-wages-unions/bc1ZqZIgwsVcOw0QHIV74M/story.html         

*****John Brown’s Body Lies A Moldering In The Grave-With The Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Regiment In Mind.

*****John Brown’s Body Lies A Moldering In The Grave-With The Massachusetts 54^th Black Volunteer Regiment In Mind.

 

Every time I pass the frieze honoring the heroic Massachusetts 54^th Black Volunteer Regiment across from the State House on Beacon Street in Boston, a unit that fought in the American Civil War, a war which we have just finished commemorating the 150^th anniversary of its formal ending (April 1865) I am struck by one figure who I will discuss in a minute. For those who do not know the 54^th Regiment the unit had been recruited and made up of all volunteers, former slaves, freedmen, maybe a current fugitive slave snuck in there, those were such times for such unheralded personal valor, the recruitment a task that the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, himself an ex-slave had been central in promoting (including two of his sons). All knew, or soon became aware that if they did not fight to the finish they would not be treated as prisoners of war but captured chattel subject to re-enslavement or death.  The regiment fought with ferocious valor before Fort Wagner down in South Carolina and other hot spots where an armed black man, in uniform or out, brought red flashes of deep venom, if venom is red, but hellfire hatred in any case to the Southern plantation owners and their hangers-on (that armed black men acting in self-defense of themselves and theirs still bringing hellfire hatred among some whites to this day, no question).

I almost automatically focus in on that old hard-bitten grizzled erect bearded soldier who is just beneath the head of the horse being ridden by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the white commander of the regiment who from a family of ardent abolitionists fell with his men before Fort Wagner and was buried with them, an honor. (See above) I do not know the details of the model Saint-Gauden’s used when he worked that section (I am sure that specific information can be found although it is not necessary to this sketch) but as I grow older I appreciate that old man soldier even more, as old men are supposed to leave the arduous duty of fighting for just causes, arms in hand, to the young.

I like to think that that old grizzled brother who aside from color looks like me when he heard the call from Massachusetts wherever he was, maybe had read about the plea in some abolitionist newspaper, had maybe even gotten the message from Frederick Douglass himself through his newspaper, The North Star, calling Sable Brother to Arms or on out the stump once Lincoln unleashed him to recruit his black brothers for whatever reason although depleting Union ranks reduced by bloody fight after bloody fight as is the nature of civil war when the societal norms are broken  as was at least one cause, he picked up stakes leaving some small farm or trade and family behind and volunteered forthwith. Maybe he had been born, like Douglass, in slavery and somehow, manumission, flight, something, following the Northern Star, got to the North. Maybe learned a skill, a useful skill, got a little education to be able to read and write and advance himself and had in his own way prospered.

But something was gnawing at him, something about the times, something about tow-headed white farm boys, all awkward and ignorant from the heartland of the Midwest, sullen Irish and other ethnic immigrants from the cities where it turned out the streets were not paved with gold and so took the bounty for Army duty, took some draft-dodger’s place for pay, hell, even high-blown Harvard boys were being armed to defend the Union (and the endless names of the fallen and endless battles sites on Memorial Hall at Harvard a graphic testament to that solemn sense of duty then). And more frequently as the days and months passed about the increasing number of white folk who hated, hated with a red-hot passion, slavery and if that passion meant anything what was he a strong black man going to do about it, do about breaking the hundreds of years chains. Maybe he still had kindred under the yolk down South in some sweated plantation, poorly fed, ill-treated, left to fester and die when not productive anymore, the women, young and old subject to Mister’s lustful appetites and he had to do something.

Then the call came, Governor Andrews of Massachusetts was raising a “sable” armed regiment (Douglass’ word) to be headed by a volunteer Harvard boy urged on by his high abolitionist parents, Colonel Shaw, the question of black military leadership of their own to be left to another day, another day long in the future as it turned out but what was he to know of that, and he shut down his small shop or farm, said good-bye to kin and neighbors and went to Boston to join freedom’s fight. I wonder if my old bearded soldier fell before Fort Wagner fight down in heated rebel country, or maybe fell in some other engagement less famous but just as important to the concept of disciplined armed black men fighting freedom’s fight. I like to think though that the grizzled old man used every bit of wit and skill he had and survived to march into Charleston, South Carolina, the fire-breathing heart of the Confederacy, then subdued at the end of war with his fellows in the 54^th stepping off to the tune of John Brown’s Body Lies A-Moldering In The Grave. A fitting tribute to Captain Brown and his band of brother, black and white, at Harper’s Ferry fight and to an old grizzled bearded soldier’s honor.