Sunday, October 02, 2016

Veterans For Peace Weekly E-News

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Friday, September 30, 2016

#NoWar2016 Conference in D.C.


Win Without War, along with a number of other organizations hosted #NoWar 2016 conference in Washington DC September 23rd-26th. #NoWar2016 was a series of panels and workshops, plus an awards ceremony and direct action. The conference was sold out and universally praised in high terms.

Executive Director Michael McPhearson spoke on *Changing War Culture to Peace Culture *
"The peace movement needs to help confront injustice and bring about justice so that we can achieve the change we seek. None of the movements can do it alone. We must do it together. No justice, no peace!"
Also be sure to check out other VFP members and Advisory Board members who were also panelists!

Leah Bolger, Bruce Gagnon, Bill Fletcher, Kathy Kelly, John Dear, David Swanson, and Medea Benjamin!

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VFP Demands Withdrawal of National Guard in Charlotte


Veterans For Peace denounces the ongoing instances of police violence against people of color, this time resulting in the killing of Keith Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Terence Crutcher of Tulsa, Oklahoma. We also stand in opposition to the State of North Carolina's militarized response to protests in Charlotte.

As Veterans For Peace, we know that increased militarization in our communities will never bring peace. We know that peace is only achieved with a strong commitment to justice. We have seen perfectly reasonable demands from protesters and community members that have so far been ignored by the state and the Charlotte police. The family of Keith Scott deserves justice as do all victims of police violence. < Full Statement Here
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Presente! Chris Snively

Veterans For Peace is saddened to learn that former staff member and veteran, Chris Snively has passed away. He worked for the National office from 2001-2003.
Read the touching tribute from his family

Former Executive DIrector, Woody Powell, offers these words in memory of Chris:
"His was a generous sharing, motivated by love rather than vanity. This young man exemplified love of the highest order."
<Read Woody's Full Memorium>
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Member Highlights!




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New Veterans for Peace Tour to Cuba

We will be leading our 4th VFP tour to Cuba in December 2016. All VFP members and supporters are invited to share solidarity with our Cuban neighbors and fellow Vets.
Please look over the tour (scroll to December Tour) and contact me if you are interested.
Contact: Jim Ryerson: jimryerson@earthlink.net

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In This Issue:

#NoWar2016 Conference
VFP Demands Withdrawal of National Guard in Charlotte

Presente!  Chris Snively

Member Highlights

Solidarity With Standing Rock

New Peace In Our Times Available!

New VFP Tour to Cuba

Black Lives Matter T-Shirts in Store Now

Save the Dates: Upcoming Events


Solidarity With Standing Rock!

Members of Veterans For Peace continue to stand in solidarity at Standing Rock. Many members will be traveling to the camp in the upcoming weeks. VFP's presence is important but also critical that we follow the guidelines set out by the indigenous activism already taking place.
If you are planning on traveling to Standing Rock, please contact the new Standing Rock VFP Committee:
Brian Trautman: trautman@veteransforpeace
Tom Palumbo: tpeacenik@gmail.com
Tarak Kauff: takauff@gmail.com
Michael Sullivan: mjs12285@gmail.com
Martin Bates: learn7peace@yahoo.com

Veterans For Peace stands in solidarity with the historic resistance at the Camp of the Sacred Stones in North Dakota. We join our Indigenous sisters and brothers in opposing the construction of an oil pipeline by the Dakota Access company that threatens drinking water and sacred burial grounds. <Full Statement Here>

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New Peace in Our TImes Now Available!

Click Here to Order Now!

  • Extensive coverage of the Resistance at Standing Rock and the VFP Delegation to Okinawa
  • Colin Kaepernick and the National Anthem by Jon Schwartz
  • U.S. Military Attempts at Greenwash by Ann Wright
  • A Vision For Black Lives by The Movement for Black Lives
  • Resistance in San Diego by Dave Patterson
  • Koch Brothers Trying to Get Into Your Pants by Denny Riley
  • Letter From Leonard Peltier
  • Israel's War on Water by Sumaya Awad
  • Interview with Illan Pappe by Alexander Rios
  • The Worst Human Being Alive by David Swanson
  •  Veterans Challenge Islamophobia by Nate Terani 

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Black Lives Matter T-Shirts Now Available!

The VFP Store now has Black Lives Matter T-shirts! 
We know that militarization at home and militarization abroad are interconnected. Working for peace abroad means working for peace at home.

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Save the Dates: Upcoming Events

Sep-Oct 2016 - Ann Wright and Diane Wilson sail on Women's Boats to Gaza
Oct 7- "Stop the Longest War in Us History" Observance in Davenport
Oct 7-10 - First SOAW bi-national convergence at the U.S./Mexico border in Nogales, Arizona
Oct 11-26  - 2016 Maine Peace Walk - Stop the War$ on Mother Earth in various cities in Maine
Nov 11 - Armistice Day in your city





Veterans For Peace, 1404 N. Broadway, St. Louis, MO 63102










 












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Space Week on Jeju Island, South Korea


keepspacegang
 
 
 
 
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
http://www.space4peace.org 
http://space4peace.blogspot.com  (blog)

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. - Henry David Thoreau

Why It's Safe to Scrap America's ICBMs-William Perry- A Guy Who Knows



Why It's Safe to Scrap America's ICBMs
New York Times Op Ed -- Friday, September 30, 201
by William J. Perry

In recent years, Russia and the United States have started rebuilding their Cold War nuclear arsenals, putting the world on the threshold of a dangerous new arms race. But we don’t have to repeat the perilous drama of the 20th century. We can maintain our country’s strength and security and still do away with the worst of the Cold War weapons.


The American plan to rebuild and maintain our nuclear force is needlessly oversize and expensive, expected to cost about $1 trillion over the next three decades. This would crowd out the funding needed to sustain the competitive edge of our conventional forces and to build the capacities needed to deal with terrorism and cyberattacks.

The good news is that the United States can downsize its plans, save tens of billions of dollars, and still maintain a robust nuclear arsenal.

First and foremost, the United States can safely phase out its land-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force, a key facet of Cold War nuclear policy. Retiring the ICBMs would save considerable costs, but it isn’t only budgets that would benefit. These missiles are some of the most dangerous weapons in the world. They could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.

If our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could destroy them; once they are launched, they cannot be recalled. The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible decision.

This is not an academic concern. While the probability of an accidental launch is low, human and machine errors do occur. I experienced a false alarm nearly 40 years ago, when I was under secretary of defense for research and engineering. I was awakened in the middle of the night and told that some Defense Department computers were showing 200 ICBMs on the way from the Soviet Union. For one horrifying moment I thought it was the end of civilization. Then the general on the phone explained that it was a false alarm. He was calling to see if I could help him determine what had gone wrong with the computer.

During the Cold War, the United States relied on ICBMs because they provided accuracy that was not then achievable by submarine-launched missiles or bombers. They also provided an insurance policy in case America’s nuclear submarine force was disabled. That’s not necessary anymore. Today, the United

Iyad Burnat­: Bil’in and The Nonviolent Resistance

Iyad Burnat­: Bil’in and The Nonviolent Resistance


Iyad Burnat­
will be in Boston
Tuesday, November 1  7:00 PM at Encuentro 5
9A Hamilton Place, Boston (near Park St. T Station)
 to speak about his ­­­new book
Bil’in and The Nonviolent Resistance
iyadBurnatPhoto3.pngIyad Burnat is the coordinator for the Popular Committee in Bil'in, Palestine. For 10 years, Iyad and the Popular Committee of this small village have held weekly non-violent demonstrations against the confiscation of their land. They have repeatedly been met with violence by the Israeli military. Iyad is coming to the Boston area to describe what life is like under Israeli occupation, his village's ongoing struggle for justice and freedom, and what inspires him to continue non-violent resistance.
Iyad is the winner of the 2015 James Lawson Award for Achievement bestowed by the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict during its summer institute at Tufts University.
Sponsored by United for Peace with Justicehttp://justicewithpeace.org 617-383-4857https://www.facebook.com/justicewithpeace/ 
  Cosponsors: to be announced
Upcoming Events: 
Newsletter: 

A View From The International Left-British Trotskyists Say:For Jeremy Corbyn’s Right to Run the Labour Party!

Workers Vanguard No. 1096
23 September 2016
 
British Trotskyists Say:For Jeremy Corbyn’s Right to Run the Labour Party!

Out with the Blairite Plotters!

The British Labour Party is holding leadership elections with the results to be announced September 24. Current party leader Jeremy Corbyn, a left-winger popular with the party’s working-class base, is being challenged by Owen Smith, who is supported by right-wing forces in the party around former prime minister Tony Blair. As Labour leader from 1994 to 2007, Blair sought to transform Labour into an outright capitalist party akin to the U.S. Democratic Party. The article below is reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 236, Autumn 2016, newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League.
SEPTEMBER 10—The day after the shock vote on 23 June for Britain to leave the European Union (EU), the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party [Labour Party Members of Parliament], consisting of Tony Blair’s disciples along with their “soft left” toadies, seized the moment to scream, yet again, for the head of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader. After choreographing a series of rapid-fire resignations from the shadow cabinet, the Blairites forced through a vote of no confidence by Labour MPs in Corbyn, which they carried by a vote of 172 to 40. The howls for Corbyn’s resignation were echoed across the board by the capitalist media and endorsed in Parliament by outgoing Tory prime minister David Cameron.
But to the plotters’ dismay, Corbyn refused to resign. As he said, to do so would have been a betrayal of the members who elected him party leader. The upshot of the failed coup was a leadership election, in which the Blairites tried unsuccessfully to keep Corbyn off the ballot. The National Executive Committee (NEC) then rigged the rules in an effort to deprive 130,000 members who had joined since 12 January of their right to vote.
From the moment Corbyn was elected party leader a year ago, the ruling establishment and its media, not least the liberal Guardian and the BBC, joined with the Blairite cabal in using every dirty trick they could come up with to isolate, discredit and remove Corbyn. The then head of the armed forces, General Sir Nicholas Houghton, appeared on television to declare Corbyn unfit to ever be prime minister because he calls for unilateral nuclear disarmament. The Corbyn camp was accused of harbouring anti-Jewish bigots, male chauvinists and violent radicals, among other slanders.
In the lead-up to the EU referendum, Corbyn was chastised for not waging an aggressive enough campaign for a remain vote, and especially for refusing to appear on platforms alongside Cameron and other pro-EU Tory leaders. Then came the actual vote for Brexit, which drove the Blairites into a frenzy. Here were the “unwashed masses” voting in defiance of the “sound advice” from their betters, the same masses who might one day elect the supposedly “unelectable” Corbyn as prime minister.
The groundswell of support for Corbyn—who supports trade union rights and has the audacity to talk of socialism—that began last summer gave voice to the aspirations of those who have been repeatedly kicked in the teeth over the years. The same dissatisfaction at the base of society also fuelled the vote against the EU and it shows no sign of dissipating. Notwithstanding Corbyn’s wrong-headed support for the EU, a recent YouGov poll indicates that he retains the support of 63 per cent of Labour voters in the north of England, which voted heavily in favour of leave (Independent, 31 August).
Hundreds of thousands of working-class people flocked to support Corbyn’s campaign for leader last year, many of them former Labour members and others who paid £3 to sign up as registered supporters so they could vote for him. Labour’s membership doubled in the months after his election, and well over 100,000 more joined the party in the weeks following the attempted Blairite coup. In order to prevent a repeat of last summer’s outcome, the NEC has not only tried to disenfranchise a huge segment of the party membership but also raised the £3 to £25 and restricted registration to a single 48-hour period. Even so, a whopping 180,000 people registered to vote in the upcoming ballot. Corbyn looks set to win the contest handsomely, yet again.
The Blairites’ candidate is Owen Smith. The other nominee, Angela Eagle, was forced to step down, deemed to be too tainted for having voted in favour of the Iraq war in 2003 and for the bombing of Syria last year. Smith postures as the candidate of the “soft left,” which means “Blairism lite”—i.e., Labour MPs who share many of the anti-working-class policies of Labour under Blair, but who soft-soap them to fool voters among whom Blair is reviled. Smith is a nonentity who was unknown even to the bulk of his South Wales electorate in a recent survey. He refused to vote against Tory welfare cuts and was for years a highly paid lobbyist for the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. It is indeed symbolic that the Blairite puppet is associated with Pfizer, one of the many capitalist vultures that make enormous profits out of the National Health Service. The NHS is about the last remaining gain of the post-1945 Labour government, and has undergone piecemeal privatisation under both Labour and Tory governments. It is in the interest of the whole of the working class that Owen Smith is resoundingly defeated in the upcoming leadership election. Jeremy Corbyn must be allowed to run the Labour Party, in his own way.
Imperialist Warmongers
Smith’s attempts to “out-Corbyn” Corbyn are laughable: when Corbyn promised that under his leadership, a Labour government would build a million new homes, Smith pledged to build a million and a half. But there is a clear class difference between the two contestants. On the EU, Corbyn pledges to honour the vote for a British exit; Smith is committed to keeping Britain in the EU despite the vote and has even called for another referendum to reverse the verdict. There is a clear difference, too, on the question of renewing the nuclear-armed Trident missile submarine system, a symbol of Britain’s commitment to the “special relationship” with Washington. When new Tory prime minister Theresa May forced a vote in Parliament, Corbyn voted against the renewal of Trident—in the face of an overwhelming majority of Tory and Labour MPs, including Smith.
Later, when he was asked in a public debate how he would respond to “military aggression by Vladimir Putin towards a Nato member,” Corbyn replied “I don’t wish to go to war.” In contrast, Smith affirmed: “We would have to come to the aid of a fellow member of Nato” (Guardian, 18 August). Corbyn’s lack of commitment to Trident and to NATO underlines why he is deemed unfit to be prime minister by the British ruling establishment and its senior partners in Washington.
We do not share Corbyn’s utopian unilateralist agenda. As Marxists, we seek to imbue workers and opponents of imperialist war with the understanding that imperialist militarism can be brought to an end only through the revolutionary seizure of power by the working class and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie under a government based on workers councils. To that end it is necessary to decisively defeat the warmongering Blairite hawks in the upcoming leadership election.
Blair and his followers repudiated Labour’s traditional lip service to “socialism,” as a prelude to openly and eagerly embracing the City of London financiers and gutting the NHS, while working assiduously to sever the party’s links to the trade unions (except for their cash). And as the response to the release in July of the long postponed Chilcot report on the Iraq war demonstrated, hatred for Blair’s avid participation alongside the U.S. Bush administration in that brutal imperialist conquest continues to run deep in Britain.
While the Blairites retain overwhelming control of the parliamentary party, they know they are despised by the bulk of the membership. The Blairites are so terrified of re-selection that they imposed a state of siege in the party, suspending Constituency Labour Party (CLP) meetings until after the leadership contest. It drove the right wing crazy that, during the attempted coup, Corbyn supporters in numerous CLPs passed motions of confidence in Corbyn’s leadership.
Party unity has long been an article of faith for the Labour lefts. On the contrary: it is necessary to exacerbate the split within the party. The Blairites should be forced to face the wrath of the party membership. Re-selection would weed out a great many of these open lackeys of finance capital who exude contempt for the poor and oppressed, and indeed for the party membership.
The working class has a side in the struggle that has raged in the Labour Party since Corbyn’s election a year ago. We are for driving out the Blairite wing, leaving Corbyn in charge of a “parliamentary socialist” Labour Party based on the trade unions. A split with the right wing would constitute a step towards the political independence of the working class. Historically, the formation of the Labour Party at the beginning of the 20th century was an expression, at the organisational level, of working-class independence from the bourgeois Liberals. At the political level, however, its programme subordinated the interests of the working class to those of the capitalist rulers.
Today the industrial proletariat is a fraction of the size it was when the Labour Party was founded. For years the trade union bureaucrats have provided no avenue for the working class to fight back, refusing to mobilise the unions’ strength to fight government austerity, job cuts and attacks on living standards. In contrast, the junior doctors in the British Medical Association (BMA) have staged a number of walkouts over the past six months and rejected a new contract agreed by the BMA leadership, forcing the head of the BMA Junior Doctors’ Committee to resign. Defying government and BMA pressure, the doctors are planning further strikes of up to five days duration. But so far there has been no attempt at solidarity strikes by the trade union leaders who organise hundreds of thousands of other workers, including a high proportion of immigrants, in the health service.
We stand with Jeremy Corbyn as part of our fight for the class independence of the proletariat, a necessary condition for advancing the class struggle against capitalism. We do not join the Corbynistas in promoting illusions that a Corbyn-led Labour Party is a direct step towards socialism, but it can aid us. Our task as the nucleus of a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party is to intervene and to demonstrate over the course of future struggles the need for an authentic, revolutionary workers party.
The American Connection
Corbyn betrayed the interests of the working class in campaigning for a vote to remain in the EU, falsely claiming that this imperialist cartel could somehow defend the rights of workers against the Tory government, a view also promoted by the trade union bureaucrats. The failure to offer a working-class pole in opposition to the EU ceded the ground to outright racist reactionaries in the Tory right and UKIP and belied Corbyn’s claim that Labour should speak for the working people.
Corbyn’s pro-EU stance also meant that he lined up with the bourgeois nationalist SNP in Scotland, where 62 per cent voted to remain. This left almost 40 per cent who voted to leave with no working-class-based political expression. Corbyn supports devolution, but his refusal to acknowledge Scotland’s right to independence also places him on the side of the Tories and Blairites who regard the “United Kingdom” as sacrosanct. Corbyn’s positions on these questions undermined the possibility of rebuilding Labour’s decimated base in Scotland to challenge the dominance of the bourgeois SNP. In opposition to English domination, we uphold the right of self-determination for the Scottish and Welsh nations.
Politically, Corbyn stands in the tradition of the Labour “lefts,” exemplified for decades by the late Tony Benn, who have never posed a threat to the existence of the capitalist order and reject the need for socialist revolution. But as far as the powers that be are concerned, there is no way that a party led by Corbyn—who has the support of the major trade unions and who opposes capitalist austerity, anti-immigrant racism and imperialist militarism—can be allowed to govern. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the capitalist rulers deluded themselves that the class war was all over, that they had won, and all of this nonsense about the working class is only history.
A year ago, when it began to dawn on these people that Corbyn would be elected Labour leader, the deputy editor of the Telegraph Allister Heath confessed that in the 1990s it seemed as if “the free-market counterrevolution of the 1970s and 1980s, combined with the collapse of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, had finally killed off socialism” (Telegraph, 31 July 2015). The “free-market counterrevolution” meant a sustained assault on trade union rights and on the living standards of the working class under Thatcher that was continued under Blair’s New Labour governments. The Blairites’ determination to destroy Labour as any kind of workers party continues with their wrecking operation against the Corbyn leadership.
The Canary website did a valuable service for the workers movement with its reportage, beginning in late June, which shed some light on the cabal behind the attempted coup. According to the Canary, the mass resignations from Corbyn’s shadow cabinet on the weekend after the referendum, leading to the no-confidence vote, appear to have been orchestrated by a public relations outfit called Portland Communications, set up in 2001 by a former Blair advisor and heavily staffed by other former figures from the Blair and Brown governments.
Portland executives have historical links to the right-wing, union-busting Murdoch media empire as well as to the World Bank and the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations. Portland, in turn, is a subsidiary of Omnicom, a multi-million dollar international firm, based in New York. The Canary revelations lift the lid on the workings of parliamentary democracy that are normally kept out of sight. The machinations described could have come out of an Edward Wilson spy novel set in the era of the U.S. imperialist-led Cold War against the Soviet Union. In those days the “American connection” to the Labour Party right wing was maintained by figures like Denis Healey through Encounter magazine and other conduits for CIA funding.
The Blairites’ connections to the U.S. imperialists are primarily to the Democratic Party. David Miliband moved to the U.S. after losing the 2010 Labour leadership contest to his brother. Miliband is a personal friend of Hillary Clinton, the U.S. presidential hopeful who now has the backing of some of the country’s most notorious hawks and warmongers, both Republican and Democrat. Miliband heads the International Rescue Committee in New York, a “charitable” organisation on whose board sit many heads of big corporations. According to the Canary, they include one Alan Batkin, director of the aforementioned Omnicom Group.
Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale spent two weeks in the U.S. in July on a U.S. government-funded “leadership” course, after which she attended the Democratic National Convention. Dugdale worked closely with former Glasgow MP Jim Murphy, one of a number of Labour politicians listed as members on the website of the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based outpost of American imperialism’s right-wing neoconservatives. The society is named after a prominent Democratic Party politician who was widely known as “the Senator from Boeing” for his close ties to the giant arms manufacturer and served as a key architect of the anti-Soviet Cold War.
It was no surprise, then, that Dugdale denounced Corbyn in August and declared her backing for Smith, as did newly-elected London mayor, Sadiq Khan. Unlike Corbyn, Khan did join Cameron in the Tory campaign for a remain vote in the EU referendum. Khan’s election campaign was supported by many grassroots Corbyn supporters, who believed that any Labour victory is good because it proves that Labour under Corbyn is electable. We nailed Khan with a placard at our literature table at London’s Mayday march which read: “No vote to Blairite stooge Sadiq Khan!”
Reds Under the Bed?
As was the case last year, the major trade unions, with the exception of the GMB, are backing Corbyn, notwithstanding some discomfort with his left-wing rhetoric and particularly his opposition to Trident. To his credit, Unite union leader Len McCluskey took a hard stand behind Corbyn against the right-wing coup plotters and brought the Canary revelations into the limelight. But McCluskey has done nothing to mobilise his membership in class struggle against government attacks. Above all, the pro-capitalist trade union tops seek to maintain a voice in Parliament, in order to lull the workers with parliamentary illusions and divert them from the road of the class struggle. That is the reason Labour was originally founded by the union bureaucracy over a century ago. The union bureaucrats know that the Blairites will not give them the time of day, much less the chance to ply their class collaboration as “advisors” to a Labour government, a timeworn means for diverting and sabotaging working-class struggle.
Now a purge of the left is underway in the Labour Party, targeting Corbyn supporters among the thousands who joined (or re-joined) recently. Last month, Tom Watson, the party’s right-wing deputy leader, famed for his manoeuvring and backstabbing, alleged that hard-left “Trotsky entryists” are “twisting the arms” of young members of the Labour Party. Corbyn dismissed Watson’s claim as nonsense, saying “I just ask Tom to do the maths—300,000 people have joined the Labour party. At no stage in anyone’s most vivid imagination are there 300,000 sectarian extremists at large in the country who have suddenly descended on the Labour party” (Observer, 14 August). Watson also mentions the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL). If anything, the AWL’s refusal to oppose the occupation of Iraq or the 2011 imperialist bombing of Libya ought to earn them a place in the Blairite camp. The left’s “crime” in Watson’s eyes has nothing to do with Trotskyism, but simply that they support re-selection of MPs. We oppose these witch hunts of the left, as we did in the 1980s. Neil Kinnock’s purge of the Militant tendency, which was also aimed at the Bennites, and Kinnock’s vicious hostility to the striking miners in 1984-85, paved the way for Blair’s project of transforming the Labour Party.
The bogeyman of “Trotskyite entryism” harks back to the Militant tendency, which claimed to be Trotskyist, but was in fact an organic part of Labour’s house-trained left. Their brief spell running Liverpool Council in the 1980s confirmed that these reformists are committed to administering the capitalist state. Tom Watson’s (dodgy) dossier also refers to the Socialist Party, which emerged in the 1990s as a split from Militant. The Socialist Party is organisationally separate from the Labour Party, but politically belongs firmly within the Labourite tradition. Its programme for “socialism” is modelled on the Clement Attlee Labour government of 1945, committed to nationalisation of industry through legislation in Parliament. As opposed to such parliamentary reformism, an elementary starting point for revolutionaries is the understanding that the working class cannot simply take over the capitalist state and wield it for its own purposes. The state is the executive committee of the capitalist ruling class and must be shattered in the course of revolutionary struggle, resulting in a new state power of the working class.
Uniquely among the British left, the Spartacist League/Britain—section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)—does strive to become the nucleus of a revolutionary party of the proletariat, modelled on the Bolshevik party of Lenin and Trotsky that led the October Revolution to victory. We have consistently taken a side with Corbyn against the Blairites, while at the same time making clear where our revolutionary internationalist programme is counterposed to his “parliamentary socialism.” Corbyn’s hopes of improving the conditions of the working class through parliamentary legislation and Keynesian economic tinkering are futile. In order to create a society for the benefit of workers, minorities, women and youth, it is necessary first of all to break the power of the bourgeoisie.
Corbyn’s opposition to imperialist militarism and war is based on the illusion that the British imperialists would simply opt out of the alliance with the U.S. and adopt a more “rational” foreign policy. British imperialism is subordinate to the U.S. militarily, and the City of London, the citadel of British capitalism, is a junior partner of Wall Street. Corbyn’s proposed reforms, such as for increased spending on public housing, the NHS and education, as well as his opposition to privatisation, are supportable.
However, to simply begin to address such issues as jobs for all, free quality healthcare and education requires mobilising the trade unions as fighting organisations of the working class, under a new, class-struggle leadership. To regenerate the former industrial areas and to lay the basis for a decent living standard for all requires the overthrow of capitalist rule. Socialist revolution will expropriate the bourgeoisie and lay the basis for an internationally planned, socialised economy. A successful workers revolution in Britain will put an end to Westminster-based capitalist rule and pave the way for a voluntary federation of workers republics within a Socialist United States of Europe.

Yeah, Put Out That Fire In Your Head-With Patti Griffin’s You Are Not Alone In Mind

Yeah, Put Out That Fire In Your Head-With Patti Griffin’s You Are Not Alone In Mind   





By Fritz Taylor 

Sam Lowell was a queer duck, an odd-ball kind of guy who couldn’t stop keeping his head from exploding with about seventeen ideas at once and the determination to do all seventeen come hell or high water. And not seventeen things like mowing the lawn or taking out the rubbish but what he called “projects” which in Sam’s case meant political projects and writings and other things along that line. Yeah, couldn’t put out “the fire in his head” the way he told it to his long-time companion, Laura Perkins, one night at supper after she had confronted him, and not for the first time, that he was getting more irritable, was more often short with her of late, had seemed distant, had seemed to be drifting into some bad place, a place where he was not at peace with himself. That not “at peace” with himself an expression that Laura had coined that night to express the way that she saw his current demeanor. That would be the expression he would use in his group therapy group to describe his condition when they met later that week. Would almost shout out the words in despair when the moderator-psychologist asked him pointedly whether he felt at peace with himself at that moment and he pointed responded immediately that he was not. Maybe it was at that point, more probably though that night when Laura confronted him with his own mirror-self that told Sam his was one troubled man.   

Yea, it was that seventeen things in order and full steam ahead that got him in trouble on more than on occasion. The need to do so the real villain of the piece. See Sam had just turned seventy and so he should have been trying to slow down, slow down enough to not try to keep doing those seventeen things like he had when he was twenty or thirty but no he was not organically capable of doing so , at least until the other shoe dropped. Dropped hard.      

It was that “other shoe” dropping that made him take stock of his situation, although it had been too little too late. One afternoon a few days after that stormy group therapy session he laid down on his bed to just think through what was driving him to distraction, driving that fury inside him that would not let him be, as he tried to put on the fire in his head. That laying down itself might have been its own breakthrough since he had expected, had fiercely desired to finish up an article that he was writing on behalf a peace walk that was to take place shortly up in Maine, a walk that was dedicated to stopping the wars, mostly of the military-type but also of environmental degradation against Mother Nature.  

Sam, not normally introspective about his past, about the events growing up that had formed him, events that had as he had told Laura on more than one occasion almost destroyed him. So that was where he started, started to try to find out why he could not relax, had to be “doing and making” as Laura called it under happier circumstances, had to be fueling that fire in his head. Realized that afternoon that as kid in order to survive he had learned at a very young age that in order to placate (and avoid) his overweening mother he had to keep his own counsel, had to go deep inside his head to find solace from the storms around his house. For years he had thought the driving force was because he was a middle child and thus had to fend for himself while his parents (and grandparents) doted respectively his younger and older brothers. But no it had been deeper than that, had been driven by feelings of inadequacy before his mother’s onslaught against his fragile head.         

As Sam traced how at three score and ten he could point to various incidents that had driven him on, had almost made him organically incapable of having a no ever active brain, of going off to some dark places where the devils would not let him relax, that kept him going around and around he realized that he was not able to relax on his own, would need something greater than himself if he was to unwind. Laura had emphatically told him that he would have to take that journey on his own, would have to settle himself down if he was to gain any peace in his whole damn world. Sam suddenly noticed after Laura had expressed her opinion that she had always been the picture of calm, had been his rock when he was in his furies. Funny he had always underestimated, always undervalued that calmness, that solid rock. He, in frustration, at his own situation asked Laura how she had maintained the calm that seemed to follow her around her world.          

Laura, after stating that she too had her inner demons, had to struggle with the same kind of demons that Sam had faced as a child and that she still had difficulties maintaining an inner calm, told Sam that her daily Buddha-like meditations had carried her to a better place. Sam was shocked at her answer. He had always known that Laura was drawn to the spiritual trends around their milieu, the “New Age stuff” he called her interest since it seemed that she had taken tidbits from every new way to salvation outside of formal religion (although she had had bouts with that as well discarding her Methodist high heavens Jehovah you are on your own in this wicked old world upbringing for the communal comfort of the Universalist-Unitarian brethren). He had respected her various attempts to survive in the world the best way she could but those roads were not for him, smacked too much of some new religion, some new road that he could not travel on. But he was also desperate to be at peace, a mantra that he was increasing using to describe his plight.     

Then Laura suggested that they attend a de-stress program that was being held at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston as part of what was billed as HUB-week, a week of medical, therapeutic, technological and social events and programs started by a number of well-known institutions in the Boston area like MGH, Harvard, MIT and others. Sam admitted to being clueless about what a de-stress program would be about and had never heard of a Doctor Benson who a million years before had written a best-selling book about the knot the West had put itself in trying to get ahead and offered mediation as a way out of the impasse. Sam was skeptical but agreed to go.

At the event which lasted about two hours various forms of meditative practice were offered including music and laughter yoga. Sam in his passed on those efforts. The one segment that drew his attention, the first segment headed by this Doctor Benson had been centered on a simple technique to reduce stress, to relax in fact was called the relax response. Best of all the Doctor had invited each member of the audience to sample his wares. Pick a word or short phrase to focus on, close your eyes, put your hands on your lap and consecrate, really try to concentrate, on that picked term for five minutes (the optimum is closer to ten plus minutes in an actual situation).           

Sam admitted candidly to Laura that while attempting fitfully focusing on one thing, in his case the phrase “at peace,” he had suffered many distractions but that he was very interested in pursuing the practice since he had actually felt that he was getting somewhere before time was called. Laura laughed at Sam’s response, so Sam-like expecting to master in five minutes a technique that she had spent years trying to pursue and had not been anywhere near totally focused yet. He asked her to help him to get started and they did until Sam felt he could do the procedure on his own.

We now have to get back to that “other shoe” dropping though. Although Sam had expressed his good intentions, had felt better after a while Laura had felt that he needed to go on his journey without her. She too now felt that she had to seek what she was looking for alone in this wicked world despite how long they had been together. So Laura called it quits, moved out of the house that she and Sam had lived in for years. Sam is alone on his journey now, committed to trying to find some peace inside despite his heartbreak over the loss of Laura. Every once in a while though in a non-meditative moment he curses that fire in his head. Yeah, he wished he could have put out that fire in his head long ago.        

Patty Griffin You Are Not Alone Live


Out In The Be-Bop Be-Bop 1960s Night- Classic Rock: 1966: Shakin’ All Over- “You Are On The Bus Or Off The Bus”- The Transformation Of “Foul-Mouth” Phil Into “Far-Out” Phil- With Mad Writer Ken Kesey And His Merry Pranksters In Mind

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Chiffons performing their classic Sweet Talkin’ Guy

CD Review

Classic Rock: 1966: Shakin’ All Over, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1998


Scene: Brought to mind by one of the pieces of artwork that graces each CD in this series. In this case, this 1966 case, the then almost ubiquitous merry prankster-edged converted yellow brick road school bus, complete with assorted vagabond minstrel/ road warrior/ah, hippies, that “ruled” the mid-1960s highway and by-ways in search of the great American freedom night. We never found it in the end, but the search was worth it then, and still worth it now.
*****
A rickety, ticky-tack, bounce over every bump in the road to high heaven, gear-shrieking school bus. But not just any yellow brick road school bus that you rode to various educationally good for you locations like movie houses, half yawn, science museums, yawn, art museums, yawn, yawn, or wind-wept picnic areas for some fool weenie roast, two yawns there too, when you were a school kid. And certainly not your hour to get home daily grind school bus, complete with surly driver (male or female, although truth to tell the females were worst since they acted just like your mother, and maybe were acting on orders from her) that got you through K-12 in one piece, and you even got to not notice the bounces to high heaven over every bump of burp in the road. No, my friends, my comrades, my brethren this is god’s own bus commandeered to navigate the highways and by-ways of the 1960s come flame or flash-out.

Yes, it is rickety, and all those other descriptive words mentioned above in regard to school day buses. That is the nature of such ill-meant mechanical contraptions after all. But this one is custom-ordered, no, maybe that is the wrong way to put it, this is “karma” ordered to take a motley crew of free-spirits on the roads to seek a “newer world,” to seek the meaning of what one persistent blogger on the subject has described as "the search for the great blue-pink American Western night."

Naturally to keep its first purpose intact this heaven-bound vehicle is left with its mustard yellow body surface underneath but over that primer the surface has been transformed by generations (generations here signifying not twenty-year cycles but trips west, and east) of, well, folk art, said folk art being heavily weighted toward graffiti, toward psychedelic day-glo hotpinkorangelemonlime splashes and zodiacally meaningful symbols. And the interior. Most of those hardback seats that captured every bounce of childhood have been ripped out and discarded to who knows where and replaced by mattresses, many layers of mattresses for this bus is not merely for travel but for home. To complete the “homey” effect there are stored, helter-skelter, in the back coolers, assorted pots and pans, mismatched dishware, nobody’s idea of the family heirloom china, boxes of dried foods and condiments, duffle bags full of clothes, clean and unclean, blankets, sheets, and pillows, again clean and unclean.

Let’s put it this way, if someone wants to make a family hell-broth stew there is nothing in the way to stop them. But also know this, and know it now, as we start to focus on this journey that food, the preparation of food, and the desire, except in the wee hours when the body craves something inside, is a very distant concern for these “campers.” If food is what you desired in the foreboding 1960s be-bop night take a cruise ship to nowhere or a train (if you can find one), some southern pacific, great northern, union pacific, and work out your dilemma in the dining car. Of course, no heaven-send, merry prankster-ish yellow brick road school bus would be complete without a high-grade stereo system to blast the now obligatory “acid rock” coming through the radiator practically, although just now, as a goof, it has to be a goof, right, one can hear Nancy Sinatra, christ, Frank’s daughter how square is that, churning out These Boots Are Made For Walkin’.

And the driver. No, not mother-sent, mother-agent, old Mrs. Henderson, who prattled on about keep in your seats and be quiet while she is driving (maybe that, subconsciously, is why the seats were ripped out long ago on the very first “voyage” west). No way, but a very, very close imitation of the god-like prince-driver of the road, the "on the road” pioneer, Neal Cassady, shifting those gears very gently but also very sure-handedly so no one notices those bumps (or else is so stoned, drug or music stoned, that those things pass like so much wind). His name: Cruising Casey (real name, Charles Kendall, Harverford College Class of ’64, but just this minute, Cruising Casey, mad man searching for the great American be-bop night under the extreme influence of one Ken Kesey, the max-daddy mad man of the great search just then). And just now over that jerry-rigged big boom sound system, again as if to mock the newer world abrewin’ The Vogues’ Five O’ Clock World.

And the passengers. Well, no one is exactly sure, as the bus approaches the outskirts of Denver, because this is strictly a revolving cast of characters depending on who was hitchhiking on that desolate back road State Route 5 in Iowa, or County Road 16 in Nebraska, and desperately needed to be picked up, or face time, and not nice time with a buzz on, in some small town pokey. Or it might depend on who decided to pull up stakes at some outback campsite and get on the bus for a spell, and decide if they were, or were not, on the bus. After all even all-day highs, all-night sex, and 24/7 just hanging around listening to the music, especially when you are ready to scratch a blackboard over the selections like the one on now, James and Bobby Purify’s I’m Your Puppet, is not for everyone.

We do know for sure that Casey is driving, and still driving effortlessly so the harsh realities of his massive drug intake have not hit yet, or maybe he really is superman. And, well, that the “leader” here is Captain Crunch since it is “his” bus paid for out of some murky deal, probably a youthful drug deal, (real name, Samuel Jackman, Columbia, Class of 1958, who long ago gave up searching, searching for anything, and just hooked into the idea of "taking the ride"), Mustang Sally (Susan Stein, Michigan, Class of 1959, ditto on the searching thing), his girlfriend, (although not exclusively, not exclusively by her choice , not his, and he is not happy about it for lots of reasons which need not detain us here). Most of the rest of the “passengers” have monikers like Silver City Slim, Luscious Lois (and she really is), Penny Pot (guess why), Moon Man, Flash Gordon (from out in space somewhere, literally, as he tells it), Denver Dennis (from New York City, go figure), and the like. They also have real names that indicate that they are from somewhere that has nothing to do with public housing projects, ghettos or barrios. And they are also, or almost all are, twenty-somethings that have some highly-rated college years after their names, graduated or not). And they are all either searching or, like the Captain, at a stage where they are just hooked into taking the ride.

One young man, however, sticks out, well, not sticks out, since he is dressed in de rigeur bell-bottomed blue jeans, olive green World War II surplus army jacket (against the mountain colds, smart boy), Chuck Taylor sneakers, long, flowing hair and beard (well, wisp of a beard) and on his head a rakish tam just to be a little different, “Far Out” Phil (real name Phillip Larkin, North Adamsville High School Class of 1964). And why Far Out sticks out is not only that he has no college year after his name, for one thing, but more importantly, that he is nothing but a old-time working class neighborhood corner boy from in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor back in North Adamsville, a close-by suburb of Boston.

Of course then Far Out Phil was known, and rightly so as any girl, self-respecting or not, could tell you as “Foul-Mouth” Phil, the world champion swearer of the 1960s North Adamsville (and Adamsville Beach) be-bop night. And right now Far Out, having just ingested a capsule of some illegal substance (not LSD, probably mescaline) is talking to Luscious Lois, talking up a storm without one swear word in use, and she is listening, gleam in her eye listening, as ironically, perhaps, The Chiffons Sweet Talkin’ Guy is beaming forth out of his little battery-powered transistor radio (look it up on Wikipedia if you don’t know about primitive musical technology) that he has carried with him since junior high school. The winds of change do shift, do shift indeed.

The Revolution Will Be No Dinner Party-Jean-Luc Godard's "La Chinose"

DVD Review

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin


La Chinoise, (in French, English subtitles), starring Jean-Pierre Leard, Juliet Berto, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1967

The last time the name of famous (1960s famous) French experimental filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard appeared in this space was in last year’s retro-review of his documentary/didactic montage of The Rolling Stones as they went through their paces in creating the rock classic “Sympathy For The Devil” in 1968. I faulted Godard's efforts there for trying the patience of even the most ardent Stones fan (including this reviewer) with his interspersing of 1960s hard political rhetoric and zany antics with a rather long drawn out exposition on the creative process that it took to create a song lasting a few moments. All the faults there, however, turn into pluses in this 1967 look at the trials and tribulation of a small group of ardent radicals trying to make sense of their world (their French world, by the way) during the tumultuous 1960s and during the heat of the struggle to break with, what in France, was the status quo- adherent to the Communist Party that, although having at one time perspective for socialist revolution and the road to a communist society, had seemingly (to them) given up that mantle to Mao and the Chinese Revolution.

The story line here is fairly simple, although perhaps rather obscure and didactic to the last couple of generations since the generation of ’68 had its heyday. Fair enough. I need not spent much time on this here however because the plot has its antecedents in, and the script fairly accurately follows, the famous Russian writer Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed”. (Dostoevsky, by the way, came within a hairbreadth of the hangman’s noose for his own youthful political activism, something while colors in a perverse way the cautionary tale he tells). The plot centers on a small group of college students who, during the summer break and with time on their hands, are struggling with ideas about their place in the world, their seeming being left out of the decision-making process of that world, and most importantly, for the “lessons” to be taken from the film what to do about it. That small group which as the plot unfurls turns itself into a political cell, as was the nature of the times, turned to revolutionary politics, or what they thought was revolutionary politics in an attempt resolve these conflicts.

In those days it was that struggle was directed against the placidity of official modern French revolutionary traditions, the Moscow-loyal French Communist Party. Interestingly and probably appropriately, not a thought was given by the group to the program of the French Socialist Party of the time, the party of the tendency in the international workers movement that merely wanted to reform modern capitalist society with a few bandages, if that was acceptable to the bourgeoisie. But neither did they investigate (except for the obligatory Trotsky slanders) the traditions of Trotskyism either, although France, historically, was a strong center for those who followed the teachings of that Russian revolutionary. Thus, the struggle is between the old style Stalinism of the Russian-oriented party, represented here doctrinally by one of the cell members, and the spirit of Mao’s Red Guards (or at least those of the Red Guards that Mao favored at the time- the film shows and, one can look up that fact, that at some point all Mao adherents with different perspectives were shouting slogans from the “Red Book” at each other).

Of course, the logic of the Maoist variant of Stalinism in the West, at least before the Chinese deals with American and international imperialism were made in the early 1970s, was based on the Chinese peasant-based guerilla warfare revolutionary struggles and therefore, in practice, was to forsake the working class and “take up the gun” in heroic individual acts of terrors, and what in fact were rather empty moral gestures. The irony here, or rather the tragedy, is that this search for a revolutionary agency was worked out in a country where the working class, unlike in America, not only had a revolutionary past, but in the next year (1968) would come very close to bring the French state to its knees in a massive general strike.

But that is music for the future. What comes out clearly here, and this is part of Godard’s genius, is that, as ardent or rigid as the students became, and as foolhardy as their endeavors proved to be in the end, their strategies were doomed to failure in the end. There is a very good train ride dialogue between the woman student leader and her philosophy mentor, Francois Jeanson, a recognized, and rightly so, heroic French supporter of the Algerian liberation struggles in the 1950s who seems both perplexed and astonished by the proposals of small group individual heroic acts of terrorism.

This trend in Western leftist student circles at least, however, became somewhat pervasive in the late 1960s when despair over ending the Vietnam War and/or taking political control over one’s own life swamped other more realistic theories of social change. I note, in particular the Weather Underground in America, a comparable grouping to the one portrayed here. Sadly, Jeanson had the better of the argument as subsequent history bears out, if not to our mutual benefit. This fundamental moralistic strategy was so thinly based (and hardly the first time that it had been proposed, the Russian revolutionaries of the 1880s, including Lenin’s brother got caught up in the fever, to speak nothing of the nihilistic characters in “The Possessed”) that after the first few failures to effect change those who advocated the strategy walked away from the whole thing…and went back to school.

The beauty of Godard experimentalism in this work is that, although there is some dialogue it really does not depend on that as much as the visually imaginary that he projects. I mentioned above his use of montage in the Stones film. Here he, seemingly, pored through every known photograph of every known, wannabe or has-been revolutionary up until that time as he adds to his main story. However, that is only part of the brilliant use of film here. I will just point out a couple shots that struck me. Most of the action takes place at cell headquarters, an apartment where the students live, read, smoke many cigarettes, and are lectured to, and at, on Mao Thought. Visually the process of turning the group from bored, if intelligent, students to armchair Red Guards is shown by the depletion of the library from the standards of Western literature until near the end the shelves are almost filled with Red Books.

I have already mentioned the importance of the Jeanson train conversation but that too, especially Yvonne’s detached casualness bears additional mention. Another is the use of lectures in traditional lecture style in the tiny apartment where there are only three or four others present. They took turns at this. The most interesting one was when the pro-Moscow student tried to lecture and was given boos and catcall for his efforts. No one said there was no shortage of infantilism in those days, as the overhead cost of trying to figure out the political universe. There are many other shots like these that give you a fairly realistic picture of that small world, replicated many, many times throughout the world in those days. Well done, Monsieur Godard

Note: I am somewhat under the spell of the gods of ’68 in reviewing this film. Unfortunately one needs to know quite a bit about the struggles within the international left in those pre- “death of communism” days here in the West to appreciate Godard’s take on it. In the end, he was not really sympathetic to those struggles, guerilla warfare Maoism or any other. Seemingly, he takes his lead form Dostoevsky on that as well. He did, however, know enough about those controversies to do a believable, and for the most part, accurate job of detailing them in this film.

The real problem is that for today’s audiences, two or more generations removed from the action, this film can only seem “quaint”. Frankly, as we have been gearing up our opposition to Obama’s Afghan War strategy here in America, more than one friend has noted this: today’s students would have no clue about the action of this film because they do not think, for the most part, about how to change the world fundamentally, how to bring about a classless society. Sadly, I agree. That said though we will have to get them thinking this way again. Agreed?

Saturday, October 01, 2016

In Honor Of The 145th Anniversary Of The Paris Commune-All Honor To The Communards

In Honor Of The 145th Anniversary Of The Paris Commune-All Honor To The Communards

 








Some events can be honorably commemorated every five, ten, twenty-five years or so like the French Revolution. Other events need to be honorably commemorated yearly, and here I include the uprising which went on to form the Paris Commune, established on March 18, 1871, the first time the working class as such took power if only for a short time and only in one city, although that the city was Paris was not accidental since the city of lights had an honorable history of such plebian uprisings from 1789, 1830, and 1848 and other lesser such insurrectionary happenings (there was an expression at the time in radical and revolutionary circles that as long as Blanqui was alive and people remembered the Babeuf uprisings that when the deal when down you could always depend on Paris to rise). We can, those of us in what now is a remnant who still believe in the old time verities and who still fight for such things as working-class led revolution, socialism leading to a world communist federation or some such seemingly utopian vision and a fairer shake in the appropriation of the world’s good, still draw lessons from that experience.

Sadly the bulk of the world’s working classes most definitely in the wake of the rather quick demise of the Soviet Union and East Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s which for better or worse had represented some socialist vision however distorted (or to use Trotsky’s terminology deformed workers states) have either dismissed socialist solutions out of hand these days when the situation in places like Greece, Spain and lots of East Europe countries cry out for such solutions or the links to such previous socialist ideas has become so attenuated that the ideas are not even in play. To take Greece as a current example anybody with the least bit of sense knows that you cannot keep squeezing the living standards of the vast majority of people in that country yet the number of those who seek a communist way out, at least as exemplified by the recent parliamentary results, a quick measure of the strength of the harder left is disheartening.

So yes, in the absence of more current positive examples, we can use the Commune to draw lessons that might help us in the one-sided fight against the human logjam that the international capitalist system, complete with its imperial coterie at the top, led by the United States, the has bequeathed us almost a century and one half later and that is ripe, no overripe to be replaced by a more human scale way of producing the good of this wicked world. Hence the commemoration in this the 144th anniversary year.

Some “talking head” commentator in the lead-up to the 2015 celebration of the French Revolution on July 14th, a commentator specifically brought in for the occasion, I heard recently on a television talk show reflecting the same sentiment I have heard elsewhere from other academic and ideological sources, had declared the French Revolution dead. By that he meant that the lessons to be learned from that experience has been exhausted, that in the post-modern world that event over two hundred years ago had become passé, passé in the whirlwind of the American century now in full bloom (an American century that we thought had run its course in the wake of the Vietnam defeat but drew new life, if only by default, with the demise of the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence). While not arguing here with the validity of that statement on the French revolution, a classic bourgeois revolution when the bourgeoisie was a progressive movement in human history and actually drew some connections between the Enlightenment philosophies that gave it inspiration and the tasks of the risen people, there are still lessons to be drawn from the Commune. If for no other reason than we still await that international working class society that such luminaries as the communist Karl Marx expanded upon in the 19th century.          

Obviously like the subsequent Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the Chinese revolutions of the 1920s and 1940s, the Vietnamese which took up a great deal of the middle third of the twentieth century, and others the Paris Commune was formed in the crucible of war, or threat of war. Karl Marx, among others, the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky for one, had noted that war is the mother of revolution and the defeat of the French armies and the virtual occupation by the victorious German armies around Paris certainly conformed to that idea that the then current government was in disarray and the social fabric after a near starvation situation required more. Every revolutionary commentary has noted that those factors formed a classic pre-revolutionary phenomena. Moreover the Commune had been thrust upon the working masses of Paris by the usual treachery of the bourgeois government thrown up after Louis Bonaparte lost control. That had not been the most promising start to any new society. But you work with what you have to work with and defend as Marx, the First International, and precious few others did the best you can despite the odds, and the disarray. So no hard and fast blueprint on revolutionary upheavals except by negative example, by what was not done, could come ready-made from that experience.  

To my mind, and this is influenced by the subsequent Russian revolutions of 1905 and February and October 1917, no question the decisive problem of the Commune was what later became to be known as the crisis of revolutionary leadership. Of course they should have expropriated the banks and centered their efforts around strengthening the authority of the Central Committee of the National Guard and not let lots of windbags and weirdos have their say based on barely deserved reputations but the result of those failures were that no serious party or parties were available to take charge and create a strong government to defend against the Thiers counter-attack from Versailles. (Also no appeals to other communes to come to the defense of Paris and no work among the Versailles soldiers.) It is problematic whether given the small weight of the industrial proletariat (masses factory workers like at Putilov in Petrograd rather than the small shop artisans and workman which dominated the Paris landscape), the lack of weaponry to fend off both the Germans and the Versailles armies, and food supply whether even if such a revolutionary leadership had existed that the Commune could have continued to exist in such isolated circumstances but the contours for the future of working class revolution would have been much different. The central and critical role of a revolutionary leadership which got fudged around in places like Germany where the working class party for all intents and purposes was barely a parliamentary party in the struggle against capitalism would have been clarified and at least a few revolutions, including those in Germany between 1918 and 1924 might have turned out differently and the world as well. The “what ifs” of history aside which are always problematic that is the bitter lesson we still before us today.   


Stop Continuing To Let The Military Sneak Into The High Schools-Down With JROTC And Military Recruiter Access


Stop Continuing To Let The Military Sneak Into The High Schools-Down With JROTC And Military Recruiter Access


 
 

 Frank Jackman comment:


 


One of the great struggles on college campuses during the height of the struggle against the Vietnam War back in the 1960s aside from trying to close down that war outright was the effort to get the various ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps, I think that is right way to say it) programs off campus. In a number of important campuses that effort was successful, although there has been back-sliding going on since the Vietnam War ended and like any successful anti-war or progressive action short of changing the way governments we could support do business is subject to constant attention or the bastards will sneak something in the back door.


        


To the extent that reintroduction of ROTC on college campuses has been thwarted, a very good anti-war action indeed which had made it just a smidgen harder to run ram shot over the world, that back door approach has been a two-pronged attack by the military branches to get their quota of recruits for their all-volunteer military services in the high schools. First to make very enticing offers to cash-strapped public school systems in order to introduce ROTC, junior version, particularly but not exclusively, urban high schools (for example almost all public high schools in Boston have some ROTC service branch in their buildings with instructors partially funded by the Defense Department and with union membership right and conditions a situation which should be opposed by teachers’ union members).


 


Secondly, thwarted at the college level for officer corps trainees they have just gone to younger and more impressible youth, since they have gained almost unlimited widespread access to high school student populations for their high pressure salesmen military recruiters to do their nasty work. Not only do the recruiters who are graded on quota system and are under pressure produce X number of recruits or they could wind doing sentry guard duty in Kabul or Bagdad get that access where they have sold many young potential military personnel many false bills of goods but in many spots anti-war veterans and other who would provide a different perspective have been banned or otherwise harassed in their efforts.  


 


Thus the tasks of the day-JROTC out of the high schools-military recruiters out as well! Let anti-war ex-soldiers, sailors, Marines and airpersons have their say.         

*The Latest From The "Revolutionary Communist Party" Website

Click on the headline to link to the "Revolutionary Communist Party" Website.

Markin comment:

Just when you thought the last remnants of the 1960s Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a misnomer if there ever was one, that wreaked havoc on every layer of Chinese society, and among its organizational "friends" abroad, including elements of the old-style Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), here is an organization that paints that old inter-bureaucratic "dog fight" as the path forward for the international working class. Oh well, I better get out my faded, dog-eared copy of the "Red Book", or else I will not be able to follow the action. Yawn.

P.S. That yawn is for the RCP and not for the need for revolutionaries to defend what social and economic gains are left from the 1949 Chinese Revolution. There may come a time when we no longer defend the Chinese workers state, if those gains continue to slip away as is the tendency now, but today is not that day. Defend the Chinese Revolution against world imperialism and the very real threat of imperialist-inspired internal counter-revolution!

*On The Anniversary Of The Chinese Revolution- The Heroic Age of The Chinese Communist Party- 1921-1949- A Review

Click on title to link to Mao's "THE TASKS OF THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY IN THE PERIOD OF RESISTANCE TO JAPAN", May 3, 1937. Mao Tse-tung delivered this report at the National Conference of the Communist Party of China, held in Yenan in May 1937.

BOOK REVIEW

A History Of The Chinese Communist Party 1921-1949, Jacques Guillermaz, Random House, New York, 1972


I am using the then current spelling of names and places as they are used in this edition of the book.

For militant leftists the defense of October 1917 Russian Revolution was the touchstone issue of international politics for most of the 20th century. In the end the demise of the Soviet Union and the other non-capitalists states of East Europe in the early 1990’s formally, at least, put an end to that question in those areas. However, the issue of the fate of China in the first half of the 21st century is in an important sense the touchstone Russian question of international politics today. The question, forward to socialism or back to some neo-capitalist formation like those in Russia and East Europe to this reviewer is an open question today. With that perspective in mind, and not unmindful of the publicity given China recently as the host of the 2008 Olympics, it is high time that this reviewer spent more time on this issue than he has thus far in this space. As preparation, it is always best to get some historical background, especially so for that new generation of militants who are unfamiliar with the last hundred years of leftist history.

As I have recently mentioned in another China review in this space, that of Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, the Communist International and Russian Communist Party fights over strategy for the Chinese revolution between the Stalinists and the Trotsky-led Left Opposition in the mid-1920’s are must reading. As is the history of the defeat of the Second Chinese Revolution in the cities in 1927 and a little later. And I would add here, as well, an overview of the creation and evolution of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) before the seizure of power is also necessary, especially for those who were neither pro-Maoists in the 1960’s and 1970’s nor Soviet Stalinists in any period. To that end Jacques Guillermaz’s well-researched and reasonably balanced academic efforts is a solid way to get the basics of the Chinese Communist political perspective in this period down in the same way that Edgar Snow chronicled the organized soviets under the tutelage of the CCP in the late 1930’s.

I do not believe that it is incorrect to label the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and thus the CCP as extensions of the Soviet Russian and Bolshevik experiences. With this caveat, however, that after 1927 (if not before) these two experiences were reflected through a Stalinist prism. Thus, with the defeat of the Second Chinese Revolution and the exodus from the cities to the countryside the CCP’s strategy, tactics, organizational structure and political prospective changed in the same manner (if not to the same degree) that the Russian party’s changed. A very strong argument can be made, and is made in this book although tangentially, that the CCP was in essence the Eastern border guards for the Soviets rather than a though-going Bolshevik revolutionary organization fighting for political power in its own right-except when backed up against the wall by the Nationalist forces under Chiang kai-shek. That in turn created the distortions of politics and organization that were endemic to the early consolidation of CCP after 1949 and continue in diluted form today.

Needless to say that an academic (although quite readable) book that has detailed, in over four hundred pages, the history of early Chinese communism is not going to get its proper fully worked out review in this small space. However, I would point out the highlights that readers should think through as they read. A nice job has been done by Guillermaz in setting the framework of Chinese communism in the context of the first Chinese revolution of 1912, the various nationalist, anti-imperialist and left-wing tendencies that existed prior to the formation of the CCP in 1921 and the thorny question of the relationship between the CCP and the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) that was to, in the end, lead to a massive quarter century battle between these two forces. To emphasize how very important the correct analysis (or in the actual case, incorrect) of that relationship were I would note here that Leon Trotsky changed and extended his Theory of Permanent Revolution (basically that worldwide, not just in the advanced capitalist countries, the proletariat would have to led the national liberation struggle and the fight for the first steps into socialism) based on the Chinese experiences. That, in the end, is how important those political fights were.

After a full exposition of the role of the CCP in the cities in the Second Chinese Revolution the key areas that this book is helpful in evaluating are the rather murky periods from the defeat in the cities until Mao’s accession of leadership in the mid1930’s. That period entailed the establishment of rural soviets in Kiangsi, the on again, off again Nationalist (KMT) campaigns to destroy the CCP-led peasant armies that culminated in the famous Long March to Yenan; the fight against the Japanese and then after the defeat of the Japanese in World War II the renewed fight for political power that culminated in victory in 1949.

Along the way we get a glimpse at the internal power struggle between the various factions, the role of the Soviet Union in those fights and the various factions in the post-World War II power struggle. Well done. I might also add, in conclusion, that this book was written at the tail end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and just before the breakout pact with American imperialism under the Nixon-Kissinger worldwide anti-Soviet front doctrine so that we find out the fates of many of the early leaders of the CCP and other state and party functionaries as well as KMT personalities. There is more than enough information to bolster the case of those of us who still see the Chinese experience as a socialist one, if a rather wobbly one at this time.