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Markin comment on this article:
The subject matter of this article details one leftist militant’s evolution from liberalism, the main starting place for virtually all militant leftists, including this writer (I have seen very few such “conversions” from those who started at the right-wing of the political spectrum), to revolutionary political back in the time of the great 1960s radical jail break-out from Cold War, red scare, white picket fence existence. While the particulars of her story may vary from mine, and others who came of political age during those heady times, the main points are very familiar. That is more evident today as, with the recent emergence of the Occupy movement, some old leftists have “risen from the grave” to show up at the various encampments to tell their “tales” of the struggle back in the day. I do note that there is something of a direct correlation between the distance from those long ago struggles and the size of the heroic role of the speaker in his or her “attic” memories. Worst many, while touting their exploits, have failed, and it can only be a conscious failure, to learn anything from our defeats and, in the end, we were defeated, defeated where it counted in the struggle for state power in order to create the “newer world” we were seeking.
A few other points. Certainly, unlike the speaker in this article, not all of us had a leg up as “red diaper babies” and grew up in a household, a Communist Party household, where the class struggle was articulated at a high level. However I have noted elsewhere when discussing my own youthful leftward political trajectory that I came out of a household that paid more than lip service to the tenets of the radical, plebeian, rank and file Catholic Worker movement of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurras. I have further noted that the way that I found out about the very first political demonstration that I participated in, against nuclear weapons proliferation, at the age of 14 at the Boston Common was one called in the fall of 1960 by SANE that I learned about from an announcement in the Catholic Worker newspaper. Someone once said that lapsed Catholics make the best communists. Maybe there is something to that. However the more germane point is that some spark, some distance memory forgotten spark got each of us going. And that unspoken spark has sustained those of us who are still struggling for these many years so it must have been very powerful.
It can be written down as almost a truism that those of us who came of age in what I call the “generation of ’68,” almost to a person, cut our teeth on the black civil rights movement, or some aspect of the black liberations struggle. In my own case it was through a project to get books to black school children in Alabama sponsored by the local NAACP chapter in the very early 1960s. From there we moved on to aid the sit-in movement in the South and some of us, like the speaker, headed south. A key, a key for everyone who moved off dead-center and did not rest self-satisfied on their laurels, or Martin Luther King’s laurels, after various pieces of legislation were enacted granting black voting rights, was the rise of the Black Panthers, black nationalism in its various guises, and also the break from placid, turn the other cheek non-violence in the struggle for black liberation. Even today that divide among older political activists is apparent between those whose political development never advanced beyond fawning over King’s memory and those who went mano y mano with the black revolutionaries.
To a certain extent the division between liberal and radical perspectives over the black question found it’s parallel in the rise of the anti-Vietnam War movement. (I feel compelled to name the war rather than use the generic “anti-war” so no reader gets confused about which of the myriad wars of the last half century I am referring to.). Those, including so-called revolutionaries, who opted for a mere attempt (unsuccessful) to stop that war rather than to stand in anti-imperialist solidarity with the Vietnamese can be directly held accountable for the lack of a serious anti-imperialist movement today when the American monster is ranging over the planet. It is almost a mantra among older radicals that “we stopped the war.” But, as on the black liberation question, some people refuse, consciously, refuse to learn the lessons of history. As the speaker correctly points out the way that war was stopped was when (finally and not without hesitation and political misdirection) the North Vietnamese/National Liberation Front forces swooped down Highway One in 1975.
The speaker makes many more germane points and tells some nice anecdotes (especially about that GM auto plant “invasion”) about some of the silly stuff we did and many mistakes we made before we got serious about the central role of the working class in the struggle for that “newer world.” Although I do not know if her talk was timed to take advantage of the ferment of the Occupy movement or not but the “lessons” from back in the day that we learned the hard way are ones that movement faces-if it ever gets off its porous dead-center populist collective butt.
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Workers Vanguard No. 990
11 November 2011
Black Struggle, the Vietnamese Revolution and the Working Class-From 1960s New Left to Trotskyism-Recollections of a Participant
Part One
We print below the first part of a presentation, slightly edited for publication, by Spartacist League speaker Diana Coleman at an October 15 forum in Los Angeles.
I’ve noticed that there is quite a bit of interest in and nostalgia for the activism and struggle of the 1960s. Well, that’s understandable. In the last few years, the world has plunged into an economic crisis unrivaled since the days of the Great Depression. The con men on Wall Street whose financial swindles were central to this collapse were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars by the Democratic Party administration of Barack Obama, following in the steps of George W. Bush. The working class, black people, Latinos and the growing mass of the poor have been made to foot the bill, losing their jobs, homes, pensions and virtually anything else that makes life remotely livable.
Every day you read of some new attack on the unions. Every day the fees go up for a college education. U.S. imperialism rampages around the world from Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya, leaving death and destruction in its wake. And particularly here in the U.S., there has been precious little class struggle, social struggle, even student struggle, in response—with the notable exception of the longshore union in Longview, Washington. We are now seeing a little action from these “Occupy Wall Street” protesters, who are basically frustrated young liberals. But the bottom line is: capitalism cannot be reformed. What is needed is a Marxist perspective of international socialist revolution.
What I am going to do today is talk about the 1960s—the last time there was serious social struggle in the U.S.—and why some of us concluded that struggle, even quite militant struggle, is not enough. You need a Marxist working-class perspective and a Leninist vanguard party that can lead the working class forward to seize state power and establish socialized, collectivized property systems around the whole world.
After that long introduction, I’m going to play you an early Phil Ochs song, “I’m Going to Say It Now.” This was probably written not long after the 1964 Free Speech Movement (FSM) at UC Berkeley. It has a lot of the themes of that period—alienation, opposition to “in loco parentis,” etc. It’s a very liberal protest song, but it foreshadows things to come:
“Oh you’ve given me a number and you’ve taken off my name,
To get around this campus why you almost need a plane,
And you’re supporting Chang Kai-Shek, while I’m supporting Mao.
So when I’ve got something to say, sir, I’m gonna say it now....
“I’ve read of other countries where the students take a stand,
Maybe even help to overthrow the leaders of the land
Now I wouldn’t go so far to say we’re also learnin’ how,
But when I’ve got something to say, sir, I’m gonna say it now.”
From the 1960s up to the early ’70s, there developed a distinct generation of American leftists whose experiences were quite different from the preceding generation of leftists, whose main experiences were the Great Depression and the labor struggles of the 1930s. This generation called itself the New Left as opposed to the “old left,” which had been dominated by the pro-Moscow Stalinist Communist Party (CP). This New Left generation, of which I’m a part, makes up a lot of the cadre and leadership of not only the Spartacist League but also our left opponents: the Progressive Labor Party (PL), Revolutionary Communist Party, International Socialist Organization (ISO), Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and Workers World Party (WWP).
Let me first say a word about the 1950s. What a nasty period—the intensely anti-Communist climate after the Korean War, blacklisting, reds driven out of the unions, the Smith Act trials of CP members, deadening conformity, women forced back into the home after World War II. My parents were in the CP, and I remember when I was seven years old the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, American Communists executed for supposedly betraying the “secret” of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union. When I asked my parents why this was happening, they said it was because the Rosenbergs were “progressives” (a code word for CPers) and Jews. Even then I knew that this described my parents, too. Later, my mother told me that if they, my parents, were arrested, my grandparents would take care of my brother and me. Luckily, it never came to that, but this was my first encounter with the U.S. “justice system,” and I never forgot it.
The Left, Old and New
Under the immense pressure of Cold War anti-Communism, the old left—both the reformist CP and the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (SWP)—suffered major right-wing defections. The SWP lost 20 percent of its membership in the Cochran-Clarke faction fight and the CP lost three-quarters of its membership in 1956-57. These ex-CPers didn’t mostly become right-wingers. Rather they mostly became liberals—they had been voting Democrat for years, anyhow. The hardcore Stalinists later became Maoists and influenced the New Left in the late ’60s, but I’ll get to that later.
These losses were heavily concentrated among the parties’ active trade unionists. This purging and defection of reds from the labor movement in the ’50s was the single most important negative factor shaping the outlook of what would become the New Left. When young political activists, white and black, entered the political scene during the civil rights movement, they encountered a labor movement with no left wing sharing their views on racial oppression or U.S. militarism. The labor bureaucrats were militant anti-Communists who had gotten their posts by working hand in glove with the government in driving the reds out of the unions and were gung ho for all of U.S. imperialism’s dirty wars.
No surprise there, but it was not just the bureaucracy. When I got a union job in the late ’60s after the New Left finally became interested in the working class, there wasn’t anybody older than me in the unions who had ever been a leftist. So what developed among the New Left was a real petty-bourgeois, anti-working-class elitism. For them, “those workers” were all “bought off” with their high wages, good union jobs, fancy pensions. Today that seems like a joke, but that was the view at the time.
Two things really brought the McCarthy period to an end: the civil rights movement and the Cuban Revolution. Castro and Che were not seen as hardline Stalinists. Well, originally they weren’t—they were petty-bourgeois nationalists. And, indeed, young would-be leftists often identified with them against the U.S. on a democratic basis of “national liberation” rather than on the basis of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
On the home front, in the American South black people faced legal segregation and were deprived of basic rights—a fact well-publicized by the Soviet Union. The Southern Jim Crow system was based on police/Klan terror against atomized rural sharecroppers, and it had become increasingly outmoded as industrialization in the South around World War II drew blacks into the working class and the Southern cities. By the late 1950s, black anger at Jim Crow segregation had given birth to the civil rights movement, shattering the climate of Cold War McCarthyism and increasingly polarizing American society. It’s not as well known, but by the early ’60s there were huge demos in the North, too: boycotts of segregated schools, rent strikes against ghetto slumlords, protests against segregated housing and racist police brutality. These culminated in the late ’60s in a series of massive ghetto rebellions.
Radicalization of Civil Rights Militants
The first group I ever joined was the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1963-64 in San Francisco. I participated in various mass demos protesting job discrimination against black people—at the Sheraton Palace, at Lucky’s (now Albertsons) and on Auto Row. In retrospect, that last one seems kind of weird—for the right of blacks to be car salesmen? But these demos were huge, drawing thousands. The following summer, I decided to go down South for the second Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Freedom Summer. This was the year after civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney had been killed, but being 19 I wasn’t as fearful as I probably should have been.
When they tell the official story of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King was the undisputed leader whom everyone loved and followed. It’s not so! King’s vaunted nonviolence was really a way of trying to keep the movement liberal, respectable, reformist. His whole strategy was to appeal to the liberal Northern establishment to, please, help out black people. Pressuring the Democrats was to remain King’s consistent strategy throughout his life.
Seeking to refurbish its image, the bourgeoisie eventually acquiesced to the demand for legal equality in the South. At the same time, the federal government sought to restrain the most militant elements of the civil rights movement and usually did little to prevent the violent suppression of civil rights activists by Southern authorities, often collaborating in that suppression. This could not help but bring the question of the class nature of the capitalist state, as an organ of repression, to the fore. SNCC was formed under the auspices of MLK’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. After some hard experiences in the South with the cops, Klan and Democrats (who ran the South, after all), SNCC moved to the left, increasingly frustrated with and eventually hostile to the Northern liberal establishment—and King himself.
When I was there in the summer of 1965, the Los Angeles Watts upheaval broke out. Martin Luther King said that “as powerful a police force as possible” should be brought to L.A. to stop it. SNCC activists on my project cursed King for that. SNCC had broken with mainstream liberalism but had not yet definitely latched onto black nationalism. I could see that SNCC was having a total political identity crisis, but I sure didn’t have the answers. By this time, I hated the Democrats and was convinced that racial oppression was integral to the capitalist system and wasn’t going to go away just because black people could ride at the front of the bus. So I decided I should spend some time in Berkeley checking out the socialist groups.
The early years of the 1960s in the South were a key moment. If the SWP, which had been the Trotskyist party, had remained a revolutionary party and concentrated its forces in the Southern civil rights movement, it may well have won to Trotskyism a large fraction of those young black militants who eventually became black nationalists. That would have really changed the political scene. But by the early 1960s, the SWP had lost its revolutionary bearings and tailed non-proletarian class forces. Domestically, it abstained from the Southern civil rights movement. Internationally, the SWP was uncritically cheerleading for the petty-bourgeois radical-nationalist leadership of the Cuban Revolution.
Trotskyists should have been calling for the unconditional military defense of the Cuban deformed workers state and, at the same time, calling on the Cuban proletariat to establish a regime of workers democracy by sweeping away the Castroite bureaucracy through a political revolution. But the SWP refused to criticize Castro. These two questions—Cuba and the black question—which had decisively broken open the McCarthy period, were exactly the two questions the SWP couldn’t deal with. In the process, they abandoned the centrality of the working class and the necessity of building Trotskyist parties in every country.
It is during this period that the Spartacist League originated as the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) opposition within the SWP, fighting on these two questions. In an August 1963 document, “The Negro Struggle and the Crisis of Leadership,” the RT wrote: “We must consider non-intervention in the crisis of leadership a crime of the worst sort.” After being expelled from the SWP, the small Spartacist forces intervened in the civil rights movement in both the South and North. Look at Spartacist Bound Volume No. 1—the SL, founded in 1966, was intervening on the black question all the time and calling on militants to break with the Democratic Party, no less than the Republicans a capitalist party. The call for a Freedom Labor Party was an axis to link the exploding black struggle to the power of labor, North and South. In the mid ’60s, Spartacists were arguing the right line but lacked the numbers and, more importantly, the acquired political authority to decisively influence the internal factional struggles in SNCC. So the crucial moment was lost.
The Rise of Students for a Democratic Society
I could say a lot more about the civil rights movement, but I want to talk about how this massive ferment influenced the student movement. The most organized expression of the New Left was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Of course, that sentence is sort of a contradiction in terms given how deliberately disorganized SDS was: participatory democracy, every chapter going its own way, etc. Restarted in 2006, the new SDS is a liberal campus group that combines parochial campus activism with Democratic Party lesser-evilism. We have an excellent article about SDS headlined “From Tepid Liberalism to Radicalism and Back Again” (WV No. 927, 2 January 2009). The original SDS went from liberalism to radicalism; the new group is running the film in reverse.
In well-publicized interviews, leaders of the new SDS push the myth that Communism destroyed the first SDS and call for such leftists to stay out of SDS. WWP and Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) work in SDS anyway, but this says less about SDS’s “non-sectarianism” and more about these reformists’ toothless politics and their own lesser-evilism. Here in L.A., during the 2008 election we saw FRSO as part of SDS busily holding a “no to McCain” campaign rally at UCLA, which in plain English meant “yes to Obama.” The new SDS’s “democratic” and “anti-authoritarian” rhetoric recapitulates the Cold War anti-Communism that the first SDS broke from.
The original SDS began as the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the student affiliate of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). Moribund by 1960, the LID had served as a handmaiden of the U.S. government in the left and labor movement. Populated by “State Department socialists,” such as Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington, the LID also counted among its members Victor and Walter Reuther—the labor traitors who rode to power in the United Auto Workers by purging Communists from the union in the 1940s—and Sidney Hook. Once close to the CP, Hook turned repentant and became a staunch supporter of American “democracy.” Hook was a leading light in the Congress for Cultural Freedom—a CIA-funded operation devoted to counteracting the appeal of Communism and the Soviet Union. These types are the ones for whom the term “CIA socialist” or “State Department socialist” was invented.
But the youth were getting a little restive. In 1960, the Student League for Industrial Democracy changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society and began to grow. In 1962, in response to Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba—a failed attempt to overthrow the Cuban Revolution—SDSers posed the question: “Whether our foreign policy had really changed from its old imperialist ways?” Obviously not! The SDS 1962 Port Huron Statement took tiny steps away from anti-Communism, opining that “the American Military response has been more effective in deterring the growth of democracy than communism.”
Even these small steps away from McCarthyism were too much for the LID elders, who hauled the SDS leadership into a trial for not being anti-Communist enough, then cut all funds to SDS and changed the locks on the SDS office. I recommend Kirkpatrick Sale’s book SDS (1973) if you want to know all the details. After much organizational wrangling, SDS and the LID patched things up. Although moving away from the dried-up LID social democrats, SDS had not fundamentally broken from lesser-evil Democratic Party pressure politics, drawing disaffected youth back into the two-party shell game and perpetuating illusions in bourgeois democracy. In the 1964 elections, a wing of SDS campaigned to go “part of the way with LBJ” (a reference to Lyndon Johnson) instead of the official Democratic Party slogan: “All the way with LBJ.”
But the times they were a-changin’, as the song by Bob Dylan said. In 1964 at UC Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement broke out in response to the administration’s attempts to censor political life on campus by barring reds and other civil rights activists (“outside agitators”) and restricting the activities of student organizations. What happened was that a young activist from CORE, Jack Weinberg, had set up an unauthorized literature table in Sproul Plaza. For this terrible crime, he was arrested. I will just comment here that considering all the trouble and hassle the SL has these days in setting up literature tables on campuses for our sub drive, one has to conclude that not too much has changed!
In this case, 3,000 students converged on Sproul Plaza and blocked in the police car. For the next 32 hours, the police car served as an impromptu podium for those defending the right of students to “free speech.” Facing reprisals from both the liberal campus administration and Democratic governor Pat Brown—the father of the current governor—FSM activists defended their right to “hear any person speak in any open area of the campus at any time on any subject” (see “The Student Revolt at Berkeley,” Spartacist No. 4, May-June 1965). The FSM’s victory fueled further student radicalization across the country and undermined illusions in the good offices of campus administrations and the Democratic Party.
A funny addendum here: Jack Weinberg, the guy in the police car, was the one who said, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” I don’t know if right then, but certainly within a few years, he was in the International Socialists (the predecessor to the thoroughly reformist ISO). And by 1984 on the 20th anniversary of the FSM, the SF Chronicle reported that Weinberg and Mario Savio, the best-known leader of the FSM, were both registered Democrats. So they sure weren’t trustworthy when they got older.
The Impact of the Vietnam War on the Left
Meanwhile, the escalation of the imperialist war in Vietnam meant more youth were being drafted, adding a direct material interest to the moral outrage felt by student activists opposing American imperialist aims. In 1965, SDS initiated the first nationwide protest against the Vietnam War. To many LID liberals, protesting a war against Communism was as bad as supporting the Communists outright. Furthermore, SDS’s call for the march included no anti-Communist exclusion clause. With a rush of new members and continued radicalization, SDS would abolish its anti-Communist exclusion clause at its 1965 summer convention, and soon afterward it split from LID entirely.
Now, I didn’t go to Berkeley from ’64 to ’68. Maybe I should have, but when I had to make my choice in ’62, Berkeley was politically dead as a doornail. I viewed Berkeley as huge and soulless, so I went to a small liberal arts school in New Mexico instead. But this did give me a sense of how quickly things can change, especially among the petty bourgeoisie. One minute Berkeley was all bouffant hairdos and “frat rats.” The next time I went there on summer vacation, it was a hotbed of student activism and everybody looked like a hippie. And the people were all the same, I could see that.
That first SDS-organized national antiwar march took place in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1965. It got 20-25,000 people, which totally amazed SDS. At the invitation of the SDS leaders, the rally was addressed by two liberal U.S. Senators. One of them denounced the “expansionist” policies of Communist China and called for a negotiated settlement in Vietnam. A few years later, it would be inconceivable for SDS to invite Democratic Senators to their antiwar protests, and anyone who spoke of Chinese expansionism would have been booed off the stage.
Let me comment first that many leftists and liberals claim that the Vietnam antiwar movement ended the war in Vietnam. No way! The Vietnamese won on the battlefield—that’s what ended the war. But this kind of liberal-pacifist antiwar movement has nevertheless become the model for all of the reformist left’s subsequent antiwar demos. If you don’t believe me, go to any PSL/ANSWER demo, where you will find exactly these same reformist politics.
We stand for the military defense of the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan against the brutal U.S. imperialist occupiers. As revolutionary Marxists, we side with oppressed countries against the predatory imperialist powers. But unlike in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, there was another element at work during the Vietnam War: there was a socially progressive character to those who fought against the imperialist butchers. The heroic Vietnamese had carried out a social revolution, albeit bureaucratically deformed, overturning capitalism in the North, and they were fighting to extend it to the South. We demanded the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces and called for the military defense of the National Liberation Front (NLF) and North Vietnamese forces, raising revolutionary slogans such as “Victory for the Vietnamese Revolution! No negotiations!” and “All Indochina must go Communist!”
The Split in the Antiwar Movement
As opposition to the war grew, more and more young activists stopped chanting for “peace” and began calling for “Victory to the NLF!” After all, the liberal establishment, including the Democratic president Johnson, backed the imperialist adventure in Vietnam. This drove the radical student movement to the left and opened it to revolutionary politics. Soon those who had been calling for “part of the way with LBJ” were chanting: “Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
Here is a description of SDS circa 1967 from the novel Vida by Marge Piercy, who had been in SDS and is a bourgeois feminist. She refers to the group SAW, but I believe what she is describing is SDS:
“Every person in SAW had their own politics—anarchist, liberal, communist, democratic-socialist, syndicalist, Catholic-worker, Maoist, Schactmanite [sic], Spartacist—but what mattered was the politics of the act.… Everyone was accommodated in the vast lumbering movement. Vida was content to be of the New Left, without a fancier label. All that hairsplitting—that was what the poor Old Lefties had sat around doing in dreary meetings in the fifties nobody else attended while the resident FBI agent took notes. Now they knew that everything must be done and they must speak to everyone, through the poetry of the act, through the theatre of the streets,… SAW was a fiercely, totally democratic organization, open to anyone with or without the low dues, with an elected leadership usually galloping in one direction while the members marched in another. Chapters did as they pleased and projects happened because enough people did them. Program was hotly debated and then often coldly ignored, unless it really was up from the grass roots. SAW was uncontrollable and lush as a vacant-lot jungle.”
Spartacists sporadically intervened into SDS in the mid ’60s, and all I can say is I don’t envy the comrade trying to do an intervention into that “lush jungle.”
Now, there was a left-right split in the antiwar movement just as there had been in the civil rights movement, where MLK had been the right wing. SDS was the left here, and the right wing was the CP and the once-Trotskyist SWP. While the CP continued to preach its class-collaborationist program of electoral support to lesser-evil Democrats, the SWP became the main organizer of peace crawls designed to cater to liberal bourgeois spokesmen—that is, popular-frontist, class-collaborationist formations based on a liberal bourgeois program. One thing that the SWP was adamant on was that these rallies and demos absolutely could not call for the Vietnamese’s military victory. Oh no, that would upset the Democrats—so the slogans had to be kept to “Out now” or “Bring our boys home!”
As the war dragged on, there were some Democrats who thought the U.S. was spending too much on napalm and Agent Orange for Vietnam when it should be building its nuclear arsenal to fight the real danger, the Soviet Union. So Democrats became a regular feature of these antiwar rallies. Often these now-antiwar Democrats (bourgeois defeatists) were viciously anti-labor. You can easily imagine how violently anti-Spartacist the SWP would get when the SL called for “Bourgeoisie out of the antiwar movement” and “Labor strikes against the war!”
This came to a head at a 1971 conference in New York City. SL comrades attempted to put forward a motion to exclude ruling-class politicians from the conference. They said, this is an antiwar conference—how can you have representatives of the ruling class that’s prosecuting the war? When the SWP would not entertain the motion, our comrades together with supporters of PL and SDS heckled Democratic Senator Vance Hartke during his speech. Comrades chanted, “Labor strikes against the war” when Victor Reuther began his speech. The SL didn’t attempt to drive them off the stage or anything like that. In response, the SWP went ballistic and sent their goon squad on a vicious assault against the protesters, some of whom were beaten, with one PL member reportedly thrown through a glass door. Assisting the SWP thugs were the minions of Tim Wohlforth’s Workers League, now the Socialist Equality Party.
But it wasn’t just the SL versus the SWP. Literally thousands of radicalized students were repelled by the SWP’s reformism and pacifism. I came back to the Bay Area in late 1968, and for one of those Spring Mobilizations (in ’69 or ’70) I heard that New Leftists in Berkeley were setting up an “anti-imperialist coalition” to march in the SWP-initiated peace demo. This sounded great to me. Like many others, I hated the “give peace a chance,” liberal, pro-American quality of these demos. I had decided that “our boys” were the ones fighting on the other side, and I was rooting for them. When this anti-imperialist contingent marched up, it looked like the SWP marshals were going to physically exclude us. But I guess that they decided that the contingent was too large and doing so would create too much of a scene.
The SWP sure gave Trotskyism a bad name. I identified Trotskyism with the worst kind of liberal reformism. They were always chanting to keep it “peaceful, legal.” My friends and I were chanting, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win!” This was a two-edged development, though, because let’s be clear that we were calling not only for military but also political support to the Stalinist bureaucracy in Vietnam.
By 1968, SDS had hundreds of campus chapters around the country. There was massive ferment on the campuses, particularly after the student strike, building occupation and massive arrests at Columbia University protesting racism and the Vietnam War in the spring of 1968. In his book, Sale gives a quote from the bourgeois press of this time on SDS:
“These youngsters, organized in the Students for a Democratic Society, (S.D.S.), are acting out a revolution—not a protest, and not a rebellion, but an honest-to-God revolution. They see themselves as the Che Guevaras of our society, and their intention is to seize control of the university, destroy its present structure, and establish the ‘liberated’ university as the redoubt from which to storm and overthrow ‘bourgeois’ America. This is what they say they are doing—they are the least conspiratorial and most candid of revolutionists—and this is what in fact they are doing.”
Noting that this gave SDS a whole lot of credit, Sale goes on to say: “The most ardently resistant SDSer couldn’t have put it better—and even he wouldn’t have been so convinced.”
Then there was the Democratic National Convention in fall 1968. Most of the protesters opposed the Democratic Party as a capitalist party presiding over social injustice. As Sale describes, SDS activists rejected “as usual the idea of mass marches but [were] doubly scornful of any project mired in electoral politics.” SDS members propagandized and organized actions against the Democratic Party and raised general hell in the city. For that, they were arrested, savagely beaten and one young man was shot to death, all under the aegis of the Democratic Party city administration of the infamous Daley machine. It had a huge impact nationally.
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Workers Vanguard No. 991
25 November 2011
Black Struggle, the Vietnamese Revolution and the Working Class-From 1960s New Left to Trotskyism-Recollections of a Participant
Part Two
We print below the second part of a presentation, slightly edited for publication, by Spartacist League speaker Diana Coleman at an October 15 forum in Los Angeles. Part One appeared in WV No. 990 (11 November).
At the same time that Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was growing, the ghettos were exploding. With the civil rights movement unable to change the hellish conditions of black life in the North, there was a rising level of frustrated expectations. There were a whole series of ghetto upheavals in the mid to late ’60s that were repressed with extreme police/National Guard violence. Young militants were breaking from the Democratic Party and the liberal pacifism of MLK. The Black Panthers (BPP) were the best of a generation of young black activists who courageously stood up to the racist ruling class and its kill-crazy cops. Unfortunately, the Panthers, along with most of the New Left, rejected the organized working class as the agent of black freedom and socialist revolution. The Panthers looked to black ghetto youth as the vanguard of black struggle.
The underlying ideology of the Panthers was that the most oppressed are the most revolutionary. But in fact the lumpenproletariat in the ghetto, removed from the means of production, has no real social power. The Panthers’ glorification of ghetto rage and rejection of the Marxist understanding of the role of the working class left them more vulnerable to state repression. They faced a systematic government campaign of assassination, police provocations, frame-ups and imprisonment, including through the FBI’s notorious Counter-Intelligence Program. Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Panther and talented journalist known as the “voice of the voiceless,” has been on death row on frame-up charges for decades now. In the face of this repression, the Panthers turned to the right, into the orbit of the reformist Communist Party (CP), its lawyers and concomitantly the Democratic Party.
But let me give some quotes from Black Panther leader David Hilliard’s speech to an antiwar demo in San Francisco in the fall of 1969. It says something that by ’69 and ’70 the speakers at these mass marches included a Black Panther and the Democratic mayor of SF. Hilliard says he had been warned by the BPP leadership not to curse and not to get mad because that would alienate the white liberals, but as you can see he did both. Like Hilliard, I usually try not to curse in speeches, but I will read this quote as it appeared in Phil Foner’s The Black Panthers Speak (1995):
“There’s too many American flags out here and our Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver, says that the American flag and the American eagle are the true symbols of fascism.…
“So then, we would like to ask the American people do they want peace in Vietnam. Well, do you? (audience) ‘Yes.’ Do you want peace in the Black communities? (audience) ‘Yes.’ Well you goddamned sure can’t get it with no guitars, you sure can’t get it demonstrating. The only way you’re going to get peace in Vietnam is to withdraw the oppressive forces from the Black communities right here in Babylon.”
As the crowd became restive and some started to boo, Hilliard got mad:
“We say down with the American fascist society. Later for Richard Milhous Nixon, the m-----f----r. Later for all the pigs of the power structure. Later for all the people out here that don’t want to hear me curse.… Because Richard Nixon is an evil man. This is the m-----f----r that unleashed the counter-insurgent teams upon the BPP.… This is the man that sends his vicious murderous dogs out into the Black community.… We will kill Richard Nixon. We will kill any m-----f----r that stands in the way of our freedom. We ain’t here for no goddamned peace, because we know that we can’t have no peace because this country was built on war. And if you want peace you got to fight for it.”
While the liberals were booing, my friends and I were cheering his opposition to pacifism. The Panthers had become broadly popular. There was a real convergence between the white left and the black left. Black people are not a separate nation but an integral part of American class society while at the same time forcibly segregated at the bottom as a race-color caste. Hilliard was subsequently brought up on charges for threatening the life of the president. Later the charges were dropped—perhaps because it was obvious that no one plans an assassination attempt in a speech in front of upward of 150,000 people in Golden Gate Park!
The Limits of Student Radicalism
Just as the Panthers came up against the dead end of their lumpen vanguard strategy, SDS came up against the dead end of student vanguardism. As I said earlier, the New Left had been very anti-working-class. Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher, who considered himself a classical Marxist, toured the U.S. in 1966, speaking at Vietnam antiwar protests. He was appalled by the intellectual elitism he found among young radicals who considered themselves anti-capitalist. Deutscher said:
“Do you really take such a contemptuous view of your working classes that you think that you alone are so sensitive or so noble as to be dissatisfied with this degrading society and that they cannot find it in themselves to be dissatisfied? Do you really believe that they are so much more prone, and by nature conditioned, to be corrupted by the meretricious advantages of this war-flourishing capitalism than you are?”
Well, that is pretty much what many did think. Deutscher also said something to the effect that he would exchange all the peace marches for one good dockworkers strike. Most of the New Left didn’t understand that, either.
What happened was that the very success of the student strikes demonstrated their impotence. In the spring of 1970, President Nixon ordered American troops in South Vietnam into neighboring Cambodia. In the ensuing campus protests, the Ohio National Guard killed four students at Kent State. Ten days later, cops killed two black students at Jackson State. Of course, the second murderous assault didn’t get as much coverage, black life being cheap for the bourgeoisie, then as now. These events triggered protests involving four and a half million students—half the U.S. student population—and many colleges remained shut through the rest of the semester. But this did not stop the Vietnam War.
If this protest demonstrated the impotence of “student power,” the May-June 1968 events in France demonstrated the actual power of the working class. Leftist student protest there triggered a workers general strike that shook the de Gaulle regime to its core. France was engulfed in a pre-revolutionary crisis that the French CP barely managed to stabilize and sell out. The incipient workers revolution in France reaffirmed in real life the revolutionary potential of the working class. This made a lot of us think twice, especially since there was a strike wave in the U.S. in ’69 and ’70—a General Electric strike, a nationwide postal wildcat strike (the first major strike against the federal government), a Midwest Teamsters wildcat and a General Motors strike.
Needless to say, this was not news to the Spartacist League. As Marxists, the SL understands that the motor force of history is the class struggle—today between the capitalist class and the proletariat. The capitalists own the means of production like the land, mines and factories, while the workers have nothing but their labor power, which they sell to the capitalists in order to live. Because the working class turns the wheels of production, it has the social power and the organization to overthrow the capitalist rulers. But the working class has to understand its power in order to use it. For that you need a revolutionary vanguard party that can bring communist consciousness to the proletariat.
A key prop of capitalism is to keep the working class divided along ethnic and racial lines, which in this country means foremost the segregation of black people. The SL fights for black freedom on the program of revolutionary integrationism: the working class must fight against all instances of racist oppression and discrimination, while at the same time genuine equality for black people in the U.S. will only come about through socialist revolution that smashes capitalism. There will be no socialist revolution without the working class taking up the fight for black freedom.
Our model is the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, which led the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. This was the greatest victory for the working people of the world: it gave the program of proletarian revolution flesh and blood. The proletariat seized power and created a workers state based on collectivized property and soviets (workers councils). The young workers state eliminated laws discriminating against women and homosexuals and recognized the right to self-determination of the many nations oppressed under tsarist/capitalist rule. The Soviet government proclaimed the right of working people to jobs, health care, housing and education.
The Russian Revolution was not made solely for Russia but was seen as the opening shot of a necessarily international struggle of labor against the rule of capital. It was an inspiration to the oppressed masses of the world and had a direct impact on the struggle of black people in the U.S. The American rulers have always seen a connection between the Russian Revolution and the struggles of black people in the U.S.—and rightly so. The Bolshevik Revolution was popular among wide layers of urban blacks and even among moderate black newspapers and organizations of the time. “Black and Red” is the American bourgeoisie’s greatest fear.
The SL attempted to convey some of this understanding in various leaflets written at the time and in sporadic interventions into SDS. In 1967, as young radicals turned to confrontation with the cops, the SL wrote: “Personal sacrifice can never substitute for a mass movement…this does not mean reverting to the simple pacifist humanitarianism of the official peace movement in order to get middle-class liberals on the picket line. What it does mean is tapping the fundamental discontent and conflicts in American society; the black ghetto uprisings and rash of militant strikes indicate the depth and explosiveness of this discontent.”
The SL fought for a one-day general strike and raised the slogan: “Labor strikes against the war!” The SL also controversially opposed the draft resistance campaign and insisted that if drafted, young radicals should go. In a position paper put forward in SDS, we argued that the voluntary purging of radicals from the army would only strengthen the ideological purity and political reliability of the army. We said that young militants should go with working-class and minority youth and continue their political agitation in the army.
Stalinism Versus Trotskyism
Another question that the SL took up in this period was the question of Maoism-Stalinism. The New Left didn’t want to deal with these old, musty debates, but these questions come after you. Stalinism versus Trotskyism, the nature of the workers states—these questions cannot be avoided. SDS liberals of the mid 1960s were poring over Mao’s “Little Red Book” of quotations by 1968.
One thing that caused this change was the tremendous authority of the Vietnamese Stalinists. They looked like they were going to and then did beat U.S. imperialism, and they made no bones about being old-line Stalinists. Since Ho Chi Minh didn’t claim to have his own ideology, it was Maoism that was the beneficiary of New Leftists looking for some kind of “new” Marxism that would be more radical than old-line Soviet Stalinism and its practice of “peaceful coexistence” with U.S. imperialism, which meant betraying social and class struggles internationally. China was under the gun of U.S. imperialism, so the Chinese Communist Party leadership was talking more left at that moment.
On a sociological level, some of the Stalinists in the American Communist Party who hadn’t simply quit to become liberals became Maoists—for example, Progressive Labor (PL)—and influenced the New Left. Maoism did not represent a break from Stalinist class collaboration but rather was what we called “Khrushchevism under the gun.” (Khrushchev was the Soviet premier at the time.) Seeking to win young radicals to a Trotskyist program, the SL exposed the repeated attempts by the Chinese Maoists to form a reactionary anti-Soviet bloc with U.S. imperialism at the expense of social struggles around the world. This alliance was sealed by Mao’s 1972 meeting with U.S. war criminal Richard Nixon in Beijing as American warplanes were raining death and destruction on Vietnam.
In the article “NLF Program: Fetter on Victory” (Spartacist supplement, May 1968) about the National Liberation Front (NLF) the SL wrote:
“There has been an understandable but nevertheless unfortunate tendency on the part of the American left to idealize Ho Chi Minh and the leadership of the NLF, and for radicals to turn their correct demands for military victory against imperialism and its puppets into uncritical political support for these leaders and their politics. This is a grave error, for not only do these would-be revolutionaries not understand the deformities of those they support—and are extremely likely to feel personally betrayed when the inevitable occurs—but are likely to carry over the Stalinist hallmarks of class-collaboration and murderous opportunism into the American revolutionary movement. It is vitally necessary to keep in mind that Ho Chi Minh and his co-thinkers have already sold out the Vietnamese revolution twice before.”
This article also presciently predicted that in the best of circumstances the “NLF will simply bypass its program and will then set out to make a limited, distorted and bureaucratic revolution from the top.” That is exactly what they did. And this is also why the SL began to raise my favorite slogan of all time: “All Indochina Must Go Communist!” This slogan cut not only against liberal pacifism at home but also against the limits of Vietnamese Stalinism. Uniquely on the left, today we uphold the same Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense and proletarian political revolution for the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Laos.
And that point from the Spartacist article, about the carrying over of class collaborationism and opportunism into the American movement, was so true. One of my old friends went to a conference in Vancouver in ’67 or ’68 and met with Vietnamese women, not only women in the CP of Vietnam but also women combatants in the NLF of South Vietnam. Of course, she was very impressed by the presence of these women who were actually fighting U.S. imperialism with gun in hand. And, of course, the Americans wanted advice on how to build an American revolutionary movement.
But the Vietnamese kept steering the conversation away from that subject. Instead, all the Americans got were reformist clichés about building the biggest possible movement on the broadest possible basis—watch out when people start telling you that, it’s code for class collaboration—and helping elect whomever would help end the war, i.e., the Democrats, who else. My friend was very disappointed by this, as were the people like myself whom she told this to. We couldn’t figure it out and filed it away as one of those things that you better not think about too hard.
The New Left Turns to the Working Class
I do want to give one example of the New Left meets the working class from my own history. In 1969, I was in a women’s liberation group, and we were so impressed by the working-class struggle in France and so frustrated by student struggles and peace marches that we decided that we had to get out of Berkeley and organize the workers. We got together a group of men and women, husbands, boyfriends, friends in the movement (as it was called). We were planning on organizing white workers because we were very much imbued with the black nationalist idea of polyvanguardism—that blacks should organize blacks, whites should organize whites, and so on.
We did a demographic study of the Bay Area and decided that the place where we could find the most young white workers was Hayward. What a boring suburb, but we all moved there, 20 or 30 of us. Later, one of our people got a job at the General Motors auto plant in Fremont, and we decided that we would start a radical caucus there. We thought you had to do something flashy to get working people’s attention, start off with a bang. So we printed up a leaflet about the birthday of BPP leader Huey Newton, which we thought was very appropriate to jolt white people out of their racism. And there were a lot of blacks working there, too, who probably did know who Huey Newton was.
We took the plant’s tour train with the leaflets stuffed under our coats. At a pre-arranged moment, we leapt off and ran around like maniacs, handing out leaflets and throwing them in the cars. Whether the workers were convinced by our politics, I don’t know, but they thought it was wild. The bosses stopped every assembly line in the plant and proceeded to chase us around. Workers hid us and showed us where to go. They figured that as long as we were there the lines would stay down. Assembly line work is hard and boring, and we were an interesting diversion that had never been seen before. It took a long time before management could round us up. They didn’t even think to stop us when we announced that we were leaving and walked out and got in our cars.
Meanwhile, during this exact period in ’69, SDS was splitting due to the real inadequacy of New Left politics in the face of the general social crisis of the late 1960s. In the summer of 1969 at the SDS National Convention in Chicago, facing the prospect of PL’s positions gaining a majority, a clique within the SDS National Collective (NC), including Bernardine Dohrn and Mike Klonsky, engineered a split, lining up Black Panthers and others to race-bait PL supporters. When this didn’t work, the NC splitters led their followers out of the conference.
The SL remained with the PL-led Worker-Student Alliance wing of SDS due to its orientation, however crude, to the proletariat. The SL referred to PL, more leftist at this time than now, as “Trotskyists with a prefrontal lobotomy.” The SL issued position papers within SDS, arguing for a Leninist vanguard party to bring the power of the working class to bear in the interests of all the oppressed (reprinted in “‘Racial Oppression and Working-Class Politics’,” WV No. 897, 31 August 2007, and “‘The Fight for Women’s Liberation’,” WV No. 910, 14 March 2008). PL was vulnerable to our Trotskyist criticism, but ultimately they clung to their “minimum/maximum program,” combining “communist” rhetoric with reformist practice.
The SL’s Trotskyist program won a hearing within SDS, and the forebear of today’s Spartacus Youth Clubs was founded as the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) in SDS in early 1970. The RMC sought to win radical students to a revolutionary, internationalist and proletarian communist program. This included fighting for an understanding of the lessons of the 1917 Russian Revolution and Trotsky’s understanding of the material roots of its bureaucratic degeneration.
The Futile Strategy of the Weathermen
Even in Hayward, we felt the effects of the SDS split. We had been organizing the working class for at least six months and had put out a ton of leaflets. Actually, there was more interest in our politics than you might imagine, the working class being very restive. We did some high school organizing at a working-class high school in Hayward. After passing out some leaflets protesting the war in Vietnam, we stood outside the school with a bullhorn and shouted: “Come out of your prisons!” The most surprising part was that several hundred did, and we led a march all over Hayward.
But some of the people in the Hayward Collective began to feel that the working class just wasn’t responding sufficiently. So they got ahold of the Weathermen, who were part of the anti-PL side of the split in SDS. The Weathermen—named, I believe, after a Bob Dylan song which includes the line: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”—had a policy of confrontation with the armed forces of the state. They practiced terrorism in the name of Third World nationalism.
Lacking a proletarian strategy, and desperate to do something, the Weather Underground would conduct acts of individual terrorism that were self-defeating and, more times than not, far more dangerous to themselves than to the bourgeoisie. Such a program was no break from liberalism but a logical conclusion, in extremis, of the liberal program of bearing “moral witness” to government crimes. The Weathermen’s strategy was futile. At the same time, their targets were representatives of imperialism and capitalist oppression. While politically opposing the Weathermen, the SL fought for their defense, insisting that they were “an integral part of the radical movement.” The rest of the left turned its back on them.
The Weathermen came to visit the Hayward Collective to win us to their variety of Third World nationalism, arguing that the American working class was totally bought off and could never make a socialist revolution. They presented their views, and then they sang us some songs. You think I’m kidding. Believe me, I’m not. First they sang, “We all live in a Weatherman machine” to the tune of “Yellow Submarine.” Then they sang “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. “Looks like we’re in for nasty weather” sort of captured their perspective. Those of us who believed in the revolutionary potential of the American working class decided maybe our theme song should be the Creedence song “Lodi” about the small, remote California town, as in “stuck in Lodi again” boring. This forum seems to include a lot of discussion about music—maybe it should have a soundtrack to go with it.
Since there was a minority of us who were not convinced, several others from our collective and I went to meet Bernardine Dohrn, a leader of the Weathermen who was on the “Ten Most Wanted” list in the U.S. I had seen her “Wanted” picture up in the local post office. We were supposed to meet on Telegraph Avenue in front of Cody’s Bookstore. Dohrn was late, and everyone was worried. She claimed that she had been up the street stealing a pair of earrings. Meeting in such a public place as Telegraph Avenue was dumb enough, but even I thought that was crazy when you were underground. But it was all a part of the “outlaw” image.
Finally, we sat down to meet, and she asked me what I was going to do when the North Koreans sailed in to Puget Sound, presumably to take over since the American working class was supposed to be so bought off. Perhaps not answering this on a very deep level—and I was kind of intimidated since she was a big shot—I just said that I didn’t think that was going to happen. She said that just showed what an American-chauvinist racist I was. So I didn’t join the Weathermen, and Dohrn and her hubby Bill Ayers eventually went back to Chicago, where they hang out in liberal circles and know such unsavory people as Barack Obama.
Breaking with Feminism
The women, two others and myself, who didn’t join the Weathermen then began a sort of feminist working-class organizing collective in East Oakland together with women we had known from the Berkeley Women’s Liberation group and others. Why we became more feminist, since the Hayward Collective certainly did not split along gender lines, I’m not quite sure. In any case, we had our East Oakland Women’s Collective, and we worked with other women to set up a citywide Oakland Women’s Liberation Group, which probably included a couple hundred women over the years. I was among those who went to work in a glass-bottle-blowing factory in East Oakland, and others went to work as operators at the phone company. There are a million more ridiculous stories from this period—“socialist feminists meet the working class”—but you don’t want to be here until midnight.
At the phone company, we saw in living color where feminism led—that is, right across the class line. We were radical feminists with a working-class bent, but the bottom line is that Marxism and feminism are counterposed. Feminism is a bourgeois ideology that asserts that the main division in society is between men and women rather than class versus class. Its logic is that all women have more in common with each other than they do with men, regardless of class. Feminism is politically incapable of resolving the most basic aspects of women’s oppression because it functions entirely within the framework of bourgeois rule. In contrast, Marxism looks to the power of the working class as the motor force for social progress. The private property system, backed by the capitalist state, and the family are the most basic and deeply intertwined aspects of class society. They cannot be “reformed” away. The inescapable conclusion is that the entire capitalist system must go.
Our collective was working through the Operators Defense Committee, which featured an eclectic combination of New Left, Maoist and workerist politics, with a heavy overlay of feminism and male exclusionism. But we were quite shaken up when there was a strike of electrical workers, who were mostly men, at the phone company. We saw that many of the women whom we had helped to recruit to women’s consciousness were recruiting others to cross the picket lines, using all the feminist arguments we had told them. “Well, we’re more oppressed, what have they ever done to fight for women’s rights? So, therefore, it’s OK to cross the picket line.” We were horrified. We were somewhat ambiguous on unions, but we knew one thing: you never cross a picket line. We had been following a feminist strategy of organizing women around their own oppression, and it didn’t lead them to a broader understanding or socialist consciousness. It led to strikebreaking.
There was a Spartacist-supported caucus in the Communications Workers of America (CWA) called the Militant Action Caucus (MAC). The MAC was based on class-struggle politics and a series of transitional demands, which are designed to link current consciousness to the necessity of the conquest of power by the proletariat. Over a period of a couple of years, culminating in the 1971 national CWA strike, we were able to test out in action our feminist strategy versus the revolutionary strategy of the SL and the class-struggle politics of the MAC. Having had some negative experiences with other groups like PL and the Revolutionary Union (predecessor of the Revolutionary Communist Party), I came grudgingly to the conclusion that only the Trotskyists of the SL seemed to know how to do working-class organizing.
Finally, even in the feminist Oakland Women’s Liberation Group, the dreaded question of Maoism versus Trotskyism came up when we helped set up what was essentially a Marxist study group. With some push from women around the SL, Trotskyist works like The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution by Harold Isaacs were included as readings. What an eye-opener! Stalinism led to the bloody defeat of the Chinese Revolution of the late 1920s and betrayed many other revolutionary opportunities, as did Maoism. All that Maoist class collaborationism, the belief that in the underdeveloped countries you should work with your own bourgeoisie—whether called the “bloc of four classes” or the “united front against imperialism”—could no longer be ignored. Trotsky’s program of permanent revolution really is the only alternative to placing confidence in the backward, imperialist- dependent bourgeoisie of an oppressed country as the vehicle for liberation.
A bunch of us East Oakland women, after hard, sometimes bruising, political discussions with the SL, decided in the summer of 1972 that we needed to join an internationalist Leninist vanguard party, embodied, at least in its nucleus, in the SL. Our eclectic wanderings on the path to Leninism are mainly important in the context of the SL’s call in 1969 for revolutionary regroupment. Here the Spartacist League called for “political and theoretical polarization of the ostensibly revolutionary groupings, leading ultimately to a left-communist regroupment of all organizations, factions, tendencies and individuals who stand on an anti-revisionist Marxist program, toward the formation of a Leninist vanguard party.”
What was proposed was not a non-aggression pact but, if anything, an intensification of political struggle. This perspective embodied the Leninist conception that a party is built through a series of splits and fusions. It worked. The SL tripled in size between 1971 and 1974, regrouping with subjectively revolutionary elements breaking from Maoism, Socialist Workers Party (SWP) reformism and New Leftism: for example, the Communist Working Collective of L.A., the Buffalo Marxist Caucus, elements of the Leninist Faction of the SWP and the Mass Strike group in Boston, as well as assorted feminists and former black nationalists, among others.
Today is not 1972, and there aren’t many subjectively revolutionary organizations or groupings around. I don’t think we are going to regroup with “Occupy Wall Street,” and there don’t seem to be any inchoate revolutionary tendencies in the International Socialist Organization or Workers World Party. Recruitment of thoughtful, unusual individuals is the order of the day, and it is hard mental work. But things change, capitalism breeds class struggle. However, the precondition for a socialist revolution is a party. As Trotsky said in Lessons of October (1924): “Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer.” We urge you to join us in the struggle to build the party necessary to lead international proletarian revolution.
Monday, December 5, 2011
From The Pages Of Workers Vanguard-Drop the Charges Against All Occupy Protesters!
Click on the headline to link to the International Communist League (ICL) website.
Workers Vanguard No. 991
25 November 2011
Democrats Unleash Cop Crackdown
Drop the Charges Against All Occupy Protesters!
For Socialist Revolution!
NOVEMBER 21—Over the last two weeks, a wave of brutal police attacks has descended on Occupy protesters and encampments across the nation, including surprise nighttime raids, unrelenting pepper spray and baton beatings and hundreds of arrests. Two days after riot police dismantled the Zuccotti Park encampment, during a November 17 “Day of Action” the NYPD left protesters bloodied and beaten and detained over 200, among them leaders of the large Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a city councilman and at least 26 journalists. Billionaire New York mayor Bloomberg unleashed the cops en masse and then praised them for their “restraint.” We demand all the charges against Occupy protesters be dropped immediately!
Crackdowns on encampments in Oakland, Portland, Denver and other cities—launched under the pretext of supposed health and safety hazards—were carried out overwhelmingly by Democratic mayors in a coordinated effort to shut down these popular protests. So-called “progressive” Democrat Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, admitted to participating in a conference call with officials from other cities nationwide to discuss how to disperse the encampments. Providing a grotesque justification for the Oakland sweep, Quan singled out “anarchist groups who have been looking for a confrontation with the police.”
Amid skyrocketing tuition costs and school budget cuts, Occupy protests have also spread to the universities and come up against the administration and its campus cop thugs. When students at UC Berkeley were attempting to set up an encampment on November 9, police moved in with nightsticks, brutally clubbing protesters who were chanting “Stop beating students!” Graphic video taken on November 18, after cops dismantled the encampment at UC Davis, shows students seated with linked arms being pepper-sprayed directly in the face by police, resulting in several hospitalizations. In an open letter that same day to the chancellor, one faculty member noted: “When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats.”
The FBI and Homeland Security are reported to have assisted the local cops, with the Feds spotted staking out Occupy sites. Last week, federal immigration agents took custody of one protester who had been arrested by local police (while meditating!) during the November 14 raid on Occupy Oakland. A native of Mexico, Francisco Ramos Stierle faces the threat of being deported, as hundreds of thousands already have been, under Obama’s “Secure Communities” program. No deportation of Francisco Ramos Stierle!
Demonstrators across the country have been hit with charges ranging from disorderly conduct and resisting arrest to inciting a riot and assaulting police officers. Such charges are meant to intimidate anyone who would oppose the violence, poverty and exploitation that are endemic to the rule of capital. Despite the brutality against Occupy protesters, many still hold to the illusion that the cops are allies. In fact, it is the job description of the police to protect the profit system through organized violence.
These recurrent, naked displays of capitalist state repression against liberal but defiant protesters, students and veterans have generated widespread anger with the “powers that be.” Suffering the unmitigated effects of the economic crisis—i.e., the closure of schools, high unemployment and the slashing of social programs—many are expressing solidarity with a movement that at least appears to be doing something to protest such ravages. However, the Occupy protests do not in any way fundamentally challenge the workings of the capitalist order, which is the root cause of misery and inequality. Notwithstanding the movement’s insistence on having no demands at all, the program embodied in the protests is simple liberal reform.
The Centrality of the Working Class
As Marxists, we struggle to impart the understanding that the barbaric capitalist profit system cannot be reformed to benefit working people and the oppressed, but must be overthrown. The only way to assure jobs and decent living standards, including free quality medical care and education for all, is by seizing the wealth from the hands of the capitalist class through socialist revolution and putting it in the hands of those whose labor makes society run, i.e., the working class.
The ubiquitous slogan of the Occupy movement—“We are the 99 percent”—is based on a populist notion of the “people,” which ludicrously lumps together everyone besides a small, rich elite, the so-called “one percent.” According to this outlook, workers and the oppressed supposedly share common interests with the managers who fire their employees, cops who gun down black people and religious leaders who preach obedience to authority.
The real, fundamental class division in capitalist society is that between the working class, which sells its labor power to survive, and the capitalist class, which owns the banks and means of production, such as the factories and mines. The bourgeoisie, the group of fat cats that actually is a very small fraction of the “one percent,” makes the real decisions and reaps the profits by exploiting labor. The interests of these two main classes are entirely irreconcilable.
Uniquely, the international working class possesses the social power—derived from its ability to shut off the flow of profit by withholding its labor—and collective interest to expropriate the bourgeoisie and reorganize society globally on a socialist basis. The heterogeneous intermediate social layers in the petty bourgeoisie—encompassing students, professionals and shopkeepers among others —has no direct relationship to the means of production. Lacking social power, the petty bourgeoisie cannot provide an alternative to capitalism and, depending on which way the wind is blowing, will align either with the workers or against them. If the working-class leadership shows that it has the resolve and program to lead society out of its crisis, it can pull much of the petty bourgeoisie behind the workers in struggle.
There is a sense of solidarity with the working class among Occupy activists, but mainly the workers are seen as simply another victimized sector of the “99 percent.” On November 15, Occupy Los Angeles approved a proposal for a “port action” on December 12 that would include the occupation of “at least one facility owned by SSA Marine, a shipping company belonging to Goldman Sachs.” The motion said that this action “could be coordinated with a possible port shutdown by port truck drivers.” Twenty-six of these largely immigrant, and unorganized, workers were recently fired by the Australian-owned Toll Group transportation company for trying to organize with the Teamsters. Three days later, a November 18 Occupy Oakland General Assembly voted to expand the L.A. proposal. It called on “each West Coast occupation to organize a mass mobilization to shut down its local port” on December 12, emphasizing solidarity with the ongoing fight by longshoremen in Longview, Washington, against the union-busting attacks of the giant EGT grain conglomerate (see “ILWU Fights Deadly Threat,” WV No. 986, 16 September).
That these activists want to solidarize with labor is welcome. At the same time, thanks in large part to the betrayals of the trade-union bureaucrats, few if any in the Occupy movement have much sense of working-class struggle. Instead, protesters have been led to believe that solidarity with workers means activists setting up community pickets to shut down port operations. However well-intentioned, such actions do little to advance the workers’ consciousness of their power as a class not only to defend their own interests but to champion the cause of all the oppressed against the capitalist ruling class and its state. As was the case when thousands of demonstrators shut down the Port of Oakland the night of November 2, the workers are relegated to the sidelines. Seeing the opportunity to allow the ranks to blow off some steam, the labor tops are happy to subsume the workers under the populist politics of the Occupy movement, politics that the bureaucrats themselves amply share.
An article in Socialist Worker (10 November), newspaper of the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), argues that: “Many labor leaders have correctly seen Occupy as a key to a revival of the union movement.” On the contrary, the labor tops embrace the Occupy movement not to revive workers struggle but to divert workers’ discontent once again into advancing the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party. This was put baldly in a video statement by SEIU president Mary Kay Henry: “We agree, all across SEIU, that we need to stand for a 99 percent agenda and re-elect our president, Barack Obama, and that those two steps are on the same path…so that we can make the 2012 election about the agenda for the 99 percent.” For the unions to become instruments of militant struggle against the exploiters requires a leadership that will advance to the battle from the perspective of class war, not acceptance of capitalist exploitation and reliance on bourgeois politicians.
Democratic Party, Enemy of Workers and the Oppressed
The populism of the “99 percent” slogan boils down to the defense and extension of American capitalist “democracy.” A posting on the official Occupy Wall Street Web site following the police raid on Zuccotti Park proclaimed, “Facing the most brutal assault on our Democracy since 9-11, New Yorkers must once again stand as one!” This statement echoes the outlook of the American ruling class, which seized upon the September 11 attacks to push “national unity” jingoism. In calling on the population to “stand as one,” the goal of the capitalist rulers was to line up support for their imperialist wars of depredation abroad, while they launched anti-immigrant witchhunts and shredded civil liberties at home. This is the true face of American “democracy.” With the protests awash in such patriotism, it is no surprise that the ongoing imperialist occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be off the radar of the Occupy movement.
Always glomming on to anything calling itself a movement, the fake socialists have fully embraced the Occupy protests. Workers World Party honcho Larry Holmes absurdly hailed Occupy as a “fledgling revolution” (workers.org, 12 October), while the ISO has enthused over it for supposedly “transforming the political landscape in the United States” (socialistworker.org, 8 November). For the reformist left, Occupy is the latest vehicle for peddling their “fight the right” opportunism, which amounts to nothing other than promoting illusions in the other party of capitalist rule, the Democrats.
The U.S. ruling class has two primary ways of dealing with protest—state repression and political co-optation. Describing how the Occupy movement receives funding and support from key Democratic Party foundations and outfits, including MoveOn.org, Patrick Henningsen commented in an article in the London Guardian (15 November): “When the dust settles and it’s all said and done, millions of Occupy participants may very well be given a sober lesson under the heading of ‘controlled opposition.’ In the end, the Occupy movement could easily end up doing the bidding of the very elite globalist powers that they were demonstrating against to begin with.”
Militant youth and workers seeking a solution to capitalism’s ills must draw the lessons of past struggles to avoid being caught in a revolving door of Democratic Party pressure politics. Mobilizing the power of the working class, independently from the parties of capital, is crucial to every struggle against imperialism, exploitation and the myriad forms of oppression under capitalism. A revolutionary workers party is the necessary instrument to weld together these struggles into the fight for proletarian power. Our task, as a small internationalist Marxist organization, is to fight for the understanding that the road to human freedom lies through socialist revolution.
Workers Vanguard No. 991
25 November 2011
Democrats Unleash Cop Crackdown
Drop the Charges Against All Occupy Protesters!
For Socialist Revolution!
NOVEMBER 21—Over the last two weeks, a wave of brutal police attacks has descended on Occupy protesters and encampments across the nation, including surprise nighttime raids, unrelenting pepper spray and baton beatings and hundreds of arrests. Two days after riot police dismantled the Zuccotti Park encampment, during a November 17 “Day of Action” the NYPD left protesters bloodied and beaten and detained over 200, among them leaders of the large Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a city councilman and at least 26 journalists. Billionaire New York mayor Bloomberg unleashed the cops en masse and then praised them for their “restraint.” We demand all the charges against Occupy protesters be dropped immediately!
Crackdowns on encampments in Oakland, Portland, Denver and other cities—launched under the pretext of supposed health and safety hazards—were carried out overwhelmingly by Democratic mayors in a coordinated effort to shut down these popular protests. So-called “progressive” Democrat Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, admitted to participating in a conference call with officials from other cities nationwide to discuss how to disperse the encampments. Providing a grotesque justification for the Oakland sweep, Quan singled out “anarchist groups who have been looking for a confrontation with the police.”
Amid skyrocketing tuition costs and school budget cuts, Occupy protests have also spread to the universities and come up against the administration and its campus cop thugs. When students at UC Berkeley were attempting to set up an encampment on November 9, police moved in with nightsticks, brutally clubbing protesters who were chanting “Stop beating students!” Graphic video taken on November 18, after cops dismantled the encampment at UC Davis, shows students seated with linked arms being pepper-sprayed directly in the face by police, resulting in several hospitalizations. In an open letter that same day to the chancellor, one faculty member noted: “When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats.”
The FBI and Homeland Security are reported to have assisted the local cops, with the Feds spotted staking out Occupy sites. Last week, federal immigration agents took custody of one protester who had been arrested by local police (while meditating!) during the November 14 raid on Occupy Oakland. A native of Mexico, Francisco Ramos Stierle faces the threat of being deported, as hundreds of thousands already have been, under Obama’s “Secure Communities” program. No deportation of Francisco Ramos Stierle!
Demonstrators across the country have been hit with charges ranging from disorderly conduct and resisting arrest to inciting a riot and assaulting police officers. Such charges are meant to intimidate anyone who would oppose the violence, poverty and exploitation that are endemic to the rule of capital. Despite the brutality against Occupy protesters, many still hold to the illusion that the cops are allies. In fact, it is the job description of the police to protect the profit system through organized violence.
These recurrent, naked displays of capitalist state repression against liberal but defiant protesters, students and veterans have generated widespread anger with the “powers that be.” Suffering the unmitigated effects of the economic crisis—i.e., the closure of schools, high unemployment and the slashing of social programs—many are expressing solidarity with a movement that at least appears to be doing something to protest such ravages. However, the Occupy protests do not in any way fundamentally challenge the workings of the capitalist order, which is the root cause of misery and inequality. Notwithstanding the movement’s insistence on having no demands at all, the program embodied in the protests is simple liberal reform.
The Centrality of the Working Class
As Marxists, we struggle to impart the understanding that the barbaric capitalist profit system cannot be reformed to benefit working people and the oppressed, but must be overthrown. The only way to assure jobs and decent living standards, including free quality medical care and education for all, is by seizing the wealth from the hands of the capitalist class through socialist revolution and putting it in the hands of those whose labor makes society run, i.e., the working class.
The ubiquitous slogan of the Occupy movement—“We are the 99 percent”—is based on a populist notion of the “people,” which ludicrously lumps together everyone besides a small, rich elite, the so-called “one percent.” According to this outlook, workers and the oppressed supposedly share common interests with the managers who fire their employees, cops who gun down black people and religious leaders who preach obedience to authority.
The real, fundamental class division in capitalist society is that between the working class, which sells its labor power to survive, and the capitalist class, which owns the banks and means of production, such as the factories and mines. The bourgeoisie, the group of fat cats that actually is a very small fraction of the “one percent,” makes the real decisions and reaps the profits by exploiting labor. The interests of these two main classes are entirely irreconcilable.
Uniquely, the international working class possesses the social power—derived from its ability to shut off the flow of profit by withholding its labor—and collective interest to expropriate the bourgeoisie and reorganize society globally on a socialist basis. The heterogeneous intermediate social layers in the petty bourgeoisie—encompassing students, professionals and shopkeepers among others —has no direct relationship to the means of production. Lacking social power, the petty bourgeoisie cannot provide an alternative to capitalism and, depending on which way the wind is blowing, will align either with the workers or against them. If the working-class leadership shows that it has the resolve and program to lead society out of its crisis, it can pull much of the petty bourgeoisie behind the workers in struggle.
There is a sense of solidarity with the working class among Occupy activists, but mainly the workers are seen as simply another victimized sector of the “99 percent.” On November 15, Occupy Los Angeles approved a proposal for a “port action” on December 12 that would include the occupation of “at least one facility owned by SSA Marine, a shipping company belonging to Goldman Sachs.” The motion said that this action “could be coordinated with a possible port shutdown by port truck drivers.” Twenty-six of these largely immigrant, and unorganized, workers were recently fired by the Australian-owned Toll Group transportation company for trying to organize with the Teamsters. Three days later, a November 18 Occupy Oakland General Assembly voted to expand the L.A. proposal. It called on “each West Coast occupation to organize a mass mobilization to shut down its local port” on December 12, emphasizing solidarity with the ongoing fight by longshoremen in Longview, Washington, against the union-busting attacks of the giant EGT grain conglomerate (see “ILWU Fights Deadly Threat,” WV No. 986, 16 September).
That these activists want to solidarize with labor is welcome. At the same time, thanks in large part to the betrayals of the trade-union bureaucrats, few if any in the Occupy movement have much sense of working-class struggle. Instead, protesters have been led to believe that solidarity with workers means activists setting up community pickets to shut down port operations. However well-intentioned, such actions do little to advance the workers’ consciousness of their power as a class not only to defend their own interests but to champion the cause of all the oppressed against the capitalist ruling class and its state. As was the case when thousands of demonstrators shut down the Port of Oakland the night of November 2, the workers are relegated to the sidelines. Seeing the opportunity to allow the ranks to blow off some steam, the labor tops are happy to subsume the workers under the populist politics of the Occupy movement, politics that the bureaucrats themselves amply share.
An article in Socialist Worker (10 November), newspaper of the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), argues that: “Many labor leaders have correctly seen Occupy as a key to a revival of the union movement.” On the contrary, the labor tops embrace the Occupy movement not to revive workers struggle but to divert workers’ discontent once again into advancing the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party. This was put baldly in a video statement by SEIU president Mary Kay Henry: “We agree, all across SEIU, that we need to stand for a 99 percent agenda and re-elect our president, Barack Obama, and that those two steps are on the same path…so that we can make the 2012 election about the agenda for the 99 percent.” For the unions to become instruments of militant struggle against the exploiters requires a leadership that will advance to the battle from the perspective of class war, not acceptance of capitalist exploitation and reliance on bourgeois politicians.
Democratic Party, Enemy of Workers and the Oppressed
The populism of the “99 percent” slogan boils down to the defense and extension of American capitalist “democracy.” A posting on the official Occupy Wall Street Web site following the police raid on Zuccotti Park proclaimed, “Facing the most brutal assault on our Democracy since 9-11, New Yorkers must once again stand as one!” This statement echoes the outlook of the American ruling class, which seized upon the September 11 attacks to push “national unity” jingoism. In calling on the population to “stand as one,” the goal of the capitalist rulers was to line up support for their imperialist wars of depredation abroad, while they launched anti-immigrant witchhunts and shredded civil liberties at home. This is the true face of American “democracy.” With the protests awash in such patriotism, it is no surprise that the ongoing imperialist occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan seem to be off the radar of the Occupy movement.
Always glomming on to anything calling itself a movement, the fake socialists have fully embraced the Occupy protests. Workers World Party honcho Larry Holmes absurdly hailed Occupy as a “fledgling revolution” (workers.org, 12 October), while the ISO has enthused over it for supposedly “transforming the political landscape in the United States” (socialistworker.org, 8 November). For the reformist left, Occupy is the latest vehicle for peddling their “fight the right” opportunism, which amounts to nothing other than promoting illusions in the other party of capitalist rule, the Democrats.
The U.S. ruling class has two primary ways of dealing with protest—state repression and political co-optation. Describing how the Occupy movement receives funding and support from key Democratic Party foundations and outfits, including MoveOn.org, Patrick Henningsen commented in an article in the London Guardian (15 November): “When the dust settles and it’s all said and done, millions of Occupy participants may very well be given a sober lesson under the heading of ‘controlled opposition.’ In the end, the Occupy movement could easily end up doing the bidding of the very elite globalist powers that they were demonstrating against to begin with.”
Militant youth and workers seeking a solution to capitalism’s ills must draw the lessons of past struggles to avoid being caught in a revolving door of Democratic Party pressure politics. Mobilizing the power of the working class, independently from the parties of capital, is crucial to every struggle against imperialism, exploitation and the myriad forms of oppression under capitalism. A revolutionary workers party is the necessary instrument to weld together these struggles into the fight for proletarian power. Our task, as a small internationalist Marxist organization, is to fight for the understanding that the road to human freedom lies through socialist revolution.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
On The "Decline" Of The English Language- With The English Writer George Orwell In Mind
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for George Orwell's famous essay, Politics and The English Language.
On The Pressing Issue Of The 50th Anniversary Reunion for the North Adamsville High School Class of 1964
Peter Paul Markin comment December 3, 2011:
Ya, maybe I am the only one who sees getting worked up about the 50th reunion of the Class of 1964 as a “pressing” life and death issue in the year 2011, a whole three years away, but there is something like a method to my madness beyond the points mentioned below. With the rise of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement this fall I have some added wind in my sails now that I have a chance to express some language, the language of class struggle, to a new audience. A language learned in my hard-ass, hard-bitten, hard-hearted, well, just hard everything, old North Adamsville working class youth. A language then not so much of technical terms of political struggle like vanguard party, workers party, and workers government but coming from a somewhat inarticulate sense of injustice in the world, that same unformed sense that I find when talking to today’s youth. Not talking our kids, the ‘missing’ generation, for the most part, unfortunately, but our grandkids, for christsake. But there is something of a disconnect between my language, a language reflecting a few hundred years of struggle and theirs, a bit-sized, heads down, fingers-tapping, text-squeezed language.
I have been for some time now holding forth in this space about the need for each generation to learn the lessons of history in their own way, create their own forms of struggle, and learn their own languages to set the framework of that struggle. Just like my generation learned, in the end and after bitter struggle, from the working class and socialist movements of our then past. And I still hold to that view with this proviso-precise political language is as important now as it has been for previous generations so learn the lessons of history- and listen, a little please, to the song sung by those previous generations. Enough said.
*******
From The North Adamsville High School website - Is there anybody on this site who is from the Class of 1964? Or has a parent (s) (Ouch!) from that class? Or a grandparent(s) (Double Ouch!)? The reason I ask this question is that now that both stands of that Class of 1964 (the North Adamsville Junior High, a.k.a., Middle School, Class of 1960 and the Adamsville Central Junior High, ditto on the middle school thing, Class of 1961, are safety past their respective 50th anniversaries of graduation from those hallowed institutions it is time to start planning for the Class of 1964’s 50th anniversary reunion in 2014. (1964 plus 50 equals 2014 for the Math majors out there)
What? In 2011, in the age of the Internet year 20 (or so), there is a pressing need to gather in the old geezers and geezer-ettes (sic, sorry) for an event three years away? Well, yes. Hear me out. See the Generation of ’68, the last generation to seriously try to put a dent in the way this society does its governmental business by attempting to turn the world upside down at the grassroots level, was just on the edge of the technological revolution so there are probably some classmates out there who will take some effort to reach. I know of one old geezer, who shall remain nameless for fear of legal repercussions, who I will only identify by zip code, 02152, who is still waiting, waiting patiently, a vice of old age, on his front porch daily for the post man to deliver his e-mail. So you can see what we are up against.
Moreover, since many of us have lost a step, or seven, to the ravages of time we need plenty of advanced preparation to make everything every possible way accessible. Of course this last comment does not apply at all to any female classmates as I do not need, do not need at all, any cyber-stones thrown at me. It also does not apply to any male classmate bigger than I am, especially those goliaths of the gridiron who did us proud in their senior football season capped by that great victory over arch-rival Adamsville High. But it is a consideration.
Needless to say the last two paragraphs are so much eyewash coming from these quarters. The real reason, the real, real reason, is that I am on a “crusade” to get classmates to write, old- fashioned write, a little something for the 50th reunion, say maybe a page of pithy things that will make us laugh-and proud that we survived 1960s high school. I figure that it may take that amount of lead time to make sure the job is done right. And definitely hear my motivation for this one out. We may be one of the last generations that still believes in (or knows about) complete sentences, paragraphs and the like. So if nothing else when some archeologists, in a thousand years, hell, in one hundred years, start digging out our current artifacts and come across our recollections in Olde English they will say btyomglolfyitmi. (Translation into Olde English: What in the world is this primitive gibberish?). Case closed.
On The Pressing Issue Of The 50th Anniversary Reunion for the North Adamsville High School Class of 1964
Peter Paul Markin comment December 3, 2011:
Ya, maybe I am the only one who sees getting worked up about the 50th reunion of the Class of 1964 as a “pressing” life and death issue in the year 2011, a whole three years away, but there is something like a method to my madness beyond the points mentioned below. With the rise of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement this fall I have some added wind in my sails now that I have a chance to express some language, the language of class struggle, to a new audience. A language learned in my hard-ass, hard-bitten, hard-hearted, well, just hard everything, old North Adamsville working class youth. A language then not so much of technical terms of political struggle like vanguard party, workers party, and workers government but coming from a somewhat inarticulate sense of injustice in the world, that same unformed sense that I find when talking to today’s youth. Not talking our kids, the ‘missing’ generation, for the most part, unfortunately, but our grandkids, for christsake. But there is something of a disconnect between my language, a language reflecting a few hundred years of struggle and theirs, a bit-sized, heads down, fingers-tapping, text-squeezed language.
I have been for some time now holding forth in this space about the need for each generation to learn the lessons of history in their own way, create their own forms of struggle, and learn their own languages to set the framework of that struggle. Just like my generation learned, in the end and after bitter struggle, from the working class and socialist movements of our then past. And I still hold to that view with this proviso-precise political language is as important now as it has been for previous generations so learn the lessons of history- and listen, a little please, to the song sung by those previous generations. Enough said.
*******
From The North Adamsville High School website - Is there anybody on this site who is from the Class of 1964? Or has a parent (s) (Ouch!) from that class? Or a grandparent(s) (Double Ouch!)? The reason I ask this question is that now that both stands of that Class of 1964 (the North Adamsville Junior High, a.k.a., Middle School, Class of 1960 and the Adamsville Central Junior High, ditto on the middle school thing, Class of 1961, are safety past their respective 50th anniversaries of graduation from those hallowed institutions it is time to start planning for the Class of 1964’s 50th anniversary reunion in 2014. (1964 plus 50 equals 2014 for the Math majors out there)
What? In 2011, in the age of the Internet year 20 (or so), there is a pressing need to gather in the old geezers and geezer-ettes (sic, sorry) for an event three years away? Well, yes. Hear me out. See the Generation of ’68, the last generation to seriously try to put a dent in the way this society does its governmental business by attempting to turn the world upside down at the grassroots level, was just on the edge of the technological revolution so there are probably some classmates out there who will take some effort to reach. I know of one old geezer, who shall remain nameless for fear of legal repercussions, who I will only identify by zip code, 02152, who is still waiting, waiting patiently, a vice of old age, on his front porch daily for the post man to deliver his e-mail. So you can see what we are up against.
Moreover, since many of us have lost a step, or seven, to the ravages of time we need plenty of advanced preparation to make everything every possible way accessible. Of course this last comment does not apply at all to any female classmates as I do not need, do not need at all, any cyber-stones thrown at me. It also does not apply to any male classmate bigger than I am, especially those goliaths of the gridiron who did us proud in their senior football season capped by that great victory over arch-rival Adamsville High. But it is a consideration.
Needless to say the last two paragraphs are so much eyewash coming from these quarters. The real reason, the real, real reason, is that I am on a “crusade” to get classmates to write, old- fashioned write, a little something for the 50th reunion, say maybe a page of pithy things that will make us laugh-and proud that we survived 1960s high school. I figure that it may take that amount of lead time to make sure the job is done right. And definitely hear my motivation for this one out. We may be one of the last generations that still believes in (or knows about) complete sentences, paragraphs and the like. So if nothing else when some archeologists, in a thousand years, hell, in one hundred years, start digging out our current artifacts and come across our recollections in Olde English they will say btyomglolfyitmi. (Translation into Olde English: What in the world is this primitive gibberish?). Case closed.
Friday, December 2, 2011
From #Occupied Boston (#Tomemonos Boston)-No Mas- The Class-War Lines Are Being Drawn-There Is A Need To Unite And Fight-Random Sights From Life At Dewey Square #5
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!
**********
Markin comment November 18, 2011:
Josh Breslin didn’t know what to expect this time as the streamlined subway car that he was riding was approaching the South Station stop on the MBTA Red Line in Boston. He half-expected to see some multi-colored hand-made poster proclaiming this stop as “Occupy Boston,” something with stenciled and silhouetted clenched fist, or something like that, proclaiming this newly sacred ground, this fetid, dank subway stop, in the name of the people. Hell, just like back in the old days, the old 1960s times of blessed memory, when no wall, no public wall anyway, was safe from revolutionary pronouncements, or off-hand midnight-crafted graffiti. He had certainly seen stranger signs plastered around the Occupy encampment the last few times that he had previously come over from his home in Cambridge on the other side of the river. Stuff from Thoreau and Gandhi, naturally, but also odd-ball wisps of wisdom about being kind, not being greedy, corporate greedy or otherwise, not being sexist, racist, homophobic and the whole litany of politically acceptable Don’ts scripted out since those ‘60s that seemed self-almost explanatory and in not need of proclamation in this microscopic social experiment, this exemplar of the “new world order,” leftist-style.
Ya, these times definitely call for some outlandish statement in bright day-glo colors something, he mused amused, to confuse the touristas who were making the Occupy site a “must see” stop on their vacation itineraries. Something to throw them off the scent when they asked their infernal questions- “What are the kids up to, why all the tents, why all the black flags (really not many but that black flag of anarchy, like the red one of communism, spooked people, made their deepest fears surface, and in the old days rightly so),” and on and on. Like he, Joshua Breslin, known far and wide back in the day under the moniker, Prince of Love, a magical mystery tour merry prankster, music-and-drugs-are- the-revolution, west coast communal living madman knew what was on the kids minds today, except they were getting the short straw in the game of who gets what in the social game.
Just then he reflected, flash-back reflected, that a lot of what he had seen and heard on those other occasions when he had crossed the river of late, maybe four or five by now, echoed some long ago, half-forgotten signs and totems from the times when he was searching for the blue-pink great American West night back in the late 1960s and had wound up in People’s Park in Berkeley out in wayward California. And had been wounded and tear-gassed, Prince of Love renown notwithstanding, for his efforts when things got twisted and the deal went down. Yes, this was just exactly what it was like and now he had a “theme” for the notes that he was feeling pressed to take on this trip now that he had a “feel” for the situation. Although this time, unlike back then, he was not expecting, not expecting in his on-coming dotage, to be wounded or tear-gassed. He frankly admitted to himself after his last visit to the camp site a few days before that he was not up those rigors now, those shake-them-off-and-come-back-swinging-youth- spunks that he had in great quantity as he headed barrel-assing out west from his old hometown, Olde Saco up Maine way.
The train then stopped jarring him in mid-thought, opened its air-pressurized doors, and its sullen passengers decamped for seven winds places. No, Josh noticed, no sign at the subway level anyway that occupyitis had expanded to the cavernous underground. On surfacing in the Dewey Square sunlight though, another mercifully warm late October day starting to break through, his ears were immediately accosted by the ranting, there was no other name for it, of “Syllable Slim,” a name that he had coined for this vagabond prince standing kitty-corner in front of him when he first heard him holding forth on the perfidies of the Democrats, democrats, Republicans, republicans and anyone else who held the whiff of power, or wanted it, at Park Street Station years ago. Now Slim was the “king” of the Dewey Square day and night having moved either uptown or downtown, Josh was not quite sure of the geographic relationship between the two subway stops, with a new audience to ignore, or try to ignore, him. What was also perfectly clear was, uptown or downtown, Slim would be hard-pressed to describe what was going on at his Occupy kingdom. His spiel did not depend on such trivials The city, any city with size, produces its fair share of drifters, grifters, and midnight shifters and they, like lemmings to the sea, have heard of the glad tidings emitting from Dewey Square (read: food, shelter, and no hassles-the famous “three squares and a cot” from “on-the-road” jungle camp lore) and have come forth. And Slim is their king.
Josh, by the way, was here, here on assignment, not much pay but an assignment anyway, his first since he “officially” retired from his onerous editorial duties a couple of years back to be able to sit back, kick back, and write that great sex/drug/political/musical/ hail fellows well met/digger commune 1960s explosion novel he had been putting off since, well, since he “got off the bus” in 1971 and headed back first to Olde Saco and then drifted down to various Boston area spots. See the pay part was required, no, demanded by Josh, in order to give his employer a real “feel” for the flavor of what was going on at Dewey Square to the “soccer moms and dads” who might be wondering what they were missing while waiting, SUV-waiting, for their little Ashley or Samson to finish up their suburban kids soccer league workouts, or one or another of twelve other possible organized kid to do things for their resumes, the kid’s that is. A few random notes to titillate the rubes, and move on. No sweat. He, moreover, was going to parlay those skimpy notes into working order for his now great Tom Wolfe-ish sociological sex/drug/political/musical/ hail fellows well met/digger commune 1960s explosion novel. And in Josh Breslin’s mind Syllable Slim was already slated, with a big intro, to lead off this 21st century magical mystery tour, merry prankster gig, warts and all. We merely get his leavings.
********
“Hey brother, can you help me put this tarp over my tent? It got cold as hell last night and the winds were blowing fierce,” yelled a cherub-faced male, almost too youthful to be here but such are the times, although it was later learned that he was now a few weeks-seasoned Occupy Boston grizzly veteran resident to a middle-aged man casually walking by. “Sure thing, let’s get to it” replied that passer-by. Was the passer-by some wayward tourist looking for the next thrill in the city night life, a career gawker, or just one many unnamed “volunteers” who have sprung from the woodwork (okay, okay suburbia) in response to the news that something more than nine-to-five and white picket fences might be in the air?
********
“Can you bring this hot pot of soup to the kitchen? Some lady, a lady who would not give her name and would not acknowledge anything but thanks, drove up on the Atlantic Avenue side and asked me to unload some stuff for her,” said one young woman in shorts, short shorts thereby showing off her firm athletic legs for one and all to see to another young woman dressed in long pants, maybe jeans, getting ready for colder climates. Shortly thereafter the “laundry lady” tooted her horn looking for help in unloading a trunk-load of everything from towels to sleeping bags. And our two young women again “hit” the Atlantic Avenue curb for this “angel.” See the angel’s kindly thing, her matronly, middle-aged, unnamed kindly thing, was to come by on Tuesday for dirty laundry and return on Thursday with everything Seventh Generation bright and clean. Said “laundry lady” is also unnamed like our tent-fixing passer-by and soup lady, but clearly one who has come out of the woodwork on the news of the glad tidings.
********
“If you want a meal, a nice hot meal, could you wash some dishes to help us out,” barked, barked above the din of the dozen assorted humans in line in front of him, a man who has daily volunteered to help out in the makeshift kitchen. A kitchen whose primitive dishwashing apparatus entailed the familiar rubber soul dish pan, some lukewarm water, a little oily from the leaving of some off-hand meal, joy detergent, and rinsing tub, dishcloth and done. Primitive like back in kid time doing after supper dishes before being released in the teenage be-bop dark streets night. And a couple of older guys, older guys who knew the streets and the lore of the streets backward and forward, stepped behind the tent and got to work on a stack while the third passed on the request. When the hot meals came on deck all three got a meal, no questions asked, but somewhere, somewhere deep inside his career vagabond heart that third man knew he was not built for this new world a-borning. Not for social solidarity dishes cleaned. Meanwhile our kitchen master chef, master of the artful tuna sandwich and of the slabbed peanut butter and jelly (grape just then) variety as well answers an older man’s inquiry about what was pressingly needed for the next day’s “menu.” That older man, a man who did not look like he had the means to do so, and could have very easily passed for a “resident” of this tent city, had been coming daily with perhaps one hundred dollars worth of whatever our master chef told him the kitchen needed. Angels, apparently, come in all sizes, shapes, and circumstances.
********
Jesus, the logistics of this encampment is simplicity itself. A few rows of tents, sleeping tents, mostly good firm weather-conditioned tents in all colors, mainly blue or the feel of blue though. Unlike those watered-down Army olive drab pup tents that I made do with out in ‘Frisco when Butterfly Swirl and I were a thing traveling up and down the West Coast in the summer of love, 1967. Of course then love drove the be-bop great western night and we probably could have made due with some newspapers under our heads. But that’s a story for another time. Then several tents at each end of the encampment for special tasks like media, the library, and the “information desk.” A few odds and end here and there but mainly kept up nicely, city urban vagabond nicely. Fit for any well-fed college student out on an urban adventure to place his or her head on, and not have mother worry too much. And at the far end, the end away from the subway station a huge granite gray slab of a building, something to do with the ‘big dig” project that created this space, officially the Rose Kennedy Greenway, in its aftermath. The side wall of that big slab now serves as the main poster board for any political messages that people have the energy (and magic marker) to proclaim. And in front of that wall a few chairs, a mike, and various other equipment for those who want harangue, humor, or hum the crowd. That fleeting chance at fifteen minutes of fame for the soul-weary, for the voiceless, and for the voiced-over. Let’s listen in for bit and jot down a few of the things said.
“Karl Marx was right, this capitalist system has got to go and we need to make a new world,” sing-songed a middle-aged man, seemingly some kind of college professor out doing missionary work this day, who then proceeded to spend his fifteen minutes expanding on his scheme to have Congress vote to limit the amount of profit each corporation can make, using some sort of exotic formula that only he had the pass code to unravel. I missed that idea when I read Marx long ago but maybe I missed one of the footnotes the probable source. Our professor didn’t. This place, every time I come, at least during the day is loaded down with professors and others from the myriad local colleges and universities that dot the Boston skyline and each brings his or her own panacea with them, usually some third-rate variation off of Marx or some other 19th century thinker dressed up to wake up the texting-enchanted modern listener.
“This place is a Potemkin Village,” chanted another younger speaker a little later to a wandering, wavering crowd audience of about seven. “The people who run this thing go home at night to their nice warm beds while we stay here and keep the faith, the real faith,” he added. This inflamed black flannel-shirted youth finished up with this epistle, “Besides half the tents are empty and the tents that have people in them are just drifters and bums who don’t know anything about what we are trying to do here. They are just trying to keep warm and away from getting hassled by the cops.” I had heard that sentiment expressed before, more than once, from political types and kind of dismissed it out of hand but this guy seemed to be speaking from some truth experience. I reminded myself to come back in a few minutes and talk to him when he was done. However when I went back about ten minutes later he was gone. But his plaintive plea stuck with me and I will have to keep on the trail of that strand.
********
Later that same day at the same wall-
“Man, play us a Hendrix tune on that thing, ‘cause you are smokin’, man” earnestly requested a young, red-bearded man, obviously a student, an ardent musical student from the look of him. “Okay man, if you play a little drum behind me,” came the reply from the reincarnation of Jimi, complete with tie-dyed headband to hold his head together. And for perhaps fifteen minutes they held it together like some aura out on the 1960s be-bop night, their fifteen minutes of fame on the Dewey Square main stage for their resumes. And the crowd that swelled to listen in knew they had heard some old phantom primordial from the womb sound, and liked it. Another group this time a guitar, harmonica, drum combination trying to bring a blues riff together sends most of the crowd wandering in all directions. Such are the hard facts of the fame game from Broadway to tent city. Hopefully some more harmonious society will have more room for the fringes of that game.
*********
“Say, can I have cigarette, man, I’m out?” said another older man weary, street weary, getting ready to enter a tent to catch a few winks. “I’m rolling Bull, okay?” answered a red-headed dread-locked young man. That cadging of cigarettes, factory-made or from the pouch, between and among the young is somewhat strange after the righteous lifetime drumbeats of foul smoking. Not all messages get through.
Such were, are, will be the random sights and sounds of the Occupy Boston encampment on any given day, or any given minute if you can be in seven places at one time, as the camp continues to organize itself in the tradition of the old westward pioneers seeking that great American west blue-pink night, and still are seeking it generations later.
********
“Hey man, don’t be cheap give me a fucking cigarette, I’m all shaky,” shouted out a razor- edged guy, obviously working off some hang-over, although not necessarily an alcoholic or drug one. “I’m down to my last one, what the fuck do you want from me,” came the surly reply. The tension spiked then passed away in the midday air. In that same midday air came this from one of the tents, voiced by an unseen man, a gruff-voiced man, not young “Fuck, give me my space, my free space, don’t be all around me.” And that voice too went to ground, unresolved.
*******
“This place is neat, three squares and a cot, and nobody hassles you and you don’t have to work for your grub, or nothing,” murmured a street veteran, shabbily-dressed, rough edge- bearded but of sober expression to no one in particular in a crowd of suburban tourists who have made the site at Dewey Square a place on their “must see” map. A young man came up to a clot of that same crowd to discuss the Occupy theme. A question was asked about the shabbily-dressed man’s comment. “Oh, ya, most of the residents are street people, a few of us like me stay to keep the peace but most of the politicos go home, or back to the dorms when the General Assembly is over. We opened the space to anyone who followed the simple rules of the camp so here we are.” One tourista smirked the smirk of someone who “knew, just knew” this thing was not going to work, not with bums, hell no. We shall see.
********
“Out of the tents, into the streets, Out of the tents, into the streets” yelled a tall dark-haired young man dressed in black, Black Bloc black, meaning black everything black, from boots to jacket, topped off with the de rigueur black bandana handkerchief covering the bottom part of his face as some kind of security blanket measure. This youth is known to me so that there is only a little affectation in his dress to be in touch with his anarchist heart. Others’ motives I am not as sure of as they flaunt their garb like wearing the “uniform” would cast away all sins and black purify their corrupted souls. Such act would guard against turning into a stinking bourgeois baddie like daddy.
This sight, the nightmare sight to every protective mother guarding her young against the travails of the world and the bane of every government seeing spook shadows behind the dress, is however here among the tents just another guy with a cause. He repeats himself several times as he tries to rouse the denizens of the new world tent city to come out and march on behalf of any number of causes, this one in solidarity with the shutting down of the Port of Oakland by Occupy Oakland on this early November day, the vanguard action city of the whole American movement and one that has been increasing under attack, under police attack almost nightly.
A few younger comrades also dressed in black, head-to-toe black as well, heeded his plea and stirred from their tents, stretching the stretch of the huddled or prone to ready themselves for the couple of mile walk on this cold but clear evening. Mostly the camp residents ignore the plea and go about their business of fixing tents, heading to the kitchen mess tent for supper or just pretend that our big-hearted black-attired anarcho-mad monk of an activist will gather his troops and leave. And here is where the funny part comes in as I think back to a guy I heard up on the “main stage” a few days back who kept yelling about this occupation site being a Potemkin Village. [Markin: For those not in the know about Russian history or are unfamiliar with the term it signifies all front, no substance. Allegedly one of Russian Empress Catherine the Great’s lovers back in the 18th century, Potemkin, ordered beautiful villages build with only the facades so his honey would have pleasant sights to see when they went riding by. Ya I know, lame but that is the story.] And today that seems true, at least to my eye, as the vast majority of the three hundred or so marchers were not resident “occupiers,” or had the now signature drawn-out slightly dazed sag look of occupiers. In any case we are off, as I have decided to express my solidarity with the sisters and brothers in Oakland (a place I know well from back in the day).
Naturally the black-suited sisters and brothers are up front leading this thing chanting solidarity slogans centered on the defense of Occupy Oakland ("From the East Bay to Back Bay-Defend Occupy Oakland"), the ubiquitous “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out” that is something of a national anthem for the movement now, and to show the tenor of militancy this night this little beauty, “What’s the solution?: Revolution, What’s the reaction?: Direct action." All in a day’s work out in the protest march world though. What makes this one a little unusual is the march route. See the line of march on this one, perhaps reflecting some super-black dream kick, is deliberately planned to go helter-skelter, one assumes to “throw off” the bicycle police and other law enforcement types who are “guarding” the march.
Of course the only ones who are confused by all this are the few marchers who are rare rookies to this scene, trampling on others' shoes we travel zigzag (and they, the rookies zigzag) up the wrong way on Winter Street or Congress Street stopping already stopped rush hour traffic with our pleas for solidarity and a whole range of other concerns. Eventually we get to the State House on Beacon Street then march down to Charles Street and move against the waiting traffic before heading back to Boylston Street and then to Downtown Crossing for the now obligatory “die in” (a momentary sit-in, if you are not familiar with that term) a few “mic check” shout-outs and then more chanting back to camp. Done, finis, chalk up some more march miles on my protest-o-meter. A spirited march, a necessary march, no question, but I hope that I was just being jittery when I got that feeling in my spine at the end of the march that something was out of joint, that those who wish to “lead” a revolution, a black-encrusted revolution, were heading up the wrong street with their antics.
********
“You had better stay the fuck away from my woman, and stay way away,” threatened a young guy, a young white guy, not a street guy, not a student but just the kind of guy who drifts in and out of things. “Fuck you and your woman,” came the reply from a young Spanish-looking dude who had daggers in his eyes as the two nearly came to blows. Just then someone yelled “rainbow” and several people appeared to calm the situation down. Not too quickly calmed it down by the way.
This too is a part of the “new world a-borning” as not everybody is quite ready yet to shift gears, or just has too much, much too much, baggage from old bourgeois society to make the leap of faith just yet.
********
Five minutes ago the sidewalk along the Atlantic Avenue side of the encampment was deserted, a lonely yellow-jacketed cop shifting back and forth on his heels to make his duty time pass more quickly. Now the first sign of the day, “Tax The Rich,” along with it human holder, here a well-dressed, well-preserved older woman, a woman who looked like she has seen many battles for social justice in her time hit the sidewalk. And her action acted as a catalyst because then came a couple of young students carrying a banner-“Banks got bailed out, we got sold out,” one of the anthems of the Occupy movement, to stand beside her. They smile, she smiles, nothing more is needed as they banner understand each other completely.
Then a convoy of about twelve middle-aged and older Universalist-Unitarians from out in some suburban town, who have rented a bus for the occasion, begin filling in the sidewalk a little farther up the street with their “peace, this,” “peace, that,” “good-will toward all” signs. Upon investigation this group had made a solemn decision, as only U-Uers can, to come weekly to Boston to stand in solidarity with the efforts in Dewey Square.
A few minutes later, from out of nowhere, came a nomadic resident of the “village” with a plateful of cookies, chocolate chip perhaps, and offers them to those “working the line” on Atlantic Avenue.
********
Later, an older model automobile, frankly a heap, driven by a menacing-looking man in lumberjack jacket with fierce flashing eyes like some crazed survivalist stopped just in front of the Atlantic Avenue entrance to the encampment and yells out, “Hey, when do I put these sleeping bags, tarps, shovels, and pots? I can’t stay but I am with you, with you all the way.” Of such acts by such desperate looking men, revolutions are made, big-time revolutions.
Toward late afternoon the Atlantic Avenue traffic gets heavier, bumper to bumper, as people try to leave the city, and city cares behind. A guy in a big dump truck, a flat-top hair cut showing yells out, “Get a job” at a group of street people standing on the avenue. Later a pedestrian muttered to that yellow-jacketed cop on duty, who was still rocking his heels, about how he paid taxes and isn’t it a shame what these people are up to. The call of the day though goes to a guy, a light-skinned Cuban-looking guy in a late model cherry red sports car driving on the far right lane away from the encampment, who yells out, “Commies, go back to where you came from.”
Ya, I know not everybody got the news about twenty years back, not everybody gets what is going on now, and not everybody, despite the sleek street slogan of ninety-nine percent, is with the Occupy movement. But just remember that guy, that lumberjack jacket guy in that old heap, who gave what he had, and gave all the way.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!
**********
Markin comment November 18, 2011:
Josh Breslin didn’t know what to expect this time as the streamlined subway car that he was riding was approaching the South Station stop on the MBTA Red Line in Boston. He half-expected to see some multi-colored hand-made poster proclaiming this stop as “Occupy Boston,” something with stenciled and silhouetted clenched fist, or something like that, proclaiming this newly sacred ground, this fetid, dank subway stop, in the name of the people. Hell, just like back in the old days, the old 1960s times of blessed memory, when no wall, no public wall anyway, was safe from revolutionary pronouncements, or off-hand midnight-crafted graffiti. He had certainly seen stranger signs plastered around the Occupy encampment the last few times that he had previously come over from his home in Cambridge on the other side of the river. Stuff from Thoreau and Gandhi, naturally, but also odd-ball wisps of wisdom about being kind, not being greedy, corporate greedy or otherwise, not being sexist, racist, homophobic and the whole litany of politically acceptable Don’ts scripted out since those ‘60s that seemed self-almost explanatory and in not need of proclamation in this microscopic social experiment, this exemplar of the “new world order,” leftist-style.
Ya, these times definitely call for some outlandish statement in bright day-glo colors something, he mused amused, to confuse the touristas who were making the Occupy site a “must see” stop on their vacation itineraries. Something to throw them off the scent when they asked their infernal questions- “What are the kids up to, why all the tents, why all the black flags (really not many but that black flag of anarchy, like the red one of communism, spooked people, made their deepest fears surface, and in the old days rightly so),” and on and on. Like he, Joshua Breslin, known far and wide back in the day under the moniker, Prince of Love, a magical mystery tour merry prankster, music-and-drugs-are- the-revolution, west coast communal living madman knew what was on the kids minds today, except they were getting the short straw in the game of who gets what in the social game.
Just then he reflected, flash-back reflected, that a lot of what he had seen and heard on those other occasions when he had crossed the river of late, maybe four or five by now, echoed some long ago, half-forgotten signs and totems from the times when he was searching for the blue-pink great American West night back in the late 1960s and had wound up in People’s Park in Berkeley out in wayward California. And had been wounded and tear-gassed, Prince of Love renown notwithstanding, for his efforts when things got twisted and the deal went down. Yes, this was just exactly what it was like and now he had a “theme” for the notes that he was feeling pressed to take on this trip now that he had a “feel” for the situation. Although this time, unlike back then, he was not expecting, not expecting in his on-coming dotage, to be wounded or tear-gassed. He frankly admitted to himself after his last visit to the camp site a few days before that he was not up those rigors now, those shake-them-off-and-come-back-swinging-youth- spunks that he had in great quantity as he headed barrel-assing out west from his old hometown, Olde Saco up Maine way.
The train then stopped jarring him in mid-thought, opened its air-pressurized doors, and its sullen passengers decamped for seven winds places. No, Josh noticed, no sign at the subway level anyway that occupyitis had expanded to the cavernous underground. On surfacing in the Dewey Square sunlight though, another mercifully warm late October day starting to break through, his ears were immediately accosted by the ranting, there was no other name for it, of “Syllable Slim,” a name that he had coined for this vagabond prince standing kitty-corner in front of him when he first heard him holding forth on the perfidies of the Democrats, democrats, Republicans, republicans and anyone else who held the whiff of power, or wanted it, at Park Street Station years ago. Now Slim was the “king” of the Dewey Square day and night having moved either uptown or downtown, Josh was not quite sure of the geographic relationship between the two subway stops, with a new audience to ignore, or try to ignore, him. What was also perfectly clear was, uptown or downtown, Slim would be hard-pressed to describe what was going on at his Occupy kingdom. His spiel did not depend on such trivials The city, any city with size, produces its fair share of drifters, grifters, and midnight shifters and they, like lemmings to the sea, have heard of the glad tidings emitting from Dewey Square (read: food, shelter, and no hassles-the famous “three squares and a cot” from “on-the-road” jungle camp lore) and have come forth. And Slim is their king.
Josh, by the way, was here, here on assignment, not much pay but an assignment anyway, his first since he “officially” retired from his onerous editorial duties a couple of years back to be able to sit back, kick back, and write that great sex/drug/political/musical/ hail fellows well met/digger commune 1960s explosion novel he had been putting off since, well, since he “got off the bus” in 1971 and headed back first to Olde Saco and then drifted down to various Boston area spots. See the pay part was required, no, demanded by Josh, in order to give his employer a real “feel” for the flavor of what was going on at Dewey Square to the “soccer moms and dads” who might be wondering what they were missing while waiting, SUV-waiting, for their little Ashley or Samson to finish up their suburban kids soccer league workouts, or one or another of twelve other possible organized kid to do things for their resumes, the kid’s that is. A few random notes to titillate the rubes, and move on. No sweat. He, moreover, was going to parlay those skimpy notes into working order for his now great Tom Wolfe-ish sociological sex/drug/political/musical/ hail fellows well met/digger commune 1960s explosion novel. And in Josh Breslin’s mind Syllable Slim was already slated, with a big intro, to lead off this 21st century magical mystery tour, merry prankster gig, warts and all. We merely get his leavings.
********
“Hey brother, can you help me put this tarp over my tent? It got cold as hell last night and the winds were blowing fierce,” yelled a cherub-faced male, almost too youthful to be here but such are the times, although it was later learned that he was now a few weeks-seasoned Occupy Boston grizzly veteran resident to a middle-aged man casually walking by. “Sure thing, let’s get to it” replied that passer-by. Was the passer-by some wayward tourist looking for the next thrill in the city night life, a career gawker, or just one many unnamed “volunteers” who have sprung from the woodwork (okay, okay suburbia) in response to the news that something more than nine-to-five and white picket fences might be in the air?
********
“Can you bring this hot pot of soup to the kitchen? Some lady, a lady who would not give her name and would not acknowledge anything but thanks, drove up on the Atlantic Avenue side and asked me to unload some stuff for her,” said one young woman in shorts, short shorts thereby showing off her firm athletic legs for one and all to see to another young woman dressed in long pants, maybe jeans, getting ready for colder climates. Shortly thereafter the “laundry lady” tooted her horn looking for help in unloading a trunk-load of everything from towels to sleeping bags. And our two young women again “hit” the Atlantic Avenue curb for this “angel.” See the angel’s kindly thing, her matronly, middle-aged, unnamed kindly thing, was to come by on Tuesday for dirty laundry and return on Thursday with everything Seventh Generation bright and clean. Said “laundry lady” is also unnamed like our tent-fixing passer-by and soup lady, but clearly one who has come out of the woodwork on the news of the glad tidings.
********
“If you want a meal, a nice hot meal, could you wash some dishes to help us out,” barked, barked above the din of the dozen assorted humans in line in front of him, a man who has daily volunteered to help out in the makeshift kitchen. A kitchen whose primitive dishwashing apparatus entailed the familiar rubber soul dish pan, some lukewarm water, a little oily from the leaving of some off-hand meal, joy detergent, and rinsing tub, dishcloth and done. Primitive like back in kid time doing after supper dishes before being released in the teenage be-bop dark streets night. And a couple of older guys, older guys who knew the streets and the lore of the streets backward and forward, stepped behind the tent and got to work on a stack while the third passed on the request. When the hot meals came on deck all three got a meal, no questions asked, but somewhere, somewhere deep inside his career vagabond heart that third man knew he was not built for this new world a-borning. Not for social solidarity dishes cleaned. Meanwhile our kitchen master chef, master of the artful tuna sandwich and of the slabbed peanut butter and jelly (grape just then) variety as well answers an older man’s inquiry about what was pressingly needed for the next day’s “menu.” That older man, a man who did not look like he had the means to do so, and could have very easily passed for a “resident” of this tent city, had been coming daily with perhaps one hundred dollars worth of whatever our master chef told him the kitchen needed. Angels, apparently, come in all sizes, shapes, and circumstances.
********
Jesus, the logistics of this encampment is simplicity itself. A few rows of tents, sleeping tents, mostly good firm weather-conditioned tents in all colors, mainly blue or the feel of blue though. Unlike those watered-down Army olive drab pup tents that I made do with out in ‘Frisco when Butterfly Swirl and I were a thing traveling up and down the West Coast in the summer of love, 1967. Of course then love drove the be-bop great western night and we probably could have made due with some newspapers under our heads. But that’s a story for another time. Then several tents at each end of the encampment for special tasks like media, the library, and the “information desk.” A few odds and end here and there but mainly kept up nicely, city urban vagabond nicely. Fit for any well-fed college student out on an urban adventure to place his or her head on, and not have mother worry too much. And at the far end, the end away from the subway station a huge granite gray slab of a building, something to do with the ‘big dig” project that created this space, officially the Rose Kennedy Greenway, in its aftermath. The side wall of that big slab now serves as the main poster board for any political messages that people have the energy (and magic marker) to proclaim. And in front of that wall a few chairs, a mike, and various other equipment for those who want harangue, humor, or hum the crowd. That fleeting chance at fifteen minutes of fame for the soul-weary, for the voiceless, and for the voiced-over. Let’s listen in for bit and jot down a few of the things said.
“Karl Marx was right, this capitalist system has got to go and we need to make a new world,” sing-songed a middle-aged man, seemingly some kind of college professor out doing missionary work this day, who then proceeded to spend his fifteen minutes expanding on his scheme to have Congress vote to limit the amount of profit each corporation can make, using some sort of exotic formula that only he had the pass code to unravel. I missed that idea when I read Marx long ago but maybe I missed one of the footnotes the probable source. Our professor didn’t. This place, every time I come, at least during the day is loaded down with professors and others from the myriad local colleges and universities that dot the Boston skyline and each brings his or her own panacea with them, usually some third-rate variation off of Marx or some other 19th century thinker dressed up to wake up the texting-enchanted modern listener.
“This place is a Potemkin Village,” chanted another younger speaker a little later to a wandering, wavering crowd audience of about seven. “The people who run this thing go home at night to their nice warm beds while we stay here and keep the faith, the real faith,” he added. This inflamed black flannel-shirted youth finished up with this epistle, “Besides half the tents are empty and the tents that have people in them are just drifters and bums who don’t know anything about what we are trying to do here. They are just trying to keep warm and away from getting hassled by the cops.” I had heard that sentiment expressed before, more than once, from political types and kind of dismissed it out of hand but this guy seemed to be speaking from some truth experience. I reminded myself to come back in a few minutes and talk to him when he was done. However when I went back about ten minutes later he was gone. But his plaintive plea stuck with me and I will have to keep on the trail of that strand.
********
Later that same day at the same wall-
“Man, play us a Hendrix tune on that thing, ‘cause you are smokin’, man” earnestly requested a young, red-bearded man, obviously a student, an ardent musical student from the look of him. “Okay man, if you play a little drum behind me,” came the reply from the reincarnation of Jimi, complete with tie-dyed headband to hold his head together. And for perhaps fifteen minutes they held it together like some aura out on the 1960s be-bop night, their fifteen minutes of fame on the Dewey Square main stage for their resumes. And the crowd that swelled to listen in knew they had heard some old phantom primordial from the womb sound, and liked it. Another group this time a guitar, harmonica, drum combination trying to bring a blues riff together sends most of the crowd wandering in all directions. Such are the hard facts of the fame game from Broadway to tent city. Hopefully some more harmonious society will have more room for the fringes of that game.
*********
“Say, can I have cigarette, man, I’m out?” said another older man weary, street weary, getting ready to enter a tent to catch a few winks. “I’m rolling Bull, okay?” answered a red-headed dread-locked young man. That cadging of cigarettes, factory-made or from the pouch, between and among the young is somewhat strange after the righteous lifetime drumbeats of foul smoking. Not all messages get through.
Such were, are, will be the random sights and sounds of the Occupy Boston encampment on any given day, or any given minute if you can be in seven places at one time, as the camp continues to organize itself in the tradition of the old westward pioneers seeking that great American west blue-pink night, and still are seeking it generations later.
********
“Hey man, don’t be cheap give me a fucking cigarette, I’m all shaky,” shouted out a razor- edged guy, obviously working off some hang-over, although not necessarily an alcoholic or drug one. “I’m down to my last one, what the fuck do you want from me,” came the surly reply. The tension spiked then passed away in the midday air. In that same midday air came this from one of the tents, voiced by an unseen man, a gruff-voiced man, not young “Fuck, give me my space, my free space, don’t be all around me.” And that voice too went to ground, unresolved.
*******
“This place is neat, three squares and a cot, and nobody hassles you and you don’t have to work for your grub, or nothing,” murmured a street veteran, shabbily-dressed, rough edge- bearded but of sober expression to no one in particular in a crowd of suburban tourists who have made the site at Dewey Square a place on their “must see” map. A young man came up to a clot of that same crowd to discuss the Occupy theme. A question was asked about the shabbily-dressed man’s comment. “Oh, ya, most of the residents are street people, a few of us like me stay to keep the peace but most of the politicos go home, or back to the dorms when the General Assembly is over. We opened the space to anyone who followed the simple rules of the camp so here we are.” One tourista smirked the smirk of someone who “knew, just knew” this thing was not going to work, not with bums, hell no. We shall see.
********
“Out of the tents, into the streets, Out of the tents, into the streets” yelled a tall dark-haired young man dressed in black, Black Bloc black, meaning black everything black, from boots to jacket, topped off with the de rigueur black bandana handkerchief covering the bottom part of his face as some kind of security blanket measure. This youth is known to me so that there is only a little affectation in his dress to be in touch with his anarchist heart. Others’ motives I am not as sure of as they flaunt their garb like wearing the “uniform” would cast away all sins and black purify their corrupted souls. Such act would guard against turning into a stinking bourgeois baddie like daddy.
This sight, the nightmare sight to every protective mother guarding her young against the travails of the world and the bane of every government seeing spook shadows behind the dress, is however here among the tents just another guy with a cause. He repeats himself several times as he tries to rouse the denizens of the new world tent city to come out and march on behalf of any number of causes, this one in solidarity with the shutting down of the Port of Oakland by Occupy Oakland on this early November day, the vanguard action city of the whole American movement and one that has been increasing under attack, under police attack almost nightly.
A few younger comrades also dressed in black, head-to-toe black as well, heeded his plea and stirred from their tents, stretching the stretch of the huddled or prone to ready themselves for the couple of mile walk on this cold but clear evening. Mostly the camp residents ignore the plea and go about their business of fixing tents, heading to the kitchen mess tent for supper or just pretend that our big-hearted black-attired anarcho-mad monk of an activist will gather his troops and leave. And here is where the funny part comes in as I think back to a guy I heard up on the “main stage” a few days back who kept yelling about this occupation site being a Potemkin Village. [Markin: For those not in the know about Russian history or are unfamiliar with the term it signifies all front, no substance. Allegedly one of Russian Empress Catherine the Great’s lovers back in the 18th century, Potemkin, ordered beautiful villages build with only the facades so his honey would have pleasant sights to see when they went riding by. Ya I know, lame but that is the story.] And today that seems true, at least to my eye, as the vast majority of the three hundred or so marchers were not resident “occupiers,” or had the now signature drawn-out slightly dazed sag look of occupiers. In any case we are off, as I have decided to express my solidarity with the sisters and brothers in Oakland (a place I know well from back in the day).
Naturally the black-suited sisters and brothers are up front leading this thing chanting solidarity slogans centered on the defense of Occupy Oakland ("From the East Bay to Back Bay-Defend Occupy Oakland"), the ubiquitous “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out” that is something of a national anthem for the movement now, and to show the tenor of militancy this night this little beauty, “What’s the solution?: Revolution, What’s the reaction?: Direct action." All in a day’s work out in the protest march world though. What makes this one a little unusual is the march route. See the line of march on this one, perhaps reflecting some super-black dream kick, is deliberately planned to go helter-skelter, one assumes to “throw off” the bicycle police and other law enforcement types who are “guarding” the march.
Of course the only ones who are confused by all this are the few marchers who are rare rookies to this scene, trampling on others' shoes we travel zigzag (and they, the rookies zigzag) up the wrong way on Winter Street or Congress Street stopping already stopped rush hour traffic with our pleas for solidarity and a whole range of other concerns. Eventually we get to the State House on Beacon Street then march down to Charles Street and move against the waiting traffic before heading back to Boylston Street and then to Downtown Crossing for the now obligatory “die in” (a momentary sit-in, if you are not familiar with that term) a few “mic check” shout-outs and then more chanting back to camp. Done, finis, chalk up some more march miles on my protest-o-meter. A spirited march, a necessary march, no question, but I hope that I was just being jittery when I got that feeling in my spine at the end of the march that something was out of joint, that those who wish to “lead” a revolution, a black-encrusted revolution, were heading up the wrong street with their antics.
********
“You had better stay the fuck away from my woman, and stay way away,” threatened a young guy, a young white guy, not a street guy, not a student but just the kind of guy who drifts in and out of things. “Fuck you and your woman,” came the reply from a young Spanish-looking dude who had daggers in his eyes as the two nearly came to blows. Just then someone yelled “rainbow” and several people appeared to calm the situation down. Not too quickly calmed it down by the way.
This too is a part of the “new world a-borning” as not everybody is quite ready yet to shift gears, or just has too much, much too much, baggage from old bourgeois society to make the leap of faith just yet.
********
Five minutes ago the sidewalk along the Atlantic Avenue side of the encampment was deserted, a lonely yellow-jacketed cop shifting back and forth on his heels to make his duty time pass more quickly. Now the first sign of the day, “Tax The Rich,” along with it human holder, here a well-dressed, well-preserved older woman, a woman who looked like she has seen many battles for social justice in her time hit the sidewalk. And her action acted as a catalyst because then came a couple of young students carrying a banner-“Banks got bailed out, we got sold out,” one of the anthems of the Occupy movement, to stand beside her. They smile, she smiles, nothing more is needed as they banner understand each other completely.
Then a convoy of about twelve middle-aged and older Universalist-Unitarians from out in some suburban town, who have rented a bus for the occasion, begin filling in the sidewalk a little farther up the street with their “peace, this,” “peace, that,” “good-will toward all” signs. Upon investigation this group had made a solemn decision, as only U-Uers can, to come weekly to Boston to stand in solidarity with the efforts in Dewey Square.
A few minutes later, from out of nowhere, came a nomadic resident of the “village” with a plateful of cookies, chocolate chip perhaps, and offers them to those “working the line” on Atlantic Avenue.
********
Later, an older model automobile, frankly a heap, driven by a menacing-looking man in lumberjack jacket with fierce flashing eyes like some crazed survivalist stopped just in front of the Atlantic Avenue entrance to the encampment and yells out, “Hey, when do I put these sleeping bags, tarps, shovels, and pots? I can’t stay but I am with you, with you all the way.” Of such acts by such desperate looking men, revolutions are made, big-time revolutions.
Toward late afternoon the Atlantic Avenue traffic gets heavier, bumper to bumper, as people try to leave the city, and city cares behind. A guy in a big dump truck, a flat-top hair cut showing yells out, “Get a job” at a group of street people standing on the avenue. Later a pedestrian muttered to that yellow-jacketed cop on duty, who was still rocking his heels, about how he paid taxes and isn’t it a shame what these people are up to. The call of the day though goes to a guy, a light-skinned Cuban-looking guy in a late model cherry red sports car driving on the far right lane away from the encampment, who yells out, “Commies, go back to where you came from.”
Ya, I know not everybody got the news about twenty years back, not everybody gets what is going on now, and not everybody, despite the sleek street slogan of ninety-nine percent, is with the Occupy movement. But just remember that guy, that lumberjack jacket guy in that old heap, who gave what he had, and gave all the way.
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