James Baldwin at 84

“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

James Baldwin

David Weiss and his Planet Without a Visa

David Loeb Weiss was born in Warsaw in 1911 and emigrated as a child with his family. He was the brother of Murry Weiss and brother-in-law of Myra Tanner, both important, even exceptional, SWP leaders who fought its sectoralist descent and continued to be important Marxist fighters after they left the party.

David, who in some ways had more of an artist’s relationship with revolutionary politics, joined the SWP at its founding in 1938 already a veteran Trotskyist militant. Active for many years, including as SWP candidate for New York Governor, he would become, among other things, a respected filmmaker directing “No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger” in 1968.

He didn’t leave the SWP as his brother and Myra did in the mid-1960’s. While he shared some of their critique his daily party activity had waned, though not his loyalty to the party. He became a typesetter at the New York Times directing a film there on the demise of the hot metal type. He was expelled from the SWP during the purges in the early 1980’s. He remained a Fourth Internationalist and went on to join the FIT then Socialist Action which he left in the 1990’s.  He was active until the realities of his age made political activity too difficult.

I was fortunate to have gotten to know David Weiss in the years before he died. He was active, in his way, until 90. He was a unique character. A bit hammy, he was an inspired speaker and fully conscious of the history of the century his life’s activity spanned. I remember arguing, good natured and over red wine, about SWP history with David until into the night at a conference in Pittsburgh. He was already well passed 80 at the time. We compared hangovers the next day.

One of the very best things about being a communist is the people you get to meet. know, collaborate and become comrades with. Remarkable people. David, won to the revolution at an early age, pursued it his entire, long life. For some perspective; he was a revolutionary activist from before Hitler took power to well after the capitalist reunification of Germany. He was most proud (or was it to impress me?) of his role in “acquainting fascists with the pavement” during the heady days of 1930’s New York politics. He rode the rails in his youth and lived his life with the same spirit.

At one conference in Detroit, I have pictures of him there that will someday with many others get scanned, during the dog days of the nineties David gave a spiel on Lenin and the couple of coaches of revolutionaries who showed up to defend proletarian internationalism at Zimmerwald during World War I. There weren’t more than that in the room that day. My god, I thought, was he there?

No, of course he wasn’t, but he could and would have been there. He certainly sounded like he was. This was because he believed, passionately, in the same things the isolated 1915 internationalists did. The long view gained by his long life certainly helped a few of us through the dejected days of the triumph of T.I.N.A in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

There is a difference between nostalgia and retaining a collective memory of the events and lessons of our movement. That collective memory is essential to navigating the muddied waters of the class war today. It’s comrades like David who embody and pass it on. This work on Trotsky’s exile of David’s, which I heard him talk about decades after he began it, continued to be a passion of his. It is fitting that we try and finish David’s film

This appeal is clear as to the importance of what David put together. Only revolutionaries can really tell the story of revolutions. This is a worthy project and I hope that comrades will, in these hard times, be able to give something to complete it. And don’t you really want to see it any way?

APPEAL FROM REFUGE PRODUCTIONS:
PLANET WITHOUT A VISA:
THE EMBATTLED LIFE OF LEON TROTSKY

In creative bursts over 30 years, award-winning filmmaker (No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger) and longtime SWP member/organizer David Loeb Weiss filmed eyewitness accounts of Trotsky’s last years in exile. He assembled an extraordinary breadth of interviews, over forty-five in all, ranging from James P. Cannon who recounts seeing Trotsky speak unamplified to a crowd of thousands in the USSR, to French comrades-in-arms Marcel Body and Pierre Pascal, who broke with their high level WW I military mission to work closely with Lenin and Trotsky, to grandson Esteban Volkov who was living with Trotsky in Mexico during both assassination attempts. All these precious interviews, most of them filmed in color from 1969-73 are rich with telling details that bring Trotsky to life. Weiss filmed also the texture and locations of exile in Turkey, Norway, France and Mexico, guided by Trotsky’s personal secretary Jean Van Heijenhoort, and he acquired home movies of Trotsky in Mexico and archival footage from the U.S. and Moscow.

As part of a student film project for UCLA, award-winning filmmaker and former SWP member Lindy Laub went to New York to interview George Novack, who introduced her to David Weiss. Laub lost contact with Weiss for 18 years but when she found him again he hadn’t progressed on his film about Leon Trotsky. He needed help so she became involved. Seeing the disarray of his work print and realizing his 30-year project may never see the light of projection, she organized the negative and moved it from his hot dusty house to film storage vaults. At 93, Weiss died leaving this irreplaceable footage with Laub hoping she would craft it into the film he’d so intensely imagined. Although he never completed the film, his accomplishment is considerable.

Recently, Suzi Weissman became involved as an invaluable advisor and, with her involvement, Laub has been transferring the sound and having these extraordinary interviews transcribed. We are doing further archival research and shooting contemporary footage to bring Trotsky’s legacy forward to the present. Now, it is most necessary to digitize for editing, i.e. transfer the negative to video, and to finally complete the film Weiss so intensely imagined.
For $200,000 we can edit and entirely finish this film.
To make your contribution to this project please see the attached form.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Yes, I want to contribute to Planet Without a Visa.
____ $100 ____$250 ____$500 ____$1,000 _____$5,000 _______________other amount
____ I am enclosing a check.
____ I pledge to send this amount to:
Lindy Laub, Refuge Productions
5465 Madison Avenue
San Diego, CA 92115
(619)287-0767 LLLaub@sbcglobal.net

Name:__________________________________________Address_______________________________________
__________________________________________________________
Telephone _______________________________________ email________________________
Please make check payable to Lindy Laub, Refuge Productions.

Machine Guns

The 21st Century is turning out to be as frenetic and savage as the one we recently left behind.  The lawyers of capital promised  the “end of history” made possible by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bubbly growth of the 1990’s. A capitalism unfettered by the class struggle would build the New Jerusalem that the workers’ movement failed to do.

That Jerusalem is surrounded by a growing wall separating the dispossessed from their expropriators and manned with nests of machine guns is not a throw back to the bad old days, but the real capitalist promise of the future.  Two great artists of the 20th Century produced, among their finest pieces, works entitled “Machine Gun”.  In a world of conflict the machine gun is both an element of oppression and an agent of liberation.  The past is not really the past, the present is only the present, the future is unwritten.

Jimi Hendrix doesn’t really need any introduction.  What Coltrane was to the saxophone, Hendrix was to the electric guitar. He paints huge, glowing, pulsating pictures with his instrument.  Hendrix was an absolute artist and, very often, an astute showman at the same time. Machine Gun is the former paratrooper’s take on Vietnam; you can hear the bombs falling.

I probably have a dozen versions of Machine Gun, each one is different.  My favorite is from the, much maligned, second set at Berkley, 1970.  This one is from the legendary Filmore East New Year’s shows with Billy Cox on bass and the thundering, and recently deceased, Buddy Miles on drums.  It has a power that can’t be explained, it can only felt.  It will make your teeth hurt.

Victor Serge was one of the very best writers of the 20th Century.  His Memoirs and Year One should be read by every student of the “wars and revolutions begun in 1914″ which all revolutionaries must be.  His memoirs, novels, poetry, letters and histories span the hopes and tragedies from the opening of the century to its midnight; the second imperialist world war.  His prose is devoid of romanticism and can be terribly dark and yet filled with hope in situations you would not think hope was possible.

Serge was one of the few survivors of the the Stalinist cataclysm.  Accidents of history and the campaign of supporters saved him from the fate of an entire generation. He walked away from a Gulag.  His recollections of his GPU interrogation still stands out years after I first read it.

Serge’s son, Vlady, went on to become a powerful artists himself, devoted in part to the memory of the fallen, and died in 2005.   The unfortunate break with Trotsky and the Fourth International, while not simply a misunderstanding, was undoubtedly helped along by Stalinist intrigues.  Serge’s witness is a warning and his hope an affirmation. He died, penniless and exiled, in the back of a Mexico City taxi cab not far from where an agent of Stalin plunged an axe into the brain of The Old Man.

Machine Gun

At the gates of the homes, at the gates of the palaces – that we have conquered-
everywhere in the city
where the riot drags on cold, dull and strong,
everywhere at the doors of our homes
the machine-guns in the dark corners.

Dull, to bring death;
blind, low, at the base of the earth,
blind, cold, of steel, of iron,
with the metal of their hate
elemental,

with their steel teeth ready to bite,
their clockwork,
wheels, nuts, springs,
their short black mouths on the mounts
squat …

Oh, the tragic machine, the thing of steel, of iron, inert, which mutilates seconds, at the fatal moment of battle,
which digests seconds – tac-tac-tac – the
seconds drop to the infinite – and lives
tumble to the great cold of the tombs,
The machine
which eats, tears, bursts, pierces, excavates
the flesh, becomes twisted in blood and nerves,
breaks the bones, makes the rails sing with the hollow of perforated chests,
makes the brain ooze with the breaking of great faces:
grey among blackened blood.
Low machine to kill, everywhere, in the town of dull riot,
lurking at the doors of our homes, watching for what wants to be born,
watching
for what lifts from human hearts and from the depths of the live earth,
for what rises from burning faith, from mad hope and from anger – from want and from light –
from enthusiasm and from prayer,
which goes up to flower – acts, cries – flames: the revolt …

Low to cut down flight, the machine-gun in ambush: victory to the man of iron laws, victory to metal on flesh – and in the dream – the law of death.

And this machine, our hands and our brains built. O Father! Did we know what we made?

It’s pronounced sik-uh-fuhnt?

syc·o·phant ˈsɪkəfənt, -ˌfænt, ˈsaɪkə-/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronu[sik-uh-fuhnt, -fant, sahy-kuh-] noun a self-seeking, servile flatterer; fawning parasite. see:

Stodgy Socialists Censor George Carlin

One of the overarching elements of bourgeois society is a hypocrisy born of the contradiction between the “rights of property” and the reality of wage slavery.  It infects all things big and small.  Nowhere is this more true than language.

As I write these lines some of my tax dollars are being used to destroy the third wedding party of the day in Afghanistan.  There are scattered limbs, broken bodies, children; the dead and those left alive who will have to live with the terror wrought in the name of “freedom” and “human rights”.

Undoubtedly there are body fluids mixing with the dirt for those unfortunate enough to have experienced, at least temporarily, their “liberation” at the hands of the United States. There are heaps of bodies lying in their shit, blood and piss thanks to the US government, but you can’t say those words on television (and you won’t see the photos either).

The killing is fine, in fact it’s policy, but there are words that cannot be used to describe these horrific scenes because they are deemed “offensive”.

Now on this blog I choose to go after the class enemy.  I have lots of opinions on the ins and outs of the revolutionary movement and can match any comrade anywhere tendency for tendency in my appreciation of sectariana.  See me at a meeting or hanging out and we’ll talk.  That is not the purpose of this blog, though it is impossible to be a revolutionary and evade some questions publicly so it will happen as events warrant.

Today I am making a small exception to ask the folks at Socialist Appeal if they were courting irony or they really are so stodgy as to expurgate the words of George Carlin in their obituary of him?  Since when did they start paper sales outside of Mormon Temples?

Are there some FCC rules for socialist publications that I am unaware of?  I don’t even think that USA Today censors “bullshit” anymore. Do workers not cuss?  Where I work those seven words that Carlin goes on about is the language of Sunday morning; you ought to hear Saturday night.  What’s up, comrades?  It’s George Fucking Carlin for fuck’s sake!

Some of the seven words Carlin roasted don’t usually find their way into my normal speech, some are regulars.   They are: shit, piss, cunt, fuck, cocksucker (I am pretty sure that’s one word), motherfucker (is that one word or two?) and tits.

Trotsky wrote a lot about offensive language being a reflection of oppression and such. That might have been true when you still had aristocrats running around Europe wearing white gloves, addressing each other with words like “thouest” while workers were mostly illiterate, but we’ve had 35 years since Meanstreets came out and we are all the better for it.  Is the WIL”s Trotskyism that orthodox?

Carlin’s was a needed voice, one that I and many will miss.  He got more radical, and more cynical, as he got older.  Here he is on The American Dream just a year or two ago. And Socialist Appeal couldn’t have said it better.

Detroit Says Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, the MOVE 9 & All Political Prisoners

For a report of this meeting see the Pan-African News Wire story.

Detroit Public Meeting to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, the MOVE 9 & All Political Prisoners

Hear Guest Speakers:
Ramona Africa, Minister of Communication for MOVE and the only adult survivor of the May 13, 1985 massacre of 11 MOVE members by the police in Philadelphia

Pam Africa, Minister of Agitation for MOVE and the Coordinator for the International Concerned Family & Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal

Date: Saturday, Aug. 2, 1:00-4:00pm
Location: Dr. Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History in Detroit
This event will be held in the Orientation Theater in the Museum on East Warren between John R and Brush

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Award-winning journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal has been imprisoned since 1981 after being falsely accused and railroaded for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer. Mumia remains on death row despite two federal court rulings vacating his death sentence. His case is still on appeal in the state of Pennsylvania. Come out and hear a political and legal update on the struggle to release this long-time activist who was a founding member of the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia as well as a staunch supporter of the MOVE organization. Also hear a report on the denial of parole for the MOVE 9 who have been incarcerated 30 years for a crime they did not commit. Additional reports will provide updated information on the imprisonment of BANCO leader Rev. Edward Pinkney from Benton Harbor, the Cuban Five Defense Campaign and the prison industrial complex in Michigan.
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This event is co-sponsored by the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice (MECAWI), the Detroit Green Party, Detroit Solidarity, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality and others.
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For more information contact:
Tel.: 313.671.3715
e-mail: ac6123@wayne.edu