George Meyers was my mentor, my friend, and the person I will always wish I was. It was wonderful to hear that Tim Wheeler had completed George’s biography. I bought two copies immediately and plowed into it with glee.

Book Review:

Tim Wheeler, “No Power Greater. The Life and Times of George A Meyers.” International Publishers, New York, 2024.

To the rest of the world, George was a union organizer, the very first President of the Maryland Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), an American soldier, and one of the leading Communists thrown in prison during the 1950’s witch hunt. But to me, he was an inspiration.

When George was working as the head of the Trade Union Commission of the Communist Party, he spent most of his time visiting union leaders and union activists around the country. I was lucky enough to fit into his itinerary a number of times during his last years. He died in 1999.

Although I have never quite lived up to it, I tried and am trying hard to live up to George’s advice on how to conduct oneself within the unions. “Disagree without being disagreeable,” he would say. I’ve lost my temper and alienated people a lot, but it would have been even worse if I hadn’t known that George was right. On our side of the class struggle, we don’t need big egos and avoidable divisions. Save your anger for the bosses.

Even more important was George’s explanation why he had graduated from being a devoted union leader to being barely-paid-at-all as a Communist. His analogy was about union contracts. “No matter what you win with a new contract,” he would explain, “You still have to win it all over again in the next one.”

In other words, working families can only get temporary victories as long as the bosses retain power. They are always eager, and eventually able, to take your victories away from you. It’s true of union contracts, as most of us old-timers can verify, but it is also true of every other kind of victory for working families.

George saw a lot more social progress than any of us alive today have seen, and he also saw it evaporating after, say, 1980. He was part of the formation of the CIO and the greatest organizing years of American history. He saw, and participated in, the defeat of world fascism. He saw, and participated in the great accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, and the anti-war movement in the 1960s. He saw labor win Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, OSHA, weekends, family leave, and other monumental changes.

He also saw Reagan rip through our rights like a ripsaw. He was spared the sight of the current Supreme Court shredding democracy and successfully attacking all the rights that working families had won, but he would have understood it. He knew that all our victories are temporary as long as the bosses are still in charge.

George Meyers taught me, and many others, a lot of things, but his teachings weren’t what affected me most. It was his demeanor. I have never known anyone so steady and calm, so contemplative, so accepting, and so positive. It amazed me. Here was a man who had been to the heights of labor success and then was imprisoned like a common criminal for years for the crime of having taught others to think. He had suffered decades of anti-communist lies and hatred. He had seen legions of weaker friends fall away.

And yet, George Meyers was the happiest man I ever met in my life. He had this great big, lopsided smile that warmed everyone who met him. George Meyer’s beaming face was a face of a better future, of a great and wonderful future. I suppose he knew that it was unlikely that he would live to see that future, but it was enough for him to know that such a future existed and that he, George Meyers, was already a part of it because of the work he was doing.

I reflected on George’s positive outlook and gorgeous smile when I heard that he was seriously ill and in hospital. I tried to understand how a man who had struggled so hard, suffered so much, and contributed so much to an apparently thankless world, could be such a happy inspiration. I think I figured it out during George’s last days when I wrote and dedicated this song, “The Winning Side”

Oh we know him when we see him
By the smile upon his face
And we all know that he loves us
Cause he loves the human race

(chorus)
No they couldn’t stop his smiling
No matter how they tried
Cause in his heart, he always knew
He was on the winning side!

Oh the bosses thought they had him
When they threw him in the cell
But they didn’t know George Meyers
He just smiled and wished them well!

When the others talk of quitting
And life’s become a trial
We know we’ll go on fighting
Cause we’ll see George Meyers’ smile!

I wrote this song when I heard that George was in the hospital. I recorded it on cassette and sent it to him. A week or so later, I learned that he had died. A month or so after that, my cassette was returned, unopened. So, as far as I know, George never got to hear his tribute. Others heard it at his wake.

Although we lost George Meyers’ corporeal presence, we’ll never lose his teachings nor his inspiration. And now, we have his biography. Thanks, Tim Wheeler!

the end

Book Review (Partial): Medhurst, John, “No Less Than Mystic. A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21^st Century Left.” Repeater Books, London, 2017

Somebody sent me a book anonymously. The package just said “Pearl Books” Wisconsin. I don’t know if everybody is getting one or if I was singled out. Even in paperback, this one costs $19.95 so whoever sent it must have either been strong of purpose or just has a lot of money. I get a lot of books because book salesmen mis-read “Workers Beat” the title of my radio show, and send me business management stuff. They think it’s “Beat Workers,” I guess.

Nevertheless, I liked the “21^st Century Left” part of the title, so I’m trying to read it. Also, it led off with an interesting quote, “The Marxist doctrine is omnipresent because it is true.” –V.I. Lenin.

But I got really worried as soon as I got to the top of the second page of the Introduction: “In the end I suggest that that anti-capitalist writers such as …Noam Chomsky… have more constructive options to offer the left today than do the sages of Bolshevism.” I flipped back to the cover and, sure enough, there was a flagrant endorsement from the world’s champion armchair socialist himself, Chomsky!

Determined as I am to hear both sides of the story, I’m still trying to read it and have accomplished all the way to page 127 now. There are 467 to go. It’s pretty easy to see, from the git-go, that the author is against all revolutionaries and for all back-biting intellectual splitters. It reads very much like a treatise on theology – lots of name dropping, obscure quotes, and hardly any commitment to a course of action.

Since the author rules out revolution in the first few pages, I was eager to see what he does recommend, so I skipped to the last chapter. It wasn’t exactly clear, but he seems to favor early anarchism – the idea that capitalism has an on/off switch that needs no process. He likes the occupy movement, whether on the large scale like the Zapatistas in Mexico or the small scale such as what occurred recently in America’s parks and public places. He likes employee stock option plans in which laborers own a controlling stock in (usually small) businesses. He likes the word “libertarian,” but I don’t think he means America’s Libertarian Party. I think he means “more liberal.” Oh yes, I nearly forgot, he favors the counterculture idea – in which no revolutionary activity, or any activity at all, is required because the bosses are about to capsize on their own and all we have to do is grow our hair long, listen to music, and recycle our trash until they’re gone. All of the people he quotes that I recognize were gradualists who believed that the bosses will stand by while we elect revolutionary socialists to replace them.

When it suits him, the author finds anti-revolutionary quotes from Rosa Luxemburg or even Leon Trotsky to discredit the people who actually did make a difference in their lifetimes.

As I spent considerable time as a counter-culturalist and, later, as a Trotskyite, I felt that I had a special need to set the record straight on Luxemburg and Trotsky. Both of them were lifetime revolutionaries with slightly divergent views on how to overcome the bosses. Luxemburg, in fact, wrote what is probably the best refutation of people like Medhurst, the present author, in her short book “Reform and Revolution.” She spoke the truth and paid for it with her life. She’s essential reading.

I don’t like dissing somebody’s thinking without offering an alternative, so let me explain a short version of the actual situation. It begins by asking “what’s wrong?”

What’s Wrong?

Nothing is wrong. Everything is going swimmingly – but only for the bosses. The people who are running most of the world are running it very well, from their point of view. Working families may not like constant wars and environmental disaster, but oil stocks are skyrocketing. Racism and police misconduct may be ugly from our point of view, but they have always paid off nicely, from slavery thru Jim Crow to the present state of things, for our employers. Mass murders may be unseemly to us, but they are just fine for arms manufacturers. For our bosses, hunger and disease are just the cost of doing busines

Anybody who is thinking clearly will see it. Working families’ problems come from our bosses, and the only long-term solution is to remove them from power. I figured that out without any help from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Mao Tse-Tung, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba or Fidel Castro, and certainly not from Noam Chomsky. In my own case, I was simply an elementary school teacher who thought, at first, that the world would change if I could end corporal punishment. When I paused being a knee-jerk activist and thought about it, though, I realized that America’s system of public and private education has not “gone astray” or “missed the point.” They may not always be good for working families, but they function pretty well for the bosses. The same is true for all the other of society’s “ills.”

What I couldn’t figure out, and, like most people, what I’m still grappling with, is what to do about it. History’s great revolutionaries may have had minor differences in their strategies and tactics, but they all agreed that the bosses need to go. In some parts of his long book, Medhurst hints that he thinks so, too, but, for the most part, his contribution provides comfort for those who don’t really intend to do anything at all.

One can live a long and comfortable life writing books about the need for change as long as they stay away from doing anything, or advocating anything that might work. They can advocate for change – heck, they can even get big financial grants from the bosses for their projects – as long as no real challenge to the bosses is involved.

Clever writers can rise to fame and fortune if they defame the people and ideas that might actually make a difference. The armchair socialist, like the cockroach, will survive after all.

–Gene Lantz

I’m on KNON.org’s “Workers Beat” radio talk show every Saturday at 9AM Central Time. My “Workers Beat Extra” podcasts usually go up on Soundcloud every Wednesday morning. If you are curious about what I really think, look at my personal web site

I’ve seen several recent articles worrying about declining fertility rates. Two of them caught my eye today:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/25/india-birth-rate-replacement-population/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/25/fertility-rates-keep-falling-there-are-no-easy-solutions-fix-it/

In one of them, government spokespersons complain about the falling birth rate in India, the worlds most populous country. The other lamented falling birth rates in the United States, the richest. Both of them complained that economies would suffer if people didn’t rev up their baby production. Both of them offered no explanation for declining birth rates except to say that people just don’t want kids like they used to.

Do People Want Kids?

People are hard-wired to have children whether they want to or not. The difference between today and the past is that more people have a choice. Thank Margaret Sanger for promoting birth control. Thank millions of women for fighting for their rights. The fight is certainly not over, but women have made some gains, and one of those important gains is that they get a little bit of say-so over when and whether they will have children.

At the risk of offending the religious and anti-woman crazies, one could make a strong case that people don’t really want children, or at least they don’t want a considerable number of them. Start with the scandalous treatment of foster children in Texas, for example. The Texas Tribune says there are 28,000 of them. Many have no foster “families.” Some of them sleep unprotected in Child Protective Service offices!

The United States has 12,000,000 children living in poverty, according to The Anna E Casey Foundation 2021 report. Texas has 1,401,000, or 19% of its total. Texas ranks Texas 46^th in taking care of children. It has the most severe anti-abortion law on the books. Texas, one might conclude, has no use for children after they are born!

Is More Population a Good Idea?

At last count (2020), this planet was supporting 7.753 billion human beings. It was 7.673 billion the year before. Some of them are at war. Some of them are dying from disease. Some are being killed by the effects of climate change. Many of them are transient immigrants. 1 in every 10 is undernourished.

Book Review:

Campbell, Randolph B, “An Empire for Slavery. The Peculiar Institution in Texas 1821-1865.” Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

I had Dr Campbell on KNON once, years ago. He was teaching at North Texas University in Denton.

Dr Campbell has strong factual basis for his description of slavery in the Lone Star state. There are 15 pages of bibliography notes that include census figures from 1840, 1850, and 1860 as well as the recordings that were made in the 1930s by former Texas slaves. He had judicial proceedings against slaves and civil cases concerning squabbles between one “owner” and another – as well as squabbles over slave “rentals” and “mortgages.” He has a lot of wills in which “owners” divided their “property” among their heirs. Campbell knows his subject.

This is a dispassionate work of history, not a polemic against slavery nor one of the many apologies for it. He just tells what happened, and that, by itself, makes riveting reading. Given the many misleading accounts of Texas history that exist and are pushed by Chambers of Commerce and politicians, this one is a genuine relief. By looking at the facts, one can finally see through some of the mythology and deliberately misleading versions. Certainly in reality, Texas slaves were not happily playing their banjos and loving their “masters.”

There are some revelations. For example, every Texas child knows that Stephen F Austin, “The Father of Texas,” spent considerable time in Mexico as a representative of his group of settlers. What I hadn’t realized is that a lot of Austin’s Mexico mission consisted of pleas to the Mexican government to allow slavery. During the entire period that white settlers poured into Mexican Tejas, slavery wasn’t legal. The law just generally wasn’t enforced, not for ideological reasons but simply because Tejas was rough country and far away from Mexico City. Many of the new settlers brought their slaves.

Campbell takes a position on the role of slavery in motivating the white settler’s eventual rebellion against Mexico. He says that it was certainly a factor, but not the immediate cause. He does note that the constitution of the Republic of Texas strongly favored slavery, as did state laws after Texas joined the United States. At the beginning, and from time to time, Black freepersons were not allowed anywhere in Texas. After Texas joined the Confederacy, manumission was outlawed.

As to the theory that white settlers intentionally moved to Texas in order to steal the land from a weak Mexican Republic, Campbell offers no opinion in this book. This is just about slavery.

Speaking of laws, Campbell explains that slaves were not legally equal to other forms of “property.” The law had to recognize that slaves were people as well as property. Slaves endured all kinds of punishments, including legal jailing and execution. Dallasites who have read the transcript of the trial of Jane Elkins, the first Texas woman officially executed, may have wondered why it included her dollar value ($700) along with the rest of the proceedings. Campbell says that the “owner” of executed “property” was legally entitled to half their “value.” Apparently, someone got $350 from the county when Jane was hanged.

It is interesting that lynching was never popular in Texas until after African Americans were freed. There were no laws protecting them from lynching, but there were plenty of laws protecting their “owners” from losing money.

Even though I know that farmers regularly try to upgrade their livestock through selective breeding, it had never occurred to me, until I read to page 154 of this book, that some “owners” did the same thing with their human “livestock!” Some male slaves were rented out to stud!

Did slaves and abolitionists fight for freedom in Texas? Well, Campbell estimates that about 4,000 slaves managed to escape to Mexico or to a few friendly native tribes, but most slaves just tried to “get by” with things the way they were. Many of the Germans who migrated to Texas after 1848 did not use slaves, some opposed it, and at least one editor, Adolph Douai of San Antonio, made a public fuss, at least for a while. Seventy percent of free Texans did not own any slaves, but they voted the slaveowners into all important offices; consequently, we may assume that they took no stand against it.  Slavery was apparently considered an economic question, not an ideological nor moral one. During the Civil War, Campbell says that 98,594 African Americans took up arms with the Federal Army. Only 47 of them were from Texas. The main reason is that Federal forces never invaded Texas; consequently, no Texas slaves were freed before Juneteenth.

Was slavery worse in Texas than elsewhere? Campbell says there is no evidence of it. As one reads of the horrors endured by Texas slaves, we can take no comfort from the idea that it was better elsewhere. Campbell says that the treatment of slaves, which varied greatly from “owner” to “owner,” was nevertheless about the same throughout the South.

–Gene Lantz

I am on KNON’s “Workers Beat” radio talk show every Saturday at 9AM Central Time. Programs and my “Workers Beat Extra” podcasts are posted on soundcloud.com on Wednesdays. If you are curious about what I really think, check out my personal web site