Later in the depressing year 1973 Ed -who died of a heart attack in Colorado just before turning 40 - had a prophecy of the capitalist future while we were sitting on marble bench in front of Broad Street School in Providence : " Ron, I just see a LONG PERIOD OF ROT " .

 Way back in 1969-1970 a young friend of mine , one Ron Marshall ( he was just 17 years old at the time ) whom I met at an anti-war demonstration in Providence , Rhode Island , was involved at the time with the YOUNG SOCIALIST ALLIANCE , the youth group of James P. Cannon's Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party . After the anti-war rally, at my house in Washington Park, Ronnie explained that Cannon actually worked side by side with the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, until Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico in 1940. He recommended Cannon's book " The History of American Trotskyism ". Imagine getting a lecture on such an obscure political topic ( in 1969 ) from 17 year old Hope High School drop out ! "Those were the days my friend ; we thought they'd never end " .

I lost track of my dear friend Ron Marshall some twenty years ago . At the time he was living in North Conway , New Hampshire. In a pleasant home above the Saco River, Ron made a living caring for an autistic man named Brian.

We were both still very much socialists - but less dogmatic at the end of the Reagan era. Today I would describe myself as an independent democratic socialist absolutely convinced that Karl Marx's explanation of capitalist exploitation, his labor theory of value, was as cogent as any proof of a theorem in my high school Plane Geometry book.

Ron and I laughed at some " Tumultuous Sixties " memories: In 1969 the Young Socialist Alliance held meetings at Brown University's Wilson Hall ( ? ) . One of the YSA members , a Brown student , lectured Ron ,then a blue collar Providence jewelry factory worker, on Marx's " labor theory of value ". The affluent Brown student drove away in a fancy jaguar and Ronnie the next day returned to the horrors of that jewelry shop.

Ron and I agreed with our mutual friend Ed Maguire that the " hard core of the anti-war movement consisted of PURE JELLO " .

Later in the depressing year 1973 Ed -who died of a heart attack in Colorado just before turning 40 - had a prophecy of the capitalist future while we were sitting on marble bench in front of Broad Street School in Providence : " Ron, I just see a LONG PERIOD OF ROT " .

And so it was ! For how long ?

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James P. Cannon Speaks! The Khrushchev Revelations

James P. Cannon Speaks! The Khrushchev Revelations. Socialist Worker