Recalling Camejo

by Bruce Patterson

In November of 1969 I was hired by the GIs Civil Liberties Defense Committee to travel from Carolina to Cleveland to give a three-minute speech about free speech before a downtown anti-war rally. It was the weekend before the massive gathering of at least a half million people that would take place in Washington DC on the 15th, and the rally in Cleveland was one of dozens of preliminaries taking place across the country.

My partner and myself — GIs on military leave — were met at the bus station by two girls who had volunteered to be our hosts. They were students at Case Western Reserve and they lived off-campus with a bunch of other "movement women" in a grand old Victorian mansion.

Feeling "solidarity" with us Vietnam vets, our hosts showed us around town, allowed us to sleep in front of their fireplace on their living room floor and generally wined and dined us.

During a communal supper made up of dishes that looked strange and tasted weird next to the mess hall grub we were accustomed to, our hosts invited us to join them on campus to hear a real public speaker, a genuine voice for social change. Peter Camejo, his name was. He was a leader of the Socialists Workers Party, an activist organization claiming, as were some others in those days, to be the one and only True Vanguard of the New American Revolution. Not only that, one of our hosts breathlessly informed us, but Peter Camejo was a Puerto Rican.

My partner and myself glanced at each other and, having done things a bit worse than go and listen to a speech by a Communist, we shrugged our shoulders and replied something like, "Sure, why not?"

I remember sitting in the back seat of the car on our way to the shindig and wondering what Peter Camejo being a Puerto Rican had to do with anything. By coincidence I'd just returned from a three-month hitch in Puerto Rico and, while we were forbidden to "fraternize" with the natives, I'd gone over the fence enough times to visit a few of their cantinas. And in that setting what I'd gathered about Puerto Ricans was that they liked laughter, music and dance; they drank their rum either straight up or mixed with coke, and they talked fast — very fast. Which was funny because, living in the steam bath tropics, they usually moved slow — real slow.

So I asked the girl who had mentioned it what was so special about Puerto Ricans.

I was being extremely naive, of course, because in reply the girl went to great lengths to explain to me how the Puerto Ricans, like the Cubans, the Vietnamese, the Palestinians, the Angolans (who?) and all of the rest of the world's oppressed "peoples" were engaged in righteous armed struggle to achieve their national liberation, to throw off their colonial masters and take charge of their own destinies. It was they — the viciously exploited and brutalized masses of the Third World yearning to breathe free — who "we" in the anti-war movement were "fighting" for.

As I was to learn upon further study — the history lessons I'd gotten in school during the 1950s and early 60s amounted to WASP self-delusion — about everything that girl said was true so far as it went. But at the time I was more fascinated by the girl's own naiveté in seriously believing that the world could be divided into good guys and bad guys, good wars and bad wars, righteous massacres and wicked ones.

Anyway, by the time we'd reached the parking lot I'd gotten my consciousness raised pretty good. As we walked in the dark through a maze of imposing campus buildings, I got it raised even some more. Finally we arrived in a large lecture hall filled shoulder to shoulder with long-haired and short-haired students and my partner and I took the opportunity to sit off by ourselves among strangers.

By then I half expected this guy Peter Camejo to be a tie-dyed Che Guevara, a fire breathing, cocaine snorting, rabble rousing, dope smoking, bomb throwing radical who'd do his best to incite us to riot. (Back then there were lots of radicals and just plain anti-war and civil rights activists who were behind bars for "inciting to riot.")

Instead, I saw this slight little fellow with olive skin who's buttoned down in a gray business suit. His hair was short, his shave clean, his bearing calm and dignified. And his speech, which sounds more like a barracks rap than a speech by a politician, is calm and dignified. He doesn't regale us with tales of the Heroic Struggles of all "Peoples" Everywhere except the Honkies, nor does he try to draw for us a map to the Promised Land.

What he talks about — and this knocks my socks off — is the Great Depression. To back up a bit, I was born in 1949. My parents, aunts and uncles and about every other adult I knew while growing up had lived in the slums during the Great Depression. I'd heard so many stories from so many people about what it was like during the hard times that I felt like I'd gone through them myself. That to get to school I myself had walked six miles through the snow with a hole in my galosh.

So when Peter Camejo started listing the vast numbers of workers thrown out of work, the uncounted millions of families who lost their life's savings to fly-by-night banks and S&Ls, the mass foreclosures and bankruptcies, the old and the crippled abandoned to die on the streets, millions of homeless migrants, watery soup lines, farm kids with rickets — he was giving statistical weight and historical significance to what my own people had gone through, the misery they'd experienced, the stories they'd told.

Next Peter Camejo broke the economy down into its working parts. What did you need to create an economic system that, through an equitable distribution of goods and services, provided the material prerequisites of human contentment? First and foremost you needed the earth with its abundance. Next you needed labor and it always helped to have tools (capital). Beyond that, all you needed was intelligent organization.

So why the Great Depression? Did the earth suddenly refuse to wield up its bounty? Did the workers all pull up lame? Did the stores and factories burn down? No, what happened was a failure of organization. And that failure could be pinned on the leadership of that organization.

Peter Camejo went on in that vein, building his argument step by step, but I wasn't listening so much anymore. In the lingo of the day, he'd already blown my mind. Because before that moment I'd always heard, and had always assumed without question, that the Great Depression had been an act of God. You know, just a shitty roll of the dice.

* * *

A while back when California's "energy crisis" began picking my wage money out of my wallet, I remembered that long ago rap by Peter Camejo. Unregulated, profit-driven, free trade, dog-eat-dog capitalism is a hustle. Elect politicians who promise to "unleash the productive capacities" of the capitalists and they will always strangle the golden goose; always turn a boom into a bust. It was the apprehension of this elementary fact of life by most of my dad's and granddad's generations that led to the election of FDR and the New Deal, the attempt to introduce a bit of logic and to put a human face upon an economic system that was, left to its own, mindless and inhuman.

As the Titans of California's newly "privatized" and "bankrupt" public utilities were busy robbing me (they could have stole my wheels and left me better off), I got to listen to an endless chorus of professional journalists — people who know who butters their bread — patiently explain to me how my money was actually getting sucked up into the cosmic vacuum called "market forces," those nebulous, nuanced, ephemeral episodes and "trends" that so confound the experts and are therefore way beyond anything a rummy like myself should be worrying about.

In other words, when with the collusion of bought politicians a roomful of monopolists corner the market in electricity and heartlessly milk it for all its worth, it's an act of God. As in, "If God did not wish you to be fleeced, He would not have made you sheep."

* * *

When some years back a Peter Camejo was running for President or some such thing under the banner of the Green Party, I was skeptical it was the same guy until I heard he was a Puerto Rican who'd made his bones during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. And once some newspaper saw fit to print his mug shot, I examined it and, subtracting some paunch and adding some hair, I knew it was the same guy all right.

Learning that Peter Camejo is now a Financial Advisor made me light into a big grin. Reminded me of the old communist sitting on a park bench and promising his buddy that, if he ever strikes it rich and has two houses while his buddy has none, well, then he's going to give his buddy the house he isn't using.

"And what if you had two cars and I needed one?" his buddy asks. "Would you give me a car?"

"Absolutely," the communist declares.

"And what if you had two shirts and I was naked?"

The communist looks him up and down, then mournfully shakes his head and replies, "In that case, old buddy, you're out of luck."

"Why's that?"

"Because I've got two shirts."

Which is being unfair to Peter Camejo, I admit. Assuming he is now ethically wheeling and dealing in "green" properties, winding up as he has seems a natural given his talents. If you are an organizer extraordinaire and you cannot successfully organize the poor and disenfranchised, then you can always organize the finances of the rich and well off. And with your spare time and money you can continue attempting to organize the poor and disenfranchised, something Peter Camejo has been doing his whole life.

Does that make him qualified to be Governor of California? I'd say it's a real good start.

So far as him once being a communist, that's like calling somebody a capitalist. Who are you talking about? The kindly old couple running the corner store, or the head hunting mercenaries now pillaging central Africa?

Besides, Peter Camejo was a Trotskyite, a sub-type of communist that, like some Christians, Muslims and Jews, eternally obsessed over defining just who was — and was not — walking the True Path (and for how long?). Along with their "ideological enemies" on the religious right, in that way the Trotskyites were like hungry bacteria devouring each other in a drop of water.

Be that as it may, Peter Camejo still has my vote. The bottom line of politics is deciding who gets what. The bottom line of economics is deciding who gets what. The fundamental difference between the rich and the poor, as Saul Alinsky was fond of pointing out, is that the rich are organized. While every candidate running for Governor knows these things in their bones, only Peter Camejo is basing his program upon the implications. Only he is voicing these obvious truths. In a political culture consisting of smoke and mirrors, such clarity is refreshing.