Click on the headline to link to the "Max Shachtman Internet Archive" for an on line copy of his 1936 article (when he was still a revolutionary) on the state of the Soviet Union on 19th anniversary of the Russian revolution. He mentions there the dissolution of the Society of Old Bolsheviks in 1935 discussed below.
Markin comment:
In political life, including our now, unfortunately, rather threadbare revolutionary political life, you run into all kind of personalities “selling” all kinds of propositions. Some can be dismissed out of hand, and I have, like you, done so. Others, while outlandish and, perhaps, strange, perk one’s interest. The question posed by the headline is one such question that I have come up against lately. Let me give the details.
Recently I attended a meeting called by militant trade unionists and their supporters concerning the struggle to save public education in Massachusetts, higher and basic. As should be well known to the reader of this space such meetings in urban areas, at least, are a magnet for every active left political tendency and individual personality who wants to “show the colors”. The education area, especially in the American professoriate, is loaded, no, overloaded with old radicals, left liberals and others who took shelter in that milieu when real leftist politics dried up in the mid-1970s. Needless to say this meeting was no exception. And needless to say it was such an old radical (with whom I had worked with on many occasions in the old days, and at times gladly) who took several of us aside and proposed, in all seriousness, that we act as a catalyst for the creation of national society of old revolutionaries-meaning those of us who had won our spurs in the old black civil rights, anti-Vietnam War, alternate life-style movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. I have taken liberty to add, for the sake of clarity the notion of a society or old Bolsheviks or old Communists to place it closer to my sense of the question. So that is the proposition that I am critiquing today.
My first reaction was that my old comrade-in-arms had failed to take his daily dosage of whatever it was that he took to control his madness. And I think, on reflection, that was probably the right reaction on the principle of first thought, best thought. But, as sometimes occurs, I got to thinking about it later not so much for the weirdness behind the presumption but in order to contrast it with more worthy societies of old revolutionaries, like the Society of Old Bolsheviks formed after the victorious Russian October revolution in 1917.
And that seems to me to be exactly the point to be made. The Bolsheviks created their society to honor those who had fought the fight, underground, above ground, in jail and in exile, not just when the revolutionary moment occurred in February 1917 but before. And only after they had won state power in the greatest victory for the oppressed until that time. Now the fact that such a society and its entrance requirements, in the end, excluded, Leon Trotsky, after Vladimir Lenin, the greatest Bolshevik of them all is a separate question and should make one a little suspect about the purposes of such a club but I will not detain the reader on that question here.
Fast forward to 2010. On what possible basis, assuming we could agree on whom to include and whom to exclude, could a remnant, a small remnant of old, still active revolutionaries gather to be indicted in our “hall of fame”? On our important, but minor, role in the now mainly reversible gains of the black civil rights struggle of the early 1960s? On our hanging on, scratching and clawing, to the bandwagon of the heroic struggle by the Vietnamese liberation fighters in their successful fight to defeat American imperialism? Or our less than stellar role in fighting a rear-guard action against the right wing yahoos in the “culture wars” of the past forty or so years? To pose the question that way is to get a better grasp on the subject. No, I will table this question until those of us who find ourselves in the “heart of the beast”, old revolutionaries and young, bring home a victory comparable to the Bolsheviks in 1917. The communist society that issues from that victory will be recognition enough for me. How about you?
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