Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the 19th century American radicals, Sarah And Angelina Grimke.
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women's History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
**********
Women And Revolution, Volume 29, Spring 1985
The Grimke Sisters:
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
By Amy Rath
"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours." —Angelina Grimke', address to Women's Loyal League, May 1863
Angelina and Sarah Grimke' were two of the earliest fighters for black and women's rights in America. Although far from being socialists or revolutionaries, the Grimke' sisters of South Carolina were among the foremost fighters for human equality of their time, the 1830s and the tumultuous era which saw the birth of the abolitionist movement, foreshadowing the great Civil War which freed the slaves. They were also among the the first women to speak publicly on political issues. "Genteel society" objected to the fact of their public appearances—and even more to the content of their speeches. Thus the first serious, widespread discussion of women's rights in the United States was directly linked to the black question and the liberation of the slaves, questions which 25 years later would tear the nation apart in civil war.
Further, the Grimke' sisters' almost visionary commitment to the fight for the liberation of all, exemplified in Angelina's famous statement to the Women's Loyal League, stands in stark contrast not only to early abolitionist anti-women prejudices, but also to the later, shameful betrayal of black rights by feminists during the Reconstruction era. "The discussion of the rights of the slave has opened the way for the discussion of other rights," wrote Angelina to Catherine E.Beecher in 1837, "and the ultimate result will most certainly be the breaking of every yoke, the letting the oppressed of every grade and description go free,—an emancipation far more glorious than any the world has ever yet seen."
The sisters and Theodore Weld published American Slavery As It Is (1840), the most influential anti-slavery document until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Though they had essentially retired from active politics by the time of John Brown's courageous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, the actual opening shot of the Civil War, they deeply believed in his cause. Angelina's stirring "Address to the Soldiers of our Second Revolution" (given at the May 1863 Women's Loyal League convention) advocated massive arming of the former slaves as part of the Union Army, and remains today a remarkably radical and prescient analysis of the implications of the Civil War:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government... are driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war— The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
On February 21,1838, hundreds of people swarmed to the great hall of the Massachusetts State Legislature. Angelina Grimke", the first woman ever to address an American legislative body, would argue for the most controversial subject of the day: the immediate abolition of slavery.
This speech—which continued over three days, despite efforts by pro-slavery forces to stop it—was the culmination of a nine months' tour by Sarah and Angelina Grimke', the first women agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), founded in 1833. While their speeches began as "parlor meetings" in private homes or church halls for women only, such was the power and growing fame of Angelina's oratory that men began to slip into the back to listen, and the Grimke' sisters became the first American women to address what were then called "promiscuous" audiences.
Uproar swept genteel society across the nation. The Grimke' sisters were breaking the rules of ladylike decorum by their "unwomanly" displays. Angelina was popularly called "Devilina"; "Fanny Wrightists!" screamed the pro-slavery press. (Fanny Wright was a Scots Utopian socialist who toured the U.S. in 1828 for abolition, public education, women's rights, the ten-hour day and "free love"; she set up an anti-slavery commune and edited a newspaper. When these projects failed, she left the country, having made little impact.) "Why are all the old hens abolitionists?" sneered the New Hampshire Patriot: "Because not being able to obtain husbands they think they may stand some chance for a negro, if they can only make amalgamation [interracial sex] fashionable."
The Congregationalist church, the descendant of the New England Puritans, issued a "Pastoral Letter" condemning the Grimke's for leaving "woman's sphere" and going against the biblical injunction, of Paul: "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." Sarah answered this, and other attacks, in the brilliant Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, the first American book on the rights of women, predating Margaret Fuller's more famous work by six years.
In her arguments Sarah relied extensively on biblical sources, for to her it was important to prove that the equality of the sexes should be a Christian belief, and she wanted to show that women had the right and duty to work for the emancipation of the slave. Her concrete solutions to women's oppression were naive: for example, she suggested that husbands should content themselves with baked potatoes and milk for dinner, to give their wives time to educate themselves. She never understood that the institution of the family itself necessarily stands in the way of women's freedom. Indeed, she could not reconcile herself to the idea that divorce should be legalized. But for all these limita¬tions, Sarah's book is the pioneer American work on the subject. She was deeply interested in women workers, and polemicized against unequal wages; she attacked with great bitterness the lack of educational opportunities for women and their total lack of legal rights. "I ask no favors for my sex," she wrote, "All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."
Many fellow abolitionists demanded that the sisters give up their arguments on women's rights, fearing that it would detract from the more important question of the hour: freedom for the slave. But Angelina pointed out that the outcry against women's public lecturing was a tool of the slaveholders: "We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of the road.... Can you not see the deep laid scheme of the clergy against us as lecturers?... If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?" (emphasis in original; letter to Theodore Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, 20 August 1837).
The Making of a Southern Abolitionist
The sisters' effectiveness as abolitionist agents had to do not only with the power and sweep of their arguments, but with the fact that they were native-born eyewitnesses to Southern slavery. Yet precisely because they were gently bred daughters of one of South Carolina's most prominent slaveholding families, they had not seen the worst of it, as they themselves were quick to point out. They did not see the slave gangs on the plantations, the brutal whippings, but the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves.
Sarah was born in 1792. The invention of the cotton gin in her infancy led her father, like many others, to expand his plantation holdings and build up his slave force. He was one of the wealthiest men in Charleston, the political capital of the South, and a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a former Speaker in the state House, a judge and author. Sarah grew up with every advantage that wealth and position could offer a woman of her time. But instead of satisfying herself with embroidery, piano and a little French, she studied her brother's lessons in mathematics, history and botany, and declared her wish to become a lawyer. Her family mocked her; her father forbade her to study Latin. Perhaps influenced by her own educational frustrations as well as her childhood revulsion for the slave system, she started to teach her personal maid to read. "I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting-maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my long locks. The light was put out, the keyhold screened, and flat on our-stomachs, before the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the laws of South Carolina."
As an adult Sarah's aspirations to make something of her life turned in the one direction open to "respectable" women of her day and class: religion. She became a Quaker. Later she converted Angelina, 12 years her junior. Before joining her sister in Philadel¬phia, the Quakers' center, Angelina undertook a personal conversion crusade against slavery among her family and friends. In her gray Quaker dress, she started arguments at tea against the sin of holding slaves, becoming quite unpopular with Charleston's ruling elite. Inquiries were made about her sanity.
Convinced at last that there was no future in this, Angelina went north. But she could not be satisfied with the orthodox Quaker doctrine, which at that time included colonization as a "solution" to slavery. Black "Friends" were made to sit on a separate bench. In the early 1830s Angelina became interested in the growing abolitionist movement, and was horrified at the violence the free North turned against anti-slavery spokesmen. William Lloyd Garrison was barely saved from lynching at the hands of a Boston mob in 1835. Theodore Weld was repeatedly mobbed as he toured the Midwest, as were many others. Early in the decade Prudence Crandall was forced to close her school for black girls in Connecticut when the well was poisoned, doctors refused to treat the students, and finally a mob torched the school building. In 1838 a pro-slavery mob, egged on by the mayor himself, burned down Philadelphia Hall, which had been built by the abolitionists as a partial answer to their difficulty in finding places to meet. An interracial- meeting of abolitionists was in progress there at the time; two days earlier, Angelina and Weld had married, and the attendance of both blacks and whites at their wedding fueled the fury of the race-terrorists.
The abolitionists were part of a broader bourgeois radical movement, the 19th century herrs of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals, and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. Although opposition to slavery was by no means as widespread in the 1830s as it was to become immediately before the Civil War, nonetheless many prominent men, such as the wealthy Tappan brothers of New York and Gerrit Smith, the biggest landowner in the North, had joined the movement by the middle of the decade. Many of the abolitionists had been part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists were formulating their philos¬ophy. Religious revivalists such as Charles G. Finney, who converted Weld, preached temperance and that slavery was a sin against god.
Angelina became convinced that god had called her to work actively for the emancipation of the slaves. Defying the Quakers (who later expelled the sisters when Angelina and Weld married in a non-Quaker ceremony), the sisters went to New York where they participated in a conference for the training of abolitionist agents. Thus began the famous speaking tour of 1837-38.
The politics of the Grimke sisters was radical bourgeois egalitarianism profoundly rooted in religion. They believed that slavery was a sin, that as "immortal, moral beings" women and blacks were the equals of white men. They argued that slavery was contrary to the laws of god (the Bible) and of man, as put forth in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; they disagreed with Garrison's view of the Constitution as a "pro-slavery" document. Again unlike Garrison, they wrote and spoke for rights of education and property for free blacks as well, and bitterly denounced racism within the abolitionist movement. They were the integrationists of their time.
For many years, however, the sisters agreed with Garrison that slavery could be done away with peacefully by moral persuasion. They preached a boycott of slave-made goods (Angelina's wedding cake was made of "free" sugar by a free black baker). One of Angelina's first writings was "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States," widely circulated by the AASS, in which she urged Southern women to begin a petition campaign for immediate emancipation, to free their own slaves and to educate them. When copies of this pamphlet reached Charleston, the postmaster publicly burned them and the police informed the Grimke' family that if their daughter ever attempted to set foot in the city, she would be jailed and then sent back on the next ship.
The sisters were also for many years staunch pacifists, as would be expected from their Quaker background. Sarah took this to such an extreme that she denied that abolitionists had the right to arm themselves in defense against pro-slavery mobs. This became a subject of controversy in the abolitionist movement in 1837 when publisher Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois by a mob. True to her pacifist idealism, Sarah ques¬tioned his right to bear the gun with which he tried to save his life.
Splits and the Coming Storm
By the 1840s the Grimke'sisters had largely withdrawn from public activity. In part this was due to ill health Angelina suffered as a result of her pregnancies, as well as family financial problems. But much of it was probably political demoralization. In 1840the abolitionist movement split over the issues of women's rights and political action. The Garrisonian wing wanted to include women in the organization, but was opposed to abolitionists voting or running for political office, since Garrison believed the "pro-slavery" U.S. Con¬stitution should be abolished and that the North should expel the South. The other wing, represented by eminent men like the Tappan brothers, excluded women from office within the organization, was against women's rights, and wanted to orient to political work in Congress. Since they agreed with neither side in this split, the Grimke's and Weld retired to private life. In later years Angelina spoke bitterly against "organizations."
Meanwhile, however, on the left wing of the abolitionist movement there were gathering forces which saw the irrepressible and inevitable necessity for a violent assault on the slave system, to end it forever by force of arms. The brilliant black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and John Brown spearheaded this growing conviction. As we noted in our SL pamphlet, "Black History and the Class Struggle," "Douglass' political evolution was not merely from 'non-resistance' to self-defense. Contained in the 'moral suasion' line was a refusal to fight slavery politically and to the wall, by all methods. That is the importance of the Douglass-Brown relationship: together they were planning the Civil War." And it was John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 which galvanized the nation; abolitionists who the day before were pacifists took the pulpit to proclaim the necessity of a violent end to the slave system.
The Grimke' sisters and especially Theodore Weld had earlier become convinced that only war could end slavery. Sarah believed she had communed with John Brown's spirit the night before his martyrdom at the hands of Colonel Robert E. Lee, acting under command of President Buchanan. "The John Huss of the United States now stands ready... to seal his testimony with his life's blood," she wrote in her diary. Two of the executed men from the Harpers Ferry raid were buried in the commune at Raritan Bay, New Jersey, where the sisters and Weld were living at the time. The graves had to be guarded against a pro-slavery mob.
When the Civil War officially began the Grimke's did emerge briefly from private life. They were staunch Unionists, supported the draft and were critical of Lincoln for not freeing the slaves sooner. They were founding members of the Women's Loyal League. It was at a meeting of this group that Angelina made her famous statement: "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
Reconstruction Betrayed: Finish the Civil War!
Following the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction, the most democratic period for blacks in U.S. history, the former abolitionist movement split again. During that period, women suffrage leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—formerly avowed abolitionists—turned their movement for women's rights into a tool of racist reaction. They organized against passage of the Fifteenth Amendment because it gave votes to blacks and not to women (the Grin-ike sisters were silent on this question, even though this disgusting racism was foreign to everything they had fought for). Stanton and Anthony worked closely with such racist Southern Democrats as James Brooks, because he purported to support women's suffrage. In a letter to the editor of the New York Standard (1865), Stanton wrote,
"...now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk
into the kingdom first In fact, it is better to be the slave
of an educated white man, then of a degraded, ignorant black one."
It was Frederick Douglass who fought this racist assault. Douglass had been a fervent supporter of the infant women's rights movement, which began largely as a result of the chauvinism which women anti-slavery activists encountered from many abolitionists. At the 1869 convention of the Equal Rights Association, Douglass made a final attempt to win the suffragists from their reactionary policy:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have [the same] urgency to obtain the ballot."
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands," while imploring a redou¬bling "of our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." And for the rest of his life Douglass remained a staunch champion of women's rights.
Though the Civil War freed the slaves, it was not the fulfillment of Angelina's vision of a great, all-encompassing human emancipation. The betrayal of Reconstruction by the counterrevolutionary and triumphant capitalist reaction of the 1870s, in which the bourgeois feminists played their small and dirty part, left unfulfilled those liberating goals to which the Grimke sisters were committed. Yet Angelina's statement—"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours"—was and is true in a way the Grimke's could not understand. Their social perspective was limited to the bourgeois order: they never identified property as the source of the oppression of both women and blacks. Indeed, as bourgeois egalitarians, the basis of their arguments was that women and blacks should have the same right to acquire property as the white man and that this would liberate them completely. As Marx noted:
"The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other."
—"The Civil War in the United States," Collected Works, Volume 19, 1861-64
The system of "free labor," capitalism, won out. Radical Reconstruction, enforced by military occupation, sought to impose equality of bourgeois democratic rights in the South. It was defeated by.compromise between the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern land-owning aristocracy, thus revealing the ultimate incapacity of bourgeois radicalism to finally liberate any sector of the oppressed. This failure and betrayal of Reconstruction perpetuated the oppression of blacks as a color caste at the bottom of American capitalist society. This racial division, with whites on top of blacks, has been and continues to be the main historical obstacle to the development of political class con¬sciousness among the American proletariat. It will take a third American Revolution, led by a multiracial workers party against capitalism itself, to break the fetters of blacks, women and all the oppressed.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- The Grimke Sisters- Fighters For Slavery Abolition And Women's Rights
Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the 19th century American radicals, Sarah And Angelina Grimke.
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women's History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
**********
Women And Revolution, Volume 29, Spring 1985
The Grimke Sisters:
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
By Amy Rath
"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours." —Angelina Grimke', address to Women's Loyal League, May 1863
Angelina and Sarah Grimke' were two of the earliest fighters for black and women's rights in America. Although far from being socialists or revolutionaries, the Grimke' sisters of South Carolina were among the foremost fighters for human equality of their time, the 1830s and the tumultuous era which saw the birth of the abolitionist movement, foreshadowing the great Civil War which freed the slaves. They were also among the the first women to speak publicly on political issues. "Genteel society" objected to the fact of their public appearances—and even more to the content of their speeches. Thus the first serious, widespread discussion of women's rights in the United States was directly linked to the black question and the liberation of the slaves, questions which 25 years later would tear the nation apart in civil war.
Further, the Grimke' sisters' almost visionary commitment to the fight for the liberation of all, exemplified in Angelina's famous statement to the Women's Loyal League, stands in stark contrast not only to early abolitionist anti-women prejudices, but also to the later, shameful betrayal of black rights by feminists during the Reconstruction era. "The discussion of the rights of the slave has opened the way for the discussion of other rights," wrote Angelina to Catherine E.Beecher in 1837, "and the ultimate result will most certainly be the breaking of every yoke, the letting the oppressed of every grade and description go free,—an emancipation far more glorious than any the world has ever yet seen."
The sisters and Theodore Weld published American Slavery As It Is (1840), the most influential anti-slavery document until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Though they had essentially retired from active politics by the time of John Brown's courageous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, the actual opening shot of the Civil War, they deeply believed in his cause. Angelina's stirring "Address to the Soldiers of our Second Revolution" (given at the May 1863 Women's Loyal League convention) advocated massive arming of the former slaves as part of the Union Army, and remains today a remarkably radical and prescient analysis of the implications of the Civil War:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government... are driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war— The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
On February 21,1838, hundreds of people swarmed to the great hall of the Massachusetts State Legislature. Angelina Grimke", the first woman ever to address an American legislative body, would argue for the most controversial subject of the day: the immediate abolition of slavery.
This speech—which continued over three days, despite efforts by pro-slavery forces to stop it—was the culmination of a nine months' tour by Sarah and Angelina Grimke', the first women agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), founded in 1833. While their speeches began as "parlor meetings" in private homes or church halls for women only, such was the power and growing fame of Angelina's oratory that men began to slip into the back to listen, and the Grimke' sisters became the first American women to address what were then called "promiscuous" audiences.
Uproar swept genteel society across the nation. The Grimke' sisters were breaking the rules of ladylike decorum by their "unwomanly" displays. Angelina was popularly called "Devilina"; "Fanny Wrightists!" screamed the pro-slavery press. (Fanny Wright was a Scots Utopian socialist who toured the U.S. in 1828 for abolition, public education, women's rights, the ten-hour day and "free love"; she set up an anti-slavery commune and edited a newspaper. When these projects failed, she left the country, having made little impact.) "Why are all the old hens abolitionists?" sneered the New Hampshire Patriot: "Because not being able to obtain husbands they think they may stand some chance for a negro, if they can only make amalgamation [interracial sex] fashionable."
The Congregationalist church, the descendant of the New England Puritans, issued a "Pastoral Letter" condemning the Grimke's for leaving "woman's sphere" and going against the biblical injunction, of Paul: "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." Sarah answered this, and other attacks, in the brilliant Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, the first American book on the rights of women, predating Margaret Fuller's more famous work by six years.
In her arguments Sarah relied extensively on biblical sources, for to her it was important to prove that the equality of the sexes should be a Christian belief, and she wanted to show that women had the right and duty to work for the emancipation of the slave. Her concrete solutions to women's oppression were naive: for example, she suggested that husbands should content themselves with baked potatoes and milk for dinner, to give their wives time to educate themselves. She never understood that the institution of the family itself necessarily stands in the way of women's freedom. Indeed, she could not reconcile herself to the idea that divorce should be legalized. But for all these limita¬tions, Sarah's book is the pioneer American work on the subject. She was deeply interested in women workers, and polemicized against unequal wages; she attacked with great bitterness the lack of educational opportunities for women and their total lack of legal rights. "I ask no favors for my sex," she wrote, "All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."
Many fellow abolitionists demanded that the sisters give up their arguments on women's rights, fearing that it would detract from the more important question of the hour: freedom for the slave. But Angelina pointed out that the outcry against women's public lecturing was a tool of the slaveholders: "We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of the road.... Can you not see the deep laid scheme of the clergy against us as lecturers?... If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?" (emphasis in original; letter to Theodore Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, 20 August 1837).
The Making of a Southern Abolitionist
The sisters' effectiveness as abolitionist agents had to do not only with the power and sweep of their arguments, but with the fact that they were native-born eyewitnesses to Southern slavery. Yet precisely because they were gently bred daughters of one of South Carolina's most prominent slaveholding families, they had not seen the worst of it, as they themselves were quick to point out. They did not see the slave gangs on the plantations, the brutal whippings, but the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves.
Sarah was born in 1792. The invention of the cotton gin in her infancy led her father, like many others, to expand his plantation holdings and build up his slave force. He was one of the wealthiest men in Charleston, the political capital of the South, and a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a former Speaker in the state House, a judge and author. Sarah grew up with every advantage that wealth and position could offer a woman of her time. But instead of satisfying herself with embroidery, piano and a little French, she studied her brother's lessons in mathematics, history and botany, and declared her wish to become a lawyer. Her family mocked her; her father forbade her to study Latin. Perhaps influenced by her own educational frustrations as well as her childhood revulsion for the slave system, she started to teach her personal maid to read. "I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting-maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my long locks. The light was put out, the keyhold screened, and flat on our-stomachs, before the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the laws of South Carolina."
As an adult Sarah's aspirations to make something of her life turned in the one direction open to "respectable" women of her day and class: religion. She became a Quaker. Later she converted Angelina, 12 years her junior. Before joining her sister in Philadel¬phia, the Quakers' center, Angelina undertook a personal conversion crusade against slavery among her family and friends. In her gray Quaker dress, she started arguments at tea against the sin of holding slaves, becoming quite unpopular with Charleston's ruling elite. Inquiries were made about her sanity.
Convinced at last that there was no future in this, Angelina went north. But she could not be satisfied with the orthodox Quaker doctrine, which at that time included colonization as a "solution" to slavery. Black "Friends" were made to sit on a separate bench. In the early 1830s Angelina became interested in the growing abolitionist movement, and was horrified at the violence the free North turned against anti-slavery spokesmen. William Lloyd Garrison was barely saved from lynching at the hands of a Boston mob in 1835. Theodore Weld was repeatedly mobbed as he toured the Midwest, as were many others. Early in the decade Prudence Crandall was forced to close her school for black girls in Connecticut when the well was poisoned, doctors refused to treat the students, and finally a mob torched the school building. In 1838 a pro-slavery mob, egged on by the mayor himself, burned down Philadelphia Hall, which had been built by the abolitionists as a partial answer to their difficulty in finding places to meet. An interracial- meeting of abolitionists was in progress there at the time; two days earlier, Angelina and Weld had married, and the attendance of both blacks and whites at their wedding fueled the fury of the race-terrorists.
The abolitionists were part of a broader bourgeois radical movement, the 19th century herrs of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals, and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. Although opposition to slavery was by no means as widespread in the 1830s as it was to become immediately before the Civil War, nonetheless many prominent men, such as the wealthy Tappan brothers of New York and Gerrit Smith, the biggest landowner in the North, had joined the movement by the middle of the decade. Many of the abolitionists had been part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists were formulating their philos¬ophy. Religious revivalists such as Charles G. Finney, who converted Weld, preached temperance and that slavery was a sin against god.
Angelina became convinced that god had called her to work actively for the emancipation of the slaves. Defying the Quakers (who later expelled the sisters when Angelina and Weld married in a non-Quaker ceremony), the sisters went to New York where they participated in a conference for the training of abolitionist agents. Thus began the famous speaking tour of 1837-38.
The politics of the Grimke sisters was radical bourgeois egalitarianism profoundly rooted in religion. They believed that slavery was a sin, that as "immortal, moral beings" women and blacks were the equals of white men. They argued that slavery was contrary to the laws of god (the Bible) and of man, as put forth in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; they disagreed with Garrison's view of the Constitution as a "pro-slavery" document. Again unlike Garrison, they wrote and spoke for rights of education and property for free blacks as well, and bitterly denounced racism within the abolitionist movement. They were the integrationists of their time.
For many years, however, the sisters agreed with Garrison that slavery could be done away with peacefully by moral persuasion. They preached a boycott of slave-made goods (Angelina's wedding cake was made of "free" sugar by a free black baker). One of Angelina's first writings was "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States," widely circulated by the AASS, in which she urged Southern women to begin a petition campaign for immediate emancipation, to free their own slaves and to educate them. When copies of this pamphlet reached Charleston, the postmaster publicly burned them and the police informed the Grimke' family that if their daughter ever attempted to set foot in the city, she would be jailed and then sent back on the next ship.
The sisters were also for many years staunch pacifists, as would be expected from their Quaker background. Sarah took this to such an extreme that she denied that abolitionists had the right to arm themselves in defense against pro-slavery mobs. This became a subject of controversy in the abolitionist movement in 1837 when publisher Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois by a mob. True to her pacifist idealism, Sarah ques¬tioned his right to bear the gun with which he tried to save his life.
Splits and the Coming Storm
By the 1840s the Grimke'sisters had largely withdrawn from public activity. In part this was due to ill health Angelina suffered as a result of her pregnancies, as well as family financial problems. But much of it was probably political demoralization. In 1840the abolitionist movement split over the issues of women's rights and political action. The Garrisonian wing wanted to include women in the organization, but was opposed to abolitionists voting or running for political office, since Garrison believed the "pro-slavery" U.S. Con¬stitution should be abolished and that the North should expel the South. The other wing, represented by eminent men like the Tappan brothers, excluded women from office within the organization, was against women's rights, and wanted to orient to political work in Congress. Since they agreed with neither side in this split, the Grimke's and Weld retired to private life. In later years Angelina spoke bitterly against "organizations."
Meanwhile, however, on the left wing of the abolitionist movement there were gathering forces which saw the irrepressible and inevitable necessity for a violent assault on the slave system, to end it forever by force of arms. The brilliant black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and John Brown spearheaded this growing conviction. As we noted in our SL pamphlet, "Black History and the Class Struggle," "Douglass' political evolution was not merely from 'non-resistance' to self-defense. Contained in the 'moral suasion' line was a refusal to fight slavery politically and to the wall, by all methods. That is the importance of the Douglass-Brown relationship: together they were planning the Civil War." And it was John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 which galvanized the nation; abolitionists who the day before were pacifists took the pulpit to proclaim the necessity of a violent end to the slave system.
The Grimke' sisters and especially Theodore Weld had earlier become convinced that only war could end slavery. Sarah believed she had communed with John Brown's spirit the night before his martyrdom at the hands of Colonel Robert E. Lee, acting under command of President Buchanan. "The John Huss of the United States now stands ready... to seal his testimony with his life's blood," she wrote in her diary. Two of the executed men from the Harpers Ferry raid were buried in the commune at Raritan Bay, New Jersey, where the sisters and Weld were living at the time. The graves had to be guarded against a pro-slavery mob.
When the Civil War officially began the Grimke's did emerge briefly from private life. They were staunch Unionists, supported the draft and were critical of Lincoln for not freeing the slaves sooner. They were founding members of the Women's Loyal League. It was at a meeting of this group that Angelina made her famous statement: "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
Reconstruction Betrayed: Finish the Civil War!
Following the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction, the most democratic period for blacks in U.S. history, the former abolitionist movement split again. During that period, women suffrage leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—formerly avowed abolitionists—turned their movement for women's rights into a tool of racist reaction. They organized against passage of the Fifteenth Amendment because it gave votes to blacks and not to women (the Grin-ike sisters were silent on this question, even though this disgusting racism was foreign to everything they had fought for). Stanton and Anthony worked closely with such racist Southern Democrats as James Brooks, because he purported to support women's suffrage. In a letter to the editor of the New York Standard (1865), Stanton wrote,
"...now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk
into the kingdom first In fact, it is better to be the slave
of an educated white man, then of a degraded, ignorant black one."
It was Frederick Douglass who fought this racist assault. Douglass had been a fervent supporter of the infant women's rights movement, which began largely as a result of the chauvinism which women anti-slavery activists encountered from many abolitionists. At the 1869 convention of the Equal Rights Association, Douglass made a final attempt to win the suffragists from their reactionary policy:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have [the same] urgency to obtain the ballot."
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands," while imploring a redou¬bling "of our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." And for the rest of his life Douglass remained a staunch champion of women's rights.
Though the Civil War freed the slaves, it was not the fulfillment of Angelina's vision of a great, all-encompassing human emancipation. The betrayal of Reconstruction by the counterrevolutionary and triumphant capitalist reaction of the 1870s, in which the bourgeois feminists played their small and dirty part, left unfulfilled those liberating goals to which the Grimke sisters were committed. Yet Angelina's statement—"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours"—was and is true in a way the Grimke's could not understand. Their social perspective was limited to the bourgeois order: they never identified property as the source of the oppression of both women and blacks. Indeed, as bourgeois egalitarians, the basis of their arguments was that women and blacks should have the same right to acquire property as the white man and that this would liberate them completely. As Marx noted:
"The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other."
—"The Civil War in the United States," Collected Works, Volume 19, 1861-64
The system of "free labor," capitalism, won out. Radical Reconstruction, enforced by military occupation, sought to impose equality of bourgeois democratic rights in the South. It was defeated by.compromise between the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern land-owning aristocracy, thus revealing the ultimate incapacity of bourgeois radicalism to finally liberate any sector of the oppressed. This failure and betrayal of Reconstruction perpetuated the oppression of blacks as a color caste at the bottom of American capitalist society. This racial division, with whites on top of blacks, has been and continues to be the main historical obstacle to the development of political class consciousness among the American proletariat. It will take a third American Revolution, led by a multiracial workers party against capitalism itself, to break the fetters of blacks, women and all the oppressed.
February Is Black History Month
March Is Women's History Month
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
**********
Women And Revolution, Volume 29, Spring 1985
The Grimke Sisters:
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
By Amy Rath
"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours." —Angelina Grimke', address to Women's Loyal League, May 1863
Angelina and Sarah Grimke' were two of the earliest fighters for black and women's rights in America. Although far from being socialists or revolutionaries, the Grimke' sisters of South Carolina were among the foremost fighters for human equality of their time, the 1830s and the tumultuous era which saw the birth of the abolitionist movement, foreshadowing the great Civil War which freed the slaves. They were also among the the first women to speak publicly on political issues. "Genteel society" objected to the fact of their public appearances—and even more to the content of their speeches. Thus the first serious, widespread discussion of women's rights in the United States was directly linked to the black question and the liberation of the slaves, questions which 25 years later would tear the nation apart in civil war.
Further, the Grimke' sisters' almost visionary commitment to the fight for the liberation of all, exemplified in Angelina's famous statement to the Women's Loyal League, stands in stark contrast not only to early abolitionist anti-women prejudices, but also to the later, shameful betrayal of black rights by feminists during the Reconstruction era. "The discussion of the rights of the slave has opened the way for the discussion of other rights," wrote Angelina to Catherine E.Beecher in 1837, "and the ultimate result will most certainly be the breaking of every yoke, the letting the oppressed of every grade and description go free,—an emancipation far more glorious than any the world has ever yet seen."
The sisters and Theodore Weld published American Slavery As It Is (1840), the most influential anti-slavery document until Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Though they had essentially retired from active politics by the time of John Brown's courageous raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, the actual opening shot of the Civil War, they deeply believed in his cause. Angelina's stirring "Address to the Soldiers of our Second Revolution" (given at the May 1863 Women's Loyal League convention) advocated massive arming of the former slaves as part of the Union Army, and remains today a remarkably radical and prescient analysis of the implications of the Civil War:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government... are driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war— The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights
On February 21,1838, hundreds of people swarmed to the great hall of the Massachusetts State Legislature. Angelina Grimke", the first woman ever to address an American legislative body, would argue for the most controversial subject of the day: the immediate abolition of slavery.
This speech—which continued over three days, despite efforts by pro-slavery forces to stop it—was the culmination of a nine months' tour by Sarah and Angelina Grimke', the first women agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), founded in 1833. While their speeches began as "parlor meetings" in private homes or church halls for women only, such was the power and growing fame of Angelina's oratory that men began to slip into the back to listen, and the Grimke' sisters became the first American women to address what were then called "promiscuous" audiences.
Uproar swept genteel society across the nation. The Grimke' sisters were breaking the rules of ladylike decorum by their "unwomanly" displays. Angelina was popularly called "Devilina"; "Fanny Wrightists!" screamed the pro-slavery press. (Fanny Wright was a Scots Utopian socialist who toured the U.S. in 1828 for abolition, public education, women's rights, the ten-hour day and "free love"; she set up an anti-slavery commune and edited a newspaper. When these projects failed, she left the country, having made little impact.) "Why are all the old hens abolitionists?" sneered the New Hampshire Patriot: "Because not being able to obtain husbands they think they may stand some chance for a negro, if they can only make amalgamation [interracial sex] fashionable."
The Congregationalist church, the descendant of the New England Puritans, issued a "Pastoral Letter" condemning the Grimke's for leaving "woman's sphere" and going against the biblical injunction, of Paul: "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." Sarah answered this, and other attacks, in the brilliant Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, the first American book on the rights of women, predating Margaret Fuller's more famous work by six years.
In her arguments Sarah relied extensively on biblical sources, for to her it was important to prove that the equality of the sexes should be a Christian belief, and she wanted to show that women had the right and duty to work for the emancipation of the slave. Her concrete solutions to women's oppression were naive: for example, she suggested that husbands should content themselves with baked potatoes and milk for dinner, to give their wives time to educate themselves. She never understood that the institution of the family itself necessarily stands in the way of women's freedom. Indeed, she could not reconcile herself to the idea that divorce should be legalized. But for all these limita¬tions, Sarah's book is the pioneer American work on the subject. She was deeply interested in women workers, and polemicized against unequal wages; she attacked with great bitterness the lack of educational opportunities for women and their total lack of legal rights. "I ask no favors for my sex," she wrote, "All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."
Many fellow abolitionists demanded that the sisters give up their arguments on women's rights, fearing that it would detract from the more important question of the hour: freedom for the slave. But Angelina pointed out that the outcry against women's public lecturing was a tool of the slaveholders: "We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of the road.... Can you not see the deep laid scheme of the clergy against us as lecturers?... If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?" (emphasis in original; letter to Theodore Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, 20 August 1837).
The Making of a Southern Abolitionist
The sisters' effectiveness as abolitionist agents had to do not only with the power and sweep of their arguments, but with the fact that they were native-born eyewitnesses to Southern slavery. Yet precisely because they were gently bred daughters of one of South Carolina's most prominent slaveholding families, they had not seen the worst of it, as they themselves were quick to point out. They did not see the slave gangs on the plantations, the brutal whippings, but the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves.
Sarah was born in 1792. The invention of the cotton gin in her infancy led her father, like many others, to expand his plantation holdings and build up his slave force. He was one of the wealthiest men in Charleston, the political capital of the South, and a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a former Speaker in the state House, a judge and author. Sarah grew up with every advantage that wealth and position could offer a woman of her time. But instead of satisfying herself with embroidery, piano and a little French, she studied her brother's lessons in mathematics, history and botany, and declared her wish to become a lawyer. Her family mocked her; her father forbade her to study Latin. Perhaps influenced by her own educational frustrations as well as her childhood revulsion for the slave system, she started to teach her personal maid to read. "I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting-maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my long locks. The light was put out, the keyhold screened, and flat on our-stomachs, before the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the laws of South Carolina."
As an adult Sarah's aspirations to make something of her life turned in the one direction open to "respectable" women of her day and class: religion. She became a Quaker. Later she converted Angelina, 12 years her junior. Before joining her sister in Philadel¬phia, the Quakers' center, Angelina undertook a personal conversion crusade against slavery among her family and friends. In her gray Quaker dress, she started arguments at tea against the sin of holding slaves, becoming quite unpopular with Charleston's ruling elite. Inquiries were made about her sanity.
Convinced at last that there was no future in this, Angelina went north. But she could not be satisfied with the orthodox Quaker doctrine, which at that time included colonization as a "solution" to slavery. Black "Friends" were made to sit on a separate bench. In the early 1830s Angelina became interested in the growing abolitionist movement, and was horrified at the violence the free North turned against anti-slavery spokesmen. William Lloyd Garrison was barely saved from lynching at the hands of a Boston mob in 1835. Theodore Weld was repeatedly mobbed as he toured the Midwest, as were many others. Early in the decade Prudence Crandall was forced to close her school for black girls in Connecticut when the well was poisoned, doctors refused to treat the students, and finally a mob torched the school building. In 1838 a pro-slavery mob, egged on by the mayor himself, burned down Philadelphia Hall, which had been built by the abolitionists as a partial answer to their difficulty in finding places to meet. An interracial- meeting of abolitionists was in progress there at the time; two days earlier, Angelina and Weld had married, and the attendance of both blacks and whites at their wedding fueled the fury of the race-terrorists.
The abolitionists were part of a broader bourgeois radical movement, the 19th century herrs of the 18th century Enlightenment, Protestant religious ideals, and the American Revolution so dramatically unfulfilled in the "Land of the Free" where four million suffered in slavery. Although opposition to slavery was by no means as widespread in the 1830s as it was to become immediately before the Civil War, nonetheless many prominent men, such as the wealthy Tappan brothers of New York and Gerrit Smith, the biggest landowner in the North, had joined the movement by the middle of the decade. Many of the abolitionists had been part of the religious and intellectual upsurge which swept the United States after 1820. Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists were formulating their philos¬ophy. Religious revivalists such as Charles G. Finney, who converted Weld, preached temperance and that slavery was a sin against god.
Angelina became convinced that god had called her to work actively for the emancipation of the slaves. Defying the Quakers (who later expelled the sisters when Angelina and Weld married in a non-Quaker ceremony), the sisters went to New York where they participated in a conference for the training of abolitionist agents. Thus began the famous speaking tour of 1837-38.
The politics of the Grimke sisters was radical bourgeois egalitarianism profoundly rooted in religion. They believed that slavery was a sin, that as "immortal, moral beings" women and blacks were the equals of white men. They argued that slavery was contrary to the laws of god (the Bible) and of man, as put forth in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; they disagreed with Garrison's view of the Constitution as a "pro-slavery" document. Again unlike Garrison, they wrote and spoke for rights of education and property for free blacks as well, and bitterly denounced racism within the abolitionist movement. They were the integrationists of their time.
For many years, however, the sisters agreed with Garrison that slavery could be done away with peacefully by moral persuasion. They preached a boycott of slave-made goods (Angelina's wedding cake was made of "free" sugar by a free black baker). One of Angelina's first writings was "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States," widely circulated by the AASS, in which she urged Southern women to begin a petition campaign for immediate emancipation, to free their own slaves and to educate them. When copies of this pamphlet reached Charleston, the postmaster publicly burned them and the police informed the Grimke' family that if their daughter ever attempted to set foot in the city, she would be jailed and then sent back on the next ship.
The sisters were also for many years staunch pacifists, as would be expected from their Quaker background. Sarah took this to such an extreme that she denied that abolitionists had the right to arm themselves in defense against pro-slavery mobs. This became a subject of controversy in the abolitionist movement in 1837 when publisher Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois by a mob. True to her pacifist idealism, Sarah ques¬tioned his right to bear the gun with which he tried to save his life.
Splits and the Coming Storm
By the 1840s the Grimke'sisters had largely withdrawn from public activity. In part this was due to ill health Angelina suffered as a result of her pregnancies, as well as family financial problems. But much of it was probably political demoralization. In 1840the abolitionist movement split over the issues of women's rights and political action. The Garrisonian wing wanted to include women in the organization, but was opposed to abolitionists voting or running for political office, since Garrison believed the "pro-slavery" U.S. Con¬stitution should be abolished and that the North should expel the South. The other wing, represented by eminent men like the Tappan brothers, excluded women from office within the organization, was against women's rights, and wanted to orient to political work in Congress. Since they agreed with neither side in this split, the Grimke's and Weld retired to private life. In later years Angelina spoke bitterly against "organizations."
Meanwhile, however, on the left wing of the abolitionist movement there were gathering forces which saw the irrepressible and inevitable necessity for a violent assault on the slave system, to end it forever by force of arms. The brilliant black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and John Brown spearheaded this growing conviction. As we noted in our SL pamphlet, "Black History and the Class Struggle," "Douglass' political evolution was not merely from 'non-resistance' to self-defense. Contained in the 'moral suasion' line was a refusal to fight slavery politically and to the wall, by all methods. That is the importance of the Douglass-Brown relationship: together they were planning the Civil War." And it was John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 which galvanized the nation; abolitionists who the day before were pacifists took the pulpit to proclaim the necessity of a violent end to the slave system.
The Grimke' sisters and especially Theodore Weld had earlier become convinced that only war could end slavery. Sarah believed she had communed with John Brown's spirit the night before his martyrdom at the hands of Colonel Robert E. Lee, acting under command of President Buchanan. "The John Huss of the United States now stands ready... to seal his testimony with his life's blood," she wrote in her diary. Two of the executed men from the Harpers Ferry raid were buried in the commune at Raritan Bay, New Jersey, where the sisters and Weld were living at the time. The graves had to be guarded against a pro-slavery mob.
When the Civil War officially began the Grimke's did emerge briefly from private life. They were staunch Unionists, supported the draft and were critical of Lincoln for not freeing the slaves sooner. They were founding members of the Women's Loyal League. It was at a meeting of this group that Angelina made her famous statement: "I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
Reconstruction Betrayed: Finish the Civil War!
Following the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction, the most democratic period for blacks in U.S. history, the former abolitionist movement split again. During that period, women suffrage leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—formerly avowed abolitionists—turned their movement for women's rights into a tool of racist reaction. They organized against passage of the Fifteenth Amendment because it gave votes to blacks and not to women (the Grin-ike sisters were silent on this question, even though this disgusting racism was foreign to everything they had fought for). Stanton and Anthony worked closely with such racist Southern Democrats as James Brooks, because he purported to support women's suffrage. In a letter to the editor of the New York Standard (1865), Stanton wrote,
"...now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see 'Sambo' walk
into the kingdom first In fact, it is better to be the slave
of an educated white man, then of a degraded, ignorant black one."
It was Frederick Douglass who fought this racist assault. Douglass had been a fervent supporter of the infant women's rights movement, which began largely as a result of the chauvinism which women anti-slavery activists encountered from many abolitionists. At the 1869 convention of the Equal Rights Association, Douglass made a final attempt to win the suffragists from their reactionary policy:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have [the same] urgency to obtain the ballot."
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands," while imploring a redou¬bling "of our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." And for the rest of his life Douglass remained a staunch champion of women's rights.
Though the Civil War freed the slaves, it was not the fulfillment of Angelina's vision of a great, all-encompassing human emancipation. The betrayal of Reconstruction by the counterrevolutionary and triumphant capitalist reaction of the 1870s, in which the bourgeois feminists played their small and dirty part, left unfulfilled those liberating goals to which the Grimke sisters were committed. Yet Angelina's statement—"I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours"—was and is true in a way the Grimke's could not understand. Their social perspective was limited to the bourgeois order: they never identified property as the source of the oppression of both women and blacks. Indeed, as bourgeois egalitarians, the basis of their arguments was that women and blacks should have the same right to acquire property as the white man and that this would liberate them completely. As Marx noted:
"The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other."
—"The Civil War in the United States," Collected Works, Volume 19, 1861-64
The system of "free labor," capitalism, won out. Radical Reconstruction, enforced by military occupation, sought to impose equality of bourgeois democratic rights in the South. It was defeated by.compromise between the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern land-owning aristocracy, thus revealing the ultimate incapacity of bourgeois radicalism to finally liberate any sector of the oppressed. This failure and betrayal of Reconstruction perpetuated the oppression of blacks as a color caste at the bottom of American capitalist society. This racial division, with whites on top of blacks, has been and continues to be the main historical obstacle to the development of political class consciousness among the American proletariat. It will take a third American Revolution, led by a multiracial workers party against capitalism itself, to break the fetters of blacks, women and all the oppressed.
*March 20th-Washington- Boston Anti-Imperialist Committee Slogans- Not One Penny, Not One Person For Obama's Wars
Click on the headline to link to the "National Assembly To End the Afghan and Iraq Wars" Website, one of callers of the National March on Washington on March 20, 2010.
Markin comment:
We will march under our own slogans of -"Not One Penny, Not One Person For Obama's Wars"-"Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Iraq And Afghanistan"-"Defend The Palestinian People"-"Hands Off Iran And Pakistan"-"Build A Workers Party That Fights For A Workers Government"
Markin comment:
We will march under our own slogans of -"Not One Penny, Not One Person For Obama's Wars"-"Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Iraq And Afghanistan"-"Defend The Palestinian People"-"Hands Off Iran And Pakistan"-"Build A Workers Party That Fights For A Workers Government"
*From The "By Any Means Necessary" Blog- A Krupskaya Biography
Click on the headline to link to a "By Any Means Necessary" blog entry of a book review of a biography of Nedezshda Krupskaya, Lenin's companion and political co-thinker in the development of the Bolshevik Party in Russia.
Friday, March 19, 2010
*All Out On March 20th To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars -A Guest Commentary From "The National Assembly To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars
Click on the title to link to the "National Assembly To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars" Website.
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on March 20th for this event. Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear. Obama- Troops Out Now!
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on March 20th for this event. Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear. Obama- Troops Out Now!
*From The "UJP" Website- For Those Who Can't Make It To Washington March 20th- A Local Boston Action
Click on the headline to link to the "UJP-Boston" Website for an announcement for a local Boston anti-war action for those who cannot go to Washington.
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on March 20th for this event. Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear. Obama- Troops Out Now!
*****
Obviously some people will not be able to go to Washington on March 20th for health, economic, family, or other reasons so here is a local opportunity to show your opposition to Obama's wars. Same struggle, same fight! Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Iraq and Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on March 20th for this event. Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear. Obama- Troops Out Now!
*****
Obviously some people will not be able to go to Washington on March 20th for health, economic, family, or other reasons so here is a local opportunity to show your opposition to Obama's wars. Same struggle, same fight! Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Iraq and Afghanistan!
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"- On The Communist International's Work Among Women- The Comintern Journal
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1986 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
*****
Women and Revolution welcomes the publication of four volumes containing the complete reprints of the journal of the Women's Secretariat of the Communist International, Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale (Communist Women's International) in the original German. Published monthly from 1921 to 1925, the journal sought to provide revolutionary leadership to communist women cadres internationally. For several years, it was a high-grade propaganda organ, an organizing tool in the internationalist tradition of Lenin and Trotsky's Third International.
Articles appeared about a range of proletarian struggles—from the great British miners strike of 1921 to "The Harsh Life of Women Farmers in Nebraska and Wyoming and Their Demands." The journal dealt with a spectrum of social questions such as "Child Suicide: A Devastating Accusation Against the Bourgeois Order" and "Prostitution in Vienna," articles on infant mortality and women in politics. Systematic reports were made of events in the international communist movement, with detailed reports on conferences of international women's organizations and various bodies of the Third International. Historical articles, such as the intriguing "Women as the Vanguard of the Great Rice Insurrection in Japan in 1918" by communist leader Sen Katayama, and literary articles appeared in just about every issue. Pieces such as "The Fascist Women's Movement in Italy" and "French Imperialism’s Rapacious Attack on the Ruhr and the Danger of a New War" oriented the communist militants in a class-struggle approach to current urgent questions. There are many articles on the working women's struggles for unionization and equality.
Development of the Communist Women's Journal
The editor of the journal Kommunistische Fraueninternationale (KF) was German communist Clara Zetkin. As a leader of the German Social Democratic Party, Zetkin had played a vital role in the development of a revolutionary Marxist position on the woman question which later became a model for the Communist International. In 1891 she helped to found Die Gheichheit (Equality), the newspaper of the SPD devoted particularly to the question of women's emancipation. In the years before the outbreak of World War I, SPD left-wingers like Zetkin had fought persistently for special work among women on a high propagandistic level. They were also among those who defended their revolutionary proletarian outlook against all forms of narrowness and chauvinism, from trade unionism, parliamentarism and nationalism to male chauvinism and feminism. After the historic betrayal of the SPD, voting for war credits in the imperialist war, Die Gheichheit became known as a voice for internationalism, opposing the imperialist war in defiance of the SPD leadership. Many of the left wing joined Rosa Luxemburg in forming the Spartacist group in 1916, precursor of the German Communist Party formed in 1919 which affiliated with the Third International. Clara Zetkin was fired as editor of Die Gheichheit by the SPD leadership, which published it for a short time as a depoliticized and chauvinist magazine.
The founding of the journal KF continued the work of Die Gheichheit, broadening it and thus realizing one of the tasks set forth in the "Resolution on Work Among Women" adopted at the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921. This congress took place three years after the conclusion of the devastating First World War and four years after the successful proletarian revolution in Russia which created the first workers state, the Soviet Union. The year 1921 marked the end of the four-year Civil War when the internal counterrevolution, in league with 14 capitalist armies, was defeated by the Soviet Red Army. But internationally, the working class had suffered important defeats in Italy and Germany. It was a time of retrenchment, a time of defensive struggle. In the words of the Theses adopted at the Congress, "On the International Situation and the Tasks of the Comintern":
"It is absolutely incontestable that on a world scale the open revolutionary struggle of the proletariat for power is at present passing through a stoppage, a slowing down in tempo. But in the very nature of things, it was impossible to expect that the revolutionary offensive after the war, insofar as it failed to result in an immediate victory, should go on developing uninterruptedly along an upward curve."
In this period of retrenchment, the International determined that it was imperative to draw into the Communist parties layers of the oppressed which had hitherto been outside of organized politics or part of the mass reformist parties. The Third Congress had adopted the "Theses on Tactics," a manual for splitting the centrist and reformist mass parties and winning over their proletarian base. Central to this task was winning the Communist parties of the world to the importance of mobilizing and organizing proletarian women and youth into the revolutionary struggle. Trotsky motivated this task in his presentation to the Third Congress:
"Millions of new workers, particularly women workers, drawn into industry during the war, have brought with them into the proletariat not only their petty-bourgeois prejudices but also their impatient aspirations for better
conditions of life
"All these layers of the proletariat, so diverse in origin and character, have been and are being drawn into the postwar movement neither simultaneously nor homogeneously. Hence the fluctuations, the flows and ebbs, the offensives and retreats in the revolutionary struggle.
But the overwhelming majority of the proletarian masses are being rapidly welded together by the shattering of old illusions, by the terrible uncertainty of existence, by the autocratic domination of the trusts, by the bandit methods of the militarized state. This multimillion-headed mass is seeking a firm and lucid leadership, a clear-cut program of action and thus creates the premises for the decisive role which the closely welded and centralized Communist Party is destined to play."
Special Work Among Women
The communists understood that winning working women to communism would require special tools. Clara Zetkin motivated the resolution which ordered all sections to establish women's commissions to undertake special work among women:
"We see clearly the residue of thousands of years of subjugation on the souls and psyches of women. This is why, despite the common organization, special organs and measures are necessary to reach the masses of women and to organize and educate them as communists.
"For such organs we propose to establish women'; agitational committees or commissions—whatever the parties wish to call them—on the leadership and administrative party levels. And these commission' should exist from the leading bodies of the local group up to the highest central leadership. We call these organ women's commissions because their task is to undertake work among women but not because we wish to stress that they consist only of women. Quite the contrary. We welcome the participation of men in the women' commissions, with their greater political experience am skill. To us, the crucial thing is that these commission work among the masses of women in a planned am permanent way; that they take a stand against all the misery, and on all subjects of interest to the lives c women; that they intervene in all spheres of social life of the welfare of the millions and millions of proletarian an semi-proletarian women with knowledge and energy.
It was to the task of guiding and strengthening these party bodies that the International Women's Secretariat of the Communist International devoted their journal
Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale. The journal reflected the living struggle of the international communist movement, deriving its existence from the contributions of correspondents elected by the Communist party in each country. Through these contributions, the pages of KF became a treasure trove of direct political experience, recording the struggle of the Communist parties of the world on questions of particular interest to women. The richness of the political debates of the Third International reflected through the struggles in various countries make fascinating reading. Particular attention was devoted to polemics against the Social Democratic false leaders of the working class and the bourgeois feminist movement.
By publishing the actual decrees of the new Soviet state on the protection of mother and child, abortion, education and a myriad of other social questions, the journal showed concretely how the basis for the emancipation of women was being laid in the Soviet Union through the replacement of social responsibilities of the nuclear family. This was the future toward which the Communist International was looking. Throughout these volumes the urgent need for defense of the Soviet Union in light of these enormous social accomplishments is highlighted.
In 1925, the character of the journal changed radically. In the handful of issues published that year, the revolutionary edge was blunted and the pages were filled with empty tributes to Lenin, nationalistic declarations of allegiance to the Soviet Union and dull statistical tracts. Stalinism had destroyed the Communist International as a revolutionary force, substituting the false doctrine of "socialism in one country." Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale was discontinued in 1925, one of the victims of Stalinism.
Women and Revolution is proud to introduce these important volumes to our readers. From time to time we hope to publish translations of selected pieces. In this issue, we publish excerpts from Clara Zetkin's Preface, printed in the first number of Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale, April 1921.
Clara Zetkin's Introduction to the Communist Women's International
This is not the journal of a communist women's movement of a single country; it is the common international organ of the communist women's movement of all countries. And this imparts special significance to Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale: presently it is the only international women's journal not to regard the problems of the so-called woman question from the shaky ground of the bourgeois view of society and from the perspective of the women's righters, but to base its viewpoint on the weather-hardened granite of the socialist, communist worldview, oriented unswervingly toward the liberation of humanity through communism. Thus it is a creation of the revolutionary workers movement itself, its most advanced, perceptive, confident and energetic component: the Communist International.
Certainly, the internationally oriented and distributed Die Gleichheit, the women's journal of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, sought to join the proletarian women's movement of the various countries on a common basis and to combine forces to achieve a common goal. But after all, for the most part the journal necessarily remained the paper of the German Social Democracy and could be an international publication only in its "secondary function," an "ersatz publication."
No thought was more remote from the Second International than establishing an international women’s publication, even on the most modest level. Despite its fundamental commitment to equal rights for the sexes it tolerated the proletarian women's movement more as unavoidable and secondary, if not as a necessary evil, rather than evaluating it according to its historical worth. Representatives of the Women's International were admitted to its conferences more or less sympathetically, but they had no statutory right to participate. The Women's International had no representation on the Secretariat of the Second International. It required world war, the destruction and shattering of the capitalist economy and bourgeois society to its very depths; it required world revolution beginning its mighty march of victory across the entire earth, crushing everything old and rotten under its iron heel and creating with bountiful hands new things demanding life; it required the power of Soviet Russia, the first state built by free and creative labor; it required a break from the chaos of betrayed principles and the new perception of the Communist International amidst these historic events, in fierce combat against its bourgeois mortal enemies and in passionate, painful struggles with those proletarians lacking insight, weak in perception and misled—all this was required for this revolutionary vanguard, nucleus of the working class, to fully value the proletarian women's movement.
As an organization of action the Communist International necessarily came to an enhanced appreciation of the participation of the masses of women in the revolutionary struggle, in revolutionary construction. As an organization of action it gleaned its insight and strength from the lessons of the past as well as from present experience, in particular in Soviet Russia where the revolution, embodied in flesh and blood, has set about overturning society. There the truth of the fact— to which Socialists of all countries and tendencies give mere lip service—was proven and continues to be completely proven in practice: without the informed, spirited and self-sacrificing participation of broad masses of women, capitalism cannot be conquered and eradicated, nor can communism be realized. Soviet Russia's rule by sword and soup ladle could reach an unprecedented level of sacrifice and heroism and thus its victorious affirmation only through the full participation of masses of women. Dire necessity called the Russian women to every battle station, into every field of economic and cultural activity. If they served the revolution in greater numbers and with more dedication, this was because they met much less prejudice than women of any other country. In Russia, the struggle for the full equality of women, as the revolution itself, has always been the great cause of men and women in common.
Under the historic leadership of the Communist Party of Soviet Russia, and with its great example, the Third International was bound to undertake that which the Second International had failed to do. On the basis of a unified and consistently executed plan the communist women were integrated into the Communist parties nationally and internationally into the world proletariat's great revolutionary fighting instrument.
Die Kommunistische FrauenInternationale must fulfill another important task. It is the publication for researching, exploring and clarifying the various questions and phenomena which particularly touch women's lives. This transitional period, in which an old, decaying society is wrestling with a new, emerging one, poses those questions and phenomena daily. Facts and perceptions storm by us. Social conditions which only yesterday still seemed to fetter the emergence of women are scattered today like dry tinder. In the masses of women, desires, wishes, will, needs arise great, naked and commanding, which were in the past small, timid, hidden, hardly breathing, subconscious. The revolutionary social situation is revolutionizing the psyche of women, and this demands social conditions which will provide them fertile soil, fresh air and warm sunshine to grow, to exist and to act according to their own capacity. In all fields women are beginning to pose their right to exist against the anachronistic, dead or dying social forms and conditions. Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale must pursue and answer from the stable standpoint of historical materialism the questions which thus arise. It is the duty of the women comrades of all countries with clear perception and firm will to channel the small, weak springs of women's new, revolutionary will to life into the powerful stream of the proletarian world revolution."
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1986 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
*****
Women and Revolution welcomes the publication of four volumes containing the complete reprints of the journal of the Women's Secretariat of the Communist International, Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale (Communist Women's International) in the original German. Published monthly from 1921 to 1925, the journal sought to provide revolutionary leadership to communist women cadres internationally. For several years, it was a high-grade propaganda organ, an organizing tool in the internationalist tradition of Lenin and Trotsky's Third International.
Articles appeared about a range of proletarian struggles—from the great British miners strike of 1921 to "The Harsh Life of Women Farmers in Nebraska and Wyoming and Their Demands." The journal dealt with a spectrum of social questions such as "Child Suicide: A Devastating Accusation Against the Bourgeois Order" and "Prostitution in Vienna," articles on infant mortality and women in politics. Systematic reports were made of events in the international communist movement, with detailed reports on conferences of international women's organizations and various bodies of the Third International. Historical articles, such as the intriguing "Women as the Vanguard of the Great Rice Insurrection in Japan in 1918" by communist leader Sen Katayama, and literary articles appeared in just about every issue. Pieces such as "The Fascist Women's Movement in Italy" and "French Imperialism’s Rapacious Attack on the Ruhr and the Danger of a New War" oriented the communist militants in a class-struggle approach to current urgent questions. There are many articles on the working women's struggles for unionization and equality.
Development of the Communist Women's Journal
The editor of the journal Kommunistische Fraueninternationale (KF) was German communist Clara Zetkin. As a leader of the German Social Democratic Party, Zetkin had played a vital role in the development of a revolutionary Marxist position on the woman question which later became a model for the Communist International. In 1891 she helped to found Die Gheichheit (Equality), the newspaper of the SPD devoted particularly to the question of women's emancipation. In the years before the outbreak of World War I, SPD left-wingers like Zetkin had fought persistently for special work among women on a high propagandistic level. They were also among those who defended their revolutionary proletarian outlook against all forms of narrowness and chauvinism, from trade unionism, parliamentarism and nationalism to male chauvinism and feminism. After the historic betrayal of the SPD, voting for war credits in the imperialist war, Die Gheichheit became known as a voice for internationalism, opposing the imperialist war in defiance of the SPD leadership. Many of the left wing joined Rosa Luxemburg in forming the Spartacist group in 1916, precursor of the German Communist Party formed in 1919 which affiliated with the Third International. Clara Zetkin was fired as editor of Die Gheichheit by the SPD leadership, which published it for a short time as a depoliticized and chauvinist magazine.
The founding of the journal KF continued the work of Die Gheichheit, broadening it and thus realizing one of the tasks set forth in the "Resolution on Work Among Women" adopted at the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921. This congress took place three years after the conclusion of the devastating First World War and four years after the successful proletarian revolution in Russia which created the first workers state, the Soviet Union. The year 1921 marked the end of the four-year Civil War when the internal counterrevolution, in league with 14 capitalist armies, was defeated by the Soviet Red Army. But internationally, the working class had suffered important defeats in Italy and Germany. It was a time of retrenchment, a time of defensive struggle. In the words of the Theses adopted at the Congress, "On the International Situation and the Tasks of the Comintern":
"It is absolutely incontestable that on a world scale the open revolutionary struggle of the proletariat for power is at present passing through a stoppage, a slowing down in tempo. But in the very nature of things, it was impossible to expect that the revolutionary offensive after the war, insofar as it failed to result in an immediate victory, should go on developing uninterruptedly along an upward curve."
In this period of retrenchment, the International determined that it was imperative to draw into the Communist parties layers of the oppressed which had hitherto been outside of organized politics or part of the mass reformist parties. The Third Congress had adopted the "Theses on Tactics," a manual for splitting the centrist and reformist mass parties and winning over their proletarian base. Central to this task was winning the Communist parties of the world to the importance of mobilizing and organizing proletarian women and youth into the revolutionary struggle. Trotsky motivated this task in his presentation to the Third Congress:
"Millions of new workers, particularly women workers, drawn into industry during the war, have brought with them into the proletariat not only their petty-bourgeois prejudices but also their impatient aspirations for better
conditions of life
"All these layers of the proletariat, so diverse in origin and character, have been and are being drawn into the postwar movement neither simultaneously nor homogeneously. Hence the fluctuations, the flows and ebbs, the offensives and retreats in the revolutionary struggle.
But the overwhelming majority of the proletarian masses are being rapidly welded together by the shattering of old illusions, by the terrible uncertainty of existence, by the autocratic domination of the trusts, by the bandit methods of the militarized state. This multimillion-headed mass is seeking a firm and lucid leadership, a clear-cut program of action and thus creates the premises for the decisive role which the closely welded and centralized Communist Party is destined to play."
Special Work Among Women
The communists understood that winning working women to communism would require special tools. Clara Zetkin motivated the resolution which ordered all sections to establish women's commissions to undertake special work among women:
"We see clearly the residue of thousands of years of subjugation on the souls and psyches of women. This is why, despite the common organization, special organs and measures are necessary to reach the masses of women and to organize and educate them as communists.
"For such organs we propose to establish women'; agitational committees or commissions—whatever the parties wish to call them—on the leadership and administrative party levels. And these commission' should exist from the leading bodies of the local group up to the highest central leadership. We call these organ women's commissions because their task is to undertake work among women but not because we wish to stress that they consist only of women. Quite the contrary. We welcome the participation of men in the women' commissions, with their greater political experience am skill. To us, the crucial thing is that these commission work among the masses of women in a planned am permanent way; that they take a stand against all the misery, and on all subjects of interest to the lives c women; that they intervene in all spheres of social life of the welfare of the millions and millions of proletarian an semi-proletarian women with knowledge and energy.
It was to the task of guiding and strengthening these party bodies that the International Women's Secretariat of the Communist International devoted their journal
Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale. The journal reflected the living struggle of the international communist movement, deriving its existence from the contributions of correspondents elected by the Communist party in each country. Through these contributions, the pages of KF became a treasure trove of direct political experience, recording the struggle of the Communist parties of the world on questions of particular interest to women. The richness of the political debates of the Third International reflected through the struggles in various countries make fascinating reading. Particular attention was devoted to polemics against the Social Democratic false leaders of the working class and the bourgeois feminist movement.
By publishing the actual decrees of the new Soviet state on the protection of mother and child, abortion, education and a myriad of other social questions, the journal showed concretely how the basis for the emancipation of women was being laid in the Soviet Union through the replacement of social responsibilities of the nuclear family. This was the future toward which the Communist International was looking. Throughout these volumes the urgent need for defense of the Soviet Union in light of these enormous social accomplishments is highlighted.
In 1925, the character of the journal changed radically. In the handful of issues published that year, the revolutionary edge was blunted and the pages were filled with empty tributes to Lenin, nationalistic declarations of allegiance to the Soviet Union and dull statistical tracts. Stalinism had destroyed the Communist International as a revolutionary force, substituting the false doctrine of "socialism in one country." Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale was discontinued in 1925, one of the victims of Stalinism.
Women and Revolution is proud to introduce these important volumes to our readers. From time to time we hope to publish translations of selected pieces. In this issue, we publish excerpts from Clara Zetkin's Preface, printed in the first number of Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale, April 1921.
Clara Zetkin's Introduction to the Communist Women's International
This is not the journal of a communist women's movement of a single country; it is the common international organ of the communist women's movement of all countries. And this imparts special significance to Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale: presently it is the only international women's journal not to regard the problems of the so-called woman question from the shaky ground of the bourgeois view of society and from the perspective of the women's righters, but to base its viewpoint on the weather-hardened granite of the socialist, communist worldview, oriented unswervingly toward the liberation of humanity through communism. Thus it is a creation of the revolutionary workers movement itself, its most advanced, perceptive, confident and energetic component: the Communist International.
Certainly, the internationally oriented and distributed Die Gleichheit, the women's journal of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, sought to join the proletarian women's movement of the various countries on a common basis and to combine forces to achieve a common goal. But after all, for the most part the journal necessarily remained the paper of the German Social Democracy and could be an international publication only in its "secondary function," an "ersatz publication."
No thought was more remote from the Second International than establishing an international women’s publication, even on the most modest level. Despite its fundamental commitment to equal rights for the sexes it tolerated the proletarian women's movement more as unavoidable and secondary, if not as a necessary evil, rather than evaluating it according to its historical worth. Representatives of the Women's International were admitted to its conferences more or less sympathetically, but they had no statutory right to participate. The Women's International had no representation on the Secretariat of the Second International. It required world war, the destruction and shattering of the capitalist economy and bourgeois society to its very depths; it required world revolution beginning its mighty march of victory across the entire earth, crushing everything old and rotten under its iron heel and creating with bountiful hands new things demanding life; it required the power of Soviet Russia, the first state built by free and creative labor; it required a break from the chaos of betrayed principles and the new perception of the Communist International amidst these historic events, in fierce combat against its bourgeois mortal enemies and in passionate, painful struggles with those proletarians lacking insight, weak in perception and misled—all this was required for this revolutionary vanguard, nucleus of the working class, to fully value the proletarian women's movement.
As an organization of action the Communist International necessarily came to an enhanced appreciation of the participation of the masses of women in the revolutionary struggle, in revolutionary construction. As an organization of action it gleaned its insight and strength from the lessons of the past as well as from present experience, in particular in Soviet Russia where the revolution, embodied in flesh and blood, has set about overturning society. There the truth of the fact— to which Socialists of all countries and tendencies give mere lip service—was proven and continues to be completely proven in practice: without the informed, spirited and self-sacrificing participation of broad masses of women, capitalism cannot be conquered and eradicated, nor can communism be realized. Soviet Russia's rule by sword and soup ladle could reach an unprecedented level of sacrifice and heroism and thus its victorious affirmation only through the full participation of masses of women. Dire necessity called the Russian women to every battle station, into every field of economic and cultural activity. If they served the revolution in greater numbers and with more dedication, this was because they met much less prejudice than women of any other country. In Russia, the struggle for the full equality of women, as the revolution itself, has always been the great cause of men and women in common.
Under the historic leadership of the Communist Party of Soviet Russia, and with its great example, the Third International was bound to undertake that which the Second International had failed to do. On the basis of a unified and consistently executed plan the communist women were integrated into the Communist parties nationally and internationally into the world proletariat's great revolutionary fighting instrument.
Die Kommunistische FrauenInternationale must fulfill another important task. It is the publication for researching, exploring and clarifying the various questions and phenomena which particularly touch women's lives. This transitional period, in which an old, decaying society is wrestling with a new, emerging one, poses those questions and phenomena daily. Facts and perceptions storm by us. Social conditions which only yesterday still seemed to fetter the emergence of women are scattered today like dry tinder. In the masses of women, desires, wishes, will, needs arise great, naked and commanding, which were in the past small, timid, hidden, hardly breathing, subconscious. The revolutionary social situation is revolutionizing the psyche of women, and this demands social conditions which will provide them fertile soil, fresh air and warm sunshine to grow, to exist and to act according to their own capacity. In all fields women are beginning to pose their right to exist against the anachronistic, dead or dying social forms and conditions. Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale must pursue and answer from the stable standpoint of historical materialism the questions which thus arise. It is the duty of the women comrades of all countries with clear perception and firm will to channel the small, weak springs of women's new, revolutionary will to life into the powerful stream of the proletarian world revolution."
*On The 7th Anniversary- All Out On March 20th To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars-A Guest Commentary From "National Assembly"
Click on the title to link to the "National Assembly To End The Afghan And Iraq War" Website.
*On The 7th Anniversary- All Out On March 20th To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars-A Guest Commentary From "National Assembly"
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on March 20th for this event. Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear. Obama- Troops Out Now!
**********
Below is a repost, in a seemingly endless series of reposts of last year's, the 6th anniversary of the Iraq War,of my comment.
Commentary
On this the Sixth Anniversary of the Iraq invasion I repost my entries from previous years. There is essentially nothing new to add, except to replace the name Bush with Obama in the slogan- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of All U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan!
From March 19, 2008
Today I will go to downtown Boston and participate in my nth demonstration against the Iraq War. I will have my banner, I will shout and I ....will be frustrated that in many fundamentals we (meaning here the anti-war movement) are no closer to forcing a total troop withdrawal from Iraq than 5 years ago. But, my frustration will pass. In fact it has already. I will shout to the bitter end- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of All United States/Allied Troops and Mercenaries From Iraq and Afghanistan!
Below I have reposted, as much as it pains me, a comment I made as we approached last year’s 4th Anniversary of the Iraq War. Damn.
COMMENTARY
WRITTEN ON MARCH 19, 2007 THE FOURTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE AMERICAN INVASION AND OCCUPATION OF IRAQ.
This will be short and sweet for four years of war without an effective extra-parliamentary (or for that matter, parliamentary) opposition in an unpopular war led by an unpopular President speaks for itself. That said, the slogan Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal from Iraq by the United States and its rapidly dwindling coalition forces retains its validity. As does the fight for a straight no vote on the war budget. And, finally, as does the validity of the desperately necessary fight to form anti-war soldiers and sailors solidarity committees. Otherwise this time next year we will be writing about the fifth year of the war. Forward.
***************
I will not repost the 2006, 2005, 2004 entries because you have already read enough on this grim subject.
*On The 7th Anniversary- All Out On March 20th To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars-A Guest Commentary From "National Assembly"
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on March 20th for this event. Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear. Obama- Troops Out Now!
**********
Below is a repost, in a seemingly endless series of reposts of last year's, the 6th anniversary of the Iraq War,of my comment.
Commentary
On this the Sixth Anniversary of the Iraq invasion I repost my entries from previous years. There is essentially nothing new to add, except to replace the name Bush with Obama in the slogan- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of All U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan!
From March 19, 2008
Today I will go to downtown Boston and participate in my nth demonstration against the Iraq War. I will have my banner, I will shout and I ....will be frustrated that in many fundamentals we (meaning here the anti-war movement) are no closer to forcing a total troop withdrawal from Iraq than 5 years ago. But, my frustration will pass. In fact it has already. I will shout to the bitter end- Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal of All United States/Allied Troops and Mercenaries From Iraq and Afghanistan!
Below I have reposted, as much as it pains me, a comment I made as we approached last year’s 4th Anniversary of the Iraq War. Damn.
COMMENTARY
WRITTEN ON MARCH 19, 2007 THE FOURTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE AMERICAN INVASION AND OCCUPATION OF IRAQ.
This will be short and sweet for four years of war without an effective extra-parliamentary (or for that matter, parliamentary) opposition in an unpopular war led by an unpopular President speaks for itself. That said, the slogan Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal from Iraq by the United States and its rapidly dwindling coalition forces retains its validity. As does the fight for a straight no vote on the war budget. And, finally, as does the validity of the desperately necessary fight to form anti-war soldiers and sailors solidarity committees. Otherwise this time next year we will be writing about the fifth year of the war. Forward.
***************
I will not repost the 2006, 2005, 2004 entries because you have already read enough on this grim subject.
*The Latest From The "Black Man With A Library" Blog-"Is Ok For Black Folks To Criticize Obama
Click on the headline to link to a "Black Man With A Library" blog entry on the above-mentioned subject.
Markin comment:
Politics is funny, sometimes. In this extremely racially-conscious society, as Glen Ford from "Black Agenda" pointed out recently, white leftists, or some white leftists, have been hesitant to challenge a black...anything, actually, but in this case a black president, fearing a charge of racism. This in a "post-racial" world, right? In any case, for what it is worth, it is very good to have black voices, who are under pressures of their own, from their own, to brand Obama for the very effective imperialist too that he is. Thanks, guys and gals.
Markin comment:
Politics is funny, sometimes. In this extremely racially-conscious society, as Glen Ford from "Black Agenda" pointed out recently, white leftists, or some white leftists, have been hesitant to challenge a black...anything, actually, but in this case a black president, fearing a charge of racism. This in a "post-racial" world, right? In any case, for what it is worth, it is very good to have black voices, who are under pressures of their own, from their own, to brand Obama for the very effective imperialist too that he is. Thanks, guys and gals.
*The Latest From "The Further Left Forum" Blog
Click on the headline ot link to the "Further Left Forum" blog.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
*From The Pen Of Friedrich Engels- "On The 20th Anniversary Of The Paris Commune"
Click on the title to link to a "Marx-Engels Internet Archive" article by Friedrich Engels in honor of the 20th anniversary of the heroic fighters of the Paris Commune in 1891.
Markin comment:
I should note that there was a little historical controversy over the 'editing' of this piece by the leaders of the German social-democracy like Bernstein and Kautsky. The purpose: to blunt the edge of Engels' rapier-like analysis of the changed military conditions that the urban proletariat would have to fight under, and making it appear that Engels, like them, thirsted on for socialism to be "voted" in. We know the sorry fate of that strategy, although some left militants have still not learned the lesson. So much for untrammelled freedom of expression so beloved of the social democrats, then and now.
Markin comment:
I should note that there was a little historical controversy over the 'editing' of this piece by the leaders of the German social-democracy like Bernstein and Kautsky. The purpose: to blunt the edge of Engels' rapier-like analysis of the changed military conditions that the urban proletariat would have to fight under, and making it appear that Engels, like them, thirsted on for socialism to be "voted" in. We know the sorry fate of that strategy, although some left militants have still not learned the lesson. So much for untrammelled freedom of expression so beloved of the social democrats, then and now.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
*All Out On March 20th To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars -A Guest Commentary From "The National Assembly To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars
Click on the title to link to the "National Assembly To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars" Website.
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on March 20th for this event. Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear. Obama- Troops Out Now!
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on March 20th for this event. Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear. Obama- Troops Out Now!
*From The "UJP" Website- For Those Who Can't Make It To Washington March 20th- A Local Boston Action
Click on the headline to link to the "UJP-Boston" Website for an announcement for a local Boston anti-war action for those who cannot go to Washington.
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on March 20th for this event. Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear. Obama- Troops Out Now!
*****
Obviously some people will not be able to go to Washington on March 20th for health, economic, family, or other reasons so here is a local opportunity to show your opposition to Obama's wars. Same struggle, same fight! Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Iraq and Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on March 20th for this event. Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear. Obama- Troops Out Now!
*****
Obviously some people will not be able to go to Washington on March 20th for health, economic, family, or other reasons so here is a local opportunity to show your opposition to Obama's wars. Same struggle, same fight! Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Iraq and Afghanistan!
*From The "In Defense Of Marxism" Website- "Bolshevism And Stalinism" -A Guest Commentary
Click on the headline to link to a "In Defense Of Marxism" entry reviewing Robert Service's biography of Leon Trotsky mentioned in an earlier entry today from "Renegade Eye".
Markin comment:
I stand by my comment earlier in the day, at least on the basis of this review. More later, after I actually read the thing. Service's "Lenin" though was that sam eold anti-communist Cold War mishmash that really didn't give much insight in Lenin's revolutionary pysche.
Markin comment:
I stand by my comment earlier in the day, at least on the basis of this review. More later, after I actually read the thing. Service's "Lenin" though was that sam eold anti-communist Cold War mishmash that really didn't give much insight in Lenin's revolutionary pysche.
*From The "Renegade Eye" Blog- Hitchens And Service On Leon Trotsky
Click on the title to link to the "Renegade Eye" blog for an entry with ex-leftist "bad boy" Christopher Hitchens having a discussion with Robert Service on his new book, a biography, "Leon Trotsky".
Markin comment:
I have read Service's other books on Bolsheviks and have not been particularly impressed. However without having read his Trotsky biography yet I nevertheless doubt that it will beat what I believe is still the definitive work, Isaac Deutscher's three volume "Prophet" set.
Markin comment:
I have read Service's other books on Bolsheviks and have not been particularly impressed. However without having read his Trotsky biography yet I nevertheless doubt that it will beat what I believe is still the definitive work, Isaac Deutscher's three volume "Prophet" set.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-"James Connolly"-For Those Who Fought For Ireland's Freedom
Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of a performance of a version of one of the many songs written to honor the great Irish revolutionary socialist,"James Connolly".
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
"James Connolly" Lyrics
Marchin' down O'Connell Street with the Starry Plough on high
There goes the Citizen Army with their fists raised in the sky
Leading them is a mighty man with a mad rage in his eye
"My name is James Connolly - I didn't come here to die
But to fight for the rights of the working man
And the small farmer too
Protect the proletariat from the bosses and their screws
So hold on to your rifles, boys, and don't give up your dream
Of a Republic for the workin' class, economic liberty"
Then Jem yelled out "Oh Citizens, this system is a curse
An English boss is a monster, an Irish one even worse
They'll never lock us out again and here's the reason why
My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die....."
And now we're in the GPO with the bullets whizzin' by
With Pearse and Sean McDermott biddin' each other goodbye
Up steps our citizen leader and roars out to the sky
"My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die...
Oh Lily, I don't want to die, we've got so much to live for
And I know we're all goin' out to get slaughtered, but I just can't take any more
Just the sight of one more child screamin' from hunger in a Dublin slum
Or his mother slavin' 14 hours a day for the scum
Who exploit her and take her youth and throw it on a factory floor
Oh Lily, I just can't take any more
They've locked us out, they've banned our unions, they even treat their animals better than us
No! It's far better to die like a man on your feet than to live forever like some slave on your knees, Lilly
But don't let them wrap any green flag around me
And for God's sake, don't let them bury me in some field full of harps and shamrocks
And whatever you do, don't let them make a martyr out of me
No! Rather raise the Starry Plough on high, sing a song of freedom
Here's to you, Lily, the rights of man and international revolution"
We fought them to a standstill while the flames lit up the sky
'Til a bullet pierced our leader and we gave up the fight
They shot him in Kilmainham jail but they'll never stop his cry
My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die...."
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
"James Connolly" Lyrics
Marchin' down O'Connell Street with the Starry Plough on high
There goes the Citizen Army with their fists raised in the sky
Leading them is a mighty man with a mad rage in his eye
"My name is James Connolly - I didn't come here to die
But to fight for the rights of the working man
And the small farmer too
Protect the proletariat from the bosses and their screws
So hold on to your rifles, boys, and don't give up your dream
Of a Republic for the workin' class, economic liberty"
Then Jem yelled out "Oh Citizens, this system is a curse
An English boss is a monster, an Irish one even worse
They'll never lock us out again and here's the reason why
My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die....."
And now we're in the GPO with the bullets whizzin' by
With Pearse and Sean McDermott biddin' each other goodbye
Up steps our citizen leader and roars out to the sky
"My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die...
Oh Lily, I don't want to die, we've got so much to live for
And I know we're all goin' out to get slaughtered, but I just can't take any more
Just the sight of one more child screamin' from hunger in a Dublin slum
Or his mother slavin' 14 hours a day for the scum
Who exploit her and take her youth and throw it on a factory floor
Oh Lily, I just can't take any more
They've locked us out, they've banned our unions, they even treat their animals better than us
No! It's far better to die like a man on your feet than to live forever like some slave on your knees, Lilly
But don't let them wrap any green flag around me
And for God's sake, don't let them bury me in some field full of harps and shamrocks
And whatever you do, don't let them make a martyr out of me
No! Rather raise the Starry Plough on high, sing a song of freedom
Here's to you, Lily, the rights of man and international revolution"
We fought them to a standstill while the flames lit up the sky
'Til a bullet pierced our leader and we gave up the fight
They shot him in Kilmainham jail but they'll never stop his cry
My name is James Connolly, I didn't come here to die...."
*Notes From The Old Home Town-As March 17th Approaches-A Moment In History- The Irish Diaspora
Click on the headline to link to a "American Left History" entry that deals with the Irish Question in little different manner.
Markin comment:
Not all the entries in this space are connected to politics, although surely most of them can be boiled down into some political essence, if you try hard enough. The following is one of those instances where trying to gain any “political traction”, or as I am fond of saying drawing any “lessons” would be foolhardy. I should also note that this entry is part of a continuing, if sporadic, series of “trips down memory lane” provoked by a fellow high school classmate who has been charged with keeping tabs on old classmates and their doings, even those of old-line communists like this writer. Go figure?
As March 17th Approaches- A moment in history…
"A Terrible Beauty Is Born", a recurring line from the great Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats,"Easter 1916"
At the corner of Hand Street and East Street forming a wedge in front of our old beige-bricked high school, and from that vantage point giving the building a majestic “mighty fortress is our home” look, there is a plaque that commemorates a fallen soldier of World War I, and is officially known as the Frank O’Brien Square. The corners and squares of most cities and towns in most countries of the world have such memorials to their war dead, needless to say far too many. That plaque furthermore now competes, unsuccessfully, with a huge Raider red billboard telling one and all of the latest doings, or upcoming events or honoring somebody or something, and in due course will be relegated to the “vaults’ of the history of our town. This entry, however, is not about that or about the follies of war, or even about why it is that young men (and now women) wind up doing the dangerous work of war that is decided by old men (and now old women), although that would be a worthy subject. No, the focus here is the name of the soldier, or rather the last name, O’Brien, and the Irishness of it.
A quick run through of the names of the students listed in the “Manet” for the Class of 1964 will illustrate my point. If Irish names are not in the majority, then they predominant, and that does not even take into consideration the half or quarter Irish heritage that is hidden behind other names. And that is exactly the point. If North Quincy in the old days was not exactly “Little Dublin”, the heritage of the Irish diaspora certainly was nevertheless apparent for all to see, and hear. That North Quincy was merely a way station away from the self-contained Irish ghettos of Dorchester and South Boston to the Irish Riveiras of the area was, or rather is, also apparent as anyone who has been in the old town of late will note.
And that too is the point. Today Asian- Americans, particularly the Chinese and Vietnamese, and other minorities have followed that well-trodden path to Quincy. And they have made, and will make, their mark on the ethos of this hard-working working class part of town. So while the faint aroma of corn beef and cabbage (and colorful pasta dishes, from the other main ethnic group of old Quincy, the Italians) has been replaced by the pungent smells of moo shi and poi and the bucolic brogue by some sing-song Mandarin dialect the life of the town moves on.
Yet, I can still feel, when I aimlessly walk certain streets, the Irishness of the diaspora “old sod”. To be sure, as a broken amber liquor bottle spotted on the ground reminded me, there were many whiskey-sodden nights (complete with the obligatory beer chaser) that many a man spent his pay on to keep his “demons” from the door. And to be sure, as well, the ubiquitous pot on the old iron stove for the potato-ladened boiled dinner that stretched an already tight food budget just a little longer when the ever present hard times cast their shadow at that same door. And, of course, there was the great secret cultural relic; the relentless, never-ending struggle to keep the family “dirty linen” from the public eye. But also this: the passed down heroic tales of our forbears, the sons and daughters of Roisin, in their heart-rending eight hundred year struggle against the crushing of the “harp beneath the crown”; of the whispered homages to the ghosts of our Fenian dead; of great General Post Office uprisings, large and small; and, of the continuing struggle in the North. Yes, as that soldier’s plaque symbolizes, an Irish presence will never completely leave the old town, nor will the willingness to sacrifice.
Oh, yes, that Frank O’Brien for whom the square in front of the old school was named , would have been my grand uncle, the brother of my Grandmother Radley (nee O’Brien) from over on Young Street across from the Welcome Young Field.
Markin comment:
Not all the entries in this space are connected to politics, although surely most of them can be boiled down into some political essence, if you try hard enough. The following is one of those instances where trying to gain any “political traction”, or as I am fond of saying drawing any “lessons” would be foolhardy. I should also note that this entry is part of a continuing, if sporadic, series of “trips down memory lane” provoked by a fellow high school classmate who has been charged with keeping tabs on old classmates and their doings, even those of old-line communists like this writer. Go figure?
As March 17th Approaches- A moment in history…
"A Terrible Beauty Is Born", a recurring line from the great Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats,"Easter 1916"
At the corner of Hand Street and East Street forming a wedge in front of our old beige-bricked high school, and from that vantage point giving the building a majestic “mighty fortress is our home” look, there is a plaque that commemorates a fallen soldier of World War I, and is officially known as the Frank O’Brien Square. The corners and squares of most cities and towns in most countries of the world have such memorials to their war dead, needless to say far too many. That plaque furthermore now competes, unsuccessfully, with a huge Raider red billboard telling one and all of the latest doings, or upcoming events or honoring somebody or something, and in due course will be relegated to the “vaults’ of the history of our town. This entry, however, is not about that or about the follies of war, or even about why it is that young men (and now women) wind up doing the dangerous work of war that is decided by old men (and now old women), although that would be a worthy subject. No, the focus here is the name of the soldier, or rather the last name, O’Brien, and the Irishness of it.
A quick run through of the names of the students listed in the “Manet” for the Class of 1964 will illustrate my point. If Irish names are not in the majority, then they predominant, and that does not even take into consideration the half or quarter Irish heritage that is hidden behind other names. And that is exactly the point. If North Quincy in the old days was not exactly “Little Dublin”, the heritage of the Irish diaspora certainly was nevertheless apparent for all to see, and hear. That North Quincy was merely a way station away from the self-contained Irish ghettos of Dorchester and South Boston to the Irish Riveiras of the area was, or rather is, also apparent as anyone who has been in the old town of late will note.
And that too is the point. Today Asian- Americans, particularly the Chinese and Vietnamese, and other minorities have followed that well-trodden path to Quincy. And they have made, and will make, their mark on the ethos of this hard-working working class part of town. So while the faint aroma of corn beef and cabbage (and colorful pasta dishes, from the other main ethnic group of old Quincy, the Italians) has been replaced by the pungent smells of moo shi and poi and the bucolic brogue by some sing-song Mandarin dialect the life of the town moves on.
Yet, I can still feel, when I aimlessly walk certain streets, the Irishness of the diaspora “old sod”. To be sure, as a broken amber liquor bottle spotted on the ground reminded me, there were many whiskey-sodden nights (complete with the obligatory beer chaser) that many a man spent his pay on to keep his “demons” from the door. And to be sure, as well, the ubiquitous pot on the old iron stove for the potato-ladened boiled dinner that stretched an already tight food budget just a little longer when the ever present hard times cast their shadow at that same door. And, of course, there was the great secret cultural relic; the relentless, never-ending struggle to keep the family “dirty linen” from the public eye. But also this: the passed down heroic tales of our forbears, the sons and daughters of Roisin, in their heart-rending eight hundred year struggle against the crushing of the “harp beneath the crown”; of the whispered homages to the ghosts of our Fenian dead; of great General Post Office uprisings, large and small; and, of the continuing struggle in the North. Yes, as that soldier’s plaque symbolizes, an Irish presence will never completely leave the old town, nor will the willingness to sacrifice.
Oh, yes, that Frank O’Brien for whom the square in front of the old school was named , would have been my grand uncle, the brother of my Grandmother Radley (nee O’Brien) from over on Young Street across from the Welcome Young Field.
Monday, March 15, 2010
*All Out On March 20th To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars -A Guest Commentary From "The National Assembly To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars
Click on the title to link to the "National Assembly To End The Afghan And Iraq Wars" Website.
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on March 20th for this event. Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to start building the long-delayed needed divorce and consequent free ride that one Barack Obama has received- for no known rational reason. We knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were, and rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear. Obama- Troops Out Now!
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on March 20th for this event. Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to start building the long-delayed needed divorce and consequent free ride that one Barack Obama has received- for no known rational reason. We knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were, and rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear. Obama- Troops Out Now!
*From The "UJP" Website- For Those Who Can't Make It To Washington March 20th- A Local Boston Action
Click on the headline to link to the "UJP-Boston" Website for an announcement for a local Boston anti-war action for those who cannot go to Washington.
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on March 20th for this event. Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear. Obama- Troops Out Now!
*****
Obviously some people will not be able to go to Washington on March 20th for health, economic, family, or other reasons so here is a local opportunity to show your opposition to Obama's wars. Same struggle, same fight! Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Iraq and Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
I have already argued in previous entries about the importance of massing in Washington, D.C. on March 20th for this event. Bring your own slogans and banners, but be there to start building the long-delayed and needed divorce from one Barack Obama who has been given a pass on war issues- for no known rational reason. We knew, because he made it clear from the beginning what his priorities were in 2008, and he rubbed our noses in it last year. Now we need to get our priorities clear. Obama- Troops Out Now!
*****
Obviously some people will not be able to go to Washington on March 20th for health, economic, family, or other reasons so here is a local opportunity to show your opposition to Obama's wars. Same struggle, same fight! Obama-Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Iraq and Afghanistan!
*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Alexandra Kollontai
Click on title to link to the "Alexandra Kollontai Internet Archives" for the works of this 1917 Bolshevik secondary revolutionary leader Alexandra Kollantai, and later Workers Opposition leader.
March Is Women's History Month
Markin comment:
No revolution can succeed without men and women of Kollontai's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, is even truer today.
March Is Women's History Month
Markin comment:
No revolution can succeed without men and women of Kollontai's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, is even truer today.
*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Inessa Armand
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the 1917 Bolshevik secondary revolutionary leader Inessa Armand.
March Is Women's History Month
Markin comment:
No revolution can succeed without men and women of Armand's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, is even truer today.
March Is Women's History Month
Markin comment:
No revolution can succeed without men and women of Armand's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, is even truer today.
*From The Pen Of Communist International Leader Karl Radek - On "Larissa Reisner" (An Early Bolshevik Leader)
Click on title to link to the "Karl Radek Internet Archive" for other of the works of this important secondary Bolshevik leader and high Communist International official.
Markin comment:
No revolution can succeed without men and women of Radek's caliber. Although Radek had his ups and downs in his later days as a Comintern official, he stood tall in October. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, is even truer today.
Markin comment:
No revolution can succeed without men and women of Radek's caliber. Although Radek had his ups and downs in his later days as a Comintern official, he stood tall in October. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, is even truer today.
*The Latest From The "Socialist Appeal" Website
Click on the title to link to the "Socialist Appeal" Website.
Markin comment:
The question of a Fifth International proposed by Hugo Chavez and seconded, apparently by the IMT, will require a longer answer. But for this minute I wonder, and I wonder seriously why so-called orthodox Marixts would be heeding a call from a, what in the final analysis is just another Latin American caudillo with some oil money. We have heard about the epicenter of world revolution being in Latin America and other "Third World" spots before, if I recall, with the guerilla foci, and the results were not pretty whatever revolutionary impulses drove that movement.
I might add that Lenin, Trotsky and the other leaders of the Communist International were very precise (remember the 21 conditions) about who they were going to let in the Communist International. "Hermano" Chavez would not even get in the side door in those days. More, much more on this later, especially on Alan Woods' rationale for dumping the historic work of Leon Trotsky that he allegedly stands on just to be a "cheerleader" for some quasi-socialist, and in this I am giving Chavez much the best of it. U.S. Hands Off Venezuela!
Markin comment:
The question of a Fifth International proposed by Hugo Chavez and seconded, apparently by the IMT, will require a longer answer. But for this minute I wonder, and I wonder seriously why so-called orthodox Marixts would be heeding a call from a, what in the final analysis is just another Latin American caudillo with some oil money. We have heard about the epicenter of world revolution being in Latin America and other "Third World" spots before, if I recall, with the guerilla foci, and the results were not pretty whatever revolutionary impulses drove that movement.
I might add that Lenin, Trotsky and the other leaders of the Communist International were very precise (remember the 21 conditions) about who they were going to let in the Communist International. "Hermano" Chavez would not even get in the side door in those days. More, much more on this later, especially on Alan Woods' rationale for dumping the historic work of Leon Trotsky that he allegedly stands on just to be a "cheerleader" for some quasi-socialist, and in this I am giving Chavez much the best of it. U.S. Hands Off Venezuela!
Sunday, March 14, 2010
*From The Pen Of James P. Cannon- "How To Organize A Study Class"
Click on the headline to link to a "James P. Cannon Internet Archive" online copy of his 1924 "How To Organize A Study Class".
Markin comment:
In light of the comment I made in one of yesterday's entry about the presentation of the short course on the Russian Bolshevik revolution this article seems timely. This article is from the days when Cannon was a central leader of the American Communist Party in the 1920s, another lean time for communists. A time though, as today, when study is most important to get ready for the days when the class struggle heats up and is less one-sided than it is now.
Markin comment:
In light of the comment I made in one of yesterday's entry about the presentation of the short course on the Russian Bolshevik revolution this article seems timely. This article is from the days when Cannon was a central leader of the American Communist Party in the 1920s, another lean time for communists. A time though, as today, when study is most important to get ready for the days when the class struggle heats up and is less one-sided than it is now.
*You Are Not Paranoid- Big Brother Is Watching- "Wiring Up The Big Brother Machine"- A Guest Book Review
Click on the headline to link to a "Workers Vanguard" article, dated February 26, 2010, concerning a book review of one man's fight against "Big Brother and the Watching Company".
Markin comment:
And all these years I thought I was being paranoid. Whee!
Markin comment:
And all these years I thought I was being paranoid. Whee!
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