Saturday, April 05, 2014

***Where The Dough Is- Steve McQueen’s The Thomas Crown Affair




DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The Thomas Crown Affair, starring Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, 1968

Everybody knows banks, whether in storefronts, in supermarket lobbies, or in marbled edifices, is where the money is. A lot of people also know of the old yegg, Willie Sutton and his famous, or infamous, remark when asked why he robbed banks and noted sardonically that was where the money was. The question posed by the film under review, The Thomas Crown Affair, is why was a guy who has plenty of money (some four million dollars, yes, pocket change today, hardly walking around money, but a substantial amount in 1967) winding up as the prime suspect in a major Boston bank robbery. Strangely enough Thomas Crown’s answer is very much like Brother Sutton’s-that is where the dough is.    

Here is the skinny. Wealthy Boston socialite, divorced socialite and that is important since he is a little skirt-crazy, Thomas Crown (played by the blue-eyed devil Steve McQueen) is bored/intrigued/into risk-taking on a big scale who plans capers, you know, bank heists, basically for the sake of doing them. And mainly he gets away with them because he hires guys who don’t know each other or him on a contract basis and so he is somewhat immune to being ratted on by snitches and guys turning over on him when the heat is on. This is the M.O. (modus operandi, okay) that gets him big dough in a downtown Boston heist as the film opens. And finding out who and what this non-criminal criminal is drives the action in this film.       

Naturally the Boston cops are clueless about how to handle such a case where it appears that the job was done seamlessly, there was no word on the street about the dough, the multitude of witnesses, bank employees and clients had a multitude of stories and they have to go outside the doughnut shop where they usually hang out. Enter one drop-dead female insurance investigator (played by Faye Dunaway) who has a serious reputation of getting the hard bank heists cases solved for a serious cut of the recovery money. So Faye goes to work, gets very close, too close in the end, to this wizard socialite Crown who has a serious case of getting his kicks by high risk actions. Oh yeah, but wait a minute we have Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in this one, two iconic beautiful people from the 1960s so you know that, well, sex has to show up or this might as well have been a film noir, or something. So sure they ruffle up some sheets, make that plenty of sheets, and Faye gets a little religion about Steve. Or maybe she was just like a lot of people wondering why a guy with dough was robbing for dough like she had never heard of Brother Willie Hutton.

[Note: This film was re-made in the 1990s with Pierce Brosnan in the title role. One big different between the two was the speed of the action in the latter film was much faster than the laconic unfolding of the scenes in this film. Even I found this earlier film rather too slow which may reflect the change-up in the demand for more action per minute in action films these latter days.]
During The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War –In Honor Of The Union Side The Third Hard Year Of War-Wilhelm Sorge’s War-Take Two

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 
I would not expect any average American citizen today to be familiar with the positions of the communist intellectuals and international working-class party organizers (First International) Karl Mark and Friedrich Engels on the events of the American Civil War. There is only so much one can expect of people to know off the tip of the tongue what for several generations now has been ancient history.  I am, however, always amazed when I run into some younger leftists and socialists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. I, in the past, have placed a number of the Marx-Engels newspaper articles from the period in this space to show the avidity of their interest and partisanship in order to refresh some memoires and enlighten others. As is my wont I like to supplement such efforts with little sketches to illustrate points that I try to make and do so below.   

Given that Marx and Engels have always been identified with a strong anti-capitalist bias for the unknowing it may seem counter-intuitive that the two men would have such a positive position on events that had as one of its outcomes an expanding unified American capitalist state. A unified capitalist state which ultimately led the vanguard actions against the followers of Marx and Engels in the 20th century in such places as Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam. The pair were however driven in their views on revolutionary politics by a theory of historical materialism which placed support of any particular actions in the context of whether they drove the class struggle toward human emancipation forward. So while the task of a unified capitalist state was supportable on historical grounds in the United States of the 1860s alone (as was their qualified support German unification later in the decade) the key to their support was the overthrow of the more backward slave labor system in one part of the country (aided by those who thrived on the results of that system like the Cotton Whigs in the North) in order to allow the new then progressive capitalist system to thrive.       
 

In the age of advanced imperialist society today, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we find that we are, unlike Marx and Engels, almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And we are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in the eyes of our forebears, and our eyes.


Furthermore few know about the fact that the small number of Marxist supporters in the United States during that Civil period, and the greater German immigrant communities here that where spawned when radicals were force to flee Europe with the failure of the German revolutions of 1848 were mostly fervent supporters of the Union side in the conflict. Some of them called the “Red Republicans” and “Red 48ers” formed an early experienced military cadre in the then forming Union armies. Below is a short sketch drawn on the effect that these hardened foreign –born abolitionists had on some of the raw recruits who showed up in their regiments and brigades during those hard four years of fighting, the third year of which we are commemorating this month of April.      
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Wilhelm Sorge, as he looked around his town, looked as he saw the dirty dusty streets of Boston clogged and in some disrepair after all the endless regiments raised helped create this condition after almost a year of war, the Brothers’ war, the war against the departed brethren down south who had gone on to form their own nation, was growing pensive. He thought back to how his father, Friedrich, the owner of small print shop on Milk Street, a former barricade fighter in his native Cologne back in ’48 (as his father would say), a known “high abolitionist” around town had played his part in raising that dust before him with his endless tirades about the necessity of creating regiments in preparation for the civil war that he knew in his bones was coming. They had, father and son, argued constantly for a time about Wilhelm’s enlisting in the fight, in Massa Lincoln’s fight Wilhelm called it. That argument had died down if it had not been extinguished when both men had seen that the other’s arguments held no sway. Wilhelm flat out saw no reason to fight, saw benefits to his career such as it was by keeping out of the fight and decidedly did not want to lift a finger to free the sweaty turgid slaves. Wilhelm was by no measure his father’s son on that score.      

 

As Wilhelm thought about the present political situation think amid the dust clouds being raised as he walked along Tremont Street he said to himself that no, he had decidedly not changed his mind over that time, over the year since he and his father had first quarreled, and subsequently, every time, every damn time his father, the “high abolitionist” Friedrich Sorge held forth on his favorite subject-freeing the “nigras.” Or rather his favorite subject of having his eldest son, one Wilhelm Sorge, him, put on the blue uniform of the Union side and go down south, south somewhere and fill in a spot in the depleting armies of the North. There were plenty of farm boys and mill hands eager to lay down their heads for that cause.

 

No, as well, he had not changed his mind one bit about how his employers had been “robbed” since the military actions had started the previous year and the flow of cotton had been so diminished that he was only working his clerks’ job at the Sanborne and Sons warehouses three days a week. The damn blockade and the wimpy position of the British ahd wreaked havoc on supplies coming through. He was supplementing that meager wage working for Jim Smith, the former neighborhood blacksmith now turned small arms manufacturer, who was always in need of a smart clerk who also had a strong pair of hands and back to work on the artillery carriages that he produced on order from Massachusetts Legislature for the Army of the Potomac. And, no, one thousand times no he had not changed his mind about the nigra stinks that had bothered him when they had worked at the Sanborne warehouses in the days before secession when those locations were filled with beautiful southern cotton that needed to be hauled on or off waiting ships dockside.

 

What was making Wilhelm pensive though, making him think every once in a while a vagrant thought about joining up in the war effort was that all his friends, his old Klimt school friends and Goethe Club friends had enlisted in one of the waves of the various deployments of Massachusetts-raised regiments. Those friends had baited him about his manhood even as he offered to take them on one by one or collectively if they so desired to see who the real man was. Moreover he grew pensive, and somewhat sheepish, every time he passed by the German graveyard on Milk Street where he could see fresh flowers sticking out of urns in front of newly buried soldier boys. Soldier boys like Werther Schmidt, his school friend, whose mother was daily prostrate before his fresh-flowered grave. He would cross the street when he spied her all in black coming up the other way for he could not stand the look she would give him when she passed. Gave him like he, not some Johnny Reb or more likely some disease, had been the cause of poor Werther’s death.

 

But who was he kidding. Lately Wilhelm Sorge had not become pensive as a result of pressure from his father and friends, nor about his reduced circumstances, nor about Negro stinks but about what Miss Lucinda Mason thought of him. Miss Lucinda Mason whose father, like his, was a “high abolitionist” and was instrumental in assisting in forming the newly authorized regiments in Massachusetts. And while her father was mildly tolerate of Wilhelm’s slackness about serving his country Lucinda, while smitten by her German young man met at a dance to raise funds for the Union efforts of all places, continually harped on the need for him to “enter service” as she called it. And of course if the rosy-cheeked, wasp-waisted Miss Lucinda Mason harped on an issue then that indeed would make a man pensive. Yes, it was like that with young Wilhelm about Miss Lucinda Mason.


From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-The Kapp Putsch and the Working Class
 


Markin comment:

The Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia in October 1917 was consciously predicated by the leadership (Lenin, Trotsky, etc., some others pushing forward, some being dragged along in the fight) on the premise that the Russian revolution would not, could not, stand alone for long either against the backlash onslaught of world imperialism, or on a more positive note, once the tasks of socialist construction reached a certain point. The purpose of the Communist International, founded in 1919 in the heat of the Russian civil war, by the Bolsheviks and their international supporters was the organizational expression of that above-mentioned premise. To work through and learn the lessons of the Bolshevik experience and to go all out to defeat world imperialism and create a new social order. I might add that political, social, and military conditions in war-weary World War I Europe in 1918 and 1919 made those premises something more than far-fetched utopian hopes. And central to those hopes were events in Germany.

If the original premise of Marxism (espoused specifically by both Marx and Engels in their respective political lifetimes) that the revolution would break out in an advanced capitalist European country then Germany, with its high level of capitalist development and socialist traditions and organizations, was the logical place to assume such an event would occur. And that premise, despite the betrayals of the German social democratic leadership in the war period, animated Lenin and Trotsky in their planning for the extension of socialist revolution westward. The rise of a “peace” socialist wing (the Independent Socialists) during the late phases of the war, the events around the smashing of the German monarchy and the creation of a socialist-led bourgeois republic in the wake of military defeat, the ill-starred Spartacist uprising, the working class response to the later Kopp Putsch, the also-ill-starred March Action of 1921, and the possibilities of a revolution in 1923 in reaction to the French exactions in the Ruhr and other events that year all made for a period of realistic revolutionary upheaval that was fertile ground for revolutionaries. And revolutionary hopes.

As we are painfully, no, very painfully, aware no revolution occurred in that period and that hard fact had profound repercussions on the then isolated Russian experiment. That hard fact has also left a somewhat unresolved question among communist militants, thoughtful communist militants anyway, about the prospects then. The question boils down to, as foreshadowed in the headline to this entry, whether there was any basis for the notion that a revolution could have occurred in Germany in 1923. We know what happened because it didn’t, but there are sometimes valuable conditionals pose in absorbing the lessons of history, our communist history. The yes or no of a German revolution is one such question. I have given my opinion previously-if there was no chance of revolution in Germany in 1923, win or lose, then the whole notion of proletarian revolution was just a utopian dream of a bunch of European outcast radicals. The corollary to that proposition is that, in the year 2010, the socialist cooperative notion that we fight for, other than as an abstract intellectual idea, is utopian, and that we are the mad grandchildren (and great-grandchildren) of those mad Europeans. That idea, with world imperialism wreaking havoc and breathing down our backs relentlessly in all quarters makes that corollary ill-founded. So let’s take another look at Germany 1923 from the several perspectives I have gathered in today’s postings.

Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm


Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.

Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.

The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff. 

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Arthur Rosenberg

The Kapp Putsch and the Working Class

On 13 March 1920 a coup organised by General Walther von Lüttwitz, the military commander of Berlin, deposed the coalition government under the Social Democratic Chancellor Gustav Bauer. A new government was announced, with Wolfgang Kapp, a senior state official in East Prussia and the founder of the extreme nationalist Fatherland Party, as Chancellor. The most reactionary elements in the armed forces and the Freikorps, which the Social Democratic leaders had unleashed upon the revolutionary workers of Berlin in 1919, had turned upon their masters. The national government fled to Stuttgart, but Karl Legien, the leader of the Socialist trade union federation, who had once described Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of the revolutionary mass strike as ‘mass nonsense’, called a general strike, which paralysed the country, and led to the rapid collapse of Kapp’s government.
When Legien issued the strike call, the Central Committee of the German Communist Party (KPD) considered that the German workers were too apathetic to respond, and declared that the KPD was not prepared to take part in a fight between two reactionary forces. Paul Levi, who was in prison, immediately protested against this imbecility, which was a forerunner of many to come, such as the theory of ‘Social Fascism’, which stated that there was no difference between Fascism and Social Democracy, and which played a major part in facilitating Hitler’s victory in 1933. The tremendous response of the working class to Legien’s call led the KPD’s leaders to reverse their attitude on the next day, and to support the strike.
We reproduce below some extracts translated by Mike Jones from Arthur Rosenberg’s classic account of the Weimar Republic, Geschichte der Weimarer Republik (EVA, Frankfurt am Main 1961). An English edition of this book was published under the title of A History of the German Republic (Methuen, London 1936), but has not been republished since. These extracts mainly deal with the workers’ response to the putsch, and the struggle to form a government after its defeat, as it has been argued that in 1920 the German revolutionary left was presented with an opportunity which it wasted. A general description of the Kapp Putsch can be found in Chris Harman’s The Lost Revolution (Bookmarks, London 1982, pp. 157–91).



IN the industrial region of Rhineland-Westphalia, the Kapp Putsch led to a great working-class uprising. Regardless of their party affiliation, the workers rose up, seized weapons, and attacked and drove away the pro-Kapp Freikorps. In Central Germany, above all in the region from Halle to Leipzig, and in Thuringia as well, open fighting broke out between armed workers and pro-Kapp troops. Kapp could not count on any real support west of the Elbe or in Southern Germany, and even the new Bavarian government pledged its loyalty to the Reich constitution, and avoided being associated with the Freikorps. [1]
In terms of power politics, Germany during the Kapp days was divided into five parts. Firstly, there were the lands to the east of the Elbe, in which Kapp mainly had the upper hand, although the general strike presented his administration with great difficulties. Secondly, there was the region in which the old government was still recognised; above all in Württemberg, Baden, Hesse and the districts bordering the North Sea. Thirdly, there was the region of Rhineland and Westphalia, where the working-class uprising was victorious. Fourthly, there was Bavaria, with its peculiar development. Fifthly, there were the Central German states where neither of the warring sides had a clear dominance, but where pro-Kapp troops, revolutionary workers, and supporters of the legitimate republican government struggled for power.
The ascendancy which the army and the middle classes had gradually regained in the Weimar Republic was seriously endangered by Kapp’s premature rebellion, as the middle classes and the troops were divided over their attitude to it, and were therefore to some extent paralysed. On the other hand, the working class surged forward with a will to struggle and a desire for unity. The working-class supporters of the Majority Socialists were now demanding the removal of Noske and Heine, and for an alliance with the USPD. [2] Even the Christian workers were prepared to join a bloc in defence of democracy and against the old ruling class. The forces that opposed Kapp were for the most part not the supporters of the Weimar Republic and the policies of Noske and Ebert [3], but the advocates of working-class action which intended to reverse the ebb of the revolution, and to continue the work of 9 November. [4]
It took only four days to finish off Kapp’s government. Receiving unfavourable reports from most parts of Germany, Kapp fell into despair, and he resigned on 17 March. The question then arose: who was to succeed him? The majority of the working class did not want a return to the discredited Weimar system, which had allowed the Kapp Putsch to occur, but desired the creation of a political system in which the Socialist workers would have a decisive voice. It was, after all, the trade unions, with the Majority Socialist Legien [5] at their head, which recognised the necessity of such a step. Legien wished to replace the Weimar coalition government with a workers’ government based upon the SPD, the USPD and the Socialist and Christian trade unions. Noske’s tendency in the SPD had been so weakened by the recent events that it would have been incapable of putting up any resistance to such a development. The army was so disintegrated by the putsch, especially since its collapse, that it would have been incapable of taking action against a workers’ government.
Such a workers’ government, which was at this point an absolute possibility, could well have been able genuinely to democratise the German army and state administration, and thus have stemmed the retrogressive development of the revolution. The failure to establish a workers’ government was not so much the fault of the SPD, but was largely due to the doctrinaire rigidity of the left-wing of the USPD, and above all of Däumig [6], the most influential member in its Berlin organisation. As the USPD refused to participate, the SPD had no other choice but to create another coalition in the old manner … [7] Since, however, the new coalition was not backed by any new forces, everything remained much the same as before. The working class had once more demonstrated in March that it could conduct a united armed struggle. But it was not capable of politically rebuilding Germany, and the Kapp Putsch effectively resulted in the defeat, not of the army, but of the working class. [8]

At a meeting of the Berlin Industrial Councils on 23 March 1920, Däumig said in respect of a workers’ government:
During the last few days, Legien has made an attempt to dispose of the Bauer-Noske government, but, it must be said, only in respect of the personalities. The principles of bourgeois democracy and trade unionism were not attacked at all. Legien, together with the Free Trade Union Association and the German Union of Civil Servants, also contacted the USPD in order to discuss the programme he had formulated. [9] For its part, the USPD advanced a series of far-reaching demands, and declared that it was opposed to any cooperation with the compromised right-wing Socialist Party. After that, Legien went to see the coalition parties.
In the course of his speech, Däumig stated that the idea of a Socialist workers’ government had been exhausted.
After Däumig, Pieck [10] spoke for the Communist Party. Amongst other things, he said:
The present situation is not ripe enough for a council republic, but it is for a purely workers’ government. As revolutionary workers, a purely workers’ government is exceedingly desirable. But it can only be a transitional phenomenon … The USPD has rejected the workers’ government, and has thereby failed to protect the interests of the working class at a politically advantageous moment.
The report notes at this point: ‘Violent opposition and applause.’
In the journal Die Kommunistische Internationale (no. 10/1920), a well-informed KPD member, under the name of ‘Spartakus’, has provided a description of the Kapp Putsch. Among other things, he writes:
The situation in Berlin was such that, after the six-day general strike, the Kapp government was totally bankrupt, as Kapp himself resigned, and the trade union federation under the leadership of Legien was forced under the pressure of its members to place demands upon the Ebert government, which caused the fragmentation of the bourgeois-Socialist coalition. The possibility existed of forcing from the Ebert-Bauer government, through the continuation of the general strike, the formation of a workers’ government with the expulsion of the bourgeois parties. Legien negotiated with the USPD, in order to induce it to enter the government. The right wing of the USPD was inclined to agree with this suggestion. The attitude of the left wing depended upon the attitude that the KPD would adopt in the event of Legien’s proposal being accepted. As the left wing exercised a great influence within the party, whether or not Hilferding and Crispien [11] would accept Legien’s proposal depended upon Däumig. When our representatives amongst the strike leaders [of the general strike in Berlin — AR] unofficially learnt of this situation, they said that a workers’ government that excluded the bourgeois parties would naturally be preferable to a return to the old bourgeois-Socialist coalition, which, whatever the changes in personalities, would be the same as the Noske regime.
Following from this, the KPD’s Central Committee decided on 21 March that it would constitute a loyal opposition to a future workers’ government based upon the SPD and USPD. That meant that the KPD would not make preparations for an armed revolt, but would confine itself to peaceful propaganda. At this time, the SPD under Legien’s leadership, the right wing of the USPD, and even the KPD, were in favour of a workers’ government. The plan was wrecked by the opposition of the left wing of the USPD led by Däumig. This explains Pieck’s attack on Däumig at the Berlin meeting of the Industrial Councils.
The official biography of Legien — Leipart’s Karl Legien: ein Gedenkbuch (Berlin 1929) — does speak of Legien’s role in the Kapp Putsch, but unfortunately is silent upon the important question of the workers’ government. [12]

Notes

1. The Kapp Putsch was paralleled in Bavaria, and a military revolt forced the Social Democratic government to resign. Nonetheless, the incoming administration did not side with Kapp.
2. The term Majority Socialists means the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Gustav Noske (1868–1946) was a right-wing leader of the SPD, who as Minister of Defence ordered the Freikorps to crush the Spartakist rebellion in 1919. Wolfgang Heine (1861–?) was an SPD leader and the Minister of the Interior in the Prussian government during 1919–20. The USPD was the Independent Social Democratic Party, a left-wing split in April 1917 from the SPD. It split in 1920 (cf. n56, Thomas article), with a majority joining the KPD, and a rump returning to the SPD in 1922.
3. Friedrich Ebert (1871–1925) was a right-wing leader of the SPD, and the first President of the Weimar Republic.
4. A reference to the revolution of 9 November 1918, which overthrew Imperial rule in Germany.
5. Karl Legien (1861–1920) led the ADGB, the union federation allied with the SPD. Up until the Kapp Putsch, he had customarily stood on the right wing of the SPD, supporting the First World War, and opposing the revolutionary upheavals of 1918–19.
6. For Ernst Däumig, cf. n67, Thomas article.
7. Noske and Heine retired from their posts, as did the Chancellor, Gustav Bauer (1870–1944), a leading Socialist trade union leader. The new coalition was led by SPD member Hermann Müller (1876–1931), and it lasted until May 1921.
8. The above paragraphs are from pages 96–98 of the German edition, and correspond to pages 137–39 of the English edition.
9. This was a nine-point programme which called for the democratisation of the state apparatus, the dismissal and disarming of reactionary elements, improved social legislation, the socialisation of mining and power production, and the dismissal of Noske and Heine.
10. Wilhelm Pieck (1876–1960) was a minor official in the SPD, but stood on the left of the party. He was a founding member of the Spartakusbund and the KPD, and was subsequently a loyal Stalinist, becoming the President of the DDR.
11. Rudolf Hilferding (1877–1942) was one of German Socialism’s foremost economic theorists. He joined the USPD, and returned with the right-wing minority to the SPD in 1922. Exiled after Hitler’s victory, he was arrested by the Gestapo in Paris in 1940. Artur Crispien (1875–1936) was an official in the SPD, joined the USPD, and returned to the SPD in 1922.
12. The above paragraphs are from pages 220–21 of the German edition, and correspond to pages 333–35 of the English edition.

 

From The Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty Website




Click below to link to the Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty website.

http://www.mcadp.org/
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Markin comment:
I have been an opponent of the death penalty for as long as I have been a political person, a long time. While I do not generally agree with the thrust of the Massachusetts Citizens Against The Death Penalty Committee’s strategy for eliminating the death penalty nation-wide almost solely through legislative and judicial means (think about the 2011 Troy Davis case down in Georgia for a practical example of the limits of that strategy) I am always willing to work with them when specific situations come up. In any case they have a long pedigree extending, one way or the other, back to Sacco and Vanzetti and that is always important to remember whatever our political differences.

From the Archives of Marxism-Soviet Power and the Liberation of Ukraine


Workers Vanguard No. 1042
 




21 March 2014
 
From the Archives of Marxism-Soviet Power and the Liberation of Ukraine
 

Following the October 1917 proletarian seizure of power, the fledgling Soviet workers state in Russia sought to advance the revolutionary struggles of the exploited and oppressed across the former tsarist empire and beyond. One such example is given by Mikhail Pavlovich’s report on the national and colonial questions at the First Congress of the Peoples of the East, held in September 1920 in Baku, capital of Soviet Azerbaijan. It is published in To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920—First Congress of the Peoples of the East (Pathfinder, 1993).
The excerpt of the report printed below focuses on Ukraine, a major arena at the time in the bloody civil war pitting the Red Army against counterrevolutionary forces backed by the imperialist powers. In that country, the class conflict was heavily overlaid with national antagonisms, especially between east and west, posing special tasks for the Bolsheviks. The vast bulk of ethnic Ukrainians were peasants or rural villagers. The peasantry in the west of the country largely toiled under a Polish landed aristocracy, with Jewish merchants serving as middlemen and moneylenders, while in the east the tsars had subjected the population to forced Russification. As a result, rural toilers were saturated with strong anti-Polish and anti-Semitic as well as anti-Russian prejudices. Meanwhile, the core of Bolshevik support in Ukraine was the heavily Russian industrial proletariat and large urban Jewish communities in the east.
Pavlovich contrasts the suffering of the Ukrainian peasantry under the likes of imperialist-backed nationalist leader Simon Petlyura, notorious for his massacre of Jews in the west, to the liberating beacon of Soviet Russia, which championed full and equal rights for all nations within the former tsarist “prison house of peoples.” After the October Revolution, many governments were formed in Ukraine, with Petlyura heading up a series of capitalist “Ukrainian People’s Republics.” The first of these regimes was overthrown with the assistance of the Red Army, bringing to power a Ukrainian Soviet government in January 1918. It lasted until March when German occupying forces swept across the country and installed a puppet government under the reactionary hetman [Cossack military commander] Skoropadsky. Subsequently, in the lead-up to the 1920 Soviet-Polish war, Petlyura made an anti-Soviet bloc with Polish nationalist Jozef Pilsudski, ceding Ukraine’s western territories to Poland.
The future envisioned by Pavlovich, one freed of backwardness and national oppression, was perverted by the Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet workers state. Having wrested political control from the proletariat in 1923-24, Stalin and his successors dumped the Bolsheviks’ internationalist traditions and whipped up Great Russian chauvinism as an ideological glue for their brittle rule. Stalin’s many crimes included dissolving the Crimean Autonomous Republic and the Chechen and Ingush autonomous regions. The entire Chechen and Ingush populations, along with Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans, were deported to Central Asia during World War II.
Nonetheless, the Soviet Union remained a workers state embodying the historic gains of the October Revolution, namely the planned economy and collectivized property, which made possible an allocation of resources that brought about a relative equality between the various republics making up the USSR, easing historic national tensions. One need only look at the economic and cultural development and the great strides in education and the advancement of women that occurred in Soviet Central Asia, which prior to 1917 was a precapitalist backwater. The final undoing of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 and the creation of distinct capitalist states unleashed nationalist hatreds and rivalries and sparked bloody communal slaughter, such as between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Putin’s murderous colonial occupation of Chechnya was an expression of the revival of the Great Russian oppressor.
Before his death in 1927, Pavlovich himself played a role in the Bolshevik effort to modernize Soviet Central Asia. A former Menshevik who had joined the Bolshevik Party at the time of the October Revolution, he coined the slogan “To Moscow, not Mecca!” as part of his focus on winning the Muslim world to embrace Soviet power in the struggle against colonial rule. In his Baku report, Pavlovich wrongly refers to tsarist Russia as a “colony.” In fact, Russia fell somewhere halfway between the great imperialist powers and the colonies. Thus, as Trotsky put it in The History of the Russian Revolution, Russia paid “for her right to be an ally of advanced countries, to import capital and pay interest on it—that is, essentially, for her right to be a privileged colony of her allies—but at the same time for her right to oppress and rob Turkey, Persia, Galicia, and in general the countries weaker and more backward than herself” (1932).
*   *   *
This colonial question, the question of the partition of Asia, is the mainspring of the bitter war that the capitalist world has been waging against Soviet Russia since the first day of the October revolution. Russia alarms the countries of the capitalist world as a beacon, a guiding star, summoning all people of courage to the struggle for a new order. It alarms them because of its many millions of inhabitants and its extraordinary wealth in natural endowments and sources of raw material and because it is no longer content to remain, as under the tsars, a semicolony of Anglo-Franco-Belgian capital. Even beyond this, Soviet Russia also inspires fear and dread in world imperialism as a colony that has freed itself from foreign oppression. By its very example it summons the enslaved East to fight for freedom. Its whole internal policy toward the backward nations contributes to the awakening and development in the East of a striving for national self-determination. And not only this, for it also renders real aid to the backward and oppressed peoples living outside the borders of Russia in their struggle against rapacious international capital (Applause)....
Who cannot see the difference between our workers’ and peasants’ socialist federation and the brigand capitalist empires? The “free constitution” of Britain holds the 300 million people of India, who have for so long groaned under the British yoke, in harsh slavery, strangling them. Republican France cruelly suppresses the slightest manifestation of desire for freedom and national self-determination in Morocco, in Algeria, in Indochina, in all its colonies. The great transatlantic republic, the United States, still refuses to recognize the independence of Cuba and the Philippines, for whose supposed liberation the war against Spain was launched in 1898.
At the same time the government and the worker and peasant masses of the Russian Socialist Federated Republic joyfully greet the formation of the autonomous Bashkir Soviet Republic, the autonomous Tatar Socialist Soviet Republic, and so forth, on the borders of the former tsarist empire—where, as in all capitalist countries, every striving for national self-determination was stifled and suppressed.
In all capitalist states without exception, both large and small—in France, Britain, Japan, America, Holland, Belgium, Poland and the rest—we see the use of crude violence against national minorities. Sometimes we see the transformation into nations of slaves and serfs of huge communities of hundreds of millions of people who have fallen under the rule of a more organized, more “civilized” minority, as in the case of the enslaved 300 millions of India, ruled by capitalist Britain, armed to the teeth.
At one pole, in the capitalist countries, there is savage suppression of national minorities—and sometimes of national majorities too, where a national minority holds the reins of government. At the other pole, in the republic of soviets, the most attentive, most fraternal feeling and attitude is shown toward not only more or less substantial national entities but even the very smallest of them.
Under the first Ukrainian People’s Republic it was the Austro-German imperialists and General Skoropadsky who ruled in Ukraine. That was the time when, by agreement with the Germans and Austrians, Petlyura’s Ukraine was obliged to supply Austria and Germany with 75 million poods [1.3 million tons] of grain, 11 million poods [200,000 tons] of cattle on the hoof, and so on.
Under the second Ukrainian People’s Republic, Ukraine was a colony of French capital, in line with the agreement that the mercenary Petlyura signed in Odessa with the French general D’Anselme. By this agreement nearly all Ukraine’s railways and financial and military enterprises were handed over to the French stockbrokers.
The third Ukrainian People’s Republic, promised by the same Petlyura, was merely a screen for the establishment in Ukraine of the hated evil rule of the Polish gentry.
The entire history of Ukraine cries out against this fresh act of betrayal by Petlyura. That history is one of heroic exploits and great defeats of the Ukrainian peasantry, the Ukrainian “cattle” in a struggle many centuries long against the Polish gentry. The whole history of the Poland of the gentry, on the other hand, is but a long series of wars against Ukraine aimed at enslaving it. Ukrainian literature—the immortal works of Shevchenko, Ukrainian folk-poetry—reflect this page of the long-suffering history of the Ukrainian people, whose entire development proceeded through bloody struggle against the Polish lords. All the cossack revolts, the whole struggle of the Zaporozhian Camp, of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, were fundamentally a fight of the Ukrainian peasants against the yoke of the Polish landowners, against the Polonizers, the enemies of the Ukrainian national language and Ukrainian culture.
And Petlyura, condottiere and hired bandit, offered his bloody services to anyone who would agree to pay him well. He wanted to surrender the Ukrainian land, the Ukrainian language, all Ukrainian culture, to the Polish gendarme, to the insolent Polonizers. They closed Belorussian schools, for example, and proclaimed Polish the state language even in the regions where Poles made up only an insignificant percentage of the population. The Polish gentry, the Polish Kulturträger, are already trying to Polonize Belorussia [Belarus], Volhynia, and Podolia, and intend to do the same in all the regions of Ukraine that they manage to conquer.
Tens of hundreds of honest Ukrainians who sincerely desire the national and cultural rebirth of Ukraine, including such pillars of Ukrainian national public opinion as Hrushevsky and Vinnichenko, have become convinced that only Soviet power can now fulfil to the end the role of liberator of Ukraine from all forms of oppression.
On May 27 the Presiding Committee of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee confirmed the decision to establish an autonomous Tatar Socialist Soviet Republic with the city of Kazan as its center. This news evoked a mighty echo throughout the many-millioned Muslim world, in Persia, Afghanistan, Turkey, and India. In the eyes of our Muslim brothers, the workers and peasants of the East, it was a fresh example of the great principles that underlie the national policy of the Russian federated republic. But this is not to the liking of the capitalist governments.
Let two or three decades pass. Let popular education spread in the republic of soviets, including the opening of thousands and thousands of schools, evening courses, academies, etc., including the complete ending of illiteracy in Russia and Ukraine. Alongside the wonderful old monuments of Russian and Ukrainian literature, such as the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Shevchenko, we will see great new works appear, composed by brilliant new poets, men of letters, etc., arising from the ranks of the workers and peasants. Tatar, Bashkir, Kirghiz, and other poetry and literature, only now awakening to life, will flourish luxuriantly. All the separate streams, tributaries, rivulets, and great rivers will intermingle in a fantastic and harmonious way, merging and feeding with their living waters one common international ocean of the poetry and learning of toiling humanity, freed for the first time from national and class oppression. This will shine with such unprecedented, incomparable beauty as neither classical Greece, with all its amazing works of art, nor the civilization of the medieval and capitalist epochs, with all their blazing galaxy of immortal poets, artists, thinkers, and scholars, could give the world.
Yes, all this will be! But before we reach this wished-for future, much blood will flow. Many thousands of fighters for the new order will fall beneath the enemy’s blows upon the battlefields. Many tens and hundreds of thousands of women and children will die from hunger and cold in their homes or beside ruined auls [villages]. All this is inevitable, alas, and it is not of our making. It results from the criminal will of the capitalists, who do not want to give up their profits. But all fighters for a better future have to suffer in this way, and not merely the representatives of the small nations, not only the population of the borderlands. Come and see what is happening in Petrograd, Moscow, Tula, in a great number of our cities. Because of the criminal blockade and the bloody war that was forced upon us, hundreds of thousands of workers in these cities are faint from hunger and cold. Yet they have not lost heart, but march off in their thousands to the front, to lay down their lives for Soviet power (Applause). They know, these heroes, that they will not die in vain, for they give their blood for their comrades’ happiness, for a better future for their children and the generations to come.
The war against Soviet Russia is a war against the East.
In the giant struggle we have begun, the peoples of the East will henceforth be our loyal allies. For a war against Soviet Russia is a war against the revolutionary East, and, vice versa, a war against the East is a war against Soviet Russia (Applause).
From The American Left History Blog Archives(2008) - On American Political Discourse - A MODEST PROPOSAL-RECRUIT, RUN INDEPENDENT LABOR MILITANTS FOR THE 2014 ELECTIONS (Updated)

Markin comment:

In 2007-2008 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not have a bad feel to it. Read on.
************

1. FIGHT FOR THE IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. TROOPS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST NOW (OR BETTER YET, YESTERDAY)! U.S. HANDS OFF THE WORLD! VOTE NO ON THE WAR BUDGET!

The quagmire in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East (Palestine, Iran, Syria you name it is the fault line of American politics today. Every bourgeois politician has to have his or her feet put to the fire on this one. Not on some flimsy ‘sense of the Congress’ softball motion for withdrawal next, year, in two years, or (my favorite) when the situation is stable. Moreover, on the parliamentary level the only real vote that matters is the vote on the war budget. All the rest is fluff. Militants should make a point of trying to enter Congressional contests where there are so-called anti-war Democrats or Republicans (an oxymoron, I believe) running to make that programmatic contrast vivid.

But, one might argue, that would split the ‘progressive’ forces. Grow up, please! That argument has grown stale since it was first put forth in the ‘popular front’ days of the 1930’s. If you want to end the war fight for this no funding position on the war budget. Otherwise the same people (yah, those progressive Democrats) who unanimously voted for the last war budget get a free ride on the cheap. By rights this is our issue. Let us take it back.

2. FIGHT FOR A LIVING WAGE AND WORKING CONDITIONS-UNIVERSAL FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL.

It is a ‘no-brainer’ that no individual, much less families, can live on the minimum wage of $7/hr. (or proposed $10/hr). What planet do these politicians live on? We need an immediate fight for a living wage, full employment and decent working conditions. We need universal free health care for all. End of story. The organized labor movement must get off its knees and fight to organize Wal-Mart and the South. A boycott of Wal-Mart is not enough. A successful organizing drive will, like in the 1930’s, go a long ay to turning the conditions of labor around.

3. FIGHT THE ATTACKS ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT.

Down with the Death Penalty! Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants who make it here! Stop the Deportations! For the Separation of Church and State! Defend abortion rights! Down with ant-same sex marriage legislation! Full public funding of education! Stop the ‘war on drugs’, basically a war on blacks and minority youth-decriminalize drugs! Defend political prisoners! This list of demands hardly exhausts the “culture war” issues we defend. It is hard to believe that in the year 2013 over 200 years after the American Revolution and the French Revolution we are fighting desperately to preserve many of the same principles that militants fought for in those revolutions. But, so be it.

4. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS PARTY.

The Donkeys, Elephants and Greens have had their chance. Now is the time to fight for our own party and for the interests of our own class, the working class. Any campaigns by independent labor militants must highlight this point. And any campaigns can also become the nucleus of a workers party network until we get strong enough to form at least a small party. None of these other parties, and I mean none, are working in the interests of working people and their allies. The following great lesson of politic today must be hammered home. Break with the Democrats, Republicans and Greens!

5. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS AND XYZ GOVERNMENT.
THIS IS THE DEMAND THAT SEPARATES THE MILITANTS FROM THE FAINT-HEARTED REFORMISTS.

We need our own form of government. In the old days the bourgeois republic was a progressive form of government. Not so any more. That form of government ran out of steam about one hundred years ago. We need a Workers Republic. We need a government based on workers councils with a ministry (I do not dare say commissariat in case any stray anarchists are still reading this) responsible to it. Let us face it if we really want to get any of the good and necessary things listed above accomplished we are not going to get it with the current form of government.

Why the XYZ part? What does that mean? No, it is not part of an algebra lesson. What it reflects is that while society is made up mainly of workers (of one sort or another) there are other classes (and parts of classes) in society that we seek as allies and could benefit from a workers government. Examples- small independent contractors, intellectuals, the dwindling number of small farmers, and some professionals like dentists. Yah, I like the idea of a workers and dentists government. The point is you have got to fight for it.

Obviously any campaign based on this program will be an exemplary propaganda campaign for the foreseeable future. But we have to start now. Continuing to support or not challenging the bourgeois parties does us no good now. That is for sure. While bourgeois electoral laws do not favor independent candidacies write-in campaigns are possible. ROLL UP YOUR SHEEVES! GET THOSE PETITIONS SIGNED! PRINT OUT THE LEAFLETS! PAINT THOSE BANNERS! GET READY TO SHAKE HANDS AND KISS BABIES
***********

And from the other side-

Workers Vanguard No. 1042
21 March 2014
 
“Socialism” That Democrats Can Support
Reformists Salivate Over Sawant’s Seattle Election
Since self-described socialist Kshama Sawant won a seat on Seattle’s City Council last November, her electoral success has been widely promoted as a model for the left. Sawant, a member of Socialist Alternative (SAlt) who narrowly defeated Democratic Party incumbent Richard Conlin, ran on a platform of liberal reform—for a $15 hour minimum wage, rent control, ending “corporate welfare” and for a tax on millionaires to fund public transportation, education and “living-wage” union jobs. While applauding other “alternative” candidacies, SAlt crows that Sawant’s win paves “a path for independent politics.” And the International Socialist Organization (ISO) chimed in approvingly: “Given the scale of the crisis that working people face, there is a serious need for some optimism that our side can fight back not just on the picket lines and in the streets, but even at the ballot box” (socialistworker.org, 16 December 2013).
SAlt says it is campaigning to build an “independent, alternative party of workers and young people to fight for the interests of the millions, not the millionaires.” For its supporters, Sawant’s campaign is a challenge to the status quo simply because it falls outside the classic two-party framework. But for authentic socialists, independence is a class question: the working class and the oppressed masses must be politically organized in opposition to the class dictatorship of the capitalists—bourgeois “democracy” is one form of that capitalist dictatorship. The workers, who form the only class in society with the objective interest and social power to overthrow capitalism, must be won to understand that their interests are counterposed to those of the exploiting class.
The history of the United States is replete with bourgeois “third” parties promising to make capitalism work for the little guy—which effectively served to channel discontent back into the Democratic Party. The “independence” of Sawant & Co. is merely another exercise in pressuring the Democratic Party from the “outside” as practiced by the capitalist Green Party and others. In fact, SAlt consistently supported Ralph Nader between 1996 and 2008, first as the Greens’ candidate and even when he ran “independent” campaigns supported by the likes of Ross Perot’s right-wing Reform Party.
Opportunists pretend that their reformist program is some kind of step forward in the direction of revolutionary change. They claim that “we” all want the same things and merely disagree about how to get there. More than a century ago Rosa Luxemburg explained the question of reform or revolution in her classic work of that name. Luxemburg polemicized against leading German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein who gave theoretical expression to the renunciation of revolutionary Marxism in favor of “evolutionary socialism,” premised on gradual reform of bourgeois society. Bernstein pronounced that for him the “movement” was everything, and the final goal of socialism was nothing. Luxemburg’s words have lost none of their sting today:
“People who pronounce themselves in favor of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modification of the old society.”
The reformist left advances the lie that one can pressure the capitalist state machinery to operate in the interests of the workers and oppressed. The only way to achieve real emancipation for the working and oppressed masses is through the expropriation of the capitalists as a class and the establishment of a workers government.
Giving the Democrats a Facelift
Revolutionary Marxists can use the electoral arena as a tactic to propagandize for socialist politics. Unlike executive offices in the capitalist state such as mayor or president, whose purpose is to administer and enforce capitalist rule, standing for election to legislative offices can provide a vehicle for communists to put forward a revolutionary program. When running candidates or offering critical support to other formations, the aim is to dispel illusions among workers, minorities, immigrants and radicalized youth that any lasting improvement of their condition can be achieved under the capitalist profit system. As a revolutionary organization we could not give any support no matter how critical to Sawant, whose campaign obscured the most elementary class line with its populist rhetoric. In his book on communist principles and tactics, “Left-Wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder (1920), Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explained: “It is entirely a matter of knowing how to apply these tactics in order to raise—not lower—the general level of proletarian class-consciousness, revolutionary spirit, and ability to fight and win.”
The “lesser evil” Democratic Party is a capitalist party acting on behalf of the profiteers, bailing out the banks, gouging the poor and spying on the population. For decades, the reformists’ “fight the right” rhetoric has served to hoodwink working people and radical youth into believing that such actions are simply excesses, thereby further chaining them to the same party through the ballot box. The reformist left presents Sawant’s victory as part of a continuum of “progressive” candidates—which tellingly includes Democratic politicians like New York’s new mayor Bill de Blasio, who won votes by promising to end racist stop-and-frisk and claiming sympathy for the “99 percent.”
Enjoying endorsements from several local Democrats and union officials, Sawant’s campaign Web site did not oppose President Obama; it never even mentioned the wars the U.S. is waging overseas much less solidarized with the victims of U.S. imperialism. On the crucial question of racial oppression, so central to the workings of capitalism in this country, Sawant limited her platform to calling for a school curriculum promoting “anti-racism” (along with anti-sexism and gay equality) and calling for a “movement” against police brutality and racial profiling. Sawant calls for an elected civilian review board which is supposed to rein in the police, though experience has shown repeatedly that such bodies are impotent except as a means for letting off a little steam after particularly egregious cases of police violence. As a columnist from the Seattle Times (26 October 2013) rightly noted, Sawant’s slogans were “pretty much indistinguishable” from those of Seattle Democrats, who cater to the city’s liberal petty-bourgeois milieu.
Notably, in both Seattle and Minneapolis (where SAlt’s candidate Ty Moore came close to winning on his platform of “People over Profit”) no Republican was on the City Council ballot. SAlt boasted about this tactic, which allowed them to run against Democratic candidates with no danger of letting any Republicans get elected. Soon after her election Sawant was appointed by Democratic mayor Ed Murray to an advisory committee made up of union officials and business executives in order to adjust the minimum wage.
Sawant described her campaign as a way to “reinvigorate” the populist Occupy movement, and Socialist Action raves that Sawant’s candidacy was the Occupy spirit “now finding expression at the ballot box” (socialistaction.org, 13 February). Not only SAlt but most of the rest of the reformist left enthused over Occupy, whose central conception was that America should reclaim democratic control of the economy from the greedy bankers and corporations by making the existing government represent the “will of the people.” As the 2012 elections approached, Occupy disintegrated as many of its activists predictably occupied...the Democratic Party.
Echoing SAlt’s vision for a crop of new “independent left-wing candidates,” the Freedom Socialist Party intoned: “The time is ripe for anti-capitalist electoral alliances” (socialism.com, December 2013). Meanwhile, Socialist Organizer urged “the labor movement and community organizations to join together to launch independent slates at the local level” (socialistorganizer.org, 6 February). Such coalitions are the way reformist organizations intend to capitalize on what SAlt terms its “historic victory” for socialism.
One example is in heavily unionized, industrial Lorain County, Ohio, where two dozen city councilors organized as the Independent Labor Party—a creation of the county’s Central Labor Council—won the election. The campaign emerged out of disaffection with local Democrats who had carried out a series of attacks on organized labor. Labor Notes (4 December 2013) approvingly quoted one Machinist who admonished: “Running independent wasn’t our first choice, but hopefully this can help bring the Democratic leaders to their senses.”
Meanwhile, in early January, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) created an “Independent Political Organization” with the purpose of supporting “progressive” candidates in the upcoming Illinois elections. According to the ISO, whose supporters are in the CTU leadership, the goal of such a formation is to unite unions with nonprofit, liberal and community organizations to defend public education against recent attacks led by Chicago’s Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel. The same teachers union—which has long worked with Democratic Party-allied organizations—just endorsed a Democrat for state representative in the 26th District of Illinois.
Socialism: What It Is and What It Is Not
Liberal and ostensibly radical commentators have been abuzz with optimism that there is a fresh opening to socialist ideas. They cite a recent poll that a majority of young people aged 18-29 view socialism in a favorable light. Drowning in student debt, pessimistic about employment and deprived of affordable health care, many young people associate “socialism” with government reforms providing some degree of relief—like free medical care or subsidized higher education.
Sawant promoted a social-democratic model of socialism consistent with such beliefs, a type of “capitalism light” modeled after the European welfare states. She commented in a Salon.com interview (18 November 2013) that a country like Finland has “elements of socialism” due to its funding of public education and strong teachers’ unions. On the contrary, socialism is a system where the bourgeoisie, the owners of industry and of finance capital, has been thrown out of power and the workers have become the new ruling class. The working people control the economy and the state, which is an institution enforcing class domination—presently the domination of the capitalist class, under socialism that of the proletariat. Socialist revolution lays the basis for rationally planned economies based on production for need, not profit, and for qualitative development of the productive forces, opening the road to the elimination of scarcity and to the creation of an egalitarian society.
Of course, the idea of “socialized medicine” such as exists in countries like Canada is appealing in comparison to being bled by the American health care giants and drug companies. But one need only look at the Scandinavian countries, traditionally governed by social democrats, that are, alas, still run for the purpose of class exploitation for private profit. No less than here the working people suffer in the grip of capitalist economic contraction: unemployment, bosses relentlessly trying to drive down wages and push the worst-paid workers deeper into poverty, anti-immigrant racism and growth of fascistic parties, etc.
“Sewer Socialism”
At the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, the “sewer socialists” sought to give socialism a “respectable” veneer through local electoral campaigns. Represented notoriously by Victor Berger’s Milwaukee section within the right wing of the Socialist Party (SP), these ministers and professionals elected to office promoted a program of municipal reform—everything from aid to schools and playgrounds to equitable taxation to better sewer systems and the suppression of vice. Nearly indistinguishable from those in the bourgeois Progressive movement, their platforms were about cleaning up capitalism and ushering in an “honest” government.
Of course a century ago, American capitalism was a rising power; at that time it was in the overall best interests of the system for the bourgeoisie to invest more resources in the infrastructure of cities as well as in education and public health measures necessary for a productive working class—and they had the wherewithal to do so.
James P. Cannon was part of the SP’s left wing that fought against the trend of “sewer socialism.” (He later went on to identify with the Russian October Revolution of 1917 and helped to found the American Communist movement and in 1928 the American Trotskyist movement.) In a 1956 article on SP leader Eugene Debs, Cannon motivated the need for a revolutionary party, writing:
“The Socialist Party of Debs’ time has to be judged, not for its failure to lead a revolution, but for its failure to work with that end in view.... Socialism signifies and requires the revolutionary transformation of society; anything less than that is mere bourgeois reform. A socialist party deserves the name only to the extent that it acts as the conscious agency in preparing the workers for the necessary social revolution.”
— Printed in The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962)
In an entirely counterposed spirit, the “independent” campaigns of SAlt and Sawant enthusiasts aim not to mobilize the working class in a struggle for socialism, but to influence politicians to push for reforms that in no way threaten capitalism. Under capitalism, even when reforms are won the bosses always look to take them back at the earliest opportunity. The way decent wages for auto workers, longshoremen, truck drivers and others were won in this country was through bitter strike struggles. Not all strikes were won, but when they were, such victories were not based on the false partnership between labor and capital but on mobilizing the workers in hard class struggle involving the use of militant (often “illegal”) tactics such as mass picketing, plant occupations and sympathy strikes. Racial and ethnic divisions were consciously combated and overcome in the course of common class struggle.
The main obstacle preventing independent class mobilizations in the U.S. has been illusions in the Democrats, pushed centrally by the sellout union leadership. SAlt marches behind the conservative labor tops who throw union money into Democratic politicians’ coffers while lobbying for a “fairer” tax system and a higher minimum wage. While we would be in favor of any law or measure to raise the pathetic minimum wage, hard labor struggles are what can actually force wage increases from employers—which might actually “tax the rich” a little!
Reformists in the Service of Bourgeois “Democracy”
SAlt’s program is in accord with its British parent organization, now named the Socialist Party, the leading group within the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), that spent over four decades of its existence buried deep within the British Labour Party. From 1983 to 1987, its forebears in the Militant tendency held executive power on the Liverpool City Council. In a September article on SAlt’s Web site, Tom Crean boasts how they played the leading role in the establishment of a “socialist majority” on the city council. Crean does not mention how, when the central government of Margaret Thatcher’s Tories cut funding to former industrial centers plagued by unemployment, the Liverpool council dealt with its “budget” problems by handing out 31,000 layoff notices. (And this as the miners strike of 1984-85 was raging in the coal mines of England and Wales—the biggest class battle since the British general strike of 1926.) Such a move was naturally met with outrage by the municipal unions, and the CWI lived to regret this “tactical error” (their words).
The British Labour Party defined itself against the Russian Revolution, adopting its famous “Clause IV” in 1918 as a conscious effort to undercut the appeal of Bolshevism to advanced workers. Clause IV says that the aim of the party is to increasingly nationalize the economy, presenting public ownership in a capitalist economy as the way to incrementally achieve “socialism.” Today the British reformist left revolves around defense of the politics of “old” Labourism against the “New Labour” Party, which has spent over a decade jettisoning its historic organizational ties to the unions. For Socialist Alternative and its British cothinkers, capitalist nationalizations and defense of “welfare state” measures against neoliberal austerity are pretty much the maximum program.
The spectacle of “socialists” seeking to administer capitalism on behalf of the bourgeois rulers has a long and sordid history. Today with consciousness at a low ebb, it is all the more important to point to the real road to the emancipation of all the oppressed. With the October Revolution of 1917, the proletariat under Bolshevik leadership overthrew capitalism, providing a model for workers and the oppressed seeking emancipation all over the world. It is the task of revolutionary Marxists to keep alive the lessons of this conquest of proletarian state power while exposing the parliamentary illusions pushed by those claiming to be socialists.
 
Socialism” That Democrats Can Support-Reformists Salivate Over Sawant’s Seattle Election


Workers Vanguard No. 1042
21 March 2014
 
“Socialism” That Democrats Can Support-Reformists Salivate Over Sawant’s Seattle Election
 

Since self-described socialist Kshama Sawant won a seat on Seattle’s City Council last November, her electoral success has been widely promoted as a model for the left. Sawant, a member of Socialist Alternative (SAlt) who narrowly defeated Democratic Party incumbent Richard Conlin, ran on a platform of liberal reform—for a $15 hour minimum wage, rent control, ending “corporate welfare” and for a tax on millionaires to fund public transportation, education and “living-wage” union jobs. While applauding other “alternative” candidacies, SAlt crows that Sawant’s win paves “a path for independent politics.” And the International Socialist Organization (ISO) chimed in approvingly: “Given the scale of the crisis that working people face, there is a serious need for some optimism that our side can fight back not just on the picket lines and in the streets, but even at the ballot box” (socialistworker.org, 16 December 2013).
SAlt says it is campaigning to build an “independent, alternative party of workers and young people to fight for the interests of the millions, not the millionaires.” For its supporters, Sawant’s campaign is a challenge to the status quo simply because it falls outside the classic two-party framework. But for authentic socialists, independence is a class question: the working class and the oppressed masses must be politically organized in opposition to the class dictatorship of the capitalists—bourgeois “democracy” is one form of that capitalist dictatorship. The workers, who form the only class in society with the objective interest and social power to overthrow capitalism, must be won to understand that their interests are counterposed to those of the exploiting class.
The history of the United States is replete with bourgeois “third” parties promising to make capitalism work for the little guy—which effectively served to channel discontent back into the Democratic Party. The “independence” of Sawant & Co. is merely another exercise in pressuring the Democratic Party from the “outside” as practiced by the capitalist Green Party and others. In fact, SAlt consistently supported Ralph Nader between 1996 and 2008, first as the Greens’ candidate and even when he ran “independent” campaigns supported by the likes of Ross Perot’s right-wing Reform Party.
Opportunists pretend that their reformist program is some kind of step forward in the direction of revolutionary change. They claim that “we” all want the same things and merely disagree about how to get there. More than a century ago Rosa Luxemburg explained the question of reform or revolution in her classic work of that name. Luxemburg polemicized against leading German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein who gave theoretical expression to the renunciation of revolutionary Marxism in favor of “evolutionary socialism,” premised on gradual reform of bourgeois society. Bernstein pronounced that for him the “movement” was everything, and the final goal of socialism was nothing. Luxemburg’s words have lost none of their sting today:
“People who pronounce themselves in favor of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modification of the old society.”
The reformist left advances the lie that one can pressure the capitalist state machinery to operate in the interests of the workers and oppressed. The only way to achieve real emancipation for the working and oppressed masses is through the expropriation of the capitalists as a class and the establishment of a workers government.
Giving the Democrats a Facelift
Revolutionary Marxists can use the electoral arena as a tactic to propagandize for socialist politics. Unlike executive offices in the capitalist state such as mayor or president, whose purpose is to administer and enforce capitalist rule, standing for election to legislative offices can provide a vehicle for communists to put forward a revolutionary program. When running candidates or offering critical support to other formations, the aim is to dispel illusions among workers, minorities, immigrants and radicalized youth that any lasting improvement of their condition can be achieved under the capitalist profit system. As a revolutionary organization we could not give any support no matter how critical to Sawant, whose campaign obscured the most elementary class line with its populist rhetoric. In his book on communist principles and tactics, “Left-Wing” Communism—An Infantile Disorder (1920), Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explained: “It is entirely a matter of knowing how to apply these tactics in order to raise—not lower—the general level of proletarian class-consciousness, revolutionary spirit, and ability to fight and win.”
The “lesser evil” Democratic Party is a capitalist party acting on behalf of the profiteers, bailing out the banks, gouging the poor and spying on the population. For decades, the reformists’ “fight the right” rhetoric has served to hoodwink working people and radical youth into believing that such actions are simply excesses, thereby further chaining them to the same party through the ballot box. The reformist left presents Sawant’s victory as part of a continuum of “progressive” candidates—which tellingly includes Democratic politicians like New York’s new mayor Bill de Blasio, who won votes by promising to end racist stop-and-frisk and claiming sympathy for the “99 percent.”
Enjoying endorsements from several local Democrats and union officials, Sawant’s campaign Web site did not oppose President Obama; it never even mentioned the wars the U.S. is waging overseas much less solidarized with the victims of U.S. imperialism. On the crucial question of racial oppression, so central to the workings of capitalism in this country, Sawant limited her platform to calling for a school curriculum promoting “anti-racism” (along with anti-sexism and gay equality) and calling for a “movement” against police brutality and racial profiling. Sawant calls for an elected civilian review board which is supposed to rein in the police, though experience has shown repeatedly that such bodies are impotent except as a means for letting off a little steam after particularly egregious cases of police violence. As a columnist from the Seattle Times (26 October 2013) rightly noted, Sawant’s slogans were “pretty much indistinguishable” from those of Seattle Democrats, who cater to the city’s liberal petty-bourgeois milieu.
Notably, in both Seattle and Minneapolis (where SAlt’s candidate Ty Moore came close to winning on his platform of “People over Profit”) no Republican was on the City Council ballot. SAlt boasted about this tactic, which allowed them to run against Democratic candidates with no danger of letting any Republicans get elected. Soon after her election Sawant was appointed by Democratic mayor Ed Murray to an advisory committee made up of union officials and business executives in order to adjust the minimum wage.
Sawant described her campaign as a way to “reinvigorate” the populist Occupy movement, and Socialist Action raves that Sawant’s candidacy was the Occupy spirit “now finding expression at the ballot box” (socialistaction.org, 13 February). Not only SAlt but most of the rest of the reformist left enthused over Occupy, whose central conception was that America should reclaim democratic control of the economy from the greedy bankers and corporations by making the existing government represent the “will of the people.” As the 2012 elections approached, Occupy disintegrated as many of its activists predictably occupied...the Democratic Party.
Echoing SAlt’s vision for a crop of new “independent left-wing candidates,” the Freedom Socialist Party intoned: “The time is ripe for anti-capitalist electoral alliances” (socialism.com, December 2013). Meanwhile, Socialist Organizer urged “the labor movement and community organizations to join together to launch independent slates at the local level” (socialistorganizer.org, 6 February). Such coalitions are the way reformist organizations intend to capitalize on what SAlt terms its “historic victory” for socialism.
One example is in heavily unionized, industrial Lorain County, Ohio, where two dozen city councilors organized as the Independent Labor Party—a creation of the county’s Central Labor Council—won the election. The campaign emerged out of disaffection with local Democrats who had carried out a series of attacks on organized labor. Labor Notes (4 December 2013) approvingly quoted one Machinist who admonished: “Running independent wasn’t our first choice, but hopefully this can help bring the Democratic leaders to their senses.”
Meanwhile, in early January, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) created an “Independent Political Organization” with the purpose of supporting “progressive” candidates in the upcoming Illinois elections. According to the ISO, whose supporters are in the CTU leadership, the goal of such a formation is to unite unions with nonprofit, liberal and community organizations to defend public education against recent attacks led by Chicago’s Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel. The same teachers union—which has long worked with Democratic Party-allied organizations—just endorsed a Democrat for state representative in the 26th District of Illinois.
Socialism: What It Is and What It Is Not
Liberal and ostensibly radical commentators have been abuzz with optimism that there is a fresh opening to socialist ideas. They cite a recent poll that a majority of young people aged 18-29 view socialism in a favorable light. Drowning in student debt, pessimistic about employment and deprived of affordable health care, many young people associate “socialism” with government reforms providing some degree of relief—like free medical care or subsidized higher education.
Sawant promoted a social-democratic model of socialism consistent with such beliefs, a type of “capitalism light” modeled after the European welfare states. She commented in a Salon.com interview (18 November 2013) that a country like Finland has “elements of socialism” due to its funding of public education and strong teachers’ unions. On the contrary, socialism is a system where the bourgeoisie, the owners of industry and of finance capital, has been thrown out of power and the workers have become the new ruling class. The working people control the economy and the state, which is an institution enforcing class domination—presently the domination of the capitalist class, under socialism that of the proletariat. Socialist revolution lays the basis for rationally planned economies based on production for need, not profit, and for qualitative development of the productive forces, opening the road to the elimination of scarcity and to the creation of an egalitarian society.
Of course, the idea of “socialized medicine” such as exists in countries like Canada is appealing in comparison to being bled by the American health care giants and drug companies. But one need only look at the Scandinavian countries, traditionally governed by social democrats, that are, alas, still run for the purpose of class exploitation for private profit. No less than here the working people suffer in the grip of capitalist economic contraction: unemployment, bosses relentlessly trying to drive down wages and push the worst-paid workers deeper into poverty, anti-immigrant racism and growth of fascistic parties, etc.
“Sewer Socialism”
At the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, the “sewer socialists” sought to give socialism a “respectable” veneer through local electoral campaigns. Represented notoriously by Victor Berger’s Milwaukee section within the right wing of the Socialist Party (SP), these ministers and professionals elected to office promoted a program of municipal reform—everything from aid to schools and playgrounds to equitable taxation to better sewer systems and the suppression of vice. Nearly indistinguishable from those in the bourgeois Progressive movement, their platforms were about cleaning up capitalism and ushering in an “honest” government.
Of course a century ago, American capitalism was a rising power; at that time it was in the overall best interests of the system for the bourgeoisie to invest more resources in the infrastructure of cities as well as in education and public health measures necessary for a productive working class—and they had the wherewithal to do so.
James P. Cannon was part of the SP’s left wing that fought against the trend of “sewer socialism.” (He later went on to identify with the Russian October Revolution of 1917 and helped to found the American Communist movement and in 1928 the American Trotskyist movement.) In a 1956 article on SP leader Eugene Debs, Cannon motivated the need for a revolutionary party, writing:
“The Socialist Party of Debs’ time has to be judged, not for its failure to lead a revolution, but for its failure to work with that end in view.... Socialism signifies and requires the revolutionary transformation of society; anything less than that is mere bourgeois reform. A socialist party deserves the name only to the extent that it acts as the conscious agency in preparing the workers for the necessary social revolution.”
— Printed in The First Ten Years of American Communism (1962)
In an entirely counterposed spirit, the “independent” campaigns of SAlt and Sawant enthusiasts aim not to mobilize the working class in a struggle for socialism, but to influence politicians to push for reforms that in no way threaten capitalism. Under capitalism, even when reforms are won the bosses always look to take them back at the earliest opportunity. The way decent wages for auto workers, longshoremen, truck drivers and others were won in this country was through bitter strike struggles. Not all strikes were won, but when they were, such victories were not based on the false partnership between labor and capital but on mobilizing the workers in hard class struggle involving the use of militant (often “illegal”) tactics such as mass picketing, plant occupations and sympathy strikes. Racial and ethnic divisions were consciously combated and overcome in the course of common class struggle.
The main obstacle preventing independent class mobilizations in the U.S. has been illusions in the Democrats, pushed centrally by the sellout union leadership. SAlt marches behind the conservative labor tops who throw union money into Democratic politicians’ coffers while lobbying for a “fairer” tax system and a higher minimum wage. While we would be in favor of any law or measure to raise the pathetic minimum wage, hard labor struggles are what can actually force wage increases from employers—which might actually “tax the rich” a little!
Reformists in the Service of Bourgeois “Democracy”
SAlt’s program is in accord with its British parent organization, now named the Socialist Party, the leading group within the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), that spent over four decades of its existence buried deep within the British Labour Party. From 1983 to 1987, its forebears in the Militant tendency held executive power on the Liverpool City Council. In a September article on SAlt’s Web site, Tom Crean boasts how they played the leading role in the establishment of a “socialist majority” on the city council. Crean does not mention how, when the central government of Margaret Thatcher’s Tories cut funding to former industrial centers plagued by unemployment, the Liverpool council dealt with its “budget” problems by handing out 31,000 layoff notices. (And this as the miners strike of 1984-85 was raging in the coal mines of England and Wales—the biggest class battle since the British general strike of 1926.) Such a move was naturally met with outrage by the municipal unions, and the CWI lived to regret this “tactical error” (their words).
The British Labour Party defined itself against the Russian Revolution, adopting its famous “Clause IV” in 1918 as a conscious effort to undercut the appeal of Bolshevism to advanced workers. Clause IV says that the aim of the party is to increasingly nationalize the economy, presenting public ownership in a capitalist economy as the way to incrementally achieve “socialism.” Today the British reformist left revolves around defense of the politics of “old” Labourism against the “New Labour” Party, which has spent over a decade jettisoning its historic organizational ties to the unions. For Socialist Alternative and its British cothinkers, capitalist nationalizations and defense of “welfare state” measures against neoliberal austerity are pretty much the maximum program.
The spectacle of “socialists” seeking to administer capitalism on behalf of the bourgeois rulers has a long and sordid history. Today with consciousness at a low ebb, it is all the more important to point to the real road to the emancipation of all the oppressed. With the October Revolution of 1917, the proletariat under Bolshevik leadership overthrew capitalism, providing a model for workers and the oppressed seeking emancipation all over the world. It is the task of revolutionary Marxists to keep alive the lessons of this conquest of proletarian state power while exposing the parliamentary illusions pushed by those claiming to be socialists.