Saturday, January 26, 2019

*In Honor Of Rosa Luxemburg- The Rose Of The Revolution- LENIN AND ROSA LUXEMBURG By Max Shachtman

Markin comment:

This is from the days when old Max Shachtman knew how to "speak" Marxism. A couple of years later, when it mattered, mattered a lot, when the defense of the Soviet Union was on the line he lost his tongue.

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From Issue no.3, of the Marxist Discussion journal What Next? By kind permission of the editor Bob Pitt, 24 Georgiana St, London, NW1 0EA, email wh@tnext.freeserve.co.uk.

LENIN AND ROSA LUXEMBURG
Max Shachtman
From The New International, May 1938

Two legends have been created about the relationship between the views of Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. Despite their antagonistic origins and aims, they supplement each other in effect. Neither one of the myth-makers approaches the extremely interesting and instructive subject from an objective historical standpoint. Consequently, the analysis made by each of them reduces itself to an instrument of factional politics which is, in both cases, the politics of reaction.

One school of thought, if such a term is permissible here, is headed by the faculty of Stalinist falsification. It covers up its reactionary objectives by posing as critics of Luxemburg and proponents of Lenin. A discussion of its arguments is rendered impossible by the very nature of its position, which formally prohibits both argument and discussion. Its scientific value is summarised in a few sentences from the papal bull issued by Stalin in 1932 in connection with the luckless Slutsky’s study on Lenin’s incorrect appraisal of Kautsky and Luxemburg: ‘You wish to enter into discussion against this Trotskyist thesis of Slutsky’s? But what is there to discuss in this? Is it not plain that Slutsky is simply slandering Lenin, slandering the Bolsheviks? Slander must be branded, not transformed into a subject for discussion.’ The Stalinists have the Catholics’ attitude toward their dogmas: they assume what is to be proved; their arbitrary conclusions are presented as their premises; their statement of the problem is at the same time their answer – and it brooks no discussion. ‘Bolshevism’ is absolutely and at all points and stages irreconcilable with ‘Luxemburgism’ because of the original sin of the latter in disputing the ‘organisational principles’ of the former.

The other school of thought is less authoritarian in tone and form, but just as rigid in unhistorical dogma; and if, unlike the Stalinists, it is not wholly composed of turncoats from revolutionary Marxism, it has a substantial sprinkling of them. Their objectives are covered-up by posing as critics of Lenin and defenders of Luxemburg. They include anachronistic philosophers of ultra-leftism and express-train travellers fleeing from the pestilence of Stalinism to the plague of Social Democracy. Bolshevism, they argue, is definitely bankrupt. The horrors of Stalinism are the logical and inevitable outcome of Lenin’s Centralism’, or – as it is put by a recent critic, Liston Oak, who seeks the ‘inner flaws of Bolshevism’ – of Lenin’s ’totalitarianism’. Luxemburg, on the other hand, stressed the democratic side of the movement, the struggle, the goal. Hence, ‘Luxemburgism’ is absolutely irreconcilable with ‘Bolshevism’ because of the original sin of the former in imposing its Jacobin, or bourgeois, or super-centralist, or totalitarian ‘organisational principles’.

The use of quotation marks around the terms employed is justified and necessary, for at least in nine cases out of ten the airy analysts have only the vaguest and most twisted idea of what the disputes between Luxemburg and Lenin really were. In just as many cases they have revealed a cavalier indisposition to acquaint themselves with the historical documents and the actual writings of the two great thinkers. A brief survey will disclose, I believe, the superficiality of the arguments which, especially since the obvious putrescence of Stalinism, have gained a certain currency in the radical movement.

Nothing but. misunderstanding can result from a failure to bear in mind the fact that Lenin and Luxemburg worked, fought and developed their ideas in two distinctly different movements, operating within no less different countries, at radically different stages of development; consequently, in countries and movements where the problems of the working class were posed in quite different forms. It is the absence of this concrete and historical approach to the disputes between Lenin, of the Social-Democratic Labour Party of Russia, and Luxemburg, of the Social-Democratic Party of Germany, that so surely brings most critics to grief.

The ‘organisational dispute’ between Lenin and Luxemburg did not originate in the former’s insistence on a break with Kautsky and the centrists before the war. When Stalin thunders against anyone ‘who can doubt that the Bolsheviks brought about a split with their own opportunists and centrist-conciliators long before the imperialist war (1904-12) without at the same time pursuing a policy of rupture, a policy of split with the opportunists and centrists of the Second International’ – he is simply substituting ukase for historical fact.

The truth is that Rosa Luxemburg reached a clear estimate of Kautsky and broke with his self-styled ‘Marxian centre’, long before Lenin did. For many years after the turn of the century, Kautsky’s prestige among all the factions of the Russian movement was unparalleled. The Menshevik Abramovich does not exaggerate when he writes that

’A West-European can hardly imagine the enormous authority which the leaders of the German Social Democracy, the Liebknechts, the Bebels, the Singers, enjoyed in Russia. Among these leaders, Karl Kautsky occupied quite a special place ... serving for all the Russian Marxists and Social Democrats as the highest authority in all the theoretical and tactical questions of scientific socialism and the labour movement. In every disputed question, in every newly-arisen problem, the first thought always was: What would Kautsky say about this? How would Kautsky have decided this question?’

Lenin’s much-disputed What is to be Done? held up, as is known, the German Social Democracy and its leader, Bebel, as models for the Russian movement. When Kautsky wrote his famous article, after the 1905 revolution in Russia, on the Slavs and the world revolution, in which, Zinoviev writes, under Luxemburg’s influence, he advanced substantially the Bolshevik conception, Lenin was highly elated. ‘Where and when,’ he wrote in July 1905, in a polemic against Parvus, ‘have I characterised the revolutionism of Bebel and Kautsky as “opportunism”? Where and when have I presumed to call into existence in the international Social Democracy a special tendency which was not identical with the tendency of Bebel and Kautsky.’ A year and a half later, Lenin wrote that ‘the vanguard of the Russian working class knows Karl Kautsky for some time now as its writer’. and a month later, in January 1907, he described Kautsky as ‘the leader of the German revolutionary Social Democrats’. In August 1908, Lenin cited Kautsky as his authority on the question of war and militarism as against Gustave Hervé, and as late as February 1914, he invoked him again as a Marxian authority in his dispute with Rosa Luxemburg on the national question. Finally, in one of his last pre-war articles, in April 1914, Wherein the German Labour Movement Should Not Be Imitated, speaking of the ’undoubted sickness’ of the German Social Democracy, he referred exclusively to the trade union leaders (specifically to Karl Legien) and the parliamentary spokesmen, but did not even mention Kautsky and the centrists, much less raise the question of the left wing (also unmentioned) splitting with them.

It is this pre-war attitude of Lenin towards the German centre – against which Luxemburg had been conducting a sharp frontal attack is early as 1910 – that explains the vehemence and the significant terminology of Lenin’s strictures against Kautsky immediately after the war broke out, for example, his letter to Shlyapnikov on 27 October 1914, in which he says: ‘I now despise and hate Kautsky more than all the rest.... R. Luxemburg was right, she long ago understood that Kautsky had the highly-developed “servility of a theoretician”...’

In sum, the fact is that by the very nature of her milieu and her work before the war, Rosa Luxemburg had arrived at a clearer and more correct appreciation of the German Social Democracy and the various currents within it than had Lenin. To a great extent, this determined and explained her polemic against Lenin on what appeared to be the ‘organisational questions’ of the Russian movement.

The beginning of the century marked the publication of two of Lenin’s most audacious and stirring works, One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward, and its forerunner, What Is to be Done? The Russian movement was then in no way comparable to the West-European, especially the German. It was composed of isolated groups and sections in Russia, more or less autonomous, pursuing policies at odds with each other and only remotely influenced by its great revolutionary Marxists abroad – Plekhanov, Lenin, Martov, Potresov, Trotsky and others. Moreover, the so-called ‘Economist’ tendency was predominant it laid the greatest stress on the element of spontaneity in the labour struggle and underrated the element of conscious leadership.

Lenin’s What is to be Done? was a merciless criticism of ‘Economism’, which he identified with ‘pure-and-simple trade unionism’, with khovstism (i.e., the policy of ragging at the tail of events, or of the masses), with opportunism. Social Democracy, he argued, is not a mere outgrowth of the spontaneous economic struggles of the proletariat, nor is it the passive servant of the workers; it is the union of the labour movement with revolutionary socialist theory which must be brought into the working class by the party, for the proletariat, by itself, can only attain a trade-union and not a socialist consciousness. In view of the dispersion of the movement in Russia, its primitive and localistic complexion, an all-Russian national party and newspaper had to be created immediately to infuse the labour movement with a socialist, political consciousness and unite it in a revolutionary struggle against Tsarism. The artificers of the party, in contrast with the desultory agitators of the time, would be the professional revolutionists, intellectuals and educated workers devoting all their time and energy to revolutionary activity and functioning within an extremely centralised party organisation. The effective political leadership was to be the editorial board of the central organ, edited by the exiles abroad, and it would have the power to organise or reorganise party branches inside Russia, admit or reject members, and even appoint their local committees and other directing organs. ‘I differ with the Mensheviks in this respect,’ wrote Lenin in 1904:

‘The basic idea of comrade Martov ... is precisely a false “democratism”, the idea of the construction of the party from the bottom to the top. My idea, on the contrary, is “bureaucratic” in the sense that the party should be constructed from above down to the bottom, from the congress to the individual party organisations.’

It should be borne in mind that, despite subsequent reconsideration, all the leaders of the Iskra tendency in the Russian movement warmly supported Lenin against the Economists. ‘Twice in succession,’ wrote A.N. Potresov, later Lenin’s furious enemy, ‘have I read through the booklet from beginning to end and can only congratulate its author. The general impression is an excellent one – in spite of the obvious haste, noted by the author himself, in which the work was written.’ At the famous London Congress in 1903, Plekhanov spoke up in Lenin’s defence: ‘Lenin did not write a treatise on the philosophy of history, but a polemical article against the Economists, who said: We must wait until we see where the working class itself will come, without the help of the revolutionary bacillus.’ And again: ‘If you eliminate the bacillus, then there remains only an unconscious mass, into which consciousness must be brought from without. If you had wanted to be right against Lenin, and if you had read through his whole book attentively, then you would have seen that this is just what he said.’

It was only after the deepening of the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks (Plekhanov included) that the latter launched their sharp attacks on Lenin’s polemical exaggeration – that is what it was – of the dominant role of the intellectuals as professional revolutionists, organisers and leaders of the party, and of the relationship between spontaneity and the element of socialist consciousness which can only be introduced into the labour movement from without. Lenin’s defence of the ideas be expressed in 1902 and 1904 on these questions and on centralism, is highly significant for an understanding of the concrete conditions under which they were advanced and the concrete aim they pursued.

In The Fruits of Demagogy, an article written in March 1905 by the Bolshevik V. Vorovsky (read and revised by Lenin), the author quotes Plekhanov’s above cited praise of Lenin’s What is to be Done? and adds:

’These words define perfectly correctly the sense and significance of the Lenin brochure, and if Plekhanov now says that he was not in agreement, from the very beginning, with its theoretical principles, it only proves how correctly he was able to judge the real significance of the brochure at a time when there was no necessity of inventing “differences of opinion in principle” with Lenin. In actuality. What is to be Done? was a polemical brochure (which was entirely dedicated to the criticism of the khvostist wing in the then Social Democracy, to a characterisation and a refutation of the specific errors of this wing). It would be ridiculous if Lenin, in a brochure which dealt with the “burning questions of our movement” were to demonstrate that the evolution of ideas, especially of scientific socialism, has proceeded and proceeds in close historical connection with the evolution of the productive forces (in close connection with the growth of the labour movement in general). For him it was important to establish the fact that, nowhere has the working class yet worked itself up independently to a socialist ideology, that this ideology (the doctrine of scientific socialism) was always brought in by the Social Democracy ...’

In 1903, at the Second Congress itself, Lenin had pointed out that the Economists bent the staff towards the one side. In order to straighten it out again, it had to ‘be bent towards the other side and that is what I did’, and almost two years later, in the draft of a resolution written for the Third Congress, he emphasised the non-universality of his organisational. views by writing that ‘under free political conditions our party can and will be built up entirely upon the principle of electability. Under absolutism, this is unrealisable for all the thousands of workers who belong to the party.’ Again, in the period of the 1905 revolution, he showed how changes in conditions determined a change in his views:

’At the Third Congress I expressed the wish that in the party committees there should be two intellectuals for every eight workers. How obsolete is this wish’ Now it would be desirable that in the new party organisations, for every intellectual belonging to the Social Democracy there should he a few hundred Social-Democratic workers.’

Perhaps the best summary of the significance of the views he set forth at the beginning of the century is given by Lenin himself in the foreword to the collection, Twelve Years, which he wrote in September 1907:

’The basic mistake of those who polemicise against What is to be Done? today, is that they tear this work completely out of the context of a definite historical milieu, a definite, now already long-past period of development of our party ... To speak at present about the fact that Iskra (in the years 1901 and 1902!) exaggerated the idea of the organisation of professional revolutionists, is the same as if somebody had reproached the Japanese, after the Russo-Japanese war, for exaggerating the Russian military power before the war, for exaggerated concern over the struggle against this power. The Japanese had to exert all forces against a possible maximum of Russian forces in order to attain the victory. Unfortunately. many judge from the outside, without seeing that today the idea of the organisation of professional revolutionists has already attained a complete victory. This victory, however, would have been impossible if, in its time, this idea had not been pushed into the foreground, if it had not been preached in an “exaggerated” manner to people who stood like obstacles in the way of its realisation ... What is to be Done? polemically corrected Economism, and it is false to consider the contents of the brochure outside of its connection with this task.’

The ideas contained in What is to be Done?, which should still be read by revolutionists everywhere – and it can be read with the greatest profit – cannot, therefore, be understood without bearing in mind the specific conditions and problems of the Russian movement of the time. That is why Lenin, in answer to a proposal to translate his brochure for the non-Russian parties, told Max Levien in 1921: ‘That is not desirable; the translation must at least be issued with good commentaries, which would have to be written by a Russian comrade very well acquainted with the history of the Communist Party of Russia, in order to avoid false application.’

Just as Lenin’s views must be considered against the background of the situation in Russia, so must Luxemburg’s polemic against them he viewed against the background of the situation in Germany. In her famous review in 1904 of Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward (an extension of the views of What is to be Done?), Luxemburg’s position was decisively coloured by the realities of the German movement. Where Lenin stressed ultra-centralism, Luxemburg stressed democracy and organisational flexibility. Where Lenin emphasised the dominant role of the professional revolutionist, Luxemburg countered with emphasis on the mass movement and its elemental upsurge.

Why? Because these various forces played clearly different roles in Russia and in Germany. The professional revolutionists whom Luxemburg encountered in Germany were not as in Russia, the radical instruments for gathering together loose and scattered local organisations, uniting them into one national party imbued with a firm Marxian ideology and freed from the opportunistic conceptions of pure and-simple trade unionism. Quite the contrary. In Germany, the ‘professionals’ were the careerists, the conservative trade union bureaucrats, the lords of the ossifying party machine, the reformist parliamentarians, the whole crew who finally succeeded in disembowelling the movement. An enormous conservative power, they weighed down like a mountain upon the militant-minded rank and file. They were the canal through which the poison of reformisin seeped into the masses. They acted as a brake upon the class actions of the workers, and not as a spur. In Russia the movement was loose and ineffectual, based on circles, as Lenin said, ‘almost always resting upon the personal friendship of a small number of persons’. In Germany, the movement was tightly organised, conservatively disciplined, routinised, and dominated by a semi-reformist, centralist leadership. These concrete circumstances led Luxemburg to the view that only an appeal to the masses, only their elemental militant movement could break through the conservative wall of the party and trade-union apparatus. The ‘centralism’ of Lenin forged a party that proved able to lead the Russian masses to a victorious revolution; the ‘centralism’ that Luxemburg saw growing in the German Social Democracy became a conservative force and ended in a series of catastrophes for the proletariat. This is what she feared when she wrote against Lenin in 1904:

‘... the role of the Social-Democratic leadership becomes one of an essentially conservative character, in that it leads to working out empirically to its ultimate conclusions the new experience acquired in the struggle and soon to converting it into a bulwark against a further innovation in the grand style. The present tactic of the German Social Democracy, for example, is generally admired for its remarkable manifoldness, flexibility and at the same time certainty. Such qualities simply mean, however, that our party has adapted itself wonderfully in its daily struggle to the present parliamentary basis, down to the smallest detail, that it knows how to exploit the whole field of battle offered by parliamentarism and to master it in accordance with given principles. At the same time, this specific formulation of tactics already serves so much to conceal the further horizon that one notes a strong inclination to perpetuate that tactic and to regard the parliamentary tactic as the Social-Democratic tactic for all time.’

But it is a far cry from the wisdom of these words, uttered in the specific conditions of Luxemburg’s struggle in Germany, to the attempts made by syndicalists and ultra-leftists of all kinds to read into her views a universal formula of rejection of the idea of leadership and centralisation. The fact of the matter is that the opportunistic enemies of Luxemburg, and her closest collaborator, Leo Jogiches (Tyszka), especially in the Polish movement in which she actively participated, made virtually the same attacks upon her ‘organisational principles’ and ‘régime of leadership’ as were levelled against Lenin. During the war, for example, the Spartakusbund was highly centralised and held tightly in the hands of that peerless organiser, Jogiches. The Social Democracy of Poland and Lithuania, which she led, was, if anything, far more highly centralised and far more merciless towards those in its ranks who deviated from the party’s line, than was the Bolshevik party under Lenin. In his history of the Russian movement, the Menshevik Theodore Dan, who did not spare Lenin for his ’organisational régime’, and sought to exploit Luxemburg’s criticism of Lenin for his own ends, nevertheless wrote that the Polish Social Democracy of the time

‘... shared in its essentials the organisational principles of Lenin, against which Rosa Luxemburg had polemised at the birth of Bolshevism; it also applied these principles in the practise of its own party, in which a rigid, bureaucratic centralism prevailed and people like Radek, Zalevsky, Unschlicht and others, who later played a leading role in the Communist Party, were expelled from the party because of their oppositional stand against the party executive.’

‘Bureaucratic centralism’, was (and is) the term generally applied by Dan and Mensheviks of all stripes to Lenin and Luxemburg and all others who seriously sought to build up a purposeful party of proletarian revolution, in contrast to that ‘democratic’ looseness prevalent in the Second International which only served as a cover behind which elements alien to the revolution could make their way to the leadership of the party and, at crucial moments, betray it to the class enemy. The irreconcilable antagonism which the reformists felt towards Lenin and Luxemburg is in sharp and significant contrast to the affinity they now feel towards the Stalinist International, in which full-blooded and genuine bureaucratic centralism has attained its most evil form. It is not difficult to imagine what Rosa Luxemburg would have written about the Stalin regime had she lived in our time; and by the same token it is not difficult to understand the poisonous campaign that the Stalinists have conducted against her for years.

The years of struggle that elapsed since the early polemics in the Russian movement, the experiences that enriched the arsenal of the great revolutionists of the time, and above all the Russian Revolution itself, undoubtedly served to draw the political tendency of Rosa Luxemburg closer to that represented with such genius by Lenin. Had she not been cut down so cruelly in the prime of her intellectual power, there is little doubt in my mind that she would have become one of the greatest figures and champions of the Communist International – not of the horribly twisted caricature that it is today, but as it was in the early years. ‘It does not even occur to me’experiences that enriched the arsenal of the great revolutionists of the time, and above all the Russian Revolution itself, undoubtedly served to draw the political tendency of Rosa Luxemburg closer to that represented with such genius by Lenin. Had she not been cut down so cruelly in the prime of her intellectual power, there is little doubt in my mind that she would have become one of the greatest figures and champions of the Communist International – not of the horribly twisted caricature that it is today, but as it was in the early years. ‘It does not even occur to me’, wrote Karl Kautsky, her bitter foe, in 1921, ‘to deny that in the course of the war Rosa drew steadily closer to the Communist world of thought, so that it is quite correct when Radek says that “with Rosa Luxemburg there died the greatest and most profound theoretical head of Communism”.’

The judgement is a correct one and doubly valid because it comes from a political opponent who knew her views so well. It is worth a thousand times more than all the superficial harpings on the theme of the irreconcilability of Marxism’s greatest teachers in our time.

NOTES
1. So as not to clutter up the text with references, I am including all the works from which I quote in this article, in a single footnote. They are: Lenin, Collected Works [in German], vols.IV, VI, VII, VIII, X, XII. – Luxemburg, Collected Works [in German], vols.III, IV. – Radek, Rosa Luxemburg Karl Licbknecht, Leo Jogiches. – Martov and Dan, Die Geschichte der russischen Sozialdemokratie. – Die Neue Zeit, 1904, 1910. – Protocol No.1, Session of Bolshevisation Commission, ECCI, 1925. – Der Kampf, 1921, 1924. – Lenin Anthology [in Russian], vol.II. – Henriette Roland-Holst, Rosa Luxemburg: Haar Leven en werken. – Stalin, Kaganovich, Postyshev, Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism.

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Time Of Her Time, Indeed-With Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle And Roll In Mind

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The Time Of Her Time, Indeed-With Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle And Roll In Mind



Sketches From The Pen Of  Frank Jackman  

Get out from that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans
Get out from that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans
Well, roll my breakfast 'cause I'm a hungry man
[Chorus:]
I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll
I said Shake, rattle and roll
Well, you never do nothin' to save your doggone soul
Wearin' those dresses, your hair done up so nice
Wearin' those dresses, your hair done up so nice
You look so warm, but your heart is cold as ice
[Chorus]
I'm like a one-eyed cat, peepin' in a sea-food store
I'm like a one-eyed cat, peepin' in a sea-food store
I can look at you, tell you don't love me no more
I believe you're doin' me wrong and now I know
I believe you're doin' me wrong and now I know
The more I work, the faster my money goes
[Chorus]
Shake, Rattle And Roll

 …she had been through it all before, six or seven times now at least,  been through the part about what happened to her when she heard the new music, heard the music that was not some left-over parent music fit for mercifully sleeping through, maybe, on the radio, some called it rhythm and blues, music from the black ghettos of places like Chicago and Detroit from guys who had come up from the South in the great post-World War I migrations to shake one Mister James Crow off their backs, get the jobs in the bustling factories to make some damn money for once to buy Missy what she wanted, came up to get away from what she heard some say was Mister’s plantations sweat all day cotton boll work and his same Mister James Crow legal system (although she understood the sweat work part she didn’t understand that Jim Crow part at all, didn’t understand what it meant, didn’t understand that it affected every legal, social, economic, and political move they made) and turn that country blues of their fathers and other brothers, that down home Saturday night juke joint drinking Jimmy Jack’s homemade liquor on electric-less guitars, into sassy electrified blues for a more sophisticated urban audience ready to dust off their roots. 

Working off the efforts of old preacher-warriors Son House (had heard or read she was not sure that he had warred against the devil against sin and warred against God with the bottle), Charley Patton, Skip James and the guy who made a pact with devil she heard down in some Mississippi sweat-hole highway, Robert Johnson. And they did work, worked the streets for pocket money first and then the little sassy clubs, all smoke, booze and smelling of blood. Guys like sainted Muddy and hell-fire Howlin’ Wolf, Magic Slim, a bunch of James’ first or last name, John Lee, and some others too. Sometimes she would hear the sounds the threading-twanging sounds and get, well, get a little jumpy thinking what it would like to be stage front when old Muddy or Howlin’ Wolf got it on, but she kept that to herself since her parents would have flipped out if she ever took step one in that direction.       
Some called the new dispensation sound rockabilly with good-looking white farm and small town boys named Elvis, Carl, Jerry Lee, Warren,    in sexy suits with nothing on their minds except good times, music, and sex who were tired of that Grand Ole Opry hokey stuff and wanted to breakout and dust off their roots too. She thought about being stage front when those guys played too and thought that she too would maybe throw her sweaty underwear up on that heathen stage like she had seen and heard that lots of girls, good girls too caught in the throughs of the moment, but she kept that to herself since her parents would have flipped out if she took step one in that direction. In any case some, more recently, had begun to call it rock and roll after some DJ, Freed she thought the name was from New York City or some big beat city, called it that and it was starting to catch on as the way to describe the beat, the dancing, and the feeling of freedom just being around the scene.

Her parents, her know-nothing parents, just called it the “devil’s music,” called it an abomination against God’s will but they called everything from the “red menace” from Russia, Uncle Joe’s an dhis minions menace, to fluoride in the water some kind of abomination against God’s will so she discounted what they had to say, what did they know anyway, what could they know about what she felt, what she felt in the certain private places of her body when the beat got strong. How could they know never having been young, never having had those feelings. She was not exactly sure why she felt that way if anybody had asked her to explain those feelings (and nobody would, or almost nobody, since they were as clueless about why they felt that way when the music came on as she was), why she felt warm in what all the girls in the before school “lav” called their “sweet spot” with a tittle whenever she heard the local radio station or the kids at Doc’s 

Drugstore over on Atlantic Avenue on the juke-box endlessly playing Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle, and Roll or Warren Smith on Rock and Roll Ruby but she did. (Some of the rougher girls whom she avoided, the girls who smoked, drank and did “it,” so they said, called it other things which she did not find out until later, much later, guys called those things too but she then still preferred the more modest “sweet spot.”) All she knew was that when the beat began to pick up she would start swaying, maybe dancing by herself, maybe with a girlfriend, and get that feeling like she was not in has been dusty Olde Saco but maybe in New York City getting checked out by all the cute boys there whose leers when she swayed would have told her they were interested in having some of her.

Someone, Betty, she thought, a girl that she had grown up and gone to school with,  gone to Olde Saco High with, said it was just her coming into “her time,” although she did not know what to make of that idea since she had that same feeling before and after she came into her time. Got her “friend.”  Betty, or whoever it was who had said it said she did not mean that, that thing every girl had to deal with, but the time when everything was confused and when a teenager did, or did not, know which way to jump. Betty said somebody on the news programs called it alienation, teen alienation, like it was a disease, an epidemic sweeping the nation that needed to be eradicated if we were to beat the Russkies or something like that, but she was not sure what that meant. All she knew was that the old songs on the jukebox or radio, the ones that she loved to listen to the previous year, Frank getting kicks on champagne, Bing crooning about going his way, Patti get all dreamy about ocean-filled Cape Cod making her forget about ocean-filled Olde Saco with its endless textile mills to break the mood, Rosemary telling everybody to come to her house and singing about wanderlust, did not make her feel that way anymore. Didn’t make her feel that she wanted to jump out of her skin.

Tommy from school she thought, thought fondly if anybody was asking although he had not shown a spark of  interest until recently so she might not have told them she thought fondly of him if they had asked, might have had a better handle on it, have had a better sense of what turbulence was going on inside her when he told the whole Problems in Democracy class in Current Events that there were some new songs coming out of the radio, some stuff from down south, some negro sound from down in Memphis somewhere, some white hillbilly sound from around that same town, that he would listen to late at night on WJKA from Chicago when the air was just right. Sounds that made him want to jump right out of his skin. (She never dared to ask, ask even later when she got to know him better, whether it made him feel warm in his “sweet spot” since she didn’t know much then about whether boys had sweet spots, or got warm).

When Tommy had said that, said it was about the music, she knew that she was not alone, not alone in feeling that a fresh breeze was coming over the land, although she, confused as she was would not have articulated it that way (that would come later). And so she asked Tommy about it after class, asked him about what it felt like for him to jump out of his skin when he heard the beat beginning. He explained to her his feelings, feelings that she said she shared with him and he smiled. She agreed to let him walk her home after school and they had talked for a couple of hours on her front porch before he left. This went on most days for a while since neither one was assertive enough to ask for a date for a long time (Tommy as painfully shy as her except she was the first to notice that he looked over her way in class and gave a little smile, really a half smile before that day when they first talked after school).

Then both saw the big full page announcement in the newspaper, in the Friday edition Daily Gazette, for the next dance around town scheduled for a week from Saturday night and that night she called him to see if, ah, they might go to the event together. If she had waited about ten minutes Tommy later told her he would have called her (in her mind though she thought she was right to call since he was, except during Current Events, painfully shy and she was not going to miss a chance to grab him before some other girl did and then where would she be). And so they had their first date, first date to go to the Surf Ballroom down at Olde Saco Beach and listen to some guys, a band, play the new music that Tommy talked about some much. She wondered to herself (she could not speak of such things to Tommy) as she prepared for that night whether she would feel warm again in her sweet spot when they danced, she hoped so…         

But let’s catch up with Tommy for a moment and see what he is thinking about (oh, besides her, since we already know a lot especially about that telltale half smile he kept throwing her way).  

… things were different now, different from a few months ago when he was all balled up and thought he was the only kid, guy or female, aged fifteen, who was confused, uncomprehending, misbegotten about how he felt, about his place in the universe and about how he felt so very sorry himself because he didn’t understand what was happening to him, and what spoke to him now that he was no longer a kid. He, Tommy Murphy, could hardly wait until the weekend, wait to hear the new sounds coming out of the south, rhythm and blues stuff, rockabilly stuff, that he kept hearing on his transistor radio up in his room on clear nights out of WJKA in Chicago, stuff that people were starting to call rock and roll because some hip DJ in New York City or some such place a lot of people were taking credit for the term called it that, was starting to catch on. Funny he thought how he could get Chicago on good nights, weekend nights, but not New York City to hear that DJ call out to all the cats to swing to the beat of rock and roll. Mister Gibbs, his science teacher explained it to him and the class one time but the explanation sounded like someone talking to the heathens about heaven.

He couldn’t get WJKA clear every week, damn, but when it did come in Tommy would start snapping his fingers to the beat, the swinging beat that “spoke” to him somehow. He could not explain it but it made him feel good when he was down, was all confused about life, okay, okay, about girls, school, and that getting ahead in the world that his parents, his mother especially kept harping on. Made him think that maybe he would be a musician and play that stuff, play and make all the girls wet. Yeah, he knew all about that part about girls, about how this rock and roll music was making them get warm, warm in all the right places according to George his older brother who knew all about girls. Had them, girls, hanging off of him even though he wasn’t a musician but just a hep cat. Make that new girl of his, Susie, warm too. He hoped.

Funny how he had met Susie, how they had met, or not really met but started out, started out in school of all places, in class. Jesus. He had noticed her before but before she was just part of that all balled up stuff he was feeling, although he had taken a few peeks at her and he thought she might have peeked back once but he was not sure. Then during Current Events in Problems in Democracy class one week it was his turn to make a presentation and he chose to talk about that radio station out in Chicago and about the sounds he heard that made him want to jump out of his skin. He couldn’t exactly explain why and blushed a bright red when the teacher, a cool guy, Mr. Merritt asked him point about why he felt that way except to say that it made him feel good, made him less angry, less confused. A couple of people in the class nodded and he thought Susie had too (although she later said “no” she hadn’t nodded she just was thinking how brave he was to talk like that about his reactions to the music and while looking at him found out something she had not noticed before, he was cute). 

After class Susie had come up to him and practically begged him to tell her more about his feelings, about how the music made him feel,   because she said when she heard Big Joe Turner coming all snapping fingers on the radio on Shake, Rattle and Roll, she felt funny inside. Of course nobody, not even Tommy, who was keen on such knowledge knew that Big Joe was a Negro then, Christ his parents, good Roman Catholics who theoretically thought well of all mankind would have fits if they knew that he was listening to Negros under any conditions just like most RC parents in the neighborhood.  Tommy knew what kind of funny Susie was talking about, her “sweet spot” funny but he knew, knew because George had told him, not to say that to girls. Not modest girls like Susie and maybe not any girl if you wanted to get past first base with them. 

That conversation had started their thing and she asked him to walk home with her so they could talk which they did until they got to her house and just stood there talking for a couple of hours before he left.

He had walked her home a few times and he found that she was easy to talk to but they both seemed to back off on talking about a first date. He knew that he was a little shy in that department and he guessed Susie was too. Then both of them saw an announcement in the newspaper for the next big dance around town and one night she had called him to see if, ah, they might go together. (He somewhat flabbergasted said “yes,” said yes knowing that if he did not some other guy would grab her and then where would he be.) And so they had their first date, first date to go to the Surf Ballroom down at Olde Saco Beach and listen to some guys, a band, the Ready Rollers, play the new music. Tommy  didn’t know what would happen as he prepared that night to pick her up at her house but he hoped the music would calm him down and that he would get that funny feeling inside when they danced, and her too, he sure hoped so…      

A Kinder, Gentler Super-hero Takes Up The Cudgels Against The Bad Guys- Michael Keaton’s “Batman Returns” (1992)-A Film Review

A Kinder, Gentler Super-hero Takes Up The Cudgels Against The Bad Guys- Michael Keaton’s “Batman Returns” (1992)-A Film Review 




DVD Review

By Greg Green

Batman Returns, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, 1992

As I pointed out in a recent film review, actually an anti-review of another film in the seemingly never-ending Batman saga, I don’t, usually do film reviews ever since I became site manager over at the on-line American Film Gazette many years ago although I do preview all films before making assignments. (See archives, dated January 26, 2018 - Yeah, The Dark Night Alright When The World Needed Super-heroes And Psychos To Bring Us Down In The Mud –“The Dark Knight” aka Batman (2008)-An Anti-Film). I refused to assign that The Dark Knight Batman episode since whole thing reeked of over the top gratuitous violence with no apparent reason to exist except for that craziness. I got blow-back on that decision, although not from any readers, at least any that I know of. I got it from Sam Lowell, who used to be under the old regime here the Senior Film Critic before he went to emeritus status. He hit me on two, no, three counts. First why the hell (his crusty old goat term) did I even bother to give any space to the film just let it die after preview. Second why the hell (ditto) did I decide a while back to “appeal” to a younger audience by posting film reviews about comic super-heroes when they don’t read such reviews anyway but once they hear about a new episode are ready to line up whatever the quality of the work, whatever the plot-line. Third, and lastly, since I told him I was going to assign this film Batman Returns to someone on the staff why the hell (ditto, ditto) bother to waste some valuable time trying to counterpoise the “regular” okay violence of this film which he had seen many years ago and had rejected for review out of hand with the so-called gratuitous violence of The Dark Knight.        
   
That last point stung me and so I am taking up my own cudgels again to point out the differences in the films rather that have one of the writers do it. I might mention that no writer was begging me to do this review nor did anybody “complain” that they hadn’t been given The Dark Knight assignment. Frankly they thought that with that last effort I had seen the light and would stop assigning these super-hero balloons and go back to the old policies of only assigning what one wag suggested were “socially redeeming” films that a site devoted to history and its important nodal points should strive to review. I have taken my fair share of heat on this but for now I still see this idea as an important tip of the hat to mass culture which is after all  part of that experience.

I mentioned in that anti-review (see archival reference above) that many films critics had given the film a positive go based on its kind of being a metaphor for what was going on in the real war of gratuitous violence in the post-9/11 world. I dismissed that as so much hokum and bile based on there being nothing else to defend about such non-stop bam-bam action. With Batman Returns  done in kinder, gentler post-Soviet demise world 1992 before the non-stop terrorism entered the daily news cycle that still is a weak argument for a gruesome film but maybe the times do have a say in what a film would impart to an audience, in both cases young audiences in particular. The plot-line, the simple plot-line as in all these super-hero sagas without fail is centered on here Batman, played by Michael Keaton foiling the efforts of the bad guys here, obviously the Penguin, played by humpty-dumpty Danny DeVito, and leading city figure Max Shrenck, played by versatile Christopher Walken and being aided or hindered depending on the scene by new ambiguous figure Cat Women, played by Michelle Pfeiffer.

The difference since there is plenty of violence here as well was the saga was done a bit tongue in cheek. No, make that an archness. Arch in as the bad guys cut some of the rough edges off their badness by being rather ironic about the bad things they were doing. Contrast that with the Joker in The Dark Knight who personified evil with every breath. That might be a distinction without a difference but it matters when the deal goes down. Maybe the age of super-heroes is over at least in this space although I am not yet convinced we should avoid this aspect of mass culture but I will have to wait and see how much guff I can take from the wags around the water cooler about “pandering” to their kids, and grandkids.


Traipsing Through The Arts -Max Daddy Edward Hopper Unchained-In Defense Of Mope- All The Lonely People, Where Do They All Belong

Traipsing Through The Arts -Max Daddy Edward Hopper Unchained-In Defense Of Mope- All The Lonely People, Where Do They All Belong   




By Laura Perkins  

I really wish that one Arthur Gilmore Doyle hereafter Doyle since I refuse to play his three- name monte game like he was some Brahmin grandee out of the 19th century swilling us with his robber baron
Heritage, pedigree some kenneled championship dog would get a life, would get some gainful employment other than clipping coupons or whatever the progeny of the robber barons does these days. Apparently after he arose out of his dead faint when I explained that James Abbott McNeill Whistler (four-name Montes are okay as long as you are an artist, once) was paying homage to the Whore of Babylon when he had his girlfriend of the time standing in a white dress with a sexually suggestive wolf’s head under her feet in painting variously titled The White Girl, Symphony In White and Homage To My Current Whore, well maybe not the last one. You would have thought that I had committed something like a mortal sin for having pretended that this great artist was not above some very risqué symbolism back in the days when such signs had to be submerged in polite society to sell to those self-same robber barons by the American ex-patriate (and other artists as well)

The gist of Doyle’s argument beyond the now usual hosanna to the saintliness of every artist who put paint to brush back in the 19th century when his robber baron forbears started buying artworks to move into high culture was that I am no art critic. A fact. Real fact which I have been at pains to declare. Doyle then went through some litany of names Johns Ruskin, Clement Devine, Erasmus Land and a few others none of them who I knew from Adam. Nor need to know since what I am about here in this series is showing there are more than two ways to at look ta works of art-sublime and more sublime. Some of them, those other ways while not sublime a word that Doyle used repeatedly to describe what I find more erotic than anything else. In that sense I have staked out some territory that has included sex in the equation when it has been called for whatever prissy Doyle may think. Especially with a guy like Whistler who slept with every one of his models, every woman who crossed his path as far as I have been able to discover.

He was sex-addled, I had to smirk to myself when one critic mentioned that Brother Whistler had a heathy interest in woman, oh really, as well as probably was high half the time, it would be interesting to see what kind of drugs he was doing let’s say when he was painting the so-called Symphony in Gray and Black or Etude in Beige and Chartreuse. Here, and this is only speculation not hard evidence, I think from that low-rent paint he was using so no wonder he had strange ideas about women, had called poor Johanna, his Whole of Babylon a lot worse than I have tagged him with. Once the medics revive Doyle again I may have a solution to our impasse.  Here is my plan though which I think might be foolproof. I am moving on to 20th century artists specifically to Edward Hopper in this piece. Since Hopper did not have or use three names for his moniker, and everybody knows once you hit the 20th century even the most pristine abstract expressionists and advanced colorists know that it is all about sex and the unconscious desire to throw it on canvas I should be home free. So that should throw our man off the sense, get him off my ass.       

[Originally this is what I had to say about my plan which I have now scaled back. “So I have had enough of this. I have a plan, have been forced to devise a plan I think will work to keep Doyle off my ass. I have decided after three consecutive articles on 19th century painters which has caused me nothing but grief Doyle only being the most high-brow of the lot. You would not believe what vile things proper evangelicals full to the brim with Bible quotations and the like will utter in the anonymous cyberspace where troll-like they call home. For people who believe in repentance and forgiveness I have been shocked by the language and the vitriolic blasts I have had to endure for simply stating that even Renaissance guys, Leonardo, Fra this and that, definitely Botticelli when he was in his cups, Raphael when the turpentine high was on him only cared about subliminal ecstasy and rapture, ah, sex, when the deal went down. For that I am exiled from the Garden, forced to spend the time until End Times being flogged by dimwits-L.P.]  

Now to Hopper the eternal mope-the guy who pictured alienation in about seven different ways. Really more since every freaking painting is like stab to the heart of modernity like we don’t already have enough nonsense going on without a guy endlessly painting bummers and having real critics like Alice Faye, Clem Devine, Lance Little and a fistful of others yakking about the man and moment meeting in about 1925 when Hopper was in his prime, before he started taking up with womenfolk and seeing where that led. Here is the kick though later on in life after he graced his canvases with alienated and angst-ridden folk he started to think about morality about the great arch of life from birth to death as he reached the age when men and women start to think about their own mortality. No big deal just had a country scene, a big old white house near some forest put an older woman, frail, what did Alice Faye call her, yes, matronly and then a younger woman dressed for the season, summer season and all that means. Beautiful-life and death. Along that same line had  a self-conscious woman young in a summer dress looking cool as a cucumber except for an outsized hat which dwarfed her face looking like some latter-day Genghis Khan, ready to do battle with all to keep her place in the sum. But that was latter stuff, stuff I will detail more in another piece or two for today I want to get that Doyle off my case and need to stay with this alienation and angst business to get him to stop his cyber-madness. (I have no expectations on those troll-like angel pinheads calling End Times on me for we all have our collective crosses to bear, Christian or not).           

That is later stuff when he got into the swing of things, when he had already made a name for himself as the master of the alienated and angst-ridden modern set. Who can forget that famous, maybe too famous, Nighthawks at the Diner where some Joe and Nemo’s crowd is waiting for Godot or somebody after the bars closed for the night and they need a saucer full of coffee and grease-laden hamburgers to set their world right. They might as well have been at the Automat for all the interaction between the lonely people. How about that great dimly lit drugstore with the Ex-Lax (or is it Ex-Lac) saying more about the world than any people-populated piece even though that whole scene is filled with more menace than if he had put a jack-roller over in the back behind that searchlight-like street light. One more to draw my point. How about that famous, or infamous, painting down at the National Gallery, now mercifully reopened, with the two people looking for all the world like they were ready for divorce court and the dog looking like the happiest one of the lot since at least he will land on his feet. I could go on and on, but I think I have made my point about Hopper being the king of alienation and angst in the post-Freudian world.     
Naturally as I have done with the previous three artists looked at in this on-going series I have a special presentation, a scoop if you will about the why of Hopper’s mopery, why his people don’t smile. I have had access from the archives to his art school or whatever training he had and have found a very interesting discovery looking over some of his early facial drawings. Hopper, hold onto your hats, never learned to draw faces with people smiling, except maybe ironic closed-mouth smiles. Never could quite get the hang of people opening up their lips in order to smile, hell, or look like they were capable of talking. I thought I was dreaming but then I showed the specimens to Sam Lowell and he agreed that the closest Hopper got to a smile, to an open mouth was some early tooth-decayed grotesque done when he was an illustrator, something hideous which would not reflect modern life, modern angst.      



I am sure that Doyle could care less about such niceties and so I think I am home free, finally got him off my back. Without using the “s” word once in reference to Hopper. Still… 

Traipsing Through The Arts -Max Daddy Edward Hopper Unchained-In Defense Of Mope- All The Lonely People, Where Do They All Belong

Traipsing Through The Arts -Max Daddy Edward Hopper Unchained-In Defense Of Mope- All The Lonely People, Where Do They All Belong   




By Laura Perkins  

I really wish that one Arthur Gilmore Doyle hereafter Doyle since I refuse to play his three- name monte game like he was some Brahmin grandee out of the 19th century swilling us with his robber baron
Heritage, pedigree some kenneled championship dog would get a life, would get some gainful employment other than clipping coupons or whatever the progeny of the robber barons does these days. Apparently after he arose out of his dead faint when I explained that James Abbott McNeill Whistler (four-name Montes are okay as long as you are an artist, once) was paying homage to the Whore of Babylon when he had his girlfriend of the time standing in a white dress with a sexually suggestive wolf’s head under her feet in painting variously titled The White Girl, Symphony In White and Homage To My Current Whore, well maybe not the last one. You would have thought that I had committed something like a mortal sin for having pretended that this great artist was not above some very risqué symbolism back in the days when such signs had to be submerged in polite society to sell to those self-same robber barons by the American ex-patriate (and other artists as well)

The gist of Doyle’s argument beyond the now usual hosanna to the saintliness of every artist who put paint to brush back in the 19th century when his robber baron forbears started buying artworks to move into high culture was that I am no art critic. A fact. Real fact which I have been at pains to declare. Doyle then went through some litany of names Johns Ruskin, Clement Devine, Erasmus Land and a few others none of them who I knew from Adam. Nor need to know since what I am about here in this series is showing there are more than two ways to at look ta works of art-sublime and more sublime. Some of them, those other ways while not sublime a word that Doyle used repeatedly to describe what I find more erotic than anything else. In that sense I have staked out some territory that has included sex in the equation when it has been called for whatever prissy Doyle may think. Especially with a guy like Whistler who slept with every one of his models, every woman who crossed his path as far as I have been able to discover.

He was sex-addled, I had to smirk to myself when one critic mentioned that Brother Whistler had a heathy interest in woman, oh really, as well as probably was high half the time, it would be interesting to see what kind of drugs he was doing let’s say when he was painting the so-called Symphony in Gray and Black or Etude in Beige and Chartreuse. Here, and this is only speculation not hard evidence, I think from that low-rent paint he was using so no wonder he had strange ideas about women, had called poor Johanna, his Whole of Babylon a lot worse than I have tagged him with. Once the medics revive Doyle again I may have a solution to our impasse.  Here is my plan though which I think might be foolproof. I am moving on to 20th century artists specifically to Edward Hopper in this piece. Since Hopper did not have or use three names for his moniker, and everybody knows once you hit the 20th century even the most pristine abstract expressionists and advanced colorists know that it is all about sex and the unconscious desire to throw it on canvas I should be home free. So that should throw our man off the sense, get him off my ass.       

[Originally this is what I had to say about my plan which I have now scaled back. “So I have had enough of this. I have a plan, have been forced to devise a plan I think will work to keep Doyle off my ass. I have decided after three consecutive articles on 19th century painters which has caused me nothing but grief Doyle only being the most high-brow of the lot. You would not believe what vile things proper evangelicals full to the brim with Bible quotations and the like will utter in the anonymous cyberspace where troll-like they call home. For people who believe in repentance and forgiveness I have been shocked by the language and the vitriolic blasts I have had to endure for simply stating that even Renaissance guys, Leonardo, Fra this and that, definitely Botticelli when he was in his cups, Raphael when the turpentine high was on him only cared about subliminal ecstasy and rapture, ah, sex, when the deal went down. For that I am exiled from the Garden, forced to spend the time until End Times being flogged by dimwits-L.P.]  

Now to Hopper the eternal mope-the guy who pictured alienation in about seven different ways. Really more since every freaking painting is like stab to the heart of modernity like we don’t already have enough nonsense going on without a guy endlessly painting bummers and having real critics like Alice Faye, Clem Devine, Lance Little and a fistful of others yakking about the man and moment meeting in about 1925 when Hopper was in his prime, before he started taking up with womenfolk and seeing where that led. Here is the kick though later on in life after he graced his canvases with alienated and angst-ridden folk he started to think about morality about the great arch of life from birth to death as he reached the age when men and women start to think about their own mortality. No big deal just had a country scene, a big old white house near some forest put an older woman, frail, what did Alice Faye call her, yes, matronly and then a younger woman dressed for the season, summer season and all that means. Beautiful-life and death. Along that same line had  a self-conscious woman young in a summer dress looking cool as a cucumber except for an outsized hat which dwarfed her face looking like some latter-day Genghis Khan, ready to do battle with all to keep her place in the sum. But that was latter stuff, stuff I will detail more in another piece or two for today I want to get that Doyle off my case and need to stay with this alienation and angst business to get him to stop his cyber-madness. (I have no expectations on those troll-like angel pinheads calling End Times on me for we all have our collective crosses to bear, Christian or not).           

That is later stuff when he got into the swing of things, when he had already made a name for himself as the master of the alienated and angst-ridden modern set. Who can forget that famous, maybe too famous, Nighthawks at the Diner where some Joe and Nemo’s crowd is waiting for Godot or somebody after the bars closed for the night and they need a saucer full of coffee and grease-laden hamburgers to set their world right. They might as well have been at the Automat for all the interaction between the lonely people. How about that great dimly lit drugstore with the Ex-Lax (or is it Ex-Lac) saying more about the world than any people-populated piece even though that whole scene is filled with more menace than if he had put a jack-roller over in the back behind that searchlight-like street light. One more to draw my point. How about that famous, or infamous, painting down at the National Gallery, now mercifully reopened, with the two people looking for all the world like they were ready for divorce court and the dog looking like the happiest one of the lot since at least he will land on his feet. I could go on and on, but I think I have made my point about Hopper being the king of alienation and angst in the post-Freudian world.     
Naturally as I have done with the previous three artists looked at in this on-going series I have a special presentation, a scoop if you will about the why of Hopper’s mopery, why his people don’t smile. I have had access from the archives to his art school or whatever training he had and have found a very interesting discovery looking over some of his early facial drawings. Hopper, hold onto your hats, never learned to draw faces with people smiling, except maybe ironic closed-mouth smiles. Never could quite get the hang of people opening up their lips in order to smile, hell, or look like they were capable of talking. I thought I was dreaming but then I showed the specimens to Sam Lowell and he agreed that the closest Hopper got to a smile, to an open mouth was some early tooth-decayed grotesque done when he was an illustrator, something hideous which would not reflect modern life, modern angst.      

I am sure that Doyle could care less about such niceties and so I think I am home free, finally got him off my back. Without using the “s” word once in reference to Hopper. Still… 

*From The Archives- Anti-War Soldiers and Sailors Solidarity Committees- Propaganda Or Agitation?

Click on the title to link to an "American Left History" blog entry, dated December 5, 2007, and titled "Political Slogans and Timeliness- Anti-War Soldiers and Sailors Solidarity Committees" that is mentioned in today's entry.

Markin Comment:

Let me put the question posed by the title of this entry in context. In early 2006, during the height of the furor over the Cheney/ Bush Administration’s handling of the Iraq War, the circle of anti-war militants that I work with proposed a strategic plan aimed at creating support groups, the soldiers and sailors solidarity committees mentioned in the headline, for the growing discontent inside the military. Politically the committees were seen by us as a shortcut way to do effective anti-war work in the absence of any real movement by organized labor to take actions, like political strikes, to put a end to the war. And also as a way to galvanize support from those anti-war militants who were repelled by the flagging mainstream middle class-led anti-war movement that seemed to be bogged down in a dead-end strategy of ever more mass demonstrations (although conveniently, as those who track such things will note, not near election time). Seemingly, more time was spent looking for ways to avoid confronting the war issue on the streets as those leading various coalitions greedily eyed the then up-coming 2006 mid-term Congressional elections, and the prospects for electing "progressive" Democrats.

There has always been a distinction made in the revolutionary movement, and if the reader is not aware of it he or she should be, and in any case I will make it here, between the tasks that small ad hoc militant leftist groups can propose and carry out in their work and those of a mass labor party or organization. Thus, today, for instance, communists and other radicals are for the most part about the business of carrying out propaganda to small groups of interested militants in order to create a cadre ready to carry out the tasks necessary when our time comes. In 2006 our circle went beyond that. We carried out the propaganda for soldiers and sailors solidarity committees in the local and regional anti-war milieus but we also saw something of a unique opportunity to link up the civilian antiwar movement with what appeared to us to be some serious discontent in the military, and we agitated around the committee slogan.

What we were responding to, as had occurred in the general population, was a war-weariness on the part of a significant section of the soldiery, a questioning of the mission in the wake of the very serious tendency toward chaos in the internal political and military situation in Iraq, a disquiet about the mounting personal hardships, especially by those National Guard units that were being held over beyond their original tour of duty, and an overall physical weariness caused by repeated deployments. The tinder was there, if only for a short time. Moreover, the point that pushed us forward was contact with elements in the military that were looking for civilian support. Thus, for most of 2006 we not only carried out propaganda for soldiers and sailors solidarity committees but we actively agitated and built them, as well. Furthermore, our agitation included encouraging larger groups to form committees, and to make contact with military personal in their area and, most importantly, in Iraq. Thus within the limits of our resources and the time frame we were working in we carried out what overall was an fairly goo small scale agitational anti-war campaign.

As I have tried to telegraph above though this ability to agitate effectively only lasted until the Bush troop "surge" of 2007. Our anti-war military work, strangely enough, was one of the casualties of that surge. Our contacts dried up, other things got resolved inside the military that helped tamp down the discontent, and, candidly, the morale of the troops improved as they smelled "victory" with the new "surge" strategy. Thus, that opening closed down. Although we did low-level work around the issue the agitational campaign ended and the slogan of the soldiers and sailors committees went back to its original use as a propaganda tool. I wrote a blog entry in this space about that shift from agitation to propaganda, and timeliness in revolutionary politics in general. (See linked article above.)

All this background, hopefully, will help explain not only the title of this entry but why recently my circle has again started to put the question of organizing soldiers and sailors solidarity committees on the front burner for propaganda purposes. This is moreover no mere abstract question. After reviewing the previous work and its rationale one of the younger, and newer, members of the circle questioned why we were reviving the slogan. Good point.

We have repeated projected that this Afghan war, and its future escalations, will be a big and permanent albatross around the neck of Barack Obama during the life of his presidency, especially from those people on his left that we want to, no, have to, talk to today. However, we also note that there is little manifestation of an anti-Obama backlash from that quarter today, although there are certainly murmurs of some inarticulate discontent. Moreover, there is nothing, at least nothing that we can grab on to, happening with the soldiers and sailors on duty now. So why the emergence of the slogan again, even if only for propaganda purposes? Well, that goes to one of the lessons that we learned from the 2006 experience.

I have recently (see blog entry for January 23), and have on many earlier occasions in this space, noted both my own background in anti-war military work and that such work is hard, tough work. One of the biggest initial hurdles is making those first contacts AND then winning through actions over time the trust of the soldiery. Our circle has come to a consensus, and rightly so I think, that we were actually too late in starting our work in 2006, that early or mid-2005 would have placed us in better position to make a bigger splash. So while this slogan is a propaganda point right now, we are making it today to get those connections going. For others, to whom this entry is really directed, and who are interested in this strategy start thinking along those lines. Also check the Fort Hood, Fort Lewis and Fort Drum G.I. Coffee House links on this profile page for further orientation. Not one penny, not one person for Obama’s wars! For soldiers and sailors anti-war solidarity committees! Immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied troops and mercenaries from Iraq and Afghanistan!

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor 1920s German Left Communist Leader Karl Korsch-Lenin and the Comintern (1924)

Markin comment:

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. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

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.
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Karl Korsch 1924

Lenin and the Comintern (1924)

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First Published: in Internationale, 1924
Translated by Roy Jameson
Source: Class Against Class;
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, for marxists.org 2009;


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I
The first item on the agenda of the Fifth World Congress of the Communist International reads: "Lenin and the Comintern. On the Basic Principles and Propaganda of Leninism." This indicates not only a commitment by the Congress to the spirit of Leninism and a widely perceivable declaration of the will of the participants to solve all questions which stand before them in the spirit of true Leninism. This does not merely indicate that particular problems which have entered into the focal point of the struggle in the last year of the Communist International in Central and Western Europe, and which appear later on in the agenda, should be taken care of from the beginning before the analysis of the economic situation which fills out its second item. Certainly the most important task of the present developmental period of the Communist International, among all of the tasks of the Central and West European and American Communists, consists in the task assigned us by Lenin: "conquering the majority of the most important strata of the working classes." Moreover, this task which is not yet resolved can only be truly solved in the spirit of Leninism: that is, concretely in the spirit of those "consequences" which Lenin derived in a most impressive manner at the end of his classic writing on Radicalism-the infantile sickness of communism-out of the history of the Russian Bolsheviks and out of the experiences of the European parties. "The main task of contemporary communism in Western Europe and America" lies today, in the year 1924, just as Lenin expressed it four years ago, after three years of the so-called united front tactics, now even more obviously than then, in "finding, feeling, and realizing the concrete plan of the not yet entirely revolutionary measures and methods which will lead the masses to a real, decisive, last great revolutionary struggle." But the solution of this practical main task of the Leninists is relevant to an entire row of items on the agenda, and no single one in particular, and only in this sense does it also serve all other tasks with this first item, which speaks of the "Fundamentals and Propaganda of Leninism." It comes down to the following: Today the entire Comintern, after the shattering event of the death of its great founder and leader, V. I. Lenin, can now first show, and must, that it is able and willing to take on the inheritance of Lenin, both theoretically and ideologically, to preserve, to enliven, and to further develop in the present situation the "spirit" of Lenin in its theory and praxis as historical reality, as Leninism. Thus in this manner the Comintern must replace the dead Lenin in his theoretical ideological function through a large powerful collective of living Leninists.[1]

In setting "Lenin and the Comintern" on the agenda of the Fifth World Congress, the executive committee has declared before the entire world that towards the fulfillment of this great task-a wholly colossal task that has never before in world history been set before a party in this form-not only the natural main inheritors of Lenin, the Russian Bolshevik party, but all the other sections of our great Communist party, the Communist International, should theoretically and practically work together. And the Congress itself will have to take the first important steps down this path; its task will be, clearly and completely and in detail, to formulate the slogans of the "Propaganda of Leninism" (which in the agenda are only indeterminately indicated) in a manner valid for the entire Comintern; to point each section of the International to the particularly important individual tasks according to their situation and their state of development, and to determine the larger guiding principles by which the solution of all these tasks is to be carried out.

But the importance of the first item on the agenda of the Fifth World Congress extends much further. One should make clear to oneself that with the closer determination of the manifold partial tasks out of which the "Propaganda of Leninism" is composed, the Congress will have taken a position with regard to the question of "Leninism" only according to the, if we may express it so, technical side, Obviously, this technical side of the question also has an inordinately large importance: The "Propaganda of Leninism" constitutes an important part of the great Communist total task of the "Organization of the Revolution." And, of course the fulfillment of precisely this propagandistic task shows itself to be in those sections of the Communist International which have not yet won state power (that is, therefore, in all European and American sections already under legal, but probably at first under illegal conditions) inordinately more difficult than in the proletarian Soviet Union. In those lands it will therefore, for the most part, have to take on entirely different forms-exactly conforming to the particular situation of each land - which by all means need a more precise explication and determination through the highest organ of the Communist International, the world Congress, But these more or less technical questions comprise in no way the kernel of the matter.

In reality the method of the Bolshevik theory as such is placed on the agenda by the inclusion of the question, "Lenin and the Comintern, On the Fundamentals and the Propaganda of Leninism." Through the clarification of the “Basic Principles of Leninism," and the development of a system of Leninistic propaganda based on these principles in all sections of the Communist International, the entire Comintern should be smelted ideologically into one firm unity, on the common basis of the revolutionary Marxian method in that form which the theoretician of Bolshevism Lenin, "restored" it and oppose it to the falsification and confusions of the so-called Marxists of the united Second International. The third item of the agenda, the Program of the Communist International, as well as the method of our revolutionary Bolshevist theory, is placed before debate in the question of "Leninism."

II
Will the Fifth World Congress be able to solve this immensely important, but at the same time immensely difficult task? Will it be able to formulate the methodological fundamentals of Leninism so sharply and correctly that a methodical and systematic Leninistic propaganda can be constructed on this basis? Will the process of ideological unification within the Communist International have progressed enough to allow all sections and groups of the Comintern to unite in a commitment to one theoretical method which in its essential features is identical for all?

Here immense difficulties arise which nearly exclude a radical solution of the task. On the one hand, we cannot yet at all speak of a unitary commitment in the various sections of the Communist International, and particularly in the German Communist party, to "Leninism" as "the" sole valid method of Marxian theory. On the other hand, in relation to the question, in what the essence of "Leninism" as a method consists, (even among those who count themselves as Leninist), there exist presently several views which depart from one another in essential features. A large number of leading and other Marxian theoreticians who belong to the organization of the Communist International and are prepared in their practical politics to act "according to Lenin," soundly reject in theory the principle of the method of Lenin as "the" restored method of "scientific Marxism." They recognize the Leninist method as one method of orientation, sufficient for the practical-political purposes of the proletarian class struggle in the present period (that is, in a period which in international scope and in European and American national scope, does not yet represent the period of the seizure of political power) - but do not recognize it as the most concrete and truest method of materialistic dialectics, as the restored method of revolutionary Marxism. For them the valid method is either the method of the founder of the German Communist party, Rosa Luxemburg, or they declare the Leninist as well as the Luxemburgian method to be one-sided, and want to recognize only the method applied by Karl Marx in his scientific period of maturity as the true Marxian method. It is not possible in this short essay to even begin a thorough debate with these absolute opponents of the Leninist method (as one, or "the" method of scientific Marxism). This task shall be taken up in the following issues of this journal in the collective work of as large a circle of Communist theoreticians as possible. For the present we suffice ourselves with the observation that the political praxis of Bolshevism and the restored form of revolutionary Marxian theory (by Lenin) builds such an indivisible cohesive whole that we are not able to see how, for example, one can bring it about to take, in regard to the role of the Communist party for the proletarian revolution, as "practical politician," the Communist standpoint on the resolution of the Second World Congress, and simultaneously as "scientific Marxist" to comprehend the relationship between the economic development and the proletarian class struggle in the specific Luxumburgian form of the dialectical materialist method. It seems to us that solely from the standpoint of the wholly "materialistic" materialism of Marx, "restored" by Lenin and advanced one step further, which also comprehends human sensuous activity and praxis as such in its objectifying reality, can the Bolshevist version of the "role of the party" be recognized. On the other hand, from the standpoint of the Luxemburgian dialectic, which on its practical side is not nearly so "materialistic" a dialectic as the Leninist one, there is always a painful remnant of "subjectivism," as regards the Leninist account of the role of the party. But be this as it may, so much seems clear: a resolution on the "Basic principles of Leninism," and a system of "Leninist Propaganda," which could be collectively agreed upon at the Fifth World Congress by Luxemburgian and Leninistic Marxists (to this must be added, thirdly, those Marxists who recognize neither the Luxernburgian further development nor the Leninistic restoration of the Marxian method as genuine and complete Marxism) would unavoidably remain just as unsatisfactory as a Communist program overwhelmingly agreed upon by these same theoreticians for the entire Communist International. The complete clarification of the relation between the Luxemburgian and the Leninistic methods of Marxian theory comprises the indispensable presuppositions for the determination of the "Basic Principles and Propaganda of Leninism."

Irrespective of the conflict between the Luxemburgians and the Leninists, there exists no general agreement today on the question of the essence of Leninism as a theoretical method; or stronger, this agreement exists today even less than previously. And it is also entirely understandable that, at a time when as the consequence of an acute crisis the most important questions of Bolshevik praxis have become the object of a bitter factional controversy, the question of the theoretical method of Leninism has also to be pulled into the maelstrom of the struggle, for the methodological consciousness of a Marxian-Communist party does not stand outside of, or in any sense above, the praxis of the party, but rather builds an important constituent of this revolutionary praxis itself. We should therefore not wonder that we find again in the presently undertaken attempts at a determination of the methods of Leninist dialectics-undertaken by various sides-all the factions which today also practically oppose one another in the struggle over tactics and other practical-political questions inside the Comintern. Particularly interesting in this regard is an essay by the comrade Thalheimer, "On the Application of the Materialistic Dialectic by Lenin in Some Questions of the Proletarian Revolution," which appeared in volumes 1/2 of the new Communist journal Arbeiterliteratur.

III
Comrade Thalheimer wants to explicate the Leninist method, which according to him is nothing but the same Marxist method of materialist dialectics which Lenin applied with the same boldness and with the same foresight and exactness as Marx himself. He shall do this by the development of three particular questions: the question of proletarian dictatorship; the agrarian question, and the question of the nationalist and imperialist wars. The section on the question of the dictatorship ends with the statement that Lenin characterized the Soviet form of the state not as "the finally discovered political form" of the dictatorship of the working class, but rather only as "a new type" of state in which the possibility of deviating "species, varieties, forms" of this type is contained. The section on the agrarian question explains that Lenin, by his treatment of this question, has given "a particularly instructive and exact application of the materialist-dialectical method." (This application consists, according to Thalheimer's portrayal, in the fact that Lenin, in order to save the kernel of the matter of the proletarian revolution-that is, the transfer of the political power to the proletariat-allowed to let fall all "rigid" demands of the previous Bolshevist agrarian program and trust that in the course of "life" everything else would find itself "by itself" "as the result of the power of example, as the result of practical considerations.") In the third and last section Comrade Thalheimer characterizes Lenin's treatment of the national question as "a true model of concrete dialectical analysis." For Lenin, on the one hand, critically destroyed the falsifications of social patriotism, and on the other hand also stressed that under certain conditions even in Europe during the World War the transformation of the imperialist war into a nationalist war would be to be sure, "not probable" but was certainly nonetheless "theoretically not impossible."

It lies far from us to want to stand back even by one hair's breadth from the admiration with which Comrade Thalheimer appraises Lenin's solution to these three important and difficult questions. We must, however, very seriously raise this question: To what extent has Lenin in his treatment of these questions as portrayed by Comrade Thalheimer given such "particularly" instructive and exact model examples of the application of the materialist method of Marxism? In what, for example, consists the particularly instructive and exact use of the materialist dialectical method in the Leninist approach to the agrarian question? Karl Marx also, as is known, recognized the capability of the revolutionary class, as soon as they had raised themselves, "to find immediately in their own situation the content and the material of their revolutionary activity: to strike down enemies, to seize measures given by the need of war, to carry forward the consequences of their own deeds. They set no theoretical undertakings above their own tasks" (Class Struggles in France, Dietzsche edition, p. 31). The theoreticians and practitioners of the Russian Revolution could trust in the middle of the struggle to the immanent, unconscious and natural dialectic with the same right which permeates in "life" and in the revolutionary class struggle as a part of this life "from itself." But does he apply the dialectical method here, precisely where he (to speak with Marx) "denies theoretical undertakings"? Does he apply the dialectic thereby in a "particularly instructive" and "particularly exact" form?

We suggest, rather, that to the contrary, precisely the position is reached where the highly developed materialist dialectic, which according to its conception of the historical process of the proletarian revolution should be fully comprehended, reaches its limit, where the concrete historical process in its material living reality, to be sure, proceeds dialectically but at a certain point in the course of its process cannot be grasped by the dialectician, It belongs to the requirements of an exact theory of the Marxian method not to ignore the existence of this limit; but it is already too much when one wants precisely to see in this the actual kernel of the "materialist dialectics" of Marx and Lenin. Similarly, although in another way, Comrade Thalheimer constructs his two other chosen examples of Lenin's application of the Marxian method in a way which certainly belong to a true materialism, and in no sense to any metaphysical methodology, but nonetheless, for heaven's sake, does not make up the innermost essence of this dialectical materialist method, the main feature and the kernel of materialism, of Marxism and Leninism generally. And to this distortion of the essence of the Marxist-Leninist method, which he accomplishes concretely in his three examples, he further adds, in the introduction and in scattered remarks in his essay, an equally contorted general theory of the essence of this method. He exaggerates the Marxian basic principle that the truth is always concrete into the caricature that the results of materialist dialectical thought in Lenin as well as Marx could not at all, never, and in no form generally be valid beyond the momentary realm of experience out of which it is derived and for which it is determined-as if Marx (e.g, in his letter to Michailowski) and Lenin (e.g., in the introduction to "Radicalism," which has the subtitle: "In what form can one speak of the international importance of the Russian Revolution?") had not very exactly distinguished between those results of their materialist dialectical research which have such general importance and those which do not. What then is a "materialistic-dialectical" method worth which gives us nothing more than that which in some sense reaches out beyond the already known present experience? Or further, as Thalheimer expresses it, brings forth nothing more than historical results, on the one side theoretical reflections (!), analysis of a particular time, on the other only guidelines for the struggle of the proletariat, "likewise in a particular time"?

In reality this new method, created by Comrade Thalheimer and transformed out of the Marxist-Leninist materialist dialectic, has nothing more to do with the materialist dialectics. In his efforts to grasp the materialist methodology of Marx and Lenin totally "materially," as a method of a pure historical science of experience and practice, Comrade Thalheimer has already overstepped the limits of that which one can call materialist dialectics, and has achieved a completely undialectical historicism, positivism, and practicism. While Rosa Luxemburg, as we have indicated above, in her version of human praxis has not wholly become materialistic, and in this one respect has remained a Hegelian dialectician, Comrade Thalheimer, on the contrary, has driven out with the remains of the Hegelian dialectic at the same time everything dialectical in the methodology of Marxian science; the materialist dialectical method of Marx, which essentially is the concrete comprehension of the proletarian revolution as historical process and as a historical action of the proletarian class, transforms itself in Thalheimer into a merely passive, ideological "reflection" of solitary historical factuality’s diverse in time and place.

This theoretical falsification of the essence of the Marxist-Leninist dialectical method leads practically to a devaluation of all the results won by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and others through these methods. And it is fairly easy to see where this tendency towards the devaluation of the results of the Marxist-Leninist research method has come from and where it leads. Let us take the example, repeated a hundred times by Thalheimer that the Soviet state is characterized by Lenin only as a type with possible varieties and species. One can devalue the results of the Marxist-Leninist methodology so much only when one, whether consciously or unconsciously, wants to disengage oneself from these results. The conception of the Soviet state, as only one type of proletarian dictatorship, with a multiplicity of possible forms, makes it possible for the theoretician of "Leninism" to disengage himself from the "rigid" form of the council dictatorship (which is, according to Lenin, capable of further development, but is even so, "the" beginning of "the" socialistic form, of democracy!) and reach the various possible "species, varieties" and degenerations of this "type," for example, the Saxony "workers' government." And likewise with all other "results" of the Marxist and Leninist theory. If they all are purely "historical creations," bound to their particular historical presuppositions, applicable only to the relation of a particular time and land, then it is self-evident that under new relations, against new experiences, and changed political needs all of these previous "results" of Marxism would lose their validity and could and must be replaced by new knowledge and guidelines, in which these new situations now "are reflected" for the "Leninist" application of the materialist dialectic. In transforming the revolutionary dialectical materialism of Marx and Lenin into a no longer dialectical and therefore also no longer revolutionary (and the converse: no longer revolutionary and thus also no longer dialectical), purely historical, empirical science and practice, Comrade Thalheimer posits under the seductive clothing of "Leninism" actually a method which by tendency is opportunistic and reformistic in place of the revolutionary method of Marxism.

IV
We have treated Thalheimer's conception of the Leninist method with such detail not only because Comrade Thalheimer has been named as the second speaker on the "question of the program" at the Fifth World Congress, and thus for that reason will be heard at the Congress with particular attention on the question of the essence of Leninism as methodology. More importantly, it was crucial to show by a typical example, in detail and clearly, that the attempt of a determination of the "Basic Principles of Leninism," and particularly a fixing of the essence of the Leninist method at the Fifth World Congress is hound up not only with great present difficulties, but beyond this also with certain dangers which are all the greater in so far as they remain very much unrecognized and unwatched precisely in this seemingly purely theoretical region, far removed from the practical struggle of the factions. Recently there have been attempts to smuggle in under the revered, revolutionary flag of "Leninism," various revisionistic, reformistic, opportunistic and liquidating contraband in the praxis and the theory of revolutionary communism. And in its innermost foundation the theory of Leninist method which Thalheimer has now formulated signifies only a false theory of a false political praxis. Just as the opportunist and reformist united front tactic is related to the revolutionary method of agitation and mass mobilization applied in Germany since the Leipzig Party Congress, so does the "Leninist" method of Thalheimer and his close comrades relate to the genuine method of revolutionary Leninism, that is to the dialectical method of revolutionary Marxism completed and restored by Lenin. The Fifth World Congress, in the explication of the fundamentals of this position, will have to erect particular protective walls against the rising flood of communist revisionism in the questions of the program and in the question of the Basic Principles of Leninism, just as with all other, immediately practical questions of Communist politics. By the fulfillment of this negative function it can powerfully counteract the threatening collapse of the completed method of revolutionary Marxist science restored by Lenin, which in its essence is nothing other than the theoretical consciousness of the revolutionary actions of the proletarian class. For a positive fixation of the essence of Leninism as method, the present moment in the development of the Comintern is just as little appropriate as for the fixation of a final Communist program, valid for an entire epoch of Communist politics.

Note

[1] More on this can be found in the last section of Zinoviev's essay, "V. I. Lenin--Genius, Teacher, Leader, and Human," nos. 31/32 of KI, and in a special essay by Bela Kun, "The Propaganda of Leninism," in no. 33.


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