Friday, June 24, 2011
Permanent US Iraq and Afghanistan Occupations Planned
Permanent US Iraq and Afghanistan Occupations Planned - by Stephen Lendman
Nothing reveals Washington's imperial agenda better than its global empire of bases. Sixty-six years post-WW II, America maintains dozens in Germany, Japan, Italy, and South Korea alone.
In total, known Pentagon bases way exceed 1,000, as well as perhaps hundreds of other shared and secret ones in about 150 countries on every continent despite no enemies anywhere justifying them.
In his 2006 book, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic," Chalmers Johnson discussed the known numbers at the time by size and branch of service. He also highlighted the fallout, including oppressive noise, pollution, environmental destruction, expropriation of valuable public and private land, and drunken, disorderly, abusive soldiers committing rape, murder, and other crimes, often unpunished under provisions of US-imposed Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs).
Currently, Pentagon bases infest Middle East/North African/Central Asian countries. In fact, at least 88 dot Iraq alone, including:
-- permanent, city-sized Main Operating Bases (MOBs); for example, Balad Air Base in northern Iraq covers 16 square miles plus another 12-mile security perimeter; these are large and permanent, have extensive infrastructure, command and control headquarters, accommodations for families in combat-free areas, hospitals, schools, recreational facilities, and nearly everything found in US cities; similar MOBs include Camp Adder in southern Iraq, Al-Asad Air Base in the west, and Victory Base Complex, compromising nine bases, including Camp Victory around Baghdad's International Airport;
-- Forward Operating Sites (FOSs), also major but smaller than MOBs; and
-- Cooperative Security Locations (CLSs) - smaller facilities to preposition weapons, munitions, and modest troop numbers.
These type bases span Afghanistan, besides ongoing expansion and construction of major facilities for permanent occupation.
Known major sites include Bagram, Kandahar, and Mazar-e-Sharif air bases. Frontline airfields include Herat, Jalalabad, and a dozen or more others, besides hundreds of large and smaller Pentagon facilities according to Tomdispatch.com writer Nick Turse in his February 10, 2010 article titled, "Totally Occupied: 700 Military Bases Spread Across Afghanistan."
Citing "official sources," he said a "base-building boom" began in 2009 for US and Afghan forces. It's ongoing for permanent occupation, including a new Camp Leatherneck and Camp Bastion 11,500 foot all-weather concrete/asphalt runway and air traffic control tower, as well as a Shindand Air Field 9,000 foot runway completed last December. Moreover, spare parts and other supplies have been stockpiled for permanency, not departure, Obama's withdrawal duplicity notwithstanding. More about it below.
Washington, in fact, came to Iraq and Afghanistan to stay. Doing so confirms a hostile presence occupied populations detest, including angry South Koreans and Japanese against continued US occupation. In less developed countries, social movements want America pushed back or expelled altogether to regain their sovereign independence, free from US imperial wars, injustice, fallout, and shame when their own nations participate.
Last February, puppet president Karzai confirmed Washington's demand for permanent bases, claiming they're in Afghanistan's interest. In fact, US and other NATO leaders agreed on a "transition strategy" last year in Lisbon to hand over control to Afghan forces by 2014. At the time, vice president Biden called it a "drop dead date." He lied. So did Obama like he did earlier, saying withdrawing US forces would begin in July 2011.
In December 2009, Obama announced 30,000 more troops for Afghanistan to enable withdrawals beginning in 18 months, insisting at the time America has no permanent occupation plans. He lied again like he's repeatedly done throughout his tenure, knowing America came to Iraq and Afghanistan to stay.
Moreover, when he took office in January 2009, 34,000 troops were in Afghanistan. By December, he tripled the number to 100,000. Cutting back incrementally by a third if, in fact, done, will still leave double the force in place from when his tenure began.
Nonetheless, on June 22, he addressed the nation, saying:
"(S)tarting next month, we will be able to remove 10,000 of our troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year, and we will bring home a total of 33,000 by next summer (to let) Afghan security forces (take) the lead. Our mission will change from combat to support. By 2014, this process of transition will be complete...."
False! A large US presence will remain permanently. Drone and other air attacks will continue, killing civilians called militants. Obama's duplicity is politically motivated with November 2012 in mind to assure enough support for reelection despite falling approval ratings.
War-weary Americans, in fact, are increasingly burdened during economic hard times. As a result, polls show growing opposition to conflicts. Congressman Dennis Kucinich said "Things are falling apart at home while we (keep) searching the world looking for dragons to slay."
Pollster Peter Brown added:
"I do not think there is any doubt (that) Afghanistan, the involvement in Iraq, and now (in) Libya has for many Americans raised questions about the wisdom of these policies."
The Brookings Institution's Stephen Hess explained that "(a) trio of wars is not exactly what Americans are interested in at this time when they have a very full platter of problems at home," harming them gravely.
In fact, when unpopular wars take precedence over pocket book issues, people react angrily, perhaps enough to deny Obama a second term if conditions deteriorate more between now and November 2012.
Obama also bogusly claimed significant Afghanistan gains, saying "we've inflicted serious losses on the Taliban and taken a number of its strongholds....(T)he tide of war is receding (and) the light of a secure peace can be seen in the distance" when it's nowhere in sight in an endless cauldron of death and destruction, affecting US forces like Afghans.
In fact, according to a US Army colonel wishing to remain anonymous, telling Time magazine:
"The mendacity is getting so egregious that I am fast losing the ability to remain quiet. These yarns of 'significant progress' are being covered up by the blood and limbs of hundreds - HUNDREDS - of American uniformed service members each and every month, and you know that the rest of this summer is going to see the peak of that bloodshed."
He added that America's ability to achieve a secure handover to Afghan forces is "sheer madness, and so far as I can tell, in the mainstream media and reputable publications, it is going almost entirely without challenge." Moreover, the same holds for Pakistan where drone kills enrage people to resist, perpetuating endless conflict.
After a decade of war and occupation, in fact, America won't admit it lost and leave. Instead, massive bloodshed continues to create the illusion of progress Obama hopes will help reelect him, mindless that what matters most are pocket book issues, especially when during hard times they go begging.
June 7 - 9 Zogby International polling numbers reflect growing voter disapproval, showing 43% approve Obama's performance. Only 38% say he deserves reelection. Besides domestic issues, it reflects growing disenchantment with endless wars, including against Libya that most Americans oppose.
Once closer to November 2012, force-fed austerity to finance them may cost sitting politicians their jobs, even Obama if voters think he spurned them when they most need help. For beleaguered Iraqis and Afghans, however, it hardly matters if America came to stay.
A Final Comment
Controlling Eurasia's vast oil and gas reserves explains why America plans permanent Iraq and Afghanistan occupations, terror bombs Libya, and heads toward possible general war by threatening Syria, Iran, and perhaps other states to fuel its insatiable military-industrial appetite.
Washington's strategy also includes encroaching close to Russian and Chinese borders to diminish their military and economic challenge, as well as potential greater dominance by establishing closer ties, thereby weakening America.
The policy is fraught with dangers, the same ones Barbara Tuchman explained in her 1962 book, "The Guns of August," on how WW I began and its early weeks. Once started, things spun out of control with cataclysmic consequences, including over 20 million dead, many millions wounded, and a generation of young men lost before it ended.
As a result, igniting another global conflict should give everyone pause, including militarists and war profiteers sacrificing sanity, security, and prosperity for inconsequential ephemeral gains by comparison.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
posted by Steve Lendman @ 1:01 AM
Showing posts with label social democracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social democracy. Show all posts
Friday, June 24, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
From The Renegade Eye Blog-"The fall of Strauss-Kahn"
The fall of Strauss-Kahn
Written by Greg Oxley in Paris
Thursday, 19 May 2011
How the mighty have fallen! Whatever the truth of the allegations of sexual assault and rape brought against him in New York, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is guilty of horrific crimes. As the head of the IMF, he is guilty of the political rape of the working people and the poorest sections of society in many underdeveloped countries. He is guilty of the rape of Greece and Portugal. Before finding himself in prison, he contributed to locking millions of people into a living hell. His brutal “remedies” inflict suffering and hardship on the poor in order to protect the interests of the bankers, the capitalists, the rich.
There is absolutely nothing “socialist” about Dominique Strauss-Kahn. At the time of his arrest, he was on his way to Europe to finalise the austerity measures to be imposed on Portugal and also discuss plans with Sarkozy and Merkel for new attacks on pensions and public spending cuts throughout the “eurozone”. For Greece, he demanded a draconian policy of public spending cuts, wage cuts, sackings, attacks on pensions and benefits, and privatisations. The Papandreou government carried out the policy, but not fast enough for Strauss-Kahn. He sent his emissaries to Greece to insist on speeding up the privatisations and the attacks on workers’ living standards. This was the only way, he said, to restore the confidence of capitalist investors.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn was not only Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. If opinion polls are to be believed, he was also the “favourite” for the presidential elections next year in France. He was certainly a “favourite” of the capitalist class! No efforts have been spared to promote the image and build support for “DSK”. The intention behind this campaign was quite clear. The capitalists wanted to secure his nomination as the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party. Of all the “left” candidates, the media told us, he was in the best position to defeat Sarkozy. This was a classic case of manipulation of public opinion with a view to national elections. In 2007, the media industry promoted Ségolène Royal, one of the most blatantly pro-capitalist of the leading figures in the Socialist Party, and then, once she had won the nomination, turned against her and campaigned to ensure victory for Sarkozy. In the event that the SP had won the elections, the capitalists would have a reliable representative in power, whose policies were almost identical to those of Sarkozy himself. Now, after four years in power, Sarkozy is discredited, and a victory for the Socialist Party in the 2012 election is a real possibility. The capitalist class wanted to ensure that whatever the result of the elections, the government would be in the hands of proven defenders of their interests. They counted on Strauss-Kahn as a man who, at the head of a “socialist” government, would apply the same reactionary policies in France as he applied to Greece, and who would firmly resist pressure “from below” to carry out measures in the interests of the workers. Now Strauss-Kahn is out of the picture, and possibly for a long time. His downfall has delighted working class militants throughout France.
Written by Greg Oxley in Paris
Thursday, 19 May 2011
How the mighty have fallen! Whatever the truth of the allegations of sexual assault and rape brought against him in New York, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is guilty of horrific crimes. As the head of the IMF, he is guilty of the political rape of the working people and the poorest sections of society in many underdeveloped countries. He is guilty of the rape of Greece and Portugal. Before finding himself in prison, he contributed to locking millions of people into a living hell. His brutal “remedies” inflict suffering and hardship on the poor in order to protect the interests of the bankers, the capitalists, the rich.
There is absolutely nothing “socialist” about Dominique Strauss-Kahn. At the time of his arrest, he was on his way to Europe to finalise the austerity measures to be imposed on Portugal and also discuss plans with Sarkozy and Merkel for new attacks on pensions and public spending cuts throughout the “eurozone”. For Greece, he demanded a draconian policy of public spending cuts, wage cuts, sackings, attacks on pensions and benefits, and privatisations. The Papandreou government carried out the policy, but not fast enough for Strauss-Kahn. He sent his emissaries to Greece to insist on speeding up the privatisations and the attacks on workers’ living standards. This was the only way, he said, to restore the confidence of capitalist investors.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn was not only Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. If opinion polls are to be believed, he was also the “favourite” for the presidential elections next year in France. He was certainly a “favourite” of the capitalist class! No efforts have been spared to promote the image and build support for “DSK”. The intention behind this campaign was quite clear. The capitalists wanted to secure his nomination as the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party. Of all the “left” candidates, the media told us, he was in the best position to defeat Sarkozy. This was a classic case of manipulation of public opinion with a view to national elections. In 2007, the media industry promoted Ségolène Royal, one of the most blatantly pro-capitalist of the leading figures in the Socialist Party, and then, once she had won the nomination, turned against her and campaigned to ensure victory for Sarkozy. In the event that the SP had won the elections, the capitalists would have a reliable representative in power, whose policies were almost identical to those of Sarkozy himself. Now, after four years in power, Sarkozy is discredited, and a victory for the Socialist Party in the 2012 election is a real possibility. The capitalist class wanted to ensure that whatever the result of the elections, the government would be in the hands of proven defenders of their interests. They counted on Strauss-Kahn as a man who, at the head of a “socialist” government, would apply the same reactionary policies in France as he applied to Greece, and who would firmly resist pressure “from below” to carry out measures in the interests of the workers. Now Strauss-Kahn is out of the picture, and possibly for a long time. His downfall has delighted working class militants throughout France.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
From The Bob Feldman Blog- Music To While Away The Class Struggle By-"Eugene Debs"
From The Bob Feldman Blog- Music To While Away The Class Struggle By-"Eugene Debs"
From the American Left Historyblog:
*The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs- Professor Currie's View
BOOK REVIEW
Eugene V. Debs, Harold W. Currie, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1976
Every January militants of the left wing of the international labor movement, the European sections more than the American, honor the Three L’s, the key leaders of the movement in the early 20th century- Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Since opening this space in early 2006 I have paid individual honor to all three in successive years. In that same spirit for this year’s, and for future January observances, I will highlight some other lesser figures of the revolutionary pantheon or those who contributed in some way to the development of this movement, mainly American at first as befits the title of this blog but eventually others in the international movement as well. This year’s first honoree was the Trotskyist founder and organization leader James P. Cannon. Cannon represented that first American generation who formed the core of cadre directly influenced to the left by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Here I take a step back to the pre-World War I period and honor probably the most well-known socialist of that period, Eugene V. Debs.
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature o the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed ‘root and branch’ and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, as is very well described in this little book, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Professor Currie has here done the very valuable service of outlining the highlights of Debs’ political career and of his inner ideological turmoil for those who need a short course on what set Debs, above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. The professor makes clear that his is a political profile and not the extensive detailed informational one of traditional biography. For that, if one is so inclined in that direction after reading this primer, then it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests’ of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state.
For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). Professor Currie details this transformation very nicely, including the seemingly inevitable thrashing about that every political person does when a politically transformative experience occurs. In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the ‘hippie’ experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day.
The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. Professor Currie goes into some detail here about the demands on these campaigns personally on the aging Debs and of the internal political oppositions to his candidacies. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially, as the good professor as noted, since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920. Professor Currie does a good job here giving the narrative of the basis of his conviction, the tenor of the times, the appeals process and his eventual release by President Harding.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, esoterica and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Professor Currie, and not he alone among academic students of Debs, has pointed out that Debs had a life long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialism movement have shown sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Professor Currie also has several sections at the end of his book on Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinism argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal page his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. That said, Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, gets a fair exposition here. And should get a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
From the American Left Historyblog:
*The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs- Professor Currie's View
BOOK REVIEW
Eugene V. Debs, Harold W. Currie, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1976
Every January militants of the left wing of the international labor movement, the European sections more than the American, honor the Three L’s, the key leaders of the movement in the early 20th century- Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Since opening this space in early 2006 I have paid individual honor to all three in successive years. In that same spirit for this year’s, and for future January observances, I will highlight some other lesser figures of the revolutionary pantheon or those who contributed in some way to the development of this movement, mainly American at first as befits the title of this blog but eventually others in the international movement as well. This year’s first honoree was the Trotskyist founder and organization leader James P. Cannon. Cannon represented that first American generation who formed the core of cadre directly influenced to the left by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Here I take a step back to the pre-World War I period and honor probably the most well-known socialist of that period, Eugene V. Debs.
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature o the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed ‘root and branch’ and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, as is very well described in this little book, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Professor Currie has here done the very valuable service of outlining the highlights of Debs’ political career and of his inner ideological turmoil for those who need a short course on what set Debs, above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. The professor makes clear that his is a political profile and not the extensive detailed informational one of traditional biography. For that, if one is so inclined in that direction after reading this primer, then it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests’ of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state.
For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). Professor Currie details this transformation very nicely, including the seemingly inevitable thrashing about that every political person does when a politically transformative experience occurs. In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the ‘hippie’ experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day.
The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. Professor Currie goes into some detail here about the demands on these campaigns personally on the aging Debs and of the internal political oppositions to his candidacies. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially, as the good professor as noted, since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920. Professor Currie does a good job here giving the narrative of the basis of his conviction, the tenor of the times, the appeals process and his eventual release by President Harding.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, esoterica and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Professor Currie, and not he alone among academic students of Debs, has pointed out that Debs had a life long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialism movement have shown sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Professor Currie also has several sections at the end of his book on Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinism argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal page his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. That said, Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, gets a fair exposition here. And should get a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
From The "London Socialist Historians Group" Blog- A Breathe Of Fresh Air On The Late Professor Tony Judt
Markin comment:
After The New York Review of Books has virtually made itself a publicity agent for the late Professor Tony Judt it is nice, very nice, to have a better take on the real politics (and scholarly standards)of that soft-shell social democrat. Praise be.
Saturday, 22 January 2011
A ''Socialist Historian''? Ian Birchall on Tony Judt
Judt out to the right
From LSHG Newsletter # 41 (Spring 2011)
LSHG Newsletter No. 40 contains an obituary by one “KF” of Tony Judt, twice described as a “socialist historian”. The LSHG has always had a commendably eclectic view of what constitutes socialist history, and it would be absurd to split hairs about who is or is not a socialist. But lines have to be drawn somewhere, and I think that to describe Judt as a “socialist historian” may cause unnecessary confusion. Indeed, I do not think Judt himself would have welcomed the description.
Judt wrote prolifically on a range of subjects, and it is certainly not my intention to deny that there may be much to be learnt from his works. In a short polemic it is impossible to cover all his writings, and I shall confine my attention to the area on which I have some competence: the French left in the twentieth century. Here, I believe, Judt’s work is often misleading if not positively pernicious.
KF recommends to us Judt’s article “A Clown in Regal Purple” [History Workshop 7, 1979]. It is indeed an interesting and thought-provoking article. But I was struck by a paragraph in which Judt refers to those who refuse to criticise current trends in social history because they don’t want to cause divisions among practitioners of the discipline. He compares this to “the response of Jean- Paul Sartre to the news of Stalin’s crimes. Keep it under wraps, he counselled – “il ne faut pas désespérer Billancourt”. [We must not make Billancourt despair]. A footnote explains that Billancourt was a large car-factory in the Paris suburbs, but gives no source for the quotation.
Thirteen years later, in his book Past Imperfect, Judt again referred to Sartre’s “famous warning ‘Il ne faut pas désespérer Billancourt’”. [PI 211] Again, in a book otherwise drowning in footnotes, Judt gives no source. He was a busy man, but one might have thought that in thirteen years he could have found time to check whether Sartre actually said any such thing (he didn’t).
Judt might claim that it was one of those things that “everybody” knows, just as we all know that King Alfred burned the cakes and that Marie Antoinette said “Let them eat cake”. As I understand it current scholarship holds that the French queen did not say this (presumably because she was too stupid, not because she was too kind-hearted). I’m not aware of recent research on Alfred and the cakes.
A conscientious historian, let alone a “socialist” one, might well have queried whether Sartre said anything so implausible. It is, after all, akin to a doctor telling a patient: “I won’t tell you you’ve got cancer because it would depress you”. But Judt never bothered to check. In praising Lichtheim’s mediocre Marxism in Modern France he stated that it “made no concessions to intellectual indolence”. [MFL viii] But “intellectual indolence" is precisely what Judt is guilty of here.
One swallow doesn’t make a summer, and one bogus quotation doesn’t make a rogue. But it is a symptom of Judt’s compulsive need, by any means necessary, to attack Sartre and the French left. Past Imperfect is a sustained exercise in moralising vituperation against French left intellectuals in the post-1945 period for their failure to denounce Stalinism.
This is a pity, because Judt had half a point. Stalinism did indeed have a pernicious influence on the French left in this period. But Judt seems quite unable to deal with the complexities, contradictions and inconsistencies which characterised his subject matter. Any inconvenient facts that failed to fit into his interminable diatribe were remorselessly ignored. Like the director of a third-rate movie, Judt wants nothing
but heroes (Camus, Raymond Aron) and villains (just about everybody else).
Many French left intellectuals were insufficiently critical of Stalinism. (Many, not all – but names like Daniel Guérin, Maurice Nadeau, Pierre Naville are absent from Judt’s index, blotted out of the historical record 1984-style because they do not fit the thesis.) Judt makes no effort to analyse the reasons for this – like John Major, he is concerned to condemn, not to understand.
Despite his apparent display of erudition, Judt prefers the sweeping generalisation to the study of contradictions. Thus he thunders that Sartre and most French Marxists never “batted a public eyelid when confronted with socio-economic data, reports of concentration camps, news of show trials, and so forth”. [MFL 208] Actually in the course of Past Imperfect Judt was obliged to note that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had written in 1950 that the concentration camps meant that there was no reason to call Russia socialist, and that in 1953 Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes had published a highly critical account of the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia. But why should mere facts stand in the way of a good sound-bite?
Ever anxious to put blood on the hands of Sartre and his friends, Judt insists that at the time of installation of Stalin’s Eastern European satellites, “what was said and done in France served directly to bolster and justify the practices of the regimes newly in place”. [MFL 236-7] Actually in 1948 Sartre and many of his associates were involved in the Rassemblement démocratiqe révolutionnaire, whose founding statement deplored “the limitation of Communism to its Stalinist form”. This infuriated the French Communist Party, and was doubtless little reported in Prague or Budapest. Again, Judt simply ignored inconvenient facts.
Between 1946 and 1962 France was involved in two bitter and bloody colonial wars. Some French leftists, like the courageous journalist Claude Bourdet (whom Judt hated almost as much as he hated Sartre) decided that fighting French imperialism should be their main priority, and considered this more important than denouncing Stalinism. Such a position belonged to an honourable tradition, summed up in Liebknecht’s famous phrase: “The main enemy is at home”.
Judt was unwilling to admit that this might be an arguable case. Judt dismisses concern for the fate of the colonised as “hyperopia” (an eye condition leading to inability to focus of near objects: at least I’ve learned a new word from reading Judt). He claims that this “may occasionally have been beneficial for Algerians, for Chilean refugees, or for Guinean peasants. But in France itself it served only to accentuate
still further an unconcern with daily local politics and to widen the distance between marxist discourse and the real needs and concerns of workers”. [MFL 237]
On the few occasions when he refers to the Algerian war, Judt seems singularly ill-informed. Until 1962 Algeria was constitutionally an integral part of French territory, so this was not some remote “Third World” struggle but a civil war, whose violence often erupted onto the streets of Paris and other mainland cities. A great many French people had a conscript soldier (or an Algerian settler) in the family: Algeria was very much part of “daily local politics”. And like George Bush, Judt seems to have thought that torture was nothing to make a fuss about – unless, of course, it was being done by Russians.
In fact, Judt showed precious little interest in the French working class. He became apoplectic with rage at the “obscenity” of Emmanuel Mounier comparing the living conditions of French workers to those in a Russian labour camp. Perhaps it was an unwise comparison. But Judt’s conclusion seems to be that French workers had no reason to be concerned at low wages, poor working conditions, etc. They should have been congratulating themselves on not being in the gulag. As for the argument of some French intellectuals that, since the French Communist Party had the electoral and trade-union support of millions of workers, it could not be simply bypassed or denounced, that seems to have been far too subtle for Judt to even discuss it.
Finally, while in these difficult times we have to take our funding where we can get it, I wonder whether taking generous grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Nuffield Foundation in order to vilify the French left is quite the conduct of a “socialist historian”.
Judt might have claimed that his sympathies were with reformist, not marxist, socialism. In 1986 he observed in Mitterrand’s France “worrying signs” of trends towards the right and political disengagement. This he saw as “the major medium term achievement of thirty years of marxist conversation in Paris”. [MFL 238] To blame disaffection with Mitterrand on Marxist intellectuals, rather than on the President’s austerity programme and his flirtation with the far right for electoral advantage, shows a distinct lack of any political understanding.
Very briefly, I would note that Judt’s defects seem to reappear when he is dealing with other periods. Thus he cites “the dictatorial and repressive instincts of the Jacobins and Babouvists”. [MFL 107] In fact there was a vigorous debate within Babouvist ranks about democracy and dictatorship. But that would have meant looking at the question in a bit more detail; Judt’s inability to spell Buonarroti [MFL 108] suggests a lack of interest in the documentation. Why let it stand in the way of a good sound-bite?
And it was not only the French left that Judt hated. Thus he tells us that Edward Thompson is “priggish” and a “Little Englander”, and that Kolakowski’s insipid polemic in the 1974 Socialist Register means that “No one who reads it will ever take E.P. Thompson seriously again”. [R 136] (Curiously, he is rather more friendly towards Eric Hobsbawm, apparently because he never involved himself in Party activity. [R 120])
There is more to be said about Judt, and it will have to be said by others more competent than I am. But if I had to choose a single description to sum him up, it would not be “socialist historian”; it would be “charlatan”.
References:
MFL: Marxism and the French Left, Oxford, 1986
PI: Past Imperfect, Berkeley/LA 1992
R: Reappraisals, Penguin, 2008.
After The New York Review of Books has virtually made itself a publicity agent for the late Professor Tony Judt it is nice, very nice, to have a better take on the real politics (and scholarly standards)of that soft-shell social democrat. Praise be.
Saturday, 22 January 2011
A ''Socialist Historian''? Ian Birchall on Tony Judt
Judt out to the right
From LSHG Newsletter # 41 (Spring 2011)
LSHG Newsletter No. 40 contains an obituary by one “KF” of Tony Judt, twice described as a “socialist historian”. The LSHG has always had a commendably eclectic view of what constitutes socialist history, and it would be absurd to split hairs about who is or is not a socialist. But lines have to be drawn somewhere, and I think that to describe Judt as a “socialist historian” may cause unnecessary confusion. Indeed, I do not think Judt himself would have welcomed the description.
Judt wrote prolifically on a range of subjects, and it is certainly not my intention to deny that there may be much to be learnt from his works. In a short polemic it is impossible to cover all his writings, and I shall confine my attention to the area on which I have some competence: the French left in the twentieth century. Here, I believe, Judt’s work is often misleading if not positively pernicious.
KF recommends to us Judt’s article “A Clown in Regal Purple” [History Workshop 7, 1979]. It is indeed an interesting and thought-provoking article. But I was struck by a paragraph in which Judt refers to those who refuse to criticise current trends in social history because they don’t want to cause divisions among practitioners of the discipline. He compares this to “the response of Jean- Paul Sartre to the news of Stalin’s crimes. Keep it under wraps, he counselled – “il ne faut pas désespérer Billancourt”. [We must not make Billancourt despair]. A footnote explains that Billancourt was a large car-factory in the Paris suburbs, but gives no source for the quotation.
Thirteen years later, in his book Past Imperfect, Judt again referred to Sartre’s “famous warning ‘Il ne faut pas désespérer Billancourt’”. [PI 211] Again, in a book otherwise drowning in footnotes, Judt gives no source. He was a busy man, but one might have thought that in thirteen years he could have found time to check whether Sartre actually said any such thing (he didn’t).
Judt might claim that it was one of those things that “everybody” knows, just as we all know that King Alfred burned the cakes and that Marie Antoinette said “Let them eat cake”. As I understand it current scholarship holds that the French queen did not say this (presumably because she was too stupid, not because she was too kind-hearted). I’m not aware of recent research on Alfred and the cakes.
A conscientious historian, let alone a “socialist” one, might well have queried whether Sartre said anything so implausible. It is, after all, akin to a doctor telling a patient: “I won’t tell you you’ve got cancer because it would depress you”. But Judt never bothered to check. In praising Lichtheim’s mediocre Marxism in Modern France he stated that it “made no concessions to intellectual indolence”. [MFL viii] But “intellectual indolence" is precisely what Judt is guilty of here.
One swallow doesn’t make a summer, and one bogus quotation doesn’t make a rogue. But it is a symptom of Judt’s compulsive need, by any means necessary, to attack Sartre and the French left. Past Imperfect is a sustained exercise in moralising vituperation against French left intellectuals in the post-1945 period for their failure to denounce Stalinism.
This is a pity, because Judt had half a point. Stalinism did indeed have a pernicious influence on the French left in this period. But Judt seems quite unable to deal with the complexities, contradictions and inconsistencies which characterised his subject matter. Any inconvenient facts that failed to fit into his interminable diatribe were remorselessly ignored. Like the director of a third-rate movie, Judt wants nothing
but heroes (Camus, Raymond Aron) and villains (just about everybody else).
Many French left intellectuals were insufficiently critical of Stalinism. (Many, not all – but names like Daniel Guérin, Maurice Nadeau, Pierre Naville are absent from Judt’s index, blotted out of the historical record 1984-style because they do not fit the thesis.) Judt makes no effort to analyse the reasons for this – like John Major, he is concerned to condemn, not to understand.
Despite his apparent display of erudition, Judt prefers the sweeping generalisation to the study of contradictions. Thus he thunders that Sartre and most French Marxists never “batted a public eyelid when confronted with socio-economic data, reports of concentration camps, news of show trials, and so forth”. [MFL 208] Actually in the course of Past Imperfect Judt was obliged to note that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty had written in 1950 that the concentration camps meant that there was no reason to call Russia socialist, and that in 1953 Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes had published a highly critical account of the Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia. But why should mere facts stand in the way of a good sound-bite?
Ever anxious to put blood on the hands of Sartre and his friends, Judt insists that at the time of installation of Stalin’s Eastern European satellites, “what was said and done in France served directly to bolster and justify the practices of the regimes newly in place”. [MFL 236-7] Actually in 1948 Sartre and many of his associates were involved in the Rassemblement démocratiqe révolutionnaire, whose founding statement deplored “the limitation of Communism to its Stalinist form”. This infuriated the French Communist Party, and was doubtless little reported in Prague or Budapest. Again, Judt simply ignored inconvenient facts.
Between 1946 and 1962 France was involved in two bitter and bloody colonial wars. Some French leftists, like the courageous journalist Claude Bourdet (whom Judt hated almost as much as he hated Sartre) decided that fighting French imperialism should be their main priority, and considered this more important than denouncing Stalinism. Such a position belonged to an honourable tradition, summed up in Liebknecht’s famous phrase: “The main enemy is at home”.
Judt was unwilling to admit that this might be an arguable case. Judt dismisses concern for the fate of the colonised as “hyperopia” (an eye condition leading to inability to focus of near objects: at least I’ve learned a new word from reading Judt). He claims that this “may occasionally have been beneficial for Algerians, for Chilean refugees, or for Guinean peasants. But in France itself it served only to accentuate
still further an unconcern with daily local politics and to widen the distance between marxist discourse and the real needs and concerns of workers”. [MFL 237]
On the few occasions when he refers to the Algerian war, Judt seems singularly ill-informed. Until 1962 Algeria was constitutionally an integral part of French territory, so this was not some remote “Third World” struggle but a civil war, whose violence often erupted onto the streets of Paris and other mainland cities. A great many French people had a conscript soldier (or an Algerian settler) in the family: Algeria was very much part of “daily local politics”. And like George Bush, Judt seems to have thought that torture was nothing to make a fuss about – unless, of course, it was being done by Russians.
In fact, Judt showed precious little interest in the French working class. He became apoplectic with rage at the “obscenity” of Emmanuel Mounier comparing the living conditions of French workers to those in a Russian labour camp. Perhaps it was an unwise comparison. But Judt’s conclusion seems to be that French workers had no reason to be concerned at low wages, poor working conditions, etc. They should have been congratulating themselves on not being in the gulag. As for the argument of some French intellectuals that, since the French Communist Party had the electoral and trade-union support of millions of workers, it could not be simply bypassed or denounced, that seems to have been far too subtle for Judt to even discuss it.
Finally, while in these difficult times we have to take our funding where we can get it, I wonder whether taking generous grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Nuffield Foundation in order to vilify the French left is quite the conduct of a “socialist historian”.
Judt might have claimed that his sympathies were with reformist, not marxist, socialism. In 1986 he observed in Mitterrand’s France “worrying signs” of trends towards the right and political disengagement. This he saw as “the major medium term achievement of thirty years of marxist conversation in Paris”. [MFL 238] To blame disaffection with Mitterrand on Marxist intellectuals, rather than on the President’s austerity programme and his flirtation with the far right for electoral advantage, shows a distinct lack of any political understanding.
Very briefly, I would note that Judt’s defects seem to reappear when he is dealing with other periods. Thus he cites “the dictatorial and repressive instincts of the Jacobins and Babouvists”. [MFL 107] In fact there was a vigorous debate within Babouvist ranks about democracy and dictatorship. But that would have meant looking at the question in a bit more detail; Judt’s inability to spell Buonarroti [MFL 108] suggests a lack of interest in the documentation. Why let it stand in the way of a good sound-bite?
And it was not only the French left that Judt hated. Thus he tells us that Edward Thompson is “priggish” and a “Little Englander”, and that Kolakowski’s insipid polemic in the 1974 Socialist Register means that “No one who reads it will ever take E.P. Thompson seriously again”. [R 136] (Curiously, he is rather more friendly towards Eric Hobsbawm, apparently because he never involved himself in Party activity. [R 120])
There is more to be said about Judt, and it will have to be said by others more competent than I am. But if I had to choose a single description to sum him up, it would not be “socialist historian”; it would be “charlatan”.
References:
MFL: Marxism and the French Left, Oxford, 1986
PI: Past Imperfect, Berkeley/LA 1992
R: Reappraisals, Penguin, 2008.
Monday, November 08, 2010
*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- "Nikky" Bukharin
Click on title to link to the Nicolai Bukharin Internet Archive's copy of Bukharin's testimony from the Moscow Trials. This is not pretty reading but old Nikky held up better than many others. The Arthur Koestler novel, "Darkness At Noon" gives a 'fictional' treatment of this event. Bukharin had a lot to answer for, but he was a Bolshevik as were many 'legally' slaughtered in those days. Stalin has a lot to answer for in the court of revolutionary history.
Markin comment:
I want to spend more time on this revolutionary, his early leftism (in some senses ultra-leftism, especially the opposition on the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Germans taking Russia, bloody and broken, out of World War I , his subsequent rightist (right Communist, that is, which in agrarian Russia could only mean conciliating some segment of the vast peasantry) bloc with Stalin and his later, post-Moscow Trials, place in Soviet thinking in the 1980s when he, again, became a 'poster child' for accommodation to the forces of "market socialism". The fate of the Soviet Union,and defeat for the international working class in its struggle against capitalism, rather undercuts the 'virtues' of those theories. But, more later
Markin comment:
I want to spend more time on this revolutionary, his early leftism (in some senses ultra-leftism, especially the opposition on the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Germans taking Russia, bloody and broken, out of World War I , his subsequent rightist (right Communist, that is, which in agrarian Russia could only mean conciliating some segment of the vast peasantry) bloc with Stalin and his later, post-Moscow Trials, place in Soviet thinking in the 1980s when he, again, became a 'poster child' for accommodation to the forces of "market socialism". The fate of the Soviet Union,and defeat for the international working class in its struggle against capitalism, rather undercuts the 'virtues' of those theories. But, more later
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
*Via The "HistoMat" Blog- On The Passing Of Public Intellectual Tony Judt
Click on the headline to link to an article via the HistoMat blog-concerning the recent passing of public intellectual, Professor Tony Judt.
Markin comment:
I have been following the Tony Judt’s serial memoirs in the last several issues of The New York Review Of Books so that I know some of the frustrations with his sheer balderdash that the writer in the linked article is discussing. For example, in the latest issue (August 19, 2010) Judt spent what precious time he had left bemoaning the decline of academic standards in the, historically, insidiously class-bound British higher education system, and the corresponding decline of the meritocracy of which he was a product in the “old” days, his old days in the 1960s. Well, everything, as we get older, was better in the old days all the way down the line, right?
On a more serious note, we can all, friend or foe, admire and honor Tony Judt’s courage in fighting the losing battle with serious illness that he fought with dignity and purpose. Still, we are political people and there is no need to soft-soap the hard fact that his political vision, his mushy social democratic political vision, was mired somewhere in the pre-World War I Second International days. In fighting the 21st century American imperial state-led “monster” military machine that is not enough, just as it was not enough in the 20th century.
Markin comment:
I have been following the Tony Judt’s serial memoirs in the last several issues of The New York Review Of Books so that I know some of the frustrations with his sheer balderdash that the writer in the linked article is discussing. For example, in the latest issue (August 19, 2010) Judt spent what precious time he had left bemoaning the decline of academic standards in the, historically, insidiously class-bound British higher education system, and the corresponding decline of the meritocracy of which he was a product in the “old” days, his old days in the 1960s. Well, everything, as we get older, was better in the old days all the way down the line, right?
On a more serious note, we can all, friend or foe, admire and honor Tony Judt’s courage in fighting the losing battle with serious illness that he fought with dignity and purpose. Still, we are political people and there is no need to soft-soap the hard fact that his political vision, his mushy social democratic political vision, was mired somewhere in the pre-World War I Second International days. In fighting the 21st century American imperial state-led “monster” military machine that is not enough, just as it was not enough in the 20th century.
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace-The Latest From The "International Socialist Organization" Website
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
ISR Issue 72, July–August 2010
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Economic crisis and class struggle
Are recessions better for the left or right, asks Phil Gasper?
The most fundamental argument in favor of socialism is that capitalism is an irrational system that over the long term cannot meet the basic needs of the majority of the population because of its tendency to go into economic crisis. But what if economic crisis leads not to the growth of the left but to the rise of the far right? This is the argument of the radical economist Doug Henwood in a short article published in May on the MRzine Web site.
Henwood begins by criticizing “radicals [who] have fantasized that a serious recession—or depression—would lead to mass radicalization,” and he goes on to argue that there is empirical support for the opposite view—that economic crisis actually benefits the far right not the radical left. The evidence he cites is recent research by the economists Markus Brükner and Hans Peter Grüner. Brükner and Grüner studied sixteen European countries and discovered that between 1970 and 2002, every 1 percent decline in economic growth in these countries was associated with an increase in the vote share of far right and nationalist parties of between 1 and 2 percent.
By contrast, Brükner and Grüner found no corresponding increase in electoral support for communist parties during the same periods of economic decline. Henwood concludes that “recessions are not good for the left and are good for the right,” and that Brükner and Grüner’s research “helps explain the rise of the Tea Partiers and other strange life forms on the right.”
The first thing to note is that this is an incredibly narrow study on which to base the sweeping conclusion that “recessions are not good for the left and are good for the right.” In fact Henwood himself immediately notes one “major exception,” namely the United States during the Great Depression, when economic crisis led to a series of mass strikes, the birth of industrial unions, and the growth of the Communist Party to about 80,000 members. However, he adds that this was only because the scale of the crisis was so severe, with unemployment rates reaching 25 percent and, additionally, the “Great Depression didn’t do much for the left in Europe.”
In fact that last claim is not accurate. While the far right obviously grew as a result of the Depression, eventually seizing power in Germany, Spain, and Austria, the left also grew in many European countries, and there was nothing inevitable about its ultimate defeat. In Germany, the Social Democratic and Communist Parties had millions of supporters, and in the election of November 1932, the last genuinely free vote before Hitler took power, their combined support was several percentage points ahead of the Nazis. The tragedy was that the two left-wing parties were fatally divided and unable to agree on a common strategy to defeat the far right in the streets as well as at the ballot box. Similarly in Spain the left grew significantly. It eventually lost the civil war as a result of major conflicts between the different left-wing parties and outside support for Franco’s fascists.
Second, economic crises are a fact of life under capitalism, and one of the main arguments in favor of a different kind of economic system. Henwood instructs the left to “stop hoping for the worst,” but our hopes either way are irrelevant to how the economy actually performs, and severe recessions will periodically take place no matter what we think about them. If it were true that in such circumstances the right will grow and the left will not, there would be grounds for thoroughgoing political pessimism. During periods of economic growth and stability, the radical transformation of society would seem unnecessary, while during periods of economic crisis it would be impossible.
Henwood is certainly right about one thing—there is no automatic relationship between economic crisis and “mass radicalization.” But it is equally wrong to think that there is an automatic connection between crisis and the growth of the right. Whether or not an economic slump results in an increase in class struggle and gains for the left depends on a whole set of complex factors, including the nature of the crisis and the constellation of political forces going into it.
Perhaps no one has written about the relationship between economic booms, slumps, and political consciousness with more insight than the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who addressed these issues several times in the 1920s and the 1930s. In a report he wrote for the Communist International in 1921, Trotsky noted that, “there is no automatic dependence of the proletarian revolutionary movement upon a crisis. There is only a dialectical interaction. It is essential to understand this.” The example that Trotksy used to illustrate this point is worth quoting at length:
Let us look at the relations in Russia. The 1905 revolution was defeated. The workers bore great sacrifices. In 1906 and 1907 the last revolutionary flare-ups occurred and by the autumn of 1907 a great world crisis broke out. The signal for it was given by Wall Street’s Black Friday. Throughout 1907 and 1908 and 1909 the most terrible crisis reigned in Russia too. It killed the movement completely, because the workers had suffered so greatly during the struggle that this depression could act only to dishearten them. There were many disputes among us over what would lead to the revolution: a crisis or a favorable conjuncture?
At that time many of us defended the viewpoint that the Russian revolutionary movement could be regenerated only by a favorable economic conjuncture. And that is what took place. In 1910, 1911 and 1912, there was an improvement in our economic situation and a favorable conjuncture which acted to reassemble the demoralized and devitalized workers who had lost their courage. They realized again how important they were in production; and they passed over to an offensive, first in the economic field and later in the political field as well. On the eve of the war [in 1914] the working class had become so consolidated, thanks to this period of prosperity, that it was able to pass to a direct assault.
This period of class militancy was cut short by the outbreak of the First World War, when a wave of patriotism swept over the country, engulfing all but the most class-conscious workers. But as the war dragged on and Russia suffered massive casualties, patriotism gave way to cynicism and then anger, which eventually culminated in the successful revolutions of 1917.
One conclusion that Trotsky drew from examples like these was that class struggle was not simply the result of economic slump or of economic boom, but was often the result of the rapid shift from slump to boom and back again. Slumps can show the necessity for change, but they can also weaken the power of the working class as some lose their jobs and others become desperate to hang on to theirs. A return to economic growth can give workers renewed confidence to make significant demands, but if the new expansion is long-lived, the possibility for radical change will be lost until a new crisis begins. Here is Trotsky again:
Many of you will recall that Marx and Engels wrote in 1851—when the boom was at its peak—that it was necessary at that time to recognize that the Revolution of 1848 had terminated, or, at any rate, had been interrupted until the next crisis. Engels wrote that while the crisis of 1847 was the mother of revolution, the boom of 1849–51 was the mother of triumphant counter-revolution. It would, however, be very one-sided and utterly false to interpret these judgments in the sense that a crisis invariably engenders revolutionary action while a boom, on the contrary, pacifies the working class…
The irresolute and half-way Revolution of 1848 did, however, sweep away the remnants of the regime of guilds and serfdom and thereby extended the framework of capitalist development. Under these conditions and these conditions alone, the boom of 1851 marked the beginning of an entire epoch of capitalist prosperity which lasted till 1873. In citing Engels it is very dangerous to overlook these basic facts…. At issue here is not whether an improvement in the conjuncture is possible, but whether the fluctuations of the conjuncture are proceeding along an ascending or descending curve. This is the most important aspect of the whole question.
So it was the long period of capitalist expansion in the 1850s and 1860s that stabilized the system and led to a relatively low level of class struggle. By contrast, the period after the First World War, according to Trotsky, was one of long-term instability and decline, during which “upswings can only be of a superficial…character, while crises become more and more prolonged and deeper going.”
The effect of booms and slumps will thus depend in part on the underlying state of the economy—whether it is in a period of sustained expansion in which recessions are relatively minor interruptions, or whether it is in a period of decline in which the booms are short-lived and sustained growth cannot be achieved.
Today we find ourselves in a period of long-term economic instability, in which a return to sustained growth seems unlikely any time in the near future. During the past decade the U.S. economy has experienced two recessions—the most recent, the worst since the Great Depression—and low growth. Even when the economy was growing in the middle of the decade real wages continued to decline. Now the economy is growing again, but unemployment remains high (the real figure is around 15 percent) and there is a strong chance that there will soon be another recession.
Will the current period prove more favorable to the left or to the right? Over the past eighteen months we have certainly seen the growth of the right, including vicious scapegoating of immigrants and the emergence of the Tea Party, with its attacks on “big government” and the supposed socialism of the Obama administration, and its strong undercurrent of racism. Some commentators, including Noam Chomsky, are convinced that there is a real threat of fascism, with parallels to the decline of Weimar Germany and the rise of the Nazis.
There is certainly no reason to be complacent about these developments, but the comparison with Germany in the 1930s makes little sense. Far from being a mass movement, the journalists Anthony DiMaggio and Paul Street describe the Tea Party as “a top-down interest group led by national and local political officials and financed by corporate America” and “fundamentally dependent upon the Republican Party.”
While the Tea Party has been able to mobilize a few thousand people and demonstrations around the country, these have been dwarfed by recent progressive mobilizations, including hundreds of thousands demonstrating for LGBT and immigrant rights. But progressive demonstrations generally receive very little media attention, while the cable channels—particularly, of course, Fox News—have given Tea Party events a level of exposure totally disproportionate to the numbers involved.
DiMaggio and Street argue that, despite some impressive recent mobilizations, much of the left has been “significantly pacified and demobilized by Obama and the corporate Democrats, has surely failed to capitalize on the recent economic downturn, and has generally failed to establish a progressive movement in the short term.” But they also point out that “the Tea Party represents a concession from Republican Party elites that they (along with their Democratic counterparts) no longer enjoy much legitimacy among the American people. Their only way of appealing to voters is to appear as if they are not political leaders, but ‘average people’ taking part in a populist uprising against a corrupt political system.”
Opinion polls show that there has been a significant shift to the left in terms of political attitudes over the past few years. In May, a survey by the Pew Research Center found that 43 percent of people under the age of thirty in the United States view socialism favorably, exactly the same percentage as those with a favorable view of capitalism. That figure alone shows that there is a remarkable opportunity for the left to grow in the current period. We have to honestly acknowledge that organizations to the left of the Democratic Party are tiny and that the labor movement in this country is at a low ebb. But if we are serious about changing the world, now is the time to get involved and rebuild them. The left can grow in a period of economic crisis.
Phil Gasper is the editor of The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Document (Haymarket Books, 2005) and a member of the ISR editorial board.
ISR Issue 72, July–August 2010
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Economic crisis and class struggle
Are recessions better for the left or right, asks Phil Gasper?
The most fundamental argument in favor of socialism is that capitalism is an irrational system that over the long term cannot meet the basic needs of the majority of the population because of its tendency to go into economic crisis. But what if economic crisis leads not to the growth of the left but to the rise of the far right? This is the argument of the radical economist Doug Henwood in a short article published in May on the MRzine Web site.
Henwood begins by criticizing “radicals [who] have fantasized that a serious recession—or depression—would lead to mass radicalization,” and he goes on to argue that there is empirical support for the opposite view—that economic crisis actually benefits the far right not the radical left. The evidence he cites is recent research by the economists Markus Brükner and Hans Peter Grüner. Brükner and Grüner studied sixteen European countries and discovered that between 1970 and 2002, every 1 percent decline in economic growth in these countries was associated with an increase in the vote share of far right and nationalist parties of between 1 and 2 percent.
By contrast, Brükner and Grüner found no corresponding increase in electoral support for communist parties during the same periods of economic decline. Henwood concludes that “recessions are not good for the left and are good for the right,” and that Brükner and Grüner’s research “helps explain the rise of the Tea Partiers and other strange life forms on the right.”
The first thing to note is that this is an incredibly narrow study on which to base the sweeping conclusion that “recessions are not good for the left and are good for the right.” In fact Henwood himself immediately notes one “major exception,” namely the United States during the Great Depression, when economic crisis led to a series of mass strikes, the birth of industrial unions, and the growth of the Communist Party to about 80,000 members. However, he adds that this was only because the scale of the crisis was so severe, with unemployment rates reaching 25 percent and, additionally, the “Great Depression didn’t do much for the left in Europe.”
In fact that last claim is not accurate. While the far right obviously grew as a result of the Depression, eventually seizing power in Germany, Spain, and Austria, the left also grew in many European countries, and there was nothing inevitable about its ultimate defeat. In Germany, the Social Democratic and Communist Parties had millions of supporters, and in the election of November 1932, the last genuinely free vote before Hitler took power, their combined support was several percentage points ahead of the Nazis. The tragedy was that the two left-wing parties were fatally divided and unable to agree on a common strategy to defeat the far right in the streets as well as at the ballot box. Similarly in Spain the left grew significantly. It eventually lost the civil war as a result of major conflicts between the different left-wing parties and outside support for Franco’s fascists.
Second, economic crises are a fact of life under capitalism, and one of the main arguments in favor of a different kind of economic system. Henwood instructs the left to “stop hoping for the worst,” but our hopes either way are irrelevant to how the economy actually performs, and severe recessions will periodically take place no matter what we think about them. If it were true that in such circumstances the right will grow and the left will not, there would be grounds for thoroughgoing political pessimism. During periods of economic growth and stability, the radical transformation of society would seem unnecessary, while during periods of economic crisis it would be impossible.
Henwood is certainly right about one thing—there is no automatic relationship between economic crisis and “mass radicalization.” But it is equally wrong to think that there is an automatic connection between crisis and the growth of the right. Whether or not an economic slump results in an increase in class struggle and gains for the left depends on a whole set of complex factors, including the nature of the crisis and the constellation of political forces going into it.
Perhaps no one has written about the relationship between economic booms, slumps, and political consciousness with more insight than the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who addressed these issues several times in the 1920s and the 1930s. In a report he wrote for the Communist International in 1921, Trotsky noted that, “there is no automatic dependence of the proletarian revolutionary movement upon a crisis. There is only a dialectical interaction. It is essential to understand this.” The example that Trotksy used to illustrate this point is worth quoting at length:
Let us look at the relations in Russia. The 1905 revolution was defeated. The workers bore great sacrifices. In 1906 and 1907 the last revolutionary flare-ups occurred and by the autumn of 1907 a great world crisis broke out. The signal for it was given by Wall Street’s Black Friday. Throughout 1907 and 1908 and 1909 the most terrible crisis reigned in Russia too. It killed the movement completely, because the workers had suffered so greatly during the struggle that this depression could act only to dishearten them. There were many disputes among us over what would lead to the revolution: a crisis or a favorable conjuncture?
At that time many of us defended the viewpoint that the Russian revolutionary movement could be regenerated only by a favorable economic conjuncture. And that is what took place. In 1910, 1911 and 1912, there was an improvement in our economic situation and a favorable conjuncture which acted to reassemble the demoralized and devitalized workers who had lost their courage. They realized again how important they were in production; and they passed over to an offensive, first in the economic field and later in the political field as well. On the eve of the war [in 1914] the working class had become so consolidated, thanks to this period of prosperity, that it was able to pass to a direct assault.
This period of class militancy was cut short by the outbreak of the First World War, when a wave of patriotism swept over the country, engulfing all but the most class-conscious workers. But as the war dragged on and Russia suffered massive casualties, patriotism gave way to cynicism and then anger, which eventually culminated in the successful revolutions of 1917.
One conclusion that Trotsky drew from examples like these was that class struggle was not simply the result of economic slump or of economic boom, but was often the result of the rapid shift from slump to boom and back again. Slumps can show the necessity for change, but they can also weaken the power of the working class as some lose their jobs and others become desperate to hang on to theirs. A return to economic growth can give workers renewed confidence to make significant demands, but if the new expansion is long-lived, the possibility for radical change will be lost until a new crisis begins. Here is Trotsky again:
Many of you will recall that Marx and Engels wrote in 1851—when the boom was at its peak—that it was necessary at that time to recognize that the Revolution of 1848 had terminated, or, at any rate, had been interrupted until the next crisis. Engels wrote that while the crisis of 1847 was the mother of revolution, the boom of 1849–51 was the mother of triumphant counter-revolution. It would, however, be very one-sided and utterly false to interpret these judgments in the sense that a crisis invariably engenders revolutionary action while a boom, on the contrary, pacifies the working class…
The irresolute and half-way Revolution of 1848 did, however, sweep away the remnants of the regime of guilds and serfdom and thereby extended the framework of capitalist development. Under these conditions and these conditions alone, the boom of 1851 marked the beginning of an entire epoch of capitalist prosperity which lasted till 1873. In citing Engels it is very dangerous to overlook these basic facts…. At issue here is not whether an improvement in the conjuncture is possible, but whether the fluctuations of the conjuncture are proceeding along an ascending or descending curve. This is the most important aspect of the whole question.
So it was the long period of capitalist expansion in the 1850s and 1860s that stabilized the system and led to a relatively low level of class struggle. By contrast, the period after the First World War, according to Trotsky, was one of long-term instability and decline, during which “upswings can only be of a superficial…character, while crises become more and more prolonged and deeper going.”
The effect of booms and slumps will thus depend in part on the underlying state of the economy—whether it is in a period of sustained expansion in which recessions are relatively minor interruptions, or whether it is in a period of decline in which the booms are short-lived and sustained growth cannot be achieved.
Today we find ourselves in a period of long-term economic instability, in which a return to sustained growth seems unlikely any time in the near future. During the past decade the U.S. economy has experienced two recessions—the most recent, the worst since the Great Depression—and low growth. Even when the economy was growing in the middle of the decade real wages continued to decline. Now the economy is growing again, but unemployment remains high (the real figure is around 15 percent) and there is a strong chance that there will soon be another recession.
Will the current period prove more favorable to the left or to the right? Over the past eighteen months we have certainly seen the growth of the right, including vicious scapegoating of immigrants and the emergence of the Tea Party, with its attacks on “big government” and the supposed socialism of the Obama administration, and its strong undercurrent of racism. Some commentators, including Noam Chomsky, are convinced that there is a real threat of fascism, with parallels to the decline of Weimar Germany and the rise of the Nazis.
There is certainly no reason to be complacent about these developments, but the comparison with Germany in the 1930s makes little sense. Far from being a mass movement, the journalists Anthony DiMaggio and Paul Street describe the Tea Party as “a top-down interest group led by national and local political officials and financed by corporate America” and “fundamentally dependent upon the Republican Party.”
While the Tea Party has been able to mobilize a few thousand people and demonstrations around the country, these have been dwarfed by recent progressive mobilizations, including hundreds of thousands demonstrating for LGBT and immigrant rights. But progressive demonstrations generally receive very little media attention, while the cable channels—particularly, of course, Fox News—have given Tea Party events a level of exposure totally disproportionate to the numbers involved.
DiMaggio and Street argue that, despite some impressive recent mobilizations, much of the left has been “significantly pacified and demobilized by Obama and the corporate Democrats, has surely failed to capitalize on the recent economic downturn, and has generally failed to establish a progressive movement in the short term.” But they also point out that “the Tea Party represents a concession from Republican Party elites that they (along with their Democratic counterparts) no longer enjoy much legitimacy among the American people. Their only way of appealing to voters is to appear as if they are not political leaders, but ‘average people’ taking part in a populist uprising against a corrupt political system.”
Opinion polls show that there has been a significant shift to the left in terms of political attitudes over the past few years. In May, a survey by the Pew Research Center found that 43 percent of people under the age of thirty in the United States view socialism favorably, exactly the same percentage as those with a favorable view of capitalism. That figure alone shows that there is a remarkable opportunity for the left to grow in the current period. We have to honestly acknowledge that organizations to the left of the Democratic Party are tiny and that the labor movement in this country is at a low ebb. But if we are serious about changing the world, now is the time to get involved and rebuild them. The left can grow in a period of economic crisis.
Phil Gasper is the editor of The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Document (Haymarket Books, 2005) and a member of the ISR editorial board.
Sunday, August 01, 2010
*From Cyberspace-"The Max Shachtman Internet Archives"-Introduction to Leon Trotsky’s "Problems of the Chinese Revolution"(1931)
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Markin comment:
The article below is prima facie evidence that when Max Shachtman was a revolutionary in his younger days he could "speak" Marxism with the best of them. Right, Leon Trotsky and Jim Cannon?
****************
Max Shachtman (1931)
Introduction to Leon Trotsky’s
Problems of the Chinese Revolution
There is hardly an event of greater world historical significance since the proletarian revolution in Russia than the awakening of the cruelly exploited and oppressed Orient, which found its most dramatic and most tragic expression in the great Chinese revolutionary movement of 1925-1927. For the first time in history, the capitalist countries of Europe, long ago matured for the socialist overthrow, gave way in revolutionary precedence to an Eastern land which bid fair to condense the experiences of capitalist evolution, under the titanic blows of the social revolution, into a brief span of time and, unlike the Occidental countries, enter boldly upon the path of socialist development. A more audacious enterprise, history could not imagine. Even the Russian working class was compelled to pass through a long period of capitalist development before it was peremptorily confronted with the opportunity and the need of breaking down the last barrier to the emancipation and free development of humanity. The Chinese proletariat, reaching a virile manhood at the crossroads of a revolutionary epoch, armed also with the strength of uncounted millions of insurgent peasants, was given the rare opportunity to choose between capitalist enslavement under its “own” bourgeoisie or socialist growth in alliance with the Soviet Union and the revolutionary working class of the West.
There is no point here in arguing the academic question as to whether China has matured economically for the establishment or construction of a socialist society. It is not a question to be settled statistically or statically in China—any more than it could have been established for Russia in 1917. This problem is solved primarily on an international scale, in the conflict between the socialist and the capitalist sectors of world economy. What has, however, been demonstrated since the day of the successful counter-revolution in China, if theoretical consideration and forecast were still inadequate, was that the basic problems of China, its. democratic tasks of national unification and independence, self- determination for its various peoples, and the agrarian revolution included, could be solved in no other way than by the victory of the workers acting independently as a class. In other words, all the problems and antagonisms arising out of the struggle against imperialist subjection, against the remnants of feudal relationships, which could have been but were not solved by the revolution of 1925-1927 or by the regime which succeeded it, will find a solution only with the success of the dictatorship of the proletariat in China. It is in the opportunity offered for the attainment of this goal that lies the great importance of the Chinese revolution of 1925-1927.
But it is precisely in examining this opportunity that we encounter a monstrous historical anomaly. The revolution ended not with a victory, but with a horribly sanguinary defeat for the proletariat and the peasantry. How was this possible? In the European bourgeois revolutions of 1848, the young proletariat and the peasantry were the fighting troops for the equally youthful bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie triumphed over feudalism, and also over the proletariat. The latter still lived in the period of the rise of capitalism; it had not yet learned how to act independently as a class; it did not have at its head a conscious revolutionary leadership. Even the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1871 is not difficult to understand, nor could anybody have expected that this first faint dawn of the proletarian revolution could, under the circumstances of time and place, see the full daylight of life. One can even go farther ahead in history, to the very end of the world war. The German proletariat overthrew the kaiser in 1918, but it did not come to power because its social democratic leadership, corrupted by the bourgeoisie, ran to the head of the marching column of mutinous workers for the purpose of turning them off to the road of bourgeois democracy.
But in China we had a partly armed proletariat. Even the peasantry was armed to a certain extent. A Communist party was in the field and had every opportunity to develop. The prestige of the Soviet Union was incalculable—every Chinese worker knew that Bolshevism had rid Russia of the imperialists and of the bankers and exploiters, every Chinese peasant knew that the Soviets had given the Russian peasant the land. The official political counsellor to the nationalist government was the Russian Communist, Borodin, just as one of its principal military directors was the Russian Communist, Galen. On every occasion, the workers and the peasants showed their desire to emulate the Russians—the former by their struggles against their own bourgeoisie, the latter by their constant attempts to carry out the first real steps of the agrarian revolution. In the Communist party itself, there was a strong current that favored breaking away from the domination of the bourgeoisie and its Kuo Min Tang and taking the path of independent class action. Yet, with all these and other favorable conditions, the proletariat not only did not come within reach of taking power, but was made the last object crushed under the heel of the bourgeois counter-revolution which did take and hold the power.
Where does the most active cause for this truly monstrous catastrophe lie? It was not so much objective difficulties that stood in the way. It was not the classic interference of the socialist agents of capital in the labor movement. The Chinese proletariat was prohibited by the policies and instructions of the leadership of the Communist International, the organizing center of the world revolution, from fulfilling the role imposed upon it by history! There is the source that must be sought to explain the bitter tragedy of the Chinese revolution.
No greater indictment can be presented against the faction of Stalin and Bucharin than this: invested with all the formal authority of the Soviet Union, of the Communist International, holding to so great an extent the destiny of China—one might say, of the whole East—in their hands, entrusted with the awful responsibility of guiding an unprecedentedly huge revolutionary movement, all they did was to translate the theories and practises of Menshevism into the language of Chinese politics, palm them off as Bolshevism, and, in the name of Lenin, pursue a course against which Lenin had fought throughout his whole political life.
All through the revolutionary period, the official leadership of the Communist International staked its cards upon the national bourgeoisie instead of upon the worker and the peasant, upon Chiang Kai-Shek, and then upon Wang Chin Wei, but not upon the Shanghai proletarian. Worse yet, the latter was told in no uncertain terms that the national bourgeoisie was the leader of the revolution, figuring as the main partner in the ill-conceived “bloc of the four classes”. The Chinese Communist Party was driven into the bourgeois Kuo Min Tang with the Stalinist whip, and there it was compelled to swear allegiance to the petty bourgeois philosophy of Sun Yat Senism. The policy of class struggle was liquidated in the interests of the “united national front”. Strikes were prohibited or else settled by “arbitration commissions” in the best class collaborationist style, for how could the worker have a conflict of interests with the Chinese employer who was his leader in the “united national front” of the Kuo Min Tang? So as not to irritate the bourgeoisie, Stalin sent telegrams to the Chinese Communist Party, instructing it to restrain the peasants from taking the land. On pain of denunciation as “Trotskyists”, the equivalent among the Stalinist churchmen to excommunication, the Chinese Communists were prohibited from forming Soviets, first under the Chiang Kai-Shek regime and later under the Wuhan government because, you see, the latter was already the revolutionary center. Even though the caliber of the man was known—he had already attempted a reactionary coup d’État early in 1926—a veritable cult was built up for Chiang Kai-Shek by the international Communist press. What more striking condemnation of the official course is needed than the fact—characteristic of the whole policy—that on the eve of Chiang Kai-Shek’s march into Shanghai to establish the counter-revolutionary regime and to massacre the militant workers, the French Communist Party and its central organ L’HumanitÉ, sent him a solemn message of greetings, hailing the establishment of the Shanghai … Commune. Such “mistakes” are not accidental. They flowed from the whole past course. By the policy of Stalin and Bucharin, not only the Chinese Communists, but the international revolutionary movement was obliged to make the mistake of confusing a Gallifet with a Communard, the counter-revolution with the Commune.
For how many years, and how heavily has the Chinese proletarian and the Chinese peasant paid for this mistake in identity!
It would, however, be wrong to believe that this mistake was made by the whole Communist movement. No. The responsibility lies entirely upon the factions of Stalin and Bucharin, and lies doubly heavy because the Bolshevik wing of the party was wiser than they and did not trample upon the teachings of Marx and Lenin, or turn its back upon the revolutionary experiences and traditions of the past. It analyzed correctly that which was at the moment, it used Marxism not to spit at but as an instrument for probing into and preparing for the future, it warned against the consequences of the prevailing policy, and at every stage of the struggle it advanced the essentially correct course. In every important particular, it was as correct in its prospect as it has been justified a thousand times over in retrospect.
There is no possible justification, however, for the line of the officialdom. What the lessons of the past and the events of the moment might have failed to teach them, the Bolshevik-Leninists of Russia pointed out to them day in and day out. They were rewarded for this work by having abuse heaped upon them, by having their views deliberately distorted and misrepresented, by having their speeches hushed up and their writings suppressed, and, when the facts of life had accumulated into mountainous evidence of their correctness, they were finally expelled from the party, imprisoned, exiled or banished from the borders of the Soviet Union. The latter fate was reserved for the greatest living Bolshevik because he, more than anyone else, refused to regard the Gallifets of the Chinese revolution as its leaders, as its Communards.
But the bureaucratic, small-minded method of solving political and theoretical disputes solves nothing but a temporary consolidation of the power of the usurpers. Marx and his followers in the labor movement spent years, decades, in studying every phase of the ill-starred Paris Commune. In the discussion of the Commune and the defeated Russian revolution of 1905, Bolshevism became the dominant current in the movement and was finally able to lead the proletariat to power. In the same sense, it can be said today that without a thorough, all-sided study and assimilation of the lessons of the Chinese revolution, the Bolshevik regiments of tomorrow will not be assembled and trained to measure up to their tasks. For the lessons of the Chinese revolution have a living, timely application to the problems of the revolutionary movement in every country in the world. They relate to the fundamental principle questions of Marxism.
But such a study is today forbidden in the official Communist movement. This makes it all the more imperative that it be undertaken, for a real beginning has hardly been made. It is with this in mind that the following contributions by comrade Trotsky have been assembled and presented to American readers. With the exception of a few pages, none of them has even been published in the English language. As has unfortunately been the case with most of the serious Marxian writings of recent times, the works presented here have for the most part had to be sent out of the Soviet Union secretly. Their distribution has been made illegal by the Stalinist regime, and even when they were first presented to the Russian party and to the Communist International, those who listened to them or read them were confined to a select few hardened bureaucrats upon whom logic, arguments and facts made no impression. At the very height of the revolutionary events in China, the masses of the Communist workers were prevented from hearing the standpoint of the Left Opposition.
So overcome with the fear of the Apposition’s arguments were the bureaucrats, that they not only prevented the publication of the former’s documents, but even their own writings and speeches, which events proceeded so rapidly to deride, had to be kept concealed. Thus, Stalin’s speech in defense of Chiang Kai-Shek, made a few days before the coup d’État in Shanghai, has never been made public. The whole Eighth Plenary Session of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, at which the discussion of the Chinese question occupied the main point on the agenda, met under the conditions of a complete censorship. For the first time in the history of the Communist International, the proceedings of so signal a Plenum were not made public, in full or in part, in the party press of any country. The Communist world knew about its sessions only from the official resolution finally adopted and from a scant article in Pravda, reprinted in the International Press Correspondence. The censorship was not, it seems, completely air-tight. Some of the Opposition’s documents and a speech or two, made their way to Germany soon after the Plenum, and they were issued in pamphlet form, first by the German Left Oppositionists and later by the French. Only for the purpose of counteracting the effect of these documents did the official publishing house of the Comintern finally print, one year after the Plenum, a slim brochure containing the speeches delivered by Bucharin, Stalin, Manuilsky, Smeral, Pepper, Ferdi, Petrov, and a number of other apparatus men, plus one of Trotsky’s speeches and one of Vuyovitch’s. Aside from this, and an odd pamphlet here and there by Tang Ping Shan—the official spokesman for Stalin and Bucharin in China who later turned renegade from Communism—by Heller, and a few others, the literary contributions of the Communist International on the problems of the Chinese revolution, in modern non-Russian languages, are confined to journalistic dispatches from China which distinguished themselves in every case by the fact that a week later the events robbed them of any pretension to truth or analytical importance. In English, the official literature is more limited and more worthless: a pamphlet by Earl Browder, another by R. Doonping—kindness and mercy dictate that nothing more be said about them.
These facts, as well as the intrinsic value of the material presented in this book, make a study of it one of the main duties of the revolutionary worker today. That it deals so largely “with the past” does not rob it of one iota of its value. The present cannot be understood unless the past in which it is rooted is understood. The criminal opportunism of yesterday is being paid for by the light-hearted adventurism of the Comintern in China today. The idea of the Soviets as the instruments of the proletarian insurrection and later the dictatorship, is being abused by Stalinism today, in the period of counter-revolution, as it was in 1927, in the period of the revolutionary ascent. Yesterday, the bourgeois regime of Wuhan was passed off as a substitute for arming the workers and peasants independently and forming their Soviets. Today, the struggles of isolated, desperate peasant bands, aroused by the belated echo in the village of the revolutionary clashes of four years ago, and doomed to degeneration without the leadership of a strong, well-knit, thoroughly restored movement of proletarian revolutionists in the cities—are this time passed off by the Stalinists as the Soviet regime. And above all, the “super-historical” formula of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” continues to be set up against the Marxian conception of the permanent revolution so as to guarantee in advance that the coming Chinese revolution will be strangled just as fatally as the last one.
There remain three other points which require comment before these remarks are brought to an end.
Among the conceptions, or rather the misconceptions, concerning the standpoint of the Opposition in the Chinese question, as contrasted to that defended by the official spokesmen, is that the divergences were confined to an issue which is now “outlived”: the establishment of Soviets in the 1927 period. It would be more accurate to say that the differences of the kernel of the Opposition with the Stalinist standpoint were and remain concerned with all the fundamental principal questions of the Chinese revolution in all its phases and at every stage. Even in the ranks of the Opposition, particularly among the ultra-Leftists, the idea took shape that the Opposition’s struggle was confined to views which excluded any “democratic” development for China, or the imperative need for advancing in China the most resolute and extreme slogans of democracy. Especially at the present stage of the counter-revolution, the need for putting forward the slogans of democracy in China becomes unpostponable. The Communists will lead the masses of workers and peasants on to the socialist path by demonstrations in life that only the dictatorship of the proletariat can solve for the people all the democratic tasks which stand on the order of the day for China. In this respect, there is no conflict between the emphasis placed by the Opposition in 1925-1927 and the emphasis it places on the slogans necessary for today. The conflict really arises in the ranks of Stalinism which, while putting forward the perspective of the “democratic dictatorship”, categorically rejects the advancement of the most necessary democratic slogans!
Further, in connection with the question of the “democratic dictatorship”, an apparent conflict may be perceived in the documents which make up this book. In the later articles, comrade Trotsky counterposes the permanent revolution to the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, whereas the early articles do not make such a contrast; indeed, the 1927 Platform of the Opposition speaks for the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. The conflict is more apparent than real and is derived from two sources. The first is that in the bloc established in 1926 between the “Trotsky” and the “Zinoviev” Oppositions (the Moscow Opposition of 1923 and the Leningrad Opposition of 1925), formal concessions of this kind were made by the former to the Left Centrists of Leningrad in the interests of maintaining the bloc against the Menshevik policy of Stalin and Bucharin. The second is that in 1925-1927, the slogan of the “democratic dictatorship”, borrowed literally and purely formally from Lenin’s pre-1917 writings, had not yet so clearly been filled with the reactionary content which the epigones poured into it. The Opposition, as proceeds plainly even from the early articles of comrade Trotsky, construed the slogan in the same sense that Lenin construed it in and after 1917, that is, that the “democratic dictatorship” was realized in the “democratic period” (the first six months) of the October revolution, but realized under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Long before the revolution, Lenin had written that the slogan had a past and a future. For China, the epigones, looking backward only to the past—and even there with a distorted vision—filled the slogan with a reactionary content, which they still seek to apply not only to “backward China”, but to about four-fifths of the whole world … including modern Spain. One of the greatest contributions to the movement made by the Opposition, and in the first place, by comrade Trotsky, is the setting of the old Leninist slogan in its proper historical perspective, the frank—and not slavish—examination of the value of the slogan in the light of revolutionary experiences, and the restoration to its rightful place of the Marxian conception of the permanent revolution, expressed by Lenin for the East in particular, in those sections of the theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International which speak of the non-capitalist path of development of the backward colonial and semi- colonial countries.
A third point which may interest readers, or arouse a certain amount of confusion, is another apparent contradiction in the standpoint of the Opposition. It is only in the later documents that comrade Trotsky speaks about the Opposition having stood against the integration of the proletarian party, the Communist Party of China, into the party of the bourgeoisie, the Kuo Min Tang. Any misunderstanding that may arise will be eliminated by reproducing part of a letter written by comrade Trotsky to the present writer on December 10, 1930, which I take the liberty of quoting.
”You are quite right when you point out that the Russian Opposition, as late as the first half of 1927, did not demand openly the withdrawal from the Kuo Min Tang. I believe, however, that I have already commented on this fact publicly somewhere. I personally was from the very beginning, that is, from 1923, resolutely opposed to the Communist party joining the Kuo Min Tang, as well as against the acceptance of the Kuo Min Tang into the `Kuomintern’. Radek was always with Zinoviev against me. The younger members of the Opposition of 1923 were with me almost to a man. Rakovsky was in Paris and not sufficiently informed. Up to 1926, I always voted independently in the Political Bureau on this question, against all the others. In 1925, simultaneously with the theses on the Eastern Chinese Railway which I have quoted in the Opposition press, I once more presented the formal proposal that the Communist party leave the Kuo Min Tang instantly. This was unanimously rejected and contributed a great deal to the baiting later on. In 1926 and 1927, I had uninterrupted conflicts with the Zinovievists on this question. Two or three times, the matter stood at the breaking point. Our center consisted of approximately equal numbers from both of the allied tendencies, for it was after all only a bloc. At the voting, the position of the 1923 Opposition was betrayed by Radek, out of principle, and by Piatakov, out of unprincipledness. Our faction (1923) was furious about it, demanded that Radek and Piatakov be recalled from the center. But since it was a question of splitting with the Zinovievists, it was the general decision that I must submit publicly in this question and acquaint the Opposition in writing with my standpoint. And that is how it happened that the demand was put up by us so late, in spite of the fact that the Political Bureau and the Plenum of the Central Committee always contrasted my view with the official view of the Opposition. Now I can say with certainty that I made a mistake by submitting formally in this question. In any case, this mistake became quite clear only by the further evolution of the Zinovievists. At that time, the split with them appeared to the overwhelming majority of our faction as absolutely fatal. Thus, the manifesto [of the International Left Opposition on the Chinese question, issued late in 1930] in no way contradicts the facts when it contends that the Russian Opposition, the real one, was against the Communist party joining the Kuo Min Tang. Out of the thousands of imprisoned, exiled, etc., hardly a single one was with Radek in this question. This fact too I have referred to in many letters, namely, that the great majority of the capitulators were not sure and firm in the Chinese and the Anglo-Russian question. That is very characteristic! …”
The documents which follow are arranged more or less in chronological order. As a whole, they present a fairly thorough picture of the course of the Chinese revolution and the struggle for Bolshevism which the Opposition carried on in all the periods of its development, up to the present day. How brilliantly they demonstrate the indispensability of Marxism— which serves the revolutionist to foresee the coming day and to prepare for it—can be left to the reader to judge. As appendices, we have included articles and speeches by other comrades. The suppressed theses of Zinoviev present invaluable facts and documents, even though they present the relations between the Communist party and the Kuo Min Tang in a confused manner. The Shanghai letter by three Russian comrades, all of them opponents of “Trotskyism”, shows that the leadership of the Comintern was well aware of the real state of affairs in China. The letter is presented here for the first time. It suffered the same fate of suppression as so much other important material. Indeed, one of its authors, the youth comrade Nassonov, together with the party comrade, Mandalyan, were recalled in disgrace from China by Stalin. As punishment, Nassonov was “exiled” to the United States as representative of the Young Communist International, and I still recall how he would tell me that in spite of everything, Stalin had been “compelled in the end to carry out” his viewpoint….
In conclusion, the writer wishes to express his gratitude, and the appreciation of the publishers, to his comrades, Sam Gordon and Morris Lewit, who gave such indispensable assistance in the final checking of the translations.
NEW YORK, August 7,
1931
Max Shachtman.
Markin comment:
The article below is prima facie evidence that when Max Shachtman was a revolutionary in his younger days he could "speak" Marxism with the best of them. Right, Leon Trotsky and Jim Cannon?
****************
Max Shachtman (1931)
Introduction to Leon Trotsky’s
Problems of the Chinese Revolution
There is hardly an event of greater world historical significance since the proletarian revolution in Russia than the awakening of the cruelly exploited and oppressed Orient, which found its most dramatic and most tragic expression in the great Chinese revolutionary movement of 1925-1927. For the first time in history, the capitalist countries of Europe, long ago matured for the socialist overthrow, gave way in revolutionary precedence to an Eastern land which bid fair to condense the experiences of capitalist evolution, under the titanic blows of the social revolution, into a brief span of time and, unlike the Occidental countries, enter boldly upon the path of socialist development. A more audacious enterprise, history could not imagine. Even the Russian working class was compelled to pass through a long period of capitalist development before it was peremptorily confronted with the opportunity and the need of breaking down the last barrier to the emancipation and free development of humanity. The Chinese proletariat, reaching a virile manhood at the crossroads of a revolutionary epoch, armed also with the strength of uncounted millions of insurgent peasants, was given the rare opportunity to choose between capitalist enslavement under its “own” bourgeoisie or socialist growth in alliance with the Soviet Union and the revolutionary working class of the West.
There is no point here in arguing the academic question as to whether China has matured economically for the establishment or construction of a socialist society. It is not a question to be settled statistically or statically in China—any more than it could have been established for Russia in 1917. This problem is solved primarily on an international scale, in the conflict between the socialist and the capitalist sectors of world economy. What has, however, been demonstrated since the day of the successful counter-revolution in China, if theoretical consideration and forecast were still inadequate, was that the basic problems of China, its. democratic tasks of national unification and independence, self- determination for its various peoples, and the agrarian revolution included, could be solved in no other way than by the victory of the workers acting independently as a class. In other words, all the problems and antagonisms arising out of the struggle against imperialist subjection, against the remnants of feudal relationships, which could have been but were not solved by the revolution of 1925-1927 or by the regime which succeeded it, will find a solution only with the success of the dictatorship of the proletariat in China. It is in the opportunity offered for the attainment of this goal that lies the great importance of the Chinese revolution of 1925-1927.
But it is precisely in examining this opportunity that we encounter a monstrous historical anomaly. The revolution ended not with a victory, but with a horribly sanguinary defeat for the proletariat and the peasantry. How was this possible? In the European bourgeois revolutions of 1848, the young proletariat and the peasantry were the fighting troops for the equally youthful bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie triumphed over feudalism, and also over the proletariat. The latter still lived in the period of the rise of capitalism; it had not yet learned how to act independently as a class; it did not have at its head a conscious revolutionary leadership. Even the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1871 is not difficult to understand, nor could anybody have expected that this first faint dawn of the proletarian revolution could, under the circumstances of time and place, see the full daylight of life. One can even go farther ahead in history, to the very end of the world war. The German proletariat overthrew the kaiser in 1918, but it did not come to power because its social democratic leadership, corrupted by the bourgeoisie, ran to the head of the marching column of mutinous workers for the purpose of turning them off to the road of bourgeois democracy.
But in China we had a partly armed proletariat. Even the peasantry was armed to a certain extent. A Communist party was in the field and had every opportunity to develop. The prestige of the Soviet Union was incalculable—every Chinese worker knew that Bolshevism had rid Russia of the imperialists and of the bankers and exploiters, every Chinese peasant knew that the Soviets had given the Russian peasant the land. The official political counsellor to the nationalist government was the Russian Communist, Borodin, just as one of its principal military directors was the Russian Communist, Galen. On every occasion, the workers and the peasants showed their desire to emulate the Russians—the former by their struggles against their own bourgeoisie, the latter by their constant attempts to carry out the first real steps of the agrarian revolution. In the Communist party itself, there was a strong current that favored breaking away from the domination of the bourgeoisie and its Kuo Min Tang and taking the path of independent class action. Yet, with all these and other favorable conditions, the proletariat not only did not come within reach of taking power, but was made the last object crushed under the heel of the bourgeois counter-revolution which did take and hold the power.
Where does the most active cause for this truly monstrous catastrophe lie? It was not so much objective difficulties that stood in the way. It was not the classic interference of the socialist agents of capital in the labor movement. The Chinese proletariat was prohibited by the policies and instructions of the leadership of the Communist International, the organizing center of the world revolution, from fulfilling the role imposed upon it by history! There is the source that must be sought to explain the bitter tragedy of the Chinese revolution.
No greater indictment can be presented against the faction of Stalin and Bucharin than this: invested with all the formal authority of the Soviet Union, of the Communist International, holding to so great an extent the destiny of China—one might say, of the whole East—in their hands, entrusted with the awful responsibility of guiding an unprecedentedly huge revolutionary movement, all they did was to translate the theories and practises of Menshevism into the language of Chinese politics, palm them off as Bolshevism, and, in the name of Lenin, pursue a course against which Lenin had fought throughout his whole political life.
All through the revolutionary period, the official leadership of the Communist International staked its cards upon the national bourgeoisie instead of upon the worker and the peasant, upon Chiang Kai-Shek, and then upon Wang Chin Wei, but not upon the Shanghai proletarian. Worse yet, the latter was told in no uncertain terms that the national bourgeoisie was the leader of the revolution, figuring as the main partner in the ill-conceived “bloc of the four classes”. The Chinese Communist Party was driven into the bourgeois Kuo Min Tang with the Stalinist whip, and there it was compelled to swear allegiance to the petty bourgeois philosophy of Sun Yat Senism. The policy of class struggle was liquidated in the interests of the “united national front”. Strikes were prohibited or else settled by “arbitration commissions” in the best class collaborationist style, for how could the worker have a conflict of interests with the Chinese employer who was his leader in the “united national front” of the Kuo Min Tang? So as not to irritate the bourgeoisie, Stalin sent telegrams to the Chinese Communist Party, instructing it to restrain the peasants from taking the land. On pain of denunciation as “Trotskyists”, the equivalent among the Stalinist churchmen to excommunication, the Chinese Communists were prohibited from forming Soviets, first under the Chiang Kai-Shek regime and later under the Wuhan government because, you see, the latter was already the revolutionary center. Even though the caliber of the man was known—he had already attempted a reactionary coup d’État early in 1926—a veritable cult was built up for Chiang Kai-Shek by the international Communist press. What more striking condemnation of the official course is needed than the fact—characteristic of the whole policy—that on the eve of Chiang Kai-Shek’s march into Shanghai to establish the counter-revolutionary regime and to massacre the militant workers, the French Communist Party and its central organ L’HumanitÉ, sent him a solemn message of greetings, hailing the establishment of the Shanghai … Commune. Such “mistakes” are not accidental. They flowed from the whole past course. By the policy of Stalin and Bucharin, not only the Chinese Communists, but the international revolutionary movement was obliged to make the mistake of confusing a Gallifet with a Communard, the counter-revolution with the Commune.
For how many years, and how heavily has the Chinese proletarian and the Chinese peasant paid for this mistake in identity!
It would, however, be wrong to believe that this mistake was made by the whole Communist movement. No. The responsibility lies entirely upon the factions of Stalin and Bucharin, and lies doubly heavy because the Bolshevik wing of the party was wiser than they and did not trample upon the teachings of Marx and Lenin, or turn its back upon the revolutionary experiences and traditions of the past. It analyzed correctly that which was at the moment, it used Marxism not to spit at but as an instrument for probing into and preparing for the future, it warned against the consequences of the prevailing policy, and at every stage of the struggle it advanced the essentially correct course. In every important particular, it was as correct in its prospect as it has been justified a thousand times over in retrospect.
There is no possible justification, however, for the line of the officialdom. What the lessons of the past and the events of the moment might have failed to teach them, the Bolshevik-Leninists of Russia pointed out to them day in and day out. They were rewarded for this work by having abuse heaped upon them, by having their views deliberately distorted and misrepresented, by having their speeches hushed up and their writings suppressed, and, when the facts of life had accumulated into mountainous evidence of their correctness, they were finally expelled from the party, imprisoned, exiled or banished from the borders of the Soviet Union. The latter fate was reserved for the greatest living Bolshevik because he, more than anyone else, refused to regard the Gallifets of the Chinese revolution as its leaders, as its Communards.
But the bureaucratic, small-minded method of solving political and theoretical disputes solves nothing but a temporary consolidation of the power of the usurpers. Marx and his followers in the labor movement spent years, decades, in studying every phase of the ill-starred Paris Commune. In the discussion of the Commune and the defeated Russian revolution of 1905, Bolshevism became the dominant current in the movement and was finally able to lead the proletariat to power. In the same sense, it can be said today that without a thorough, all-sided study and assimilation of the lessons of the Chinese revolution, the Bolshevik regiments of tomorrow will not be assembled and trained to measure up to their tasks. For the lessons of the Chinese revolution have a living, timely application to the problems of the revolutionary movement in every country in the world. They relate to the fundamental principle questions of Marxism.
But such a study is today forbidden in the official Communist movement. This makes it all the more imperative that it be undertaken, for a real beginning has hardly been made. It is with this in mind that the following contributions by comrade Trotsky have been assembled and presented to American readers. With the exception of a few pages, none of them has even been published in the English language. As has unfortunately been the case with most of the serious Marxian writings of recent times, the works presented here have for the most part had to be sent out of the Soviet Union secretly. Their distribution has been made illegal by the Stalinist regime, and even when they were first presented to the Russian party and to the Communist International, those who listened to them or read them were confined to a select few hardened bureaucrats upon whom logic, arguments and facts made no impression. At the very height of the revolutionary events in China, the masses of the Communist workers were prevented from hearing the standpoint of the Left Opposition.
So overcome with the fear of the Apposition’s arguments were the bureaucrats, that they not only prevented the publication of the former’s documents, but even their own writings and speeches, which events proceeded so rapidly to deride, had to be kept concealed. Thus, Stalin’s speech in defense of Chiang Kai-Shek, made a few days before the coup d’État in Shanghai, has never been made public. The whole Eighth Plenary Session of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, at which the discussion of the Chinese question occupied the main point on the agenda, met under the conditions of a complete censorship. For the first time in the history of the Communist International, the proceedings of so signal a Plenum were not made public, in full or in part, in the party press of any country. The Communist world knew about its sessions only from the official resolution finally adopted and from a scant article in Pravda, reprinted in the International Press Correspondence. The censorship was not, it seems, completely air-tight. Some of the Opposition’s documents and a speech or two, made their way to Germany soon after the Plenum, and they were issued in pamphlet form, first by the German Left Oppositionists and later by the French. Only for the purpose of counteracting the effect of these documents did the official publishing house of the Comintern finally print, one year after the Plenum, a slim brochure containing the speeches delivered by Bucharin, Stalin, Manuilsky, Smeral, Pepper, Ferdi, Petrov, and a number of other apparatus men, plus one of Trotsky’s speeches and one of Vuyovitch’s. Aside from this, and an odd pamphlet here and there by Tang Ping Shan—the official spokesman for Stalin and Bucharin in China who later turned renegade from Communism—by Heller, and a few others, the literary contributions of the Communist International on the problems of the Chinese revolution, in modern non-Russian languages, are confined to journalistic dispatches from China which distinguished themselves in every case by the fact that a week later the events robbed them of any pretension to truth or analytical importance. In English, the official literature is more limited and more worthless: a pamphlet by Earl Browder, another by R. Doonping—kindness and mercy dictate that nothing more be said about them.
These facts, as well as the intrinsic value of the material presented in this book, make a study of it one of the main duties of the revolutionary worker today. That it deals so largely “with the past” does not rob it of one iota of its value. The present cannot be understood unless the past in which it is rooted is understood. The criminal opportunism of yesterday is being paid for by the light-hearted adventurism of the Comintern in China today. The idea of the Soviets as the instruments of the proletarian insurrection and later the dictatorship, is being abused by Stalinism today, in the period of counter-revolution, as it was in 1927, in the period of the revolutionary ascent. Yesterday, the bourgeois regime of Wuhan was passed off as a substitute for arming the workers and peasants independently and forming their Soviets. Today, the struggles of isolated, desperate peasant bands, aroused by the belated echo in the village of the revolutionary clashes of four years ago, and doomed to degeneration without the leadership of a strong, well-knit, thoroughly restored movement of proletarian revolutionists in the cities—are this time passed off by the Stalinists as the Soviet regime. And above all, the “super-historical” formula of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” continues to be set up against the Marxian conception of the permanent revolution so as to guarantee in advance that the coming Chinese revolution will be strangled just as fatally as the last one.
There remain three other points which require comment before these remarks are brought to an end.
Among the conceptions, or rather the misconceptions, concerning the standpoint of the Opposition in the Chinese question, as contrasted to that defended by the official spokesmen, is that the divergences were confined to an issue which is now “outlived”: the establishment of Soviets in the 1927 period. It would be more accurate to say that the differences of the kernel of the Opposition with the Stalinist standpoint were and remain concerned with all the fundamental principal questions of the Chinese revolution in all its phases and at every stage. Even in the ranks of the Opposition, particularly among the ultra-Leftists, the idea took shape that the Opposition’s struggle was confined to views which excluded any “democratic” development for China, or the imperative need for advancing in China the most resolute and extreme slogans of democracy. Especially at the present stage of the counter-revolution, the need for putting forward the slogans of democracy in China becomes unpostponable. The Communists will lead the masses of workers and peasants on to the socialist path by demonstrations in life that only the dictatorship of the proletariat can solve for the people all the democratic tasks which stand on the order of the day for China. In this respect, there is no conflict between the emphasis placed by the Opposition in 1925-1927 and the emphasis it places on the slogans necessary for today. The conflict really arises in the ranks of Stalinism which, while putting forward the perspective of the “democratic dictatorship”, categorically rejects the advancement of the most necessary democratic slogans!
Further, in connection with the question of the “democratic dictatorship”, an apparent conflict may be perceived in the documents which make up this book. In the later articles, comrade Trotsky counterposes the permanent revolution to the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, whereas the early articles do not make such a contrast; indeed, the 1927 Platform of the Opposition speaks for the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. The conflict is more apparent than real and is derived from two sources. The first is that in the bloc established in 1926 between the “Trotsky” and the “Zinoviev” Oppositions (the Moscow Opposition of 1923 and the Leningrad Opposition of 1925), formal concessions of this kind were made by the former to the Left Centrists of Leningrad in the interests of maintaining the bloc against the Menshevik policy of Stalin and Bucharin. The second is that in 1925-1927, the slogan of the “democratic dictatorship”, borrowed literally and purely formally from Lenin’s pre-1917 writings, had not yet so clearly been filled with the reactionary content which the epigones poured into it. The Opposition, as proceeds plainly even from the early articles of comrade Trotsky, construed the slogan in the same sense that Lenin construed it in and after 1917, that is, that the “democratic dictatorship” was realized in the “democratic period” (the first six months) of the October revolution, but realized under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Long before the revolution, Lenin had written that the slogan had a past and a future. For China, the epigones, looking backward only to the past—and even there with a distorted vision—filled the slogan with a reactionary content, which they still seek to apply not only to “backward China”, but to about four-fifths of the whole world … including modern Spain. One of the greatest contributions to the movement made by the Opposition, and in the first place, by comrade Trotsky, is the setting of the old Leninist slogan in its proper historical perspective, the frank—and not slavish—examination of the value of the slogan in the light of revolutionary experiences, and the restoration to its rightful place of the Marxian conception of the permanent revolution, expressed by Lenin for the East in particular, in those sections of the theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International which speak of the non-capitalist path of development of the backward colonial and semi- colonial countries.
A third point which may interest readers, or arouse a certain amount of confusion, is another apparent contradiction in the standpoint of the Opposition. It is only in the later documents that comrade Trotsky speaks about the Opposition having stood against the integration of the proletarian party, the Communist Party of China, into the party of the bourgeoisie, the Kuo Min Tang. Any misunderstanding that may arise will be eliminated by reproducing part of a letter written by comrade Trotsky to the present writer on December 10, 1930, which I take the liberty of quoting.
”You are quite right when you point out that the Russian Opposition, as late as the first half of 1927, did not demand openly the withdrawal from the Kuo Min Tang. I believe, however, that I have already commented on this fact publicly somewhere. I personally was from the very beginning, that is, from 1923, resolutely opposed to the Communist party joining the Kuo Min Tang, as well as against the acceptance of the Kuo Min Tang into the `Kuomintern’. Radek was always with Zinoviev against me. The younger members of the Opposition of 1923 were with me almost to a man. Rakovsky was in Paris and not sufficiently informed. Up to 1926, I always voted independently in the Political Bureau on this question, against all the others. In 1925, simultaneously with the theses on the Eastern Chinese Railway which I have quoted in the Opposition press, I once more presented the formal proposal that the Communist party leave the Kuo Min Tang instantly. This was unanimously rejected and contributed a great deal to the baiting later on. In 1926 and 1927, I had uninterrupted conflicts with the Zinovievists on this question. Two or three times, the matter stood at the breaking point. Our center consisted of approximately equal numbers from both of the allied tendencies, for it was after all only a bloc. At the voting, the position of the 1923 Opposition was betrayed by Radek, out of principle, and by Piatakov, out of unprincipledness. Our faction (1923) was furious about it, demanded that Radek and Piatakov be recalled from the center. But since it was a question of splitting with the Zinovievists, it was the general decision that I must submit publicly in this question and acquaint the Opposition in writing with my standpoint. And that is how it happened that the demand was put up by us so late, in spite of the fact that the Political Bureau and the Plenum of the Central Committee always contrasted my view with the official view of the Opposition. Now I can say with certainty that I made a mistake by submitting formally in this question. In any case, this mistake became quite clear only by the further evolution of the Zinovievists. At that time, the split with them appeared to the overwhelming majority of our faction as absolutely fatal. Thus, the manifesto [of the International Left Opposition on the Chinese question, issued late in 1930] in no way contradicts the facts when it contends that the Russian Opposition, the real one, was against the Communist party joining the Kuo Min Tang. Out of the thousands of imprisoned, exiled, etc., hardly a single one was with Radek in this question. This fact too I have referred to in many letters, namely, that the great majority of the capitulators were not sure and firm in the Chinese and the Anglo-Russian question. That is very characteristic! …”
The documents which follow are arranged more or less in chronological order. As a whole, they present a fairly thorough picture of the course of the Chinese revolution and the struggle for Bolshevism which the Opposition carried on in all the periods of its development, up to the present day. How brilliantly they demonstrate the indispensability of Marxism— which serves the revolutionist to foresee the coming day and to prepare for it—can be left to the reader to judge. As appendices, we have included articles and speeches by other comrades. The suppressed theses of Zinoviev present invaluable facts and documents, even though they present the relations between the Communist party and the Kuo Min Tang in a confused manner. The Shanghai letter by three Russian comrades, all of them opponents of “Trotskyism”, shows that the leadership of the Comintern was well aware of the real state of affairs in China. The letter is presented here for the first time. It suffered the same fate of suppression as so much other important material. Indeed, one of its authors, the youth comrade Nassonov, together with the party comrade, Mandalyan, were recalled in disgrace from China by Stalin. As punishment, Nassonov was “exiled” to the United States as representative of the Young Communist International, and I still recall how he would tell me that in spite of everything, Stalin had been “compelled in the end to carry out” his viewpoint….
In conclusion, the writer wishes to express his gratitude, and the appreciation of the publishers, to his comrades, Sam Gordon and Morris Lewit, who gave such indispensable assistance in the final checking of the translations.
NEW YORK, August 7,
1931
Max Shachtman.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
*From The Wilds Of Cyberspace-From The "Against The Stream" Journal Website- A Guest Commentary On Arizona's SB 1070
Click on the title to link to the website mentioned in the headline for the latest news and opinion from that site.
Arizona's Racial Profiling Push
— Malik Miah
ARIZONA GOVERNOR Jan Brewer is quick to blame the federal government for the economic and social ills of her state. Responding to a growing movement to boycott Arizona for its new “show me your papers” law (signed by her on April 23 and to become effective July 29) as “thoughtless and harmful,” she complained that the outraged response “adds to the massive economic burden Arizonans have sustained for years due to the federal government’s failure to secure its borders.”
The new law states that cops must (not merely can) stop all individuals who they determine have a “reasonable suspicion” of being “illegal.” When Gov Brewer was asked the question how reasonable suspicion is determined, she said: “I don’t know but I’m sure our cops will be trained to know how to pick people out.”
Racial Profiling Lives
One politician didn’t have Brewer’s difficulty. He said it’s obvious who is illegal: Just look at their clothes, shoes and other known features of “illegal aliens.” Racial profiling — despite official disclaimers that no one takes seriously — is the core of the law, and quite intentionally so.
The law even says any private citizen can sue cops and law enforcement agencies if they don’t stop “suspicious” individuals. Every brown-skinned person in Arizona can now face white vigilantism if they don’t show proof of citizenship. Propelled by those who think illegals carry forged drivers’ licenses and birth certificates, the inevitable false arrests and deportations of U.S. citizens of Latino heritage will occur.
If more proof is needed to show this is really about the rights of Mexican Americans and Latinos — and not about stopping “illegal criminals” — Arizona’s legislature made that crystal clear when it adopted a new anti-ethnic studies law on May 12. According to The Huffington Post, “Under the ban, sent to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer by the state legislature, schools will lose state funding if they offer any courses that ‘promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.’”
The specific target of the new law is the Tucson Unified School District’s popular Mexican American studies department. The state superintendent of schools Tom Horne charges that the program exhibits “ethnic extremism.” The program is not new or exclusionary. It’s open to all ethnic groups and is nearly 15 years old.
No Accent Allowed
In addition, The Wall Street Journal uncovered a move that the Arizona Department of Education has told schools that teachers with “heavy” or “ungrammatical” accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes. Teachers who can’t meet the new fluency standards have the option of taking classes to improve English but if they fail to reach the state’s targets would be fired or reassigned.
“At least we don’t have to pretend any more,” writes African-American columnist Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post. “Arizona’s passing of that mean-spirited new immigration law wasn’t about high-minded principle or the need to maintain public order. Apparently, it was all about putting Latinos in their place.”
The far right is openly moving to turn Arizona into a replica of the Bull Connor [the notorious Birmingham, Alabama segregationist police chief] era when state officials of Southern governments stood in front of schools to prevent Black children from attending all-white schools.
The shift to the right among whites in general shows the retreat taking place in the country on issues of race and ethnic rights. A McClatchy-Ipsos poll found that 61% of Americans and 64% of registered voters support the Arizona law, even though few have actually read it. The same poll says some 69% of Americans don’t mind if cops stop and ask them about their citizenship.
The so-called Tea Party freedom-loving anti-government types also back the law, even though it directly puts the state government in their personal lives. White people don’t expect to be stopped, since they know who the law is aimed at.
“Good whites” — legal and illegal — don’t see the contradiction of accepting history taught in schools about Italians, Irish or others from Europe while seeing Latino heritage as un-American. Many Asian Americans (few live in Arizona) think the law doesn’t affect them since they clearly don’t look Mexican. Some African Americans back the law, thinking it may get them more job opportunities.
Of course, the “show me the papers” supporters deny the true anti-Latino intent and aims of the law. Some even claim to agree with the great civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, who fought for equality for Blacks by demanding that the country recognize everyone as individuals and not by their ethnic origins.
This twisting of history — of what King said and meant — is used to justify reactionary positions. It was common to use code words like “neighborhood schools” and “colorblind” school programs to justify the denial of desegregation and full rights for minorities. Today the code words are “protect the borders.”
Arizona’s population is 30% Latino (not including undocumented workers). The numbers are growing as the U.S.-born segment of the state continues to expand. Arizona’s white majority has never liked the fact that the state once was originally part of Mexico.
Many white Arizonans are not proud of this link to Mexican and Native American heritage. They see the country as being “taken” from them and fear the end of white political power. These are the roots of the anti-immigrant and anti-Latino heritage backlash in the state and growing parts of the country. The objective is simple: protect historic white privileges.
Many Arizonans with white skin want the “good old days” when Latinos stayed in their place and did not challenge the white political power structure. The fearmongering of demagogues is to keep white workers from understanding the demographic change taking place, that their interests as workers are not served by aligning with racists and white bosses, and that they have more in common with fellow workers of other races and ethnic backgrounds.
Memory of Jim Crow
During the days of Jim Crow segregation of the Deep South, it was easy to racially profile African Americans — by skin color. It wasn’t called that then because the laws of the land in the Deep South were clear about where Blacks could eat, sleep or work. Blacks were legally denied the right to vote. White workers then were also made to believe their interests were with the bosses and bigots.
It took a massive civil disobedience movement to push the federal government to act and use force against the racist state troopers and immoral laws like the one in Arizona today.
The right wing points to polls showing a majority of people supporting the law in Arizona. If a poll were taken in the Deep South in the 1960s, a majority of whites would have supported the racist laws. They regularly complained about “Northerners” and “liberals” denying them “states rights.” At the time most whites rejected full integration of Blacks into society as equals. The Confederate civil war “heroes” are still cheered in these states.
After World War II, it took a government Executive Order to integrate the military. No referendum was taken, since it is likely a majority would have rejected the president’s decision. It took a powerful women’s rights movement to open the door for job opportunities and education equality for women. Gays are still fighting for full equality.
Popular Protests
The response to the Arizona law is growing. City Councils in northern and southern California have passed resolutions to boycott Arizona. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, born in Austria, has spoken out against the law.
(California’s reaction is noteworthy, since it was California in 1994 that passed its own anti-immigrant law and played the “illegal alien” card for political purpose. When Proposition 187 was adopted by referendum to deny social benefits to “illegal immigrants” families, the law was taken to court and never implemented.)
In New Mexico, where 45% of its population is Latino, Governor Bill Richardson also rejects targeting undocumented workers. He’s proud of his Mexican roots and has promoted Mexican and Native American culture even though many whites don’t like it. His state allows undocumented people to receive driver’s licenses, educate their children and receive other benefits.
“There is a decided positive in encouraging biculturalism and people working and living together instead of inciting tension,” says Richardson. “The worry I have about Arizona is it is going to spread. It arouses the nativist instinct in people.”
On May 1, pro-immigrant protests took place in Arizona and other states. City councils, universities along with civil liberties organizations, civil rights groups (Black and Latino) and many others are calling for a boycott of Arizona. Prominent athletes are among these opponents since Latinos are a large segment of many sports teams.
In Los Angeles, singer Gloria Estefan kicked off a massive downtown march to demand immigration reform and protest the Arizona law. Estefan spoke in Spanish and English atop a flatbed truck. Proclaiming the United States is a nation of immigrants, she said immigrants are good, hardworking people, not criminals.
The popular protests reflect what occurred two decades ago, when Arizona politicians opposed making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday even after it became a national holiday. Only the huge economic price led to a change.
The Anglo news media have downplayed these protests while giving front-page coverage and constant analysis to small Tea Party events.
In contrast, the Spanish-speaking media give these events broad coverage. The Mexican president and Latin American officials have protested the law and likely racial profiling of their citizens when visiting the United States. Suits have been filed in Arizona by Latino leaders and progressive-minded whites including the mayor of Phoenix, the state’s largest city.
The boycott campaign is an important weapon. People of all races and ethnic groups are denouncing the racial profiling and anti-immigrant law as an attack on their rights. Black leaders especially know the history of code words in taking away their communities’ rights.
Arab and Muslim leaders know this better than any group today because of their treatment, while whites who murder pro-choice doctors or attack IRS offices and kill civilians are not even called terrorists.
Open Borders and Citizenship
Rand (son of Ron) Paul, a Tea Party hero who won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate to replace the retiring Jim Bunning, wants to repeal or “reinterpret” part of the 14th Amendment that confers citizenship on anyone born in the USA to exclude citizenship for children of “illegal” immigrants. So much for the Constitution (Paul isn’t a big fan of the Civil Rights Act either). While this kind of thinking may be part of the right-wing freak show at the present moment, it represents a menace that must be confronted head-on in a principled fashion.
While liberals and other pro-immigration reform supporters have no viable solutions to help undocumented workers or solve the immigrant citizenship issue, they all know that 10 million undocumented working people cannot and will not be kicked out of the country. These workers play an invaluable role and have a positive impact on society. They reject the racism of the right.
What is a viable pro-immigrant solution? First and foremost we can demand that all racial profiling is made illegal. Second, we can raise the demand to open the borders so all workers and their families can freely migrate to work.
Hundreds of people die each year trying to cross the border looking for jobs and to help their families. If these workers could freely travel to work, they couldn’t be so easily be abused by the landowners and employers who deny them their benefits and wages. They could also join unions, which would benefit all workers.
The solution offered by Democrats and the Obama administration does not move in this direction. Instead it pushes for more stringent border patrols to arrest “illegals” and to declare intent to find a long-term path to citizenship for undocumented workers who currently work in the country.
The emphasis is on law enforcement and building new fences and walls, not human rights. Many Latino leaders and reform supporters, unfortunately, have accepted this “compromise” solution.
There is a deep misunderstanding about the relationship between free labor movement and citizenship. Just as workers across Europe can travel and be employed in member countries of the European Union, it does not give them the vote unless they are citizens. This is what should happen in North America. And it is the demand for which labor and the civil rights and civil liberties organizations should press.
Any compromise with the anti-immigrant hysteria and so called “Take Back America” crowd will undermine genuine reform. The issue of open borders is a way to turn the tables on the right. Calling for an open border policy and free labor movement is the only solution that can end the second-class status of undocumented workers and paves the way for solidarity and unity between citizen workers and noncitizens. It also can allow a legal path to citizenship for those who may want it.
It is not enough to oppose the racism of the right, or to call the new Arizona “show me your papers” laws as racial profiling and un-American as the ACLU does. It is necessary to demand fundamental reform that defends the rights of these working people.
The defense of undocumented workers is a defense of all working people. The issue of immigrant rights is an issue of human rights.
ATC 147, July-August 2010
Arizona's Racial Profiling Push
— Malik Miah
ARIZONA GOVERNOR Jan Brewer is quick to blame the federal government for the economic and social ills of her state. Responding to a growing movement to boycott Arizona for its new “show me your papers” law (signed by her on April 23 and to become effective July 29) as “thoughtless and harmful,” she complained that the outraged response “adds to the massive economic burden Arizonans have sustained for years due to the federal government’s failure to secure its borders.”
The new law states that cops must (not merely can) stop all individuals who they determine have a “reasonable suspicion” of being “illegal.” When Gov Brewer was asked the question how reasonable suspicion is determined, she said: “I don’t know but I’m sure our cops will be trained to know how to pick people out.”
Racial Profiling Lives
One politician didn’t have Brewer’s difficulty. He said it’s obvious who is illegal: Just look at their clothes, shoes and other known features of “illegal aliens.” Racial profiling — despite official disclaimers that no one takes seriously — is the core of the law, and quite intentionally so.
The law even says any private citizen can sue cops and law enforcement agencies if they don’t stop “suspicious” individuals. Every brown-skinned person in Arizona can now face white vigilantism if they don’t show proof of citizenship. Propelled by those who think illegals carry forged drivers’ licenses and birth certificates, the inevitable false arrests and deportations of U.S. citizens of Latino heritage will occur.
If more proof is needed to show this is really about the rights of Mexican Americans and Latinos — and not about stopping “illegal criminals” — Arizona’s legislature made that crystal clear when it adopted a new anti-ethnic studies law on May 12. According to The Huffington Post, “Under the ban, sent to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer by the state legislature, schools will lose state funding if they offer any courses that ‘promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.’”
The specific target of the new law is the Tucson Unified School District’s popular Mexican American studies department. The state superintendent of schools Tom Horne charges that the program exhibits “ethnic extremism.” The program is not new or exclusionary. It’s open to all ethnic groups and is nearly 15 years old.
No Accent Allowed
In addition, The Wall Street Journal uncovered a move that the Arizona Department of Education has told schools that teachers with “heavy” or “ungrammatical” accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes. Teachers who can’t meet the new fluency standards have the option of taking classes to improve English but if they fail to reach the state’s targets would be fired or reassigned.
“At least we don’t have to pretend any more,” writes African-American columnist Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post. “Arizona’s passing of that mean-spirited new immigration law wasn’t about high-minded principle or the need to maintain public order. Apparently, it was all about putting Latinos in their place.”
The far right is openly moving to turn Arizona into a replica of the Bull Connor [the notorious Birmingham, Alabama segregationist police chief] era when state officials of Southern governments stood in front of schools to prevent Black children from attending all-white schools.
The shift to the right among whites in general shows the retreat taking place in the country on issues of race and ethnic rights. A McClatchy-Ipsos poll found that 61% of Americans and 64% of registered voters support the Arizona law, even though few have actually read it. The same poll says some 69% of Americans don’t mind if cops stop and ask them about their citizenship.
The so-called Tea Party freedom-loving anti-government types also back the law, even though it directly puts the state government in their personal lives. White people don’t expect to be stopped, since they know who the law is aimed at.
“Good whites” — legal and illegal — don’t see the contradiction of accepting history taught in schools about Italians, Irish or others from Europe while seeing Latino heritage as un-American. Many Asian Americans (few live in Arizona) think the law doesn’t affect them since they clearly don’t look Mexican. Some African Americans back the law, thinking it may get them more job opportunities.
Of course, the “show me the papers” supporters deny the true anti-Latino intent and aims of the law. Some even claim to agree with the great civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, who fought for equality for Blacks by demanding that the country recognize everyone as individuals and not by their ethnic origins.
This twisting of history — of what King said and meant — is used to justify reactionary positions. It was common to use code words like “neighborhood schools” and “colorblind” school programs to justify the denial of desegregation and full rights for minorities. Today the code words are “protect the borders.”
Arizona’s population is 30% Latino (not including undocumented workers). The numbers are growing as the U.S.-born segment of the state continues to expand. Arizona’s white majority has never liked the fact that the state once was originally part of Mexico.
Many white Arizonans are not proud of this link to Mexican and Native American heritage. They see the country as being “taken” from them and fear the end of white political power. These are the roots of the anti-immigrant and anti-Latino heritage backlash in the state and growing parts of the country. The objective is simple: protect historic white privileges.
Many Arizonans with white skin want the “good old days” when Latinos stayed in their place and did not challenge the white political power structure. The fearmongering of demagogues is to keep white workers from understanding the demographic change taking place, that their interests as workers are not served by aligning with racists and white bosses, and that they have more in common with fellow workers of other races and ethnic backgrounds.
Memory of Jim Crow
During the days of Jim Crow segregation of the Deep South, it was easy to racially profile African Americans — by skin color. It wasn’t called that then because the laws of the land in the Deep South were clear about where Blacks could eat, sleep or work. Blacks were legally denied the right to vote. White workers then were also made to believe their interests were with the bosses and bigots.
It took a massive civil disobedience movement to push the federal government to act and use force against the racist state troopers and immoral laws like the one in Arizona today.
The right wing points to polls showing a majority of people supporting the law in Arizona. If a poll were taken in the Deep South in the 1960s, a majority of whites would have supported the racist laws. They regularly complained about “Northerners” and “liberals” denying them “states rights.” At the time most whites rejected full integration of Blacks into society as equals. The Confederate civil war “heroes” are still cheered in these states.
After World War II, it took a government Executive Order to integrate the military. No referendum was taken, since it is likely a majority would have rejected the president’s decision. It took a powerful women’s rights movement to open the door for job opportunities and education equality for women. Gays are still fighting for full equality.
Popular Protests
The response to the Arizona law is growing. City Councils in northern and southern California have passed resolutions to boycott Arizona. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, born in Austria, has spoken out against the law.
(California’s reaction is noteworthy, since it was California in 1994 that passed its own anti-immigrant law and played the “illegal alien” card for political purpose. When Proposition 187 was adopted by referendum to deny social benefits to “illegal immigrants” families, the law was taken to court and never implemented.)
In New Mexico, where 45% of its population is Latino, Governor Bill Richardson also rejects targeting undocumented workers. He’s proud of his Mexican roots and has promoted Mexican and Native American culture even though many whites don’t like it. His state allows undocumented people to receive driver’s licenses, educate their children and receive other benefits.
“There is a decided positive in encouraging biculturalism and people working and living together instead of inciting tension,” says Richardson. “The worry I have about Arizona is it is going to spread. It arouses the nativist instinct in people.”
On May 1, pro-immigrant protests took place in Arizona and other states. City councils, universities along with civil liberties organizations, civil rights groups (Black and Latino) and many others are calling for a boycott of Arizona. Prominent athletes are among these opponents since Latinos are a large segment of many sports teams.
In Los Angeles, singer Gloria Estefan kicked off a massive downtown march to demand immigration reform and protest the Arizona law. Estefan spoke in Spanish and English atop a flatbed truck. Proclaiming the United States is a nation of immigrants, she said immigrants are good, hardworking people, not criminals.
The popular protests reflect what occurred two decades ago, when Arizona politicians opposed making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday even after it became a national holiday. Only the huge economic price led to a change.
The Anglo news media have downplayed these protests while giving front-page coverage and constant analysis to small Tea Party events.
In contrast, the Spanish-speaking media give these events broad coverage. The Mexican president and Latin American officials have protested the law and likely racial profiling of their citizens when visiting the United States. Suits have been filed in Arizona by Latino leaders and progressive-minded whites including the mayor of Phoenix, the state’s largest city.
The boycott campaign is an important weapon. People of all races and ethnic groups are denouncing the racial profiling and anti-immigrant law as an attack on their rights. Black leaders especially know the history of code words in taking away their communities’ rights.
Arab and Muslim leaders know this better than any group today because of their treatment, while whites who murder pro-choice doctors or attack IRS offices and kill civilians are not even called terrorists.
Open Borders and Citizenship
Rand (son of Ron) Paul, a Tea Party hero who won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate to replace the retiring Jim Bunning, wants to repeal or “reinterpret” part of the 14th Amendment that confers citizenship on anyone born in the USA to exclude citizenship for children of “illegal” immigrants. So much for the Constitution (Paul isn’t a big fan of the Civil Rights Act either). While this kind of thinking may be part of the right-wing freak show at the present moment, it represents a menace that must be confronted head-on in a principled fashion.
While liberals and other pro-immigration reform supporters have no viable solutions to help undocumented workers or solve the immigrant citizenship issue, they all know that 10 million undocumented working people cannot and will not be kicked out of the country. These workers play an invaluable role and have a positive impact on society. They reject the racism of the right.
What is a viable pro-immigrant solution? First and foremost we can demand that all racial profiling is made illegal. Second, we can raise the demand to open the borders so all workers and their families can freely migrate to work.
Hundreds of people die each year trying to cross the border looking for jobs and to help their families. If these workers could freely travel to work, they couldn’t be so easily be abused by the landowners and employers who deny them their benefits and wages. They could also join unions, which would benefit all workers.
The solution offered by Democrats and the Obama administration does not move in this direction. Instead it pushes for more stringent border patrols to arrest “illegals” and to declare intent to find a long-term path to citizenship for undocumented workers who currently work in the country.
The emphasis is on law enforcement and building new fences and walls, not human rights. Many Latino leaders and reform supporters, unfortunately, have accepted this “compromise” solution.
There is a deep misunderstanding about the relationship between free labor movement and citizenship. Just as workers across Europe can travel and be employed in member countries of the European Union, it does not give them the vote unless they are citizens. This is what should happen in North America. And it is the demand for which labor and the civil rights and civil liberties organizations should press.
Any compromise with the anti-immigrant hysteria and so called “Take Back America” crowd will undermine genuine reform. The issue of open borders is a way to turn the tables on the right. Calling for an open border policy and free labor movement is the only solution that can end the second-class status of undocumented workers and paves the way for solidarity and unity between citizen workers and noncitizens. It also can allow a legal path to citizenship for those who may want it.
It is not enough to oppose the racism of the right, or to call the new Arizona “show me your papers” laws as racial profiling and un-American as the ACLU does. It is necessary to demand fundamental reform that defends the rights of these working people.
The defense of undocumented workers is a defense of all working people. The issue of immigrant rights is an issue of human rights.
ATC 147, July-August 2010
Friday, July 23, 2010
*From The "Spartacist" Journal Archives-"British Communism Aborted:The Far left: 1900-1920"- A Guest Book Review/Commentary
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of the Spartacist journal, Winter 1985-86, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social and political questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Spartacist periodically throughout the year.
*******************
"British Communism Aborted:The Far left: 1900-1920"- A Guest Book Review/Commentary
A REVIEW
The Origins of British Bolshevism
by Raymond Challinor Croom, Helm Ltd., London, 1977
If knowledge is not always power, ignorance is always weakness. With the deteriorating American school system calculated to produce ignorant youth in a period of reaction and Cold War, education of Marxist cadre is a crucial task for a Leninist organization. In this spirit, the Spartacist League/U.S. has instituted a nationally centralized program of internal education in Marxism and general knowledge.
As an aspect of this educational program, a significant part of the Central Committee plenum of the S L/ U.S., held last August, was devoted to a consideration of Raymond Challinor's The Origins of British Bolshevism. This is a study of the British Socialist Labour Party (SLP) from its origin around 1900 to its rapid disintegration in the early 1920s, following the organization's refusal to participate in the formation of the British section of the Communist International. Also as part of the education program Ed Clarkson of the SL Central Committee gave an educational presentation on Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder to a National Committee plenum of the Spartacus Youth League, the SL's youth section (reprinted as "Leninist Tactics and the Road to Workers Power" in Young Spartacus Nos. 130 and I3l, October and November 1985). We print below an edited version of a presentation to the plenum by comrade George Foster of the Sparta cist League Central Committee on Challinor's book.
This study of the British SLP illuminates in one important, concrete case the historic problem of forging Communist parties in the West out of the subjectively revolutionary elements in the pre-1917 socialist and anarcho-syndicalist movements. It also adds appreciably to our understanding of why the Communist Party in Britain was stillborn. The sterility of the CPGB and absence of a real Leninist tradition in Britain have been key negative conditions for the complete hegemony of Laborite reformism over the workers movement right down to the present.
The Third International
Much of the discussion focused on Challinor's parochial and nationally limited conception of revolutionary organization. The very title conveys a false understanding, as if a genuine counterpart of Russian Bolshevism was spontaneously generated on British (or Scottish) soil. Unlike the British SLP, the Russian Bolshevik Party was forged as an instrument to struggle for power amid the universal revolutionary ferment of the last years of the tsarist empire. It was this which set the Bolsheviks apart from even the best pre-World War I socialist parties in the West. In the discussion one conference participant pointed out:
"...[T]he Communist International does not fall from the skies, it comes from the experience of the Russian workers movement and the Russian Revolution— [T]he combination of a great empire; a central ethnicity that was not to be threatened, but massive national oppression; the growth of a great, raw, militant proletariat; pressures given the autocracy such that every member of the intelligentsia went through a selection process—all this churned up through wars, agrarian issues—[thus it was] that of all the parties of the Second International the Russian Social Democrats had the vanguard of experience."
The Bolsheviks' revolutionary experience was generalized and codified in the famous 21 Conditions for membership in the Communist International.
The British SLP was an example of a small Marxist propaganda group, originating and developing under relatively stable conditions of bourgeois democracy, which was then confronted with convulsive events, namely, the first imperialist world war and the Russian Revolution. The SLP had become so habituated to its prewar situation that it failed to make the turn toward the tasks of a new, far stormier period of social struggle.
Presentation
Comrades all have the study guide, the questions that were prepared to be thought about in conjunction with reading the book of Challinor.
For some of these questions the answers are quite clear; others are complex and require a lot of evaluation, thought and weighing; and at least one of them ought to frighten you a bit—which is, how does a party prepare for unanticipated and perhaps unprecedented events in a situation where the tasks posed by those events may for a period be far beyond your capacity? And the simple answer that comes to mind is: go through the experiences of the Bolshevik Party. Which may seem like a tautology, but isn't. And that's the point of this talk—that comrades Lenin and Trotsky and the first four congresses of the Communist International provide us with at least the political method and structure whereby we can forge a party which has both the program and possibly the capacity to make the rapid changes and adjustments necessary to lead to the revolutionary victory of the workers over the bourgeoisie.
I'd like to begin discussing the book by reading a quote from James Cannon, pioneer American Communist and Trotskyist, which 1 think sets this book in its context. And the quote is from Cannon's review of The Roots of American Communism by Theodore Draper. You'll find it in the book The First Ten Years of American Communism. Cannon says:
"The traditional sectarianism of the Americans was expressed most glaringly in their attempt to construct revolutionary unions outside the existing labor movement; their refusal to fight for’ immediate demands' in the course of the class struggle for the socialist goal; and their strongly entrenched anti-parliamentarism, which was only slightly modified in the first program of the Communist Party. All that hodgepodge of ultra-radicalism was practically wiped out of the American movement in 1920-21 by Lenin. He did it, not by an administrative order backed up by police powers, but by the simple device of publishing a pamphlet called "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. (This famous pamphlet was directed in part against the Dutch theoreticians who had exerted such a strong influence on the Americans and a section of the Germans.)"
Cannon goes on:
"The 'Theses and Resolutions' of the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 also cleared up the thinking of the American communists over a wide range of theoretical and political problems, and virtually eliminated the previously dominating influence exerted by the sectarian conceptions of De Leon and the Dutch leaders."
That is to say, whatever the particularities of the fate of the British Socialist Labour Party (SLP) and the impact of that on the viability of the Communist Party of Britain as it was constituted, its importance is far less of a factor than Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Lenin's work is literally a handbook of communist tactics which solved many of the problems of the American movement—the question of "boring from within," the question of the connection between parliamentarism and industrial action, the question of industrial unions, the question of conservative-dominated craft unions, the question of dual unionism. Unfortunately for most militants of the British SLP, afflicted with many of the very same political diseases, the lessons of Bolshevism were not assimilated. This was not, as Challinor maintains, a consequence of a misinformed Lenin's attempt to arrange a shotgun wedding of unsuitable partners to found the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), but rather a consequence of the SLP's parochial failure to grasp the world-historic significance of the 1917 October Revolution.
Roots of SLP: Britain and America
Now, the British SLP, as comrades read, arose out of a split with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) (later to become the British Socialist Party). And the split was a good split. It entailed the question of Millerandism, of Ireland, and of the SDF's very opportunistic courting of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). In the first section of his book Challinor lays out the political issues very clearly. The SDF was a rotten creation of a man named H.M. Hyndman who was not one of Marx's favorite people. Comrades, if they've read the book by Pelling on the origins of the British Labour Party [Henry Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party}, know that Hyndman started out as a Tory radical. He was a fervid supporter of British imperialism, the monarchy and parliamentarism. He was also an anti-Semite and a dedicated opponent of militant class struggle, especially strikes. Himself a wealthy businessman, he and his cronies owned the SDF's newspaper, Justice. It was not until April 1916, under the bloody impact of the imperialist war, that the BSP— the product of a 1912 fusion of the SDF with the small left rump of the Independent Labour Party—got rid of Hyndman. Hyndman and his cohorts then formed a group called the National Socialist Party! A man before his time!
The U.S. SLP played a very big role, of course, in the formation of the British SLP. The American SLP was founded by immigrants of German and Jewish origin. Following Daniel De Leon's rise to leadership the party grew rapidly—controlling over 70 trade unions in the New York Central Labor Federation. The SLP wielded sufficient influence to secure (in 1893) adoption by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) of an eleven-point socialist program. By 1894 it had ousted Samuel Gompers from the presidency of the AFL. Gompers was not pleased. Within a year he was back in office and the SLP was out.
Which caused De Leon to renounce the tactic of "boring from within." As he put it, "the hole you're likely to bore from within is the one you're going to exit through." [Laughter.] And from these experiences came his hostility both to craft unionism and his very strong adherence to industrial unionism. The SLP attempted to set up their own industrial union federation which was called the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, which had 13,000 members. This formation rapidly disintegrated.
De Leon later refined his conceptions of industrial unionism and actually foreshadowed, in aspects at least, the idea of soviet rule of society—rule based on industrial workers organized in industrial enterprises, i.e., Soviets. And as comrades know, De Leon played an important role, along with Debs, in forging the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW.
The British SLP when it arose was concentrated overwhelmingly in Scotland and comrades may wonder why that was the case. Why was it that Glasgow, and in particular the Clydeside industrial belt, was the scene of the SLP's greatest strength and most influence in the proletariat? In his very detailed and interesting book called The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-21, Walter Kendall aptly observes:
"Scottish radicalism also had its roots deep in a separate native cultural tradition. At the time of Charles I Scottish nobles and Calvinist clergy had combined to prevent the re-imposition of episcopacy in Scotland. In ensuing centuries the Church of Scotland retained a narrow, rigid theology, continually in conflict with English orthodoxy, a factor which gave a specifically different outlook and flavour to Scottish intellectual life. The Scottish educational system, given an initial impetus by the teachings of John Knox. remained in advance of the English until well into the twentieth century. Religion, the ideology of the establishment in Britain, had in Scotland a more striking record of national struggle. Penetrating deeper into the culture of the people, it gave them a penchant for the cut and thrust of logical argument, an appreciation and enthusiasm for dialectics not to be found in England. As John Knox was acolyte to Calvin, as John Carstairs Matheson to de Leon. So, in later years, Campbell and Gallacher were first to Lenin and then to his successor Stalin."
This is a polite way of presenting the Scottish psyche. [Laughter.]
There were other factors also ably cited by Kendall. There were a very large number of Irish immigrants in the Clydeside area, many of whom were active supporters of Sinn Fein. And as comrades know, the great Irish revolutionary James Connolly was indeed one of the founders of the SLP. Large-scale capitalism came late to Scotland and a large proportion of the proletariat of Glasgow had been uprooted from the countryside and pushed into the city, which like Petrograd had enormous engineering plants. So for a number of reasons the SLP sank its roots very deeply into Scotland and had very close links with the Irish struggle, and also, because of the large Scottish and Irish emigrations to North America, with the class struggle in the United States.
Impact of 1905 Russian Revolution
One of the enormous international impacts of the 1905 Russian Revolution was to turn the attention of socialists to the power of mass political strikes. In Germany Rosa Luxemburg and her followers seized upon the weapon of the mass strike as an answer to the social-reformist passivity of SPD [Social Democratic Party] tops, while failing to grasp the critical differences between the activities of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the 1905 upheavals in Russia [see "The Russian Revolution of 1905," Workers Vanguard Nos. 288 and 289, 11 and 25 September 1981]. The experience of 1905 was very directly connected with the founding of the IWW in the United States in that same year. This inspired subsequently similar efforts on the part of the British SLP.
However, the British SLP's Advocates of Industrial Unionism (AIU) never managed to rise to the level of the IWW despite a very strong swing toward syndicalism on the part of the British proletariat in the period from 1905 through 1913. In those years of stormy class conflict, a response to a massive rationalization and further concentration of British capital at the expense of the workers, trade unions in Britain grew enormously. This upsurge hit its high point in 1912 with the great miners strike.
During this period the AIU managed to only hitch a ride on this elemental wave of class struggle. But this was sufficient to blood its militants in the class struggle, and root them deeply in the militant proletariat in the sprawling Clyde engineering plants. This was to place them in a strategic position during the tumultuous strikes that ripped the region both in 1915-16 and early 1919.
In comparison with its British competitors, e.g., Hyndman's BSP and the ILP, the British SLP was impressive. Indeed it compares favorably to the American SLP of De Leon. The British SLP rejected De Leon's sectarian disavowal of "immediate demands," and played an important role in the class struggle. De Leon found himself isolated from the labor movement with his split with the IWW in 1908. Already in 1900 Hillquit, Berger and Debs had led a split out of the SLP to found the Socialist Party (SP). Cannon asserts in The First Ten Years that the SLP even before 1905 was well on its way to becoming a sect, noting the SP not only pulled in all the reformists, but also most of the left, vital revolutionary elements of the American proletariat.
Forging a Bolshevik Party
Challinor definitely misleads his readers by implying that the De Leonist SLP was two-thirds or three-quarters of the way to being a Bolshevik-type party. He says, "Clearly, the SLP was among the first to see the need for an organisational and ideological split from social democracy." In discussing this matter it's particularly useful to look at the SLP through the lens of Lenin's What Is To Be Done? About a year before the SLP was born,
Lenin wrote his work. If "Left- Wing" Communism constitutes a handbook on communist tactics, What Is To Be Done? contains the blueprints for the construction of a party and a cadre. So that the whole struggle against economism, the struggle for a party of professional revolutionaries, the struggle which Lenin talks about at great length in "Left-Wing" Communism—for a political party to be a tribune of the people, to master politics in many arenas—all this is laid out of course in What Is To Be Done? You don't see anything at all like this in the SLP.
On everything from press questions to forms of organization the differences are clear. In particular they are clear on the necessity of constructing a cadre of full-time professional revolutionaries. The British SLP had difficulty keeping a full-timer and a lot of the time didn't have one. I found it a source of great irritation that Challinor holds this up as a virtue. Referring to the valiant work of SLP leader MacManus during the war, he says:
"It is hard to imagine how great the strain upon certain individuals must have been. For example. Arthur MacManus was editor of The Socialist, and in I9l5,when the Clyde Workers' Committee was formed, he became its chairman. As spokesman for this rank-and-file organization, the most powerful of its kind in the country, he played a leading role in the creation of a National Workers' & Shop Stewards' Movement. All this was done in his spare time: he also had a full-time job as an engineer at G. & J. Weir's Cathcart works, where he was the most well-known militant. Besides these commitments, which would have been more than enough for half a do/en men with only a normal amount of energy. MacManus found time to help in the struggle in Ireland. In 1915, James Connolly visited Glasgow and told his old SLP comrades that the authorities had suppressed their journal, the Irish Worker. So the SLP undertook to print it clandestinely on the Party's press at Renfrew Street. In his autobiography Tom Bell stated, 'Comrade Arthur MacManus was especially keen on doing this; working night and day to get it out, and arranged for the shipment of the paper, which he took over personally to Dublin'."
Heroic MacManus indeed was. But the inability of the SLP to provide for full-time party workers was a source of abiding weakness. It prevented the cohering of a cadre around a program, and prevented that leadership from jelling. One gets the impression of a lot of very talented, capable, tough-minded, experienced propagandists and trade-union agitators who tended to be more an association than a party. I think this explains one of the big questions that this book raises. Why was it that those elements of the SLP who were for a fusion with the Third International, who wanted to bring the SLP in as part of the Communist Party of Britain and who themselves were among the most pre-eminent of the SLP leaders, actually had the organization taken away from them and were incapable of effecting any significant split for Leninism? The answer is to be found in their inability to construct a party with the resources, but above all the perspective, of maintaining a cadre of professional revolutionists.
If the SLP started out as a good split from the SDF, on the eve of World War 1 it had a very murky split, reflecting above all the political incapacity of De Leonism to serve as a guide for revolutionary action. In 1912 the SLP lost over half its members in a dispute over whether or not it was permissible for the party to support reforms—e.g., should an SLP councillor in Glasgow cast a vote for more money to the unemployed. Defeated at the Manchester conference, the anti-reform "impossibilists" walked out of the party, taking a majority of the membership with them.
The SLP had a good line on the first imperialist war, but its activities in the unions during the war revealed weakness in the party. In short the SLP did not carry its line against the war in a way that counted into the massive Clyde strikes of 1915-1916—strikes in which the SLP played a leading role. Challinor excuses this on the grounds that for the SLP to insist that the Clyde Workers' Committee—which was running this massive strike against the Munitions Act— adopt the SLP's line on the war would have split the Workers' Committee. Again you see here a failure to grasp what Lenin later was to try to teach the British workers movement—which was that they were obligated to have their people who were working in that arena attempt to transform this strike, to agitate to infuse the strike with a political content aimed against the imperialist war and the British government. The strike was a strike against key munitions industries in wartime, and against the M munitions Act. Objectively it was a political strike against war par excellence.
Instead the behavior of SLP strike leader John Muir dragged the SLP's antiwar banner in the mud. Dragged before the bosses' court for his role in the strike, Muir cravenly swore that the strike was a purely economic struggle over shop issues and that he was for the war and war production! And the SLP tolerated this renegade remaining in its ranks! The honor of the Clyde Workers' Committee was upheld by John Maclean, the representative of the left internationalist wing of the BSP, who turned his trial into a political indictment of the bourgeoisie and its imperialist war.
British capitalism emerged from World War I profoundly shaken. Under the impact of the October Revolution the class antagonisms generated by war exploded in a massive postwar strike wave accompanied by episodic strikes and mutinies in the armband navy. In January 1919 the Clyde workers went out in a massive general strike for a 40-hour week. The government responded with armed troops. Unfortunately the strike did not spread and the strikers did not test the troops. At the time the government had only two battalions of reserves.
Challinor quotes from Aneurin Sevan's In Place of Fear, which described the famous 1919 meeting between the prime minister, Lloyd George, and the leaders of the Triple
Alliance. All I can say is, Lloyd George knew his Labour leaders [laughter]—which he ought to, since the Liberal Party and the ILP and the trade unions were very closely
linked. It reminds me of the German events of the autumn of 1918, when the troops were mutinying and forming Soviets. The German general staff pulled the same act on
the German soldiers' Soviets on the Western Front, saying, "Well, fine. You soldiers' Soviets have to withdraw two million people from France and Belgium. Here, you do it.
Are you ready?" Nope, they weren't. But that was a gamble[laughs]. In Britain a couple of the right guys in there and one might have had something approaching a 1905
situation, or at least a very big, much more massive wave ofpolitical strikes—which would have put the British workers in a lot better position both objectively and from a
standpoint of cohering a communist party. The whole incident both highlights the counterrevolutionary role of the trade-union tops, and exposes the political incapacity
of the SLP which had no idea how to overcome these roadblocks to revolution. ,
Challinor plays up the very real strengths of the SLP, while downplaying its De Leonist weaknesses—indeed, treating them as virtues. Meanwhile he presents such a compelling picture of the wretchedness of the BSP that one wonders how any chunk of this party made it into the Comintern. In fact the BSP was a heterogeneous organization that underwent a series of left-right polarizations under the impact of the war and the Russian Revolutions of 1917.
Affiliation to the Communist International
Following the 1916 split between Hyndman and E.G. Fairchild, who had a Kautskyite position on the war, the BSP moved leftward. At its April 1919 Conference the BSP declared itself for soviet rule and polled its branches on affiliation to the Communist International (Cl). Fairchild supported the Russian Revolution, but didn't consider a soviet-type revolution in Britain a serious possibility. The left majority, including John Maclean who maintained a consistent internationalist position as a BSPer throughout the war, believed the British revolution was on the order of the day and that they should link up with the Third International. The result of the ballot on affiliation to the Communist International, announced in October, was 98 to 4 in favor of affiliation.
Undoubtedly among those for the CI were a goodly number of "November Bolsheviks." Theodore Rothstein, a rotten apple, was perhaps the leading example of this layer. His trajectory was parallel to that of many left social-democratic sharpies in Europe, who thought that the Third International was the wave of the future. You had the Frossards and Cachins and scads of social democrats in the French party who went over to the Third International but didn't belong there. The main aim of the 21 Conditions was to filter such people out, and also to filter out the practices they brought with them.
The Russians were, I think, much more familiar with the BSP than SLP. All of the Bolshevik congresses except the one held in Stockholm—from 1903 to the Revolution— were held in London. Lenin himself lived for a time in London, as did some 30,000 other Russian emigres. And of those that were leftists—adherents to socialism—many belonged to the BSP. They constituted a large portion of the left wing of that organization. During the war a very large number of them were supporters of Trotsky's Nashe Slovo which was printed in Paris. Challinor makes the point that half of the circulation of that journal took place in Britain, .and the overwhelming proportion of that in London. There was also a colony of Russian exiles—and that too swelled enormously after the 1905Revolution—in Scotland, again associated with the SDF/BSP.
Litvinov and Chicherin and a number of others were associated with and had links with the BSP in London. Further, SDF members both in England and Scotland ran guns to the Russian revolutionaries from 1905 through 1907—quite a lot of them, hundreds of Brownings, millions of rounds of ammo. They would buy them in Europe, smuggle them to Newcastle, get them to Scotland, and then on to tsarist ships to smuggle them into Russia.
So not all BSPers were clones of the top-hatted and corpulent H.M. Hyndman! As with the SLP, a significant part of the BSP far left was located in Scotland. Most noteworthy was John Maclean, who as earlier indicated maintained a consistent internationalist position on the war, and played an important role in the Clyde strikes. The formidable Maclean was arguably the most capable proletarian revolutionist in Britain and a close associate of BSPer Peter Petroff, a hero of the 1905 Russian Revolution.
The Communist unity negotiations in Britain are very confusing, above all a reflection of the political confusion of the participants in the negotiations. There were three main groups and a couple of subsidiary ones. You had the SLP, Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation, the South Wales Socialist Society and the ILP left, and they all hailed the Russian Revolution—both revolutions. And some of them genuinely hailed the second one too. [Laughter.] It does strike you in reading the SLP's writings on the Russian Revolution that on the one hand, yes, they're happy it happened and... its real, main and key significance was it vindicates the SLP and its line in Britain! [Laughs.] In short, to repeat, the SLP failed to appreciate the world-historic significance of the October Revolution both in the broad sense and also in the particular communist sense that Lenin outlined in "Left- Wing" Communism.
I think Challinor makes a very good case that Lenin did not have clear ideas on everything that was going on in Britain. How could he? He was at some distance from the events, and certainly had other things occupying his mind in the immediate period after the October Revolution. Further, revolutionary Russia was blockaded by the imperialists. His information was partial.
However, Lenin did recognize something very important: that there needed to be a unified Communist party in Britain. You had all these groups claiming adherence to the October Revolution, to soviet government and for the Third International. There was an objective requirement for a Bolshevik-type party in Britain. But if there was to be such a party it had to have a policy toward the Labour Party. What gets omitted in Challinor is any policy toward the Labour Party except throwing rocks at it.
Was Britain going through a revolutionary period in 1918-1920? No. But if the Triple Alliance had decided to tell Lloyd George to shove it, we might have had something
break. But that didn't happen, and a lot of people voted Labour. There were 4 million workers affiliated to the Labour Party. The Labour Party in 1918 became socialist. You better believe that had something to do with the October Revolution and the Labour Party covering its ass. For communists the question was how to deal with this obstacle.
The most striking failure was, as I mentioned earlier, the failure of the pro-fusion wing of the SLP, the Communist Unity Group of MacManus and Bell, to carry the majority of the SLP into the CPGB. They had no conception of factional struggle for their particular position. Thus the best of the SLP, who could not understand how to conduct a faction fight in their own party, certainly could not understand what Lenin was talking about at all regarding the Labour Party. Challinor drags out J.T. Murphy's "cogent arguments" against Labour Party affiliation. These are not very cogent at all and have been answered dozens of times. Reading Murphy what comes through is: we'll either be swamped in the Labour Party or we have to destroy it. There's no conception of using class-struggle means to polarize and gut it—i.e., no conception therefore of political struggle for a political line and program. Behind that is the conception of the party as the worst sort of a passive propaganda society.
This was a fatal flaw of De Leonism, its social-democratic underbelly. The party through patient propaganda and education was to win the proletariat to its side. In the U.S. De Leon projected the SLP would eventually win at the polls and dissolve the capitalist government. Should the bourgeoisie resist, they would be "locked out" by the socialist industrial unions, which would then proceed to administer socialism. The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of a transition period and of the role of the party in that transition are absent.
So the SLP had a pretty good party in terms of—not the party that made the October Revolution—but of what was floating around in England or even the U.S. in that period. They didn't make it. What stands out is their parochialism. In the U.S. out of the left wing of the SP came the Haywood wing of the IWW, Cannon. Swabeck, John Reed, the foreign-language federations and a few of the native American workers. And out of that was forged a viable Communist Party—a little too viable in its early period. Like Cannon said, they fought like hell all the time. It was the Comintern that came in and provided the lessons and the correctives to teach the young American CP how to become a Leninist party—how to solve a lot of the problems that had tied up the American party and British and German and pre-war social democracy.
The party issuing out of the 1920 Communist Unity Convention was stillborn. And the indication of that was— no fights. The recent Euro/tankie fight is the CPGB's first serious faction fight. Very early on the British party acquired a set of leaders who seemed to live forever [laughs] and didn't get any better. The congenital incapacity of the CPGB was evident during the 1926 General Strike and since, and has also had negative impact on Trotskyism in Britain. Cannon and a section of the American CP were forged into genuine Leninists who, when the degeneration of the Comintern came, were able to pick up the banner. This was not the case in Britain. Gerry Healy tries to suck glorious origins of British Trotskyism out of his thumb, but it's a fact that Trotskyism had to be imported.
The SLP in Britain disappeared very quickly after it stood aside from the Third International, in many ways like the syndicalist wing of the IWW did in the U.S. Cannon made the point that one would have thought, on the face of it, given the history of the IWW during the war which was as a semi-party, certainly revolutionary-minded and with many experienced militants, that a large number of them would have made it to the Communist Party. But, as he put it, it was the foreigners, the callow youth, only some fragments of the IWW that actually came to be the core of the American Communist Party. They didn't have the experience of many of the IWW, but in the end program was decisive. But there at least you had a germ cell that was fertilized and grew. I think in Britain what you had was a miscarriage; Challinor might more aptly have titled his book "The Abortion of British Bolshevism."
For Challinor, himself a supporter of the anti-Soviet and social-democratic Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of Britain, the abortionists are Lenin and the Communist International. Clearly he feels that it was erroneous to insist that the new CPGB affiliate to the Labour Party, as this blocked the majority of the SLP, whom he wrongly considers the "native Bolsheviks," from entering that CP.
Challinor's position should be contrasted with that of Lenin at the Second Congress. Lenin insisted that the question of the Labour Party be debated before the International. He insisted that the new International not repeat the experience of the Second International and let the British comrades get into a room and decide the question among themselves. The Labour Party question was not simply a British question but an international problem. It was the obligation of the Cl to come up with a policy and pursue it. If this led to some splits, so be it, but it would be good experience for the British party to try to implement these tactics.
Challinor does not take up the real difficulty in implementing the CIs policy. To carry it off successfully you needed a hard, cohesive, ideologically tested formation. And that certainly was not what the British CP was. We have a contradiction. If the CPGB had successfully affiliated, they probably would very likely have capitulated in just the way many of the SLPers feared they would. [Interjection: Adopt a position in favor of entry, and don't enter!] Right, right! A zero approximation of a position of shallow entry! [Laughter.] What you needed were Comintern reps on the scene to take these various would-be Bolsheviks by the political scruff of the neck, to teach them and fight with them. Lenin was very aware that a policy of affiliation was no automatic recipe for success. He thought this would be a good school for the CPGB, a school of political struggle, leading very possibly to splits and a fusion on a higher order.
Challinor, like all anti-Leninist centrists, invokes Lenin against Lenin. He quotes Lenin's criticism of the Third Congress Org Resolution that it was "too Russian." We've made the point numerous times but it bears repeating. Lenin thought that resolution was "too Russian" in the sense that it was too long and no one would read or understand it. But if you read on, he remarks (and this was his last speech to the Communist International):
"We Russians must also find ways and means to explaining the principles of this resolution to the foreigners. Unless we do that, it will be absolutely impossible for them to carry it out. I am sure that in this connection we must tell not only the Russians, but the foreign comrades as well, that the most important thing in the period we are now entering is to study. We are studying in the general sense. They, however, must study in the special sense, in order that they may really understand the organisation, structure, method and content of revolutionary work. If they do that, I am sure the prospects of the world revolution will be not only good, but excellent." —Collected Works Vol. 33
Better the road of Lenin than that of Challinor!
Summary
A question was raised about the attitude of the SLP to the colonial question, and in particular to the Amritsar massacre. Regarding this a British comrade has handed me a note stating that a reading of The Socialist, the SLP's newspaper, and also The Call, which was the BSP's, indicates that in fact they did take it up. He observes: "If it's possible to differentiate active internationalism in the building of the party from the tribune of the people, I think they were pretty good on the latter." In that sense I think they would therefore be with the best of the Second International. Comrades recall that last year we printed the following quote from Trotsky on this question from his 1932 essay "What Next?" He was referring to the German centrists, and Ledebour in particular:
"Ledebour demands that a battle be waged against colonial oppression: he is ready to vote in parliament against colonial credits: he is ready to take upon himself fearless defense of the victims of a crushed colonial insurrection. But Ledebour will not participate in preparing a colonial insurrection. Such work he considers putschism. adventurism. Bolshevism. And therein is the whole gist of the matter."
The American SLP hung on for years, and it's a question as to how this happened. It's not the same people who founded the party in the 1860s or the 1870s although, to look at them, sometimes you think so. [Laughter.] They became a sect, but some sects don't make it. The American SLP made it because they did have a base among some of the foreign-language groups. They stopped publication of their Bulgarian-language paper only a short while ago. It's been pointed out that the SLP probably got the Bulgarians in the U.S. because they were the closest thing to the Narrows [Bulgarian Narrow Socialist Party]. [Laughter.] Shachtman in '46 decided the Workers Party would become a small mass party in a very big country. The Bulgarians tried to be a small party in a small country and wound up a mass party.
As I said, John Maclean was probably the best of the BSP. Indeed Lenin singled him out as representing the best far-left, internationalist wing of British socialism. And he also didn't make it. He spiraled into creating a nationalist party, i.e., the Scottish Communist Party. He thought that the axis of a workers revolution in Britain would be an Irish/Scottish revolution. And London would follow—which is just plain wrong. You have to get the capital. In other times, from a very different class standpoint, this strategy was tried and didn't succeed. [Laughter.]
When the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Representation Committee were being formed it was not at all clear that they would forge a labor party which would capture the allegiance of the British proletariat. But indeed it did succeed, and by 1918 had become a formidable obstacle to proletarian revolution. Remember the Leeds Conference, where you had people like Snowden and Henderson coming out for "soviets" in Britain... adopting the protective coloration of pink.
In closing, to reiterate Cannon's point: the October Revolution marked a watershed not only in the broad international sense but also in the specific, communist sense. It was the Bolsheviks who taught us how to forge parties of a new type—vanguard parties, Leninist parties, combat parties. The experience of Bolshevism solved all the dilemmas that had arisen in the preceding period: the questions of "boring from within," parliamentary action, industrial action, etc. So that we stand far higher than the SLP did, but on the shoulders of the Russian Revolution. If we can see these things it's because we're the continuators. As Cannon said, "We are the party of the Russian Revolution"—our teachers.
*************
Are You Ready to Take the Power?
We reprint below an excerpt from In Place of Fear, the autobiography of the late Aneurin Bevan.
I remember vividly Robert Smillie describing to me an interview the leaders of the Triple Alliance had with David Lloyd George in 1919. The strategy of the leaders was clear. The miners under Robert Smillie, the transport workers under Robert Williams, and the National Union of Railwaymen under James Henry Thomas, formed the most formidable combination of industrial workers-in the history of Great Britain. They had agreed on the demands that were to be made on the employers, knowing well that the government would be bound to be involved at an early stage. And so it happened. A great deal of industry was still under government wartime control and so the state power was immediately implicated.
Lloyd George sent for the Labour leaders, and they went, so Robert told me, "truculently determined they would not be talked over by the seductive and eloquent Welshman." At this Bob's eyes twinkled in his grave, strong face. "He was quite frank with us from the outset," Bob went on. "He said to us: 'Gentlemen, you have fashioned, in the Triple Alliance of the unions represented by you, a most powerful instrument. I feel bound to tell you that in our opinion we are at your mercy. The Army is disaffected and cannot be relied upon. Trouble has occurred already in a number of camps. We have just emerged from a great war and the people are eager for the reward of their sacrifices, and we are in no position to satisfy them. In these circumstances, if you carry out your threat and strike, then you will defeat us.
"'But if you do so,' went on Mr. Lloyd George, 'have you weighed the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the Government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the State which is stronger than the State itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the State, or withdraw and accept the authority of the State. Gentlemen,' asked the Prime Minister quietly, 'have you considered, and if you have, are you ready?' From that moment on," said Robert Smillie, "we were beaten and we knew we were."
The following is an article from an archival issue of the Spartacist journal, Winter 1985-86, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social and political questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Spartacist periodically throughout the year.
*******************
"British Communism Aborted:The Far left: 1900-1920"- A Guest Book Review/Commentary
A REVIEW
The Origins of British Bolshevism
by Raymond Challinor Croom, Helm Ltd., London, 1977
If knowledge is not always power, ignorance is always weakness. With the deteriorating American school system calculated to produce ignorant youth in a period of reaction and Cold War, education of Marxist cadre is a crucial task for a Leninist organization. In this spirit, the Spartacist League/U.S. has instituted a nationally centralized program of internal education in Marxism and general knowledge.
As an aspect of this educational program, a significant part of the Central Committee plenum of the S L/ U.S., held last August, was devoted to a consideration of Raymond Challinor's The Origins of British Bolshevism. This is a study of the British Socialist Labour Party (SLP) from its origin around 1900 to its rapid disintegration in the early 1920s, following the organization's refusal to participate in the formation of the British section of the Communist International. Also as part of the education program Ed Clarkson of the SL Central Committee gave an educational presentation on Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder to a National Committee plenum of the Spartacus Youth League, the SL's youth section (reprinted as "Leninist Tactics and the Road to Workers Power" in Young Spartacus Nos. 130 and I3l, October and November 1985). We print below an edited version of a presentation to the plenum by comrade George Foster of the Sparta cist League Central Committee on Challinor's book.
This study of the British SLP illuminates in one important, concrete case the historic problem of forging Communist parties in the West out of the subjectively revolutionary elements in the pre-1917 socialist and anarcho-syndicalist movements. It also adds appreciably to our understanding of why the Communist Party in Britain was stillborn. The sterility of the CPGB and absence of a real Leninist tradition in Britain have been key negative conditions for the complete hegemony of Laborite reformism over the workers movement right down to the present.
The Third International
Much of the discussion focused on Challinor's parochial and nationally limited conception of revolutionary organization. The very title conveys a false understanding, as if a genuine counterpart of Russian Bolshevism was spontaneously generated on British (or Scottish) soil. Unlike the British SLP, the Russian Bolshevik Party was forged as an instrument to struggle for power amid the universal revolutionary ferment of the last years of the tsarist empire. It was this which set the Bolsheviks apart from even the best pre-World War I socialist parties in the West. In the discussion one conference participant pointed out:
"...[T]he Communist International does not fall from the skies, it comes from the experience of the Russian workers movement and the Russian Revolution— [T]he combination of a great empire; a central ethnicity that was not to be threatened, but massive national oppression; the growth of a great, raw, militant proletariat; pressures given the autocracy such that every member of the intelligentsia went through a selection process—all this churned up through wars, agrarian issues—[thus it was] that of all the parties of the Second International the Russian Social Democrats had the vanguard of experience."
The Bolsheviks' revolutionary experience was generalized and codified in the famous 21 Conditions for membership in the Communist International.
The British SLP was an example of a small Marxist propaganda group, originating and developing under relatively stable conditions of bourgeois democracy, which was then confronted with convulsive events, namely, the first imperialist world war and the Russian Revolution. The SLP had become so habituated to its prewar situation that it failed to make the turn toward the tasks of a new, far stormier period of social struggle.
Presentation
Comrades all have the study guide, the questions that were prepared to be thought about in conjunction with reading the book of Challinor.
For some of these questions the answers are quite clear; others are complex and require a lot of evaluation, thought and weighing; and at least one of them ought to frighten you a bit—which is, how does a party prepare for unanticipated and perhaps unprecedented events in a situation where the tasks posed by those events may for a period be far beyond your capacity? And the simple answer that comes to mind is: go through the experiences of the Bolshevik Party. Which may seem like a tautology, but isn't. And that's the point of this talk—that comrades Lenin and Trotsky and the first four congresses of the Communist International provide us with at least the political method and structure whereby we can forge a party which has both the program and possibly the capacity to make the rapid changes and adjustments necessary to lead to the revolutionary victory of the workers over the bourgeoisie.
I'd like to begin discussing the book by reading a quote from James Cannon, pioneer American Communist and Trotskyist, which 1 think sets this book in its context. And the quote is from Cannon's review of The Roots of American Communism by Theodore Draper. You'll find it in the book The First Ten Years of American Communism. Cannon says:
"The traditional sectarianism of the Americans was expressed most glaringly in their attempt to construct revolutionary unions outside the existing labor movement; their refusal to fight for’ immediate demands' in the course of the class struggle for the socialist goal; and their strongly entrenched anti-parliamentarism, which was only slightly modified in the first program of the Communist Party. All that hodgepodge of ultra-radicalism was practically wiped out of the American movement in 1920-21 by Lenin. He did it, not by an administrative order backed up by police powers, but by the simple device of publishing a pamphlet called "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. (This famous pamphlet was directed in part against the Dutch theoreticians who had exerted such a strong influence on the Americans and a section of the Germans.)"
Cannon goes on:
"The 'Theses and Resolutions' of the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 also cleared up the thinking of the American communists over a wide range of theoretical and political problems, and virtually eliminated the previously dominating influence exerted by the sectarian conceptions of De Leon and the Dutch leaders."
That is to say, whatever the particularities of the fate of the British Socialist Labour Party (SLP) and the impact of that on the viability of the Communist Party of Britain as it was constituted, its importance is far less of a factor than Lenin's "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Lenin's work is literally a handbook of communist tactics which solved many of the problems of the American movement—the question of "boring from within," the question of the connection between parliamentarism and industrial action, the question of industrial unions, the question of conservative-dominated craft unions, the question of dual unionism. Unfortunately for most militants of the British SLP, afflicted with many of the very same political diseases, the lessons of Bolshevism were not assimilated. This was not, as Challinor maintains, a consequence of a misinformed Lenin's attempt to arrange a shotgun wedding of unsuitable partners to found the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), but rather a consequence of the SLP's parochial failure to grasp the world-historic significance of the 1917 October Revolution.
Roots of SLP: Britain and America
Now, the British SLP, as comrades read, arose out of a split with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) (later to become the British Socialist Party). And the split was a good split. It entailed the question of Millerandism, of Ireland, and of the SDF's very opportunistic courting of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). In the first section of his book Challinor lays out the political issues very clearly. The SDF was a rotten creation of a man named H.M. Hyndman who was not one of Marx's favorite people. Comrades, if they've read the book by Pelling on the origins of the British Labour Party [Henry Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party}, know that Hyndman started out as a Tory radical. He was a fervid supporter of British imperialism, the monarchy and parliamentarism. He was also an anti-Semite and a dedicated opponent of militant class struggle, especially strikes. Himself a wealthy businessman, he and his cronies owned the SDF's newspaper, Justice. It was not until April 1916, under the bloody impact of the imperialist war, that the BSP— the product of a 1912 fusion of the SDF with the small left rump of the Independent Labour Party—got rid of Hyndman. Hyndman and his cohorts then formed a group called the National Socialist Party! A man before his time!
The U.S. SLP played a very big role, of course, in the formation of the British SLP. The American SLP was founded by immigrants of German and Jewish origin. Following Daniel De Leon's rise to leadership the party grew rapidly—controlling over 70 trade unions in the New York Central Labor Federation. The SLP wielded sufficient influence to secure (in 1893) adoption by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) of an eleven-point socialist program. By 1894 it had ousted Samuel Gompers from the presidency of the AFL. Gompers was not pleased. Within a year he was back in office and the SLP was out.
Which caused De Leon to renounce the tactic of "boring from within." As he put it, "the hole you're likely to bore from within is the one you're going to exit through." [Laughter.] And from these experiences came his hostility both to craft unionism and his very strong adherence to industrial unionism. The SLP attempted to set up their own industrial union federation which was called the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, which had 13,000 members. This formation rapidly disintegrated.
De Leon later refined his conceptions of industrial unionism and actually foreshadowed, in aspects at least, the idea of soviet rule of society—rule based on industrial workers organized in industrial enterprises, i.e., Soviets. And as comrades know, De Leon played an important role, along with Debs, in forging the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW.
The British SLP when it arose was concentrated overwhelmingly in Scotland and comrades may wonder why that was the case. Why was it that Glasgow, and in particular the Clydeside industrial belt, was the scene of the SLP's greatest strength and most influence in the proletariat? In his very detailed and interesting book called The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-21, Walter Kendall aptly observes:
"Scottish radicalism also had its roots deep in a separate native cultural tradition. At the time of Charles I Scottish nobles and Calvinist clergy had combined to prevent the re-imposition of episcopacy in Scotland. In ensuing centuries the Church of Scotland retained a narrow, rigid theology, continually in conflict with English orthodoxy, a factor which gave a specifically different outlook and flavour to Scottish intellectual life. The Scottish educational system, given an initial impetus by the teachings of John Knox. remained in advance of the English until well into the twentieth century. Religion, the ideology of the establishment in Britain, had in Scotland a more striking record of national struggle. Penetrating deeper into the culture of the people, it gave them a penchant for the cut and thrust of logical argument, an appreciation and enthusiasm for dialectics not to be found in England. As John Knox was acolyte to Calvin, as John Carstairs Matheson to de Leon. So, in later years, Campbell and Gallacher were first to Lenin and then to his successor Stalin."
This is a polite way of presenting the Scottish psyche. [Laughter.]
There were other factors also ably cited by Kendall. There were a very large number of Irish immigrants in the Clydeside area, many of whom were active supporters of Sinn Fein. And as comrades know, the great Irish revolutionary James Connolly was indeed one of the founders of the SLP. Large-scale capitalism came late to Scotland and a large proportion of the proletariat of Glasgow had been uprooted from the countryside and pushed into the city, which like Petrograd had enormous engineering plants. So for a number of reasons the SLP sank its roots very deeply into Scotland and had very close links with the Irish struggle, and also, because of the large Scottish and Irish emigrations to North America, with the class struggle in the United States.
Impact of 1905 Russian Revolution
One of the enormous international impacts of the 1905 Russian Revolution was to turn the attention of socialists to the power of mass political strikes. In Germany Rosa Luxemburg and her followers seized upon the weapon of the mass strike as an answer to the social-reformist passivity of SPD [Social Democratic Party] tops, while failing to grasp the critical differences between the activities of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in the 1905 upheavals in Russia [see "The Russian Revolution of 1905," Workers Vanguard Nos. 288 and 289, 11 and 25 September 1981]. The experience of 1905 was very directly connected with the founding of the IWW in the United States in that same year. This inspired subsequently similar efforts on the part of the British SLP.
However, the British SLP's Advocates of Industrial Unionism (AIU) never managed to rise to the level of the IWW despite a very strong swing toward syndicalism on the part of the British proletariat in the period from 1905 through 1913. In those years of stormy class conflict, a response to a massive rationalization and further concentration of British capital at the expense of the workers, trade unions in Britain grew enormously. This upsurge hit its high point in 1912 with the great miners strike.
During this period the AIU managed to only hitch a ride on this elemental wave of class struggle. But this was sufficient to blood its militants in the class struggle, and root them deeply in the militant proletariat in the sprawling Clyde engineering plants. This was to place them in a strategic position during the tumultuous strikes that ripped the region both in 1915-16 and early 1919.
In comparison with its British competitors, e.g., Hyndman's BSP and the ILP, the British SLP was impressive. Indeed it compares favorably to the American SLP of De Leon. The British SLP rejected De Leon's sectarian disavowal of "immediate demands," and played an important role in the class struggle. De Leon found himself isolated from the labor movement with his split with the IWW in 1908. Already in 1900 Hillquit, Berger and Debs had led a split out of the SLP to found the Socialist Party (SP). Cannon asserts in The First Ten Years that the SLP even before 1905 was well on its way to becoming a sect, noting the SP not only pulled in all the reformists, but also most of the left, vital revolutionary elements of the American proletariat.
Forging a Bolshevik Party
Challinor definitely misleads his readers by implying that the De Leonist SLP was two-thirds or three-quarters of the way to being a Bolshevik-type party. He says, "Clearly, the SLP was among the first to see the need for an organisational and ideological split from social democracy." In discussing this matter it's particularly useful to look at the SLP through the lens of Lenin's What Is To Be Done? About a year before the SLP was born,
Lenin wrote his work. If "Left- Wing" Communism constitutes a handbook on communist tactics, What Is To Be Done? contains the blueprints for the construction of a party and a cadre. So that the whole struggle against economism, the struggle for a party of professional revolutionaries, the struggle which Lenin talks about at great length in "Left-Wing" Communism—for a political party to be a tribune of the people, to master politics in many arenas—all this is laid out of course in What Is To Be Done? You don't see anything at all like this in the SLP.
On everything from press questions to forms of organization the differences are clear. In particular they are clear on the necessity of constructing a cadre of full-time professional revolutionaries. The British SLP had difficulty keeping a full-timer and a lot of the time didn't have one. I found it a source of great irritation that Challinor holds this up as a virtue. Referring to the valiant work of SLP leader MacManus during the war, he says:
"It is hard to imagine how great the strain upon certain individuals must have been. For example. Arthur MacManus was editor of The Socialist, and in I9l5,when the Clyde Workers' Committee was formed, he became its chairman. As spokesman for this rank-and-file organization, the most powerful of its kind in the country, he played a leading role in the creation of a National Workers' & Shop Stewards' Movement. All this was done in his spare time: he also had a full-time job as an engineer at G. & J. Weir's Cathcart works, where he was the most well-known militant. Besides these commitments, which would have been more than enough for half a do/en men with only a normal amount of energy. MacManus found time to help in the struggle in Ireland. In 1915, James Connolly visited Glasgow and told his old SLP comrades that the authorities had suppressed their journal, the Irish Worker. So the SLP undertook to print it clandestinely on the Party's press at Renfrew Street. In his autobiography Tom Bell stated, 'Comrade Arthur MacManus was especially keen on doing this; working night and day to get it out, and arranged for the shipment of the paper, which he took over personally to Dublin'."
Heroic MacManus indeed was. But the inability of the SLP to provide for full-time party workers was a source of abiding weakness. It prevented the cohering of a cadre around a program, and prevented that leadership from jelling. One gets the impression of a lot of very talented, capable, tough-minded, experienced propagandists and trade-union agitators who tended to be more an association than a party. I think this explains one of the big questions that this book raises. Why was it that those elements of the SLP who were for a fusion with the Third International, who wanted to bring the SLP in as part of the Communist Party of Britain and who themselves were among the most pre-eminent of the SLP leaders, actually had the organization taken away from them and were incapable of effecting any significant split for Leninism? The answer is to be found in their inability to construct a party with the resources, but above all the perspective, of maintaining a cadre of professional revolutionists.
If the SLP started out as a good split from the SDF, on the eve of World War 1 it had a very murky split, reflecting above all the political incapacity of De Leonism to serve as a guide for revolutionary action. In 1912 the SLP lost over half its members in a dispute over whether or not it was permissible for the party to support reforms—e.g., should an SLP councillor in Glasgow cast a vote for more money to the unemployed. Defeated at the Manchester conference, the anti-reform "impossibilists" walked out of the party, taking a majority of the membership with them.
The SLP had a good line on the first imperialist war, but its activities in the unions during the war revealed weakness in the party. In short the SLP did not carry its line against the war in a way that counted into the massive Clyde strikes of 1915-1916—strikes in which the SLP played a leading role. Challinor excuses this on the grounds that for the SLP to insist that the Clyde Workers' Committee—which was running this massive strike against the Munitions Act— adopt the SLP's line on the war would have split the Workers' Committee. Again you see here a failure to grasp what Lenin later was to try to teach the British workers movement—which was that they were obligated to have their people who were working in that arena attempt to transform this strike, to agitate to infuse the strike with a political content aimed against the imperialist war and the British government. The strike was a strike against key munitions industries in wartime, and against the M munitions Act. Objectively it was a political strike against war par excellence.
Instead the behavior of SLP strike leader John Muir dragged the SLP's antiwar banner in the mud. Dragged before the bosses' court for his role in the strike, Muir cravenly swore that the strike was a purely economic struggle over shop issues and that he was for the war and war production! And the SLP tolerated this renegade remaining in its ranks! The honor of the Clyde Workers' Committee was upheld by John Maclean, the representative of the left internationalist wing of the BSP, who turned his trial into a political indictment of the bourgeoisie and its imperialist war.
British capitalism emerged from World War I profoundly shaken. Under the impact of the October Revolution the class antagonisms generated by war exploded in a massive postwar strike wave accompanied by episodic strikes and mutinies in the armband navy. In January 1919 the Clyde workers went out in a massive general strike for a 40-hour week. The government responded with armed troops. Unfortunately the strike did not spread and the strikers did not test the troops. At the time the government had only two battalions of reserves.
Challinor quotes from Aneurin Sevan's In Place of Fear, which described the famous 1919 meeting between the prime minister, Lloyd George, and the leaders of the Triple
Alliance. All I can say is, Lloyd George knew his Labour leaders [laughter]—which he ought to, since the Liberal Party and the ILP and the trade unions were very closely
linked. It reminds me of the German events of the autumn of 1918, when the troops were mutinying and forming Soviets. The German general staff pulled the same act on
the German soldiers' Soviets on the Western Front, saying, "Well, fine. You soldiers' Soviets have to withdraw two million people from France and Belgium. Here, you do it.
Are you ready?" Nope, they weren't. But that was a gamble[laughs]. In Britain a couple of the right guys in there and one might have had something approaching a 1905
situation, or at least a very big, much more massive wave ofpolitical strikes—which would have put the British workers in a lot better position both objectively and from a
standpoint of cohering a communist party. The whole incident both highlights the counterrevolutionary role of the trade-union tops, and exposes the political incapacity
of the SLP which had no idea how to overcome these roadblocks to revolution. ,
Challinor plays up the very real strengths of the SLP, while downplaying its De Leonist weaknesses—indeed, treating them as virtues. Meanwhile he presents such a compelling picture of the wretchedness of the BSP that one wonders how any chunk of this party made it into the Comintern. In fact the BSP was a heterogeneous organization that underwent a series of left-right polarizations under the impact of the war and the Russian Revolutions of 1917.
Affiliation to the Communist International
Following the 1916 split between Hyndman and E.G. Fairchild, who had a Kautskyite position on the war, the BSP moved leftward. At its April 1919 Conference the BSP declared itself for soviet rule and polled its branches on affiliation to the Communist International (Cl). Fairchild supported the Russian Revolution, but didn't consider a soviet-type revolution in Britain a serious possibility. The left majority, including John Maclean who maintained a consistent internationalist position as a BSPer throughout the war, believed the British revolution was on the order of the day and that they should link up with the Third International. The result of the ballot on affiliation to the Communist International, announced in October, was 98 to 4 in favor of affiliation.
Undoubtedly among those for the CI were a goodly number of "November Bolsheviks." Theodore Rothstein, a rotten apple, was perhaps the leading example of this layer. His trajectory was parallel to that of many left social-democratic sharpies in Europe, who thought that the Third International was the wave of the future. You had the Frossards and Cachins and scads of social democrats in the French party who went over to the Third International but didn't belong there. The main aim of the 21 Conditions was to filter such people out, and also to filter out the practices they brought with them.
The Russians were, I think, much more familiar with the BSP than SLP. All of the Bolshevik congresses except the one held in Stockholm—from 1903 to the Revolution— were held in London. Lenin himself lived for a time in London, as did some 30,000 other Russian emigres. And of those that were leftists—adherents to socialism—many belonged to the BSP. They constituted a large portion of the left wing of that organization. During the war a very large number of them were supporters of Trotsky's Nashe Slovo which was printed in Paris. Challinor makes the point that half of the circulation of that journal took place in Britain, .and the overwhelming proportion of that in London. There was also a colony of Russian exiles—and that too swelled enormously after the 1905Revolution—in Scotland, again associated with the SDF/BSP.
Litvinov and Chicherin and a number of others were associated with and had links with the BSP in London. Further, SDF members both in England and Scotland ran guns to the Russian revolutionaries from 1905 through 1907—quite a lot of them, hundreds of Brownings, millions of rounds of ammo. They would buy them in Europe, smuggle them to Newcastle, get them to Scotland, and then on to tsarist ships to smuggle them into Russia.
So not all BSPers were clones of the top-hatted and corpulent H.M. Hyndman! As with the SLP, a significant part of the BSP far left was located in Scotland. Most noteworthy was John Maclean, who as earlier indicated maintained a consistent internationalist position on the war, and played an important role in the Clyde strikes. The formidable Maclean was arguably the most capable proletarian revolutionist in Britain and a close associate of BSPer Peter Petroff, a hero of the 1905 Russian Revolution.
The Communist unity negotiations in Britain are very confusing, above all a reflection of the political confusion of the participants in the negotiations. There were three main groups and a couple of subsidiary ones. You had the SLP, Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation, the South Wales Socialist Society and the ILP left, and they all hailed the Russian Revolution—both revolutions. And some of them genuinely hailed the second one too. [Laughter.] It does strike you in reading the SLP's writings on the Russian Revolution that on the one hand, yes, they're happy it happened and... its real, main and key significance was it vindicates the SLP and its line in Britain! [Laughs.] In short, to repeat, the SLP failed to appreciate the world-historic significance of the October Revolution both in the broad sense and also in the particular communist sense that Lenin outlined in "Left- Wing" Communism.
I think Challinor makes a very good case that Lenin did not have clear ideas on everything that was going on in Britain. How could he? He was at some distance from the events, and certainly had other things occupying his mind in the immediate period after the October Revolution. Further, revolutionary Russia was blockaded by the imperialists. His information was partial.
However, Lenin did recognize something very important: that there needed to be a unified Communist party in Britain. You had all these groups claiming adherence to the October Revolution, to soviet government and for the Third International. There was an objective requirement for a Bolshevik-type party in Britain. But if there was to be such a party it had to have a policy toward the Labour Party. What gets omitted in Challinor is any policy toward the Labour Party except throwing rocks at it.
Was Britain going through a revolutionary period in 1918-1920? No. But if the Triple Alliance had decided to tell Lloyd George to shove it, we might have had something
break. But that didn't happen, and a lot of people voted Labour. There were 4 million workers affiliated to the Labour Party. The Labour Party in 1918 became socialist. You better believe that had something to do with the October Revolution and the Labour Party covering its ass. For communists the question was how to deal with this obstacle.
The most striking failure was, as I mentioned earlier, the failure of the pro-fusion wing of the SLP, the Communist Unity Group of MacManus and Bell, to carry the majority of the SLP into the CPGB. They had no conception of factional struggle for their particular position. Thus the best of the SLP, who could not understand how to conduct a faction fight in their own party, certainly could not understand what Lenin was talking about at all regarding the Labour Party. Challinor drags out J.T. Murphy's "cogent arguments" against Labour Party affiliation. These are not very cogent at all and have been answered dozens of times. Reading Murphy what comes through is: we'll either be swamped in the Labour Party or we have to destroy it. There's no conception of using class-struggle means to polarize and gut it—i.e., no conception therefore of political struggle for a political line and program. Behind that is the conception of the party as the worst sort of a passive propaganda society.
This was a fatal flaw of De Leonism, its social-democratic underbelly. The party through patient propaganda and education was to win the proletariat to its side. In the U.S. De Leon projected the SLP would eventually win at the polls and dissolve the capitalist government. Should the bourgeoisie resist, they would be "locked out" by the socialist industrial unions, which would then proceed to administer socialism. The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of a transition period and of the role of the party in that transition are absent.
So the SLP had a pretty good party in terms of—not the party that made the October Revolution—but of what was floating around in England or even the U.S. in that period. They didn't make it. What stands out is their parochialism. In the U.S. out of the left wing of the SP came the Haywood wing of the IWW, Cannon. Swabeck, John Reed, the foreign-language federations and a few of the native American workers. And out of that was forged a viable Communist Party—a little too viable in its early period. Like Cannon said, they fought like hell all the time. It was the Comintern that came in and provided the lessons and the correctives to teach the young American CP how to become a Leninist party—how to solve a lot of the problems that had tied up the American party and British and German and pre-war social democracy.
The party issuing out of the 1920 Communist Unity Convention was stillborn. And the indication of that was— no fights. The recent Euro/tankie fight is the CPGB's first serious faction fight. Very early on the British party acquired a set of leaders who seemed to live forever [laughs] and didn't get any better. The congenital incapacity of the CPGB was evident during the 1926 General Strike and since, and has also had negative impact on Trotskyism in Britain. Cannon and a section of the American CP were forged into genuine Leninists who, when the degeneration of the Comintern came, were able to pick up the banner. This was not the case in Britain. Gerry Healy tries to suck glorious origins of British Trotskyism out of his thumb, but it's a fact that Trotskyism had to be imported.
The SLP in Britain disappeared very quickly after it stood aside from the Third International, in many ways like the syndicalist wing of the IWW did in the U.S. Cannon made the point that one would have thought, on the face of it, given the history of the IWW during the war which was as a semi-party, certainly revolutionary-minded and with many experienced militants, that a large number of them would have made it to the Communist Party. But, as he put it, it was the foreigners, the callow youth, only some fragments of the IWW that actually came to be the core of the American Communist Party. They didn't have the experience of many of the IWW, but in the end program was decisive. But there at least you had a germ cell that was fertilized and grew. I think in Britain what you had was a miscarriage; Challinor might more aptly have titled his book "The Abortion of British Bolshevism."
For Challinor, himself a supporter of the anti-Soviet and social-democratic Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of Britain, the abortionists are Lenin and the Communist International. Clearly he feels that it was erroneous to insist that the new CPGB affiliate to the Labour Party, as this blocked the majority of the SLP, whom he wrongly considers the "native Bolsheviks," from entering that CP.
Challinor's position should be contrasted with that of Lenin at the Second Congress. Lenin insisted that the question of the Labour Party be debated before the International. He insisted that the new International not repeat the experience of the Second International and let the British comrades get into a room and decide the question among themselves. The Labour Party question was not simply a British question but an international problem. It was the obligation of the Cl to come up with a policy and pursue it. If this led to some splits, so be it, but it would be good experience for the British party to try to implement these tactics.
Challinor does not take up the real difficulty in implementing the CIs policy. To carry it off successfully you needed a hard, cohesive, ideologically tested formation. And that certainly was not what the British CP was. We have a contradiction. If the CPGB had successfully affiliated, they probably would very likely have capitulated in just the way many of the SLPers feared they would. [Interjection: Adopt a position in favor of entry, and don't enter!] Right, right! A zero approximation of a position of shallow entry! [Laughter.] What you needed were Comintern reps on the scene to take these various would-be Bolsheviks by the political scruff of the neck, to teach them and fight with them. Lenin was very aware that a policy of affiliation was no automatic recipe for success. He thought this would be a good school for the CPGB, a school of political struggle, leading very possibly to splits and a fusion on a higher order.
Challinor, like all anti-Leninist centrists, invokes Lenin against Lenin. He quotes Lenin's criticism of the Third Congress Org Resolution that it was "too Russian." We've made the point numerous times but it bears repeating. Lenin thought that resolution was "too Russian" in the sense that it was too long and no one would read or understand it. But if you read on, he remarks (and this was his last speech to the Communist International):
"We Russians must also find ways and means to explaining the principles of this resolution to the foreigners. Unless we do that, it will be absolutely impossible for them to carry it out. I am sure that in this connection we must tell not only the Russians, but the foreign comrades as well, that the most important thing in the period we are now entering is to study. We are studying in the general sense. They, however, must study in the special sense, in order that they may really understand the organisation, structure, method and content of revolutionary work. If they do that, I am sure the prospects of the world revolution will be not only good, but excellent." —Collected Works Vol. 33
Better the road of Lenin than that of Challinor!
Summary
A question was raised about the attitude of the SLP to the colonial question, and in particular to the Amritsar massacre. Regarding this a British comrade has handed me a note stating that a reading of The Socialist, the SLP's newspaper, and also The Call, which was the BSP's, indicates that in fact they did take it up. He observes: "If it's possible to differentiate active internationalism in the building of the party from the tribune of the people, I think they were pretty good on the latter." In that sense I think they would therefore be with the best of the Second International. Comrades recall that last year we printed the following quote from Trotsky on this question from his 1932 essay "What Next?" He was referring to the German centrists, and Ledebour in particular:
"Ledebour demands that a battle be waged against colonial oppression: he is ready to vote in parliament against colonial credits: he is ready to take upon himself fearless defense of the victims of a crushed colonial insurrection. But Ledebour will not participate in preparing a colonial insurrection. Such work he considers putschism. adventurism. Bolshevism. And therein is the whole gist of the matter."
The American SLP hung on for years, and it's a question as to how this happened. It's not the same people who founded the party in the 1860s or the 1870s although, to look at them, sometimes you think so. [Laughter.] They became a sect, but some sects don't make it. The American SLP made it because they did have a base among some of the foreign-language groups. They stopped publication of their Bulgarian-language paper only a short while ago. It's been pointed out that the SLP probably got the Bulgarians in the U.S. because they were the closest thing to the Narrows [Bulgarian Narrow Socialist Party]. [Laughter.] Shachtman in '46 decided the Workers Party would become a small mass party in a very big country. The Bulgarians tried to be a small party in a small country and wound up a mass party.
As I said, John Maclean was probably the best of the BSP. Indeed Lenin singled him out as representing the best far-left, internationalist wing of British socialism. And he also didn't make it. He spiraled into creating a nationalist party, i.e., the Scottish Communist Party. He thought that the axis of a workers revolution in Britain would be an Irish/Scottish revolution. And London would follow—which is just plain wrong. You have to get the capital. In other times, from a very different class standpoint, this strategy was tried and didn't succeed. [Laughter.]
When the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Representation Committee were being formed it was not at all clear that they would forge a labor party which would capture the allegiance of the British proletariat. But indeed it did succeed, and by 1918 had become a formidable obstacle to proletarian revolution. Remember the Leeds Conference, where you had people like Snowden and Henderson coming out for "soviets" in Britain... adopting the protective coloration of pink.
In closing, to reiterate Cannon's point: the October Revolution marked a watershed not only in the broad international sense but also in the specific, communist sense. It was the Bolsheviks who taught us how to forge parties of a new type—vanguard parties, Leninist parties, combat parties. The experience of Bolshevism solved all the dilemmas that had arisen in the preceding period: the questions of "boring from within," parliamentary action, industrial action, etc. So that we stand far higher than the SLP did, but on the shoulders of the Russian Revolution. If we can see these things it's because we're the continuators. As Cannon said, "We are the party of the Russian Revolution"—our teachers.
*************
Are You Ready to Take the Power?
We reprint below an excerpt from In Place of Fear, the autobiography of the late Aneurin Bevan.
I remember vividly Robert Smillie describing to me an interview the leaders of the Triple Alliance had with David Lloyd George in 1919. The strategy of the leaders was clear. The miners under Robert Smillie, the transport workers under Robert Williams, and the National Union of Railwaymen under James Henry Thomas, formed the most formidable combination of industrial workers-in the history of Great Britain. They had agreed on the demands that were to be made on the employers, knowing well that the government would be bound to be involved at an early stage. And so it happened. A great deal of industry was still under government wartime control and so the state power was immediately implicated.
Lloyd George sent for the Labour leaders, and they went, so Robert told me, "truculently determined they would not be talked over by the seductive and eloquent Welshman." At this Bob's eyes twinkled in his grave, strong face. "He was quite frank with us from the outset," Bob went on. "He said to us: 'Gentlemen, you have fashioned, in the Triple Alliance of the unions represented by you, a most powerful instrument. I feel bound to tell you that in our opinion we are at your mercy. The Army is disaffected and cannot be relied upon. Trouble has occurred already in a number of camps. We have just emerged from a great war and the people are eager for the reward of their sacrifices, and we are in no position to satisfy them. In these circumstances, if you carry out your threat and strike, then you will defeat us.
"'But if you do so,' went on Mr. Lloyd George, 'have you weighed the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the Government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the State which is stronger than the State itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the State, or withdraw and accept the authority of the State. Gentlemen,' asked the Prime Minister quietly, 'have you considered, and if you have, are you ready?' From that moment on," said Robert Smillie, "we were beaten and we knew we were."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)