*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor Irish And American Labor Leader James Larkin

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Irish and American labor leader James Larkin.

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Leibknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor The German Spartacist Fighters of 1919

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Spartacist Uprising of 1919.

Markin comment:

These Spartacists are the comrades-in-arms of our beloved rose of the revolution, Rosa Luxemburg, and revolutionary militant, Karl Liebknecht.

very January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Leibknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International (1938)- *From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- The Popular Front In Spain, 1936

Click on title to link to Leon Trotsky's article on the Popular Front in the heat of the Spanish Civil War. Those who want to defend the concept, the POUM, the POUM leadership of Nin/Andrade/Maurin, etc.-Take cover.

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International (1938)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Communist International!- Leon Trotsky's "Manifesto Of The Communist International"

Click On Title To Link The Leon Trotsky Internet Archives For "An Invitation To The First World Congress Of The Communist International" In 1919.

Commentary

This year marks the 90th Anniversary of the founding of the Communist International. The Communist International in its early heroic days represented the hopes and aspirations of the advanced guard of the international working class in the wake of the promise presented by the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In the end, that was not to be (Stalin unceremoniously liquidated it during World War II in 1943, long after it revolutionary potential had been exhausted). However today it continues to be desperately necessary to fight for those goals outlined in the first four Congresses. In short, Labor must rule. Below is Leon Trotsky's "Manifesto of the Communist International". It still reads pretty well today. ForwardLeon Trotsky

The First Five Years of the Communist International

Volume 1

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Manifesto of the Communist International
to the Workers of the World [1]

SEVENTY-TWO YEARS AGO the Communist Party proclaimed its program to the world in the form of a Manifesto written by the greatest heralds of the proletarian revolution, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Even at that time Communism no sooner entered the arena of struggle than it was beset by baiting, lies, hatred and persecution of the possessing classes who rightfully sensed their mortal enemy in Communism. The development of Communism during this three-quarters of a century proceeded along complex paths: side by side with periods of stormy upsurge it knew periods of decline; side by side with successes – cruel defeats. But essentially the movement proceeded along the path indicated in advance by the Communist Manifesto. The epoch of final, decisive struggle has come later than the apostles of the socialist revolution had expected and hoped. But it has come. We Communists, the representatives of the revolutionary proletariat of the various countries of Europe, America and Asia who have gathered in Soviet Moscow, feel and consider ourselves to be the heirs and consummators of the cause whose program was affirmed 72 years ago. Our task is to generalize the revolutionary experience of the working class, to purge the movement of the corroding admixture of opportunism and social-patriotism, to unify the efforts of all genuinely revolutionary parties of the world proletariat and thereby facilitate and hasten the victory of the Communist revolution throughout the world.

* * *
Today when Europe is covered with debris and smoking ruins, the worst pyromaniacs in history are busy seeking out the criminals responsible for the war. In their wake follow their servants – professors, members of parliament, journalists, social-patriots and other political pimps of the bourgeoisie.

For many years the Socialist movement predicted the inevitability of the imperialist war, seeing its causes in the insatiable greed of the property-owning classes of the two chief camps and, generally, of all capitalist countries. At the Basle Congress [2], two years before the war exploded, the responsible Socialist leaders of all countries branded imperialism as bearing the guilt for the impending war, and threatened the bourgeoisie with the socialist revolution which would descend upon the bourgeoisie’s head as the proletarian retribution for the crimes of militarism. Today after the experience of the last five years, after history, having laid bare the predatory appetites of Germany, is unmasking the no less criminal acts of the Allies, the state-Socialists of the Entente countries continue in the wake of their respective governments to discover the war criminal in the person of the overthrown German Kaiser. On top of this, the German social-patriots who in August 1914 proclaimed Hohenzollern’s diplomatic White Book to be the holiest evangel of the peoples are nowadays following in the footsteps of the Entente Socialists and are with vile subservience indicting the overthrown German monarchy, which they had so slavishly served, as the chief war criminal. They thus hope to obscure their own role and at the same time to worm their way into the good graces of the conquerors. But in the light of unfolding events and diplomatic revelations, side by side with the role of the toppled dynasties – the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns, and the Habsburgs – and of the capitalist cliques of these countries, the role of the ruling classes of France, England, Italy and the United States stands out in all its boundless criminality.

English diplomacy did not lift its visor of secrecy up to the very outbreak of war. The government of the City [3] obviously feared to reveal its intention of entering the war on the side of the Entente lest the Berlin government take fright and be compelled to eschew war. In London they wanted war. That is why they conducted themselves in such a way as to raise hopes in Berlin and Vienna that England would remain neutral, while Paris and Petrograd firmly counted on England’s intervention.

Prepared by the entire course of development over a number of decades, the war was unleashed through the direct and conscious provocation of Great Britain. The British government thereby calculated on extending just enough aid to Russia and France, while they became exhausted, to exhaust England’s mortal enemy, Germany. But the might of German militarism proved far too formidable and demanded of England not token but actual intervention in the war. The role of a gleeful third partner to which Great Britain, following her ancient tradition, aspired, fell to the lot of the United States.

The Washington government became all the more easily reconciled to the English blockade which one-sidedly restricted American stock market speculation in European blood, because the countries of the Entente reimbursed the American bourgeoisie with lush profits for violations of “international law.” However, the Washington government was likewise constrained by the enormous military superiority of Germany to drop its fictitious neutrality. In relation to Europe as a whole the United States assumed the role which England had taken in previous wars and which she tried to take in the last war in relation to the continent, namely: weakening one camp by playing it against another, intervening in military operations only to such an extent as to guarantee her all the advantages of the situation. According to American standards of gambling, Wilson’s stake was not very high, but it was the final stake, and consequently assured his winning the prize.

As a result of the war the contradictions of the capitalist system confronted mankind in the shape of pangs of hunger, exhaustion from cold, epidemics and moral savagery. This settled once and for all the academic controversy within the Socialist movement over the theory of impoverishment [4] and the gradual transition from capitalism to socialism. Statisticians and pedants of the theory that contradictions were being blunted, had for decades fished out from all the corners of the globe real or mythical facts testifying to the rising well-being of various groups and categories of the working class. The theory of mass impoverishment was regarded as buried, amid contemptuous jeers from the eunuchs of bourgeois professordom and mandarins of Socialist opportunism. At the present time this impoverishment, no longer only of a social but also of a physiological and biological kind, rises before us in all its shocking reality.

The catastrophe of the imperialist war has completely swept away all the conquests of trade union and parliamentary struggles. For this war itself was just as much a product of the internal tendencies of capitalism as were those economic agreements and parliamentary compromises which the war buried in blood and muck.

Finance capital, which plunged mankind into the abyss of war, itself underwent a catastrophic change in the course of this war. The dependency of paper money upon the material foundation of production has been completely disrupted. Progressively losing its significance as the means and regulator of capitalist commodity circulation, paper money became transformed into an instrument of requisition, of seizure and military-economic violence in general.

The debasement of paper money reflects the general mortal crisis of capitalist commodity circulation. During the decades preceding the war, free competition, as the regulator of production and distribution, had already been thrust aside in the main fields of economic life by the system of trusts and monopolies; during the course of the war the regulating-directing role was torn from the hands of these economic groups and transferred directly into the hands of militarystate power. The distribution of raw materials, the utilization of Baku or Rumanian oil, Donbas coal, Ukrainian wheat, the fate of German locomotives, freight cars and automobiles, the rationing of relief for starving Europe – all these fundamental questions of the world’s economic life are not being regulated by free competition, nor by associations of national and international trusts and consortiums, but by the direct application of military force, for the sake of its continued preservation. If the complete subjection of the state power to the power of finance capital had led mankind into the imperialist slaughter, then through this slaughter finance capital has succeeded in completely militarizing not only the state but also itself; and it is no longer capable of fulfilling its basic economic functions otherwise than by means of blood and iron.

The opportunists, who before the World War summoned the workers to practice moderation for the sake of gradual transition to socialism, and who during the war demanded class docility in the name of civil peace and national defense, are again demanding self-renunciation of the proletariat – this time for the purpose of overcoming the terrible consequences of the war. If these preachments were to find acceptance among the working masses, capitalist development in new, much more concentrated and monstrous forms would be restored on the bones of several generations – with the perspective of a new and inevitable world war. Fortunately for mankind this is not possible.

The state-ization of economic life, against which capitalist liberalism used to protest so much, has become an accomplished fact. There is no turning back from this fact – it is impossible to return not only to free competition but even to the domination of trusts, syndicates and other economic octopuses. Today the one and only issue is: Who shall henceforth be the bearer of state-ized production – the imperialist state or the state of the victorious proletariat?

In other words: Is all toiling mankind to become the bond slaves of victorious world cliques who, under the firm-name of the League of Nations [5] and aided by an “international” army and “international” navy, will here plunder and strangle some peoples and there cast crumbs to others, while everywhere and always shackling the proletariat – with the sole object of maintaining their own rule? Or shall the working class of Europe and of the advanced countries in other parts of the world take in hand the disrupted and ruined economy in order to assure its regeneration upon socialist principles?

It is possible to shorten the epoch of crisis through which we are living only by measures of the proletarian dictatorship which does not look back to the past, which respects neither inherited privileges nor property rights, which takes as its starting point the need of saving the starving masses; and to this end mobilizes all forces and resources, introduces universal labor conscription, establishes the regime of labor discipline in order in the course of a few years not only to thus heal the gaping wounds inflicted by war but also to raise mankind to new and unprecedented heights.

* * *
The national state which gave a mighty impulsion to capitalist development has become too narrow for the further development of productive forces. This renders all the more precarious the position of small states, hemmed in by the major powers of Europe and scattered through other sections of the world. These small states, which have arisen at different times as fragments chipped from bigger ones, as so much small change in payment for various services rendered and as strategic buffers, retain their own dynasties, their own ruling cliques, their own imperialist pretensions, their own diplomatic intrigues. Prior to the war, their phantom independence rested on the selfsame thing as the equilibrium of Europe: the uninterrupted antagonism between the two imperialist camps. The war has disrupted this equilibrium. By giving at first an enormous preponderance to Germany, the war compelled the small states to seek their salvation under the magnanimous wings of German militarism. After Germany was crushed, the bourgeoisie of the small states, together with their respective patriotic “Socialists,” turned their faces to the victorious Allied imperialism and began seeking guarantees for their continued independent existence in the hypocritical points of the Wilsonian program. At the same time the number of small states has increased; out of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, out of portions of the former Czarist empire, new states [6] have been carved, which were no sooner born than they flung themselves at one another’s throats over the question of state boundaries. The Allied imperialists are meanwhile preparing such combinations of small powers, both old and new, as would be bound to themselves through the hold of mutual hatreds and common impotence. While oppressing and violating the small and weak peoples, while dooming them to starvation and destruction, the Allied imperialists, like the imperialists of the Central Empire a brief while ago, do not stop talking about the right of self-determination, which is today being trampled underfoot in Europe as in all other parts of the world.

The small peoples can be assured the opportunity of free existence only by the proletarian revolution which will free the productive forces of all countries from the tentacles of the national states, unifying the peoples in closest economic collaboration on the basis of a common economic plan, and offering the weakest and smallest people an opportunity of freely and independently directing their national cultural affairs without any detriment to the unified and centralized European and world economy.

The last war, which was by and large a war for colonies, was at the same time a war conducted with the help of colonies. The colonial populations were drawn into the European war on an unprecedented scale. Indians, Negroes, Arabs and Madagascans fought on the territories of Europe – for the sake of what? For the sake of their right to continue to remain the slaves of England and France. Never before has the infamy of capitalist rule in the colonies been delineated so clearly; never before has the problem of colonial slavery been posed so sharply as it is today.

A number of open insurrections and the revolutionary ferment in all the colonies have hence arisen. In Europe itself, Ireland [7] keeps signaling through sanguinary street battles that she still remains and still feels herself to be an enslaved country. In Madagascar [8], Annam [9] and elsewhere the troops of the bourgeois republic have more than once quelled the uprisings of colonial slaves during the war. In India the revolutionary movement has not subsided for a single day and has recently led to the greatest labor strikes in Asia, which the English government has met by ordering its armored cars into action in Bombay.

The colonial question has been thus posed in its fullest measure not only on the maps at the diplomatic congress in Paris but also within the colonies themselves. At best, Wilson’s program [10] has as its task: to effect a change of labels with regard to colonial slavery. The emancipation of thecolonies is conceivable only in conjunction with the emancipation of the working class in the metropolises. The workers and peasants not only of Annam, Algiers [11], and Bengal [12], but also of Persia and Armenia [13],; will gain their opportunity of independent existence only in that hour when the workers of England and France, having overthrown Lloyd George [14] and Clemenceau [15], will have taken state power into their own hands. Even now the struggle in the more developed colonies, while taking place only under the banner of national liberation, immediately assumes a more or less clearly defined social character. If capitalist Europe has violently dragged the most backward sections of the world into the whirlpool of capitalist relations, then socialist Europe will come to the aid of liberated colonies with her technology, her organization and her ideological influence in order to facilitate their transition to a planned and organized socialist economy.

Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia! The hour of proletarian dictatorship in Europe will strike for you as the hour of your own emancipation!

The entire bourgeois world accuses the Communists of destroying freedom and political democracy. These are lies. Upon assuming power, the proletariat merely lays bare the complete impossibility of employing the methods of bourgeois democracy and creates the conditions and forms of a new and much higher workers’ democracy. The whole course of capitalist development, especially during its final imperialist epoch, has acted to undermine political democracy not only by dividing nations into two irreconcilably hostile classes, but also by condemning numerous petty-bourgeois and proletarian layers, as well as the most disinherited lowest strata of the proletariat, to economic debilitation and political impotence.

In those countries where historical development provided the opportunity, the working class has utilized the regime of political democracy in order to organize against capitalism. The same thing will likewise take place in the future in those countries where conditions for the proletarian revolution have not yet matured. But broad intermediate masses not only in the villages but also in the cities are being held back by capitalism, lagging entire epochs behind historical development.

The peasant in Bavaria [16] and Baden [17] who still cannot sec beyond the spires of his village church, the small French wine producer who is being driven into bankruptcy by the large-scale capitalists who adulterate wine, and the small American farmer fleeced and cheated by bankers and Congressmen – all these social layers thrust back by capitalism away from the mainstream of development are called upon, on paper, by the regime of political democracy to assume the direction of the state. But in reality, on all the basic questions which determine the destinies of the peoples, the financial oligarchy makes the decision behind the back of parliamentary democracy. Such was previously the ease on the question of war; such is now the ease on the question of peace. To the extent that the financial oligarchy still bothers to obtain the sanction of parliamentary ballots for its acts of violence, there are at the disposal of the bourgeois state for obtaining the necessary results all the instruments of lies, demagogy, baiting, calumny, bribery and terror, inherited from the centuries of class slavery and multiplied by all the miracles of capitalist technology.

To demand of the proletariat that it devoutly comply with rules and regulations of political democracy in the final life-and-death combat with capitalism is like demanding of a man, fighting for his life against cutthroats, that he observe the artificial and restrictive rules of French wrestling, which the enemy introduces but fails to observe.

In this kingdom of destruction where not only the means of production and transport but also the institutions of political democracy are heaps of blood-soaked stumps, the proletariat is compelled to create its own apparatus designed first and foremost to cement the inner ties of the working class and to assure the possibility of its revolutionary intervention into the future development of mankindÇ This apparatus is represented by the Workers’ Soviets. The old parties, the old organizations of trade unions have in the persons of their leading summits proved incapable not only of solving but even of understanding the tasks posed by the new epoch. The proletariat has created a new type of organization, a broad organization which embraces the working masses independently of trade or level of political development already attained; a flexible apparatus which permits of continual renovation and extension; and is capable of attracting into its orbit ever newer layers, opening wide its doors to the toiling layers in the city and the country who are close to the proletariat. This irreplaceable organization of working-class self-rule, this organization of its struggle for and later of its conquest of state power, has been tested in the experience of various countries and constitutes the mightiest conquest and weapon of the proletariat in our epoch.

In those countries where the toiling masses live a conscious life, Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies are now being built and will continue to be built. To strengthen the Soviets, to raise their authority, to counterpose them to the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie – this is today the most important task of the class-conscious and honest workers of all countries. Through the medium of Soviets the working class can save itself from the decomposition which is introduced into its midst by the hellish sufferings of war, by starvation, by the violence of the possessing classes and by the treachery of its former leaders. Through the medium of Soviets the working class will be able to come to power most surely and easily in all countries where the Soviets are able to rally the majority of the toilers. Through the medium of Soviets the working class, having conquered power, will exercise its sway over all spheres of the country’s economic and cultural life, as is the ease at present in Russia. The foundering of the imperialist state, from the Czarist state to the most “democratic” ones, is taking place simultaneously with the foundering of the imperialist military system. The multimillioned armies mobilized by imperialism could only be maintained so long as the proletariat remained obediently under the yoke of the bourgeoisie. The crack-up of national unity signifies the inevitable crackup of the army. This is what happened first in Russia, then in Germany and Austria-Hungary. The same thing may be expected to occur in other imperialist countries as well. The uprising of the peasant against the landlord, of the worker against the capitalist, and of both against the monarchical or “democratic” bureaucracy, inevitably brings in its train the uprising of soldiers against the commanders and subsequently – a deep cleavage between the proletarian and bourgeois elements of the army. Imperialist war, which pitted one nation against another, has passed and is passing over into civil war which pits class against class.

The wails of the bourgeois world against civil war and against Red Terror represent the most monstrous hypocrisy yet known in the history of political struggles. There would be no civil war if the clique of exploiters who have brought mankind to the very brink of ruin did not resist every forward step of the toiling masses, if they did not organize conspiracies and assassinations, and did not summon armed assistance from without in order to maintain or restore their thievish privileges.

Civil war is imposed upon the working class by its mortal enemies. Without renouncing itself and its own future, which is the future of all mankind, the working class cannot fail to answer blow for blow.

While never provoking civil war artificially, the Communist parties seek to shorten as much as possible the duration of civil war whenever the latter does arrive with iron necessity; they seek to reduce to a minimum the number of victims and, above all, to assure victory to the proletariat. Hence flows the necessity of disarming the bourgeoisie in time, of arming the workers in time, of creating in time the Communist army to defend the workers’ power and to preserve its socialist construction inviolate. Such is the Red Army of Soviet Russia which arose and exists as the bulwark of the conquests of the working class against all attacks from within and without. The Soviet Army is inseparable from the Soviet State.

Recognizing the world character of their tasks, the advanced workers have from the very first steps of the organized Socialist movement striven to unify it on an international scale. The beginnings were made in 1864 in London by the First International. The Franco-Prussian War out of which emerged the Germany of the Hohenzollerns [18] cut the ground from under the First International and at the same time gave impetus to the development of national workers’ parties. As far back as 1889 these parties came together in the Congress of Paris and created the organization of the Second International. But the center of gravity of the labor movement during that period remained wholly on national soil, wholly within the framework of national states, upon the foundation of national industry, within the sphere of national parliamentarianism. The decadeÇs of reformist organizational activity gave birth to an entire generation of leaders, the majority of whom recognized in words the program of the social revolution but renounced it in deeds, becoming mired in reformism, in a docile adaptation to the bourgeois state. The opportunist character of the leading parties of the Second International has been completely disclosed; and it led to the greatest collapse in world history at a moment when the march of historic events demanded revolutionary methods of struggle from the working-class parties. If the war of 1870 dealt a blow to the First International, disclosing that there was as yet no fused mass force behind its social-revolutionary program, then the war of 1914 killed the Second International, disclosing that the mightiest organizations of the working masses were dominated by parties which had become transformed into auxiliary organs of the bourgeois state!

This applies not only to the socialpatriots who have today clearly and openly gone over to the camp of the bourgeoisie, who have become the latter’s favorite plenipotentiaries and trustees and the most reliable executioners of the working class; it also applies to the amorphous and unstable tendency of the Socialist Center [19] which seeks to reestablish the Second International, that is, to reestablish the narrowness, the opportunism and the revolutionary impotence of its leading summits. The Independent Party of Germany, the present majority of the Socialist Party of France, the Menshevik group of Russia, the Independent Labor Party of England and other similar groups are actually trying to fill the place which had been occupied prior to the war by the old official parties of the Second International. They come forward as hitherto with the ideas of compromise and conciliationism; with all the means at their disposal, they paralyze the energy of the proletariat, prolonging the crisis and thereby redoubling Europe’s calamities. The struggle against the Socialist Center is the indispensable premise for the successful struggle against imperialism.

Sweeping aside the halfheartedness, lies and corruption of the outlived official Socialist parties, we Communists, united in the Third International, consider ourselves the direct continuators of the heroic endeavors and martyrdom of a long line of revolutionary generations from Babeuf [20] – to Karl Liebknecht [21] and Rosa Luxemburg. [22]

If the First International presaged the future course of development and indicated its paths; if the Second International gathered and organized millions of workers; then the Third International is the International of open mass action, the International of revolutionary realization, the International of the deed.

Bourgeois world order has been sufficiently lashed by Socialist criticism. The task of the International Communist Party consists in overthrowing this order and erecting in its place the edifice of the socialist order. We summon the working men and women of all countries to unite under the Communist banner which is already the banner of the first great victories.

Workers of the World – in the struggle against imperialist barbarism, against monarchy, against the privileged estates, against the bourgeois state and bourgeois property, against all kinds and forms of class or national oppression – Unite!

Under the banner of Workers’ Soviets, under the banner of revolutionary struggle for power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, under the banner of the Third International – Workers of the World Unite!


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Notes
1. The Manifesto of the Communist International was adopted unanimously at the last (fifth) session of the First World Congress on March 6, 1919. It was published in the first issue of Communist International, organ of the Comintern which appeared in Russian, German, French and English, and which began publication in May 1919, with Zinoviev as editor.

2. The last pre-war Congress of the Second International took place in 1912 at Basle, Switzerland. Only one point was on the agenda of this Congress, namely, the struggle against the war danger. After Jaurès delivered his report, a revolutionary resolution was adopted.

3. City – that section of London where the biggest English banks are located.

4. The term “theory of impoverishment” was invented by Bernstein, the father of revisionism, in 1890. Bernstein leveled his criticism especially against Marx’s famous assertion that the poverty of the proletariat as a whole tends to increase with the development of capitalism. “Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process or transformation, grows the mass misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation ...” (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.I, p.836.) Marx and Engels first propounded this in the Communist Manifesto in 1848. Most of the theoreticians of the Second International made a concession to Bernstein by arguing that Marx had allegedly referred to the relative and not at all to the absolute impoverishment of the masses. “The proposition in the Manifesto concerning the tendency of capitalism to lower the living standards of the workers, and even to transform them into paupers, has been subjected to a heavy barrage. Parsons, professors, ministers, journalists, Social-Democratic theoreticians, and trade union leaders come to the front against the so-called ‘theory of impoverishment.’ They invariably discovered signs of growing prosperity among the toilers, palming off the labor aristocracy as the proletariat, or taking a fleeting tendency as permanent. Meanwhile, even the development of the mightiest capitalism in the world, namely US capitalism, has transformed millions of workers into paupers who are maintained at the expense of federal, municipal, or private charity.” (Leon Trotsky, 90 Years of the Communist Manifesto, New International, Vol.4 No.2, Feb. 1938, p.54)

5. The League of Nations – the “thieves’ kitchen” as Lenin called it – was created at the Versailles Conference convened by the victors of the first imperialist war early in 1919. At its inception and for many years thereafter the League prohibited the entry of the conquered countries. It was one of the instruments which helped prepare the Second World War.

6. It was in this way that Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia and other countries were formed in 1919.

7. In 1916 uprisings occurred in Ireland against England which were crushed with typical imperialist brutality.

8. Madagascar, an island off the coast of Africa, is part of the French colonial empire.

9.Annam was a French colony on the eastern shore of the Indo-China peninsula, i.e. present-day Vietnam.

10. Woodrow Wilson was President of the US 1912-20. During the first imperialist world war Wilson offered to mediate between the Allies and Germany, proposing that a peace be negotiated without annexations or reparations, etc., etc. This pacifist program for world peace, along with the notorious “14 points” and League of Nations as a “world tribunal,” etc., etc., were hailed by all the liberals and social-chauvinists. Every one of the Wilsonian ideas and “ideals” proved absolutely bankrupt and a complete fraud.

11.Algiers was then a French colony in North Africa. Now the state of Algeria.

12. Bengal was then the largest province of India. East Bengal now forms the state of Bangladesh and West Bengal a state of India.

13. Armenia was then a de facto protectorate of England.

14. Lloyd George, one of the authors of the Versailles Treaty, was the head of the English government during the First World War. Beginning his career as a liberal reformer, he came into prominence in 1908 as the sponsor of the 8-hour day for the miners. Thereafter he instituted (1909) arbitration bodies, comprising representatives of the government, labor and the “public,” to regulate wages in the most back-ward branches of English industry; and in 1911, he sponsored laws covering unemployment insurance, sick benefits, etc. (compare Roosevelt’s “New Deal”). Naturally, this record qualified him eminently to serve as the leader of the imperialist bourgeoisie during the First World War and in the critical period following this war. While propagandizing the war as a “war for democracy” Lloyd George, hand in hand with the Tories, bolstered up the dictatorship of the English imperialist clique, undermined the previous conquests of the English working class, introduced conscription, crushed the uprisings in Ireland and so on. In the postwar epoch, he resorted to compromise in order to restore capitalist equilibrium. After the Soviets had crushed ail the attempts of the imperialist intervention and of the counter-revolution he became one of the advocates of re-establishing economic ties with the Soviet Union. In November 1922, Lloyd George and his Liberal Party suffered defeat in the parliamentary elections, and the Tories took over the reins directly.

15. Clemenceau, chief inspirer of Versailles, was in his youth a radical, called himself a Socialist and was even for a time member of the French Socialist Party. Later he became the beloved leader of the French big bourgeoisie – its “Tiger.” In the days of the Versailles Conference and during the era of the First World Congress of the Communist International, Clemenceau headed the French cabinet.

16. Bavaria – one of the autonomous states of the old German empire. Its population is predominantly rural, the largest section of this rural population consisting of the so-called “strong” or middle farmer.

17. Baden – a South German state with the same characteristics as Bavaria.

18. Up to the Franco-Prussian War (1870), Germany was divided into a number of independent states. The war with France and the victory over Napoleon III eliminated the chief opponent of their unification. The modern German empire was founded in 1871 with the Prussian King Wilhelm I at the head.

19. “The Socialist Center,” or the Centrists in the labor movement – in 1914-18 and throughout the era of the first four Congresses of the Comintern constituted chiefly by the German and Austrian follower of Karl Kautsky. Kautsky preached that the basic task of the labor movement after the last war was to reestablish a united Second International; and he pleaded with the Socialists of all countries that they mutually forgive and forget their respective sins.

20.Babeuf was the leader of the extreme wing of the French plebeian revolutionists at the end of the eighteenth century. Babeuf and his followers were the first ones in history to attempt a revolutionary overturn in order to establish the dictatorship of the toilers. Babeuf’s conspiracy was discovered and, together with a number of his followers, he was executed in 1797.

21. Karl Liebknecht (1891-1919) – leader of the German revolutionary labor movement, founder with Rosa Luxemburg of the German Communist Party, founder of the Communist Youth movement. Long before the First World War, he earned revolutionary renown by his struggle against militarism. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison for writing his pamphlet, Militarism and Anti-Militarism. Liebknecht’s name is a symbol of revolutionary internationalism and irreconcilable opposition to imperialist war. On August 3, 1914 he opposed voting for war credits at a session of the Social-Democratic parliamentary fraction; but under the pressure of party discipline he voted together with the entire party fraction at the Reichstag session on August 4, 1914. When the next vote was taken, on December 2, 1914, he was the only deputy who cast his vote against. But even before that, in October of the same year, he published, jointly with Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and Clara Zetkin, a statement against the official party position in the Swiss Social-Democratic press. In March 1915, when the Reichstag took a vote on war credits, 30 Social Democrats left the chambers and the only ones who voted against were Liebknecht and Otto Rühle. In 1915 he began to organize the Spartacus League and started the publication of the famous Spartacus Letters. When the Zimmerwald Conference convened, Liebknecht was drafted into the army and could not attend, but he forwarded a letter to this conference which closed with the following words: “Not civil peace, but civil war – that is our slogan.” On January 12, 1916 the Social-Democratic fraction expelled him from its ranks. On May Day 1916 he distributed anti-war leaflets in Potsdam Square in Berlin, was arrested and sentenced to hard labor. The victory of the Russian October found him in prison where he greeted the conquest of the Russian workers and peasants, and summoned the German workers to follow this great example. The November 1918 revolution in Germany freed him from prison, untying his hands for a direct struggle against the social-chauvinists and their centrist allies. Together with Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches (Tyshko) he organized the Communist Party of Germany which in December 1919 broke all connections with the Independent Social-Democratic Party, headed by Kautsky and Haase. As member of the revolutionary committee, he headed the uprising of the Berlin workers in January 1919. After this uprising was suppressed he was arrested by the Scheidemann government and on January 15, 1919 was assassinated together with Rosa Luxemburg by a gang of German officers, covertly abetted by the Scheidemannists.

22. Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) – the theoretician of German Communism and author of a number of theoretical books on economics, politics and other questions. She played a very prominent role in the labor movement before the First World War and was the leader of its left wing. She participated in the Polish and Russian revolutionary movements; and from 1910 headed the revolutionary opposition within the German Social Democracy. In 1918, together with Liebknecht, she founded the German Communist Party. Rosa, “our Rosa” as the old revolutionary movement knew her, was born in Poland. At the age of eighteen she was forced to migrate because of her revolutionary activities to Zurich, Switzerland. In 1893 she founded the Polish Social-Democratic Party (later known as the Social-Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania). In 1897 she began participating in the German socialist movement. It was Luxemburg, Mehring and Plekhanov who initiated the struggle against revisionism within the Second International (Bernsteinism and Millerandism) and compelled Kautsky to take a position against it. At the 1907 London Congress of the Russian party she supported the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks on all the key problems of the Russian revolution. The same year, in autumn, together with Lenin she introduced at the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International the revolutionary anti-war resolution which was adopted in essence by that Congress. Long before the war she came into conflict with Kautsky and other Centrists in the German party. When the First World War broke out, she took an internationalist position from the outset. From jail – she was incarcerated in February 1915 – she collaborated in the illegally published Spartacus Letters, and in the work of the Spartacus League. In the spring of 1916 she wrote in jail, under the pseudonym of Junius, the famous pamphlet The Crisis of the Social Democracy in which she pointed out the urgent need of creating the Third International. After the November 1918 revolution in Germany she was freed and joined in the work of creating the Communist Party, being the founder and editor of Rote Fahne, the party’s central organ. After the crushing of the 1919 uprising in Berlin she was arrested and murdered together with Karl Liebknecht.


As is always appropriate on international working class holidays and days of remembrance here is the song most closely associated with that movement “The Internationale” in English, French and German. I will not vouch for the closeness of the translations but certainly of the spirit. Workers Of The World Unite!

The Internationale [variant words in square brackets]

Arise ye workers [starvelings] from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We'll change henceforth [forthwith] the old tradition [conditions]
And spurn the dust to win the prize.

So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.

No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we'll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They'll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We'll shoot the generals on our own side.

No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E'er the thieves will out with their booty [give up their booty]
And give to all a happier lot.
Each [those] at the forge must do their duty
And we'll strike while the iron is hot.




________________________________________

L'Internationale

Debout les damnés de la terre
Debout les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère
C'est l'éruption de la fin
Du passe faisons table rase
Foules, esclaves, debout, debout
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout

C'est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain (bis)
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain

Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes
Décrétons le salut commun
Pour que le voleur rende gorge
Pour tirer l'esprit du cachot
Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge
Battons le fer quand il est chaud

L'état comprime et la loi triche
L'impôt saigne le malheureux
Nul devoir ne s'impose au riche
Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux
C'est assez, languir en tutelle
L'égalité veut d'autres lois
Pas de droits sans devoirs dit-elle
Egaux, pas de devoirs sans droits

Hideux dans leur apothéose
Les rois de la mine et du rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose
Que dévaliser le travail
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande
Ce qu'il a crée s'est fondu
En décrétant qu'on le lui rende
Le peuple ne veut que son dû.

Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans
Appliquons la grève aux armées
Crosse en l'air, et rompons les rangs
S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales
A faire de nous des héros
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux

Ouvriers, paysans, nous sommes
Le grand parti des travailleurs
La terre n'appartient qu'aux hommes
L'oisif ira loger ailleurs
Combien, de nos chairs se repaissent
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours
Un de ces matins disparaissent
Le soleil brillera toujours.


________________________________________

Die Internationale

Wacht auf, Verdammte dieser Erde,
die stets man noch zum Hungern zwingt!
Das Recht wie Glut im Kraterherde
nun mit Macht zum Durchbruch dringt.
Reinen Tisch macht mit dem Bedranger!
Heer der Sklaven, wache auf!
Ein nichts zu sein, tragt es nicht langer
Alles zu werden, stromt zuhauf!

Volker, hort die Signale!
Auf, zum letzten Gefecht!
Die Internationale
Erkampft das Menschenrecht

Es rettet uns kein hoh'res Wesen
kein Gott, kein Kaiser, noch Tribun
Uns aus dem Elend zu erlosen
konnen wir nur selber tun!
Leeres Wort: des armen Rechte,
Leeres Wort: des Reichen Pflicht!
Unmundigt nennt man uns Knechte,
duldet die Schmach langer nicht!

In Stadt und Land, ihr Arbeitsleute,
wir sind die starkste Partei'n
Die Mussigganger schiebt beiseite!
Diese Welt muss unser sein;
Unser Blut sei nicht mehr der Raben
und der machtigen Geier Frass!
Erst wenn wir sie vertrieben haben
dann scheint die Sonn' ohn' Unterlass!

On The 50th Anniversary Of The May Days In France--A Film Documentary Of Our 1960s Times- Chris Marker’s “A Grin Without A Cat”- A Review

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of an interview with an American pilot in Vietnam from Chris Marker's A Grin Without A Cat.

DVD Review

A Grin Without A Cat, directed by Chris Marker, Icarus Films, 1977

The old saying- a picture is worth a thousand words- is an apt, more than apt, expression in reviewing this hotchpotch of a film documentary. Why hotchpotch? Well, this two part (on one disc), multi-lingual (in choice of languages to listen in and in the languages spoken in the various segments), three hour documentary exposition originally produced in 1977, of many of the great events of the middle third of the 20th century comes rapid-fire at you in a montage effect. For those who merely want a flavor of those political times (roughly 1960 to 1980) there is enough here to act as a primer, and to whet your appetite for more research of the times. For the political aficionado familiar with the period one has to dig a little to get a sense of the basically social democratic world view that informs the viewpoint behind the production by the filmmaker, Chris Markers. Either way it is an interesting way to spent three hours, although for non-political “junkies” perhaps viewing one segment at a time is the better course.

Some of the highlights here are much footage from the anti-Vietnam war struggle as it began to take center stage in the mid-1960s, especially in Europe; plenty of footage of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara (including around his 1967 death in Bolivia) and the meaning of the Cuban revolution and rural guerrilla warfare (and as a by-product, urban guerrilla warfare) for world revolutionary strategy; the then historic May Days actions in Paris in 1968 by both students and workers (together and in opposition to each other depending on the stage of the struggle); the seminal anti-Stalinist events in Prague in 1968; Allende’s Popular Front Chile in the early 1970s; and, strewn throughout reflections of the 1960s events from about a decade later perspective by various participants and commentators. Very little material here on the anti-imperialist struggle in America, but the rest more than makes up for it. Kudos on this one.

From The "Further Left Forum"- And Now Spain

Click on the headline to link to the Further Left Forum entry, And Now Spain

On the 100th Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution-A SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC VIEW OF LEON TROTSKY

On the 100th Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution-A SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC VIEW OF LEON TROTSKY  

BOOK REVIEW

LEON TROTSKY, IRVING HOWE, HOLT,RHINEHART, New York, 1978

As readers of this space may know I make no bones about being an admirer of the work of Leon Trotsky (see archives). I also believe that the definitive biography of the man is Isaac Deutchers’ s three-volume set. Nevertheless, others have written biographies on Trotsky that are either less balanced than Deutscher’s or come at it from a different angle with a different ax to grind. Irving Howe’s, self-defined quasi-biography is a standard social-democratic take on Trotsky’s life and work.

The late Mr. Howe, long time editor of the political journal "Dissent" and a political 'godfather' of today's neo-conservatives, takes on the huge task of attempting to whittle down one of the big figures of 20th century history against the backdrop of that mushy social-democratic ‘State Department’ socialism that the left New York intelligentsia gravitated to in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. That standard response invokes admiration for the personality and intellectual achievements of Trotsky the man while abhorring his politics, especially those pursued as a high Soviet official when he was in political power. In the process Mr. Howe demonstrates as much about his weak ‘socialist libertarian’ politics grounded in a theory of Soviet ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ than a serious examination into Trotsky’s politics. There are some chasms that cannot be breached and this is one of them.

In classic fashion Howe sets up Trotsky’s virtues early. Thus he recognizes and appreciates the early romantic revolutionary and free-lance journalist in the true Russian tradition who faced jail and exile without flinching; the brilliant, if flawed, Marxist theoretician who defied all-comers at debate and whose theory of permanent revolution set the standard for defining the strategic pace of the Russian revolution; the great organizer of the revolutionary fight for power in 1917 and later organizer of the Red Army victory in the Civil War; the premier Communist literary critic of his age; the ‘premature’ anti-Stalinist who fought against the degeneration of the revolution; the lonely exile rolling the rock up the mountain despite personal tragedy and political isolation. However, my friends, Howe’s biographical sketches are about an intensely political man by one who was a political opponent of everything that Trotsky stood for. Thus, all the patently obvious and necessary recognition of Trotsky as one of the great figures of the first half of the 20th century is a screen for taking Trotsky off of Olympus.

And here again Howe uses all the points there are in the social democratic standard catechism. The flawed nature of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution as applied to Russia in 1917 and also to later semi-colonial and colonial countries; the undemocratic nature of the Bolshevik seizure of power in regard to other socialist parties; the horrors of the Civil War which helped lead to the degeneration of the revolution; Trotsky’s recognized tendency as a Soviet official to be attracted to administrative solutions; his adamant defense of the heroic days of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet Union, even in its degenerated state, against all comers until the end of his life; his weakness as a party political organizer in the fierce intra-party factional struggles and later, in attempting to found new communist parties and a new international; and, the inevitable ‘crime of crimes’ for the social democratic set- his failure to politically bloc with the Bukharinite Right Opposition after its defeat by Stalin.

Of course the kindest interpretation one can make for Howe’s polemic is that he believes like many another erstwhile biographer that Trotsky should have given up the political struggle and become- what? Another bourgeois academic or better yet an editor of Partisan Review, Dissent or Commentary? Obviously Mr. Howe did not pay sufficient attention to the parts that he considered Trotsky’s virtues. The parts about the intrepid revolutionary with a great sense of history and his role in it. And the wherewithal to find a place in it. Does that seem like the Trotsky that Howe wrote about? No. A fairer way to put it is this. Trotsky probably represented the highest expression of what it was like to be a communist man, warts and all, in the sea of a non-Communist world. And that is high historical praise indeed.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-From The Archives On The Chilean Popular Front

Click on the title to link to an on line copy of the "Workers Vanguard" article on the subject mentioned in the headline.

*From The Pen Of Early Soviet Culture Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky- Yulii Martov

Click on title to link to early Bolshevik Culture and Education Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky's profile of left-Menshevik leader Yulii Martov from his 1923 "Revolutionary Silhouettes". Lunarcharsky may have been a "soft" Bolshevik but he had insights into the Bolshevik leadership (and here into the 'softness' of the best of the Menshevik leadership) that helped explain the successes (and some of the subsequent political problems) of that leadership.

*From The Pen Of V.I. Lenin In 1914-"The Task Of The Revolutionary Social-Democracy In The European War"

Click on title to link to V.I. Lenin's 1914 article-"The Task Of The Revolutionary Social- Democracy In The European War"

*IN DEFENSE OF THE PARIS COMMUNE, 1871

Click on title to link to Karl Marx's defense of the Paris Commune in "The Civil War in France".

BOOK REVIEW

THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE, KARL MARX, Charles H. Kerr, New York, reprint, 1988

The substance of this review was originally used to comment on Leon Trotsky’s pamphlet on the Paris Commune in which he emphasized the lack of revolutionary leadership as one of the decisive factors in the defeat of the Commune. All revolutionary Marxists, following Marx’s lead, have studied the lessons of the Commune from various angles and have essentially drawn the same lessons as he did. Therefore the essential points are covered by Trotsky. Additionally, here you get the Marx’s masterful contemporary analysis of the events and his adamant defense of the Communards against some of the faint-hearted labor leaders of Europe before the international working class.

I might add one note which Lenin and others incorporated into their strategies. One of the few, if only substantial revisions that Marx made in his seminal document the Communist Manifesto was to revamp his understanding of the state after the takeover by the working class. In 1848 he assumed that the working class would take over the capitalist state as is. Reflecting on the Paris Commune experience he dramatically changed that factor and held that the working class would have to smash the old state machinery and develop its own institutions. This is in line with the experience of previous revolutionary history, especially the experience of the French Revolution.

LESSONS OF THE PARIS COMMUNE, 1871

All militants pay homage to the memory of the Commune. For a historical narrative of the events surrounding the rise and fall of the Commune look elsewhere. However, if you want to draw the lessons of the Commune this book offers a superior strategic study. Not surprisingly Trotsky, the organizer of the Russian October Revolution in 1917 and creator of the Red Army, uses the strength and weaknesses of the Commune against the experiences of the October Revolution to educate the militants of his day. Today some of those lessons are still valid for the international labor movement in the seemingly one-sided class struggle being waged against it.

When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one learns something new even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. Nevertheless, one can still learn lessons and measure them against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the immediate aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we also have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions. Trotsky’s analysis follows this path.

Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of later experiences cited above, and as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses, Trotsky honored the Paris Commune as a beacon of the coming world socialist revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe and the faint-hearted elements in the European labor movement. It is truly one of the revolutionary peaks.

The Commune nevertheless also presented in embryo the first post-1848 Revolution instance of what was to be later characterized by Lenin at the beginning of World War I as the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. Moreover, after Lenin’s death this question preoccupied Trotsky for much of the later part of his life. Trotsky’s placing the problems facing the Commune in this context made me realize that this crisis really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. Unfortunately, that question is still to be resolved.

Many working class tendencies, Anarchist, Anarcho-Syndicalist, Left Social Democratic and Communist justifiably pay homage to the defenders of the Paris Commune and claim its traditions. Why does an organization of short duration and subject to savage reprisals still command our attention? The Commune shows us the heroism of the working masses, their capacity to unite for action, their capacity to sacrifice themselves in the name of a future, more just, organization of society. Every working class tendency can honor those qualities, particularly when far removed from any active need to do more than pay homage to the memory of the fallen Communards.

Nevertheless, as Trotsky notes, to truly honor the Communards it is necessary to understand that at the same time the Commune shows us the many times frustrating incapacity of the masses to act in their objective interests, their indecision in the leadership of the movement, their almost always fatal desire to halt after the first successes. Obviously, only a revolutionary party can provide that kind of leadership in order fight against these negative traits. At that stage in the development of the European working class where political class consciousness was limited to the vanguard, capitalism was still capable of progressive expansion and other urban classes were at least verbally espousing socialist solutions it is improbable that such an organization could have been formed. Nevertheless such an organization was objectively necessary.

It is a truism in politics, including revolutionary politics, that timing is important and many times decisive. As Trotsky noted seizure of power by the Commune came too late. It had all the possibilities of taking the power on September 4, 1870 rather than March 18, 1871 and that would have permitted the proletariat of Paris to place itself at the head of the workers of the whole country in their struggle. At the very least, it would have allowed time for the workers of other cities and the peasantry in the smaller towns and villages to galvanize their forces for action in defense of Paris and to create their own communes. Unfortunately the Parisian proletariat had neither a party, nor leaders forged by previous struggles that could or would reach out to the rest of France.

Moreover, a revolutionary workers' party, while entirely capable of using parliamentary methods is not, and should not, be a machine for parliamentary wrangling. In a revolution such activity at times amounts to parliamentary cretinism. The Central Committee of the National Guard, the embodiment of organizational power, had more than its share of such wrangling and confusionist politics. In contrast, a revolutionary party is the accumulated and organized experience of the proletariat. It is only with the aid of the party, which rests upon the whole history of its past, which foresees theoretically the road forward, all its stages, and knows how to act in the situation, that the proletariat avoids making the same historical mistakes, overcomes its hesitations, and acts decisively to seize power. Needless to say those same qualities are necessary to retain power against the inevitable counter-revolutionary onslaught. The proletariat of Paris did not have such a party. The result was that the revolution broke out in their very midst, too late, and Paris was encircled. Like other revolutionary opportunities six months delay proved fatal. Capitalism cruelly exacted its revenge. That is a great lesson of the Commune, for others read this book.

SOME OF THE BOOKS REVIEWED HERE MAY NOT BE READILY AVAILABLE AT LOCAL BOOKSTORES OR LIBRARIES. CHECK AMAZON.COM FOR AVAILABILITY THERE, BOTH NEW AND USED.

The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States- 1930s American Socialist Workers Party Leader Max Shachtman-Prospects for a Labor Party(1937)

Click on the headline to link to a Max Shachtman Internet Archives online copy of Prospects for a Labor Party(1937)

Markin comment on this series:

Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.

Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.

As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts run a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
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Markin comment on this article:

Max Shachtman knew how to "speak" Marxism back in the 1930s and believe it. Later he could speak that language only at Sunday picnics and the like as he drifted back into the warm embrace of American imperialism.

From The Archives Of The International Communist League- The Stalinist School of Falsification Revisted-A Reply To The "Guardian", Part Eight- TROTSKYISM vs. SWP REVISIONISM

Markin comment:

In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.

After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.

I am continuing today  what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973

Markin comment on this series:

No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.

When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.

So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
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The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited

These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]

Reply to the Guardian

THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED

8. TROTSKYISM vs. SWP REVISIONISM
T
The last four articles of the Guardian series on "Trotsky's Heritage" are devoted to demonstrating that Trotskyism is reformist and "counterrevolutionary" by discussing the current policies of the Socialist Workers Party and, to a lesser extent, of the Workers League (WL). Not once is the Spartacist League mentioned. This is no accident. The SWP, which was once the leading party of the Fourth International, has long since abandoned the path of revolutionary Trotskyism for the swamp of reformism. First adapting itself to Castroist in 1961-63 by foreseeing a "guerrilla road to power" and to black nationalism with the theory that "consistent nationalism" leads to socialism, the SWP made its dive into reformism in 1965, becoming the organizer of a popular-front antiwar movement dominated by bourgeois liberals. Since then it has extended this class collaborationism into new fields, organizing single-issue movements for the "democratic" demand of self-determination for just about everyone, from blacks (community control) and women to homosexuals and American Indians.

The political bandits of the WL, on the other hand, have made their mark in the U.S. socialist left by constantly shifting their political line in order to temporarily adapt to whatever is popular at the moment (Huey Newton, Red Guards, Ho Chi Minh. Arab nationalists, left-talking union bureaucrats) only to return to a more "orthodox" position soon after. Its constants are a belief that an all-encompassing final crisis of capitalism will eliminate the need to struggle for the Bolshevik politics of the Transitional Program and an abiding passion for tailing after labor fakers of any stripe, from pseudo-radicals to ultra conservatives.

Thus it is easy to "prove" that Trotskyism is reformist by citing the policies of the SWP and the WL. But this has about as much value as "proving" that Lenin was for a "peaceful road to socialism" by citing Khrushchev.

Feminism and Trotskyism

Because of the rotten betrayals of the SWP during the past decade, Trotskyism has become confused in the minds of many militants with the crassest reformist grovelling before the liberal bourgeoisie. It also gives Maoists like Davidson plenty of opportunity to make correct attacks:

"Their [SWP's] approach is to tail opportunistically each spontaneous development in the mass democratic movements. Each constituency, in succession, is then dubbed the 'vanguard' leading the proletariat to socialism, with the added provision that the 'vanguard of the vanguard' in each sector is presently made up of the student youth."
--Guardian, 13 June 1973

This theory, formerly called the "dialectic of the sectors of intervention" by the SWP's European friends, is a denial of the leading role of the proletariat and is expressed in their programmatic capitulation to feminism, nationalism, student power, etc. Elsewhere, Davidson criticized the SWP for tailing the nationalism of the black petty bourgeoisie and the WL for tailing the chauvinism of the labor aristocracy (Guardian, 30 May 1973). Again this is correct.

But such criticism is cheap--it represents not the slightest step toward a Marxist program of proletarian class struggle. Thus after criticizing the SWP for tailing petty-bourgeois feminists, Davidson counterposes the "mass democratic struggle for the emancipation of women." This is the tip of the iceberg, for behind the contention that the struggle for women's liberation is only "democratic" (and not socialist) lies a call for maintenance of the bourgeois family (simply "reforming" it by calling "for husbands to share equally in the responsibilities of the home") and for an alliance with "even the women of the exploiting classes."

SL Embodies Trotskyist Program

Instead of capitulating to bourgeois pacifism the SL called for class-struggle opposition to the Vietnam war: for labor strikes against the war, bourgeoisie out of the antiwar movement, military support to the NLF, all Indochina must go communist; instead of petty-bourgeois draft refusal the SL was unique in consistently advocating communist work in the army.

Rather than capitulating to bourgeois nationalism, the SL called for an end to all discrimination on the basis of race, opposition to community control and preferential hiring, for a transitional black organization on a program of united class struggle.

In the struggle for women's liberation, the SL opposed capitulation to bourgeois feminism and the equally reactionary abstentionism of various workerist groups: We called for women's liberation through socialist revolution, bourgeois politicians out of the women's movement, free abortion on demand and adopted the prospect of the eventual creation of a women's section of the SL, as envisioned by the early Communist International.

Alone of all the ostensibly Marxist organizations the SL has upheld the Leninist norms of youth-party relations, with the youth section (Revolutionary Communist Youth, RCY [now the Spartacus Youth League, SYL]) organizationally separate but politically subordinate to the party.

Nationalism vs. Class Struggle

On the question of black nationalism, Davidson criticizes the SWP for tailing petty-bourgeois nationalists...and then declares that U.S. blacks constitute a nation and should have the right to secede. The nationalist theory of a "black nation" in the U.S. ignores the fact that blacks (and the other racial ethnic minorities) are thoroughly integrated into the U.S. economy although overwhelmingly at the bottom levels, have no common territory, special language or culture. Garveyite "back to Africa movements, the theory of a black nation and all other forms of black separatism have the principal effect of dividing the proletariat and isolating the most exploited and potentially most revolutionary section in separate organizations fighting for separate goals. Both the SWP, with its enthusiasm for community control, and Maoists like Davidson's October League and the Communist League with their reactionary-utopian concepts of a black nation, serve to disunite the working class and tie it to the bourgeoisie. The SWP's enthusiasm for a black political party lead it to enthuse over clambakes of black Democrats (such as the 1971 Gary convention), while black-nation separatism aids bourgeois nationalist demagogues like Newark's Ford Foundation-backed Imamu Baraka (Leroi Jones).

In part the capitulation to black nationalism by wide sectors of the U.S. left is a distorted recognition that this most exploited sector of the working class will indeed play a key role in an American socialist revolution. Black workers are potentially the leading section of the proletariat. But this requires the integration of its most conscious elements into the single vanguard party and a relentless struggle for the program of united working-class struggle among black workers. Conscious of the need for special methods of work among doubly-oppressed sectors of the proletariat, the SL has called for a transitional black organization not as a concession to black separatism but precisely in order to better combat nationalism among the black masses. ("Black and Red--Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom," Spartacist, May-June 1967).

Leninism vs. Workerism

Since the demise of the Weatherman-RYM II section of SDS in late 1969, black nationalism and feminism have been joined by a crude workerism as the dominant forms of petty-bourgeois ideology in the socialist movement. Adapting to the present backward consciousness of the working class, workerists have sought to gain instant popularity and influence by organizing on the level of militant trade unionism. Failing to heed (and in some cases denying) Lenin's dictum that socialist consciousness must be brought to the working class from the outside, by the revolutionary party, the radical workerists today carry out trade-union work which is in no way distinguishable from that of the reformist Communist party in the 1930's and 1940's. Falling in behind every militant-talking out-bureaucrat, and not a few in-bureaucrats as well, they fail to wage a political struggle in the unions, saving their support for the NLF, Mao, etc., for the campuses.

Among ostensible Trotskyist groups, workerism has taken the form of denying the need to struggle for the whole of the Transitional Program in the trade unions. Some fake-Trotskyists argue that wage demands alone are revolutionary (Workers league), others that the Transitional Program must be served to the workers in bits and pieces, one course at a time (Class Struggle league); still others verbally proclaim the Transitional Program in their documents, but see the strategy for power as based on giving "critical support" to every available out-bureaucrat (Revolutionary Socialist League). The SWP, for its part, does almost no trade-union work at all and in its press gives uncritical support to liberal bureaucrats, both in power and out.

The Spartacist League, in contrast, calls for the formation of caucuses based on the Transitional Program to struggle for leadership of the unions. While willing to form united fronts in specific struggles, the SL sees the fundamental task as the creation of a communist opposition--not just militant trade unionism. Together with Trotsky we affirm that the Transitional Program is the program for struggle in the unions. This does not mean that every caucus program must be a carbon copy of the SL Declaration of Principles--it is necessary to choose those demands which best serve to raise socialist consciousness in the particular situation. What is essential is that the caucus program of transitional demands not be limited to militant reformism, but contain the political perspective of socialist revolution.

Davidson quotes from Trotsky's 1940 conversations with SWP leaders to claim that Trotskyist trade union work amounted to "anti-communism." We have recently published a series of articles on "Trotskyist Work in the Trade Unions" (WV No. 25-28) detailing our criticisms of the SWP's policy of one-sided emphasis on blocs with "progressive" bureaucrats and its failure to build a communist pole 'in the unions. However, it was perfectly correct during the late 1930's to concentrate the Trotskyists' trade-union work on opposition to the Stalinists: these were the agents of Roosevelt in the labor movement, the authors and enforcers of the no-strike pledge during World War II. Of course, no one can accuse Davidson's friends in the October League or Revolutionary Union of attacking the Communist Party (or for that matter any militant reformist bureaucrat) in their trade-union work. Rather they uniformly support left bureaucrats in office (such as Chavez of the Farmworkers) and form blocs with-out-bureaucrats when the incumbent leadership is too conservative to awaken any illusions at all among the workers.

Consistent with his pattern of distortion of Trotsky's positions in the earlier articles of the series, Davidson seeks to create the impression that Trotsky endorsed the SWP's practice of blocking with "progressive" bureaucrats against the Stalinists. Not so! In 1940 Trotsky explicitly criticized the SWP for softness toward pro-Roosevelt unionists and insisted on an orientation toward the ranks of the CP.

The Struggle for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International

The degeneration of the SWP from Bolshevism to centrism did not simply occur one day in 1961, but was the result of a process of programmatic (and ultimately organizational) degeneration of the Fourth International after World War It. The critical point came with the split of the FI in 1953 which signified the organizational demise of the unified world party of socialist revolution. At the heart of the split was the program put forward by Michel Pablo, head of the International Secretariat of the FI, of "deep entry" into the reformist Stalinist parties, redubbed centrist in order to justify the new line. Pablo, no longer saw the crisis of revolutionary leadership as the key roadblock to revolution and the construction of the Fourth International as the solution. Instead he adopted the objectivist theory that the overwhelming crisis of capitalism (his "war-revolution thesis") would force the Stalinists to undertake at least deformed revolutions. Thus Pablo's "Theses on International Perspectives" of the Third Congress of the FI (1951) state:

"The objective conditions determine in the long run the character and dynamic of the mass movement which, taken to a certain level, can overcome all the subjective obstacles in the path of the revolution."
--Quatrieme Internationale, August-September 1951

When it became clear that the implication of Pablo's line was the organizational liquidation of the FI into the dominant Stalinist and social-democratic parties, and when this was brought home by a liquidationist pro-Pablo faction (headed by Cochran and Clarke) in the SWP itself, the party majority reacted sharply. James Cannon wrote:

"The essence of Pabloist revisionism is the overthrow of that part of Trotskyism which is today its most vital part--the conception of the crisis of mankind as the crisis of the leadership of the labor movement summed up in the question of the party."
--"Factional Struggle and Party Leadership," November 1953

The organizational destruction of the FI by Pabloist revisionism in 1953 had come about as the result of a number of factors affecting the entire Trotskyist movement after World War II, but particularly the European sections. For one thing, virtually their entire pre-war leadership had been murdered either by the Nazi Gestapo or the Stalinist GPU. The living continuity with Trotsky had virtually been broken. Furthermore the sections had been decimated and largely isolated from the working class, while the Stalinists had been able to expand their influence through leadership of anti-Hitler partisan struggles. At the same time Stalinist regimes were set up under the protection of the Russian Army in Eastern Europe, and peasant-based insurrection in China led to the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a deformed workers state. Faced with these unexpected developments the initial response of the Trotskyist movement was to maintain that the Eastern European Stalinist regimes were still capitalist. Not until 1955 did the SWP, for instance, decide that China had become a deformed workers state. Having unwittingly vulgarized Trotsky's dialectical understanding of Stalinism, the orthodox Trotskyists stressed Stalinism's counterrevolutionary side until their theories no longer squared with reality. This disorientation enabled the revisionist current around Pablo to justify its opportunist appetites by concluding from the limited social transformations in Eastern Europe that non-proletarian, non-Trotskyist forces can lead any form of social revolution.

The SWP had been least affected by this process, having emerged from the war with its leadership intact, its membership and ties to the working class increased and the Stalinists still relatively weak compared to Europe. It was natural that in 1953 the SWP should lead the fight for orthodox Trotskyism. But in fact the party waged only a half-struggle, virtually withdrawing from any international work until the late 1950's. The "International Committee" which it formed with the French and British majorities who opposed Pablo hardly functioned at all. As the party lost virtually its entire trade-union cadre in the Cochran-Clarke fight, and as the greater part of its entire membership left during the McCarthy years, the leadership began moving to the right in the late 1950's in search of some force or movement it, could latch onto in order to regain mass influence.

It found this in the Cuban revolution, which evoked a wave of sympathy throughout Latin America and in the U.S. The party leadership declared that Cuba was basically a healthy workers state, although not yet possessing the forms of workers democracy (!) and that Fidel Castro was a natural Marxist (i.e., he supposedly acted like a Trotskyist even though he talked first as a bourgeois nationalist and later as a Stalinist).

Not surprisingly, this was the same line taken by the Pabloists in Europe. If the petty-bourgeois Stalinist bureaucracies could carry out a social revolution in Eastern Europe, they reasoned, why not also a petty-bourgeois nationalist like Castro. Thus in practice the SWP was coming over to the Pabloist line. At the same time an opposition was formed inside the SWP (the Revolutionary Tendency, predecessor of the Spartacist League) which considered Cuba a deformed workers state and criticized the SWP leadership's capitulation to Castro and the European Pabloists. The RT in 1963 proposed a counter thesis ("Toward the Rebirth of the Fourth International") to the majority's document which was the basis for the SWP's reunification with the European Pabloists to form the "United Secretariat." While the party majority supported a peasant-based "guerrilla road to power" the RT upheld the orthodox Trotskyist position that only the proletariat could lead the struggle for agrarian revolution and national liberation.

The RT was expelled from the SWP in 1963 for its revolutionary opposition to the majority's Pabloist tailing after petty-bourgeois forces. Subsequently the gap between the SWP's policies and the Trotskyism of the Spartacist group continued to widen. The ex-Trotskyist SWP capitulated in turn to black nationalism, bourgeois pacifism and feminism, to the point where today it is a hardened reformist organization with appetites to become the dominant social democratic party of the U.S.

We must learn from this history of defeats that revisionism leads to the same consequences whether it comes from Stalinist origins or from erstwhile Trotskyists. The Maoist line defended by the Guardian in no way offers a proletarian alternative to the reformism of the SWP. Instead of the SWP's single issue reformist campaigns in alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie (NPAC, WONAAC), the Maoists propose multi-issue reformist campaigns in alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie (PCPJ). The only road to socialist revolution is to make a sharp break with Stalinist and Pabloist revisionism and return to the Marxist program of proletarian class independence, uniquely embodied in the U.S. by the Spartacist League. Internationally this means an unrelenting struggle for the creation of a democratic-centralist programmatically-united Trotskyist tendency to carry out the task of reconstruction of the FI.

Down with Pabloism!
For the Rebirth of the Fourth International!