Monday, July 15, 2013

The Latest From The “Veterans For Peace” Facebook Page-Gear Up For The Fall 2013 Anti-War Season-Troops Out Now!

Click on the headline to link to the Veterans For Peace Facebook page for the latest news on what anti-war front the organization is working on. 
 


Re-posted from the American Left History blog- Thursday, November 11, 2010

A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!

Markin comment:

Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.

Now normally in Boston, and in most places, a Veterans Day parade means a bunch of Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) or American Legion-types taking time off from drinking at their post bars (“the battle of the barstool”) and donning the old overstuffed uniform and heading out on to Main Street to be waved at, and cheered on, by like-minded, thankful citizens. And of course that happened this time as well. What also happened in Boston this year (and other years but I have not been involved in previous marches) was that the Veterans For Peace (VFP) organized an anti-war march as part of their “Veterans Day” program. Said march to be held at the same place and time as the official one.

Previously there had been a certain amount of trouble, although I am not sure that it came to blows, between the two groups. (I have only heard third-hand reports on previous events.) You know the "super-patriots" vs. “commie symps” thing that has been going on as long as there have been ex-soldiers (and others) who have differed from the bourgeois party pro-war line. In any case the way this impasse had been resolved previously, and the way the parameters were set this year as well, was that the VFP took up the rear of the official parade, and took up the rear in an obvious way. Separated, if you can believe, this from the main body of the official parade by a medical emergency truck. Nice, right? Something of the old "I’ll take my ball and bat and go home" by the "officials" was in the air on that one.

But here is where there is a certain amount of rough plebeian justice, a small dose for those on the side of the angels, in this wicked old world.  In order to form up, and this was done knowingly by VFP organizers, the official marchers, the bands and battalions that make up such a march, had to “run the gauntlet” of dove emblem-emblazoned VFP banners waving frantically directly in front of their faces as they passed by. Moreover, although we formed the caboose of this thing the crowds along the parade route actually waited as the official paraders marched by and waved and clapped at our procession. Be still my heart. But that response just provides another example of the "street cred” that ex-soldiers have on the anti-war question. Now, if there is to be any really serious justice in the world, if only these vets would go beyond the “bring the troops home” and embrace- immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S./Allied Troops from Iraq and Afghanistan then we could maybe start to get somewhere out on those streets. But today I was very glad to be fighting for our communist future among those who know first-hand about the dark side of the American experience. No question.

The Latest From The "Leonard Peltier Defense Committee" Website-Free Leonard Peltier Now!-Free All Our Class-War Prisoners!-An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!

The Latest From The "Leonard Peltier Defense Committee" Website-Free Leonard Peltier Now!-Free All Our Class-War Prisoners!-An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!

http://www.leonardpeltier.net/

Click on the headline to link to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee website for the latest news on our class-war political prisoner brother, Leonard Peltier.

Markin comment:

Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Leonard, Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!


 
***Out In The Be-Bop Be-Bop 1960s Night- Take Two- In The Time Of Donna Blanchard’s Time- With Elvis Presley In Mind






From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

CD Review

The Heart Of Rock ‘n’ Roll: 1960-61-Take Two, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1997


Scene: Brought to mind by one of the snapshot photos that grace each CD in this series. Doc’s Drugstore and Soda Foundation, located in the heart of the North Adamsville shopping streets, and most importantly, just a few minutes walk from North Adamsville High School. The soda fountain counter area is complete with a dozen single stools, a speckled faux-marble formica countertop with assorted pastry trays, candy boxes, pie cabinets and various condiment combinations for Doc’s ‘greasy spoon” hamburgers and hot dogs. Said single stools are strictly for losers, girl friend-less guys (or once in a great while a girl just trying catch a quick soda on the way home) or old people waiting for Doc to fill their ancient medicines prescriptions. They are no factor, no factor at all in this teen-worthy world. No, less than no factor. Every once in a while, however, one of Fritz Cullen’s corner boys takes his foot off the wall in front of Doc’s and enters to get a take out Cherry Coke, the de riguer drink of Fritz’s boyos.

But the fountain is strictly for food and drink, food and drink that is also strictly secondary to why Doc’s is a teen-worthy heaven. The real draw is the quiet booths that line both corner walls and are only for after school boy-girl couples, four-some girls looking for guys to dance with, and at night, mainly school year weekend and summer every nights, Fritz’s Cullen’s corner boys when they tire of holding up Doc’s wall out front (or more realistically when the hour is late and the girl prospects have dimmed). But the booths mean nothing by themselves except as “resting” areas after some fast dance coming from Doc’s super-charged juke box, complete with the very latest records straight from Pete’ Platters Record Shop so you know the are hot.

Right now, just this very teen ear minute, one can hear the sassy sound of The Drifters This Magic Moment in the background as we fix on a boy and girl taking a break from deep conversation (deep conversation related in teen world to either sex, setting up dates, analyzing the state of their eternal relationship, or some combination of all three) and taking a straw sip from their shared Cherry Coke. The Cherry Coke automatically means that rank and file Doc’s corner boy Harry “Red” Radley is present on one of the straws. On the other Donna Blanchard, one of the hottest sixteen year old sophomore girls at North Adamsville High, with a nice shape, a sweet smile, and a “come hither” look that has had more than one boy moony-eyed for her affections. But no dice, no dice at all. In this autumn of the year of our lord nineteen hundred and sixty Miss Donna Blanchard only has eyes, and whatever else she has to give, for one Red Radley. Let’s listen in as the eminently forgettable Booby Vee is droning on in the background about some lost love (and rightfully so, if the truth be known) on Take Good Care Of My Baby.
*********

“What the matter, honey, don’t you want me like that," murmered Donna Blanchard after being told for the fifth or sixth time by our corner boy Red Radley that, if you can believe this, no he was not ready for heavy sex (meaning of course, in the language of the young, some variety of “going all the way”). It seems that last Saturday night down at Adamsville Beach, the local “parking” heaven where one and all went to see the ”submarine races” in the local teen code parlance Donna, making no bones that she was ready, more than ready, to go all the way with Red got turned down. Turned down flat. Fortunately for Red Donna, embarrassed by such a fool for a boy friend, had “neglected” to mention this hard fact of life when the obligatory Monday morning Girls’ “Lav” talk got around to the subject of the weekend scorecard. In short, who did, and didn’t do it. Right now Red and Donna are trying to sort things out as a strangely ironic song by Cathy Jean and the Roommates, Please Love Me Forever, spins on the juke box.

What? A member in good standing of Fritz Cullen’s corner boys, corner boys who have, publicly anyway, notched up (went all they way with) more North Adamsville girls than maybe there were girls in North Adamsville turned down a chance at paradise. And turned down a certified fox like Donna Blanchard. No way. Moreover, Red, displaying not uncommon teen male bravado had lied to his fellow corner boys and said that he had had already “gone all the way” with Donna. Jesus. Did our Red have a medical problem? No. Did he have some religious scruples about pre-martial sex? Hell, no. Our Red, as it turns out was a virgin and was terrified when Donna, a virgin herself but ready for the time of her time, came on so strong. Especially when she went wild on Saturday night when the local 24/7 rock and roll station, WMEX, played a medley of Elvis tunes including his latest, Surrender.

Some times things end right in the teen universe, sometimes they don’t. This time they didn’t. Well, at least for Red. After their little conversation at Doc’s Red and Donna agreed, but mostly Donna agreed, that they should see other people. That’s teen code, and maybe universal code, for “breaking up.” So now one sees the fetching Donna Blanchard riding around in Jimmy Jakes '59 cherry Chevy, and sitting very close indeed. Moreover she has that look, that certain look like she now knows a thing or two about ways of the world. Well, after all it was the time of her time, wasn’t it? As for Red, well, Red is seen more and more occupying one of those single stools at Doc’s counter sipping a Cherry Coke and endlessly throwing nickels, dimes and quarters in the juke box playing Elvis’ It’s Now or Never. Enough said.
Out In The Crime Noir 1950s Night-Bunco Madness-“Confidence Girl”


From The Pen Of Frank Jackman


Confidence Girl, Hillary Brooke, Tom Conway, 1952

The scam artist team of Mary Webb and Richard Kingsley had it made, had it made in the shade, making every CEO of every indemnity company get more gray hairs than they already had. Making every department store owner cringe over his or her losses, making even the worldly-wise pawnbrokers around town sit up and take notice. No question they were the best from coast to coast, not small time grifters, drifters and midnight sifters like a lot of punk back alley guys who tell stories about how they ripped a guy for twenty bucks in some three-card Monte in about 1937 and they never got over it. High quality goods only. Furs, jewels, maybe a switch and bait thrown in, or a get rich real estate scam that exploded in the mark’s face. Beautiful work, real pros. And then split town, split town fast with no forwarding address, and some pretty wise people with egg on their face.

Let me give an example of one caper. Mary Webb would go into a high-end department store and look at, say, a mink worth ten or fifteen grand. Then as nice as you please she would walk, no, maybe sass-shay out the front door. Of course she would be grabbed and it would be all over for our Mary. Except for one thing the guy doing the nabbing was none other than Kingsley working his racket as a special investigator for the indemnity companies. See he had talked the department store dick innocently into the plot with a lot of investigator mumbo-jumbo. Come nabbing time Mary, escorted to her getaway car by Kingsley, flew the coop and Kingsley used as an excuse the old she pulled a gun on him. Sweet, right. Sweet stuff like that until they let things get too complicated, let too many moving parts get in the way.

See, Kingsley, maybe knowing that the odds, the percentages, of avoiding the police blotter were dropping with each caper, devised a scam of scams so he and Mary could be on easy street, retire undefeated, and go off into the sunset and raise some of those kids that Mary kept squawking about. Mary had his number though on that subject, knew he wasn’t set to be somebody’s daddy but still she loved the guy and that will make anybody do stuff that in a calmer moment would be dismissed out of hand. She bought into the scam. Funny nobody had figured from the start the pair working out together, no real chemistry except for the capers that drove them. But there they were. So as everybody knows who knows scams, and maybe knows police department Bunco squads, could see that old ‘crime doesn’t pay” sign coming a mile away as the plot thickened.

Kingsley had master-mined a variant the old get rich quick scam that had netted them plenty of dough in the past, except this time they were going really big, maybe a million if things worked out right. It all depended on Mary pulling off, well, a confidence girl act. That is getting people to have confidence in her, mainly by buying stocks that she would advise them to buy as sound investments, run up the price and then sell-out leaving plenty of that previously mentioned egg on some savvy faces. The vehicle for this confidence build-up was to make Mary a psychic, but a psychic who knew more detailed information about the future marks than normal in such situations. And that is where that“too many moving parts” came in. Kingsley has an associate, a gangster nightclub owner, front Mary’s act. That included bringing a lot of the nightclub help and gang members into the action to grab bits of information from the customers. Using information about a local bizarre killing and identifying the killer as the bait. But the cops after being a bit dumb about Kingsley’s and Mary’s act got wise, got wise when that whole killer expose kind of blew up in our pair’s faces when things got out of hand. The other show dropped, dropped hard. But when they were rolling along, pulling a caper and then moving out, they were the best, no question. Maybe there is a cautionary tale in all of this.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

***Waiting For That One High White Note Moment- “As It Is In Heaven”-A Film Review



Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for As It Is In Heaven.
DVD Review

As It Is In Heaven, Michael Nyqvist, Frida Hallgren, in Swedish, English subtitles, 2004


The overwhelming number of film reviews in this space in the recent past has been about film noir classics, especially crime noir classics from the 1940s and 1950s. The exception has been a couple of the films in the Swedish crime novelist Steig Larrson’s trilogy and now this Swedish film (with English subtitles) film, As It Is In Heaven, starring the same male performer who was a lynch pin for those other films, Michale Nyqvist. Here he plays the same understated role, with plenty of studied bewilderment which seems to be his specialty (and coolness under duress as well). Although his trials and tribulations are central to the plot this is more of an ensemble cinematic operation.

A little plot summary is required to motivate that last statement. A hard-driven, world-renowned symphonic conductor is on his last legs physically after pushing his career envelope in search of that perfect musical sound. What is called in jazz reaching for that "high white note." In order to get back to his old self (or just live his life out) he needs rest and no more world-historic reaching. So naturally, naturally for a Swedish audience I assume, he goes go back to his boyhood township to get back to his roots, or to find some peace since this place is definitely off the main road, the mainly snowy main road. Of course, as described via flashbacks, his roots were rather attenuated with the town since he had left originally under duress, his and his mother’s, at an early age in order to become something in the musical world.

Here comes the ensemble part. His old home town is nothing but a hell’s broth of broken people, thwarted love, unkindness and the like. I thought immediately of something out of Peyton Place or the now dwindling day-time American television soap operas. But this town also had a church-based chorus, as many towns in this world do. So put together one world-renowned conductor trying to find his roots, love and that high white note that has eluded him in earlier days and one motley group of choral wannabes with every social and physical pathology an isolated small town can produce and of course you will in the end uncover that high white note, literally. A nice film, a nice foreign film, a nice change of pace vehicle for Nyqvist (although I don’t have to see his studied whatever for a while which means holding off on watching that third part of the Larrson trilogy that has just come out).

The Latest From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee- Free Lynne Stewart

The Latest From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee- Free Lynne Stewart

Click on the headline to link to the Justice For Lynn Stewart Defense Committee for the latest in her case.

Markin comment:

Free Lynne Stewart ! Free Grandma Now!



CLICK ABOVE TO SIGN THE Change.org PETITION TO FREE LYNNE!

Rallies for Lynne

July 8th, 2013

RALLIES FOR LYNNE:

Tues., July 9, New York City

Gather at Foley Sq, Lower Manhattan Courts, 4 – 7 pm
And march to 500 Pearl St.

Tues., July 9, Los Angeles

Protest at Westwood Federal Building
11000 Wilshire Blvd., 5 p.m.

Fri., July 12, Washington, D.C.

Columbia Heights Civic Plaza 5:30 – 8 pm
14th St & Park Rd. NW


From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-

 

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
************

 Leon Trotsky

The Intelligentsia and Socialism

(1910)




Written: 1910
Publisher: New Park, London, ISBN 0 902030 58 2. First printing January 1966 Second impression 1974. Reprinted from Fourth International (London), Autumn-Winter 1964-65
Source: Volume 20 of Collected (Russian) Works of L.D. Trotsky, Moscow 1926
Translated: Brian Pearce
Online Version: Marxists Internet Archive, 2002
Transcribed: Robert Barrois
HTML Markup: David Walters
Proofreading: Einde O’Callaghan, November 2006.

Ten years ago, or even six or seven years ago, defenders of the Russian subjective school of sociology (the “Socialist-Revolutionaries”) might have successfully utilized for their purpose the latest pamphlet by the Austrian philosopher Max Adler. During the last five or six years, however, we have passed through such a thorough, objective “school of sociology”, and its lessons are written on our bodies in such expressive scars, that the most eloquent apotheosis of the intelligentsia, even coming from the “Marxist” pen of M. Adler, will not be of any help to Russian subjectivism. On the contrary, the fate of our Russian subjectivists is a most serious argument against Max Adler’s allegations and conclusions.
The subject of this pamphlet is the relation between the intelligentsia and socialism. For Adler this is not merely a matter for theoretical analysis but also a matter of conscience. He wants to convince. Adler’s pamphlet, based on a speech made to an audience of socialist students, is filled with ardent conviction. The spirit of proselytism permeates this little work, giving a special nuance to ideas which have no claim to novelty. To win the intelligentsia for his ideals, to conquer their support at whatever cost, this political desire utterly prevails over social analysis in Adler’s pamphlet, giving it the particular tone it has, and determining its weaknesses.
What are the intelligentsia? Adler gives this concept, of course, not a moral but a social definition: the intelligentsia are not an order bound together by a historic vow, but the social stratum which embraces all kinds of “brain-work” occupations. However hard it may be to draw a line of demarcation between “manual” and “brain” work, the general social features of the intelligentsia are clear enough, without any further going into details. The intelligentsia are an entire class – Adler calls them an inter-class group, but essentially there is no difference – existing within the framework of bourgeois society. And for Adler the question is: who or what possesses the better right to the soul of this class? What ideology is inwardly obligatory upon it, as a result of the very nature of its social functions? Adler answers: the ideology of collectivism. That the European intelligentsia, in so far as they are not directly hostile to the ideas of collectivism, at best stand aloof from the life and struggle of the working masses, neither hot nor cold, is a fact to which Adler does not shut his eyes. But it shouldn’t be like that, he says, there are no adequate objective grounds for it. Adler decidedly opposes those Marxists who deny the existence of general conditions which could bring about a mass movement of the intelligentsia towards socialism.
“There exist,” he declares in his foreword, “sufficient factors – though not purely economic ones, but drawn from another sphere – which can influence the entire mass of the intelligentsia, even apart from their proletarian life-situation, as adequate motives for them to join with the socialist workers’ movement. All that is needed is that the intelligentsia be made aware of the essential nature of this movement and of their own social position.” What are these factors? “Since inviolability, and above all, possibility of free development of spiritual interests,” says Adler, “are among the essential conditions of life for the intelligentsia, theoretical interest is therefore fully on an equality with economic interest where the intelligentsia are concerned. Thus, if the grounds for the intelligentsia joining the socialist movement are to be sought principally outside the economic sphere, this is explicable no less by the specific ideological conditions of existence of mental labour than by the cultural content of socialism” (page 7). Independently of the class nature of the entire movement (after all, it’s only a road!), independently of its everyday party-political image (after all, it’s only a means!), socialism by its very essence, as a universal social ideal, means the liberation of all forms of mental labour from every sort of socio-historical fetter and limitation. This premise, this vision, provides the ideological bridge over which the intelligentsia of Europe can and must pass into the camp of Social Democracy.
This is Adler’s basic standpoint, to developing which his whole pamphlet is devoted. Its radical fault, which at once leaps to the eye, is its non-historical nature. The social grounds for the intelligentsia to enter the camp of collectivism which Adler relies on have indeed been there for a very long time; and yet there is no trace, in a single European country, of any mass move by the intelligentsia towards Social Democracy. Adler sees this, of course, just as well as we do. But he prefers to see the reason for the estrangement of the intelligentsia from the working-class movement in the circumstance that the intelligentsia don’t understand socialism. In a certain sense that is true. But in that case what explains this persistent lack of understanding, which exists alongside their understanding many other extremely complicated matters? Clearly, it is not the weakness of their theoretical logic, but the power of irrational elements in their class psychology. Adler himself speaks about this in his chapter Bürgerliche Schranken des Verständnisses (Bourgeois Limits to Understanding), which is one of the best in the pamphlet. But he thinks, he hopes, he is sure – and here the preacher gets the better of the theoretician – that European Social Democracy will overcome the irrational elements in the mentality of the brain-workers if only it will reconstruct the logic of its relations with them. The intelligentsia don’t understand socialism because the latter appears to them from day to day in its routine shape as a political party, one of many, just like the others. But if the intelligentsia can be shown the true face of socialism, as a world wide cultural movement, they cannot but recognize in it their best hopes and aspirations. So Adler thinks.
We have come so far without examining whether in fact pure cultural requirements (development of technique, science, art) are in fact more powerful, so far as the intelligentsia as a class are concerned, than the class suggestions radiating from family, school, church and state, or than the voice of material interests. But even if we accept this for the sake of argument, if we agree to see in the intelligentsia above all a corporation of priests of culture who up to now have merely failed to grasp that the socialist break with bourgeois society is the best way to serve the interests of culture, the question then remains in all its force: can West-European Social Democracy offer the intelligentsia, theoretically and morally, anything more convincing or more attractive than what it has offered up to now?
Collectivism has been filling the world with the sound of its struggle for several decades already. Millions of workers have been united during this period in political, trade-union, co-operative, educational and other organizations. A whole class has raised itself from the depths of life and forced its way into the holy of holies of politics, regarded hitherto as the private preserve of the property-owning classes. Day by day the socialist press – theoretical, political, trade-union – re-evaluates bourgeois values, great and small, from the standpoint of a new world. There is not one question of social and cultural life (marriage, the family, upbringing, the school, the church, the army, patriotism, social hygiene, prostitution) on which socialism has not counterposed its view to the view of bourgeois society. It speaks in all the languages of civilized mankind. There work and fight in the ranks of the socialist movement people of different turns of mind and various temperaments, with different pasts, social connections and habits of life. And if the intelligentsia nevertheless “don’t understand” socialism, if all this together is insufficient to enable them, to compel them to grasp the cultural-historical significance of this world movement, then oughtn’t one to draw the conclusion that the causes of this fatal lack of understanding must be very profound and that attempts to overcome it by literary and theoretical means are inherently hopeless?
This idea emerges still more strikingly in the light of history. The biggest influx of intellectuals into the socialist movement – and this applies to all countries in Europe – took place in the first period of the party’s existence, when it was still in its childhood. This first wave brought with it the most outstanding theoreticians and politicians of the International. The more European Social Democracy grew, the bigger the mass of workers that was united around it, the weaker (not only relatively but absolutely) has the influx of fresh elements from the intelligentsia become. The Leipziger Volkszeitung sought for a long time in vain, through newspaper advertisements, an editorial worker with a university training. Here a conclusion forces itself upon us, a conclusion completely contrary to Adler: the more definitely socialism has revealed its content, the easier it has become for each and everyone to understand its mission in history, the more decidedly have the intelligentsia recoiled from it. While this does not mean that they fear socialism itself; it is nevertheless plain that in the capitalist countries of Europe there must have occurred some deep-going social changes which have hindered fraternization between university people and the workers, at the same time as they have facilitated the coming of the workers to the socialist movement.
What sort of changes have these been? The most intelligent individuals, groups and strata from the proletariat have joined and are joining Social Democracy. The growth and concentration of industry and transport is merely hastening this process. A completely different type of process is going on where the intelligentsia are concerned. The tremendous capitalist development of the last two decades has unquestionably skimmed off the cream of this class. The most talented intellectual forces, those with power of initiative and flight of thought, have been irrevocably absorbed by capitalist industry, by the trusts, railway companies and banks, which pay fantastic salaries for organizational work. Only second-raters remain for the service of the state, and government offices, no less than newspaper editors of all tendencies, complain about the shortage of “people”. As regards the representatives of the ever-increasing semi-proletarian intelligentsia – unable to escape from their eternally dependent and materially insecure way of life – for them, carrying out as they do fragmentary, second-rate and not very attractive functions in the great mechanism of culture, the cultural interests to which Adler appeals cannot be strong enough independently to direct their political sympathies towards the socialist movement.
Added to this is the circumstance that any European intellectual for whom going over to the camp of collectivism is not psychologically out of the question has practically no hope of winning a position of personal influence for himself in the ranks of the proletarian parties. And this question is of decisive importance. A worker comes to socialism as a part of a whole, along with his class, from which he has no prospect of escaping. He is even pleased with the feeling of his moral unity with the mass, which makes him more confident and stronger. The intellectual, however, comes to socialism, breaking his class umbilical cord as an individual, as a personality, and inevitably seeks to exert influence as an individual. But just here he comes up against obstacles – and as time passes the bigger these obstacles become. At the beginning of the Social-Democratic movement, every intellectual who joined, even though not above the average, won for himself a place in the working-class movement. Today every newcomer finds, in the Western European countries, the colossal structure of working-class democracy already existing. Thousands of labour leaders, who have automatically been promoted from their class, constitute a solid apparatus at the head of which stand honoured veterans, of recognized authority, figures that have already become historic. Only a man of exceptional talent would in these circumstances be able to hope to win a leading position for himself – but such a man, instead of leaping across the abyss into a camp alien to him, will naturally follow the line of least resistance into the realm of industry or state service. Thus there also stands between the intelligentsia and socialism, like a watershed, in addition to everything else, the organizational apparatus of Social Democracy. It arouses discontent among members of the intelligentsia with socialist sympathies, from whom it demands discipline and self-restraint – sometimes in respect of their “opportunism” and sometimes, contrariwise, in respect of their excessive “radicalism” – and dooms them to the role of querulous lookers-on who vacillate in their sympathies between anarchism and national-liberalism. Simplicissimus is their highest ideological banner. With various modifications and to varying degrees, this phenomenon is repeated in all countries of Europe. These people are, more than any other group, too blasé, so to speak, too cynical, for a revelation, even the most moving, of the cultural significance of socialism to conquer their souls. Only rare “ideologues” – using this word in both the good sense and the bad – are capable of coming to socialist convictions under the stimulus of pure theoretical thinking, with, as their points of departure, the demands of law, as in the case of Anton Menger, or the requirements of technique, as in that of Atlanticus. But even such as these, as we know, do not usually get as far as the actual Social-Democratic movement, and the class struggle of the proletariat in its internal connection with socialism remains for them a book sealed with seven seals.

* * *

In considering that it is impossible to win the intelligentsia to collectivism with a program of immediate material gains Adler is absolutely right. But this still does not signify that it is possible to win the intelligentsia by any means at all, nor that immediate material interests and class ties do not affect the intelligentsia more cogently than all the cultural-historical prospects offered by socialism.
If we exclude that stratum of the intelligentsia which directly serves the working masses, as workers’ doctors, lawyers, and so on (a stratum which, as a general rule, is composed of the less talented representatives of these professions), then we see that the most important and influential part of the intelligentsia owes its livelihood to payments out of industrial profit, rent from land or the state budget, and thus is directly or indirectly dependent on the capitalist classes or the capitalist state.
Abstractly considered, this material dependence puts out of the question only militant political activity in the anti-capitalist ranks, but not spiritual freedom in relation to the class which provides employment. In actual fact, however, this is not so. Precisely the “spiritual” nature of the work that the intelligentsia do inevitably forms a spiritual tie between them and the possessing classes. Factory managers and engineers with administrative responsibilities necessarily find themselves in constant antagonism to the workers, against whom they are obliged to uphold the interests of capital. It is self-evident that the function they perform must, in the last analysis, adapt their ways of thinking and their opinions to itself. Doctors and lawyers, despite the more independent nature of their work, necessarily have to be in psychological contact with their clients. While an electrician can, day after day, install electric wiring in the offices of ministers, bankers and their mistresses, and yet remain himself in spite of this, it is a different matter for a doctor, who is obliged to find music in his soul and in his voice which will accord with the feelings and habits of these persons. This sort of contact, moreover, inevitably takes place not only at the top end of bourgeois society. The suffragettes of London engage a pro-suffragette lawyer to defend them. A doctor who treats majors’ wives in Berlin or the wives of “Christian-Social” shopkeepers in Vienna, a lawyer who handles the affairs of their fathers, brothers, and husbands, can hardly allow himself the luxury of enthusiasm for the cultural prospects of collectivism. All this applies likewise to writers, artists, sculptors, entertainers – not so directly and immediately, but no less inexorably. They offer the public their work or their personalities, they depend on its approval and its money, and so, whether in an open or a hidden way, they subordinate their creative achievement to that “great monster” which they hold in such contempt: the bourgeois mob. The fate of Germany’s “young” school of writers – now already, by the way, getting rather thin on top – shows the truth of this as well as anything. The example of Gorky, explained by the conditions of the epoch in which he grew up, is an exception which merely proves the rule: his inability to adapt himself to the anti-revolutionary degeneration of the intelligentsia rapidly deprived him of his “popularity”.
Here is revealed once more the profound social difference between the conditions of brain work and manual work. Though it enslaves the muscles and exhausts the body, factory work is powerless to subject to itself the worker’s mind. All the measures which have been attempted to get control of the latter, in Switzerland as in Russia, have proved uniformly fruitless. The brain worker is from the physical standpoint incomparably freer. The writer does not have to get up when the hooter sounds, behind the doctor’s back stands no supervisor, the lawyer’s pockets are not searched when he leaves the court. But in return, he is compelled to sell not his mere labour-power, not just the tension of his muscles, but his entire personality as a human being – and not through fear but through conscientiousness. As a result, these people don’t want to see and cannot see that their professional frock-coat is nothing but a prisoner’s uniform of better cut than ordinary.

* * *

In the end, Adler himself seems to be dissatisfied with his abstract and essentially idealistic formula on the interrelation between the intelligentsia and socialism. In his own propaganda he addresses himself, really, not to the class of brain workers fulfilling definite functions in capitalist society, but to their young generation who are only at the stage of preparing for their future role – to the students. Evidence of this is provided not only by the dedication “To the Free Students’ Union of Vienna” but also by the very nature of this pamphlet-speech, its impassioned agitational and sermonizing tone. It would be unthinkable to express oneself in this manner before an audience of professors, writers, lawyers, doctors. Such a speech would stick in one’s throat after the first few words. Thus, in direct dependence on the human material with which he finds himself working, Adler himself limits his task. The politician corrects the formula of the theoretician. In the end it is a question of struggle for influence over the students.
The university is the final stage of the state-organized education of the sons of the possessing and ruling classes, just as the barracks is the final educational institution for the young generation of the workers and peasants. The barracks fosters the psychological habits of obedience and discipline appropriate to the subordinate social functions to be fulfilled subsequently. The university, in principle, trains for management, leadership, government. From this angle even the German student societies are useful class institutions, since they create traditions which unite fathers and sons, strengthen national self-esteem, implant the habits which are needed in a bourgeois setting, and, finally, supply scars on the nose or under the ear which will serve as the stamp of one’s belonging to the ruling class. The human material which passes through the barracks is, of course, incomparably more important for Adler’s party than that which passes through the university. But in certain historical circumstances – namely, when, with rapid industrial development, the army is proletarian in its social composition, as is the case in Germany – the party can nevertheless say: “I won’t trouble to go into the barracks. It’s enough for me to see the young worker as far as its threshold and [the main thing] to meet him when he comes out again. He won’t leave me, he’ll stay mine.” But where the university is concerned, the party, if it wants at all to carry out an independent struggle for influence over the intelligentsia, must say exactly the opposite: “Only here and only now, when the young fellow is to a certain extent freed from his family, and when he has not yet become the captive of his position in society, can I count on drawing him into our ranks. It’s now or never.”
Among the workers the difference between “fathers” and “sons” is purely one of age. Among the intelligentsia it is not only a difference of age but also a social difference. The student, in contrast both to the young worker and to his own father, fulfils no social function, does not feel direct dependence on capital or the state, is not bound by any responsibilities, and – at least objectively, if not subjectively – is free in his judgement of right and wrong. At this period everything within him is fermenting, his class prejudices are as formless as his ideological interests, questions of conscience matter very strongly to him, his mind is opening for the first time to great scientific generalizations, the extraordinary is almost a physiological need for him. If collectivism is at all capable of mastering his mind, now is the moment, and it will indeed do it through the nobly scientific character of its basis and the comprehensive cultural content of its aims, not as a prosaic “knife and fork” question. On this last point Adler is absolutely right.
But here too we are again obliged to pull up short before a bald fact. It is not only Europe’s intelligentsia as a whole but its offspring, too, the students, who decidedly don’t show any attraction towards socialism. There is a wall between the workers’ party and the mass of the students. To account for this fact merely by the inadequacy of agitational work, which has not been able to approach the intelligentsia from the correct angle, which is how Adler tries to account for it, means overlooking the whole history of the relations between the students and the “people”, it means seeing in the students an intellectual and moral category rather than a product of social history. True, their material dependence on bourgeois society affects the students only obliquely, through their families, and is therefore weakened. But, as against this, the general social interests and needs of the classes from which the students are recruited are reflected in the feelings and opinions of the students with full force, as though in a resonator. Throughout their entire history – in its best, most heroic moments just as in periods of utter moral decay – the students of Europe have been merely the sensitive barometer of the bourgeois classes. They became ultra-revolutionary, sincerely and honourably fraternizing with the people, when bourgeois society had no way out but revolution. They took de facto the place of the bourgeois democratic forces when the political nullity of these prevented them from standing at the head of the revolution, as happened in Vienna in 1848. But they also fired on the workers in June of that same year, in Paris, when bourgeoisie and workers found themselves on opposite sides of the barricade. After Bismarck’s wars had united Germany and appeased the bourgeois classes, the German student hastened to become that figure, bloated with beer and conceit, who, alongside the Prussian lieutenant, is always turning up in the satirical papers. In Austria the student became the banner-bearer of national exclusiveness and militant chauvinism in proportion as the conflict grew sharper between the different nations of this country for influence over the government. And there is no doubt that through all these historical transformations, even the most repellent, the students showed political keenness, and readiness for self-sacrifice, and militant idealism; the qualities on which Adler relies so strongly. Though the normal philistine of 30 or 40 will not risk getting his face smashed in for any hypothetical notions about “honour”, his son will do this, with fervour. The Ukrainian and Polish students at Lvov University recently showed us again that they not only know how to carry out any national or political tendency to the very end, but also to offer their breasts to the muzzles of revolvers. Last year the German students of Prague were ready to face all the violence of the mob in order to demonstrate in the street their right to exist as a German society. Here we have militant idealism – sometimes just like that of a fighting cock – which is characteristic not of a class or of an idea but of an age-group; on the other hand, the political content of this idealism is entirely determined by the historical spirit of those classes from which the students come and to which they return. And this is natural and inevitable.
In the last analysis, all possessing classes send their sons to university, and if students were to be, while at the university, a tabula rasa on which socialism could write its message, what would then become of class heredity, and of poor old historical determinism?

* * *

It remains, in conclusion, to clarify one other aspect of the question, which speaks both for Adler and against him.
The only way to attract the intelligentsia to socialism, according to Adler, is to bring to the forefront the ultimate aim of the movement, in its full scope. But Adler recognizes, of course, that this ultimate aim looms clearer and more complete in proportion to the progress of the concentration of industry, the proletarianization of the middle strata and the intensification of class antagonisms. Independently of the will of political leaders and the differences in national tactics, in Germany the “ultimate aim” stands forth with incomparably greater clarity and immediacy than in Austria or Italy. But this very same social process, the intensification of the struggle between labour and capital, hinders the intelligentsia from crossing over to the camp of the party of labour. The bridges between the classes are broken down, and to cross over, one would have to leap across an abyss which gets deeper with every passing day. Thus, parallel with conditions that objectively make it easier for the intelligentsia to grasp theoretically the essence of collectivism, the social obstacles are growing greater in the way of political adhesion by the intelligentsia to the socialist army. Joining the socialist movement in any advanced country, where social life exists, is not a speculative act, but a political one, and here social will completely prevails over theorizing reason. And this finally means that it is harder to win the intelligentsia today than it was yesterday, and that it will be harder tomorrow than it is today.
In this process, too, however, there is a “break in gradualness”. The attitude of the intelligentsia to socialism, which we have described as one of alienation which increases with the very growth of the socialist movement, can and must change decisively as a result of an objective political change which will shift the balance of social forces in radical fashion. Among Adler’s assertions this much is true, that the intelligentsia is interested in the retention of capitalist exploitation not directly and not unconditionally, but only obliquely, through the bourgeois classes, in so far as the intelligentsia is materially dependent on these latter. The intelligentsia might go over to collectivism if it were given reason to see as probable the immediate victory of collectivism, if collectivism arose before it not as the ideal of a different, remote and alien class but as a near and tangible reality; finally, if – and this is not the least important condition – a political break with the bourgeoisie did not threaten each brain-worker taken separately with grave material and moral consequences. Such conditions can be established for the intelligentsia of Europe only by the political rule of a new social class; to some extent by a period of direct and immediate struggle for this rule. Whatever may have been the alienation of the European intelligentsia from the working masses – and this alienation will increase still further, especially in the younger capitalist countries, like Austria, Italy, the Balkan countries – nevertheless, in an epoch of great social reconstruction the intelligentsia – sooner, probably, than the other intermediate classes – will go over to the side of the defenders of the new society. A big role will be played in this connection by the intelligentsia’s social qualities, which distinguish it from the commercial and industrial petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry: its occupational ties with the cultural branches of social labour, its capacity for theoretical generalization, the flexibility and mobility of its thinking; in short, its intellectuality. Confronted with the inescapable fact of the transfer of the entire apparatus of society into new hands, the intelligentsia of Europe will be able to convince itself that the conditions thus established not only will not cast them into the abyss but on the contrary, will open before them unlimited possibilities for the application of technical, organizational and scientific forces; and they will be able to bring forward these forces from their ranks, even in the first, most critical period, when the new régime will have to overcome enormous technical, social and political difficulties.
But if the actual conquest of the apparatus of society depended on the previous coming over of the intelligentsia to the party of the European proletariat, then the prospects of collectivism would be wretched indeed – because, as we have endeavoured to show above, the coming over of the intelligentsia to Social Democracy within the framework of the bourgeois régime is getting, contrary to all Max Adler’s expectations, less and less possible as time goes by.

Free Bradley Manning -July 14 Update

As of the 10th Of July the defense has rested its case



***Poet's Corner-William Wordsworth's Ode To The French Revolution As The Anniversary Approaches


William Wordsworth's famous ode to the beginning of the French revolution is full of all the youthful enthusiasm such a world historic event can elicit. Even in stuffy old Georgian England among the young, the radicals, and some of the plebeian masses the idea that one could break from the ancient regime, from taking humankind, taking French humankind anyway, where one was a mere subject of some arbitrary happenstance (although in England one should have reflected on one’s own monarchial state as well) to a cry of freedom citizen struck a deep chord throughout Europe and the Americas . No wonder the French went crazy, and in almost all classes too, began calling each other citizen, it certainly had a certain cache. At the beginning.

Of course we have now seen enough revolutions to know that they not only have their own cycles but that they, the great ones anyway, English, American, French, Russian, Chinese, are stern task-masters, make simple social patterns long established explode and create new forms, maybe many forms, before they are spent and not a few things go awry as well. Including the hard fact that revolutions have tended to devour their own. Then many a former fellow-traveler, rightly or wrongly, gets cold feet, gets a feeling that this revolution stuff is a lot more complicated that he or she had bargained for. And so they find reasons, rightly or wrongly, to move away from, to disown what they once proclaimed from the rooftops. Such, alas, has been the hard human experience thus far as we try, essentially, to struggle against the three great tragedies of life; sex, death, and hunger. It has been that last one that most modern revolutions, especially ones espousing socialist goals have, concentrated on.

And that seeming plebeian task is, perhaps, why, while there have been some creative artists associated with revolutions that the norm has been that such types, have shied away from non-artistic revolutionary movements. The exceptions like Milton in the English Revolution, Wordsworth in the early French Revolution and Gorky in the Russian Revolution have been driven by stronger political motives, for a time anyway. One also thinks of Andre Breton and the Surrealist whose Manifesto of Revolutionary Art was written in conjunction with Leon Trotsky’s efforts to form a new revolutionary international after the demise of the initial energies of Russian Revolution under Stalin. However , when one looks closely at the relationship between creative artists and revolutionary movements one notes the sparse numbers who have adhered to such movements welcome as they are.

That Wordsworth, like many another former 'friend' of revolutions over the ages, went over to the other side when things got too hot does not however take away from his efforts here in the fresh bloom of the French Revolution.

The French Revolution as it appeared to Enthusiasts

. Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!—

Oh! times, In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,

When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress--to assist the work
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,

The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
(As at some moment might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of paradise itself )
The budding rose above the rose full blown.

What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of? The inert
Were roused, and lively natures rapt away!
They who had fed their childhood upon dreams,

The playfellows of fancy, who had made
All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength
Their ministers,--who in lordly wise had stirred
Among the grandest objects of the sense,

And dealt with whatsoever they found there
As if they had within some lurking right
To wield it;--they, too, who, of gentle mood,
Had watched all gentle motions, and to these

Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more wild,
And in the region of their peaceful selves;--
Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty
Did both find, helpers to their heart's desire,

And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish;
Were called upon to exercise their skill,
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!

But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,--the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!

William Wordsworth
***Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night- Death Be Not Proud- Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep  

 


The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler, Vintage Books, New York, 1976

 
Recently, after doing one of my periodic re-readings of Raymond Chandler’s tough as nails P.I. (private investigator, private detective, private dick, gumshoe, shamus, key-hole peeper, sleuth or whatever you call guys who do heavy lifting for short dough and expenses trying to keep the world on its axis in your neighborhood), Philip Marlowe, I noted in reviewing The Lady In The Lake that the story-line and the action there paled against certain earlier works like Farewell, My Lovely and the crime novel under review here, The Big Sleep.  Needless to say someone, in response to that characterization, took exception to my remark. And forthwith had to be sure that I was informed that I was totally off-base in my evaluation. That person, a person unknown to me, but clearly with more than a passing knowledge of Chandler’s works, and, more importantly, with a knowledge of the evolution of the Marlowe character through several books, believed that Marlowe in Lady although maybe a little world –weary, maybe not as committed to endlessly tilting at windmills for light cash and many bruises represented a, get this, more mature Marlowe, rather than the hot-headed and impetuous younger Marlowe whom he or she characterized as a “bull in a china shop.”              

No question there are many Marlowes, or rather Marlowe characteristics, which made him along with Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op (and the classic P.I., Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon  but we only got one look, admittedly a full-blown and robust look, but only one at that guy), the premier tough guy detective of the 1930s and 1940s when such men were needed, and necessary to get through the crime noir night. So that recklessness, that tilting at windmills, that gallant (to the ladies, although he only passed by them in his gallantry), that getting rid of the bad guys, or at least holding them in check, that ability to take a low-blow punch to the groin and elsewhere, take a couple of well-placed but not fatal slugs in the pursue of a little rough justice in this wicked old world gets a much better work-out in The Big Sleep.  In Lady it is clear our boy had lost a step or two in the battle against the bad guys. And that is probably the biggest distinction I could make between the two novels Brother Marlowe had taken a few too many punches, a few too many slugs and so was kind of slumming out in the boondocks on that one. Here our man in ready to take on some rough hombres, en masse, to keep such guys in check, and to give an old man a little peace before he went to his big sleep, to his rest.              

Let me give you the “skinny” and maybe you will see my side in the great Marlowe night. See that old man, old General Sternwood, a guy with two wayward, reckless and wild daughters was going to need all the peace he could grab due to their careless unrestrained  ways. Seems the younger daughter, the wilder of the two, slightly wilder, liked her dope (a lanadum cocktail in those days, maybe a little sister morphine) and not afraid to take her clothes off at the drop of a hat, was the subject of blackmail by parties unknown, or rather relentless, once they knew they could keep tapping the old man to keep things hush-hush. And of course there was that matter of the strange disappearance of the older daughter’s husband, Rusty Regan, who was from the old school, and had kept the old man company in his last hurrah. Enter one Philip Marlowe.    

Yes enter one multi-tasker Philip Marlowe to track down those low-rent blackmailers, to track down the whereabouts of old Rusty, and to single-handedly break-up one bad guy gangster Eddie Mars’ hold on the Sternwood family. Yes, Philip took a few beatings from Eddie compliant cops and from no good back alley guys in Eddie’s employ but he got the sweaty thing tied together with a bow before he was through. And along the way he got a little justice for a stand-up guy who was took his our fatal beating for being a stand-up guy, opened some eyes about what one Eddie Mars was all about, and gave an old man some peace. What he couldn’t do was bring old Rusty back to life, or make those daughters come to heel, give up their wild ways, but what can you expect in this wicked old world. Our boy Marlowe gave it his all here, and he has the bumps to prove it.              

Oh yah, about Raymond Chandler, about the guy who wrote the books. Like I said in that other review he, along with Brother Hammett, turned those dreary drawing room sleuths who dominated the reading market back in the day on its head and gave us detectives we could admire, could get behind, warts and all. Thanks, guys.

 

From The Marxist Archives-Marxism and the Nationalization of Oil in Mexico

Workers Vanguard No. 886
16 February 2007


LENIN

TROTSKY
 


Marxism and the Nationalization of Oil in Mexico

(Quote of the Week)



The Calderón government in Mexico is threatening to reverse the 1938 nationalization of oil by the regime of Lázaro Cárdenas, which touched off a furious imperialist reaction that included a British boycott of Mexican oil. As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky made clear, the proletariat internationally, and particularly the workers of the advanced capitalist countries, must oppose the depredations of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Marxists in oppressed semicolonial countries, while opposing imperialism, must stress the need for the independence of the proletariat from the national bourgeoisie.

The oil magnates are not rank-and-file capitalists, not ordinary bourgeoisie. Having seized the richest natural resources of a foreign country, standing on their billions and supported by the military and diplomatic forces of their metropolis, they strive to establish in the subjugated country a regime of imperialistic feudalism, subordinating to themselves legislation, jurisprudence, and administration. Under these conditions expropriation is the only effective means of safeguarding national independence and the elementary conditions of democracy….

Without succumbing to illusions and without fear of slander, the advanced workers will completely support the Mexican people in their struggle against the imperialists. The expropriation of oil is neither socialism nor communism. But it is a highly progressive measure of national self-defense….

The international proletariat has no reason to identify its program with the program of the Mexican government…. Without giving up its own identity, every honest working class organization of the entire world, and first of all in Great Britain, is duty-bound to take an irreconcilable position against the imperialist robbers, their diplomacy, their press, and their fascist hirelings. The cause of Mexico, like the cause of Spain, like the cause of China, is the cause of the international working class. The struggle over Mexican oil is only one of the advance-line skirmishes of future battles between the oppressors and the oppressed.

—Leon Trotsky, “Mexico and British Imperialism,” 5 June 1938,
printed in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38)

******************

Leon Trotsky

Mexico And British Imperialism

(June 1938)


Written: 5 June 1938.
Source: Socialist Appeal [New York], 25 June 1938, from the collection at the Holt Labor Library.
Translated: Socialist Appeal.
Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters.
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2004. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

The international campaign which imperialist circles are waging over the expropriation of Mexican oil enterprises by the Mexican government has been distinguished by all the features of imperialism’s propagandistic bacchanalias – combining impu-dence, deceitfulness, speculation in ignorance, with cocksureness in its own impunity.
The signal for this campaign was given by the British government when it declared a boycott of Mexican oil. Boycott, as is known, always involves self-boycott, and is therefore accom-panied by great sacrifices on the part of the boycotter. Great Britain was until recently the largest consumer of Mexican oil; naturally not out of sympathy for the Mexican people, but out of consideration for her own advantage.


Britain and Cedillo

Heaviest consumer of oil in Great Britain itself is the state, with its gigantic navy and rapidly growing air force. A boycott of Mexican oil by the British government signifies, therefore, a simultaneous boycott not only of British industry but also of national defense. Mr. Chamberlain’s government has shown with unusual frankness that the profits of Britain’s capitalist robbers loom above state interests themselves. Oppressed classes and oppressed peoples must thoroughly learn this fundamental conclusion.
Both chronologically and logically the uprising of General Cedillo grew out of Chamberlain’s policy. The Monroe Doctrine prevents the British admiralty from applying a military-naval blockade of the Mexican coast. They must act through internal agents, who, it is true, do not openly fly the British flag, yet serve the same interests as Chamberlain – the interests of a clique of oil magnates. In the White Book issued by British diplomacy just a few days ago we may be sure that the negotiations of its agents with General Cedillo are not included. Imperialist diplomacy carries on its major business under cover of secrecy.


Ignorance and Deceit

In order to compromise the expropriation in the eyes of bourgeois public opinion, they represent it as a “Communist” measure. Historical ignorance combines here with conscious deceit. Semi-colonial Mexico is fighting for its national independence, political and economic. This is the basic meaning of the Mexican revolution at this stage. The oil magnates are not rank-and-file capitalists, not ordinary bourgeoisie. Having seized the richest natural resources of a foreign country, standing on their billions and supported by the military and diplomatic forces of their metropolis, they strive to establish in the subjugated country a regime of imperialistic feudalism, subordinating to themselves legislation, jurisprudence, and administration. Under these conditions expropriation is the only effective means of safeguarding national independence and the elementary conditions of democracy.
What direction the further economic development of Mexico may take depends decisively upon factors of an international character. But this is a question of the future. The Mexican revolution is now carrying out the same work as, for instance, the United States of America accomplished in three-quarters of a century, beginning with the Revolutionary War for independence and finishing with the Civil War for the abolition of slavery and for national unification. The British government not only did everything at the end of the eighteenth century to retain the United States under the status of a colony, but later, in the years of the Civil War, supported the slaveholders of the South against the abolitionists of the North, striving for the sake of its imperialist interests to thrust the young republic into a state of economic backwardness and national disunity.


Brtain and Slavery

To the Chamberlains of that time, too, the expropriation of the slaveholders seemed a diabolical “Bolshevik” measure. In reality the historic task of the Northerners consisted in clearing the arena for the independent democratic development of bourgeois society. Precisely this task is being solved at this stage by the government of Mexico. General Cardenas stands among those statesmen of his country who have been fulfilling work comparable to that of Washington, Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and General Grant. And, of course, it is not accidental that the British government, in this case, too, finds itself on the other side of the historic trench.
The world press, in particular the French, preposterous as it may seem, continues to drag my name into the question of the expropriation of the oil industry. If I have already refuted this nonsense once it is not at all because I fear “responsibility,” as was insinuated by one talkative agent of the GPU. On the contrary, I would consider it an honor to carry even a part of the responsibility for this courageous and progressive measure of the Mexican government. But I do not have the least basis for it. I first learned of the decree of expropriation from the newspapers. But, naturally, this is not the question.


Two Aims Pursued

Two aims are pursued in interjecting my name. First, the organizers of the campaign wish to impart to the expropriation a “Bolshevik” coloration. Second, they are attempting to strike a blow at the national self-respect of Mexico. The imperialists are endeavoring to represent the affair as if Mexico’s statesmen were incapable of determining their own road. A wretched and ignoble hereditary slaveholders’ psychology! Precisely because Mexico today still belongs to those backward nations which are only now impelled to fight for their independence, greater audacity of thought is engendered among its statesmen than is granted to the conservative dregs of a great past. We have witnessed similar phenomena in history more than once!
The French weekly Marianne, a notorious organ of the French People’s Front, even asserts that on the oil question the government of General Cardenas acted not only as one with Trotsky but also ... in the interests of Hitler. It is a question, you see, of depriving the great-hearted “democracies” of oil in case of war and, contrariwise, of supplying Germany and other fascist nations. This is not one whit more clever than the Moscow trials. Humanity learns, not without amazement, that Great Britain is being deprived of Mexican oil because of the ill-will of General Cardenas and not because of Chamberlain’s self-boycott. But then the “democracies” possess a simple way of paralyzing this “fascist” plot: let them buy Mexican oil, once more Mexican oil, and again Mexican oil! To every honest and sensible person it is now beyond all doubt that if Mexico should find itself forced to sell liquid gold to fascist countries, the responsibility for this act would fall fully and completely upon the governments of the imperialist “democracies.”


Prompting from Moscow

Behind the back of Marianne and its ilk stand the Moscow prompters. At first glance this seems preposterous, since other prompters of the same school use diametrically opposed librettos. But the whole secret consists in the fact that the friends of the GPU adapt their views to geographic gradations of latitude and longitude. If some of them promise support to Mexico, others picture General Cardenas as an ally of Hitler. From the latter point of view, Cedillo’s oil rebellion should be viewed, it would seem, as a struggle in the interests of world democracy.
Let us, however, leave the clowns and intriguers to their own fate. We do not have them in mind, but the class-conscious workers of the entire world. Without succumbing to illusions and without fear of slander, the advanced workers will completely support the Mexican people in their struggle against the imperialists. The expropriation of oil is neither socialism nor communism. But it is a highly progressive measure of national self-defense. Marx did not, of course, consider Abraham Lincoln a communist; this did not, however, prevent Marx from entertain-ing the deepest sympathy for the struggle that Lincoln headed. The First International sent the Civil War president a message of greeting, and Lincoln in his answer greatly appreciated this moral support.


Workers, Support Mexico

The international proletariat has no reason to identify its program with the program of the Mexican government. Revolutionists have no need of changing color, adapting themselves, and rendering flattery in the manner of the GPU school of courtiers, who in a moment of danger will sell out and betray the weaker side. Without giving up its own identity, every honest working class organization of the entire world, and first of all in Great Britain, is duty-bound – to take an irreconcilable position against the imperialist robbers, their diplomacy, their press, and their fascist hirelings. The cause of Mexico, like the cause of Spain, like the cause of China, is the cause of the international working class. The struggle over Mexican oil is only one of the advance-line skirmishes of future battles between the oppressors and the oppressed.