Honor The 91st Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Historic Second World Congress (The 21 Conditions Congress) Of The CI (July-August 1920)
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
*********
Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International
The Summoning of the Second World Congress of the Communist International
To all Communist Parties and groups, to all red trades unions, to all Communist women’s organisations, to all Communist youth leagues, to all workers’ organisations standing on the basis of communism, to all honest toilers!
Comrades!
The Executive Committee of the Communist International has decided to call the Second Congress of the Communist International for July 15, 1920 in Moscow.
The Executive Committee of the Communist International has proposed the following provisional draft agenda for the Second Congress.
1. Report of the Executive Committee of the Communist International.
2. Reports of the representatives of the various countries. The reports should be presented in writing.
3. The present international situation and the tasks of the Communist International.
4. The question of parliamentarism.
5. The trades unions and the factory councils.
6. The role and structure of the Communist Party before and after the conquest of power by the proletariat.
7. The national question and the colonial question.
8. The agrarian question.
9. Attitude towards the new ‘centrist’ currents that only pay lip service to the communist programme, and on the conditions for entry to the Communist International.
10. The statutes of the Communist International.
11. The question of organisation (legal and illegal organisations, women’s organisations, etc.).
12. Youth movement.
13. Elections.
14. Any Other Business.
All Communist Parties, groups and trades unions that have officially joined the Communist International and are recognised by its Executive Committee are invited to participate in the Congress with full voting rights.
Those groups and organisations that stand on the basis of the Communist International but are in opposition to the officially affiliated Communist Parties are also called upon to take part in the Congress, which will itself decide what voting rights they are to have.
All groups of revolutionary syndicalists, the branches of the IWW and other organisations with whom the Executive Committee of the Communist International has entered into relations are also called upon to take part in the Congress.
[The Industrial Workers of the World or ‘Wobblies’, the militant American industrial union founded in 1905 in the face of the AFL’s opposition to organising unskilled workers. Opposed the 1914 war and supported the Russian Revolution, and was persecuted for this, many members being arrested. Dominated by anarcho-syndicalism, it was subsequently racked by disputes over its position in relation to the American Communist movement.]
The youth leagues should not only be represented by the Executive Committee of the Youth International but also by the Communist organisations of all the individual countries.
The calling of an international conference of Communist women and an international conference of Communist youth leagues are also planned in conjunction with the impending Congress.
If it is at all possible, the first international conference of the red trades unions is also to be held in conjunction with the Congress.
All parties and organisations are called upon to send the greatest possible number of delegates to the Congress. (The question of the number of valid votes in the Congress will naturally be decided independently from the number of delegates.)
The Executive Committee of the Communist International firmly insists that all Communist Parties represented at the Congress absolutely must nominate one of their delegates as the permanent representative to the Executive Committee of the Communist International. This comrade must be able to stay for a lengthy period in Russia.
It can be seen from the draft agenda that the Congress will discuss the most important questions with which the communists of the whole world are engaged. The rapid growth of the ideas of communism throughout the whole world forces us to speed up the calling of the Congress. The Congress will give the proletarians of all countries an exact and clear answer to all the questions which are on the agenda and await an answer.
The First Congress of the Communist International raised the banner of communism. Today millions of class conscious workers throughout the world are already standing beneath this banner. Now it is no longer a matter of propaganda for communist ideas. Now the epoch dawns of the organisation of the communist proletariat and the immediate struggle for the communist revolution.
The Second International has collapsed like a house of cards. The attempts of a few ‘socialist’ diplomats to found a new bastard International that is to stand between the Second and the Communist International are simply ridiculous and find no support on the part of the workers. Separated by the military censorship, the state of siege and the slander campaign of the yellow Social Democrats and the bourgeois press, the workers of each country nevertheless stretched out to each other a fraternal hand. During the one year of its existence the Communist International has won a decisive moral victory in the working masses throughout the world. Millions and millions of workers throng to the honest international association of workers that calls itself the Communist International.
Let these ordinary workers make their parties and organisations choose once and for all; let them put an end to the unworthy game that some of the old diplomats, the ‘leaders’ are playing, in trying to hold their parties back from joining the Communist International.
Let the trade union members especially, who formally still belong to the white-guard International organised in Amsterdam by those agents of capital Legien, Albert Thomas and others,’ strive to make their workers’ organisations break with the betrayers of the Workers’ cause and send their delegates to the Congress of the Communist International.
[This refers to the reformist or ‘yellow’ International Federation of Trades Unions re-established in 1919 at Amsterdam. It comprised trade union federations of European countries for the most part dominated by reformist and centrist socialist parties and also the British Trade Union Congress. Trades unions controlled by or sympathetic to parties affiliated to the Communist International formed the Red International of Labour Unions.]
The Second Congress of the Communist International that meets on July 15 should in reality become an international congress of the working class and at the same time a congress of really convinced comrades, true followers of a really communist programme and of revolutionary communist tactics.
Let every workers’ organisation, every circle of workers, discuss the agenda proposed by the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Let the workers themselves bring in their drafts for the resolutions on the questions raised and let the whole Communist press in the coming weeks dedicate its columns to the discussion of the important problems confronting us. The preparatory work must be carried out with energy and zeal. Only if that happens will our Congress be able to draw the balance-sheet of the experience of class-conscious workers from all over the world and express the real will of communist workers of all countries.
The Executive Committee of the Communist International sends fraternal greetings to the class-conscious proletarians all over the world and summons them into the common fraternal ranks.
Long live the international Communist association of workers!
Long live the Communist International!
Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Communist International
G. Zinoviev
Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Communist International
K. Radek.
Saturday, March 06, 2010
*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 91st Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919)-Forward To Summons To Second Congress
Honor The 91th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Historic Second World Congress (The 21 Conditions Congress) Of The CI (July-August 1920)
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
*********
Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International
Foreword
The Second Congress of the Third (Communist) International was one of the great milestones in the history of the international working class. Under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, it united those forces throughout the world who had taken up the banner of the October Revolution. In its discussions, the main principles of Communism were hammered out; its economic and political analysis and its philosophical method, dialectical materialism, were all elaborated. Fifty-six years of gigantic changes notwithstanding, these principles remain the only basis on which the working class can and must resolve its crisis of leadership and thus the crisis of humanity; for we still live in the same historical epoch as the delegates who gathered in Petrograd in July, 1920, the epoch of the socialist revolution.
The resolutions and theses of the Congress are of tremendous value to the revolutionary movement. But in the full proceedings even more can be found. The first four Congresses of the Communist International, held each year from 1919 to 1922, were characterised by the sharpest controversy and the fullest discussion, in complete contrast to the stage-managed unanimity of the Comintern in its Stalinist phase. Not only the doctrine of Bolshevism, but the method of struggle for it is displayed in these debates.
To Lenin and the Bolsheviks, from August 1914 it was a vital necessity to form a new International to replace the Second International. The old social-democratic parties had shown themselves to be utterly corroded with opportunism, as the leaders rushed to join their respective ruling classes in the imperialist slaughter. Lenin above all had grasped what was expressed in this collapse of the Second International: that capitalism had reached its highest stage, imperialism, ‘the eve of the world-wide socialist revolution’. A Third International was required, not just to take up the tasks abandoned by the opportunist and centrist leaders, but to prepare the leadership for the world revolution.
The victory of the working class in Russia in October, 1917, was seen only in this light. Knowing that the Russian Revolution was part of the world crisis, the Bolsheviks could take the decision for insurrection. After that, the future of the revolution depended on the spread of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the rest of the world.
The revolutionary upsurge in every continent which followed 1917 entirely confirmed the correctness of this decision. But this movement had to be consciously reflected in the establishment of Communist Parties with deep roots in the masses. That is why the defence of the Soviet state was inseparable from the building of the Communist International, ‘World Party of Socialist Revolution’.
This consideration determined the way the struggles at the Congresses of the Communist International were conducted. The task was essentially to establish the international character of the October Revolution, the history, theory and method of Bolshevism. Each delegate to the Second Congress was presented with copies of two books: Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism and Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism: in each of these, the author attempted to distil the essence of Bolshevism and of Soviet power, and put it at the disposal of the international working class.
For this essence to be brought into the consciousness of revolutionary parties, the issues had to be fought out in the context of the actual struggles in which the working class was engaged. Only by struggling to grasp the developments taking place in the class struggle, as expressed in the most advanced layers of the revolutionary class in each country, could Marxist theory be developed. That is why the work of the Russian delegates in these debates is characterised by the combination of rock-like firmness on theoretical questions, and great flexibility and unbounded patience in explaining them.
The enemies of communism have tried to depict the position of the Russians in the Comintern, and especially at its Second Congress, as one of ‘dictatorship’, finding in Lenin’s leadership the basis for Stalin’s later bureaucratic caricature. This view is not merely false: it is a deliberate attempt to defend the opportunism of all anti-communist trends in the labour movement. As Trotsky explained:
Adherence to the International is not a matter of fulfilling international etiquette but of undertaking revolutionary fighting tasks. For this reason it cannot in any case be based on omissions, misunderstandings or ambiguities. The Communist International contemptuously rejects all those conventionalities which used to entangle relations within the Second International from top to bottom; and which had as their mainstay this, that the leaders of each national party pretended not to notice the opportunist, chauvinist declarations and actions of other national parties, with the expectation that the latter would repay in the same coin. The reciprocal relations among the national ‘Socialist’ parties were only a shabby counterpart of the relations among the bourgeois diplomats in the era of armed peace. Precisely for this reason, no sooner had the capitalist generals thrust capitalist diplomacy aside, than the conditional diplomatic falsehood of the ‘fraternal’ parties of the Second International was supplanted by the naked militarism of its leaders. (The First Five Years of de Communist International, Vol. I, pp. 112-3)
Soon after its Founding Congress, Lenin had summed up the place of the Communist International in history:
The First International (1864-72) laid the foundation of the proletarian, international struggle for Socialism.
The period of the Second International (1889-1914) was a period of preparation of the soil for the broad, the mass spread of the movement in a number of countries.
The Third International gathered the fruits of the work of the Second International, discarded its opportunist, social-chauvinist, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois dross and has begun to realise the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The international revolutionary alliance of the parties which are leading the most revolutionary movement in the world, the movement of the proletariat for the overthrow of the yoke of capital, now rests on an unprecedentedly firm base in the shape of several Soviet republics, which are giving embodiment to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and to its victory over capitalism on an international scale.
When the delegates had assembled in Moscow for the First Congress of the Communist International in March 1919, the International was little more than a collection of propaganda groups. Only a few of those present represented actually functioning parties. Apart from the Russians, the only important one was the newly-formed German Communist Party, and they had sent Eberlein with a mandate to oppose the formation of the International at that time. (He was persuaded to abstain.) What the Congress accomplished was to clarify the meaning of the split in the world workers’ movement.
The opening of the Second Congress, only sixteen months later, saw a completely changed situation. In several countries, Communist Parties were now functioning. Despite many weaknesses, they had brought together the best elements in the working class and among the intellectuals and youth. In all, twenty-one Communist Parties were represented at the Congress.
Most important was the presence of representatives from several Asian countries. In the Second International, while lip-service had been paid to international solidarity with colonial peoples, nothing had ever been done to organise the fight for socialism outside the advanced capitalist countries. It was a sign of the new stage reached in the world revolution, that the Russian revolution had attracted the support of workers and peasants in colonial countries for communism.
Although the immediate post-war wave of revolution had subsided, the crisis of world capitalism was clear for all to see. Central to this was the survival of the Soviet state, beating off the onslaught of the armies of imperialism and its agents, with the aid of workers in many countries. As the Congress met, the Red Army was throwing back the Polish Army, sent against Russia with the backing of Anglo-French imperialism. A large map, wing the daily advance of the Red Army, was displayed in the Congress hall.
The task of the First Congress had been to bring into a unified organisation all those who had broken with reformism and who wanted to bring about the spread of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The question facing the Second Congress was how to bring under the leadership of Communism those masses of workers who, while sympathising with the Russian Revolution, still followed right-wing and centrist leaders.
In his speech on ‘The Basic Tasks of the Communist International’, at the opening session (July 19), Lenin warned against assuming that the world capitalist crisis would by itself lead to the collapse of capitalism. ‘We must now “prove” through the practice of the revolutionary parties that they are sufficiently conscious, that they possess sufficient organisation, links with the exploited masses, determination and understanding to utilise this crisis for a successful and victorious revolution. The preparation of this “proof” is the main reason why we have gathered here for this Congress of the Communist International.'
This meant that the fight had to be waged against opportunism and centrism, not only in the workers’ movement as a whole, but especially within the parties which had applied to join the Communist International. Opportunism and centrism had a material basis: ‘[It is] because the more advanced countries made and make their culture possible at the expense of thousands of millions of oppressed people... The disease is protracted, its cure has taken a long time, longer than the optimists could have hoped for.’ (pp. 27-28.) The fight against ‘leftist’ tendencies was a subordinate part of this struggle: ‘Opportunism is our main enemy ... the correction of the errors of the “left” trend in communism will be an easy one.’ This emphasis is maintained throughout the Congress.
The delegations to the Congress were not all Communist. Also invited – to the annoyance of some of the ‘lefts’ – were representatives of three centrist organisations, the USPI) from Germany, the French Socialist Party and the Italian Socialist Party. When the ‘leftist’ Wijnkoop challenged the right of the first two of these to take part in the Congress as observers, he was sharply put in his place. Nothing must stand in the way of the fight to destroy centrism.
To secure the presence of delegations officially representing the French and German centrist parties, long and careful work had been carried out. The success of this operation was possible because of the pressure of masses of workers on the leaderships of these organisations. Forced to break with the Second International, the centrist leaders had come to Moscow to obtain, they thought, a deal from the Bolsheviks: give us the right to our opportunism at home, they wanted to tell Lenin and Trotsky, and we shall make speeches about communism.
It was not just a matter of rejecting and exposing this proposition. What had to be done was to release whole layers of the European working class from the swamp of centrism. As this was one of the main tasks of the Second Congress, it is worth looking more closely at the development of the German and French parties, as well as at the related position of the Italian Socialist Party.
The Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) had broken from the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) in 1917. It included in its ranks a wide range of political tendencies. Some of its leaders, notably Kautsky, Bernstein and Hilferding, differed only slightly from the open class-collaborators who had led the SPD into support for German imperialism in 1914. On the left wing, grouped around Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Leo Jogiches, were the Spartacists, opposing the war as revolutionary internationalists. While they held positions close to those of the Bolsheviks, they did not grasp the need to break organisationally with centrism, and only formed the Communist Party (KPD) in the last days of 1918, when the German revolution was already under way.
Between these tendencies, however, were important groups of workers, including the militant shop stewards’ movement (revolutionäre Obleute). In the course of the overthrow of the old regime in November 1918, the attachment of these men to the USPD was crucial. The USPD leaders had joined the SPD in a ‘Council of People’s Representatives’. At the decisive moments of the revolution, when the right-wing leaders were working to prevent the destruction of the capitalist state, the connections of the USPD with the factories was vital to give the Council the necessary authority. Only thus was the power handed back to the Junkers and the General Staff. When they had been used in this way, the USPD leaders broke with the Council, in December, 1918.
The KPD was formed only after this, merging the Spartacists with other groups outside the USPD. The new party was marked by the deepest confusion, and at its founding conference the Spartacist leaders were swamped by leftist and adventurist tendencies. Otherwise, it might have been possible to win over a far larger section of the USPD ranks.
The problems of the KPD were intensified when its three main leaders, Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Jogiches, were murdered just after the Party was formed. Paul Levi, one of Rosa’s supporters, took over the leadership, and managed to overcome some of the leftist errors, including the decision to boycott parliamentary elections. In October, 1919, he manoeuvred to drive one section of the ultra-left out of the Party, later to become the KAPD (Communist Workers’ Party). But the fight against leftism was still not over.
In March, 1920, the working class defeated the attempted coup by General Lüttwitz and the Prussian civil servant Kapp, in a movement of greater revolutionary activity than 1919. To the despair of Levi, at that time in prison, the KPD leaders issued a call in opposition to the general strike, which mobilised the mass of German workers. (The directive was ignored by the organisations of the Party, and soon reversed.)
Meanwhile, the USPD had grown in numbers and influence. By the time of the Second Congress it had 800,000 members, to the KPD’s 50,000. Among these workers, revolutionary ideas were widespread, especially support for the Russian Revolution. During late 1919 and 1920, the issue of affiliation of the USPD to the Communist International became the major question facing the party.
The leaders had worked hard to find a form of international centrist collaboration. At the USPD Congress in Leipzig in November-December 1919, a formula was worked out which called for ‘a united proletarian International’, and the entry into negotiations with ‘the Third International and the social-revolutionary parties of other countries’. The left wing, which opposed this attempt to avoid straight affiliation to the International, did however declaring his agreement with communism. Not until the following year did the PSI finally expel Turati, and apply for re-affiliation to the Communist International. By that time, fascism had its boot on the neck of the Italian working class.
The debates over the Conditions for Entry into the Communist International were therefore far from a formality. The Bolsheviks aimed to bring into the ranks of Communism all those workers confused by the centrists, while at the same time excluding the centrist leaders who were only disguised opportunists. That is why – to the bewilderment of men like Wijnkoop – the USPD and the SFIO were both represented on the Commission drawing up the Conditions. When it appeared that some centrist leaders might have crept through the original 19 Conditions, two extra points were added. One insisted that a majority of the leadership of a Communist Party must be in the hands of those who fought for affiliation to the Communist International; the other demanded the expulsion of anyone who rejected the Conditions in principle. The debates on these Conditions enabled the Bolsheviks to cut the centrists to pieces. (July 29, 30.)
The proceedings show how far many of the delegates were from under standing what the Bolsheviks were fighting for. We have already mentioned the opposition of Wijnkoop. But he was by no means alone. He himself mentions his ‘mistakes’ in the Amsterdam Bureau. This had been set up by the Executive Committee of the Communist International, with Wijnkoop as its secretary. But it had been dissolved before the Second Congress, when it was found to be operating as a factional centre for the ‘leftists’.
Two different ‘left’ trends emerge from the Congress. Wijnkoop represents those who tend to see the International only as an organisation of propaganda sects, and this includes some of those who had supported the formation of the Communist International right from the start. These people are firmly put down whenever they rear their heads.
But there was another quite different tendency on the left. Characterised by youthful impatience, this group’s syndicalism or even semi-anarchism reflected revolutionary currents in the working class. Lenin in particular takes great care with these people, while never giving them the slightest concession.
For example, when the issue comes up of the affiliation of a British Communist Party to the Labour Party, there is no question that Lenin and the Bolsheviks favour the position of the British Socialist Party (BSP) for affiliation.
But in his speech on the question (Session of July 23), Lenin goes out of his way to criticise the BSP and to praise the syndicalist speakers – with whom he disagreed – as genuine representatives of the British workers. When Tanner tells the Congress that he is opposed to political parties in the working class, Lenin tries to persuade him that the National Advisory Council of the Shop Stewards Movement, which sent Tanner and his friends to the Congress, is already a step towards a party.
But the conclusion of the speech is unequivocal: if the British communists cannot reach agreement on the issue of Labour Party affiliation, it would be better to form two Communist Parties, until experience had shown the correctness of the International’s viewpoint, Lenin says. For what was at stake was the fight to place the Communist Party into the closest connection with the living movement of the working class.
In the discussions on the National and Colonial Question (Sessions of July 25 and July 28), the same relationship between principles and concrete struggle is expressed. The Theses, drafted by Lenin, open by condemning the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy, which starts with an abstract and formal idea of equality, and turns it into an instrument for maintaining oppression. Instead, communists had to analyse each situation concretely.
The main issue for Lenin was the bringing together of the workers and peasants of all countries for the overthrow of the capitalists and landlords. This meant uniting the national liberation struggles in colonial and semicolonial countries with the fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the defence of the Soviet state. The Theses draw on the experience of Soviet Republics in Central Asia in this respect.
In his original draft, Lenin had called for communists to support the ‘bourgeois-national movements’ against imperialism. In the Commission, this had been contested, and agreement was reached on the use of the term ‘national-revolutionary’, instead of ‘bourgeois-national’. This was not some verbal trick, but an attempt by Lenin to develop the understanding of the movement in the light of the discussions with the Asian delegates.
Similarly, he agrees with the unanimous decision of the Commission to recommend acceptance of both his Theses, as amended, and those of the Indian M.N. Roy. As Lenin says in his speech: ‘The latter were framed chiefly from the standpoint of the situation in India and other big Asian countries oppressed by British imperialism. Herein lies their great importance for us.'
The same method is displayed in the discussions on Parliament (August 2), Trades Unions (August 3) and the Agrarian Question (August 4). In each case, it is not a matter of formulating abstract doctrine in the head, but of drawing out of the living experience of struggle the general principles to guide the work of communists. It is particularly instructive to contrast the speech of Lenin on Parliament with Bordiga’s formalism.
The attitude of the American delegates to trade union work parallels that of the British to the Labour Party. Neither the Communist Party of America, nor the Communist Labour Party had engaged in work within the American Federation of Labour. despite appeals for them to do so from the Executive Committee of the Communist International Even after the Congress, John Reed in particular was opposed to such an attitude to the AFL.
The most important result of the Second Congress was that it set up a functioning centralised organisation. Despite all the problems and weaknesses which remained, the principle that revolutionary parties had to be built, as
sections of a World Party, was accepted and acted upon. In the Statutes and the Conditions for Entry, as well as all the other resolutions and Theses agreed by the Congress, the conception of revolutionary internationalism was basic, and shown to be vital for all Marxist work in the epoch of imperialism.
Only by basing itself on the experience of a centralised International could a communist leadership develop its understanding of the tasks facing the working class in any country. It is this conclusion that inspires the Manifesto, drafted and presented by Trotsky (August 8), and which ends with the call:
In all his work, whether as leader of a revolutionary uprising, or as Organizer of underground groups, as secretary of a trade union, or as agitator at mass meetings, as member of parliament or co-operative worker or barricade fighter, the communist always remains true to himself as a disciplined member of the Communist Party, an unrelenting fighter, a mortal enemy of capitalist society, its economic foundation, its State forms, its democratic lies, its religion and its morality. He is a self-sacrificing soldier of the proletarian revolution and an untiring herald of the new society.
Working men and women! On this earth there is only one banner under which it is worth fighting and dying: it is the banner of the Communist International.
And in the subsequent twenty years, many thousands did fight and die under that banner, even after it had fallen into the hands of the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy, and the ideas inscribed upon it corrupted and distorted out of all recognition.
In 1943, Stalin formally dissolved the Comintern. But this act – carried out to cement the alliance of the Soviet bureaucracy with Anglo-American imperialism – came ten years after the World Party founded by the leaders of the Russian Revolution had ceased to exist, and after most of those leaders had been destroyed by Stalin’s thugs.
After the German working class had been handed over to Nazism by the treacherous policies of Stalinism, a new International, the Fourth, had to be built, if the lessons of the Third were not to be lost. Founded in the period of defeats and betrayals, it is the only continuator of the struggle for communism. As imperialism is now plunged into its deepest-ever crisis, the Fourth International, organised by the International Committee, can and must bring into the class battles of today all the experience of the fight for the principles of Communism, against Stalinism and its revisionist conciliators.
Never before has it been so vital for the working class to have at its disposal the theory, strategy and tactics which will enable it to mobilise its strength as a historical force. Never before have such conditions existed for the struggle for Marxism and the construction of revolutionary parties.
The proceedings of the Second Congress of the Communist International contain a wealth of material which will be used in the training of the cadres who will lead the socialist revolution.
Editor, New Park Publications
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
*********
Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International
Foreword
The Second Congress of the Third (Communist) International was one of the great milestones in the history of the international working class. Under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, it united those forces throughout the world who had taken up the banner of the October Revolution. In its discussions, the main principles of Communism were hammered out; its economic and political analysis and its philosophical method, dialectical materialism, were all elaborated. Fifty-six years of gigantic changes notwithstanding, these principles remain the only basis on which the working class can and must resolve its crisis of leadership and thus the crisis of humanity; for we still live in the same historical epoch as the delegates who gathered in Petrograd in July, 1920, the epoch of the socialist revolution.
The resolutions and theses of the Congress are of tremendous value to the revolutionary movement. But in the full proceedings even more can be found. The first four Congresses of the Communist International, held each year from 1919 to 1922, were characterised by the sharpest controversy and the fullest discussion, in complete contrast to the stage-managed unanimity of the Comintern in its Stalinist phase. Not only the doctrine of Bolshevism, but the method of struggle for it is displayed in these debates.
To Lenin and the Bolsheviks, from August 1914 it was a vital necessity to form a new International to replace the Second International. The old social-democratic parties had shown themselves to be utterly corroded with opportunism, as the leaders rushed to join their respective ruling classes in the imperialist slaughter. Lenin above all had grasped what was expressed in this collapse of the Second International: that capitalism had reached its highest stage, imperialism, ‘the eve of the world-wide socialist revolution’. A Third International was required, not just to take up the tasks abandoned by the opportunist and centrist leaders, but to prepare the leadership for the world revolution.
The victory of the working class in Russia in October, 1917, was seen only in this light. Knowing that the Russian Revolution was part of the world crisis, the Bolsheviks could take the decision for insurrection. After that, the future of the revolution depended on the spread of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the rest of the world.
The revolutionary upsurge in every continent which followed 1917 entirely confirmed the correctness of this decision. But this movement had to be consciously reflected in the establishment of Communist Parties with deep roots in the masses. That is why the defence of the Soviet state was inseparable from the building of the Communist International, ‘World Party of Socialist Revolution’.
This consideration determined the way the struggles at the Congresses of the Communist International were conducted. The task was essentially to establish the international character of the October Revolution, the history, theory and method of Bolshevism. Each delegate to the Second Congress was presented with copies of two books: Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism and Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism: in each of these, the author attempted to distil the essence of Bolshevism and of Soviet power, and put it at the disposal of the international working class.
For this essence to be brought into the consciousness of revolutionary parties, the issues had to be fought out in the context of the actual struggles in which the working class was engaged. Only by struggling to grasp the developments taking place in the class struggle, as expressed in the most advanced layers of the revolutionary class in each country, could Marxist theory be developed. That is why the work of the Russian delegates in these debates is characterised by the combination of rock-like firmness on theoretical questions, and great flexibility and unbounded patience in explaining them.
The enemies of communism have tried to depict the position of the Russians in the Comintern, and especially at its Second Congress, as one of ‘dictatorship’, finding in Lenin’s leadership the basis for Stalin’s later bureaucratic caricature. This view is not merely false: it is a deliberate attempt to defend the opportunism of all anti-communist trends in the labour movement. As Trotsky explained:
Adherence to the International is not a matter of fulfilling international etiquette but of undertaking revolutionary fighting tasks. For this reason it cannot in any case be based on omissions, misunderstandings or ambiguities. The Communist International contemptuously rejects all those conventionalities which used to entangle relations within the Second International from top to bottom; and which had as their mainstay this, that the leaders of each national party pretended not to notice the opportunist, chauvinist declarations and actions of other national parties, with the expectation that the latter would repay in the same coin. The reciprocal relations among the national ‘Socialist’ parties were only a shabby counterpart of the relations among the bourgeois diplomats in the era of armed peace. Precisely for this reason, no sooner had the capitalist generals thrust capitalist diplomacy aside, than the conditional diplomatic falsehood of the ‘fraternal’ parties of the Second International was supplanted by the naked militarism of its leaders. (The First Five Years of de Communist International, Vol. I, pp. 112-3)
Soon after its Founding Congress, Lenin had summed up the place of the Communist International in history:
The First International (1864-72) laid the foundation of the proletarian, international struggle for Socialism.
The period of the Second International (1889-1914) was a period of preparation of the soil for the broad, the mass spread of the movement in a number of countries.
The Third International gathered the fruits of the work of the Second International, discarded its opportunist, social-chauvinist, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois dross and has begun to realise the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The international revolutionary alliance of the parties which are leading the most revolutionary movement in the world, the movement of the proletariat for the overthrow of the yoke of capital, now rests on an unprecedentedly firm base in the shape of several Soviet republics, which are giving embodiment to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and to its victory over capitalism on an international scale.
When the delegates had assembled in Moscow for the First Congress of the Communist International in March 1919, the International was little more than a collection of propaganda groups. Only a few of those present represented actually functioning parties. Apart from the Russians, the only important one was the newly-formed German Communist Party, and they had sent Eberlein with a mandate to oppose the formation of the International at that time. (He was persuaded to abstain.) What the Congress accomplished was to clarify the meaning of the split in the world workers’ movement.
The opening of the Second Congress, only sixteen months later, saw a completely changed situation. In several countries, Communist Parties were now functioning. Despite many weaknesses, they had brought together the best elements in the working class and among the intellectuals and youth. In all, twenty-one Communist Parties were represented at the Congress.
Most important was the presence of representatives from several Asian countries. In the Second International, while lip-service had been paid to international solidarity with colonial peoples, nothing had ever been done to organise the fight for socialism outside the advanced capitalist countries. It was a sign of the new stage reached in the world revolution, that the Russian revolution had attracted the support of workers and peasants in colonial countries for communism.
Although the immediate post-war wave of revolution had subsided, the crisis of world capitalism was clear for all to see. Central to this was the survival of the Soviet state, beating off the onslaught of the armies of imperialism and its agents, with the aid of workers in many countries. As the Congress met, the Red Army was throwing back the Polish Army, sent against Russia with the backing of Anglo-French imperialism. A large map, wing the daily advance of the Red Army, was displayed in the Congress hall.
The task of the First Congress had been to bring into a unified organisation all those who had broken with reformism and who wanted to bring about the spread of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The question facing the Second Congress was how to bring under the leadership of Communism those masses of workers who, while sympathising with the Russian Revolution, still followed right-wing and centrist leaders.
In his speech on ‘The Basic Tasks of the Communist International’, at the opening session (July 19), Lenin warned against assuming that the world capitalist crisis would by itself lead to the collapse of capitalism. ‘We must now “prove” through the practice of the revolutionary parties that they are sufficiently conscious, that they possess sufficient organisation, links with the exploited masses, determination and understanding to utilise this crisis for a successful and victorious revolution. The preparation of this “proof” is the main reason why we have gathered here for this Congress of the Communist International.'
This meant that the fight had to be waged against opportunism and centrism, not only in the workers’ movement as a whole, but especially within the parties which had applied to join the Communist International. Opportunism and centrism had a material basis: ‘[It is] because the more advanced countries made and make their culture possible at the expense of thousands of millions of oppressed people... The disease is protracted, its cure has taken a long time, longer than the optimists could have hoped for.’ (pp. 27-28.) The fight against ‘leftist’ tendencies was a subordinate part of this struggle: ‘Opportunism is our main enemy ... the correction of the errors of the “left” trend in communism will be an easy one.’ This emphasis is maintained throughout the Congress.
The delegations to the Congress were not all Communist. Also invited – to the annoyance of some of the ‘lefts’ – were representatives of three centrist organisations, the USPI) from Germany, the French Socialist Party and the Italian Socialist Party. When the ‘leftist’ Wijnkoop challenged the right of the first two of these to take part in the Congress as observers, he was sharply put in his place. Nothing must stand in the way of the fight to destroy centrism.
To secure the presence of delegations officially representing the French and German centrist parties, long and careful work had been carried out. The success of this operation was possible because of the pressure of masses of workers on the leaderships of these organisations. Forced to break with the Second International, the centrist leaders had come to Moscow to obtain, they thought, a deal from the Bolsheviks: give us the right to our opportunism at home, they wanted to tell Lenin and Trotsky, and we shall make speeches about communism.
It was not just a matter of rejecting and exposing this proposition. What had to be done was to release whole layers of the European working class from the swamp of centrism. As this was one of the main tasks of the Second Congress, it is worth looking more closely at the development of the German and French parties, as well as at the related position of the Italian Socialist Party.
The Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) had broken from the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) in 1917. It included in its ranks a wide range of political tendencies. Some of its leaders, notably Kautsky, Bernstein and Hilferding, differed only slightly from the open class-collaborators who had led the SPD into support for German imperialism in 1914. On the left wing, grouped around Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Leo Jogiches, were the Spartacists, opposing the war as revolutionary internationalists. While they held positions close to those of the Bolsheviks, they did not grasp the need to break organisationally with centrism, and only formed the Communist Party (KPD) in the last days of 1918, when the German revolution was already under way.
Between these tendencies, however, were important groups of workers, including the militant shop stewards’ movement (revolutionäre Obleute). In the course of the overthrow of the old regime in November 1918, the attachment of these men to the USPD was crucial. The USPD leaders had joined the SPD in a ‘Council of People’s Representatives’. At the decisive moments of the revolution, when the right-wing leaders were working to prevent the destruction of the capitalist state, the connections of the USPD with the factories was vital to give the Council the necessary authority. Only thus was the power handed back to the Junkers and the General Staff. When they had been used in this way, the USPD leaders broke with the Council, in December, 1918.
The KPD was formed only after this, merging the Spartacists with other groups outside the USPD. The new party was marked by the deepest confusion, and at its founding conference the Spartacist leaders were swamped by leftist and adventurist tendencies. Otherwise, it might have been possible to win over a far larger section of the USPD ranks.
The problems of the KPD were intensified when its three main leaders, Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Jogiches, were murdered just after the Party was formed. Paul Levi, one of Rosa’s supporters, took over the leadership, and managed to overcome some of the leftist errors, including the decision to boycott parliamentary elections. In October, 1919, he manoeuvred to drive one section of the ultra-left out of the Party, later to become the KAPD (Communist Workers’ Party). But the fight against leftism was still not over.
In March, 1920, the working class defeated the attempted coup by General Lüttwitz and the Prussian civil servant Kapp, in a movement of greater revolutionary activity than 1919. To the despair of Levi, at that time in prison, the KPD leaders issued a call in opposition to the general strike, which mobilised the mass of German workers. (The directive was ignored by the organisations of the Party, and soon reversed.)
Meanwhile, the USPD had grown in numbers and influence. By the time of the Second Congress it had 800,000 members, to the KPD’s 50,000. Among these workers, revolutionary ideas were widespread, especially support for the Russian Revolution. During late 1919 and 1920, the issue of affiliation of the USPD to the Communist International became the major question facing the party.
The leaders had worked hard to find a form of international centrist collaboration. At the USPD Congress in Leipzig in November-December 1919, a formula was worked out which called for ‘a united proletarian International’, and the entry into negotiations with ‘the Third International and the social-revolutionary parties of other countries’. The left wing, which opposed this attempt to avoid straight affiliation to the International, did however declaring his agreement with communism. Not until the following year did the PSI finally expel Turati, and apply for re-affiliation to the Communist International. By that time, fascism had its boot on the neck of the Italian working class.
The debates over the Conditions for Entry into the Communist International were therefore far from a formality. The Bolsheviks aimed to bring into the ranks of Communism all those workers confused by the centrists, while at the same time excluding the centrist leaders who were only disguised opportunists. That is why – to the bewilderment of men like Wijnkoop – the USPD and the SFIO were both represented on the Commission drawing up the Conditions. When it appeared that some centrist leaders might have crept through the original 19 Conditions, two extra points were added. One insisted that a majority of the leadership of a Communist Party must be in the hands of those who fought for affiliation to the Communist International; the other demanded the expulsion of anyone who rejected the Conditions in principle. The debates on these Conditions enabled the Bolsheviks to cut the centrists to pieces. (July 29, 30.)
The proceedings show how far many of the delegates were from under standing what the Bolsheviks were fighting for. We have already mentioned the opposition of Wijnkoop. But he was by no means alone. He himself mentions his ‘mistakes’ in the Amsterdam Bureau. This had been set up by the Executive Committee of the Communist International, with Wijnkoop as its secretary. But it had been dissolved before the Second Congress, when it was found to be operating as a factional centre for the ‘leftists’.
Two different ‘left’ trends emerge from the Congress. Wijnkoop represents those who tend to see the International only as an organisation of propaganda sects, and this includes some of those who had supported the formation of the Communist International right from the start. These people are firmly put down whenever they rear their heads.
But there was another quite different tendency on the left. Characterised by youthful impatience, this group’s syndicalism or even semi-anarchism reflected revolutionary currents in the working class. Lenin in particular takes great care with these people, while never giving them the slightest concession.
For example, when the issue comes up of the affiliation of a British Communist Party to the Labour Party, there is no question that Lenin and the Bolsheviks favour the position of the British Socialist Party (BSP) for affiliation.
But in his speech on the question (Session of July 23), Lenin goes out of his way to criticise the BSP and to praise the syndicalist speakers – with whom he disagreed – as genuine representatives of the British workers. When Tanner tells the Congress that he is opposed to political parties in the working class, Lenin tries to persuade him that the National Advisory Council of the Shop Stewards Movement, which sent Tanner and his friends to the Congress, is already a step towards a party.
But the conclusion of the speech is unequivocal: if the British communists cannot reach agreement on the issue of Labour Party affiliation, it would be better to form two Communist Parties, until experience had shown the correctness of the International’s viewpoint, Lenin says. For what was at stake was the fight to place the Communist Party into the closest connection with the living movement of the working class.
In the discussions on the National and Colonial Question (Sessions of July 25 and July 28), the same relationship between principles and concrete struggle is expressed. The Theses, drafted by Lenin, open by condemning the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy, which starts with an abstract and formal idea of equality, and turns it into an instrument for maintaining oppression. Instead, communists had to analyse each situation concretely.
The main issue for Lenin was the bringing together of the workers and peasants of all countries for the overthrow of the capitalists and landlords. This meant uniting the national liberation struggles in colonial and semicolonial countries with the fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the defence of the Soviet state. The Theses draw on the experience of Soviet Republics in Central Asia in this respect.
In his original draft, Lenin had called for communists to support the ‘bourgeois-national movements’ against imperialism. In the Commission, this had been contested, and agreement was reached on the use of the term ‘national-revolutionary’, instead of ‘bourgeois-national’. This was not some verbal trick, but an attempt by Lenin to develop the understanding of the movement in the light of the discussions with the Asian delegates.
Similarly, he agrees with the unanimous decision of the Commission to recommend acceptance of both his Theses, as amended, and those of the Indian M.N. Roy. As Lenin says in his speech: ‘The latter were framed chiefly from the standpoint of the situation in India and other big Asian countries oppressed by British imperialism. Herein lies their great importance for us.'
The same method is displayed in the discussions on Parliament (August 2), Trades Unions (August 3) and the Agrarian Question (August 4). In each case, it is not a matter of formulating abstract doctrine in the head, but of drawing out of the living experience of struggle the general principles to guide the work of communists. It is particularly instructive to contrast the speech of Lenin on Parliament with Bordiga’s formalism.
The attitude of the American delegates to trade union work parallels that of the British to the Labour Party. Neither the Communist Party of America, nor the Communist Labour Party had engaged in work within the American Federation of Labour. despite appeals for them to do so from the Executive Committee of the Communist International Even after the Congress, John Reed in particular was opposed to such an attitude to the AFL.
The most important result of the Second Congress was that it set up a functioning centralised organisation. Despite all the problems and weaknesses which remained, the principle that revolutionary parties had to be built, as
sections of a World Party, was accepted and acted upon. In the Statutes and the Conditions for Entry, as well as all the other resolutions and Theses agreed by the Congress, the conception of revolutionary internationalism was basic, and shown to be vital for all Marxist work in the epoch of imperialism.
Only by basing itself on the experience of a centralised International could a communist leadership develop its understanding of the tasks facing the working class in any country. It is this conclusion that inspires the Manifesto, drafted and presented by Trotsky (August 8), and which ends with the call:
In all his work, whether as leader of a revolutionary uprising, or as Organizer of underground groups, as secretary of a trade union, or as agitator at mass meetings, as member of parliament or co-operative worker or barricade fighter, the communist always remains true to himself as a disciplined member of the Communist Party, an unrelenting fighter, a mortal enemy of capitalist society, its economic foundation, its State forms, its democratic lies, its religion and its morality. He is a self-sacrificing soldier of the proletarian revolution and an untiring herald of the new society.
Working men and women! On this earth there is only one banner under which it is worth fighting and dying: it is the banner of the Communist International.
And in the subsequent twenty years, many thousands did fight and die under that banner, even after it had fallen into the hands of the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy, and the ideas inscribed upon it corrupted and distorted out of all recognition.
In 1943, Stalin formally dissolved the Comintern. But this act – carried out to cement the alliance of the Soviet bureaucracy with Anglo-American imperialism – came ten years after the World Party founded by the leaders of the Russian Revolution had ceased to exist, and after most of those leaders had been destroyed by Stalin’s thugs.
After the German working class had been handed over to Nazism by the treacherous policies of Stalinism, a new International, the Fourth, had to be built, if the lessons of the Third were not to be lost. Founded in the period of defeats and betrayals, it is the only continuator of the struggle for communism. As imperialism is now plunged into its deepest-ever crisis, the Fourth International, organised by the International Committee, can and must bring into the class battles of today all the experience of the fight for the principles of Communism, against Stalinism and its revisionist conciliators.
Never before has it been so vital for the working class to have at its disposal the theory, strategy and tactics which will enable it to mobilise its strength as a historical force. Never before have such conditions existed for the struggle for Marxism and the construction of revolutionary parties.
The proceedings of the Second Congress of the Communist International contain a wealth of material which will be used in the training of the cadres who will lead the socialist revolution.
Editor, New Park Publications
Friday, March 05, 2010
*A Short Note On The March 4th Defense Of Education Rally At U/Mass-Boston
Click on the headline to link to a "Boston Indymedia" entry from the U/Mass-Boston Commitee To Have Fun (nice name,right?).
Markin comment:
As most people are already painfully aware of, public services, especially in places like California have been crippled during this latest almost catastrophic capitalist economic downturn. Nowhere is this more true that in the public education sector, including higher education. As a response to the ever-spiraling upward cost of tuition and other expenses and a bizarre corresponding decrease in the number of tenured and secured faculty and other personnel that make a campus what it is California students, teachers and labor leaders took the lead in calling for a nation-wide March 4th action. Hence, this writer’s presence at the U/Massachusetts- Boston rally.
The event at U/Mass, as such, was small but spirited. Certainly the young students who did take the time to make their voices heard, made them heard. And that is no small thing at this campus. I should note that while Boston has many, many colleges and universities, mainly private and expensive, U/Mass-Boston is a commuter school catering to a mainly working class, minority and immigrant clientele.
Although the economic squeeze has hit this population hard in every way the public college student here, in comparison at least to the mass of the private college students, although they are starting to fell the crunch too, are not, at this minute, necessarily the kind of student who will come out to such rallies. Many of these students work, are first generation college students, and have a myriad other responsibilities, many times not academically-related. Moreover, and I know this from personal experience, this campus is filled with “shoulder to the wheel” types who understand the only way out of the ghetto, the barrio and the working class quarters is to get that “education for the 21st century”. We have no quarrel with that aspiration; we just want that to include remembering for where they came and who got left behind...
What amazed me most, however, is that although those who did show up for this rally really were more spirited than I have seen students for a long time, since my school days and maybe yours, they do not have a clue about the wider picture. A huge theme, expressed by radicals and plain students alike here and elsewhere that day, ran along the lines of “taxing” the rich. Naturally, I had to mention that it would be far easier for working people to just take state power than to get the enactment a serious tax program that would put a dent in the fortunes of the “Fortune 500”. Far easier, for that is where they live. Nobody questioned my critique, although nobody really bought into the idea. More prevalent, as one would expect, was the call for politicians, especially Democratic politicians, to do the right thing. And without even one little “or else” attached. We have some work to do.
At the end of the day though what was most telling was the failure to link up the Obama war policies and the economic question. And that is the most revealing different, at least anecdotally, from the crowds, the mainly older crowds, which I have been running into recently at various anti-war rallies. The oldsters, for the most part, can make the link at some level. Strange that today the young are fighting for their economic future and the oldsters are fighting for their political “souls”. We have to put the two together, right? Then that easy road to a workers government mentioned above WILL be mere child’s play.
Markin comment:
As most people are already painfully aware of, public services, especially in places like California have been crippled during this latest almost catastrophic capitalist economic downturn. Nowhere is this more true that in the public education sector, including higher education. As a response to the ever-spiraling upward cost of tuition and other expenses and a bizarre corresponding decrease in the number of tenured and secured faculty and other personnel that make a campus what it is California students, teachers and labor leaders took the lead in calling for a nation-wide March 4th action. Hence, this writer’s presence at the U/Massachusetts- Boston rally.
The event at U/Mass, as such, was small but spirited. Certainly the young students who did take the time to make their voices heard, made them heard. And that is no small thing at this campus. I should note that while Boston has many, many colleges and universities, mainly private and expensive, U/Mass-Boston is a commuter school catering to a mainly working class, minority and immigrant clientele.
Although the economic squeeze has hit this population hard in every way the public college student here, in comparison at least to the mass of the private college students, although they are starting to fell the crunch too, are not, at this minute, necessarily the kind of student who will come out to such rallies. Many of these students work, are first generation college students, and have a myriad other responsibilities, many times not academically-related. Moreover, and I know this from personal experience, this campus is filled with “shoulder to the wheel” types who understand the only way out of the ghetto, the barrio and the working class quarters is to get that “education for the 21st century”. We have no quarrel with that aspiration; we just want that to include remembering for where they came and who got left behind...
What amazed me most, however, is that although those who did show up for this rally really were more spirited than I have seen students for a long time, since my school days and maybe yours, they do not have a clue about the wider picture. A huge theme, expressed by radicals and plain students alike here and elsewhere that day, ran along the lines of “taxing” the rich. Naturally, I had to mention that it would be far easier for working people to just take state power than to get the enactment a serious tax program that would put a dent in the fortunes of the “Fortune 500”. Far easier, for that is where they live. Nobody questioned my critique, although nobody really bought into the idea. More prevalent, as one would expect, was the call for politicians, especially Democratic politicians, to do the right thing. And without even one little “or else” attached. We have some work to do.
At the end of the day though what was most telling was the failure to link up the Obama war policies and the economic question. And that is the most revealing different, at least anecdotally, from the crowds, the mainly older crowds, which I have been running into recently at various anti-war rallies. The oldsters, for the most part, can make the link at some level. Strange that today the young are fighting for their economic future and the oldsters are fighting for their political “souls”. We have to put the two together, right? Then that easy road to a workers government mentioned above WILL be mere child’s play.
*From The "Socialist Worker"- Updated Reports On The March 4th Day Of Actions- Guest Commentaries
Click on the headline to link to a "Socialist Worker" Website for updates on the events around March 4th-Defend Public Education Day Of Action.
*From The March 4th National Day Of Action- Drop All Charges Against The Milwaukee 16!
Click on the headline to link to a "National March 4th Day Of Action" entry calling for support to the Milwaukee 16.
*The March 4th Day Of Action Facebook
Click on the headline to link to the "March 4th Day Of Action" Facebook page
*Free The Oakland March 4th Public Education Defenders!
Click on the headline to link to a "Oakland (Ca.)Local" blog entry calling for the defense of 150 people arrested during a "Defend Public Education" rally.
Markin comment:
This one is a no-brainer- Free the protesters now!
Markin comment:
This one is a no-brainer- Free the protesters now!
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Black Freedom, Women's Rights and the Civil War
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for black abolitionist Sojourner Truth.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1989 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
**********
Black Freedom, Women's Rights
and the Civil War
This article is based on a talk given by W&R associate editor Amy Rath at a public forum held 5 April 1988 at Howard University. For additional historical material on women in the anti-slavery struggle, see "The Grimke Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights" (W&R No. 29, Spring 1985) and "Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom" (W&R No. 32, Winter 1986).
The talk discusses the movement for women's rights in the U.S. prior to the Civil War, its link through the radical abolition movement with the fight against black slavery, and the destruction of that link to produce the antecedents of the present "feminists." It centers on the ideology of the antebellum abolitionists, the most far-sighted of whom saw that all democratic struggles were vitally linked and that deeply revolutionary changes would be required to establish equality. These men and women were not Marxists but bourgeois radicals of their time; for many, the primary political motivation was religion.
Northern anti-slavery activists espoused "free labor" and accepted the idea that if legal barriers to equality were removed, the American dream would be possible for anyone, given talent and hard work. In antebellum America, in the context of steady immigration and an expanding frontier, a propertyless farmhand could perhaps acquire land of his own, while a (white) laborer might look to becoming a small-scale employer of labor in a generation. But if the "free labor" ideology imagined a democratic political system of economic equals based on a society of skilled artisans and yeoman farmers, this model rapidly became a fiction. A capitalist class of Northern industrial, finance and railroad capitalists had the ascendancy. Though still a predominantly agricultural country, America was the fastest-growing industrial power (with the second-highest industrial output, after Britain). America was already the world's technological leader, very much feared as a competitor by Britain, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.
The slave society of the South existed in the framework of a powerful Northern industrial sector which purchased staple crops from the South, first of all cotton. The rich plantations which possessed the South's best land and dominated the region politically were built on a pre-capitalist class relationship of black chattel slavery; at the same time they were part of a money economy in the world's most dynamic capitalist country. The conflict of social systems between the ever more powerful North and the backward South was a profound contradiction heading for collision, exacerbated by America's undemocratic "states' rights" political system which had given the South disproportionate control of the national government (especially the presidency and Supreme Court) since Independence.
The Progressive Bourgeoisie and the Limits of Reconstruction
The "irrepressible conflict" exploded in the Civil War, in the course of which Lincoln, the Northern bourgeoisie's ablest political leader, found himself obliged to go much further than he had intended in the direction of adopting the emancipation program of the abolitionists. Fifteen years before, abolitionists had been viewed as an isolated, if noisy, crew of radical fanatics.
The Civil War smashed slavery and left behind in the South a chaotic situation and four million ex-slaves who had been promised "freedom." But the war and its aftermath underlined that a truly egalitarian radical vision of social reconstruction already could not be promoted by a capitalist ruling class.
In her talk, comrade Rath emphasized the birth of a "feminist" women's movement as a rightward split at a crucial moment in American history: the era of "Reconstruction." Reconstruction posed a possibility of socially revolutionary transformations in the South: the regional ruling class, based on the ownership of land and slaves, had been militarily defeated; under the occupying Northern power, political rights were exercised by the former slaves and those willing to be allied with them.
Reconstruction brought not only black enfranchisement but significant democratic reforms: the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention drafted the state's first divorce law, while Reconstruction legislatures established the South's first public schools and went to work on liberalizing the South's draconian penal codes and reforming the planters' property tax system (which had taxed the farmer's mule and the workman's tools while all but exempting the real wealth—land). But the Northern capitalists betrayed the promise of Reconstruction, allowing it to be physically smashed by forces such as the Ku Klux Klan, even though that meant the destruction of the Republican Party in the South.
Replacing slavery, a new system of racial subordination took shape: a refurbished system of labor discipline through such measures as one-year labor contracts and "vagrancy" laws to bind ex-slaves to the plantations, and a rigid system of Jim Crow segregation. The defeat of Reconstruction shaped the postwar South into modern times: the sharecropping, the poll taxes, convict labor (the chain gang), the "separate but equal" unequal facilities.
While the woman suffrage leaders described in comrade Rath's talk took a stand against the great democratic gains that hung in the balance, many women mobilized by the anti-slavery movement served honorably in Reconstruction, for example as freedmen's schoolteachers who risked their lives to participate in freeing black people from the chains of bondage.
During Reconstruction, debate raged over the agrarian question: the radical demand raised by the freed-men and destitute white Unionist Southerners that the secessionists' estates be confiscated and distributed to them. Some abolitionists saw that racial democracy could not be achieved if a class of whites continued to own the land where a class of blacks were laborers. They argued for justice to those who had been slaves (who created the wealth of the plantations, beginning by clearing the wilderness).
But the tide had turned: the triumphant Northern rulers would not permit such an attack on "property rights" (especially as Northerners directly and Northern banks were coming to own a good deal of Southern property). Fundamentally, the federal power reinvested political power in the hands of the former "best people" of the old Confederacy. In the sequel, intensive exploitation of black agricultural labor, rather than industrial development or capital investment in the modernization of agriculture, remained the basis of the Southern economy.
What was the alternative? Working-class power was shown by the 1848 and 1871 upheavals in Europe to be the alternative to bourgeois rule, as Marx and Engels explained from the Communist Manifesto onward, but conditions were not mature even in Europe for the small proletariat to seize and wield state power. In mid-19th century America, the Northern bourgeoisie under the pressure of a revolutionary Civil War possessed a genuinely progressive side, the basis for the abolitionists' support for the Republican Party. The abolitionists' great debates revolved around how far out in front of the progressive bourgeoisie they should be. There were "radicals" and those with a more "realistic" appraisal of what the Republican Party would support. Today, more than a century after Reconstruction, that debate is transcended. The ruling class long since passed firmly over to the side of reaction; the federal government is no defender of the oppressed. Those who look to find support for an egalitarian program in any wing of the ruling class are doomed to disappointment. To complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution is a responsibility of the modern working class.
When the post-Civil War suffragettes chose to focus on the narrowest political rights for middle-class women and turn their backs on the rights and survival of the most desperately oppressed, they prefigured all of today's "constituency" and "reform" politics which refuse to attack the profound class inequalities ingrained in capitalist society. Sojourner Truth's classic "Ain't I a Woman" speech (see below) today stands as a powerful indictment of these ladies as much as of the outright sexists she was debating. Those who renounce the revolutionary content of the demand for women's liberation so as to advance their schemes for election of female politicians or advancement of women in academia are direct descendants of those first "feminists" who refused to challenge the power structure of their time on behalf of justice for two million of their sisters who were freed slaves.
But there is another women's movement: the women who have joined in the front ranks of every revolutionary struggle on this planet, from the 19th-century radical abolitionists to the women workers who sparked the Russian Revolution to the communist women of today. When the October Revolution of 1917 smashed the old tsarist society in Russia, militant women were among the first recruits to communism in dozens of countries where women were oppressed by semi-feudal conditions and "customs." Young women radicalized around questions like women's education, the veil, wife-beating, religious obscurantism, arranged marriages, etc., recognized a road forward to uprooting social reaction and building a society freed from sexual, racial and class inequality. Our heroes are the revolutionary women who have shared in making all of revolutionary history, from the first moment that slaves rose up against the Roman Empire to the great struggles of today.
It was 1863, and the bloodiest war ever fought by the U.S. was raging. Abraham Lincoln had finally realized he must pronounce the destruction of slavery as the North's goal in this civil war. On 22 September 1862, his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declared that on the first of January, 1863, all slaves in the Confederacy "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, it turned the tide of battle. The war was now indisputably a war to end slavery, not simply to repair the Union. Soon thereafter, the government began to enlist blacks into the army; these ex-slaves and sons of ex-slaves tipped the military balance in favor of the Union. It was a matter of time until black soldiers singing "John Brown's Body" marched into Charleston, South Carolina—the "soul of secession," as Karl Marx called it-after Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea.
In May of the revolutionary year 1863, the first convention of the Women's Loyal National League met in New York City. Its most eminent speaker was a woman whose name is little known today: Angelina Grimke" Weld. As part of her address she gave a keen analysis of the war:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether
white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government...are
driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war "The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
—Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina
A resolution was presented: "There can never be a true peace in this Republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all women are practically established." Angelina Grimke' defended it against those who thought it too radical:
"I rejoice exceedingly that that resolution would combine us with the negro. I feel that we have been with him— True, we have not felt the slaveholder's lash; true, we have not had our hands manacled, but our hearts have been crushed I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
It was only after the Civil War that an ideology arose which was later named "feminism": the idea that the main division in society is sex. In response to the debate over the role of the newly freed slaves in U.S. society, the leaders of the woman suffrage movement—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—sided with the counterrevolutionary assault on Reconstruction. The birth of bourgeois feminism was part of a right-wing process which shattered the vision of the left wing of the revolutionary democracy into separate, feeble bourgeois reform movements.
The Second American Revolution
The Civil War was one of the great social revolutions in the history of the world, destroying the slaveholding class in the South and freeing the black slaves. Not only Marxists saw that. The best fighters of the day—the Grimke sisters, the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens—knew that the war would have to become a revolution against slavery before the North could win. They hated the feudalistic society of the South, with its degraded slaves, its cruelty, its arrogant, leisurely gentlemen planters, its impoverished rural whites, its lack of education, industry and general culture. The radical abolitionists wanted to wipe away that society, and also saw much wrong in the North, such as the subservience of women, and legal and social discrimination against blacks. Their ideology was to create a new order based on free labor and "equality before the law," a concept brought to the U.S. by the Radical Republican Charles Sumner out of his study of the 1789 French Revolution.
In Europe after the French Revolution the status of women was the most visible expression of the contradiction between capitalist society and its own ideals. But in the U.S. that was not so true, because of chattel slavery. The United States—the first country to proclaim itself a democratic republic—was the largest slaveholding country in the world, a huge historical contradiction which had to be resolved.
The Industrial Revolution
It was the Industrial Revolution, fundamentally, that generated what William Seward called the "Irrepressible Conflict." In broad historical terms the Industrial Revolution had created the material conditions for the elimination of slavery in society. Technological and social advances made possible a much more productive capitalist agriculture and industry. In 1854 the abolitionist clergyman Theodore Parker described slavery as "the foe to Northern Industry—to our mines, our manufactures, and our commerce...to our democratic politics in the State, our democratic culture in the school, our democratic work in the community" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom).
The Industrial Revolution had a contradictory effect on the condition of women. Production of goods had been primarily through cottage industry, but with the invention of the spinning jenny, the power loom and the steam engine, cottage industry was ended. The men left home to go to the factory, while women stayed home to do the housework, raise the children and to buy at the local store what once they had made at home.
Women's labor ceased to be productive labor in the strict Marxist sense. This is the material basis for the 19th-century ideology of the "women's sphere." While the material advances of the Industrial Revolution made life easier for women, it also locked them into the stifling confines of domesticity in the isolated nuclear family. Women also worked in factories, but even in the industries in which they were concentrated (in textile production they made up two-thirds of the labor force) generally they worked only for a few years before getting married.
The Fight for Women's Legal Rights
Slaves were a class, but women are a specially oppressed group dispersed through all social classes. Although all women were oppressed to some extent because of their position in the family, the class differences were fundamental between the black slave woman and the slave plantation mistress, or the Northern German-speaking laundress and the wife of the owner of the Pennsylvania iron mill. "Sisterhood" was as much a myth then as it is now. Women identified first with the class to which they belonged, determined by who their husbands or fathers were.
Before the Civil War, women were basically without any civil rights. They couldn't sue or be sued, they couldn't be on juries, all their property and earnings went to their husband or father. Although women did have the vote for a few years in New Jersey and Virginia after the American Revolution, this advance was quickly eliminated. (This was part of a general right-wing turn after the Revolution, when suffrage was restricted gradually through property qualifications. In New York State, for example, with some restrictions blacks could vote up to about 1821.) For the wealthy upper-class woman, this lack of legal rights loomed as a terrible injustice because it prevented her from functioning as a full member of the ruling class (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the mother of American feminism and the daughter of a judge, felt this keenly). For the working-class or slave woman, if her property legally belonged to her husband it didn't seem a problem— she didn't have any property.
Though the legal question was a small matter for poor and slave women, nevertheless legal injustice is not insignificant for Marxists, and it is bound up with multi-layered social oppression. This was true for the position of women in pre-Civil War society. Until the 1850s wife-beating was legal in most states. Divorce was almost impossible, and when it was obtained children went with the husband. The accepted attitude toward women was assumption of their "inferiority," and the Bible was considered an authority. When anesthesia was discovered in the 1840s, doctors opposed its use for childbirth, because that suffering was women's punishment for Eve's sin.
The Anti-Slavery Struggle and Democratic Rights
But how were women to fight for equal rights in this society divided between slave and free? Angelina Grimke' was precisely correct when she said, "until the negro gets his rights, we will never have ours." It was necessary to destroy chattel slavery, which was retarding the development of the whole society. The movement for women's rights developed in the North out of the struggle to abolish slavery. It could hardly have developed in the South. In the decades before the war, in response to the growing Northern anti-slavery agitation, the South was becoming more reactionary than ever: more fanatical in defense of the ideology of slavery and more openly repressive. There were wholesale assaults on basic democratic rights, from attacks on the rights of the small layer of free blacks, who were seen as a source of agitation and insurrection, to a ban on the distribution of abolitionist literature.
In the South, there were no public schools. It was illegal to teach slaves to read, and almost half of the entire Southern population was illiterate. But in the North over 90 percent of the residents could read and write. Girls and boys went to school in about the same proportions, the only country in the world where this was true. So while in the North women teachers were paid less than men, and women factory hands received one-quarter the wage of men, in the South there were few teachers at all, and few industrial workers.
As a young slave in Maryland, and later while he was trying to earn a living as a refugee in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass came to understand the common interests of all working people in the South, slaves and free blacks and whites. He learned a trade on the docks, where he experienced racist treatment from white workmen, who saw black labor as a threat to their jobs. But Douglass realized that the position of the workmen, too, against their boss was eroded and weakened by slavery and racism. As Marx said, "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." And indeed, the working-class movement met with little success in the antebellum U.S., whereas after the war there was an upsurge in unionism and labor struggle.
The vanguard of the abolitionist movement—the radical insurrectionist wing—believed in the identity of the interests of all the oppressed. John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the great activist of the Underground Railroad, and the Grimke sisters were all inspired by a vision of human equality based in revolutionary democracy. Although their egalitarian principle was based on a religious view and ours is based on a Marxist understanding of society, we honor their essential work in leading the anti-slavery struggle. The abolition of slavery did profoundly alter the United States, it did open the road to liberation by making possible the development of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard, which will establish justice by abolishing the exploitation of man by man.
The Grimke Sisters of South Carolina
Penetrating insights into the situation of women in pre-Civil War America came from women who were committed abolitionists. Sarah and Angelina Grimke are examples, as is Sojourner Truth who is better known today. The Grimke sisters were unusual members of the ruling class who defected to the other side. As daughters of one of South Carolina's most powerful slave-holding families, they had grown up in luxury, but left the South because of their revulsion for slavery. The Grimke sisters became famous in 1837-1838 as agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The power of their personal witness of the atrocities of the slave system drew huge audiences. The sisters were quick to point out that as upper-class white women, they had seen only the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves, and not the more brutal treatment of plantation hands in the fields. But one of the things they did know about was the sexual exploitation of women slaves and the brutal breakup of black families through the slave trade.
Because the sisters addressed the issues of sexual exploitation frankly and often, it was one of the issues the opposition used to try to shut them up. The clergy complained that the Grimke's brought up a subject "which ought not to be named"—how dare these delicate .blossoms of Southern womanhood talk about sex! The very idea of women speaking publicly represented an attack on the proper relationship between the sexes and would upset "women's place" in the home. Contemporary observers were shocked by the sight of women participating actively in the debates of the anti-slavery movement, as they did especially in New England, the birthplace of radical abolitionism. The Grimkes replied by pointing out that the same argument was used against abolition itself: it would upset the established order of social relations. They effectively linked up women's rights and emancipation of the slaves.
Sojourner Truth: "Ain't I a Woman?"
Black women got it from both sides, as the life of Sojourner Truth shows. She was born a slave around 1797 in New York State and was not freed until 1827, under the "gradual emancipation" provisions of the state law. As a slave she was prevented from marrying the man she loved, who was brutally beaten for daring to visit her (they were owned by different masters). They were both forcibly married to other slaves. Her son was sold South as a small child, away from her. After she was freed, she lived a backbreaking existence in New York City, one of the more racist cities in the North and a center for the slave trade.
Sojourner Truth went to all the women's rights conventions. The famous story about her dates from 1853. The usual crowd of male hecklers had almost shut down the proceedings. The women were unable to answer their sneers of how delicate and weak women were. Sojourner Truth asked for the floor and got it, despite the opposition of a lot of the delegates to the presence of a black abolitionist. You have to keep in mind what this woman looked like in this gathering of ladies: she was six feet tall, nearly 60 years old, very tough and work-worn. She said:
"The man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place—and ain't I a woman?
"Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have born...children, and seen most of 'em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me—and ain't I a woman?"
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
Sojourner Truth put her finger on the heart of the contradiction between the stifling idealization of women and their oppression as housewives and mothers and exploitation as slaves and workers.
Women's Rights and the Abolitionist Movement
Support for women's rights was tenuous within the politically diverse anti-slavery movement. Many free-soilers were not anti-racist; some opposed slavery because they didn't want blacks around. Even some of the most dedicated abolitionists argued that "women's rights" could harm the anti-slavery cause, and in 1840 a split in the American Anti-Slavery Society was precipitated by the election of a woman to the leading body.
That same year at an international anti-slavery meeting in London, women members of the American delegation were denied their seats. In the audience was the young Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Out of this experience she decided to begin organizing for women's rights. Eight years later, in 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York the first women's rights convention in the world was held. At first Stanton wasn't going to put forward the vote as a demand—she was afraid it was too extreme. She had to be argued into it by Frederick Douglass. It was the only demand that didn't get unanimous support at the meeting; it was considered too radical.
The role of Douglass was not an accident. The best fighters for women's rights were not the Elizabeth Cady Stantons and the Susan B. Anthonys—the ones who "put women first"—but the left-wing abolitionists. The most militant advocates of black equality, the insurrectionist wing, the prophets of the Civil War, were also the most consistent fighters for women's rights, because they saw no division of interest between blacks and women. Frederick Douglass not only attended all the women's meetings, arguing effectively for full equality for women, but he brought the message elsewhere. He put forward resolutions for women's rights at black conventions, and they were passed. He used to advertise the meetings in his paper and print reports on the proceedings. His paper's motto was, "Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren."
The Fight Over the 14th Amendment
Stanton and Anthony had suspended their woman suffrage campaign for the duration of the war. They circulated petitions for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, which became the 13th Amendment. After the war Stanton and Anthony set up an Equal Rights Association to agitate for the vote for both blacks and women. They thought because of the broad social upheaval the time was ripe for woman suffrage. But this proved not to be the case.
The question here was citizenship rights under capitalist law, specifically voting. Compare it with how voting rights and citizenship were looked at in another revolution at the same time: the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian revolution (whose example dramatically reinforced ideological conservatism among the American bourgeoisie). The Commune subsumed nationality and citizenship to class considerations. Anybody who got elected from the working class, whatever country they were born in, sat on the legislative body of the Commune, while the industrialists and the bourgeois parliamentarians fled the city and were "disenfranchised" as their property was expropriated.
This was not on the agenda in the United States in the 1860s. The historical tasks of the Civil War and Reconstruction were to complete the unfinished bourgeois revolution, to resolve questions like slave versus free, national sovereignty and democratic rights. In his novel Gore Vidal calls Lincoln the Bismarck of his country, and this is justified. For example, before the Civil War, each state printed its own money. Greenbacks were first made by the Union to finance the war. The Supreme Court regularly said, "the United States are." Only after the war did this country's name become a singular noun—one national government.
But the big question was what to do with the newly emancipated slaves, and this question focused on two things: land and the vote. The debate over the vote represented, in legal terms, a struggle to determine what "citizenship" meant in relation to the state. Many Northern states did not allow blacks to vote, either. The 14th Amendment, which was passed to answer this question, says that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens of the nation and of the state in which they live, and that states can't abridge their "privileges and immunities" or deprive them of life, liberty, or property without "due process of law" or deny them "equal protection of the laws."
The Republican Party, which was founded as an anti-slavery party, contained within it many shades of political opinion. It has been argued that the only reason the Republicans gave the vote to blacks was to maintain political control over the states in the conquered Confederacy. This was true of some Republicans, but the men who politically dominated Congress during the period of Radical Reconstruction were committed revolutionary democrats, as observers of the time said of Thaddeus Stevens, who was called the "Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America." There were good reasons for Douglass' loyalty to the Republicans, given after much early hesitation and sometimes combined with scathing criticism.
But there were a lot of contradictions. The party that was trying to implement black rights was also the party that was massacring the Indians in the West, breaking workers' strikes in the North, presiding over a new scale of graft and corruption, and trying to annex Santo Domingo. In the fight to replace slavery with something other than a peonage system which mimicked bondage, the land question was key. And the robber barons—the moneylords, the triumphant ruling class-rapidly got pretty nervous about the campaign to confiscate the plantations and give them to the blacks. It was an assault on property rights, in line with what those uppity workers in the North were demanding: the eight-hour day, unions, higher wages. The ruling class was quite conscious about this; an 1867 New York Times editorial stated:
"If Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital...there can be no decent pretense for confining the task to the slave-holder of the South. It is a question, not of humanity, not of loyalty, but of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North.... An attempt to justify the confiscation of Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen, strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections. It concerns Massachusetts quite as much as Mississippi."
—Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War
This question was not resolved quickly, but over a couple of decades. But to collapse a lot of complex history, the revolutionary tide receded under the weight of triumphant capitalism. In 1877 Union troops were withdrawn from Southern occupation as part of the compromise making Rutherford B. Hayes president. The Civil War did not establish black equality, and the 14th and 15th Amendments which codified in law the war's revolutionary gains were turned into virtual dead letters. Nor did the Civil War liberate women, not even in a limited, legalistic sense. They continued to be denied even the simple right to vote (although in some districts in South Carolina in 1870, under the encouragement of black election officials, black women exercised the franchise for a brief time).
From the defeat of Reconstruction was spawned the kind of society we have now. On top of the fundamental class divisions in the U.S. is pervasive and institutionalized racial oppression. The black slaves were liberated from bondage only to become an oppressed race/color caste, segregated at the bottom of society— although today, unlike the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, blacks also constitute a key component of the American proletariat.
The Birth of American Feminism
Many Radical Republicans were critical of the 14th Amendment, which was a true child of compromise. Sumner called it "uncertain, loose, cracked, and rickety." Opposition centered on a loophole that allowed a state to opt for losing some representation in Congress if it chose to restrict black suffrage—and Southern states exploited this concession. But what Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't like about it was that for the first time, the word "male" appeared in the Constitution. And this fight was the birth of American feminism.
Of course the 14th Amendment should have given women the vote, and the importance of suffrage for black women was not inconsiderable. But a Civil War had just been fought on the question of black freedom, and it was indeed the "Negro's Hour," as many abolitionists argued. The biggest benefit for women's rights would have been to struggle for the biggest expansion possible in black freedom—to campaign for the land, for black participation in government on the state and federal level, to crush racism in the North, to integrate blacks in housing, education, jobs—to push to the limit the revolutionary possibilities of the period. But Stanton and Anthony sided with the right-wing
assault on the revolutionary opening that existed. They wrote:
"Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Ung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster's spelling book, making laws for [white abolitionists] Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble."
Stanton and Anthony embraced race-hatred and anti-immigrant bigotry against the Irish, blacks, Germans and Asians, grounded in class hostility.
They took this position at a time when blacks in the South faced escalating race-terror. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 to terrorize Southern blacks; hundreds were murdered. Republicans of both colors were targeted, and a special object of Klan hatred was the schoolhouse and the schoolteacher (many of them Northern women). In the North as well there was a struggle over the vote, over integrated schools. There was a fight to end Jim Crow in the Washington, D.C. trolley system (after the law desegregating streetcars was passed there in 1865, Sojourner Truth herself went around the capital boarding the cars of companies that were refusing to seat blacks). The freedmen's struggles for a fundamental transformation of race relations triggered in the North what some historians have called the first racist backlash. Frederick Douglass' home in Rochester, New York was burned to the ground; Republican and abolitionist leaders routinely received death threats.
So in this period of violent struggle over the race question, the feminists joined forces with the Democrats, the political party of the Klan and the Confederacy, who hoped to exploit the women's issue against blacks. Henry Blackwell (Lucy Stone's husband) argued that white women voting in the South would cancel out the black vote. Stanton and Anthony teamed up with George Train, a notorious racist, who financed their newspaper, Revolution. They adopted the slogan "educated suffrage"—that is, a literacy test for voters—which was deliberately formulated against non-English-speaking immigrants and ex-slaves.
Frederick Douglass made a valiant attempt to win the feminists over to support for the amendments at a meeting of the Equal Rights Association in 1869, where he argued for the urgency of the vote for blacks:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed to the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot."
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands" while imploring a redoubling of "our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." But by this point, a split was inevitable. The feminists blamed the Republican Party and the abolitionists for the defeat in Kansas of an 1867 referendum on woman suffrage. They decided that "men" could not be trusted, and for the first time argued that women must organize separately for their own rights. They even flirted with male exclusionism. The movement split in two, one maintaining a formally decent posture on the race question as a cover for doing nothing. The main wing led by Stanton and Anthony wanted to address broad issues, but their capitulation to racist reaction defined them.
They claimed the ballot would solve everything. Their paper was printed in a "rat" office (below union scale). Anthony urged women to be scabs to "better" their condition, then whined when the National Labor Congress refused to admit her as a delegate! Stanton said it proved the worst enemy of women's rights was the working man.
After Reconstruction went down to defeat, the first "feminists" dedicated themselves to the reactionary attempt to prove woman suffrage wouldn't rock the Jim Crow boat. But in the South, the restabilization of a system of overt racist injustice set the context for all social questions. In the South, any extension of the franchise was feared as a threat to "white supremacy" stability. By 1920, when woman suffrage was passed nationally— largely because of World War I which brought women into industry and social life—not a single Southern state had passed the vote for women, although almost every other state had some form of it.
Today, the bourgeois feminists like to hark back to the struggle over the 14th Amendment as proof there must be a separatist women's movement. They claim Stanton and Anthony as their political mothers. Let them have them! We stand in a different tradition: the heritage of Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, the Grimke sisters, of revolutionary insurrectionism against the class enemy. Today, to complete the unfinished tasks of the Civil War and emancipate women and blacks from social slavery requires a communist women's movement, part of a multiracial vanguard party fighting for workers power in the interests of all the oppressed.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1989 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
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Black Freedom, Women's Rights
and the Civil War
This article is based on a talk given by W&R associate editor Amy Rath at a public forum held 5 April 1988 at Howard University. For additional historical material on women in the anti-slavery struggle, see "The Grimke Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights" (W&R No. 29, Spring 1985) and "Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom" (W&R No. 32, Winter 1986).
The talk discusses the movement for women's rights in the U.S. prior to the Civil War, its link through the radical abolition movement with the fight against black slavery, and the destruction of that link to produce the antecedents of the present "feminists." It centers on the ideology of the antebellum abolitionists, the most far-sighted of whom saw that all democratic struggles were vitally linked and that deeply revolutionary changes would be required to establish equality. These men and women were not Marxists but bourgeois radicals of their time; for many, the primary political motivation was religion.
Northern anti-slavery activists espoused "free labor" and accepted the idea that if legal barriers to equality were removed, the American dream would be possible for anyone, given talent and hard work. In antebellum America, in the context of steady immigration and an expanding frontier, a propertyless farmhand could perhaps acquire land of his own, while a (white) laborer might look to becoming a small-scale employer of labor in a generation. But if the "free labor" ideology imagined a democratic political system of economic equals based on a society of skilled artisans and yeoman farmers, this model rapidly became a fiction. A capitalist class of Northern industrial, finance and railroad capitalists had the ascendancy. Though still a predominantly agricultural country, America was the fastest-growing industrial power (with the second-highest industrial output, after Britain). America was already the world's technological leader, very much feared as a competitor by Britain, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.
The slave society of the South existed in the framework of a powerful Northern industrial sector which purchased staple crops from the South, first of all cotton. The rich plantations which possessed the South's best land and dominated the region politically were built on a pre-capitalist class relationship of black chattel slavery; at the same time they were part of a money economy in the world's most dynamic capitalist country. The conflict of social systems between the ever more powerful North and the backward South was a profound contradiction heading for collision, exacerbated by America's undemocratic "states' rights" political system which had given the South disproportionate control of the national government (especially the presidency and Supreme Court) since Independence.
The Progressive Bourgeoisie and the Limits of Reconstruction
The "irrepressible conflict" exploded in the Civil War, in the course of which Lincoln, the Northern bourgeoisie's ablest political leader, found himself obliged to go much further than he had intended in the direction of adopting the emancipation program of the abolitionists. Fifteen years before, abolitionists had been viewed as an isolated, if noisy, crew of radical fanatics.
The Civil War smashed slavery and left behind in the South a chaotic situation and four million ex-slaves who had been promised "freedom." But the war and its aftermath underlined that a truly egalitarian radical vision of social reconstruction already could not be promoted by a capitalist ruling class.
In her talk, comrade Rath emphasized the birth of a "feminist" women's movement as a rightward split at a crucial moment in American history: the era of "Reconstruction." Reconstruction posed a possibility of socially revolutionary transformations in the South: the regional ruling class, based on the ownership of land and slaves, had been militarily defeated; under the occupying Northern power, political rights were exercised by the former slaves and those willing to be allied with them.
Reconstruction brought not only black enfranchisement but significant democratic reforms: the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention drafted the state's first divorce law, while Reconstruction legislatures established the South's first public schools and went to work on liberalizing the South's draconian penal codes and reforming the planters' property tax system (which had taxed the farmer's mule and the workman's tools while all but exempting the real wealth—land). But the Northern capitalists betrayed the promise of Reconstruction, allowing it to be physically smashed by forces such as the Ku Klux Klan, even though that meant the destruction of the Republican Party in the South.
Replacing slavery, a new system of racial subordination took shape: a refurbished system of labor discipline through such measures as one-year labor contracts and "vagrancy" laws to bind ex-slaves to the plantations, and a rigid system of Jim Crow segregation. The defeat of Reconstruction shaped the postwar South into modern times: the sharecropping, the poll taxes, convict labor (the chain gang), the "separate but equal" unequal facilities.
While the woman suffrage leaders described in comrade Rath's talk took a stand against the great democratic gains that hung in the balance, many women mobilized by the anti-slavery movement served honorably in Reconstruction, for example as freedmen's schoolteachers who risked their lives to participate in freeing black people from the chains of bondage.
During Reconstruction, debate raged over the agrarian question: the radical demand raised by the freed-men and destitute white Unionist Southerners that the secessionists' estates be confiscated and distributed to them. Some abolitionists saw that racial democracy could not be achieved if a class of whites continued to own the land where a class of blacks were laborers. They argued for justice to those who had been slaves (who created the wealth of the plantations, beginning by clearing the wilderness).
But the tide had turned: the triumphant Northern rulers would not permit such an attack on "property rights" (especially as Northerners directly and Northern banks were coming to own a good deal of Southern property). Fundamentally, the federal power reinvested political power in the hands of the former "best people" of the old Confederacy. In the sequel, intensive exploitation of black agricultural labor, rather than industrial development or capital investment in the modernization of agriculture, remained the basis of the Southern economy.
What was the alternative? Working-class power was shown by the 1848 and 1871 upheavals in Europe to be the alternative to bourgeois rule, as Marx and Engels explained from the Communist Manifesto onward, but conditions were not mature even in Europe for the small proletariat to seize and wield state power. In mid-19th century America, the Northern bourgeoisie under the pressure of a revolutionary Civil War possessed a genuinely progressive side, the basis for the abolitionists' support for the Republican Party. The abolitionists' great debates revolved around how far out in front of the progressive bourgeoisie they should be. There were "radicals" and those with a more "realistic" appraisal of what the Republican Party would support. Today, more than a century after Reconstruction, that debate is transcended. The ruling class long since passed firmly over to the side of reaction; the federal government is no defender of the oppressed. Those who look to find support for an egalitarian program in any wing of the ruling class are doomed to disappointment. To complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution is a responsibility of the modern working class.
When the post-Civil War suffragettes chose to focus on the narrowest political rights for middle-class women and turn their backs on the rights and survival of the most desperately oppressed, they prefigured all of today's "constituency" and "reform" politics which refuse to attack the profound class inequalities ingrained in capitalist society. Sojourner Truth's classic "Ain't I a Woman" speech (see below) today stands as a powerful indictment of these ladies as much as of the outright sexists she was debating. Those who renounce the revolutionary content of the demand for women's liberation so as to advance their schemes for election of female politicians or advancement of women in academia are direct descendants of those first "feminists" who refused to challenge the power structure of their time on behalf of justice for two million of their sisters who were freed slaves.
But there is another women's movement: the women who have joined in the front ranks of every revolutionary struggle on this planet, from the 19th-century radical abolitionists to the women workers who sparked the Russian Revolution to the communist women of today. When the October Revolution of 1917 smashed the old tsarist society in Russia, militant women were among the first recruits to communism in dozens of countries where women were oppressed by semi-feudal conditions and "customs." Young women radicalized around questions like women's education, the veil, wife-beating, religious obscurantism, arranged marriages, etc., recognized a road forward to uprooting social reaction and building a society freed from sexual, racial and class inequality. Our heroes are the revolutionary women who have shared in making all of revolutionary history, from the first moment that slaves rose up against the Roman Empire to the great struggles of today.
It was 1863, and the bloodiest war ever fought by the U.S. was raging. Abraham Lincoln had finally realized he must pronounce the destruction of slavery as the North's goal in this civil war. On 22 September 1862, his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declared that on the first of January, 1863, all slaves in the Confederacy "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, it turned the tide of battle. The war was now indisputably a war to end slavery, not simply to repair the Union. Soon thereafter, the government began to enlist blacks into the army; these ex-slaves and sons of ex-slaves tipped the military balance in favor of the Union. It was a matter of time until black soldiers singing "John Brown's Body" marched into Charleston, South Carolina—the "soul of secession," as Karl Marx called it-after Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea.
In May of the revolutionary year 1863, the first convention of the Women's Loyal National League met in New York City. Its most eminent speaker was a woman whose name is little known today: Angelina Grimke" Weld. As part of her address she gave a keen analysis of the war:
"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether
white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government...are
driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war "The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."
—Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina
A resolution was presented: "There can never be a true peace in this Republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all women are practically established." Angelina Grimke' defended it against those who thought it too radical:
"I rejoice exceedingly that that resolution would combine us with the negro. I feel that we have been with him— True, we have not felt the slaveholder's lash; true, we have not had our hands manacled, but our hearts have been crushed I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."
It was only after the Civil War that an ideology arose which was later named "feminism": the idea that the main division in society is sex. In response to the debate over the role of the newly freed slaves in U.S. society, the leaders of the woman suffrage movement—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—sided with the counterrevolutionary assault on Reconstruction. The birth of bourgeois feminism was part of a right-wing process which shattered the vision of the left wing of the revolutionary democracy into separate, feeble bourgeois reform movements.
The Second American Revolution
The Civil War was one of the great social revolutions in the history of the world, destroying the slaveholding class in the South and freeing the black slaves. Not only Marxists saw that. The best fighters of the day—the Grimke sisters, the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens—knew that the war would have to become a revolution against slavery before the North could win. They hated the feudalistic society of the South, with its degraded slaves, its cruelty, its arrogant, leisurely gentlemen planters, its impoverished rural whites, its lack of education, industry and general culture. The radical abolitionists wanted to wipe away that society, and also saw much wrong in the North, such as the subservience of women, and legal and social discrimination against blacks. Their ideology was to create a new order based on free labor and "equality before the law," a concept brought to the U.S. by the Radical Republican Charles Sumner out of his study of the 1789 French Revolution.
In Europe after the French Revolution the status of women was the most visible expression of the contradiction between capitalist society and its own ideals. But in the U.S. that was not so true, because of chattel slavery. The United States—the first country to proclaim itself a democratic republic—was the largest slaveholding country in the world, a huge historical contradiction which had to be resolved.
The Industrial Revolution
It was the Industrial Revolution, fundamentally, that generated what William Seward called the "Irrepressible Conflict." In broad historical terms the Industrial Revolution had created the material conditions for the elimination of slavery in society. Technological and social advances made possible a much more productive capitalist agriculture and industry. In 1854 the abolitionist clergyman Theodore Parker described slavery as "the foe to Northern Industry—to our mines, our manufactures, and our commerce...to our democratic politics in the State, our democratic culture in the school, our democratic work in the community" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom).
The Industrial Revolution had a contradictory effect on the condition of women. Production of goods had been primarily through cottage industry, but with the invention of the spinning jenny, the power loom and the steam engine, cottage industry was ended. The men left home to go to the factory, while women stayed home to do the housework, raise the children and to buy at the local store what once they had made at home.
Women's labor ceased to be productive labor in the strict Marxist sense. This is the material basis for the 19th-century ideology of the "women's sphere." While the material advances of the Industrial Revolution made life easier for women, it also locked them into the stifling confines of domesticity in the isolated nuclear family. Women also worked in factories, but even in the industries in which they were concentrated (in textile production they made up two-thirds of the labor force) generally they worked only for a few years before getting married.
The Fight for Women's Legal Rights
Slaves were a class, but women are a specially oppressed group dispersed through all social classes. Although all women were oppressed to some extent because of their position in the family, the class differences were fundamental between the black slave woman and the slave plantation mistress, or the Northern German-speaking laundress and the wife of the owner of the Pennsylvania iron mill. "Sisterhood" was as much a myth then as it is now. Women identified first with the class to which they belonged, determined by who their husbands or fathers were.
Before the Civil War, women were basically without any civil rights. They couldn't sue or be sued, they couldn't be on juries, all their property and earnings went to their husband or father. Although women did have the vote for a few years in New Jersey and Virginia after the American Revolution, this advance was quickly eliminated. (This was part of a general right-wing turn after the Revolution, when suffrage was restricted gradually through property qualifications. In New York State, for example, with some restrictions blacks could vote up to about 1821.) For the wealthy upper-class woman, this lack of legal rights loomed as a terrible injustice because it prevented her from functioning as a full member of the ruling class (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the mother of American feminism and the daughter of a judge, felt this keenly). For the working-class or slave woman, if her property legally belonged to her husband it didn't seem a problem— she didn't have any property.
Though the legal question was a small matter for poor and slave women, nevertheless legal injustice is not insignificant for Marxists, and it is bound up with multi-layered social oppression. This was true for the position of women in pre-Civil War society. Until the 1850s wife-beating was legal in most states. Divorce was almost impossible, and when it was obtained children went with the husband. The accepted attitude toward women was assumption of their "inferiority," and the Bible was considered an authority. When anesthesia was discovered in the 1840s, doctors opposed its use for childbirth, because that suffering was women's punishment for Eve's sin.
The Anti-Slavery Struggle and Democratic Rights
But how were women to fight for equal rights in this society divided between slave and free? Angelina Grimke' was precisely correct when she said, "until the negro gets his rights, we will never have ours." It was necessary to destroy chattel slavery, which was retarding the development of the whole society. The movement for women's rights developed in the North out of the struggle to abolish slavery. It could hardly have developed in the South. In the decades before the war, in response to the growing Northern anti-slavery agitation, the South was becoming more reactionary than ever: more fanatical in defense of the ideology of slavery and more openly repressive. There were wholesale assaults on basic democratic rights, from attacks on the rights of the small layer of free blacks, who were seen as a source of agitation and insurrection, to a ban on the distribution of abolitionist literature.
In the South, there were no public schools. It was illegal to teach slaves to read, and almost half of the entire Southern population was illiterate. But in the North over 90 percent of the residents could read and write. Girls and boys went to school in about the same proportions, the only country in the world where this was true. So while in the North women teachers were paid less than men, and women factory hands received one-quarter the wage of men, in the South there were few teachers at all, and few industrial workers.
As a young slave in Maryland, and later while he was trying to earn a living as a refugee in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass came to understand the common interests of all working people in the South, slaves and free blacks and whites. He learned a trade on the docks, where he experienced racist treatment from white workmen, who saw black labor as a threat to their jobs. But Douglass realized that the position of the workmen, too, against their boss was eroded and weakened by slavery and racism. As Marx said, "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." And indeed, the working-class movement met with little success in the antebellum U.S., whereas after the war there was an upsurge in unionism and labor struggle.
The vanguard of the abolitionist movement—the radical insurrectionist wing—believed in the identity of the interests of all the oppressed. John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the great activist of the Underground Railroad, and the Grimke sisters were all inspired by a vision of human equality based in revolutionary democracy. Although their egalitarian principle was based on a religious view and ours is based on a Marxist understanding of society, we honor their essential work in leading the anti-slavery struggle. The abolition of slavery did profoundly alter the United States, it did open the road to liberation by making possible the development of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard, which will establish justice by abolishing the exploitation of man by man.
The Grimke Sisters of South Carolina
Penetrating insights into the situation of women in pre-Civil War America came from women who were committed abolitionists. Sarah and Angelina Grimke are examples, as is Sojourner Truth who is better known today. The Grimke sisters were unusual members of the ruling class who defected to the other side. As daughters of one of South Carolina's most powerful slave-holding families, they had grown up in luxury, but left the South because of their revulsion for slavery. The Grimke sisters became famous in 1837-1838 as agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The power of their personal witness of the atrocities of the slave system drew huge audiences. The sisters were quick to point out that as upper-class white women, they had seen only the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves, and not the more brutal treatment of plantation hands in the fields. But one of the things they did know about was the sexual exploitation of women slaves and the brutal breakup of black families through the slave trade.
Because the sisters addressed the issues of sexual exploitation frankly and often, it was one of the issues the opposition used to try to shut them up. The clergy complained that the Grimke's brought up a subject "which ought not to be named"—how dare these delicate .blossoms of Southern womanhood talk about sex! The very idea of women speaking publicly represented an attack on the proper relationship between the sexes and would upset "women's place" in the home. Contemporary observers were shocked by the sight of women participating actively in the debates of the anti-slavery movement, as they did especially in New England, the birthplace of radical abolitionism. The Grimkes replied by pointing out that the same argument was used against abolition itself: it would upset the established order of social relations. They effectively linked up women's rights and emancipation of the slaves.
Sojourner Truth: "Ain't I a Woman?"
Black women got it from both sides, as the life of Sojourner Truth shows. She was born a slave around 1797 in New York State and was not freed until 1827, under the "gradual emancipation" provisions of the state law. As a slave she was prevented from marrying the man she loved, who was brutally beaten for daring to visit her (they were owned by different masters). They were both forcibly married to other slaves. Her son was sold South as a small child, away from her. After she was freed, she lived a backbreaking existence in New York City, one of the more racist cities in the North and a center for the slave trade.
Sojourner Truth went to all the women's rights conventions. The famous story about her dates from 1853. The usual crowd of male hecklers had almost shut down the proceedings. The women were unable to answer their sneers of how delicate and weak women were. Sojourner Truth asked for the floor and got it, despite the opposition of a lot of the delegates to the presence of a black abolitionist. You have to keep in mind what this woman looked like in this gathering of ladies: she was six feet tall, nearly 60 years old, very tough and work-worn. She said:
"The man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place—and ain't I a woman?
"Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have born...children, and seen most of 'em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me—and ain't I a woman?"
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
Sojourner Truth put her finger on the heart of the contradiction between the stifling idealization of women and their oppression as housewives and mothers and exploitation as slaves and workers.
Women's Rights and the Abolitionist Movement
Support for women's rights was tenuous within the politically diverse anti-slavery movement. Many free-soilers were not anti-racist; some opposed slavery because they didn't want blacks around. Even some of the most dedicated abolitionists argued that "women's rights" could harm the anti-slavery cause, and in 1840 a split in the American Anti-Slavery Society was precipitated by the election of a woman to the leading body.
That same year at an international anti-slavery meeting in London, women members of the American delegation were denied their seats. In the audience was the young Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Out of this experience she decided to begin organizing for women's rights. Eight years later, in 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York the first women's rights convention in the world was held. At first Stanton wasn't going to put forward the vote as a demand—she was afraid it was too extreme. She had to be argued into it by Frederick Douglass. It was the only demand that didn't get unanimous support at the meeting; it was considered too radical.
The role of Douglass was not an accident. The best fighters for women's rights were not the Elizabeth Cady Stantons and the Susan B. Anthonys—the ones who "put women first"—but the left-wing abolitionists. The most militant advocates of black equality, the insurrectionist wing, the prophets of the Civil War, were also the most consistent fighters for women's rights, because they saw no division of interest between blacks and women. Frederick Douglass not only attended all the women's meetings, arguing effectively for full equality for women, but he brought the message elsewhere. He put forward resolutions for women's rights at black conventions, and they were passed. He used to advertise the meetings in his paper and print reports on the proceedings. His paper's motto was, "Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren."
The Fight Over the 14th Amendment
Stanton and Anthony had suspended their woman suffrage campaign for the duration of the war. They circulated petitions for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, which became the 13th Amendment. After the war Stanton and Anthony set up an Equal Rights Association to agitate for the vote for both blacks and women. They thought because of the broad social upheaval the time was ripe for woman suffrage. But this proved not to be the case.
The question here was citizenship rights under capitalist law, specifically voting. Compare it with how voting rights and citizenship were looked at in another revolution at the same time: the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian revolution (whose example dramatically reinforced ideological conservatism among the American bourgeoisie). The Commune subsumed nationality and citizenship to class considerations. Anybody who got elected from the working class, whatever country they were born in, sat on the legislative body of the Commune, while the industrialists and the bourgeois parliamentarians fled the city and were "disenfranchised" as their property was expropriated.
This was not on the agenda in the United States in the 1860s. The historical tasks of the Civil War and Reconstruction were to complete the unfinished bourgeois revolution, to resolve questions like slave versus free, national sovereignty and democratic rights. In his novel Gore Vidal calls Lincoln the Bismarck of his country, and this is justified. For example, before the Civil War, each state printed its own money. Greenbacks were first made by the Union to finance the war. The Supreme Court regularly said, "the United States are." Only after the war did this country's name become a singular noun—one national government.
But the big question was what to do with the newly emancipated slaves, and this question focused on two things: land and the vote. The debate over the vote represented, in legal terms, a struggle to determine what "citizenship" meant in relation to the state. Many Northern states did not allow blacks to vote, either. The 14th Amendment, which was passed to answer this question, says that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens of the nation and of the state in which they live, and that states can't abridge their "privileges and immunities" or deprive them of life, liberty, or property without "due process of law" or deny them "equal protection of the laws."
The Republican Party, which was founded as an anti-slavery party, contained within it many shades of political opinion. It has been argued that the only reason the Republicans gave the vote to blacks was to maintain political control over the states in the conquered Confederacy. This was true of some Republicans, but the men who politically dominated Congress during the period of Radical Reconstruction were committed revolutionary democrats, as observers of the time said of Thaddeus Stevens, who was called the "Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America." There were good reasons for Douglass' loyalty to the Republicans, given after much early hesitation and sometimes combined with scathing criticism.
But there were a lot of contradictions. The party that was trying to implement black rights was also the party that was massacring the Indians in the West, breaking workers' strikes in the North, presiding over a new scale of graft and corruption, and trying to annex Santo Domingo. In the fight to replace slavery with something other than a peonage system which mimicked bondage, the land question was key. And the robber barons—the moneylords, the triumphant ruling class-rapidly got pretty nervous about the campaign to confiscate the plantations and give them to the blacks. It was an assault on property rights, in line with what those uppity workers in the North were demanding: the eight-hour day, unions, higher wages. The ruling class was quite conscious about this; an 1867 New York Times editorial stated:
"If Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital...there can be no decent pretense for confining the task to the slave-holder of the South. It is a question, not of humanity, not of loyalty, but of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North.... An attempt to justify the confiscation of Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen, strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections. It concerns Massachusetts quite as much as Mississippi."
—Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War
This question was not resolved quickly, but over a couple of decades. But to collapse a lot of complex history, the revolutionary tide receded under the weight of triumphant capitalism. In 1877 Union troops were withdrawn from Southern occupation as part of the compromise making Rutherford B. Hayes president. The Civil War did not establish black equality, and the 14th and 15th Amendments which codified in law the war's revolutionary gains were turned into virtual dead letters. Nor did the Civil War liberate women, not even in a limited, legalistic sense. They continued to be denied even the simple right to vote (although in some districts in South Carolina in 1870, under the encouragement of black election officials, black women exercised the franchise for a brief time).
From the defeat of Reconstruction was spawned the kind of society we have now. On top of the fundamental class divisions in the U.S. is pervasive and institutionalized racial oppression. The black slaves were liberated from bondage only to become an oppressed race/color caste, segregated at the bottom of society— although today, unlike the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, blacks also constitute a key component of the American proletariat.
The Birth of American Feminism
Many Radical Republicans were critical of the 14th Amendment, which was a true child of compromise. Sumner called it "uncertain, loose, cracked, and rickety." Opposition centered on a loophole that allowed a state to opt for losing some representation in Congress if it chose to restrict black suffrage—and Southern states exploited this concession. But what Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't like about it was that for the first time, the word "male" appeared in the Constitution. And this fight was the birth of American feminism.
Of course the 14th Amendment should have given women the vote, and the importance of suffrage for black women was not inconsiderable. But a Civil War had just been fought on the question of black freedom, and it was indeed the "Negro's Hour," as many abolitionists argued. The biggest benefit for women's rights would have been to struggle for the biggest expansion possible in black freedom—to campaign for the land, for black participation in government on the state and federal level, to crush racism in the North, to integrate blacks in housing, education, jobs—to push to the limit the revolutionary possibilities of the period. But Stanton and Anthony sided with the right-wing
assault on the revolutionary opening that existed. They wrote:
"Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Ung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster's spelling book, making laws for [white abolitionists] Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble."
Stanton and Anthony embraced race-hatred and anti-immigrant bigotry against the Irish, blacks, Germans and Asians, grounded in class hostility.
They took this position at a time when blacks in the South faced escalating race-terror. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 to terrorize Southern blacks; hundreds were murdered. Republicans of both colors were targeted, and a special object of Klan hatred was the schoolhouse and the schoolteacher (many of them Northern women). In the North as well there was a struggle over the vote, over integrated schools. There was a fight to end Jim Crow in the Washington, D.C. trolley system (after the law desegregating streetcars was passed there in 1865, Sojourner Truth herself went around the capital boarding the cars of companies that were refusing to seat blacks). The freedmen's struggles for a fundamental transformation of race relations triggered in the North what some historians have called the first racist backlash. Frederick Douglass' home in Rochester, New York was burned to the ground; Republican and abolitionist leaders routinely received death threats.
So in this period of violent struggle over the race question, the feminists joined forces with the Democrats, the political party of the Klan and the Confederacy, who hoped to exploit the women's issue against blacks. Henry Blackwell (Lucy Stone's husband) argued that white women voting in the South would cancel out the black vote. Stanton and Anthony teamed up with George Train, a notorious racist, who financed their newspaper, Revolution. They adopted the slogan "educated suffrage"—that is, a literacy test for voters—which was deliberately formulated against non-English-speaking immigrants and ex-slaves.
Frederick Douglass made a valiant attempt to win the feminists over to support for the amendments at a meeting of the Equal Rights Association in 1869, where he argued for the urgency of the vote for blacks:
"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed to the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot."
—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle
At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands" while imploring a redoubling of "our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." But by this point, a split was inevitable. The feminists blamed the Republican Party and the abolitionists for the defeat in Kansas of an 1867 referendum on woman suffrage. They decided that "men" could not be trusted, and for the first time argued that women must organize separately for their own rights. They even flirted with male exclusionism. The movement split in two, one maintaining a formally decent posture on the race question as a cover for doing nothing. The main wing led by Stanton and Anthony wanted to address broad issues, but their capitulation to racist reaction defined them.
They claimed the ballot would solve everything. Their paper was printed in a "rat" office (below union scale). Anthony urged women to be scabs to "better" their condition, then whined when the National Labor Congress refused to admit her as a delegate! Stanton said it proved the worst enemy of women's rights was the working man.
After Reconstruction went down to defeat, the first "feminists" dedicated themselves to the reactionary attempt to prove woman suffrage wouldn't rock the Jim Crow boat. But in the South, the restabilization of a system of overt racist injustice set the context for all social questions. In the South, any extension of the franchise was feared as a threat to "white supremacy" stability. By 1920, when woman suffrage was passed nationally— largely because of World War I which brought women into industry and social life—not a single Southern state had passed the vote for women, although almost every other state had some form of it.
Today, the bourgeois feminists like to hark back to the struggle over the 14th Amendment as proof there must be a separatist women's movement. They claim Stanton and Anthony as their political mothers. Let them have them! We stand in a different tradition: the heritage of Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, the Grimke sisters, of revolutionary insurrectionism against the class enemy. Today, to complete the unfinished tasks of the Civil War and emancipate women and blacks from social slavery requires a communist women's movement, part of a multiracial vanguard party fighting for workers power in the interests of all the oppressed.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Art And The Bolshevik Revolution
Click on the headline to link to a “Wikipedia” entry for the Russian Constructivists.
March Is Women’s History Month
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1982 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest- for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
The Russian Avant-Garde:
Art and the Bolshevik Revolution
by Vladimir Zelinski
Two recent American exhibitions—"The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930—New Perspectives" 1980 national tour, and this winter's Guggenheim Museum show in New York City, part of the George Costakis collection—reveal an incredibly vital and heterogeneous movement. In the period from roughly 1916-17 to 1924, the paintings, constructions and industrial designs of a host of talented artists placed Russian art, before (and thereafter) a derivative and provincial backwater, at the leading edge of 20th century creativity in the arts. The whole Bauhaus school, in particular, is incomprehensible without the influence of the Russian Constructivists and "production artists," transmitted by such figures as Kandinsky and El Lissitzky.
This movement was largely ignored in the West for almost half a century until its first major Western exhibit in London in 1971. Today such exhibits are promoted and armed with a mendacious anti-Communist "message": the bourgeois media disappear the social relation of this art to the October Revolution and pretend that it was repressed in revolutionary Russia under Lenin and Trotsky. In fact the avant-garde was literally disappeared—but only under triumphant Stalinism. During the consolidation of Stalinist bureaucratic rule, the revolutionary artists were transformed into non-persons and then plucked from obscurity and subjected to frenzied attacks on their supposed degenerate "bourgeois formalism" by Stalin's culture boss Zhdanov.
The reason is simple: though art is not "political" in a direct sense, this art in its own way is political dynamite. It gives the lie to the equation of Leninism with Stalinism, connived at by capitalist ideologues and Stalinist hacks alike ever since the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky was smashed. Time has not defused the political impact of these fine works. Their exhibition in the USSR today would reveal the stunning mediocrity of "official art" (as well as the sorry state of "dissident" and "non-conformist" artistic production). It would also inevitably raise deeply embarrassing and (for the usurping bureaucrats) unanswerable questions. What happened to these artists? Why was genuinely great art possible in Russia in the early '20s, in the midst of incredible backwardness and massive poverty, but not now, under conditions of relative material plenty and technological progress?
Art and Society
Since bourgeois patrons were obviously lacking, clearly the government and cultural institutions of the infant Soviet workers state had to play a central role in supporting this art, an art whose abstractness and aura of airiness and radiant optimism place it at far remove from the dogmas and products of Stalinist "socialist realism."
Russian " revolutionary" art did not, of course, spring from the head of Lenin. The bourgeois media would like to suggest that there is little if any relationship between the Bolsheviks' successful October Revolution and the cultural explosion of 1917-25. But there are in fact numerous ties, going back all the way to the 1850s artistic revolt against the hitherto dominant neo¬classical tradition. This is not to say that Russian painters and writers were necessarily Marxist. Rather they inevitably mirrored the travail of a society groaning beneath the yoke of a tsarist autocracy incapable of effecting Russia's passage into the mainstream of bourgeois economic, political and cultural development.
The author of the main work leading to the founding of the Russian realist school, The Aesthetic Relation of An to Reality, was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, better known among revolutionaries for his seminal novel What Is To Be Done?, which so profoundly moved and influenced a generation of Russian revolutionaries, Lenin among them. Chernyshevsky's belief that it was necessary to forestall "the accusation that art is an empty diversion" through imbuing it with social content was characteristic of the radical intelligentsia.
Thus the "Wanderers" grouping of artists founded under Chernyshevsky's influence in 1870grew along lines strikingly similar to those of overtly political groupings. Many of its members, like the Populists, "went to the people" and elevated the Russian peasant, mired in his immemorial priest-ridden backwardness, as hero of the new art. Wealthy Slavophile merchants supported artistic colonies (Abramtsevo and Talashkino) whose residents sought inspiration in a William Morris-ish arts-and-craftsy revival of moribund Byzantine tradition or the primitive folk art of lubok (chapbook) woodcuts.
Around the turn of the century a symbolist school arose influenced by the fin-du-siecle "decadents" of the West. Although reflecting the increasing cultural sophistication of their patrons, such artists as Viktor Borrisov-Mussatov succeeded only in producing yet paler copies of the already effete Puvis de Chavannes, elegiac paintings of abandoned country mansions and empty-gazed demoiselles—works which with hindsight one is tempted to assert expressed (like much of Chekhov) the consciousness of a merchant/ landholding gentry lacking an historic future. And art-for-art's-sake withdrawal from social concerns also arose, partly reflecting Russian artists' sense of futility at the intelligentsia's failure to transform society by literary means.
This "World of Art," centered around the multi-talented Aleksandr Benois, nonetheless laid the foundations for future developments, mounting a series of exhibitions that introduced contemporary European art to Russian painters and young Russian artists to a wider public.
The Great Experiment
The first expressions of the coming breakthrough appeared between 1905-1917, with the rise of a gifted and innovative younger generation of painters. Their openness to experimentation, derived partly from the German expressionists and French cubists, arose also from the sudden sense of release generated even in defeat by the great proletarian upsurge of the 1905 Revolution. (See "Before 'Socialist Realism' in the Soviet Union," W&R No. 13, Winter 1976-77, for a discussion of this burst of creativity in other artistic areas, notably dance and theater.)
This feeling that the whole anachronistic edifice of tsarism was crumbling inspired in these artists a will to radically reshape art and its relation to society. Seeking through scientific inquiry into the interaction of planes, volumes, color, overall structuring of the canvas and their effects on the viewer to discover laws inherent to art, they rejected the naturalistic tradition (in which even cubism remained based). This was the program that, despite factional differences, united the Russian avant-garde right down to their repression by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Hence the rationalism of this art, its tendency toward a radical geometricizing simplification.
The art of the Russian avant-garde thus to an extent anticipated the revolution to whose ideals it lent expression: a fundamental faith in man's capacity to rationally reshape society, doing away with the material and intellectual compulsion springing from the anarchy and inequality of capitalist class rule. Nor is this so strange as it might seem: tsarism had only gotten away by the skin of its teeth. And successful revolutions, just because they are so deeply rooted in the needs of
society, tend to cast their shadow before them. Thus that severe archetype of French revolutionary art, David's Oath of the Horatii with its celebration of stoic bourgeois civic morality, was painted in 1784-85, a period in which a whole crop of masterpieces in fact appeared.
New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer commented on the Guggenheim show (New York Times Magazine, 11 October 1981):
"In Popova's oeuve, as in that of many other members of the Russian avant-garde, we first encounter a Cubist vocabulary that looks more or less familiar But then
something happens. A vision—mystical or political or, as was more often the case, some combination of the two—intervenes to alter the inherited vocabulary and set it on a new course, and we are suddenly confronted with forms, textures, ideas that owe little or nothing to the styles that set them on their way."
Unlike the anti-communist Kramer, whose puzzlement results from ideological blinders, we Trotskyists know what the "something" was that seemingly just "happened." It was the October Revolution. Kramer cannot admit its profoundly liberating effect upon society from top to bottom, because to do so would dispel the assiduously cultivated bourgeois myth that the proletarian triumph of 1917 was a Bolshevik putsch from above. But indeed this cultural explosion affected not just Popova but a host of young artists, all of whom just "happened" to make their creative breakthroughs in the crucial years 1917-18. One must look to the great bourgeois upheavals—the Italian Renaissance, the French Revolution—for a parallel to this sort of artistic and societal self-confidence.
The Guggenheim Exhibition
One came away from the powerful Guggenheim exhibit convinced of the viability of modernist "abstract" art. What is it about these paintings that produces so marked an effect? First there is the overwhelming vitality. This was a cultural explosion in the making, with an incredible variety of styles and techniques. Times critic Kramer has difficulty reining in his incredulity in the face of these artists' prescience: "Her" [Olga Rozanova's]untitled abstract painting of a vertical green stripe, dating from 1917, was produced more than 30 years before the American painter Barnett Newman began work on the paintings of a very similar design that won him a place of renown— Ivan Kliun
.vividly anticipated more recent developments—in this case, the kind of Minimal Art...that enjoyed a great vogue in the 1960s."
The problems being confronted here are those which non-objectivist painters have faced right up to the present, while the solutions advanced by the Russians are both elegant and convincing. These paintings really work. They convey a sense of life and vitality, the result of a concern for painterly texture and the most subtle color gradations. Virtually all these artists cultivated a bright palette that, along with the sheer elegance of their works, their clarity and subtlety of structure, the sense of artistic problems being met and solved, makes them the tangible conveyors across 60 years of the vigor, hope and optimism of revolutionary Russia.
The large number of women artists in the Guggenheim exhibit is itself a powerful index. Kramer comments:
"The Russian avant-garde was the only art movement of its kind in which the achievements of women were unquestionably equal to those of their male colleagues, a circumstance that appears to owe more to the enlightened attitudes of the pre-Revolutionary liberal intelligentsia than to any measures initiated by the Soviet regime after the Revolution."
Kramer's liberal banalities beg the question. But the fact remains: the only artistic movement in which women were, in Kramer's words, "unquestionably equal" was associated with the only proletarian revolution in history. In the atmosphere of the triumphant Revolution women, many of whom might have remained Sunday painters, their art an ornament on their role as dutiful mothers, had the confidence to devote themselves wholly to art. For every Natalia Goncharova, well-known before the Revolution, there are a half dozen who were unknown at its outset and who would, without its liberating effect, in all likelihood have remained so.
The Bolsheviks and Art
What the Bolsheviks did after 1917 was basically to provide the material/organizational framework and then leave artists and writers to work out artistic problems on their own. In the face of decades of bourgeois propaganda to the contrary, it cannot be sufficiently stressed that this was the standpoint of literally all authoritative Party leaders. Trotsky's "Communist Policy Toward Art" thus simply voices the standard attitude:
"Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian methods are not the same as the artistic. The party leads the proletariat but not the historic processes of history. There are domains in which the party leads, directly and imperatively. There are domains in which it only cooperates. There are, finally, domains in which it only orients itself. The domain of art is not one in which the party is called upon to command. It can and must protect and help it, but it can lead it only indirectly...."
Anatoly Lunacharsky, head of Narkompros, the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment, and thus directly in charge of cultural affairs, held identical views: "Of course the state does not have the intention of imposing revolutionary ideas and tastes upon artists. Such compulsion could result only in fake-revolutionary art, since the prime requisite of genuine art is the honesty/sincerity of the artist" ("Revolution and Art," October 1920).
Lunacharsky sought to prevent the dominance of any one artistic clique, which meant above all in post-1919 Russia combatting the influence of the "Proletkult," led by one-time God-seeker and now arch-workerist Bogdanov. Against the Proletkult insistence that art be immediately relevant and comprehensible to Russia's incredibly backward masses (a movement which fed straight into Stalinist "socialist realism"), Lunacharsky insisted "... we cannot adapt our literature to the low cultural level of the broad masses of peasants or even to that of the workers themselves. This would be a mammoth error." Like Trotsky, he refused to accede to the workerists' obscurantist rejection of all past art as simply "bourgeois' insisting that "new proletarian and socialist art can be built only on the foundation of all our acquisitions from the past." This debate mirrored the crucial battle being waged by Lenin and Trotsky, in war-ravaged and starving Russia, for the need to learn to develop and wield the techniques of advanced capitalist production, as against the primitive and Utopian sloganeering of groups like the "Workers Opposition."
Of course, for many members of the Russian avant-garde, such was the attractive power of the Bolshevik-led transformation of society that pure art was not enough. Many became Agitprop artists, creators of revolutionary posters and decorators of the brightly-painted propaganda trains that brought the message of liberation to the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union. Essentially these artists' task was political propaganda, attempting first of all to raise the political, and not primarily the artistic, consciousness of their viewers. Another group of artists, at the Institute of Artistic Culture founded by Kandinsky sought to create an overall environment in which the most everyday objects (the ubiquitous Russian tea service, textiles, chairs, clothing, Popova's elegant designs for cigar and cigarette cases) would have worked along with a new architecture and constructivist theater to educate and raise the taste and perceptiveness of Russia's culturally deprived masses. The intention was not a debased "proletarian" art a la Proletkult, but to create the conditions for a classless art, as the workers overcame their decades of material and cultural want, and the achievement of plenty allowed the attainment of socialism.Still many avant-garde artists in post-Revolution
Russia eschewed any effort at direct political relevance. In the scant decade from the October Revolution to the consolidation of Stalinist bureaucratic rule in the late '20s, many Russian artists felt themselves, for the only time in their history, free to devote themselves to art pure and simple, without the imperative need to voice an overt social message. Yet in the manner that great art captures the social matrix from which it springs/ the works of these artists are imbued with optimism and are animated by the hopes of an entire society.
Stalinist Degeneration
What happened instead was the bitter disappointment of those hopes: Stalinist degeneration, the result of the conjuncture of Russian backwardness with the devastation first of World War I and then the civil war, plus—critically—the failure to extend the revolution to advanced Europe, as in Germany in 1923. The work of the avant-garde artists began to disappear from public view, just as the Bolshevik opposition to Stalin disappeared from view. The artists were fortunate even to survive.
That supreme genius of abstraction, Kasimir Malevich, was reduced in the '30s to painting sacchar¬ine landscapes and insipid portraits of smiling village maidens. One can imagine the despair and self-loathing with which this artist must have had to contend. Such surviving members of the Russian avant-garde as Costakis was able to meet in the late '40s and '50s were then either bitter or demoralized. This is not the least of the crimes of the Stalinists: the deliberate destruction of a whole generation of outstanding painters and writers, the transformation of "socialist" (as in "socialist realism") into a term of opprobrium among artists. Under tsarism Russian art and literature had suffered profoundly from the compulsion to make social, not artistic, concerns central. Today, in the deformed and degenerated workers states under the rule of a parasitic bureaucratic caste, any work of art or literature that does not confront this central problem—the need to oust the usurping bureaucracy— is felt to be inherently mendacious. It lies by omission, the artist knows this, and it shows in his work. For literature this has meant that virtually the sole genre open to serious Soviet writers is satire, for which the opportunities certainly are legion. But even here the works, with a few exceptions like Voinovich, tend to be heavy-handed and obvious, like Aleksandr Zinoviev's aptly named The Yawning Heights. They too are massively deformed, presenting a black-and-white view of society profoundly at odds with the multivalent complexity of great art: socialist realism with the plus and minus signs reversed.
Polish film director Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron, currently being shown in the U.S., is a striking case in point. As a piece of hack propaganda for the clerical-reactionary Solidarnos'c', Man of Iron necessarily lies at its heart. It falsely portrays the movement which led to Solidarnos': as the continuation of previous working-class struggles against the Stalinist regime and celebrates the marriage of the workers and intellectuals as presided over by the Catholic church. Unlike the talented director's Man of Marble, a serious work of art probing the contradictions of post-war Polish society, Man of Iron expresses simply the anti-Communist lies of Solidarnos"— and not surprisingly, this has also severely hurt Wajda's art. As we said in Workers Vanguard: "Wajda rejected what Stalinism has done to truth and art, but Man of Iron embraces the lies of anti-Communism and of the church. Of Polish youth, he has said, 'People who are 20 today need to know, and to understand, why their parents are lying.' That is so. They also need to know why one of their leading artists cannot tell the truth" ("Man of Iron: The Gospel According to Solidarnos's"," WV No. 297, 22 January).
The Struggle for Socialism
It is essential to understand that something precious remains of the social gains, the great inspiring goals, which made the explosive, if brief, flowering of art in the Soviet Union possible. Despite its Stalinist degeneration and the line drawn in blood of revolutionaries and workers that separates it from the Soviet Union of Lenin, the USSR today still rests on the foundations of socialized property established by the working class when it took state power. That these foundations are in every sphere massively undermined by the Stalinist usurpers only heightens the urgency of the international working class taking up the defense and extension of this historic victory. To truly defend the socialized property forms of the USSR, and to drive the liberating force of authentic communism forward, it, is necessary to forge an international vanguard party of the proletariat to overthrow capitalism worldwide through socialist revolution and oust the Stalinist bureaucracies of the deformed workers states through political revolution.
It is of course impossible to say what forms art would take in a genuinely socialist society, one freed of bureaucratic misrule and building on the foundations of technological plenty, not the generalized want of Russia in the '20s—and not in a few countries surrounded by hostile imperialism, but in a world socialist order. Nonetheless it seems safe to predict that whatever its form, the art of a triumphant socialism will partake of the radiance and optimism so triumphantly captured by the Russian avant-garde in the short time granted it."
March Is Women’s History Month
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1982 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest- for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
The Russian Avant-Garde:
Art and the Bolshevik Revolution
by Vladimir Zelinski
Two recent American exhibitions—"The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930—New Perspectives" 1980 national tour, and this winter's Guggenheim Museum show in New York City, part of the George Costakis collection—reveal an incredibly vital and heterogeneous movement. In the period from roughly 1916-17 to 1924, the paintings, constructions and industrial designs of a host of talented artists placed Russian art, before (and thereafter) a derivative and provincial backwater, at the leading edge of 20th century creativity in the arts. The whole Bauhaus school, in particular, is incomprehensible without the influence of the Russian Constructivists and "production artists," transmitted by such figures as Kandinsky and El Lissitzky.
This movement was largely ignored in the West for almost half a century until its first major Western exhibit in London in 1971. Today such exhibits are promoted and armed with a mendacious anti-Communist "message": the bourgeois media disappear the social relation of this art to the October Revolution and pretend that it was repressed in revolutionary Russia under Lenin and Trotsky. In fact the avant-garde was literally disappeared—but only under triumphant Stalinism. During the consolidation of Stalinist bureaucratic rule, the revolutionary artists were transformed into non-persons and then plucked from obscurity and subjected to frenzied attacks on their supposed degenerate "bourgeois formalism" by Stalin's culture boss Zhdanov.
The reason is simple: though art is not "political" in a direct sense, this art in its own way is political dynamite. It gives the lie to the equation of Leninism with Stalinism, connived at by capitalist ideologues and Stalinist hacks alike ever since the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky was smashed. Time has not defused the political impact of these fine works. Their exhibition in the USSR today would reveal the stunning mediocrity of "official art" (as well as the sorry state of "dissident" and "non-conformist" artistic production). It would also inevitably raise deeply embarrassing and (for the usurping bureaucrats) unanswerable questions. What happened to these artists? Why was genuinely great art possible in Russia in the early '20s, in the midst of incredible backwardness and massive poverty, but not now, under conditions of relative material plenty and technological progress?
Art and Society
Since bourgeois patrons were obviously lacking, clearly the government and cultural institutions of the infant Soviet workers state had to play a central role in supporting this art, an art whose abstractness and aura of airiness and radiant optimism place it at far remove from the dogmas and products of Stalinist "socialist realism."
Russian " revolutionary" art did not, of course, spring from the head of Lenin. The bourgeois media would like to suggest that there is little if any relationship between the Bolsheviks' successful October Revolution and the cultural explosion of 1917-25. But there are in fact numerous ties, going back all the way to the 1850s artistic revolt against the hitherto dominant neo¬classical tradition. This is not to say that Russian painters and writers were necessarily Marxist. Rather they inevitably mirrored the travail of a society groaning beneath the yoke of a tsarist autocracy incapable of effecting Russia's passage into the mainstream of bourgeois economic, political and cultural development.
The author of the main work leading to the founding of the Russian realist school, The Aesthetic Relation of An to Reality, was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, better known among revolutionaries for his seminal novel What Is To Be Done?, which so profoundly moved and influenced a generation of Russian revolutionaries, Lenin among them. Chernyshevsky's belief that it was necessary to forestall "the accusation that art is an empty diversion" through imbuing it with social content was characteristic of the radical intelligentsia.
Thus the "Wanderers" grouping of artists founded under Chernyshevsky's influence in 1870grew along lines strikingly similar to those of overtly political groupings. Many of its members, like the Populists, "went to the people" and elevated the Russian peasant, mired in his immemorial priest-ridden backwardness, as hero of the new art. Wealthy Slavophile merchants supported artistic colonies (Abramtsevo and Talashkino) whose residents sought inspiration in a William Morris-ish arts-and-craftsy revival of moribund Byzantine tradition or the primitive folk art of lubok (chapbook) woodcuts.
Around the turn of the century a symbolist school arose influenced by the fin-du-siecle "decadents" of the West. Although reflecting the increasing cultural sophistication of their patrons, such artists as Viktor Borrisov-Mussatov succeeded only in producing yet paler copies of the already effete Puvis de Chavannes, elegiac paintings of abandoned country mansions and empty-gazed demoiselles—works which with hindsight one is tempted to assert expressed (like much of Chekhov) the consciousness of a merchant/ landholding gentry lacking an historic future. And art-for-art's-sake withdrawal from social concerns also arose, partly reflecting Russian artists' sense of futility at the intelligentsia's failure to transform society by literary means.
This "World of Art," centered around the multi-talented Aleksandr Benois, nonetheless laid the foundations for future developments, mounting a series of exhibitions that introduced contemporary European art to Russian painters and young Russian artists to a wider public.
The Great Experiment
The first expressions of the coming breakthrough appeared between 1905-1917, with the rise of a gifted and innovative younger generation of painters. Their openness to experimentation, derived partly from the German expressionists and French cubists, arose also from the sudden sense of release generated even in defeat by the great proletarian upsurge of the 1905 Revolution. (See "Before 'Socialist Realism' in the Soviet Union," W&R No. 13, Winter 1976-77, for a discussion of this burst of creativity in other artistic areas, notably dance and theater.)
This feeling that the whole anachronistic edifice of tsarism was crumbling inspired in these artists a will to radically reshape art and its relation to society. Seeking through scientific inquiry into the interaction of planes, volumes, color, overall structuring of the canvas and their effects on the viewer to discover laws inherent to art, they rejected the naturalistic tradition (in which even cubism remained based). This was the program that, despite factional differences, united the Russian avant-garde right down to their repression by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Hence the rationalism of this art, its tendency toward a radical geometricizing simplification.
The art of the Russian avant-garde thus to an extent anticipated the revolution to whose ideals it lent expression: a fundamental faith in man's capacity to rationally reshape society, doing away with the material and intellectual compulsion springing from the anarchy and inequality of capitalist class rule. Nor is this so strange as it might seem: tsarism had only gotten away by the skin of its teeth. And successful revolutions, just because they are so deeply rooted in the needs of
society, tend to cast their shadow before them. Thus that severe archetype of French revolutionary art, David's Oath of the Horatii with its celebration of stoic bourgeois civic morality, was painted in 1784-85, a period in which a whole crop of masterpieces in fact appeared.
New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer commented on the Guggenheim show (New York Times Magazine, 11 October 1981):
"In Popova's oeuve, as in that of many other members of the Russian avant-garde, we first encounter a Cubist vocabulary that looks more or less familiar But then
something happens. A vision—mystical or political or, as was more often the case, some combination of the two—intervenes to alter the inherited vocabulary and set it on a new course, and we are suddenly confronted with forms, textures, ideas that owe little or nothing to the styles that set them on their way."
Unlike the anti-communist Kramer, whose puzzlement results from ideological blinders, we Trotskyists know what the "something" was that seemingly just "happened." It was the October Revolution. Kramer cannot admit its profoundly liberating effect upon society from top to bottom, because to do so would dispel the assiduously cultivated bourgeois myth that the proletarian triumph of 1917 was a Bolshevik putsch from above. But indeed this cultural explosion affected not just Popova but a host of young artists, all of whom just "happened" to make their creative breakthroughs in the crucial years 1917-18. One must look to the great bourgeois upheavals—the Italian Renaissance, the French Revolution—for a parallel to this sort of artistic and societal self-confidence.
The Guggenheim Exhibition
One came away from the powerful Guggenheim exhibit convinced of the viability of modernist "abstract" art. What is it about these paintings that produces so marked an effect? First there is the overwhelming vitality. This was a cultural explosion in the making, with an incredible variety of styles and techniques. Times critic Kramer has difficulty reining in his incredulity in the face of these artists' prescience: "Her" [Olga Rozanova's]untitled abstract painting of a vertical green stripe, dating from 1917, was produced more than 30 years before the American painter Barnett Newman began work on the paintings of a very similar design that won him a place of renown— Ivan Kliun
.vividly anticipated more recent developments—in this case, the kind of Minimal Art...that enjoyed a great vogue in the 1960s."
The problems being confronted here are those which non-objectivist painters have faced right up to the present, while the solutions advanced by the Russians are both elegant and convincing. These paintings really work. They convey a sense of life and vitality, the result of a concern for painterly texture and the most subtle color gradations. Virtually all these artists cultivated a bright palette that, along with the sheer elegance of their works, their clarity and subtlety of structure, the sense of artistic problems being met and solved, makes them the tangible conveyors across 60 years of the vigor, hope and optimism of revolutionary Russia.
The large number of women artists in the Guggenheim exhibit is itself a powerful index. Kramer comments:
"The Russian avant-garde was the only art movement of its kind in which the achievements of women were unquestionably equal to those of their male colleagues, a circumstance that appears to owe more to the enlightened attitudes of the pre-Revolutionary liberal intelligentsia than to any measures initiated by the Soviet regime after the Revolution."
Kramer's liberal banalities beg the question. But the fact remains: the only artistic movement in which women were, in Kramer's words, "unquestionably equal" was associated with the only proletarian revolution in history. In the atmosphere of the triumphant Revolution women, many of whom might have remained Sunday painters, their art an ornament on their role as dutiful mothers, had the confidence to devote themselves wholly to art. For every Natalia Goncharova, well-known before the Revolution, there are a half dozen who were unknown at its outset and who would, without its liberating effect, in all likelihood have remained so.
The Bolsheviks and Art
What the Bolsheviks did after 1917 was basically to provide the material/organizational framework and then leave artists and writers to work out artistic problems on their own. In the face of decades of bourgeois propaganda to the contrary, it cannot be sufficiently stressed that this was the standpoint of literally all authoritative Party leaders. Trotsky's "Communist Policy Toward Art" thus simply voices the standard attitude:
"Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian methods are not the same as the artistic. The party leads the proletariat but not the historic processes of history. There are domains in which the party leads, directly and imperatively. There are domains in which it only cooperates. There are, finally, domains in which it only orients itself. The domain of art is not one in which the party is called upon to command. It can and must protect and help it, but it can lead it only indirectly...."
Anatoly Lunacharsky, head of Narkompros, the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment, and thus directly in charge of cultural affairs, held identical views: "Of course the state does not have the intention of imposing revolutionary ideas and tastes upon artists. Such compulsion could result only in fake-revolutionary art, since the prime requisite of genuine art is the honesty/sincerity of the artist" ("Revolution and Art," October 1920).
Lunacharsky sought to prevent the dominance of any one artistic clique, which meant above all in post-1919 Russia combatting the influence of the "Proletkult," led by one-time God-seeker and now arch-workerist Bogdanov. Against the Proletkult insistence that art be immediately relevant and comprehensible to Russia's incredibly backward masses (a movement which fed straight into Stalinist "socialist realism"), Lunacharsky insisted "... we cannot adapt our literature to the low cultural level of the broad masses of peasants or even to that of the workers themselves. This would be a mammoth error." Like Trotsky, he refused to accede to the workerists' obscurantist rejection of all past art as simply "bourgeois' insisting that "new proletarian and socialist art can be built only on the foundation of all our acquisitions from the past." This debate mirrored the crucial battle being waged by Lenin and Trotsky, in war-ravaged and starving Russia, for the need to learn to develop and wield the techniques of advanced capitalist production, as against the primitive and Utopian sloganeering of groups like the "Workers Opposition."
Of course, for many members of the Russian avant-garde, such was the attractive power of the Bolshevik-led transformation of society that pure art was not enough. Many became Agitprop artists, creators of revolutionary posters and decorators of the brightly-painted propaganda trains that brought the message of liberation to the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union. Essentially these artists' task was political propaganda, attempting first of all to raise the political, and not primarily the artistic, consciousness of their viewers. Another group of artists, at the Institute of Artistic Culture founded by Kandinsky sought to create an overall environment in which the most everyday objects (the ubiquitous Russian tea service, textiles, chairs, clothing, Popova's elegant designs for cigar and cigarette cases) would have worked along with a new architecture and constructivist theater to educate and raise the taste and perceptiveness of Russia's culturally deprived masses. The intention was not a debased "proletarian" art a la Proletkult, but to create the conditions for a classless art, as the workers overcame their decades of material and cultural want, and the achievement of plenty allowed the attainment of socialism.Still many avant-garde artists in post-Revolution
Russia eschewed any effort at direct political relevance. In the scant decade from the October Revolution to the consolidation of Stalinist bureaucratic rule in the late '20s, many Russian artists felt themselves, for the only time in their history, free to devote themselves to art pure and simple, without the imperative need to voice an overt social message. Yet in the manner that great art captures the social matrix from which it springs/ the works of these artists are imbued with optimism and are animated by the hopes of an entire society.
Stalinist Degeneration
What happened instead was the bitter disappointment of those hopes: Stalinist degeneration, the result of the conjuncture of Russian backwardness with the devastation first of World War I and then the civil war, plus—critically—the failure to extend the revolution to advanced Europe, as in Germany in 1923. The work of the avant-garde artists began to disappear from public view, just as the Bolshevik opposition to Stalin disappeared from view. The artists were fortunate even to survive.
That supreme genius of abstraction, Kasimir Malevich, was reduced in the '30s to painting sacchar¬ine landscapes and insipid portraits of smiling village maidens. One can imagine the despair and self-loathing with which this artist must have had to contend. Such surviving members of the Russian avant-garde as Costakis was able to meet in the late '40s and '50s were then either bitter or demoralized. This is not the least of the crimes of the Stalinists: the deliberate destruction of a whole generation of outstanding painters and writers, the transformation of "socialist" (as in "socialist realism") into a term of opprobrium among artists. Under tsarism Russian art and literature had suffered profoundly from the compulsion to make social, not artistic, concerns central. Today, in the deformed and degenerated workers states under the rule of a parasitic bureaucratic caste, any work of art or literature that does not confront this central problem—the need to oust the usurping bureaucracy— is felt to be inherently mendacious. It lies by omission, the artist knows this, and it shows in his work. For literature this has meant that virtually the sole genre open to serious Soviet writers is satire, for which the opportunities certainly are legion. But even here the works, with a few exceptions like Voinovich, tend to be heavy-handed and obvious, like Aleksandr Zinoviev's aptly named The Yawning Heights. They too are massively deformed, presenting a black-and-white view of society profoundly at odds with the multivalent complexity of great art: socialist realism with the plus and minus signs reversed.
Polish film director Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron, currently being shown in the U.S., is a striking case in point. As a piece of hack propaganda for the clerical-reactionary Solidarnos'c', Man of Iron necessarily lies at its heart. It falsely portrays the movement which led to Solidarnos': as the continuation of previous working-class struggles against the Stalinist regime and celebrates the marriage of the workers and intellectuals as presided over by the Catholic church. Unlike the talented director's Man of Marble, a serious work of art probing the contradictions of post-war Polish society, Man of Iron expresses simply the anti-Communist lies of Solidarnos"— and not surprisingly, this has also severely hurt Wajda's art. As we said in Workers Vanguard: "Wajda rejected what Stalinism has done to truth and art, but Man of Iron embraces the lies of anti-Communism and of the church. Of Polish youth, he has said, 'People who are 20 today need to know, and to understand, why their parents are lying.' That is so. They also need to know why one of their leading artists cannot tell the truth" ("Man of Iron: The Gospel According to Solidarnos's"," WV No. 297, 22 January).
The Struggle for Socialism
It is essential to understand that something precious remains of the social gains, the great inspiring goals, which made the explosive, if brief, flowering of art in the Soviet Union possible. Despite its Stalinist degeneration and the line drawn in blood of revolutionaries and workers that separates it from the Soviet Union of Lenin, the USSR today still rests on the foundations of socialized property established by the working class when it took state power. That these foundations are in every sphere massively undermined by the Stalinist usurpers only heightens the urgency of the international working class taking up the defense and extension of this historic victory. To truly defend the socialized property forms of the USSR, and to drive the liberating force of authentic communism forward, it, is necessary to forge an international vanguard party of the proletariat to overthrow capitalism worldwide through socialist revolution and oust the Stalinist bureaucracies of the deformed workers states through political revolution.
It is of course impossible to say what forms art would take in a genuinely socialist society, one freed of bureaucratic misrule and building on the foundations of technological plenty, not the generalized want of Russia in the '20s—and not in a few countries surrounded by hostile imperialism, but in a world socialist order. Nonetheless it seems safe to predict that whatever its form, the art of a triumphant socialism will partake of the radiance and optimism so triumphantly captured by the Russian avant-garde in the short time granted it."
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