Click On Title To Link To "Wikipedia"'s Entry For The Fall Of Saigon And A Famous Photograph Of The Evacuation Of The United States Embassy In The Wake Of The North Vietnamese Army Advances On Saigon.
Markin comment:
This is a repost of last year's 34th anniversary commemoration and the points below still apply, perhaps more so in light of Democratic president Obama's troops escalations in Afghanistan since then.
****
April 30th Marks The 35th Anniversary Of The Military Victory Of The North Vietnamese Army/South Vietnamese National Liberation Front With The Fall Of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City).
Other years I have used this occasion to review some work directly related to that victory from the view point of highlighting some exploit of the victors in that war- our side. One should not underestimate the importance of that victory by a determined, if outgunned military force, in crimping the style of American imperial policy for a significant period (and some would argue its continuing effect today). One should also note, sadly, that this event (always dramatically visualized in the mind’s eye by those pictures of the helicopters evacuating American and other personnel from the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy) the last clear cut anti-capitalist victory that we have been able to celebrate. That, in itself, is cause for reflection.
This year, with the almost daily growing evidence by the Obama administration that it is seeking to escalate the American presence in the quagmire that is Afghanistan beyond any rational necessity, I wish to review the memoir of one of the American architects of the American escalation in Vietnam, Secretary of War Robert Strange McNamara. As McNamara’s version of the Vietnam saga unfolds, and not incidentally or accidentally his craven attempt to reshape the history of his involvement in that process as well, one cannot help but see that the same sense of American hubris is at play now. As always to be on the safe side here the slogan remains- Obama- All U.S./Allied Troops Out Of Iraq and Afghanistan Now!
The Fog Of War, Part II- War Secretary Robert McNamara’s View Of His Handiwork in Vietnam
Book Review
In Retrospect: The Tragedy And Lessons Of Vietnam, Robert Strange McNamara with Brain VanDeMark, Random House, 1995
Anyone who had caught the Friday March 27, 2009 headlines is aware that the Democratic Party-run Obama government has called for some 4,000 additional troops for Afghanistan and what they, euphemistically, call civilian support teams in order to bolster the sagging regime of “Mayor of Kabul” Karzai. Those numbers are in addition to the 17,000 extras already committed by the Obama regime in February. Does the word escalation seem appropriate here?
One of the problems of having gone through the Vietnam experience in my youth (including periods of lukewarm support for American policy under John F. Kennedy, a hands-off attitude in the early Lyndon B. Johnson years and then full-bore opposition under the late Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford regimes) is a tendency to view today’s American imperial policy in the same by-the-numbers approach as I took as a result of observing the Vietnam War as it unfolded. There are differences, some of them hugely so, between Vietnam and Afghanistan. Just as, I have previously noted in this space, there are differences between Vietnam and the recently “completed” Iraq War. (Hey, I’m just going by what the media tells me is going on. They wouldn’t lead us astray, would they?)
But, I keep getting this eerie feeling in the back of my neck every time I hear, or see, anything concerning Afghanistan coming out of this new Obama administration. They appear clueless, yet are determined to forge ahead with this policy that can only lead to the same kind of quagmire than Vietnam and Iraq turned into. That is where the analogies to Vietnam do connect up. In this regard, I have recently been re-reading Kennedy/Johnson War Secretary Robert Strange (that’s his middle name, folk, I didn’t make it up and didn’t need to) McNamara’s memoirs, written in 1995, of his central role in the development of Vietnam policy, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam”.
Obviously McNamara has put his own ‘spin’ on his personal role then in order to absolve himself (a little) before history. That is to be expected. What comes through crystal clear, however, because in the final analysis McNamara still doesn’t get it, is that when you’re the number one imperial power all the decisions you make are suppose to fall into place for your benefit because you represent the “good guys”. Regardless of what you do, or do not, know about the internal workings of the situation at hand. The Kennedy/Johnson administrations were almost totally ignorant of the internal working of Vietnamese society. That is why I have that eerie, very eerie, feeling about this Obama war policy.
In the normal course of events former high level bureaucrats in American presidential administrations usually save their attempts at self-justification for high ticket published memoirs or congenial `softball' speaking tours and conferences. In short, they prefer to preach to the choir at retail prices. Apparently, Cold Warrior extraordinaire Secretary of War Robert Strange McNamara felt that such efforts were very necessary in his case and hence he had to go to the prints in order to whitewash his role in the history of his times. Despite an apparent agreement with his “ghost writer” not to cover certain subjects and be allowed to present his story his way it is always good to catch a view of how the other side operates. It ain't pretty.
After a lifetime of relative public silence, at the age of 8o something, McNamara decided to give his take on events in which he was a central figure like dealing with the fact of American imperial military superiority in the post- World War II period, dealing with the Russians and the fight for American nuclear superiority during the Cold War, the ill-conceived Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the later Cuban Missile crisis and above all his role in the escalation of the wars in Southeast Asia, primarily Vietnam.
Very little here focuses on his time at the World Bank, a not unimportant omission that would highlight my point that he might have changed his clothing in the course of his career but not his mindset. While those of us interested in learning the lessons of history have long understood that to know the political enemy is the beginning of wisdom one will not find much here that was not infinitely better covered by the late journalist David Halberstam in his classic “The Best and The Brightest”.
McNamara has chosen to present his story in the form of parables, or rather, little vignettes about the “lessons” to be drawn from experiences (eleven in all by the way). Thus, we are asked to sit, embarrassingly, through McNamara's freshman course in revisionist history as he attempts to take himself from the cold-hearted Cold Warrior and legitimate “war criminal” to the teddy-bearish old man who has learned something in his life- after a lifetime of treachery. Yet, like that freshman course there are things to be learned despite the professor and more to learn, if only by reading between the lines, than he or she wanted to express.
McNamara presents his take by dividing the Vietnam War buildup, at least at the executive level, into periods; the early almost passive Kennedy days; the post Kennedy assassination period when Lyndon Johnson was trying to be all things to all men; the decisive post-1964 election period; and, various periods of fruitless and clueless escalation. It is this process that is, almost unwittingly, the most important to take from this world. Although McNamara, at the time of writing was an older and wiser man, when he had power he went along with ever step of the “hawks”, civilian and military. He led no internal opposition, and certainly not public one. This is the classic “good old boys” network where one falls on one’s sword when the policy turns wrong. And he is still scratching his head over why masses of anti-war protesters chanted “war criminal” when they confronted him with his deeds. And then listen to the latest screeds by current War Secretary Gates concerning Afghanistan. It will sound very familiar.
In the end, if one took his story at face value, one could only conclude that he was just trying to serve his bosses the best way he could and if things went wrong it was their fault. Nothing new there, though. Henry Kissinger has turned that little devise into an art form. Teary-eyed at the end McNamara might be as he acknowledges his role in the mass killings of his time, but beware of a wolf in sheep's clothing. Yet, you need to read this book if you want to understand how these guys (and gals) defended their state then, and now.
As is always appropriate on international working class holidays and days of remembrance here is the song most closely associated with that movement “The Internationale” in English, French and German. I will not vouch for the closeness of the translations but certainly of the spirit. Workers Of The World Unite!
The Internationale [variant words in square brackets]
Arise ye workers [starvelings] from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We'll change henceforth [forthwith] the old tradition [conditions]
And spurn the dust to win the prize.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we'll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They'll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We'll shoot the generals on our own side.
No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E'er the thieves will out with their booty [give up their booty]
And give to all a happier lot.
Each [those] at the forge must do their duty
And we'll strike while the iron is hot.
________________________________________
L'Internationale
Debout les damnés de la terre
Debout les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère
C'est l'éruption de la fin
Du passe faisons table rase
Foules, esclaves, debout, debout
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout
C'est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain (bis)
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain
Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes
Décrétons le salut commun
Pour que le voleur rende gorge
Pour tirer l'esprit du cachot
Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge
Battons le fer quand il est chaud
L'état comprime et la loi triche
L'impôt saigne le malheureux
Nul devoir ne s'impose au riche
Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux
C'est assez, languir en tutelle
L'égalité veut d'autres lois
Pas de droits sans devoirs dit-elle
Egaux, pas de devoirs sans droits
Hideux dans leur apothéose
Les rois de la mine et du rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose
Que dévaliser le travail
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande
Ce qu'il a crée s'est fondu
En décrétant qu'on le lui rende
Le peuple ne veut que son dû.
Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans
Appliquons la grève aux armées
Crosse en l'air, et rompons les rangs
S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales
A faire de nous des héros
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux
Ouvriers, paysans, nous sommes
Le grand parti des travailleurs
La terre n'appartient qu'aux hommes
L'oisif ira loger ailleurs
Combien, de nos chairs se repaissent
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours
Un de ces matins disparaissent
Le soleil brillera toujours.
________________________________________
Die Internationale
Wacht auf, Verdammte dieser Erde,
die stets man noch zum Hungern zwingt!
Das Recht wie Glut im Kraterherde
nun mit Macht zum Durchbruch dringt.
Reinen Tisch macht mit dem Bedranger!
Heer der Sklaven, wache auf!
Ein nichts zu sein, tragt es nicht langer
Alles zu werden, stromt zuhauf!
Volker, hort die Signale!
Auf, zum letzten Gefecht!
Die Internationale
Erkampft das Menschenrecht
Es rettet uns kein hoh'res Wesen
kein Gott, kein Kaiser, noch Tribun
Uns aus dem Elend zu erlosen
konnen wir nur selber tun!
Leeres Wort: des armen Rechte,
Leeres Wort: des Reichen Pflicht!
Unmundigt nennt man uns Knechte,
duldet die Schmach langer nicht!
In Stadt und Land, ihr Arbeitsleute,
wir sind die starkste Partei'n
Die Mussigganger schiebt beiseite!
Diese Welt muss unser sein;
Unser Blut sei nicht mehr der Raben
und der machtigen Geier Frass!
Erst wenn wir sie vertrieben haben
dann scheint die Sonn' ohn' Unterlass!
Friday, April 30, 2010
*From The International Communist League- Once Again On Haiti- A Repudiation- A Guest Commentary
Click on the headline to link to an "American Left History" blog entry, dated February 20, 2010, a polemic concerning the question of the timing of the call for U.S./U.N. withdrawal from Haiti between the International Communist League and the Internationalist Group.
Markin comment:
I am not privy to the internal workings of the International Communist League or of the Spartacist League/U.S. or of all their motivations behind issuing this repudiation. Obviously the tasks of a left organization, including its internal functioning, and that of a left individual militant are of different orders. However I am not persuaded, on a first reading of this repudiation of their earliest position on U.S./U.N. withdrawal from Haiti, that they were wrong to NOT raise the issue of withdrawal in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. That, in any case, was my own position at the time and although I have been wrong politically more times than I like to admit I do not think that it was wrong in that short window of time. I will, however, think about this one some more based on the issues raised in the statement. U.S./U.N Troops Out Of Haiti Now!
********
27 April 2010
Statement of the International Executive Committee of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
Repudiating Our Position on Haiti Earthquake
A Capitulation to U.S. Imperialism
In its articles on the Haitian earthquake, Workers Vanguard, the newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S., committed a betrayal of the fundamental principle of opposition to one’s “own” imperialist rulers. In addition to justifying the U.S. imperialist troops as essential to the aid effort, these articles polemicized against the principled and correct position of demanding the immediate withdrawal of the troops. This line was carried in a number of presses in other ICL sections, becoming the de facto line of the International Communist League. Without a public accounting and correction, we would be far down the road to our destruction as a revolutionary party. From the beginning the only revolutionary internationalist position was to demand that all U.S./UN troops get out of Haiti!
In our article in WV No. 951 (29 January), repeated in subsequent issues of the newspaper, we baldly stated:
“The U.S. military is the only force on the ground with the capacity—e.g., trucks, planes, ships—to organize the transport of what food, water, medical and other supplies are getting to Haiti’s population. And they’re doing it in the typical piggish U.S. imperialist manner. We have always opposed U.S. and UN occupations in Haiti and everywhere—and it may become necessary to call for U.S./UN out of Haiti in the near future—but we are not going to call for an end to such aid as the desperate Haitian masses can get their hands on.”
The International Executive Committee of the ICL repudiates this betrayal of our revolutionary program. As stated in the SL/U.S. Programmatic Statement: “We unconditionally oppose all U.S. military intervention—and U.S. military bases—abroad, and defend the colonial, semicolonial and other smaller, less developed countries in the face of U.S./UN attack and embargo.”
Even in very belatedly raising the call for “All U.S./UN Troops Out of Haiti Now!” in WV No. 955 (26 March), we continued to evade and reject the principle of opposition to the U.S. imperialist occupation of neocolonial Haiti. Moreover this article stated: “As we made clear in our article, ‘Haiti Earthquake Horror: Imperialism, Racism and Starvation’ (WV No. 951, 29 January), while we were not for the U.S. military going into Haiti, neither were we going to demand, in the immediate aftermath of that horrific natural disaster, the immediate withdrawal of any forces that were supplying such aid as was reaching the Haitian masses.” In fact, our earlier article had not clearly stated that we were not for the U.S. troops going in nor did it even call the U.S. military takeover what it was.
The U.S. military invasion was designed to provide a “humanitarian” face-lift to bloody U.S. imperialism and was aimed at securing U.S. military control in Haiti and reasserting American imperialist domination over the Caribbean, including against imperialist rivals like France. In failing to oppose the invasion, we also ignored the particular danger this posed to the Cuban deformed workers state (as well as to the bourgeois nationalist-populist regime of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela). We accepted Washington’s line that the provision of aid was inextricably linked to the U.S. military takeover and thus helped to sell the myth peddled by the Democratic Party Obama administration that this was a “humanitarian” mission. Our statement that “it may become necessary to call for U.S./UN out of Haiti in the near future” (emphasis added) amounted to giving conditional support to U.S. military intervention. As one leading party comrade argued, the only difference between the position we took and August 4, 1914, when the German Social Democrats voted war credits to the German imperialist rulers at the outset of the First World War, is that this was not a war.
Thus we gutted the revolutionary internationalist essence of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution linking the fight for social and national liberation to the struggle for proletarian state power both in neocolonial and in more advanced countries. This means educating the proletariat in North America, and internationally, that its class interests lie in actively championing the fight against the imperialist domination of Haiti. Instead our articles did the opposite, promoting illusions in U.S. imperialist “democracy” as the savior of the Haitian people. We all but echoed Barack Obama as he dispatched imperialist combat troops, including elements of the 82nd Airborne Division and a Marine expeditionary unit. One doubts that we could so easily have taken such a position if the Republican Bush administration were still in the White House.
In its latest article, “SL Twists and Turns on Haiti” (Internationalist, 9 April), the centrist Internationalist Group (IG) writes: “While support to imperialist occupation is a small step for reformists, who only seek to modify imperialist policies rather than to bring down the imperialist system, in the case of the SL/ICL it should be harder to digest.” Indeed it is. For its part, the IG treated the earthquake as an opening for revolution in Haiti, asserting: “This small but militant proletariat can place itself at the head of the impoverished urban and rural masses seeking to organize their own power, particularly at present where the machinery of the capitalist state is largely reduced to rubble and a few marauding bands of police” (“Haiti: Workers Solidarity, Yes! Imperialist Occupation, No!” Internationalist, 20 January).
Instead of simply exposing the IG’s Third Worldist fantasies, we concentrated in our polemics on zealous apologies for the U.S. imperialist military intervention, a position to the right of the IG. These centrist apologists for Third World nationalism quite correctly characterized our position as “social imperialist”—socialist in words, support for imperialism in deeds. This is a bitter pill to swallow. Only through a savage indictment of our line can we avoid the alternative of going down the road that led the founders of the IG to defect from our organization in the pursuit of forces other than the proletariat. In their case, this has ranged from remnants of the Stalinist bureaucracy that sold out to imperialist counterrevolution in the DDR to Latin American nationalists and left-talking trade-union bureaucrats.
In the context of polemics with the IG, Workers Vanguard misused the authority of the revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky in order to alibi support to an imperialist occupation. In his 1938 article “Learn to Think,” Trotsky argued that one should not always put a minus where the bourgeoisie puts a plus. He was referring not to a military occupation force but to instances where an imperialist government might send military aid to anti-colonialist fighters. Moreover, Trotsky’s reference in this article to workers fraternizing with an army called in to fight a fire manifestly did not refer to a situation like Haiti where U.S. imperialist troops were invading a neocolonial country, an act which Leninists unconditionally oppose on principle.
However, neither do revolutionaries foster illusions in such non-military aid as capitalist governments may provide. In responding to the U.S. imperialist invasion of Haiti following the earthquake, we would have done well to look to the position of our Australian section in 2005 responding to the imperialist “aid” intervention in Indonesia, specifically the secessionist province of Aceh, following the tsunami. Demanding “Australian/all imperialist military/cops get out of Aceh now!” an article in Australasian Spartacist titled “Australian Imperialists Seize on Tsunami Catastrophe” (No. 190, Autumn 2005) indicted imperialist aid programs. The article pointed out that “whatever short-term benefit a part of them may provide to a small number of oppressed people,” such aid is “always aimed at reinforcing neocolonial subjugation of the Third World masses.”
The “Politics of the Possible”
From the time of our tendency’s inception as a left opposition within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the early 1960s, we have recognized that national isolation must in short order destroy any subjectively revolutionary formation, not least one subjected to the pressures of operating in the heartland of world imperialism, the United States. Genuine proletarian internationalism means disciplined international collaboration, without which we cannot successfully counter the powerful pull of nationalist opportunism.
The handmaiden to our embellishment of U.S. imperialist intervention was the abrogation of international democratic centralism. The role of propaganda as the scaffolding of a revolutionary party is to publish the line of the party as decided through discussion and motions by the party leadership. Prior to going into print opposing the call for “troops out of Haiti” in WV No. 951, the SL/U.S. Political Bureau and the International Secretariat (the resident administrative body of the IEC) abdicated responsibility by not holding an organized discussion and vote, instead setting our line through informal consultation. However, once the line was published in Workers Vanguard it was picked up by many of the ICL’s other sectional presses, indicating that there was little initial disagreement.
A meeting of the I.S. on March 18 did at last vote to call for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. and United Nations troops. However, the motions adopted at that meeting, which became the basis for the article in WV No. 955, reaffirmed that “we were correct in not calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.” In stating that “the particular exceptional circumstances that obtained two months ago no longer exist,” the motions also continued to insist that conditional defense of the U.S. military invasion was correct in the immediate conjuncture of a natural disaster. Moreover, while criticizing the formulation that the U.S. military was the only force on the ground with the wherewithal to deliver aid, the I.S. motions did not mandate a public correction of this statement. This kind of dishonesty was condemned by James P. Cannon, founder of American Trotskyism. In addressing a situation where the Trotskyist SWP at its 1954 convention needed to acknowledge mistakes, he noted: “You know, the Stalinists make more changes, and more rapid and drastic changes, than any other party in history. But they never say: ‘We made a mistake.’ They always say: ‘The situation has changed.’ We should be more precise and more honest.”
Menshevism often takes the guise of “realism” and “expediency.” Looking to come up with a “concrete solution” in a situation where there was no such solution from a proletarian revolutionary vantage point, we capitulated. What our small revolutionary party had to put forward was a proletarian internationalist perspective for the liberation of Haiti, above all through opposition to our “own” imperialist rulers. In the immediate situation, the only concrete expression of such a program was negative—to demand that any and all Haitian refugees be allowed into the U.S. with full citizenship rights, to oppose any deportations of Haitians who had made it here and above all to demand all U.S./UN troops out.
Our articles distorted reality in order to justify the American military presence. We correctly criticized the reformists for spreading illusions in the imperialist governments by demanding that they provide “aid, not troops” but our own response was worse. Our articles presented U.S. military intervention as the only “realistic” way for the Haitian masses to get “aid” and claimed demagogically that withdrawal of U.S. combat troops “would result in mass death through starvation.” This was to treat the question not from the standpoint of Marxist program, but through the liberal lens of “disaster relief.” Michael Harrington—the former leader of the Democratic Socialists of America and adviser to the “war on poverty” programs of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Democratic Party administration—captured the core of such a social-democratic worldview with the expression, “the left wing of the possible.”
The “politics of the possible” is a palpable pressure in the period of post-Soviet reaction, where revolution—or even, particularly in the U.S., militant class struggle—appears remote and there is an overwhelming absence of resonance for our political views. There is a yawning abyss between what we stand for and the consciousness of the working class and young radicals, even those who claim to be socialist. As we have noted, it has been very difficult to maintain our revolutionary continuity and very easy to have it destroyed.
The Fight to Maintain a Revolutionary Perspective
In fighting against the Cochranite opposition in the then-revolutionary American Socialist Workers Party in the early 1950s, James P. Cannon argued:
“The revolutionary movement, under the best conditions, is a hard fight, and it wears out a lot of human material. Not for nothing has it been said a thousand times in the past: ‘The revolution is a devourer of men.’ The movement in this, the richest and most conservative country in the world, is perhaps the most voracious of all.
“It is not easy to persist in the struggle, to hold on, to stay tough and fight it out year after year without victory; and even, in times such as the present, without tangible progress. That requires theoretical conviction and historical perspective as well as character. And, in addition to that, it requires association with others in a common party.”
— “Trade Unionists and Revolutionists,” 11 May 1953
The example of the degeneration of the SWP from a revolutionary party through centrism to abject reformism is instructive. The party endured more than a decade of stagnation and isolation during the anti-Communist witchhunt. Seeing their role reduced essentially to a holding operation in the citadel of U.S. imperialism, aging party cadre like those in the Cochran wing gave up on a revolutionary perspective. The SWP majority under Cannon and Farrell Dobbs fought to preserve the revolutionary continuity of Trotskyism against this liquidationism. But they themselves were not immune from the deforming pressures that led the Cochranites to split.
Four years later, in 1957, the SWP supported the introduction of federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas—the end result of which was the crushing of local black self-defense efforts against the howling racist mobs fighting school integration. Painting U.S. troops as reliable defenders of black people engendered significant opposition within the party in the 1950s, particularly from Richard Fraser whose program of revolutionary integrationism as the road to black freedom in the U.S. we take as our own. But the wrong line was never corrected and the view of the U.S. imperialist army as the only “realistic” force to defend civil rights protesters in the Jim Crow South against racist terror deepened. By 1964 the SWP had adopted the grotesque campaign slogan, “Withdraw the Troops from Viet Nam and Send Them to Mississippi!” By 1965, the SWP had thrown overboard the last remnant of a revolutionary opposition to imperialism, promoting the reformist lie that a classless peace movement could stop U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants.
The young SWP cadre in the Revolutionary Tendency who fought the party’s degeneration were the founding leaders of our organization. Recognizing where the SWP went, and holding it up as a mirror of where we could go without correcting our mistakes and the outright betrayal of our revolutionary internationalist program in response to the Haiti earthquake, is part of the fight to preserve this continuity with Cannon’s revolutionary party that extends back to Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks.
But the ability to make such a correction is hardly cause for celebration. It merely lays the basis for political rectification. We crossed the class line and the urgent necessity is to reassert and struggle to maintain the proletarian internationalist program of Leninism.
—27 April 2010
Markin comment:
I am not privy to the internal workings of the International Communist League or of the Spartacist League/U.S. or of all their motivations behind issuing this repudiation. Obviously the tasks of a left organization, including its internal functioning, and that of a left individual militant are of different orders. However I am not persuaded, on a first reading of this repudiation of their earliest position on U.S./U.N. withdrawal from Haiti, that they were wrong to NOT raise the issue of withdrawal in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. That, in any case, was my own position at the time and although I have been wrong politically more times than I like to admit I do not think that it was wrong in that short window of time. I will, however, think about this one some more based on the issues raised in the statement. U.S./U.N Troops Out Of Haiti Now!
********
27 April 2010
Statement of the International Executive Committee of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
Repudiating Our Position on Haiti Earthquake
A Capitulation to U.S. Imperialism
In its articles on the Haitian earthquake, Workers Vanguard, the newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S., committed a betrayal of the fundamental principle of opposition to one’s “own” imperialist rulers. In addition to justifying the U.S. imperialist troops as essential to the aid effort, these articles polemicized against the principled and correct position of demanding the immediate withdrawal of the troops. This line was carried in a number of presses in other ICL sections, becoming the de facto line of the International Communist League. Without a public accounting and correction, we would be far down the road to our destruction as a revolutionary party. From the beginning the only revolutionary internationalist position was to demand that all U.S./UN troops get out of Haiti!
In our article in WV No. 951 (29 January), repeated in subsequent issues of the newspaper, we baldly stated:
“The U.S. military is the only force on the ground with the capacity—e.g., trucks, planes, ships—to organize the transport of what food, water, medical and other supplies are getting to Haiti’s population. And they’re doing it in the typical piggish U.S. imperialist manner. We have always opposed U.S. and UN occupations in Haiti and everywhere—and it may become necessary to call for U.S./UN out of Haiti in the near future—but we are not going to call for an end to such aid as the desperate Haitian masses can get their hands on.”
The International Executive Committee of the ICL repudiates this betrayal of our revolutionary program. As stated in the SL/U.S. Programmatic Statement: “We unconditionally oppose all U.S. military intervention—and U.S. military bases—abroad, and defend the colonial, semicolonial and other smaller, less developed countries in the face of U.S./UN attack and embargo.”
Even in very belatedly raising the call for “All U.S./UN Troops Out of Haiti Now!” in WV No. 955 (26 March), we continued to evade and reject the principle of opposition to the U.S. imperialist occupation of neocolonial Haiti. Moreover this article stated: “As we made clear in our article, ‘Haiti Earthquake Horror: Imperialism, Racism and Starvation’ (WV No. 951, 29 January), while we were not for the U.S. military going into Haiti, neither were we going to demand, in the immediate aftermath of that horrific natural disaster, the immediate withdrawal of any forces that were supplying such aid as was reaching the Haitian masses.” In fact, our earlier article had not clearly stated that we were not for the U.S. troops going in nor did it even call the U.S. military takeover what it was.
The U.S. military invasion was designed to provide a “humanitarian” face-lift to bloody U.S. imperialism and was aimed at securing U.S. military control in Haiti and reasserting American imperialist domination over the Caribbean, including against imperialist rivals like France. In failing to oppose the invasion, we also ignored the particular danger this posed to the Cuban deformed workers state (as well as to the bourgeois nationalist-populist regime of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela). We accepted Washington’s line that the provision of aid was inextricably linked to the U.S. military takeover and thus helped to sell the myth peddled by the Democratic Party Obama administration that this was a “humanitarian” mission. Our statement that “it may become necessary to call for U.S./UN out of Haiti in the near future” (emphasis added) amounted to giving conditional support to U.S. military intervention. As one leading party comrade argued, the only difference between the position we took and August 4, 1914, when the German Social Democrats voted war credits to the German imperialist rulers at the outset of the First World War, is that this was not a war.
Thus we gutted the revolutionary internationalist essence of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution linking the fight for social and national liberation to the struggle for proletarian state power both in neocolonial and in more advanced countries. This means educating the proletariat in North America, and internationally, that its class interests lie in actively championing the fight against the imperialist domination of Haiti. Instead our articles did the opposite, promoting illusions in U.S. imperialist “democracy” as the savior of the Haitian people. We all but echoed Barack Obama as he dispatched imperialist combat troops, including elements of the 82nd Airborne Division and a Marine expeditionary unit. One doubts that we could so easily have taken such a position if the Republican Bush administration were still in the White House.
In its latest article, “SL Twists and Turns on Haiti” (Internationalist, 9 April), the centrist Internationalist Group (IG) writes: “While support to imperialist occupation is a small step for reformists, who only seek to modify imperialist policies rather than to bring down the imperialist system, in the case of the SL/ICL it should be harder to digest.” Indeed it is. For its part, the IG treated the earthquake as an opening for revolution in Haiti, asserting: “This small but militant proletariat can place itself at the head of the impoverished urban and rural masses seeking to organize their own power, particularly at present where the machinery of the capitalist state is largely reduced to rubble and a few marauding bands of police” (“Haiti: Workers Solidarity, Yes! Imperialist Occupation, No!” Internationalist, 20 January).
Instead of simply exposing the IG’s Third Worldist fantasies, we concentrated in our polemics on zealous apologies for the U.S. imperialist military intervention, a position to the right of the IG. These centrist apologists for Third World nationalism quite correctly characterized our position as “social imperialist”—socialist in words, support for imperialism in deeds. This is a bitter pill to swallow. Only through a savage indictment of our line can we avoid the alternative of going down the road that led the founders of the IG to defect from our organization in the pursuit of forces other than the proletariat. In their case, this has ranged from remnants of the Stalinist bureaucracy that sold out to imperialist counterrevolution in the DDR to Latin American nationalists and left-talking trade-union bureaucrats.
In the context of polemics with the IG, Workers Vanguard misused the authority of the revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky in order to alibi support to an imperialist occupation. In his 1938 article “Learn to Think,” Trotsky argued that one should not always put a minus where the bourgeoisie puts a plus. He was referring not to a military occupation force but to instances where an imperialist government might send military aid to anti-colonialist fighters. Moreover, Trotsky’s reference in this article to workers fraternizing with an army called in to fight a fire manifestly did not refer to a situation like Haiti where U.S. imperialist troops were invading a neocolonial country, an act which Leninists unconditionally oppose on principle.
However, neither do revolutionaries foster illusions in such non-military aid as capitalist governments may provide. In responding to the U.S. imperialist invasion of Haiti following the earthquake, we would have done well to look to the position of our Australian section in 2005 responding to the imperialist “aid” intervention in Indonesia, specifically the secessionist province of Aceh, following the tsunami. Demanding “Australian/all imperialist military/cops get out of Aceh now!” an article in Australasian Spartacist titled “Australian Imperialists Seize on Tsunami Catastrophe” (No. 190, Autumn 2005) indicted imperialist aid programs. The article pointed out that “whatever short-term benefit a part of them may provide to a small number of oppressed people,” such aid is “always aimed at reinforcing neocolonial subjugation of the Third World masses.”
The “Politics of the Possible”
From the time of our tendency’s inception as a left opposition within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the early 1960s, we have recognized that national isolation must in short order destroy any subjectively revolutionary formation, not least one subjected to the pressures of operating in the heartland of world imperialism, the United States. Genuine proletarian internationalism means disciplined international collaboration, without which we cannot successfully counter the powerful pull of nationalist opportunism.
The handmaiden to our embellishment of U.S. imperialist intervention was the abrogation of international democratic centralism. The role of propaganda as the scaffolding of a revolutionary party is to publish the line of the party as decided through discussion and motions by the party leadership. Prior to going into print opposing the call for “troops out of Haiti” in WV No. 951, the SL/U.S. Political Bureau and the International Secretariat (the resident administrative body of the IEC) abdicated responsibility by not holding an organized discussion and vote, instead setting our line through informal consultation. However, once the line was published in Workers Vanguard it was picked up by many of the ICL’s other sectional presses, indicating that there was little initial disagreement.
A meeting of the I.S. on March 18 did at last vote to call for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. and United Nations troops. However, the motions adopted at that meeting, which became the basis for the article in WV No. 955, reaffirmed that “we were correct in not calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.” In stating that “the particular exceptional circumstances that obtained two months ago no longer exist,” the motions also continued to insist that conditional defense of the U.S. military invasion was correct in the immediate conjuncture of a natural disaster. Moreover, while criticizing the formulation that the U.S. military was the only force on the ground with the wherewithal to deliver aid, the I.S. motions did not mandate a public correction of this statement. This kind of dishonesty was condemned by James P. Cannon, founder of American Trotskyism. In addressing a situation where the Trotskyist SWP at its 1954 convention needed to acknowledge mistakes, he noted: “You know, the Stalinists make more changes, and more rapid and drastic changes, than any other party in history. But they never say: ‘We made a mistake.’ They always say: ‘The situation has changed.’ We should be more precise and more honest.”
Menshevism often takes the guise of “realism” and “expediency.” Looking to come up with a “concrete solution” in a situation where there was no such solution from a proletarian revolutionary vantage point, we capitulated. What our small revolutionary party had to put forward was a proletarian internationalist perspective for the liberation of Haiti, above all through opposition to our “own” imperialist rulers. In the immediate situation, the only concrete expression of such a program was negative—to demand that any and all Haitian refugees be allowed into the U.S. with full citizenship rights, to oppose any deportations of Haitians who had made it here and above all to demand all U.S./UN troops out.
Our articles distorted reality in order to justify the American military presence. We correctly criticized the reformists for spreading illusions in the imperialist governments by demanding that they provide “aid, not troops” but our own response was worse. Our articles presented U.S. military intervention as the only “realistic” way for the Haitian masses to get “aid” and claimed demagogically that withdrawal of U.S. combat troops “would result in mass death through starvation.” This was to treat the question not from the standpoint of Marxist program, but through the liberal lens of “disaster relief.” Michael Harrington—the former leader of the Democratic Socialists of America and adviser to the “war on poverty” programs of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Democratic Party administration—captured the core of such a social-democratic worldview with the expression, “the left wing of the possible.”
The “politics of the possible” is a palpable pressure in the period of post-Soviet reaction, where revolution—or even, particularly in the U.S., militant class struggle—appears remote and there is an overwhelming absence of resonance for our political views. There is a yawning abyss between what we stand for and the consciousness of the working class and young radicals, even those who claim to be socialist. As we have noted, it has been very difficult to maintain our revolutionary continuity and very easy to have it destroyed.
The Fight to Maintain a Revolutionary Perspective
In fighting against the Cochranite opposition in the then-revolutionary American Socialist Workers Party in the early 1950s, James P. Cannon argued:
“The revolutionary movement, under the best conditions, is a hard fight, and it wears out a lot of human material. Not for nothing has it been said a thousand times in the past: ‘The revolution is a devourer of men.’ The movement in this, the richest and most conservative country in the world, is perhaps the most voracious of all.
“It is not easy to persist in the struggle, to hold on, to stay tough and fight it out year after year without victory; and even, in times such as the present, without tangible progress. That requires theoretical conviction and historical perspective as well as character. And, in addition to that, it requires association with others in a common party.”
— “Trade Unionists and Revolutionists,” 11 May 1953
The example of the degeneration of the SWP from a revolutionary party through centrism to abject reformism is instructive. The party endured more than a decade of stagnation and isolation during the anti-Communist witchhunt. Seeing their role reduced essentially to a holding operation in the citadel of U.S. imperialism, aging party cadre like those in the Cochran wing gave up on a revolutionary perspective. The SWP majority under Cannon and Farrell Dobbs fought to preserve the revolutionary continuity of Trotskyism against this liquidationism. But they themselves were not immune from the deforming pressures that led the Cochranites to split.
Four years later, in 1957, the SWP supported the introduction of federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas—the end result of which was the crushing of local black self-defense efforts against the howling racist mobs fighting school integration. Painting U.S. troops as reliable defenders of black people engendered significant opposition within the party in the 1950s, particularly from Richard Fraser whose program of revolutionary integrationism as the road to black freedom in the U.S. we take as our own. But the wrong line was never corrected and the view of the U.S. imperialist army as the only “realistic” force to defend civil rights protesters in the Jim Crow South against racist terror deepened. By 1964 the SWP had adopted the grotesque campaign slogan, “Withdraw the Troops from Viet Nam and Send Them to Mississippi!” By 1965, the SWP had thrown overboard the last remnant of a revolutionary opposition to imperialism, promoting the reformist lie that a classless peace movement could stop U.S. imperialism’s dirty war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants.
The young SWP cadre in the Revolutionary Tendency who fought the party’s degeneration were the founding leaders of our organization. Recognizing where the SWP went, and holding it up as a mirror of where we could go without correcting our mistakes and the outright betrayal of our revolutionary internationalist program in response to the Haiti earthquake, is part of the fight to preserve this continuity with Cannon’s revolutionary party that extends back to Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks.
But the ability to make such a correction is hardly cause for celebration. It merely lays the basis for political rectification. We crossed the class line and the urgent necessity is to reassert and struggle to maintain the proletarian internationalist program of Leninism.
—27 April 2010
*From The "HistoMat" Blog- An Update On The UK Elections
Click on the headline ot link to a "HistoMat" blog entry, dated April 29, 2010, on the upcoming UK parliamentary elections.
Markin comment:
I have already given my view on the UK elections in this space today. "HistoMat" just gives some nice anecdotal evidence for that view. Thanks- "HistoMat".
Markin comment:
I have already given my view on the UK elections in this space today. "HistoMat" just gives some nice anecdotal evidence for that view. Thanks- "HistoMat".
Thursday, April 29, 2010
*No Vote To New Labor In The United Kingdom (UK) Parliamentary Elections
Click on the headline to link to a "Lenin Internet Archive" online copy of his 1920 classic statement of revolutionary tactics, "Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder-"Left-Wing" Communism In Great Britain"
Markin comment:
For radicals and revolutionaries in America come election time it is, or should be, a no-brainer to call for a NO vote to all the pro-capitalist parties, big or small, donkeys, elephants or greens. Occasionally, at least this has been the case in the span of my political lifetime; we can support one or another socialist or communist candidate depending on their programs. However, for the most part, lacking even a reformist workers party to campaign for, we use the heightened political atmosphere that elections bring to get out our propaganda messages. On such themes as the need to for labor to break from the capitalist parties, in particular its long alliance with the American Democratic Party, the need to build an independent working class party with a class struggle program and the need to deal with questions of special oppression for women, blacks and others.
The tasks for radicals and revolutionaries in the United Kingdom (UK) are slightly different. (I am under the sway of the BBC in this usage as it is their preferred form, and it further recognizes something that should be painful to every revolutionary-that Great Britain is still a monarchy). There, for the past century or so, the working class has had its own party, at least in a formal sense. So the question of whether to support or not support this reformist formation is an open and lively political question. As this entry’s headline indicates there should be no question that New Labor should not be supported by a vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections. After over a decade of hard, bitter, austere administration of the capitalist state against the short and ling term interests of the working class this should be a “no-brainer” as well. The only question then would be support, if any, to the myriad ostensibly socialist organizations that populate the left of the Labor Party, inside or out.
I say that No vote position should be a “no-brainer” but I am beginning to see and hear rumblings from the UK, now that the three-way race seems to be a donnybrook, that those to the left of Labor should give some kind of “critical support” to Labor- the “poodle” party to the Bush/Obama imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan…and who knows where tomorrow. And, of course, those who wish to do so will trot out Lenin, the Lenin of “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder”, to argue that New Labor should be supported “like a rope supports a hanging man”, but supported nevertheless. As the linked article above by Lenin demonstrates Arthur Henderson, and his cohorts, seem almost to be bloody "Bolsheviks" by comparison with today's crop of "labor leaders".
Now critical support to reformist parties, of which Old Labor in the UK was a sterling example, can be an important tactic. Old Labor, however, was at least solidly based on the trade unions and was a class party. An argument could easily be made that Old Labor would not have existed without the support, financial or otherwise, from the trade unions. New Labor is increasingly, and consciously, breaking from that path and modeling itself on the American Democratic Party. But, although at some point, the question of being able to support New Labor at all, as a matter of principle, may come up that is not the case today, nor is it the main criterion for calling for a No vote. Critical support is a tactic that revolutionaries use, including old comrades Lenin and Trotsky, to point out the contradictions between the working class base and the actions of the leadership in cases where revolutionaries are not powerful and authoritative enough to lead the working class. Where can one point to any contradiction in New Labor that revolutionaries could use to draw the lessons for the working class base. To pose the question is to give the answer in this case. No Vote To New Labor!
Note: I had a certain amount of sport bringing up the United Kingdom (UK) designation. However there is a point to be made here. The minimum, minimum, minimum program that revolutionaries should thing about on the question of critical support is actually a democratic program from the 17th century, Cromwell’s program. Abolish the monarchy! Abolish the House of Lords! Abolish the state church! Doesn’t Socialist Republics of the British Isles, although a little bulky to say and write, read and sound better than UK? Ya, I thought so.
Markin comment:
For radicals and revolutionaries in America come election time it is, or should be, a no-brainer to call for a NO vote to all the pro-capitalist parties, big or small, donkeys, elephants or greens. Occasionally, at least this has been the case in the span of my political lifetime; we can support one or another socialist or communist candidate depending on their programs. However, for the most part, lacking even a reformist workers party to campaign for, we use the heightened political atmosphere that elections bring to get out our propaganda messages. On such themes as the need to for labor to break from the capitalist parties, in particular its long alliance with the American Democratic Party, the need to build an independent working class party with a class struggle program and the need to deal with questions of special oppression for women, blacks and others.
The tasks for radicals and revolutionaries in the United Kingdom (UK) are slightly different. (I am under the sway of the BBC in this usage as it is their preferred form, and it further recognizes something that should be painful to every revolutionary-that Great Britain is still a monarchy). There, for the past century or so, the working class has had its own party, at least in a formal sense. So the question of whether to support or not support this reformist formation is an open and lively political question. As this entry’s headline indicates there should be no question that New Labor should not be supported by a vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections. After over a decade of hard, bitter, austere administration of the capitalist state against the short and ling term interests of the working class this should be a “no-brainer” as well. The only question then would be support, if any, to the myriad ostensibly socialist organizations that populate the left of the Labor Party, inside or out.
I say that No vote position should be a “no-brainer” but I am beginning to see and hear rumblings from the UK, now that the three-way race seems to be a donnybrook, that those to the left of Labor should give some kind of “critical support” to Labor- the “poodle” party to the Bush/Obama imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan…and who knows where tomorrow. And, of course, those who wish to do so will trot out Lenin, the Lenin of “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder”, to argue that New Labor should be supported “like a rope supports a hanging man”, but supported nevertheless. As the linked article above by Lenin demonstrates Arthur Henderson, and his cohorts, seem almost to be bloody "Bolsheviks" by comparison with today's crop of "labor leaders".
Now critical support to reformist parties, of which Old Labor in the UK was a sterling example, can be an important tactic. Old Labor, however, was at least solidly based on the trade unions and was a class party. An argument could easily be made that Old Labor would not have existed without the support, financial or otherwise, from the trade unions. New Labor is increasingly, and consciously, breaking from that path and modeling itself on the American Democratic Party. But, although at some point, the question of being able to support New Labor at all, as a matter of principle, may come up that is not the case today, nor is it the main criterion for calling for a No vote. Critical support is a tactic that revolutionaries use, including old comrades Lenin and Trotsky, to point out the contradictions between the working class base and the actions of the leadership in cases where revolutionaries are not powerful and authoritative enough to lead the working class. Where can one point to any contradiction in New Labor that revolutionaries could use to draw the lessons for the working class base. To pose the question is to give the answer in this case. No Vote To New Labor!
Note: I had a certain amount of sport bringing up the United Kingdom (UK) designation. However there is a point to be made here. The minimum, minimum, minimum program that revolutionaries should thing about on the question of critical support is actually a democratic program from the 17th century, Cromwell’s program. Abolish the monarchy! Abolish the House of Lords! Abolish the state church! Doesn’t Socialist Republics of the British Isles, although a little bulky to say and write, read and sound better than UK? Ya, I thought so.
Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- In The Halls Of Justice The Only Justice Is In The Halls- "Lenny"
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of a Lenny Bruce stand- up routine.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
DVD Review
Lenny, starring Dustin Hoffman and Valerie Perrine, directed by Bob Fosse, MGM, 1974
Except for the last paragraph the rest of this review was used to review the documentary "Lenny Bruce: Without Tears". The points made there apply here, for the most part, as well.
Okay, the average black male kid on the average ghetto city block knows, and knows without blinking, and knows from some seemingly unspoken source deep within his genetic structure that the cards are stacked against him. That the cops, the courts, or some other part of the “justice” system will, eventually, come knocking at the door or grab him off the street for something, usually dope. The average Latino male kid on the average barrio city now knows pretty much knows that same thing, again usually on some bogus drug charge. And nowadays even young black and Latina women are getting that same message coded into their psyches. What is not encoded is for a white, Jewish comic guy who has an off-beat sense of humor and has something to say, sometimes something profound to say, to face that same music, anytime. That, my friends, is the Lenny Bruce story in a nutshell and forms the theme for this commentary.
Really, I could leave the headline, taken from something Lenny Bruce said when he was in deep and surreal legal trouble back in the 1960s, and that would tell the tale here. Nevertheless the case of one off –beat comic who tried to “go outside the envelope” of the confines of safe, secure, no waves, post-World World II cultural expression is an object lesson for the rest of us. Being a little bit uppity, being a little too black or brown, or being a little too red could get you in more trouble than you can shake a stick at then, and now.
On viewing this documentary my first impression was “what is all the fuss about?” At the vantage point, forty or fifty years after the events, it is hard to see what the so-called moral police of the day got in a dither over in Bruce’s work. On any given day you can hear more lewdness, lunacy, and sheer vulgarity on “talk” radio or television than Lenny ever uttered. That, however, is the point. Lenny was the point man, the trenchant social critic cum comedian who is honored now after the fact, but was not while the heat was on.
One of the highlights of this documentary is Lenny Bruce performing in various venues interspersed with “talking head” commentary by those who knew or interviewed him. The most interesting one is with jazz critic and social activist, Nat Hentoff, when Lenny is deep in trouble and has physically been ravished by his struggle. Kenneth Tynan, of 1950s San Francisco poetic fame, and Malcolm Muggeridge add their somewhat bizarre two cents worth. As does Bruce fellow social critic, Mort Sahl.
Throwing out the above names and discussing the time frame of Bruce’s troubles brings one final point. Was Lenny, like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Tynan, part of the 1950s “beat” generation? Certainly he was part of the avant guarde back door jazz scene and miles in front of any one else in the Milton Berle/Sid Caesar 1950s comedy world. One of the commentators noted that Bruce was primarily an entertainer, a man trying to make a living at what he did best. That seems right. But whether he was “beat” or not, he certainly pushed the envelop. And that is part of his legacy, and worthy of honor by us.
*****
The commercial movie "Lenny", starring Dustin Hoffman as Lenny, delves more into the personal side of Lenny's life, including his various affairs with women, especially the one leading up to his marriage(his wife here played by Valerie Perrine who seems perfect in this languid, strangely alluring stripper role), his jones, and his sinking down as a person under the weight of all those things and the long arm of the law. Hoffman is strongest when he digs deep into the legal imbroglio of Bruce's life and when he does some of his stand-up routines although anyone who has watched the Bruce documentary will note that it is almost impossible to mimic Bruce's mannerisms successfully. But a well done job, nevertheless.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
DVD Review
Lenny, starring Dustin Hoffman and Valerie Perrine, directed by Bob Fosse, MGM, 1974
Except for the last paragraph the rest of this review was used to review the documentary "Lenny Bruce: Without Tears". The points made there apply here, for the most part, as well.
Okay, the average black male kid on the average ghetto city block knows, and knows without blinking, and knows from some seemingly unspoken source deep within his genetic structure that the cards are stacked against him. That the cops, the courts, or some other part of the “justice” system will, eventually, come knocking at the door or grab him off the street for something, usually dope. The average Latino male kid on the average barrio city now knows pretty much knows that same thing, again usually on some bogus drug charge. And nowadays even young black and Latina women are getting that same message coded into their psyches. What is not encoded is for a white, Jewish comic guy who has an off-beat sense of humor and has something to say, sometimes something profound to say, to face that same music, anytime. That, my friends, is the Lenny Bruce story in a nutshell and forms the theme for this commentary.
Really, I could leave the headline, taken from something Lenny Bruce said when he was in deep and surreal legal trouble back in the 1960s, and that would tell the tale here. Nevertheless the case of one off –beat comic who tried to “go outside the envelope” of the confines of safe, secure, no waves, post-World World II cultural expression is an object lesson for the rest of us. Being a little bit uppity, being a little too black or brown, or being a little too red could get you in more trouble than you can shake a stick at then, and now.
On viewing this documentary my first impression was “what is all the fuss about?” At the vantage point, forty or fifty years after the events, it is hard to see what the so-called moral police of the day got in a dither over in Bruce’s work. On any given day you can hear more lewdness, lunacy, and sheer vulgarity on “talk” radio or television than Lenny ever uttered. That, however, is the point. Lenny was the point man, the trenchant social critic cum comedian who is honored now after the fact, but was not while the heat was on.
One of the highlights of this documentary is Lenny Bruce performing in various venues interspersed with “talking head” commentary by those who knew or interviewed him. The most interesting one is with jazz critic and social activist, Nat Hentoff, when Lenny is deep in trouble and has physically been ravished by his struggle. Kenneth Tynan, of 1950s San Francisco poetic fame, and Malcolm Muggeridge add their somewhat bizarre two cents worth. As does Bruce fellow social critic, Mort Sahl.
Throwing out the above names and discussing the time frame of Bruce’s troubles brings one final point. Was Lenny, like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Tynan, part of the 1950s “beat” generation? Certainly he was part of the avant guarde back door jazz scene and miles in front of any one else in the Milton Berle/Sid Caesar 1950s comedy world. One of the commentators noted that Bruce was primarily an entertainer, a man trying to make a living at what he did best. That seems right. But whether he was “beat” or not, he certainly pushed the envelop. And that is part of his legacy, and worthy of honor by us.
*****
The commercial movie "Lenny", starring Dustin Hoffman as Lenny, delves more into the personal side of Lenny's life, including his various affairs with women, especially the one leading up to his marriage(his wife here played by Valerie Perrine who seems perfect in this languid, strangely alluring stripper role), his jones, and his sinking down as a person under the weight of all those things and the long arm of the law. Hoffman is strongest when he digs deep into the legal imbroglio of Bruce's life and when he does some of his stand-up routines although anyone who has watched the Bruce documentary will note that it is almost impossible to mimic Bruce's mannerisms successfully. But a well done job, nevertheless.
*Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- The Halls Of Justice The Only Justice Is In The Halls- The Life and Hard Times Of Lenny Bruce
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of "Lenny Bruce On The Irish". Ouch!
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
DVD Review
Lenny Bruce: Without Tears, Lenny Bruce and various commentators, directed by Fred Baker, New Titles Productions, 1972
Okay, the average black male kid on the average ghetto city block knows, and knows without blinking, and knows from some seemingly unspoken source deep within his genetic structure that the cards are stacked against. That the cops, the courts, or some other part of the “justice” system will, eventually, come knocking at the door or grab him off the street for something, usually dope. The average Latino male kid on the average barrio city now knows pretty much knows that same thing, again usually on some bogus drug charge. And nowadays even young black and Latina women are getting that same message coded into their psyches. What is not encoded is for a white, Jewish comic guy who has an off-beat sense of humor and has something to say, sometimes something profound to say to face that same music, anytime. That, my friends, is the Lenny Bruce story in a nutshell and forms the theme for this commentary.
Really, I could leave the headline, taken from something Lenny Bruce said when he was in deep and surreal legal trouble back in the 1960s, and that would tell the tale here. Nevertheless the case of one off –beat comic who tried to “go outside the envelope” of confines of safe, secure, no waves, post-World World II cultural expression is an object lesson for the rest of us. Being a little bit uppity, being a little too black or brown, or being a little too red will get you in more trouble than you can shake a stick at then, and now.
On viewing this documentary my first impression was “what is all the fuss about?” At the vantage point, forty or fifty years after the events, it is hard to see what the so-called moral police of the day got in a dither over in Bruce’s work. On any given day you can hear more lewdness, lunacy, and sheer vulgarity on “talk” radio or television than Lenny ever uttered. That, however, is the point. Lenny was the point man, the trenchant social critic cum comedian who was honored after the fact, but not while the heat was on.
One of the highlights of this documentary is Lenny Bruce performing in various venues interspersed with “talking head” commentary by those who knew or interviewed him. The most interesting one is with jazz critic and social activist, Nat Hentoff, when Lenny is deep in trouble and has physically been ravished by his struggle. Kenneth Tynan, of 1950s San Francisco poetic fame, and Malcolm Muggeridge add their somewhat bizarre two cents worth. As does Bruce fellow social critic, Mort Sahl.
Throwing out the above names and discussing the time frame of Bruce’s troubles brings one final point. Was Lenny, like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Tynan, part of the 1950s “beat” generation? Certainly he was part of the avant guarde back door jazz scene and miles in front of any one else in the Milton Berle/Sid Caesar 1950s comedy world. One of the commentators noted that Bruce was primarily an entertainer, a man trying to make a living at what he did best. That seems right. But whether he was “beat” or not, he certainly pushed the envelop. And that is part of his legacy, and worthy of honor by us.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
DVD Review
Lenny Bruce: Without Tears, Lenny Bruce and various commentators, directed by Fred Baker, New Titles Productions, 1972
Okay, the average black male kid on the average ghetto city block knows, and knows without blinking, and knows from some seemingly unspoken source deep within his genetic structure that the cards are stacked against. That the cops, the courts, or some other part of the “justice” system will, eventually, come knocking at the door or grab him off the street for something, usually dope. The average Latino male kid on the average barrio city now knows pretty much knows that same thing, again usually on some bogus drug charge. And nowadays even young black and Latina women are getting that same message coded into their psyches. What is not encoded is for a white, Jewish comic guy who has an off-beat sense of humor and has something to say, sometimes something profound to say to face that same music, anytime. That, my friends, is the Lenny Bruce story in a nutshell and forms the theme for this commentary.
Really, I could leave the headline, taken from something Lenny Bruce said when he was in deep and surreal legal trouble back in the 1960s, and that would tell the tale here. Nevertheless the case of one off –beat comic who tried to “go outside the envelope” of confines of safe, secure, no waves, post-World World II cultural expression is an object lesson for the rest of us. Being a little bit uppity, being a little too black or brown, or being a little too red will get you in more trouble than you can shake a stick at then, and now.
On viewing this documentary my first impression was “what is all the fuss about?” At the vantage point, forty or fifty years after the events, it is hard to see what the so-called moral police of the day got in a dither over in Bruce’s work. On any given day you can hear more lewdness, lunacy, and sheer vulgarity on “talk” radio or television than Lenny ever uttered. That, however, is the point. Lenny was the point man, the trenchant social critic cum comedian who was honored after the fact, but not while the heat was on.
One of the highlights of this documentary is Lenny Bruce performing in various venues interspersed with “talking head” commentary by those who knew or interviewed him. The most interesting one is with jazz critic and social activist, Nat Hentoff, when Lenny is deep in trouble and has physically been ravished by his struggle. Kenneth Tynan, of 1950s San Francisco poetic fame, and Malcolm Muggeridge add their somewhat bizarre two cents worth. As does Bruce fellow social critic, Mort Sahl.
Throwing out the above names and discussing the time frame of Bruce’s troubles brings one final point. Was Lenny, like Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Tynan, part of the 1950s “beat” generation? Certainly he was part of the avant guarde back door jazz scene and miles in front of any one else in the Milton Berle/Sid Caesar 1950s comedy world. One of the commentators noted that Bruce was primarily an entertainer, a man trying to make a living at what he did best. That seems right. But whether he was “beat” or not, he certainly pushed the envelop. And that is part of his legacy, and worthy of honor by us.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
***Books To While Away The Class Struggle By- The Short Stories Of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the 19th century American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin
Book Review
Hawthorne’s Short Stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vintage Books, New York, 1946
The old social democratic literary critic and editor of “Dissent”, Irving Howe, once noted that Mark Twain, and his post-Civil War works represented a dramatic break from the Euro-centric ante bellum literary establishment. And on this question I agree with him. As I do on his choice of Nathaniel Hawthorne as an exemplar of that tradition. Certainly his most famous work, “The Scarlet Letter”, reflects that European influence, as do the collected short stories under review here.
As the reader, perhaps, knows Hawthorne made his living writing short stories for the women reader-oriented literary magazines of the day long before he wrote “The Scarlet Letter” and some of these have turned out to be classics of the early American Republic. Moreover, and this is one of his attractions for me, I know virtually every place where the action of the short stories takes place from the Merrymount May Day pole to the granite mountains of New Hampshire and beyond. More importantly, I know the weight, the dead weight of that grinding Puritan foundation that drove much of the early American experience here in New England. Hawthorne, in short, knows where the WASP-ish bodies are buried and is here to tell one and all the tales. Sometimes with pathos, sometimes with gothic effects, but always with a sense of some underlying moral purpose. You see Hawthorne too is smitten and bitten by that same Puritan ethos and that is the secret to the power of his writing.
As is usually the case with compilations, literary or otherwise, not all the work here is top-shelf. The best, and most representative to my mind, are the high Puritan “The Minister’s Black Veil, the chilling “The White Old Maid’, the swamp Yankee classic “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure”, the prophetic “The Birthmark”, the Gothic classic “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, and another high Puritan classic “The Maypole of Merrymount.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin
Book Review
Hawthorne’s Short Stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vintage Books, New York, 1946
The old social democratic literary critic and editor of “Dissent”, Irving Howe, once noted that Mark Twain, and his post-Civil War works represented a dramatic break from the Euro-centric ante bellum literary establishment. And on this question I agree with him. As I do on his choice of Nathaniel Hawthorne as an exemplar of that tradition. Certainly his most famous work, “The Scarlet Letter”, reflects that European influence, as do the collected short stories under review here.
As the reader, perhaps, knows Hawthorne made his living writing short stories for the women reader-oriented literary magazines of the day long before he wrote “The Scarlet Letter” and some of these have turned out to be classics of the early American Republic. Moreover, and this is one of his attractions for me, I know virtually every place where the action of the short stories takes place from the Merrymount May Day pole to the granite mountains of New Hampshire and beyond. More importantly, I know the weight, the dead weight of that grinding Puritan foundation that drove much of the early American experience here in New England. Hawthorne, in short, knows where the WASP-ish bodies are buried and is here to tell one and all the tales. Sometimes with pathos, sometimes with gothic effects, but always with a sense of some underlying moral purpose. You see Hawthorne too is smitten and bitten by that same Puritan ethos and that is the secret to the power of his writing.
As is usually the case with compilations, literary or otherwise, not all the work here is top-shelf. The best, and most representative to my mind, are the high Puritan “The Minister’s Black Veil, the chilling “The White Old Maid’, the swamp Yankee classic “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure”, the prophetic “The Birthmark”, the Gothic classic “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, and another high Puritan classic “The Maypole of Merrymount.
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard" -On The West Virginia Coal Mine Diaster - A Guest Commentary
Click on the headline to link to a "Workers Vanguard" article, dated April 23, 2010 concerning the recent West Virginia coal mine disaster.
Markin comment:
The headline of the "Workers Vanguard" article said it all. And I say, mourn, then organize like hell.
Markin comment:
The headline of the "Workers Vanguard" article said it all. And I say, mourn, then organize like hell.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
*From "The Rag Blog"-Coal Mining : Union-Busting and the Massey Disaster
Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry concerning the Massey mining company and the desperate need to organize the mines, all mines.
Markin comment:
Mourn, then organize, and organize like hell.
Markin comment:
Mourn, then organize, and organize like hell.
From "The Rag Blog"-Paul Krassner : Kent State Anniversary Blues- A Guest Commentary-And Jackson State Too
Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry by Paul Krassner, well- known radical figure from the 1960s, on the events at Kent State in Ohio in 1970. I would add also down at Jackson State in Mississippi, as well
Markin comment:
Kent State/Jackson State- Never Forget- Never Forgive!
Neil Young » Ohio Lyrics
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Markin comment:
Kent State/Jackson State- Never Forget- Never Forgive!
Neil Young » Ohio Lyrics
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
From The "HistoMat" Blog- A New Work On Karl Marx By An Aficionado
Click on the headline to link to a "HistoMat" entry concerning an interesting, apparently non-academic, if you can believe that, work on Karl Marx by a life-long devotee to the cause. Now we just need to strenuously apply the Old Moor's lessons about the neature of the class struggle, and how to win it.
*Activists Chain Themselves to Arizona Capitol to Protest Russell Pearce's SB 1070-Down With The Arizona Immigrant Profiling Bill
Click on the headline to link to a "Green Left News" blog entry concerning an Arizona (on the front lines of the immigration question) piece of anti-immigrant legislation now pending there. Down with this bill, SB 1070. Full citizenship rights for all who make it here!
*From The "HistoMat" Blog- On Christopher Hitchens and Orwell's Animal Farm
Click on the headline to link to a "HistoMat" blog entry concerning Orwellians, new and old. This entry double-speaks for itself
*The Jackson State Killings, 1970- Never Forget, Never Forgive- Kent State Too
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Jackson State (Mississippi) killing of two students , and injuring of several others.
Markin comment:
Hey, am I the only one, except Bob Feldman, who has linked the Kent State and Jackson State student killings by the government together today as we mark the fortieth anniversary of those events. It was the same struggle by us and the same rationale by those in power. Remember all students (and others) were put on notice that the American government, federal and local, had you in their cross hairs if you decided to get uppity. Etch that in your brains for future reference.
Markin comment:
Hey, am I the only one, except Bob Feldman, who has linked the Kent State and Jackson State student killings by the government together today as we mark the fortieth anniversary of those events. It was the same struggle by us and the same rationale by those in power. Remember all students (and others) were put on notice that the American government, federal and local, had you in their cross hairs if you decided to get uppity. Etch that in your brains for future reference.
Monday, April 26, 2010
*Films to While Away The Class Struggle By-"The Cartel"- A Guest Review
Click on the title to link to a "Boston Sunday Globe" article, dated April 25, 2010, reviewing "The Cartel", a film about teachers unions and their effect on public education from an essentially anti-union perspective.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
Markin comment:
One would think that with a title like "The Cartel" we would be treated to an expose of the greedy, profit-hungry underside of the international capitalist order and its nefarious doings. Or of some murky South American drug operation gone bust. No, the cartel in question is the organized teachers movement in America, also known as teachers unions. Apparently, according to the producer of this documentary, our fellow unionists are the root cause (although to be 'fair' he tacks on administrators as well) of the demise of public education in this country. Also, apparently, rather than have a stable and dedicated workforce to solve the very real problems of the public education system we are to bow down to 'virtues' of selective, elite charter schools, or better, something like Volunteers For America where young, unemployed college graduates go out and give the best two years, or so, of their lives to teaching, burn out, and then go back to graduate or professional schools in order to get real dough. That said, under the old political principle "know thy enemy" go out and watch this thing. Defend Public Education! Defend Teachers Unions! No More Central Falls!
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin
Markin comment:
One would think that with a title like "The Cartel" we would be treated to an expose of the greedy, profit-hungry underside of the international capitalist order and its nefarious doings. Or of some murky South American drug operation gone bust. No, the cartel in question is the organized teachers movement in America, also known as teachers unions. Apparently, according to the producer of this documentary, our fellow unionists are the root cause (although to be 'fair' he tacks on administrators as well) of the demise of public education in this country. Also, apparently, rather than have a stable and dedicated workforce to solve the very real problems of the public education system we are to bow down to 'virtues' of selective, elite charter schools, or better, something like Volunteers For America where young, unemployed college graduates go out and give the best two years, or so, of their lives to teaching, burn out, and then go back to graduate or professional schools in order to get real dough. That said, under the old political principle "know thy enemy" go out and watch this thing. Defend Public Education! Defend Teachers Unions! No More Central Falls!
* A Second Look At Bad Blake- A Jeff Bridges Film Retropsective
Click on the headline to link to a "Boston Sunday Globe" article, dated April 25, 2010, concerning a Jeff Bridges retrospective at a local theater.
Markin comment:
Long before Jeff Bridges won his well-deserved Oscar for his Bad Blake role in last year’s “Crazy Hearts” I noted, in a response to someone’s comment in another blog, that in a sense he had been playing those kind of award-worthy roles all his now forty year acting career and that he should have been honored long time ago. I also noted the similarities between the way he played his role as Duane in “The Last Picture Show” and Bad Blake in “Crazy Hearts”. Now for those who did not, or do not, believe me and need visual proof you are to be well-treated. At least those in the Boston area and, perhaps, in your town if you push for it you will get a chance to see a Jeff Bridges retrospective at the local theater described in the “Boston Sunday Globe” linked article. The following is not an exclusive list of my choices but “Last Picture”, “Rancho Deluxe”, “Fat City”, “ The Big Lebowski”, and, of course “Crazy Hearts” should be on your dance card. If no retrospective is coming up in your area check out “Netflix”. They are all available on that site. Kudos, Duane. Kudos, Bad.
Markin comment:
Long before Jeff Bridges won his well-deserved Oscar for his Bad Blake role in last year’s “Crazy Hearts” I noted, in a response to someone’s comment in another blog, that in a sense he had been playing those kind of award-worthy roles all his now forty year acting career and that he should have been honored long time ago. I also noted the similarities between the way he played his role as Duane in “The Last Picture Show” and Bad Blake in “Crazy Hearts”. Now for those who did not, or do not, believe me and need visual proof you are to be well-treated. At least those in the Boston area and, perhaps, in your town if you push for it you will get a chance to see a Jeff Bridges retrospective at the local theater described in the “Boston Sunday Globe” linked article. The following is not an exclusive list of my choices but “Last Picture”, “Rancho Deluxe”, “Fat City”, “ The Big Lebowski”, and, of course “Crazy Hearts” should be on your dance card. If no retrospective is coming up in your area check out “Netflix”. They are all available on that site. Kudos, Duane. Kudos, Bad.
*At the Dawn Of American Imperialism- The Life and Times Of Teddy Roosevelt- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for American President Theodore Roosevelt.
DVD Review
Teddy Roosevelt: An American Lion, The History Channel Productions, 2003
A number of American bourgeois political figures, usually presidential, come to epitomize the era that they live in. For example one thinks of Washington as founder of the American bourgeois republic, Jackson as the advocate of the rough-Hew democratic element that built the country and drove it westward, and Lincoln as its war time preserver and extender. The subject of this review, early 20th century President Theodore Roosevelt, readily brings to mind that period when the American republic went from being something of a backwater democratic experiment, an important one to be sure, but still outside of the main currents of world affairs to the first nibbling of its current imperial status. Needless to say that symbols of eras do not have the final say in what their era was about but certainly the life of old Teddy came as close as it could to that end.
If most people were asked one thing about Teddy Roosevelt that one thing would probably be his experiences as leader of the eclectic army unit, “The Roughriders” , that fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, a war that closed out the 19th century and ushered in the new age of inter-imperial rivalries. That however, as this three plus hours production, at times painfully demonstrates, is only a small part of the personal story of the man. As usual in this type of documentary production a good number of “talking head” commentators, including Teddy scholars, historians of the “robber baron” era, surviving relatives, and other specialists give their take on the meaning of the man, his influence on history and his role in the creation of the American imperial state.
And what was that role? Part One of this two part production centers on Teddy early sickly childhood, his struggle for health, and his intellectual and physical pursuits. It then moves on to his college career at Harvard, his marriages and family life and all the other sidelights that give substance to these visual biographies. The key though, given his patrician class background, is his magnet-like attachment to the political rough and tumble, first in local New York Republican state politics and then later as campaigner and official in various national Republican administrations in the late 19th century. This segment finishes up with Roosevelt’s above-mentioned war adventure in Cuba that he did so much to encourage, his time as New York Governor, as accidental American Vice President and equally accidental President after McKinley’s assassination.
Part two centers on his presidency which included his fight against the trusts, his fight to save the Western lands for the future, his role in international diplomacy, his creation of a strong navy that he had started earlier in his career as a Navy Department official, and his acknowledged indifference, although not hostility, to the fate of black people in this country at a time when “Jim Crow” was gripping the South (and got reflected by de facto segregation in the North as well). The remainder of the documentary details his post-presidential years including his run as the “Bull Moose” candidate in 1912, his support to Wilson’s war efforts and his last years away from the center of attention. All in all well done, with many good photographs and film clips from the period plus a spirited Teddy narration by actor Richard Dreyfuss. For the Teddy aficionado probably not enough but for the novice a very good primer of what it was like to stand at the head of the American Republic at the dawn of the imperium.
DVD Review
Teddy Roosevelt: An American Lion, The History Channel Productions, 2003
A number of American bourgeois political figures, usually presidential, come to epitomize the era that they live in. For example one thinks of Washington as founder of the American bourgeois republic, Jackson as the advocate of the rough-Hew democratic element that built the country and drove it westward, and Lincoln as its war time preserver and extender. The subject of this review, early 20th century President Theodore Roosevelt, readily brings to mind that period when the American republic went from being something of a backwater democratic experiment, an important one to be sure, but still outside of the main currents of world affairs to the first nibbling of its current imperial status. Needless to say that symbols of eras do not have the final say in what their era was about but certainly the life of old Teddy came as close as it could to that end.
If most people were asked one thing about Teddy Roosevelt that one thing would probably be his experiences as leader of the eclectic army unit, “The Roughriders” , that fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, a war that closed out the 19th century and ushered in the new age of inter-imperial rivalries. That however, as this three plus hours production, at times painfully demonstrates, is only a small part of the personal story of the man. As usual in this type of documentary production a good number of “talking head” commentators, including Teddy scholars, historians of the “robber baron” era, surviving relatives, and other specialists give their take on the meaning of the man, his influence on history and his role in the creation of the American imperial state.
And what was that role? Part One of this two part production centers on Teddy early sickly childhood, his struggle for health, and his intellectual and physical pursuits. It then moves on to his college career at Harvard, his marriages and family life and all the other sidelights that give substance to these visual biographies. The key though, given his patrician class background, is his magnet-like attachment to the political rough and tumble, first in local New York Republican state politics and then later as campaigner and official in various national Republican administrations in the late 19th century. This segment finishes up with Roosevelt’s above-mentioned war adventure in Cuba that he did so much to encourage, his time as New York Governor, as accidental American Vice President and equally accidental President after McKinley’s assassination.
Part two centers on his presidency which included his fight against the trusts, his fight to save the Western lands for the future, his role in international diplomacy, his creation of a strong navy that he had started earlier in his career as a Navy Department official, and his acknowledged indifference, although not hostility, to the fate of black people in this country at a time when “Jim Crow” was gripping the South (and got reflected by de facto segregation in the North as well). The remainder of the documentary details his post-presidential years including his run as the “Bull Moose” candidate in 1912, his support to Wilson’s war efforts and his last years away from the center of attention. All in all well done, with many good photographs and film clips from the period plus a spirited Teddy narration by actor Richard Dreyfuss. For the Teddy aficionado probably not enough but for the novice a very good primer of what it was like to stand at the head of the American Republic at the dawn of the imperium.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-How the Bolsheviks Fought for Women's Emancipation
Click on the headline to link to the "Leon Trotsky Internet Archive' online copy of his 1923 article, "From The Old Family To The New".
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1988 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.
**********
Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky
How the Bolsheviks Fought fo Women's Emancipation
On the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin announced, "In the course of two years of Soviet power in one of the most backward countries of Europe more has been done to emancipate women, to make her the equal of the 'strong' sex, than has been done during the past 130 years by all the advanced, enlightened, 'democratic' republics of the world taken together" ("Soviet Power and the Status of Women," Collected Works). This truth has a fundamental materialist basis. Only a socialist revolution, breaking the bonds of private property, can create the conditions necessary for the emancipation of women. It's more than ever true today: amidst the barbarous social decay of the imperialist "democracies" like the United States, where reactionary bigots target women's rights, even a mere statement of formal equality like the ERA can't make it into law.
Women and Revolution here reprints three early Soviet decrees addressed to the emancipation of women. Codifying the hard-fought gains of the Bolshevik Revolution, these decrees laid out a perspective for the introduction of new social forms to replace the institution of the family and to draw women into the socialist construction of society. As Lenin said in November 1918, "The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women take part in it. The Soviet government is doing everything in its power to enable women to carry on independent proletarian socialist work" ("Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women," Collected Works).
Women in the Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution was sparked by the working women of St. Petersburg, when, 71 years ago, they celebrated International Women's Day with a spontaneous strike and march through the streets. Thousands of women standing in bread lines joined them; hastily improvised red banners rose above the crowd, demanding bread, peace and higher wages. Years of imperialist war had brought the mammoth social tensions of tsarist Russia, where modern capitalism existed superimposed upon entrenched medievalism, to the breaking point.
The Bolsheviks had long been active in organizing Russian proletarian women. The journal Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), founded in 1914, was only one means by which the Bolsheviks sought to win the ranks of working women over to revolutionary socialism. Social backwardness and poverty in Russia before the revolution fell doubly hard on its women: even mai the minimal gains which capitalism had made possible in the more advanced industrialized countries Europe did not exist in semi-feudal Russia, where serfdom had been abolished a mere 56 years earlier, life lay in the grip of the Orthodox church an priests; religious prejudices were deeply rooted in poverty and ignorance. Peasant women in particular lived under indescribably primitive conditions, cultural impoverished that in 1897 the illiteracy rate was as as 92 percent.
The Bolsheviks understood that the oppression of women could not be legislated out of existence family as the capitalist economic institution for bearing the next generation could not simply be swept away by decree. It had to be replaced with socialized child and housework to remove the burden of doing chores from women, enabling them to participate fully in social and political life. Such a revolutionary restructuring of society could occur only with large-scale industrialization, necessarily years in the future. While fully committed to this revolutionary program, the Bolsheviks were handicapped by terrible objective conditions. For the first few years of Soviet rule their meager resources were absorbed by the Red Army's drive to defeat the imperialists and White Guards who launched a counterrevolutionary war against the young workers republic.
Sweeping Away the Filth of Tsardom
Once in power, the Bolsheviks moved immediately to end all the old legal impediments to women's equality. Women were given the vote, at a time when only Norway and Denmark had legalized women's suffrage. Marriage and divorce were made a simple matter of civil registration, while all distinctions between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" children were annulled. In 1919 the Communist Party created the Department of Working Women and Peasant Women, Zhenotdel, for special work among women, which included organizing over 25,000 literacy schools.
In 1920 the Soviet government legalized abortion and made it free. The People's Commissariat of Health pressed for development of and education about birth control methods, which barely existed in Russia at that time, while discouraging abortion as a threat to health in this age before antibiotics. Even more crucial was the workers government's commitment to eliminating the poverty which drove many women to abortion for sheer lack of ability to provide for their children. The Bolsheviks' aim was to build childcare centers and socialized dining halls to enable women to work knowing their children would be well cared for and fed; single mothers were to receive special help. Despite the severe objective limits facing Soviet society, the birth rate went steadily up and the infant mortality rate steadily down.
The workers revolution in Russia, in sweeping away the rotten filth of tsardom, also abolished in December 1917 all the old laws against homosexual acts. As Dr. Grigorii Batkis, the director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, pointed out in "The Sexual Revolution in Russia," published in the Soviet Union in 1923:
"Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle:
'It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters so long as nobody is injured and no one's interests are encroached upon.... "Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called 'natural' intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters." [emphasis in original]
The Fight for Women's Rights in Soviet Central Asia
Nowhere was the condition of women more downtrodden than in the primitive Muslim areas of Soviet Central Asia. The Bolsheviks believed that women, having the most to gain, would be the link that broke the feudal chain in the Soviet East, but they could not with one blow abolish oppressive Muslim institutions. The Bolshevik approach was based on ma¬terialism, not moralism. The Muslim bride price, for example, was not some sinister plot against womankind, but had arisen as an institution central to distrib¬uting land and water rights among different clans (see "Early Bolshevik Work Among Women of the Soviet East," W&R No. 12, Summer 1976, for a fuller discussion).
Systematic Bolshevik work among Muslim women was only possible in 1921, after the end of the bitter Civil War. Dedicated and heroic members of the Zhenotdel donned veils in order to meet Muslim women and explain the laws and goals of the new Soviet republic. Special meeting places, sometimes "Red Yertas" or tents in nomadic areas or clubs in cities, were a key way for the Communist Party to begin to win the trust of these women. Such clubs followed Lenin's policy of using Soviet state power to carefully and systematically undermine native tribalism by demonstrating the superiority of Soviet institutions. The tremendous pro¬ductive capacity of the Soviet planned economy provided the services, education and jobs that finally decisively undercut the ancient order and liberated women from their stifling subjugation.
Today the condition of women in Soviet Central Asia is centuries removed from the oppression their sisters across the border in Afghanistan still face. We said "Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!" because the 1979 Soviet Army intervention against murderous Islamic counterrevolution (whose rallying cry is keeping women under the veil) posed the possibility of a revolutionary transformation of this hideously backward country. Under the protection of the Red Army, the women of Afghanistan have been taught to read and write, and a major¬ity of university students are now women and girls; many hold jobs outside the home; and there are 15,000 women in the Afghan army, defending their new freedoms.
Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky!
Many of the gains made by Soviet women under the Bolsheviks were subsequently reversed by the Stalinist political counterrevolution. In 1936, abortion was made illegal. (It was again legalized in 1955.) Divorce becar difficult to obtain, co-education was abolished, horr sexuality was again outlawed. As Trotsky said, "The actual liberation of women is unrealizable on a basis 'generalized want.' Experience soon proved this ai tere truth which Marx had formulated eighty years before." The cruel Civil War decimated the proletariat in the young workers state. Most fundamentally, failure to extend the Revolution internationally strengthened the Stalinist bureaucratic caste in the isola Soviet Union. Workers democracy was smashed." Leninist internationalist program was abandoned favor of the search for "peaceful coexistence" versus imperialism, while domestically the Stalinists sou social props and ideological justifications for bure cratic rule. Exploiting social backwardness to strenghten their grip over society, the Stalinists rehabilitated family as a useful institution of social conservatism control.
Trotsky denounced the Stalinist bureaucracy "Thermidor in the Family" (The Revolution Betray "These gentlemen have, it seems, completely fogooten that socialism was to remove the cause which impels woman to abortion, and not force her into the 'joys of motherhood' with the help of a foul police interference in what is to every woman the most mate sphere of life....
"Instead of openly saying, 'We have proven still poor and ignorant for trie creation of socialist tions among men, our children and grandchildren realize this aim,' the leaders are forcing people together against the shell of the broken family, and not only that, but to consider it, under threat of extreme penalties, the sacred nucleus of triumphant socialism. It is hard to measure with the eye the scope of the retreat."
Despite these counterrevolutionary measures, capitalist private property has not been restored in the Soviet Union. The tremendous productive capac the Soviet planned economy has opened opportunities for women—in education, jobs, social service—which capitalism can never provide. We defend the USSR today unconditionally against imperialism because the fundamental gains of the October lution remain; it is a society based on production for social needs, not capitalist profit. At the same time call for political revolution to re-establish workers democracy and to return the Soviet Union to the liberating goals and program of Lenin and Trotsky.
Today there is great interest in the Soviet Union, in part because of the visible difficulties of American imperialism, but also because of Gorbachev's promises of glasnost (openness). Yet this "enlightened bureaucrat" will never tell the truth about the revolutionary work of the Bolshevik Party. Between that tradition and today's bureaucracy lies the gulf of the bloody political counterrevolution carried out by Stalin.
To appease the nuclear nuts in the White House, Gorbachev appears willing to pull out of Afghanistan. The Kremlin bureaucracy's willingness to abandon Afghan women to illiteracy, the veil and chattel slavery starkly exposes the gulf separating them from the Bolsheviks, who understood that the question of women's liberation,was key, above all in such backward, feudal areas.
In imperialist countries like the United States, only the abolition of private property will make women's emancipation a historical reality. It will take a socialist revolution in the U.S. to win the basic rights and social institutions the Bolsheviks fought for in the early years of the USSR. Given the tremendous productive capacity of U.S. industry and a far higher level of culture than that which the Bolsheviks inherited from the tsar, we have no doubt that the American workers government will be able to quickly implement such far-reaching social programs. For women's liberation through socialist revolution!
Soviet Measures to Liberate Women
Decree of the People's Commissariat of Health and Social Welfare and the People's Commissariat of Justice in Soviet Russia
During recent decades the number of women interrupting pregnancy by abortion has risen both in the West and in our country.
The legislation of all countries combats this evil by severe punishment of the women undergoing abortions as well as of the doctors performing them. To date this method has succeeded only in making the operation illegal, performed in secrecy, and in making women the victims of ignorant quacks or unscrupu¬lous doctors who turn a profit from abortion. As a result, 50 percent of these women become seriously ill and 4 percent of these die from the consequences of the operation.
The Workers and Peasants Government regards this phenomenon as a terrible evil for the entire society. The Workers and Peasants Government sees the consolidation of the socialist order and agitation against abortion among the broad masses of the female working-class population as the way to successfully combat it. It combats this evil in practice with the most far-reaching protection of mothers and children, hoping that it will gradually disappear. However, as long as the remnants of the past and the difficult economic conditions of the present compel some women to undergo an abortion, the People's Commissariat of Health and Social Welfare and the People's Commissariat of Justice regard the use of penal measures as inappropriate and therefore, to preserve women's health and protect the race against ignorant or self-seeking profiteers, it is resolved:
I. Free abortion, interrupting pregnancy by artificial
means, shall be performed in state hospitals, where
women are assured maximum safety in the operation.
II. It is absolutely prohibited to perform this operation without a doctor.
III. Midwives or "wise women" who break this law
shall forfeit their license to practice and be handed over to the People's Court.
IV. Doctors performing this operation in their private offices for personal gain shall also be brought before the People's Court.
Women's Work in the Economy
Women as Participants in the Construction of Soviet Russia
Resolution of the Eighth Congress of Soviets
Considering that the primary task of the hour is raising the level of industry, transportation and agriculture; that women comprise more than half of the population of Soviet Russia—women workers and peasants; that implementing the proposed unified economic plan is only possible by involving all the female labor power: the Eighth
Congress of Soviets resolves that:
a) Women workers and peasants are to be
involved in all economic organizations which are
working out and realizing the unified economic
plan; likewise in factory administrations, in fac¬
tory committees and in the administration of the
trade-union organizations.
b) For the purpose of reducing the unproduc¬
tive work of women in the household and in child-
care, the Eighth Congress of Soviets requires that
the local Soviets encourage women workers to
support, with their initiative and activity, the
reforms of social institutions, the beginnings of
communist construction, such as organizing com¬
munal dwellings and workshops for washing and
mending laundry in city and village, organizing
squads of cleaning women, creating foster care
centers, communal laundries and dining halls.
The Eighth Congress of Soviets charges the newly constituted Central Executive Committee of the Soviets to immediately begin working out measures aimed at reducing the unproductive work of women in the household and family, thereby increasing the supply of free labor power to raise the people's standard of living and augment the productivity of the Workers Republic.
Social Institutions for the Relief of the Housewife Communal Kitchens in Moscow
The Russian Soviet bodies are committed to the opinion that the traditional housework performed by the mothers of families in individual households must pass over to socialized institutions. This is both in the interest of women, who squander their time and energy in arduous, grinding, unproductive tasks, and in the interest of society, which can make full use of women's talents and accomplishments in the economy and culture. In Moscow there are at present no fewer than 559 communal kitchens in which hot midday and evening meals are prepared daily for 606,100 adults. The children take their meals in the childcare and educa¬tional centers where they have found places or which they attend during the day.
Compare the blessings of "orderly conditions" in the states that are still capitalist with this result of "Bolshevik chaos"! Part and parcel of these "orderly conditions" is the fact that in all major cities, in all industrial centers, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands go without a warm midday meal every day and in the evening in an uncomfortable home they choke down a meal their harried wives have prepared hurriedly and with insufficient means. Increasingly, women in the proletariat and also in the petty bourgeoisie must con¬tribute to the family's income. The double burden of working for a living and running the household rests on her. Meals in common—insofar as they occur at all— unite an overtired mother, a husband who is often grouchy because he does not find at home what he seeks, and children whose eyes and clothing bespeal their lack of care and attention.
'In Russia the working woman can throw off the burden of household obligations. She knows not only she herself, but, more importantly, her husband and children are better cared for than she could manage a home even with great energy and devotion. The home can now be a home in the most noble sense for husband and wife, for parents and children, a place to be together, for thinking and striving together, for enjoyment. Women have the time and leisure to learn, to educate themselves, to participate in all areas of social life, both giving and receiving. Oh, these Bolshevik "wreckers" and "destroyers"! Is that no what the philistines of all the capitalist countrie are still prattling?
Note on the documents: The three pieces reprinted here are our own translations from the April 1921 issue of Die Kommunistische Fraueninfernationat (Communist Women's International), the official German-language journal of the Women's Secretariat of the Communist International. In W&R No. 9 (Summer 1975) we reprinted another version of the abortion legislation, which included at the end the signature "N. Semashko, People's Commissar of Health; Kursk) People's Commissar of Justice." That was taken fron the book Health Protection in the U.S.S.R. by N./A Semashko, published in London by Gollancz in 1934 The date given for the decree on abortion in Semashki is 18 November 1920. Regarding "Women's Work in the Economy": the Eighth Congress of Soviets was held in Moscow from 22 to 29 December 1920. We were unable to find a date for the third piece; the Comintern women's journal did not give a source."
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1988 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.
**********
Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky
How the Bolsheviks Fought fo Women's Emancipation
On the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin announced, "In the course of two years of Soviet power in one of the most backward countries of Europe more has been done to emancipate women, to make her the equal of the 'strong' sex, than has been done during the past 130 years by all the advanced, enlightened, 'democratic' republics of the world taken together" ("Soviet Power and the Status of Women," Collected Works). This truth has a fundamental materialist basis. Only a socialist revolution, breaking the bonds of private property, can create the conditions necessary for the emancipation of women. It's more than ever true today: amidst the barbarous social decay of the imperialist "democracies" like the United States, where reactionary bigots target women's rights, even a mere statement of formal equality like the ERA can't make it into law.
Women and Revolution here reprints three early Soviet decrees addressed to the emancipation of women. Codifying the hard-fought gains of the Bolshevik Revolution, these decrees laid out a perspective for the introduction of new social forms to replace the institution of the family and to draw women into the socialist construction of society. As Lenin said in November 1918, "The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women take part in it. The Soviet government is doing everything in its power to enable women to carry on independent proletarian socialist work" ("Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women," Collected Works).
Women in the Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution was sparked by the working women of St. Petersburg, when, 71 years ago, they celebrated International Women's Day with a spontaneous strike and march through the streets. Thousands of women standing in bread lines joined them; hastily improvised red banners rose above the crowd, demanding bread, peace and higher wages. Years of imperialist war had brought the mammoth social tensions of tsarist Russia, where modern capitalism existed superimposed upon entrenched medievalism, to the breaking point.
The Bolsheviks had long been active in organizing Russian proletarian women. The journal Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), founded in 1914, was only one means by which the Bolsheviks sought to win the ranks of working women over to revolutionary socialism. Social backwardness and poverty in Russia before the revolution fell doubly hard on its women: even mai the minimal gains which capitalism had made possible in the more advanced industrialized countries Europe did not exist in semi-feudal Russia, where serfdom had been abolished a mere 56 years earlier, life lay in the grip of the Orthodox church an priests; religious prejudices were deeply rooted in poverty and ignorance. Peasant women in particular lived under indescribably primitive conditions, cultural impoverished that in 1897 the illiteracy rate was as as 92 percent.
The Bolsheviks understood that the oppression of women could not be legislated out of existence family as the capitalist economic institution for bearing the next generation could not simply be swept away by decree. It had to be replaced with socialized child and housework to remove the burden of doing chores from women, enabling them to participate fully in social and political life. Such a revolutionary restructuring of society could occur only with large-scale industrialization, necessarily years in the future. While fully committed to this revolutionary program, the Bolsheviks were handicapped by terrible objective conditions. For the first few years of Soviet rule their meager resources were absorbed by the Red Army's drive to defeat the imperialists and White Guards who launched a counterrevolutionary war against the young workers republic.
Sweeping Away the Filth of Tsardom
Once in power, the Bolsheviks moved immediately to end all the old legal impediments to women's equality. Women were given the vote, at a time when only Norway and Denmark had legalized women's suffrage. Marriage and divorce were made a simple matter of civil registration, while all distinctions between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" children were annulled. In 1919 the Communist Party created the Department of Working Women and Peasant Women, Zhenotdel, for special work among women, which included organizing over 25,000 literacy schools.
In 1920 the Soviet government legalized abortion and made it free. The People's Commissariat of Health pressed for development of and education about birth control methods, which barely existed in Russia at that time, while discouraging abortion as a threat to health in this age before antibiotics. Even more crucial was the workers government's commitment to eliminating the poverty which drove many women to abortion for sheer lack of ability to provide for their children. The Bolsheviks' aim was to build childcare centers and socialized dining halls to enable women to work knowing their children would be well cared for and fed; single mothers were to receive special help. Despite the severe objective limits facing Soviet society, the birth rate went steadily up and the infant mortality rate steadily down.
The workers revolution in Russia, in sweeping away the rotten filth of tsardom, also abolished in December 1917 all the old laws against homosexual acts. As Dr. Grigorii Batkis, the director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, pointed out in "The Sexual Revolution in Russia," published in the Soviet Union in 1923:
"Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle:
'It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters so long as nobody is injured and no one's interests are encroached upon.... "Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called 'natural' intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters." [emphasis in original]
The Fight for Women's Rights in Soviet Central Asia
Nowhere was the condition of women more downtrodden than in the primitive Muslim areas of Soviet Central Asia. The Bolsheviks believed that women, having the most to gain, would be the link that broke the feudal chain in the Soviet East, but they could not with one blow abolish oppressive Muslim institutions. The Bolshevik approach was based on ma¬terialism, not moralism. The Muslim bride price, for example, was not some sinister plot against womankind, but had arisen as an institution central to distrib¬uting land and water rights among different clans (see "Early Bolshevik Work Among Women of the Soviet East," W&R No. 12, Summer 1976, for a fuller discussion).
Systematic Bolshevik work among Muslim women was only possible in 1921, after the end of the bitter Civil War. Dedicated and heroic members of the Zhenotdel donned veils in order to meet Muslim women and explain the laws and goals of the new Soviet republic. Special meeting places, sometimes "Red Yertas" or tents in nomadic areas or clubs in cities, were a key way for the Communist Party to begin to win the trust of these women. Such clubs followed Lenin's policy of using Soviet state power to carefully and systematically undermine native tribalism by demonstrating the superiority of Soviet institutions. The tremendous pro¬ductive capacity of the Soviet planned economy provided the services, education and jobs that finally decisively undercut the ancient order and liberated women from their stifling subjugation.
Today the condition of women in Soviet Central Asia is centuries removed from the oppression their sisters across the border in Afghanistan still face. We said "Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!" because the 1979 Soviet Army intervention against murderous Islamic counterrevolution (whose rallying cry is keeping women under the veil) posed the possibility of a revolutionary transformation of this hideously backward country. Under the protection of the Red Army, the women of Afghanistan have been taught to read and write, and a major¬ity of university students are now women and girls; many hold jobs outside the home; and there are 15,000 women in the Afghan army, defending their new freedoms.
Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky!
Many of the gains made by Soviet women under the Bolsheviks were subsequently reversed by the Stalinist political counterrevolution. In 1936, abortion was made illegal. (It was again legalized in 1955.) Divorce becar difficult to obtain, co-education was abolished, horr sexuality was again outlawed. As Trotsky said, "The actual liberation of women is unrealizable on a basis 'generalized want.' Experience soon proved this ai tere truth which Marx had formulated eighty years before." The cruel Civil War decimated the proletariat in the young workers state. Most fundamentally, failure to extend the Revolution internationally strengthened the Stalinist bureaucratic caste in the isola Soviet Union. Workers democracy was smashed." Leninist internationalist program was abandoned favor of the search for "peaceful coexistence" versus imperialism, while domestically the Stalinists sou social props and ideological justifications for bure cratic rule. Exploiting social backwardness to strenghten their grip over society, the Stalinists rehabilitated family as a useful institution of social conservatism control.
Trotsky denounced the Stalinist bureaucracy "Thermidor in the Family" (The Revolution Betray "These gentlemen have, it seems, completely fogooten that socialism was to remove the cause which impels woman to abortion, and not force her into the 'joys of motherhood' with the help of a foul police interference in what is to every woman the most mate sphere of life....
"Instead of openly saying, 'We have proven still poor and ignorant for trie creation of socialist tions among men, our children and grandchildren realize this aim,' the leaders are forcing people together against the shell of the broken family, and not only that, but to consider it, under threat of extreme penalties, the sacred nucleus of triumphant socialism. It is hard to measure with the eye the scope of the retreat."
Despite these counterrevolutionary measures, capitalist private property has not been restored in the Soviet Union. The tremendous productive capac the Soviet planned economy has opened opportunities for women—in education, jobs, social service—which capitalism can never provide. We defend the USSR today unconditionally against imperialism because the fundamental gains of the October lution remain; it is a society based on production for social needs, not capitalist profit. At the same time call for political revolution to re-establish workers democracy and to return the Soviet Union to the liberating goals and program of Lenin and Trotsky.
Today there is great interest in the Soviet Union, in part because of the visible difficulties of American imperialism, but also because of Gorbachev's promises of glasnost (openness). Yet this "enlightened bureaucrat" will never tell the truth about the revolutionary work of the Bolshevik Party. Between that tradition and today's bureaucracy lies the gulf of the bloody political counterrevolution carried out by Stalin.
To appease the nuclear nuts in the White House, Gorbachev appears willing to pull out of Afghanistan. The Kremlin bureaucracy's willingness to abandon Afghan women to illiteracy, the veil and chattel slavery starkly exposes the gulf separating them from the Bolsheviks, who understood that the question of women's liberation,was key, above all in such backward, feudal areas.
In imperialist countries like the United States, only the abolition of private property will make women's emancipation a historical reality. It will take a socialist revolution in the U.S. to win the basic rights and social institutions the Bolsheviks fought for in the early years of the USSR. Given the tremendous productive capacity of U.S. industry and a far higher level of culture than that which the Bolsheviks inherited from the tsar, we have no doubt that the American workers government will be able to quickly implement such far-reaching social programs. For women's liberation through socialist revolution!
Soviet Measures to Liberate Women
Decree of the People's Commissariat of Health and Social Welfare and the People's Commissariat of Justice in Soviet Russia
During recent decades the number of women interrupting pregnancy by abortion has risen both in the West and in our country.
The legislation of all countries combats this evil by severe punishment of the women undergoing abortions as well as of the doctors performing them. To date this method has succeeded only in making the operation illegal, performed in secrecy, and in making women the victims of ignorant quacks or unscrupu¬lous doctors who turn a profit from abortion. As a result, 50 percent of these women become seriously ill and 4 percent of these die from the consequences of the operation.
The Workers and Peasants Government regards this phenomenon as a terrible evil for the entire society. The Workers and Peasants Government sees the consolidation of the socialist order and agitation against abortion among the broad masses of the female working-class population as the way to successfully combat it. It combats this evil in practice with the most far-reaching protection of mothers and children, hoping that it will gradually disappear. However, as long as the remnants of the past and the difficult economic conditions of the present compel some women to undergo an abortion, the People's Commissariat of Health and Social Welfare and the People's Commissariat of Justice regard the use of penal measures as inappropriate and therefore, to preserve women's health and protect the race against ignorant or self-seeking profiteers, it is resolved:
I. Free abortion, interrupting pregnancy by artificial
means, shall be performed in state hospitals, where
women are assured maximum safety in the operation.
II. It is absolutely prohibited to perform this operation without a doctor.
III. Midwives or "wise women" who break this law
shall forfeit their license to practice and be handed over to the People's Court.
IV. Doctors performing this operation in their private offices for personal gain shall also be brought before the People's Court.
Women's Work in the Economy
Women as Participants in the Construction of Soviet Russia
Resolution of the Eighth Congress of Soviets
Considering that the primary task of the hour is raising the level of industry, transportation and agriculture; that women comprise more than half of the population of Soviet Russia—women workers and peasants; that implementing the proposed unified economic plan is only possible by involving all the female labor power: the Eighth
Congress of Soviets resolves that:
a) Women workers and peasants are to be
involved in all economic organizations which are
working out and realizing the unified economic
plan; likewise in factory administrations, in fac¬
tory committees and in the administration of the
trade-union organizations.
b) For the purpose of reducing the unproduc¬
tive work of women in the household and in child-
care, the Eighth Congress of Soviets requires that
the local Soviets encourage women workers to
support, with their initiative and activity, the
reforms of social institutions, the beginnings of
communist construction, such as organizing com¬
munal dwellings and workshops for washing and
mending laundry in city and village, organizing
squads of cleaning women, creating foster care
centers, communal laundries and dining halls.
The Eighth Congress of Soviets charges the newly constituted Central Executive Committee of the Soviets to immediately begin working out measures aimed at reducing the unproductive work of women in the household and family, thereby increasing the supply of free labor power to raise the people's standard of living and augment the productivity of the Workers Republic.
Social Institutions for the Relief of the Housewife Communal Kitchens in Moscow
The Russian Soviet bodies are committed to the opinion that the traditional housework performed by the mothers of families in individual households must pass over to socialized institutions. This is both in the interest of women, who squander their time and energy in arduous, grinding, unproductive tasks, and in the interest of society, which can make full use of women's talents and accomplishments in the economy and culture. In Moscow there are at present no fewer than 559 communal kitchens in which hot midday and evening meals are prepared daily for 606,100 adults. The children take their meals in the childcare and educa¬tional centers where they have found places or which they attend during the day.
Compare the blessings of "orderly conditions" in the states that are still capitalist with this result of "Bolshevik chaos"! Part and parcel of these "orderly conditions" is the fact that in all major cities, in all industrial centers, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands go without a warm midday meal every day and in the evening in an uncomfortable home they choke down a meal their harried wives have prepared hurriedly and with insufficient means. Increasingly, women in the proletariat and also in the petty bourgeoisie must con¬tribute to the family's income. The double burden of working for a living and running the household rests on her. Meals in common—insofar as they occur at all— unite an overtired mother, a husband who is often grouchy because he does not find at home what he seeks, and children whose eyes and clothing bespeal their lack of care and attention.
'In Russia the working woman can throw off the burden of household obligations. She knows not only she herself, but, more importantly, her husband and children are better cared for than she could manage a home even with great energy and devotion. The home can now be a home in the most noble sense for husband and wife, for parents and children, a place to be together, for thinking and striving together, for enjoyment. Women have the time and leisure to learn, to educate themselves, to participate in all areas of social life, both giving and receiving. Oh, these Bolshevik "wreckers" and "destroyers"! Is that no what the philistines of all the capitalist countrie are still prattling?
Note on the documents: The three pieces reprinted here are our own translations from the April 1921 issue of Die Kommunistische Fraueninfernationat (Communist Women's International), the official German-language journal of the Women's Secretariat of the Communist International. In W&R No. 9 (Summer 1975) we reprinted another version of the abortion legislation, which included at the end the signature "N. Semashko, People's Commissar of Health; Kursk) People's Commissar of Justice." That was taken fron the book Health Protection in the U.S.S.R. by N./A Semashko, published in London by Gollancz in 1934 The date given for the decree on abortion in Semashki is 18 November 1920. Regarding "Women's Work in the Economy": the Eighth Congress of Soviets was held in Moscow from 22 to 29 December 1920. We were unable to find a date for the third piece; the Comintern women's journal did not give a source."
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-How the Bolsheviks Fought for Women's Emancipation
Click on the headline to link to the "Leon Trotsky Internet Archive' online copy of his 1923 article, "From The Old Family To The New".
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1988 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.
**********
Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky
How the Bolsheviks Fought fo Women's Emancipation
On the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin announced, "In the course of two years of Soviet power in one of the most backward countries of Europe more has been done to emancipate women, to make her the equal of the 'strong' sex, than has been done during the past 130 years by all the advanced, enlightened, 'democratic' republics of the world taken together" ("Soviet Power and the Status of Women," Collected Works). This truth has a fundamental materialist basis. Only a socialist revolution, breaking the bonds of private property, can create the conditions necessary for the emancipation of women. It's more than ever true today: amidst the barbarous social decay of the imperialist "democracies" like the United States, where reactionary bigots target women's rights, even a mere statement of formal equality like the ERA can't make it into law.
Women and Revolution here reprints three early Soviet decrees addressed to the emancipation of women. Codifying the hard-fought gains of the Bolshevik Revolution, these decrees laid out a perspective for the introduction of new social forms to replace the institution of the family and to draw women into the socialist construction of society. As Lenin said in November 1918, "The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women take part in it. The Soviet government is doing everything in its power to enable women to carry on independent proletarian socialist work" ("Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women," Collected Works).
Women in the Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution was sparked by the working women of St. Petersburg, when, 71 years ago, they celebrated International Women's Day with a spontaneous strike and march through the streets. Thousands of women standing in bread lines joined them; hastily improvised red banners rose above the crowd, demanding bread, peace and higher wages. Years of imperialist war had brought the mammoth social tensions of tsarist Russia, where modern capitalism existed superimposed upon entrenched medievalism, to the breaking point.
The Bolsheviks had long been active in organizing Russian proletarian women. The journal Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), founded in 1914, was only one means by which the Bolsheviks sought to win the ranks of working women over to revolutionary socialism. Social backwardness and poverty in Russia before the revolution fell doubly hard on its women: even mai the minimal gains which capitalism had made possible in the more advanced industrialized countries Europe did not exist in semi-feudal Russia, where serfdom had been abolished a mere 56 years earlier, life lay in the grip of the Orthodox church an priests; religious prejudices were deeply rooted in poverty and ignorance. Peasant women in particular lived under indescribably primitive conditions, cultural impoverished that in 1897 the illiteracy rate was as as 92 percent.
The Bolsheviks understood that the oppression of women could not be legislated out of existence family as the capitalist economic institution for bearing the next generation could not simply be swept away by decree. It had to be replaced with socialized child and housework to remove the burden of doing chores from women, enabling them to participate fully in social and political life. Such a revolutionary restructuring of society could occur only with large-scale industrialization, necessarily years in the future. While fully committed to this revolutionary program, the Bolsheviks were handicapped by terrible objective conditions. For the first few years of Soviet rule their meager resources were absorbed by the Red Army's drive to defeat the imperialists and White Guards who launched a counterrevolutionary war against the young workers republic.
Sweeping Away the Filth of Tsardom
Once in power, the Bolsheviks moved immediately to end all the old legal impediments to women's equality. Women were given the vote, at a time when only Norway and Denmark had legalized women's suffrage. Marriage and divorce were made a simple matter of civil registration, while all distinctions between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" children were annulled. In 1919 the Communist Party created the Department of Working Women and Peasant Women, Zhenotdel, for special work among women, which included organizing over 25,000 literacy schools.
In 1920 the Soviet government legalized abortion and made it free. The People's Commissariat of Health pressed for development of and education about birth control methods, which barely existed in Russia at that time, while discouraging abortion as a threat to health in this age before antibiotics. Even more crucial was the workers government's commitment to eliminating the poverty which drove many women to abortion for sheer lack of ability to provide for their children. The Bolsheviks' aim was to build childcare centers and socialized dining halls to enable women to work knowing their children would be well cared for and fed; single mothers were to receive special help. Despite the severe objective limits facing Soviet society, the birth rate went steadily up and the infant mortality rate steadily down.
The workers revolution in Russia, in sweeping away the rotten filth of tsardom, also abolished in December 1917 all the old laws against homosexual acts. As Dr. Grigorii Batkis, the director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, pointed out in "The Sexual Revolution in Russia," published in the Soviet Union in 1923:
"Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle:
'It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters so long as nobody is injured and no one's interests are encroached upon.... "Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called 'natural' intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters." [emphasis in original]
The Fight for Women's Rights in Soviet Central Asia
Nowhere was the condition of women more downtrodden than in the primitive Muslim areas of Soviet Central Asia. The Bolsheviks believed that women, having the most to gain, would be the link that broke the feudal chain in the Soviet East, but they could not with one blow abolish oppressive Muslim institutions. The Bolshevik approach was based on ma¬terialism, not moralism. The Muslim bride price, for example, was not some sinister plot against womankind, but had arisen as an institution central to distrib¬uting land and water rights among different clans (see "Early Bolshevik Work Among Women of the Soviet East," W&R No. 12, Summer 1976, for a fuller discussion).
Systematic Bolshevik work among Muslim women was only possible in 1921, after the end of the bitter Civil War. Dedicated and heroic members of the Zhenotdel donned veils in order to meet Muslim women and explain the laws and goals of the new Soviet republic. Special meeting places, sometimes "Red Yertas" or tents in nomadic areas or clubs in cities, were a key way for the Communist Party to begin to win the trust of these women. Such clubs followed Lenin's policy of using Soviet state power to carefully and systematically undermine native tribalism by demonstrating the superiority of Soviet institutions. The tremendous pro¬ductive capacity of the Soviet planned economy provided the services, education and jobs that finally decisively undercut the ancient order and liberated women from their stifling subjugation.
Today the condition of women in Soviet Central Asia is centuries removed from the oppression their sisters across the border in Afghanistan still face. We said "Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!" because the 1979 Soviet Army intervention against murderous Islamic counterrevolution (whose rallying cry is keeping women under the veil) posed the possibility of a revolutionary transformation of this hideously backward country. Under the protection of the Red Army, the women of Afghanistan have been taught to read and write, and a major¬ity of university students are now women and girls; many hold jobs outside the home; and there are 15,000 women in the Afghan army, defending their new freedoms.
Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky!
Many of the gains made by Soviet women under the Bolsheviks were subsequently reversed by the Stalinist political counterrevolution. In 1936, abortion was made illegal. (It was again legalized in 1955.) Divorce becar difficult to obtain, co-education was abolished, horr sexuality was again outlawed. As Trotsky said, "The actual liberation of women is unrealizable on a basis 'generalized want.' Experience soon proved this ai tere truth which Marx had formulated eighty years before." The cruel Civil War decimated the proletariat in the young workers state. Most fundamentally, failure to extend the Revolution internationally strengthened the Stalinist bureaucratic caste in the isola Soviet Union. Workers democracy was smashed." Leninist internationalist program was abandoned favor of the search for "peaceful coexistence" versus imperialism, while domestically the Stalinists sou social props and ideological justifications for bure cratic rule. Exploiting social backwardness to strenghten their grip over society, the Stalinists rehabilitated family as a useful institution of social conservatism control.
Trotsky denounced the Stalinist bureaucracy "Thermidor in the Family" (The Revolution Betray "These gentlemen have, it seems, completely fogooten that socialism was to remove the cause which impels woman to abortion, and not force her into the 'joys of motherhood' with the help of a foul police interference in what is to every woman the most mate sphere of life....
"Instead of openly saying, 'We have proven still poor and ignorant for trie creation of socialist tions among men, our children and grandchildren realize this aim,' the leaders are forcing people together against the shell of the broken family, and not only that, but to consider it, under threat of extreme penalties, the sacred nucleus of triumphant socialism. It is hard to measure with the eye the scope of the retreat."
Despite these counterrevolutionary measures, capitalist private property has not been restored in the Soviet Union. The tremendous productive capac the Soviet planned economy has opened opportunities for women—in education, jobs, social service—which capitalism can never provide. We defend the USSR today unconditionally against imperialism because the fundamental gains of the October lution remain; it is a society based on production for social needs, not capitalist profit. At the same time call for political revolution to re-establish workers democracy and to return the Soviet Union to the liberating goals and program of Lenin and Trotsky.
Today there is great interest in the Soviet Union, in part because of the visible difficulties of American imperialism, but also because of Gorbachev's promises of glasnost (openness). Yet this "enlightened bureaucrat" will never tell the truth about the revolutionary work of the Bolshevik Party. Between that tradition and today's bureaucracy lies the gulf of the bloody political counterrevolution carried out by Stalin.
To appease the nuclear nuts in the White House, Gorbachev appears willing to pull out of Afghanistan. The Kremlin bureaucracy's willingness to abandon Afghan women to illiteracy, the veil and chattel slavery starkly exposes the gulf separating them from the Bolsheviks, who understood that the question of women's liberation,was key, above all in such backward, feudal areas.
In imperialist countries like the United States, only the abolition of private property will make women's emancipation a historical reality. It will take a socialist revolution in the U.S. to win the basic rights and social institutions the Bolsheviks fought for in the early years of the USSR. Given the tremendous productive capacity of U.S. industry and a far higher level of culture than that which the Bolsheviks inherited from the tsar, we have no doubt that the American workers government will be able to quickly implement such far-reaching social programs. For women's liberation through socialist revolution!
Soviet Measures to Liberate Women
Decree of the People's Commissariat of Health and Social Welfare and the People's Commissariat of Justice in Soviet Russia
During recent decades the number of women interrupting pregnancy by abortion has risen both in the West and in our country.
The legislation of all countries combats this evil by severe punishment of the women undergoing abortions as well as of the doctors performing them. To date this method has succeeded only in making the operation illegal, performed in secrecy, and in making women the victims of ignorant quacks or unscrupu¬lous doctors who turn a profit from abortion. As a result, 50 percent of these women become seriously ill and 4 percent of these die from the consequences of the operation.
The Workers and Peasants Government regards this phenomenon as a terrible evil for the entire society. The Workers and Peasants Government sees the consolidation of the socialist order and agitation against abortion among the broad masses of the female working-class population as the way to successfully combat it. It combats this evil in practice with the most far-reaching protection of mothers and children, hoping that it will gradually disappear. However, as long as the remnants of the past and the difficult economic conditions of the present compel some women to undergo an abortion, the People's Commissariat of Health and Social Welfare and the People's Commissariat of Justice regard the use of penal measures as inappropriate and therefore, to preserve women's health and protect the race against ignorant or self-seeking profiteers, it is resolved:
I. Free abortion, interrupting pregnancy by artificial
means, shall be performed in state hospitals, where
women are assured maximum safety in the operation.
II. It is absolutely prohibited to perform this operation without a doctor.
III. Midwives or "wise women" who break this law
shall forfeit their license to practice and be handed over to the People's Court.
IV. Doctors performing this operation in their private offices for personal gain shall also be brought before the People's Court.
Women's Work in the Economy
Women as Participants in the Construction of Soviet Russia
Resolution of the Eighth Congress of Soviets
Considering that the primary task of the hour is raising the level of industry, transportation and agriculture; that women comprise more than half of the population of Soviet Russia—women workers and peasants; that implementing the proposed unified economic plan is only possible by involving all the female labor power: the Eighth
Congress of Soviets resolves that:
a) Women workers and peasants are to be
involved in all economic organizations which are
working out and realizing the unified economic
plan; likewise in factory administrations, in fac¬
tory committees and in the administration of the
trade-union organizations.
b) For the purpose of reducing the unproduc¬
tive work of women in the household and in child-
care, the Eighth Congress of Soviets requires that
the local Soviets encourage women workers to
support, with their initiative and activity, the
reforms of social institutions, the beginnings of
communist construction, such as organizing com¬
munal dwellings and workshops for washing and
mending laundry in city and village, organizing
squads of cleaning women, creating foster care
centers, communal laundries and dining halls.
The Eighth Congress of Soviets charges the newly constituted Central Executive Committee of the Soviets to immediately begin working out measures aimed at reducing the unproductive work of women in the household and family, thereby increasing the supply of free labor power to raise the people's standard of living and augment the productivity of the Workers Republic.
Social Institutions for the Relief of the Housewife Communal Kitchens in Moscow
The Russian Soviet bodies are committed to the opinion that the traditional housework performed by the mothers of families in individual households must pass over to socialized institutions. This is both in the interest of women, who squander their time and energy in arduous, grinding, unproductive tasks, and in the interest of society, which can make full use of women's talents and accomplishments in the economy and culture. In Moscow there are at present no fewer than 559 communal kitchens in which hot midday and evening meals are prepared daily for 606,100 adults. The children take their meals in the childcare and educa¬tional centers where they have found places or which they attend during the day.
Compare the blessings of "orderly conditions" in the states that are still capitalist with this result of "Bolshevik chaos"! Part and parcel of these "orderly conditions" is the fact that in all major cities, in all industrial centers, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands go without a warm midday meal every day and in the evening in an uncomfortable home they choke down a meal their harried wives have prepared hurriedly and with insufficient means. Increasingly, women in the proletariat and also in the petty bourgeoisie must con¬tribute to the family's income. The double burden of working for a living and running the household rests on her. Meals in common—insofar as they occur at all— unite an overtired mother, a husband who is often grouchy because he does not find at home what he seeks, and children whose eyes and clothing bespeal their lack of care and attention.
'In Russia the working woman can throw off the burden of household obligations. She knows not only she herself, but, more importantly, her husband and children are better cared for than she could manage a home even with great energy and devotion. The home can now be a home in the most noble sense for husband and wife, for parents and children, a place to be together, for thinking and striving together, for enjoyment. Women have the time and leisure to learn, to educate themselves, to participate in all areas of social life, both giving and receiving. Oh, these Bolshevik "wreckers" and "destroyers"! Is that no what the philistines of all the capitalist countrie are still prattling?
Note on the documents: The three pieces reprinted here are our own translations from the April 1921 issue of Die Kommunistische Fraueninfernationat (Communist Women's International), the official German-language journal of the Women's Secretariat of the Communist International. In W&R No. 9 (Summer 1975) we reprinted another version of the abortion legislation, which included at the end the signature "N. Semashko, People's Commissar of Health; Kursk) People's Commissar of Justice." That was taken fron the book Health Protection in the U.S.S.R. by N./A Semashko, published in London by Gollancz in 1934 The date given for the decree on abortion in Semashki is 18 November 1920. Regarding "Women's Work in the Economy": the Eighth Congress of Soviets was held in Moscow from 22 to 29 December 1920. We were unable to find a date for the third piece; the Comintern women's journal did not give a source."
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1988 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.
**********
Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky
How the Bolsheviks Fought fo Women's Emancipation
On the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin announced, "In the course of two years of Soviet power in one of the most backward countries of Europe more has been done to emancipate women, to make her the equal of the 'strong' sex, than has been done during the past 130 years by all the advanced, enlightened, 'democratic' republics of the world taken together" ("Soviet Power and the Status of Women," Collected Works). This truth has a fundamental materialist basis. Only a socialist revolution, breaking the bonds of private property, can create the conditions necessary for the emancipation of women. It's more than ever true today: amidst the barbarous social decay of the imperialist "democracies" like the United States, where reactionary bigots target women's rights, even a mere statement of formal equality like the ERA can't make it into law.
Women and Revolution here reprints three early Soviet decrees addressed to the emancipation of women. Codifying the hard-fought gains of the Bolshevik Revolution, these decrees laid out a perspective for the introduction of new social forms to replace the institution of the family and to draw women into the socialist construction of society. As Lenin said in November 1918, "The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women take part in it. The Soviet government is doing everything in its power to enable women to carry on independent proletarian socialist work" ("Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women," Collected Works).
Women in the Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution was sparked by the working women of St. Petersburg, when, 71 years ago, they celebrated International Women's Day with a spontaneous strike and march through the streets. Thousands of women standing in bread lines joined them; hastily improvised red banners rose above the crowd, demanding bread, peace and higher wages. Years of imperialist war had brought the mammoth social tensions of tsarist Russia, where modern capitalism existed superimposed upon entrenched medievalism, to the breaking point.
The Bolsheviks had long been active in organizing Russian proletarian women. The journal Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), founded in 1914, was only one means by which the Bolsheviks sought to win the ranks of working women over to revolutionary socialism. Social backwardness and poverty in Russia before the revolution fell doubly hard on its women: even mai the minimal gains which capitalism had made possible in the more advanced industrialized countries Europe did not exist in semi-feudal Russia, where serfdom had been abolished a mere 56 years earlier, life lay in the grip of the Orthodox church an priests; religious prejudices were deeply rooted in poverty and ignorance. Peasant women in particular lived under indescribably primitive conditions, cultural impoverished that in 1897 the illiteracy rate was as as 92 percent.
The Bolsheviks understood that the oppression of women could not be legislated out of existence family as the capitalist economic institution for bearing the next generation could not simply be swept away by decree. It had to be replaced with socialized child and housework to remove the burden of doing chores from women, enabling them to participate fully in social and political life. Such a revolutionary restructuring of society could occur only with large-scale industrialization, necessarily years in the future. While fully committed to this revolutionary program, the Bolsheviks were handicapped by terrible objective conditions. For the first few years of Soviet rule their meager resources were absorbed by the Red Army's drive to defeat the imperialists and White Guards who launched a counterrevolutionary war against the young workers republic.
Sweeping Away the Filth of Tsardom
Once in power, the Bolsheviks moved immediately to end all the old legal impediments to women's equality. Women were given the vote, at a time when only Norway and Denmark had legalized women's suffrage. Marriage and divorce were made a simple matter of civil registration, while all distinctions between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" children were annulled. In 1919 the Communist Party created the Department of Working Women and Peasant Women, Zhenotdel, for special work among women, which included organizing over 25,000 literacy schools.
In 1920 the Soviet government legalized abortion and made it free. The People's Commissariat of Health pressed for development of and education about birth control methods, which barely existed in Russia at that time, while discouraging abortion as a threat to health in this age before antibiotics. Even more crucial was the workers government's commitment to eliminating the poverty which drove many women to abortion for sheer lack of ability to provide for their children. The Bolsheviks' aim was to build childcare centers and socialized dining halls to enable women to work knowing their children would be well cared for and fed; single mothers were to receive special help. Despite the severe objective limits facing Soviet society, the birth rate went steadily up and the infant mortality rate steadily down.
The workers revolution in Russia, in sweeping away the rotten filth of tsardom, also abolished in December 1917 all the old laws against homosexual acts. As Dr. Grigorii Batkis, the director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, pointed out in "The Sexual Revolution in Russia," published in the Soviet Union in 1923:
"Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle:
'It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters so long as nobody is injured and no one's interests are encroached upon.... "Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called 'natural' intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters." [emphasis in original]
The Fight for Women's Rights in Soviet Central Asia
Nowhere was the condition of women more downtrodden than in the primitive Muslim areas of Soviet Central Asia. The Bolsheviks believed that women, having the most to gain, would be the link that broke the feudal chain in the Soviet East, but they could not with one blow abolish oppressive Muslim institutions. The Bolshevik approach was based on ma¬terialism, not moralism. The Muslim bride price, for example, was not some sinister plot against womankind, but had arisen as an institution central to distrib¬uting land and water rights among different clans (see "Early Bolshevik Work Among Women of the Soviet East," W&R No. 12, Summer 1976, for a fuller discussion).
Systematic Bolshevik work among Muslim women was only possible in 1921, after the end of the bitter Civil War. Dedicated and heroic members of the Zhenotdel donned veils in order to meet Muslim women and explain the laws and goals of the new Soviet republic. Special meeting places, sometimes "Red Yertas" or tents in nomadic areas or clubs in cities, were a key way for the Communist Party to begin to win the trust of these women. Such clubs followed Lenin's policy of using Soviet state power to carefully and systematically undermine native tribalism by demonstrating the superiority of Soviet institutions. The tremendous pro¬ductive capacity of the Soviet planned economy provided the services, education and jobs that finally decisively undercut the ancient order and liberated women from their stifling subjugation.
Today the condition of women in Soviet Central Asia is centuries removed from the oppression their sisters across the border in Afghanistan still face. We said "Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!" because the 1979 Soviet Army intervention against murderous Islamic counterrevolution (whose rallying cry is keeping women under the veil) posed the possibility of a revolutionary transformation of this hideously backward country. Under the protection of the Red Army, the women of Afghanistan have been taught to read and write, and a major¬ity of university students are now women and girls; many hold jobs outside the home; and there are 15,000 women in the Afghan army, defending their new freedoms.
Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky!
Many of the gains made by Soviet women under the Bolsheviks were subsequently reversed by the Stalinist political counterrevolution. In 1936, abortion was made illegal. (It was again legalized in 1955.) Divorce becar difficult to obtain, co-education was abolished, horr sexuality was again outlawed. As Trotsky said, "The actual liberation of women is unrealizable on a basis 'generalized want.' Experience soon proved this ai tere truth which Marx had formulated eighty years before." The cruel Civil War decimated the proletariat in the young workers state. Most fundamentally, failure to extend the Revolution internationally strengthened the Stalinist bureaucratic caste in the isola Soviet Union. Workers democracy was smashed." Leninist internationalist program was abandoned favor of the search for "peaceful coexistence" versus imperialism, while domestically the Stalinists sou social props and ideological justifications for bure cratic rule. Exploiting social backwardness to strenghten their grip over society, the Stalinists rehabilitated family as a useful institution of social conservatism control.
Trotsky denounced the Stalinist bureaucracy "Thermidor in the Family" (The Revolution Betray "These gentlemen have, it seems, completely fogooten that socialism was to remove the cause which impels woman to abortion, and not force her into the 'joys of motherhood' with the help of a foul police interference in what is to every woman the most mate sphere of life....
"Instead of openly saying, 'We have proven still poor and ignorant for trie creation of socialist tions among men, our children and grandchildren realize this aim,' the leaders are forcing people together against the shell of the broken family, and not only that, but to consider it, under threat of extreme penalties, the sacred nucleus of triumphant socialism. It is hard to measure with the eye the scope of the retreat."
Despite these counterrevolutionary measures, capitalist private property has not been restored in the Soviet Union. The tremendous productive capac the Soviet planned economy has opened opportunities for women—in education, jobs, social service—which capitalism can never provide. We defend the USSR today unconditionally against imperialism because the fundamental gains of the October lution remain; it is a society based on production for social needs, not capitalist profit. At the same time call for political revolution to re-establish workers democracy and to return the Soviet Union to the liberating goals and program of Lenin and Trotsky.
Today there is great interest in the Soviet Union, in part because of the visible difficulties of American imperialism, but also because of Gorbachev's promises of glasnost (openness). Yet this "enlightened bureaucrat" will never tell the truth about the revolutionary work of the Bolshevik Party. Between that tradition and today's bureaucracy lies the gulf of the bloody political counterrevolution carried out by Stalin.
To appease the nuclear nuts in the White House, Gorbachev appears willing to pull out of Afghanistan. The Kremlin bureaucracy's willingness to abandon Afghan women to illiteracy, the veil and chattel slavery starkly exposes the gulf separating them from the Bolsheviks, who understood that the question of women's liberation,was key, above all in such backward, feudal areas.
In imperialist countries like the United States, only the abolition of private property will make women's emancipation a historical reality. It will take a socialist revolution in the U.S. to win the basic rights and social institutions the Bolsheviks fought for in the early years of the USSR. Given the tremendous productive capacity of U.S. industry and a far higher level of culture than that which the Bolsheviks inherited from the tsar, we have no doubt that the American workers government will be able to quickly implement such far-reaching social programs. For women's liberation through socialist revolution!
Soviet Measures to Liberate Women
Decree of the People's Commissariat of Health and Social Welfare and the People's Commissariat of Justice in Soviet Russia
During recent decades the number of women interrupting pregnancy by abortion has risen both in the West and in our country.
The legislation of all countries combats this evil by severe punishment of the women undergoing abortions as well as of the doctors performing them. To date this method has succeeded only in making the operation illegal, performed in secrecy, and in making women the victims of ignorant quacks or unscrupu¬lous doctors who turn a profit from abortion. As a result, 50 percent of these women become seriously ill and 4 percent of these die from the consequences of the operation.
The Workers and Peasants Government regards this phenomenon as a terrible evil for the entire society. The Workers and Peasants Government sees the consolidation of the socialist order and agitation against abortion among the broad masses of the female working-class population as the way to successfully combat it. It combats this evil in practice with the most far-reaching protection of mothers and children, hoping that it will gradually disappear. However, as long as the remnants of the past and the difficult economic conditions of the present compel some women to undergo an abortion, the People's Commissariat of Health and Social Welfare and the People's Commissariat of Justice regard the use of penal measures as inappropriate and therefore, to preserve women's health and protect the race against ignorant or self-seeking profiteers, it is resolved:
I. Free abortion, interrupting pregnancy by artificial
means, shall be performed in state hospitals, where
women are assured maximum safety in the operation.
II. It is absolutely prohibited to perform this operation without a doctor.
III. Midwives or "wise women" who break this law
shall forfeit their license to practice and be handed over to the People's Court.
IV. Doctors performing this operation in their private offices for personal gain shall also be brought before the People's Court.
Women's Work in the Economy
Women as Participants in the Construction of Soviet Russia
Resolution of the Eighth Congress of Soviets
Considering that the primary task of the hour is raising the level of industry, transportation and agriculture; that women comprise more than half of the population of Soviet Russia—women workers and peasants; that implementing the proposed unified economic plan is only possible by involving all the female labor power: the Eighth
Congress of Soviets resolves that:
a) Women workers and peasants are to be
involved in all economic organizations which are
working out and realizing the unified economic
plan; likewise in factory administrations, in fac¬
tory committees and in the administration of the
trade-union organizations.
b) For the purpose of reducing the unproduc¬
tive work of women in the household and in child-
care, the Eighth Congress of Soviets requires that
the local Soviets encourage women workers to
support, with their initiative and activity, the
reforms of social institutions, the beginnings of
communist construction, such as organizing com¬
munal dwellings and workshops for washing and
mending laundry in city and village, organizing
squads of cleaning women, creating foster care
centers, communal laundries and dining halls.
The Eighth Congress of Soviets charges the newly constituted Central Executive Committee of the Soviets to immediately begin working out measures aimed at reducing the unproductive work of women in the household and family, thereby increasing the supply of free labor power to raise the people's standard of living and augment the productivity of the Workers Republic.
Social Institutions for the Relief of the Housewife Communal Kitchens in Moscow
The Russian Soviet bodies are committed to the opinion that the traditional housework performed by the mothers of families in individual households must pass over to socialized institutions. This is both in the interest of women, who squander their time and energy in arduous, grinding, unproductive tasks, and in the interest of society, which can make full use of women's talents and accomplishments in the economy and culture. In Moscow there are at present no fewer than 559 communal kitchens in which hot midday and evening meals are prepared daily for 606,100 adults. The children take their meals in the childcare and educa¬tional centers where they have found places or which they attend during the day.
Compare the blessings of "orderly conditions" in the states that are still capitalist with this result of "Bolshevik chaos"! Part and parcel of these "orderly conditions" is the fact that in all major cities, in all industrial centers, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands go without a warm midday meal every day and in the evening in an uncomfortable home they choke down a meal their harried wives have prepared hurriedly and with insufficient means. Increasingly, women in the proletariat and also in the petty bourgeoisie must con¬tribute to the family's income. The double burden of working for a living and running the household rests on her. Meals in common—insofar as they occur at all— unite an overtired mother, a husband who is often grouchy because he does not find at home what he seeks, and children whose eyes and clothing bespeal their lack of care and attention.
'In Russia the working woman can throw off the burden of household obligations. She knows not only she herself, but, more importantly, her husband and children are better cared for than she could manage a home even with great energy and devotion. The home can now be a home in the most noble sense for husband and wife, for parents and children, a place to be together, for thinking and striving together, for enjoyment. Women have the time and leisure to learn, to educate themselves, to participate in all areas of social life, both giving and receiving. Oh, these Bolshevik "wreckers" and "destroyers"! Is that no what the philistines of all the capitalist countrie are still prattling?
Note on the documents: The three pieces reprinted here are our own translations from the April 1921 issue of Die Kommunistische Fraueninfernationat (Communist Women's International), the official German-language journal of the Women's Secretariat of the Communist International. In W&R No. 9 (Summer 1975) we reprinted another version of the abortion legislation, which included at the end the signature "N. Semashko, People's Commissar of Health; Kursk) People's Commissar of Justice." That was taken fron the book Health Protection in the U.S.S.R. by N./A Semashko, published in London by Gollancz in 1934 The date given for the decree on abortion in Semashki is 18 November 1920. Regarding "Women's Work in the Economy": the Eighth Congress of Soviets was held in Moscow from 22 to 29 December 1920. We were unable to find a date for the third piece; the Comintern women's journal did not give a source."
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