Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the American playwright Clifford Odets.
Book/Play Review
Waiting For Lefty, and other plays, Clifford Odets, Random House, New York, 1935
There has always been a place for didactic political plays, like the one under review here, “Waiting For Lefty”, within the left-wing movement. Such plays have value both as a means to express certain plebeian cultural values that are not expressed through mainstream bourgeois cultural institutions and for purely propaganda purposes to get the “message” out to the sometimes illiterate, sometimes just barely literate, or sometimes merely recalcitrant masses. These are both honorable and acceptable means in order to create an “alternative” cultural expression looking forward to the new culture of the new communist society.
Moreover, there has been no lack of those cultural workers, including playwrights and actors, who, while not plebes themselves, have readily come over to our side, at least for a while. This movement toward the plebes is episodic but takes a big leap forward especially in times of general social turmoil like the period of the Great Depression in the 1930’s and in the social movements of the 1960s. That is the case with the playwright under review, Clifford Odets, and the cultural organization that initially sponsored his works, The Theater Guild of New York, in the 1930s.
Put a collectivist spirit in the air as a result of serious class struggles for union recognition in some a massive strike wave in 1934, a turn by the Communist International toward the popular front and alliance with previously ignored or despised bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements, some hunger actors and related cultural workers, AND the bright lights of New York and you have the Theater Guild. Its illustrious personal included many young performers who would go on to, if not honorable theater careers, then long ones like Lee J. Cobb and Elia Kazan who made appearances in Clifford Odets works.
As to “Waiting For Lefty” it certainly is a period piece of those times. The subject, a pending strike of taxi cab workers, and how various characters came to class consciousness, or at least of consciousness of the need to struggle against the bosses is pretty straight forward. Except, that the Lefty of the title, a known militant worker from whom his fellows had previously taken their political lead is no where to be found. Or rather is, in the end, found dead, in some back alley from a boss’s thug’s bullet. Lefty may have been the catalyst for action, for developing political awareness, but the plebes are on their own now. The class struggle continues. Definitely, as intended, an uplift kind of play that could use a revival today. If not of the play itself then of the need for class struggle theme behind it.
Note: I would be remiss if I did not mention that Clifford Odets, and a number of other members of the Theater Guild troupe, most infamously Elia Kazan and Lee J. Cobb, when the sunny days of the 1930s struggles passed and the hard Cold War days of the “red scare” came in the 1950s had no problem naming names of those whom they were asked to identify as communists or, more probably, fellow travelers by various Washington committees. Were they, like some of the characters in Odets’ “Till The Die I Die” (also in this book), tortured by some Gestapo-like fiends into submission for that information? Or were they threatened with some other more psychological abuse and being merely mortal could not stand the heat. No, they “sang” just to keep their jobs. Others like Dalton Trumbo, the Hollywood Ten and Howard Fast, brought their toothbrushes with them to the committees and took the jail time instead. While there was (and is) a huge gap between the politics of these Stalinists and ours we honor them despite their politics. For Odets, Kazan and Cobbs we have nothing but scorn.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
*The Latest From The "SteveLendmanBlog"-Obama's Gulf Commission: Distortion, Obstruction and Whitewash Assured - A Guest Commentary
Click on the headline to link to the latest from the "SteveLendmanBlog"-"Obama's Gulf Commission: Distortion, Obstruction and Whitewash Assured."
Markin comment:
This blog is indispensable for those who need hard information about the subjects of pressing subjects of the day. Moreover, brother Lendman covers material that I either don't know much about or don't want to deal with, especially the perfidies of bourgeois politics here in America (and in Israel). Thanks.
Markin comment:
This blog is indispensable for those who need hard information about the subjects of pressing subjects of the day. Moreover, brother Lendman covers material that I either don't know much about or don't want to deal with, especially the perfidies of bourgeois politics here in America (and in Israel). Thanks.
*The Latest From The National Jericho Movement- Free All Class War Prisoners!
Click on the headline to link to the latest from the "National Jericho Movement" Website- Free All Class War Prisoners!
*The Latest From The "Citizen Soldier" Website-A Guest Commentary
Click on the headline to link to a "Citizen Soldier" entry concerning the relationship between the working class and support for the American imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan from those who are fighting those damn wars.
*From The "International Marxist Tendency" Website- On The 90th Anniversary Of The Kapp Putsch In Germany-Guest Commentaries
Click on the headline to link to a "International Marxist Tendency" Website entry for the Kapp Putsch in Germany on the 90th anniversary of this victory for the international working class.
*********
4. The Kapp Putsch
Written by Rob Sewell
Saturday, 01 October 1988
ONCE THE THREAT of revolution bad subsided, and the workers' councils began to dissolve, the bourgeois looked for the removal of the Noske-Scheidemann-Ebert government. On 13 March 1920, 12,000 troops from the Ehrhardt Brigade and the Baltikum Brigade under General Luettwitz, entered Berlin in order to establish a military dictatorship, and declare Wolfgang Kapp, a founder of the old Fatherland Party, as the new Chancellor.
Noske, the Commander-in-Chief, called upon Reichswehr officers to put down the rebellion, which they refused point blank to do. The head of the army, General Hans von Seekt, simply announced he was going on 'indefinite leave'. To save its skin, the government fled from Berlin, firstly to Dresden, where a Freikorps general threated to put the entire cabinet under arrest, and then to Stuttgart.
As a matter of self-preservation the SPD, USPD and trade union leaders appealed to the workers to put down this military putsch and defend the republic. A general strike was called which so paralysed Berlin that Kapp could not find a single secretary to issue the decree that he had assumed power!
In a completely ultra-left fashion the young KPD issued a statement that the workers should remain neutral as it was a fight 'between two counter-revolutionary wings'. Within 24 hours the KPD were forced to reverse their position 180 degrees. The German workers were solid in their determination to defeat the military coup and the communists had no alternative but to participate in the struggle.
The coup electrified the whole country. From Berlin, the strike spread spontaneously through the Ruhr, Central Germany and Bavaria. Such was the counter movement that, in nearly every city and town, the military were driven out by mass demonstrations of workers and the middle class. The sheer scale of the resistance to General Luettwitz was gigantic.
In the Ruhr armed workers began to join forces in a 'Red Army' that put the Reichswehr to flight. They were estimated as 50,000 strong, fully equipped with modern weapons and artillery. They became, for a period, masters of the Ruhr.
Workers took action all over. Typically, in Chemnitz, the post office, railway station and town hall were occupied by armed workers. The Executive Council established on 15 March was made up of ten KPD members, nine SPD, one USPD and one Democrat, and extended its authority over a radius of 50 kilometres.
The spontaneous movement of the masses against the coup was similar to the later actions of the Spanish proletariat in July 1936 after Franco's revolt. As in Spain, with a revolutionary leadership, the German workers could have taken power easily.
Lenin had compared the Kapp putsch to the Kornilov uprising in August 1917 in Russia. In a similar way the forces of counter-revolution attempted to overthrow the Kerensky government and restore the old regime of the Tsar. Unlike the KPD, the Bolshevik Party immediately threw itself into the forefront of defending the revolution, organising a united front with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries in order to defeat reaction. It was a huge blunder for the German KPD initially to advocate neutrality in such a struggle. Such ultra-leftism simply put up barriers between themselves, the social democratic workers and ordinary trade unionists.
A Swing to the Left
The consequences of the Kapp putsch brought about a great shift in the political landscape. After its failure, Noske resigned. In June 1920 the USPD became the second largest party in the Reichstag with 81 deputies; in the Landstags of Saxony, 'I'huringia and Brunswick it became the largest party. Its membership had grown spectacularly to 800,000. It published 55 daily newspapers. In the Reichstag elections, the USPD had got 4,895,000 votes, more than double its January 1919 figure, whilst the SPD, due to the masses' shift to the left, lost half the votes it won in January 1919, falling to 5,614,000. The SPD still, however, remained the biggest party in the Reichstag. On the other side of the spectrum, the vote for the extreme right also doubled at the expense of the liberals, indicating a growing polarisation of the situation in Germany.
In Bavaria, General von Nohl, ungrateful for past services, forced out the SPD Premier Johannes Hoffmann and established a more right wing government. In the Ruhr, however, the armed workers who had succeded in driving out the Freikorps and the Reichswehr forces now refused to lay down their arms as requested by the central government.
The new coalition government, under SPD member Hermann Mueller, decided to despatch government troops - who had previously refused to fight Kapp - to restore order in the Ruhr, which they did eagerly and with much brutality. Hundreds were killed and hundreds more executed to restore 'normality'.
Towards a mass Communist International
The year 1920 was a turning point not only for the KPD but also for the Communist International. The founding congress of the Third International, in March of the previous year had laid down the fundamental principles of the socialist revolution and the nature of soviet power. The success of the Bolshevik revolution was now having a big effect within the ranks of the mass parties of social democracy, with large layers pressing for affiliation to the new International. Negotiations concerning affiliations were opened by a whole series of mass workers' organisations: the Independent Labour Party in Britain, the French Socialist Party, the USPD of Germany, the Italian Socialist Party, the Norwegian Labour Party, and a number of others.
The possibility of creating a mass Communist International was in the offing. But the danger also existed of bringing into the new International reformist and centrist leaders who were attempting to keep a firm grip on their radicalised rank and file. In order to win over the genuine revolutionary membership, and to separate them from their opportunist leaders, the Comintern formulated 18 conditions for affiliation to the new International. When some of the opportunist leaders were prepared to swallow these conditions, three more were added to effectively exclude them.
The KPD had grown from 3-4000 members in January 1919 to 78,000 immediately after the Kapp putsch, despite an ultra-left split-off. It was nevertheless tiny in comparison to the two other mass parties, which had approaching one million members apiece. Under the impact of events, however, the ranks of the USPD was moving away from reformism and towards the ideas of Marxism. At its March 1919 conference, the USPD came out in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat and a soviet government. In December it broke with the Second International and began negotiations with the Comintern. In October at its Halle Congress the USPD, after a four-hour appeal by the president of the Comintern, Zinoviev, voted to accept the 21 conditions and affiliate to the Communist International. Negotiations then opened up with the KPD with a view to the creation of a merged united Communist Party, which was founded in December with a membership approaching a half a million workers. The German Communist Party was now a truly mass party, which under the guidance of the Comintern, began to make preparations for the socialist revolution in Germany.
In December, the 140,000 strong French Socialist Party voted to affiliate to the new International. The whole of the old Socialist Party apparatus, its headquarters, its secretariat, and its daily paper L'Humanité with a circulation of 200,000 became the weapons of the new Communist Party. In Czechoslovakia also a mass Communist Party was formed out of the Socialist Party, numbering 350,000 members. With the split in the Italian Socialist Party, 50,000 members were drawn into the ranks of the newly founded Italian Communist Party.
These mass parties did not emerge from small sectarian groups on the fringes of the labour movement, but arose from the traditional mass organisations of the working class that were experiencing political turmoil due to the colossal events of the period. The mass of workers do not learn from theory, but from experience. They tend to take the line of least resistance and develop enormous loyalty to their traditional mass organisations that they have built up over generations. It was on the basis of titanic events that these parties were thrown into ferment, reformism became compromised and the rank and file moved towards the ideas of genuine Marxism.
The First Congress of the Communist International in March 1919 met amid great hopes of a rapid development of the European revolution. By the time of the Second Congress in 1920, it became obvious that more serious organisational and political preparation would be needed for the proletariat to gain victories in Western Europe. Along with the creation of mass communist parties went the urgent necessity of imbuing them with an understanding of revolutionary strategy and tactics. In the words of Trotsky: 'The art of tactics and strategy, the art of revolutionary struggle can be mastered only through experience, through criticism and self-criticism...the revolutionary struggle for power has its own laws, its own usages, its own tactics, its own strategy. Those who do not master this art will never taste victory.'
Lenin's Struggle Against Ultra-Leftism
In 1919 and 1920, a number of ultra-left tendencies appeared within the ranks of the newly formed Communist parties. This reflected a revolutionary impatience, which in turn was a reaction against the opportunist actions of the old reformist leaderships. This ultra-leftism was an attempt to find a short-cut to success. It failed to appreciate the strong grip of reformism on the minds of the mass of the workers, and the patient work that was needed to break these illusions.
One of Lenin's most important works, Left Wing Communism - An Infantile Disorder, was devoted to this problem. Lenin saw ultra-leftism as a natural problem occuring in the newly formed communist parties, whose membership had been won to an irreconcilable struggle against capitalism and those who defended it. He compared it to a childhood illness which was a necessary part of growing up. Lenin's book, together with the discussions at the Second Congress, was aimed at educating the leaders of the various communist parties in the tactics and methods of bolshevism. For the child-like 'lefts' and sectarians of today, who repeat all the mistakes of the ultra-lefts of the past, these writings and ideas remain a closed book. As Lenin explained:
"It is beyond doubt...those who try to deduce the tactics of the revolutionary proletariat from principles such as: 'the Communist Party must keep its doctrine pure and its independence of reformism inviolate: its mission is to lead the way without stopping or turning, by the direct road to the communist revolution' will inevitably fall into error."
The task of the communist leaderships was to innoculate itself against infantile-leftism and absorb the method, tactics and strategy of Bolshevism in order to equip itself for the revolutionary battles that were unfolding in the main capitalist countries, particularly Germany.
After the unification of the new party, a central committee was elected under the joint chairmanship of Ernst Daeumig and Paul Levi, who had been a close friend of Rosa Luxemburg. At Levi's insistence, the ultra-left group was expelled from the Party, and established themselves as the short-lived German Communist Workers Party (KAPD). In February 1921, after violently disagreeing with the Comintern's decision to split the Italian Socialist Party, Paul Levi resigned from the party leadership. In his place came Brandler, Meyer, Froelich, and Thalheimer.
To assist the KPD, the Comintern had despatched the Hungarian Communist leader Bela Kun to Berlin, after the crushing in blood of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. (The Hungarian Revolution is dealt with in Militant International Review Number 18). But as leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Bela Kun had made big mistakes, and was infected by ultra-left ideas. This tendency was fed by Zinoviev, the head of the Comintern, Bukharin and Radek, who poured scorn on the defensive struggles of the SPD organisations.
The 'March Offensive'
The new leadership of the KPD, egged on by the Comintern representatives, looked increasingly for a showdown with German capitalism. Their blind impatience became the framework of the new theory of the so-called 'offensive'. The whole essence of this theory was that the advance guard - the KPD - could by its own actions 'electrify' the passive proletariat into taking revolutionary action.
The situation in Germany was extremely tense after French troops had occupied Dusseldorf because of the government's failure to pay reparations in full. The party's central organ Rote Fahne stated: 'The workers of central Germany are not taken in by the 'anti-putschist' rumours alleging that a spirit of cowardice and apathy has arisen in the German working class.'
On 27 March a decision was taken by the German leaders to launch the revolutionary offensive in support of the miners of central Germany, whose Mansfeld coalfield had been occupied by the security police to prevent 'sabotage and attacks on managers'. This provocative occupation was conducted under the orders of the SPD President of Saxony, Otto Horsing, who attempted to pacify the area and purge it of Communist influence. The miners conducted armed resistance under the leadership of Max Hoelz, an heroic revolutionary figure, who had earlier been expelled from the KPD. The KPD called on the working class throughout Germany to arm itself in solidarity with the miners. They had completely misjudged the mood and the action remained mainly isolated to the central German area.
Out of desperation the Party attempted to provoke the workers into action. A KPD leader, Hugo Eberlein, was sent 'to provoke an uprising in mid-Germany', and, according to many sources, even went so far as to advocate the sham kidnapping of local KPD leaders, dynamiting a munitions depot, blowing up a workers' co-operative in Halle, and blaming it on the police in order to fuel the anger of the workers. Fortunately, little came of these crazy plans. Groups of communist workers occupied the Leuna Works and called for support, but were driven out after a bitter confrontation. The Communist Party organised the occupation of the docks in Hamburg in support of a partial strike, but again it was soon dispersed. The workers remained passive, leaving the KPD members to fight it out alone with the police.
This infamous 'March Action' resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands being imprisoned for their involvement. The ultra-left actions of many good communists widened the split between them and the reformist rank and file. Within a short time over 200,000 members had deserted the KPD in disgust.
A few days after the debacle, Paul Levi issued a bitter attack on the Party's action, which was broadly correct. However, he wrongly published these criticisms outside the party's ranks, and as a result was disciplined and subsequently expelled from the KPD.
Lenin was alarmed at the putschist actions of the KPD and strongly condemned those responsible. 'The theses of Thaelheimer and Bela Kun are radically false...That a representative of the Executive proposed a lunatic ultra-left tactic of immediate action "to help the Russians" I can believe without difficulty: this representative (Bela Kun) is often too far to the left.'
The United Front Policy
At the Third Congress of the Comintern in June 1921, both Lenin and Trotsky conducted a rigorous struggle against the so-called 'Theory of the Offensive' and the fallacies of the 'March Action'. The Congress also recognised a new turn in the international situation that had arisen. The first great revolutionary wave had now ebbed and capitalism had succeeded temporarily in stabilising itself. 'In 1919', stated Trotsky, 'we said it (the revolution) was a question of months, and now we say it is a question perhaps of years.' As the immediate struggle for power had been temporarily postponed, the tactics of the Comintern had to be concentrated on the united front policy: fighting in day to day struggles on wages, conditions etc., bringing around it the ranks of the reformist organisations. The united front was used to unify the workers' organisations in action against a common enemy. It did not mean the abandoning of any programme or mutual criticism under the guise of a spurious unity. In essence, it meant: 'March separately under your own banners, but strike together'. It was precisely through this joint action of the mass parties that the KPD could demonstrate the superiority of militant struggles over the limitations of reformism. In this new period of temporary, relative stability, the communist parties had to step up their activities in partial struggles to win the majority of the working class to their programme. In a nutshell, it was not a question of the Conquest of Power, but the Conquest of the Masses. The new KPD slogan became: 'Towards the Masses!'.
The turn of the German Communists towards united front work saw a steady revival in the party's influence. The annual report presented to the Leipzig party conference in 1922 described the considerable progress: amongst women, youth and children's sections, the co-operatives and trade unions. Alongside its press agency, the party now had 38 daily newspapers and numerous periodicals. They possessed over 12,000 councillors, with an absolute majority in 80 town councils and were the biggest party in a further 170. In the trade unions they possessed nearly 1000 organised fractions with 400 members in leadership positions.
Even according to the ultra-left Ruth Fischer, 'In the second half of 1922 the party was gaining in numbers and influence. In the third quarter of 1922 it had 218,555 members. It showed a sharp rise from the 180,443 of the previous year, just after the March Action.' The KPD was by far the biggest communist party in Western Europe.
On 24 June 1922, the foreign minister Walter Rathenau was murdered by the extreme right wing 'Organisation Consul', a gang of ex-army officers. There was widespread revulsion - as with the Kapp putsch and moves towards united working class action, which the KPD used to the maximum effect. On 4 July a monster demonstration organised by all the workers' organisations proved an outstanding success. It provided the KPD with the opportunity to prove in action the superiority of militant leadership and policies. Yet, because of this, the SPD broke off relations with the Communists four days later.
POLITICAL MURDERS COMMITTED (January 1919 - June 1922) BY PERSONS BELONGING TO THE
RIGHT LEFT
Number of political murders committed 354 22
Number of persons sentenced for these murders 24 38
Death sentences - 10
Confessed assassins found 'Not Guilty' 23 -
Political assassins subsequently promoted in the Army 3 -
Average length of prison term per murder four months fifteen years
Average fine per murder two marks -
(Source: Vier Jahre Politischer Mord, EJ Gumbel)
At this time inflation began to take off. Years of successive governments reverting to the printing press to plug their budget deficits had completely undermined the currency. It took 300 marks to buy one dollar in June: by December it was 8000 marks, and by January 1923, 18,000 marks to the dollar. This had a shattering effect not only on the workers but the middle classes, particularly those on fixed incomes, who faced absolute ruin.
By this stage the German bourgeois became increasingly determined to regain all the concessions won by the proletariat in the November revolution. In 1918 under the threat of revolution, the capitalist class were prepared to grant huge concessions: trade union recognition, agreement to withdraw support from company unions, establishment of shop stewards' committees, universal suffrage, all de-mobbed soldiers to be able to return to their former employment and the shortening of the working day to 8 hours. In October 1922 as inflation reached new heights, the German bourgeoisie prepared their offensive. The powerful industrialist Fritz Thyssen addressed an open letter to the government which stated 'Germany's salvation can only come from a return to the 10-hour working day.' The former Minister Dernburg fumed: 'every 8-hour day is a nail in Germany's coffin'!
Two weeks later another leading industrialist, Hugo Stinnes, declared:
"I do not hesitate to say that I am convinced that the German people will have to work two extra hours per day for the next 10 or 15 years...the preliminary conditions for any successful stabilisation is, in my opinion, that wage struggles and strikes be excluded for a long period...we must have the courage to say to the people: 'for the present and for some time to come you will have to work overtime without overtime payment.'"
The battle lines were drawn. Living standards were to be driven down to starvation levels to put German capitalism back on its feet. With hyper-inflation and the state facing bankruptcy, the SPD-Liberal coalition of Wirth collapsed, giving way to the right wing bourgeois government led by Wilhelm Cuno, director of the Hamburg-Amerika Line.
*********
4. The Kapp Putsch
Written by Rob Sewell
Saturday, 01 October 1988
ONCE THE THREAT of revolution bad subsided, and the workers' councils began to dissolve, the bourgeois looked for the removal of the Noske-Scheidemann-Ebert government. On 13 March 1920, 12,000 troops from the Ehrhardt Brigade and the Baltikum Brigade under General Luettwitz, entered Berlin in order to establish a military dictatorship, and declare Wolfgang Kapp, a founder of the old Fatherland Party, as the new Chancellor.
Noske, the Commander-in-Chief, called upon Reichswehr officers to put down the rebellion, which they refused point blank to do. The head of the army, General Hans von Seekt, simply announced he was going on 'indefinite leave'. To save its skin, the government fled from Berlin, firstly to Dresden, where a Freikorps general threated to put the entire cabinet under arrest, and then to Stuttgart.
As a matter of self-preservation the SPD, USPD and trade union leaders appealed to the workers to put down this military putsch and defend the republic. A general strike was called which so paralysed Berlin that Kapp could not find a single secretary to issue the decree that he had assumed power!
In a completely ultra-left fashion the young KPD issued a statement that the workers should remain neutral as it was a fight 'between two counter-revolutionary wings'. Within 24 hours the KPD were forced to reverse their position 180 degrees. The German workers were solid in their determination to defeat the military coup and the communists had no alternative but to participate in the struggle.
The coup electrified the whole country. From Berlin, the strike spread spontaneously through the Ruhr, Central Germany and Bavaria. Such was the counter movement that, in nearly every city and town, the military were driven out by mass demonstrations of workers and the middle class. The sheer scale of the resistance to General Luettwitz was gigantic.
In the Ruhr armed workers began to join forces in a 'Red Army' that put the Reichswehr to flight. They were estimated as 50,000 strong, fully equipped with modern weapons and artillery. They became, for a period, masters of the Ruhr.
Workers took action all over. Typically, in Chemnitz, the post office, railway station and town hall were occupied by armed workers. The Executive Council established on 15 March was made up of ten KPD members, nine SPD, one USPD and one Democrat, and extended its authority over a radius of 50 kilometres.
The spontaneous movement of the masses against the coup was similar to the later actions of the Spanish proletariat in July 1936 after Franco's revolt. As in Spain, with a revolutionary leadership, the German workers could have taken power easily.
Lenin had compared the Kapp putsch to the Kornilov uprising in August 1917 in Russia. In a similar way the forces of counter-revolution attempted to overthrow the Kerensky government and restore the old regime of the Tsar. Unlike the KPD, the Bolshevik Party immediately threw itself into the forefront of defending the revolution, organising a united front with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries in order to defeat reaction. It was a huge blunder for the German KPD initially to advocate neutrality in such a struggle. Such ultra-leftism simply put up barriers between themselves, the social democratic workers and ordinary trade unionists.
A Swing to the Left
The consequences of the Kapp putsch brought about a great shift in the political landscape. After its failure, Noske resigned. In June 1920 the USPD became the second largest party in the Reichstag with 81 deputies; in the Landstags of Saxony, 'I'huringia and Brunswick it became the largest party. Its membership had grown spectacularly to 800,000. It published 55 daily newspapers. In the Reichstag elections, the USPD had got 4,895,000 votes, more than double its January 1919 figure, whilst the SPD, due to the masses' shift to the left, lost half the votes it won in January 1919, falling to 5,614,000. The SPD still, however, remained the biggest party in the Reichstag. On the other side of the spectrum, the vote for the extreme right also doubled at the expense of the liberals, indicating a growing polarisation of the situation in Germany.
In Bavaria, General von Nohl, ungrateful for past services, forced out the SPD Premier Johannes Hoffmann and established a more right wing government. In the Ruhr, however, the armed workers who had succeded in driving out the Freikorps and the Reichswehr forces now refused to lay down their arms as requested by the central government.
The new coalition government, under SPD member Hermann Mueller, decided to despatch government troops - who had previously refused to fight Kapp - to restore order in the Ruhr, which they did eagerly and with much brutality. Hundreds were killed and hundreds more executed to restore 'normality'.
Towards a mass Communist International
The year 1920 was a turning point not only for the KPD but also for the Communist International. The founding congress of the Third International, in March of the previous year had laid down the fundamental principles of the socialist revolution and the nature of soviet power. The success of the Bolshevik revolution was now having a big effect within the ranks of the mass parties of social democracy, with large layers pressing for affiliation to the new International. Negotiations concerning affiliations were opened by a whole series of mass workers' organisations: the Independent Labour Party in Britain, the French Socialist Party, the USPD of Germany, the Italian Socialist Party, the Norwegian Labour Party, and a number of others.
The possibility of creating a mass Communist International was in the offing. But the danger also existed of bringing into the new International reformist and centrist leaders who were attempting to keep a firm grip on their radicalised rank and file. In order to win over the genuine revolutionary membership, and to separate them from their opportunist leaders, the Comintern formulated 18 conditions for affiliation to the new International. When some of the opportunist leaders were prepared to swallow these conditions, three more were added to effectively exclude them.
The KPD had grown from 3-4000 members in January 1919 to 78,000 immediately after the Kapp putsch, despite an ultra-left split-off. It was nevertheless tiny in comparison to the two other mass parties, which had approaching one million members apiece. Under the impact of events, however, the ranks of the USPD was moving away from reformism and towards the ideas of Marxism. At its March 1919 conference, the USPD came out in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat and a soviet government. In December it broke with the Second International and began negotiations with the Comintern. In October at its Halle Congress the USPD, after a four-hour appeal by the president of the Comintern, Zinoviev, voted to accept the 21 conditions and affiliate to the Communist International. Negotiations then opened up with the KPD with a view to the creation of a merged united Communist Party, which was founded in December with a membership approaching a half a million workers. The German Communist Party was now a truly mass party, which under the guidance of the Comintern, began to make preparations for the socialist revolution in Germany.
In December, the 140,000 strong French Socialist Party voted to affiliate to the new International. The whole of the old Socialist Party apparatus, its headquarters, its secretariat, and its daily paper L'Humanité with a circulation of 200,000 became the weapons of the new Communist Party. In Czechoslovakia also a mass Communist Party was formed out of the Socialist Party, numbering 350,000 members. With the split in the Italian Socialist Party, 50,000 members were drawn into the ranks of the newly founded Italian Communist Party.
These mass parties did not emerge from small sectarian groups on the fringes of the labour movement, but arose from the traditional mass organisations of the working class that were experiencing political turmoil due to the colossal events of the period. The mass of workers do not learn from theory, but from experience. They tend to take the line of least resistance and develop enormous loyalty to their traditional mass organisations that they have built up over generations. It was on the basis of titanic events that these parties were thrown into ferment, reformism became compromised and the rank and file moved towards the ideas of genuine Marxism.
The First Congress of the Communist International in March 1919 met amid great hopes of a rapid development of the European revolution. By the time of the Second Congress in 1920, it became obvious that more serious organisational and political preparation would be needed for the proletariat to gain victories in Western Europe. Along with the creation of mass communist parties went the urgent necessity of imbuing them with an understanding of revolutionary strategy and tactics. In the words of Trotsky: 'The art of tactics and strategy, the art of revolutionary struggle can be mastered only through experience, through criticism and self-criticism...the revolutionary struggle for power has its own laws, its own usages, its own tactics, its own strategy. Those who do not master this art will never taste victory.'
Lenin's Struggle Against Ultra-Leftism
In 1919 and 1920, a number of ultra-left tendencies appeared within the ranks of the newly formed Communist parties. This reflected a revolutionary impatience, which in turn was a reaction against the opportunist actions of the old reformist leaderships. This ultra-leftism was an attempt to find a short-cut to success. It failed to appreciate the strong grip of reformism on the minds of the mass of the workers, and the patient work that was needed to break these illusions.
One of Lenin's most important works, Left Wing Communism - An Infantile Disorder, was devoted to this problem. Lenin saw ultra-leftism as a natural problem occuring in the newly formed communist parties, whose membership had been won to an irreconcilable struggle against capitalism and those who defended it. He compared it to a childhood illness which was a necessary part of growing up. Lenin's book, together with the discussions at the Second Congress, was aimed at educating the leaders of the various communist parties in the tactics and methods of bolshevism. For the child-like 'lefts' and sectarians of today, who repeat all the mistakes of the ultra-lefts of the past, these writings and ideas remain a closed book. As Lenin explained:
"It is beyond doubt...those who try to deduce the tactics of the revolutionary proletariat from principles such as: 'the Communist Party must keep its doctrine pure and its independence of reformism inviolate: its mission is to lead the way without stopping or turning, by the direct road to the communist revolution' will inevitably fall into error."
The task of the communist leaderships was to innoculate itself against infantile-leftism and absorb the method, tactics and strategy of Bolshevism in order to equip itself for the revolutionary battles that were unfolding in the main capitalist countries, particularly Germany.
After the unification of the new party, a central committee was elected under the joint chairmanship of Ernst Daeumig and Paul Levi, who had been a close friend of Rosa Luxemburg. At Levi's insistence, the ultra-left group was expelled from the Party, and established themselves as the short-lived German Communist Workers Party (KAPD). In February 1921, after violently disagreeing with the Comintern's decision to split the Italian Socialist Party, Paul Levi resigned from the party leadership. In his place came Brandler, Meyer, Froelich, and Thalheimer.
To assist the KPD, the Comintern had despatched the Hungarian Communist leader Bela Kun to Berlin, after the crushing in blood of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. (The Hungarian Revolution is dealt with in Militant International Review Number 18). But as leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Bela Kun had made big mistakes, and was infected by ultra-left ideas. This tendency was fed by Zinoviev, the head of the Comintern, Bukharin and Radek, who poured scorn on the defensive struggles of the SPD organisations.
The 'March Offensive'
The new leadership of the KPD, egged on by the Comintern representatives, looked increasingly for a showdown with German capitalism. Their blind impatience became the framework of the new theory of the so-called 'offensive'. The whole essence of this theory was that the advance guard - the KPD - could by its own actions 'electrify' the passive proletariat into taking revolutionary action.
The situation in Germany was extremely tense after French troops had occupied Dusseldorf because of the government's failure to pay reparations in full. The party's central organ Rote Fahne stated: 'The workers of central Germany are not taken in by the 'anti-putschist' rumours alleging that a spirit of cowardice and apathy has arisen in the German working class.'
On 27 March a decision was taken by the German leaders to launch the revolutionary offensive in support of the miners of central Germany, whose Mansfeld coalfield had been occupied by the security police to prevent 'sabotage and attacks on managers'. This provocative occupation was conducted under the orders of the SPD President of Saxony, Otto Horsing, who attempted to pacify the area and purge it of Communist influence. The miners conducted armed resistance under the leadership of Max Hoelz, an heroic revolutionary figure, who had earlier been expelled from the KPD. The KPD called on the working class throughout Germany to arm itself in solidarity with the miners. They had completely misjudged the mood and the action remained mainly isolated to the central German area.
Out of desperation the Party attempted to provoke the workers into action. A KPD leader, Hugo Eberlein, was sent 'to provoke an uprising in mid-Germany', and, according to many sources, even went so far as to advocate the sham kidnapping of local KPD leaders, dynamiting a munitions depot, blowing up a workers' co-operative in Halle, and blaming it on the police in order to fuel the anger of the workers. Fortunately, little came of these crazy plans. Groups of communist workers occupied the Leuna Works and called for support, but were driven out after a bitter confrontation. The Communist Party organised the occupation of the docks in Hamburg in support of a partial strike, but again it was soon dispersed. The workers remained passive, leaving the KPD members to fight it out alone with the police.
This infamous 'March Action' resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands being imprisoned for their involvement. The ultra-left actions of many good communists widened the split between them and the reformist rank and file. Within a short time over 200,000 members had deserted the KPD in disgust.
A few days after the debacle, Paul Levi issued a bitter attack on the Party's action, which was broadly correct. However, he wrongly published these criticisms outside the party's ranks, and as a result was disciplined and subsequently expelled from the KPD.
Lenin was alarmed at the putschist actions of the KPD and strongly condemned those responsible. 'The theses of Thaelheimer and Bela Kun are radically false...That a representative of the Executive proposed a lunatic ultra-left tactic of immediate action "to help the Russians" I can believe without difficulty: this representative (Bela Kun) is often too far to the left.'
The United Front Policy
At the Third Congress of the Comintern in June 1921, both Lenin and Trotsky conducted a rigorous struggle against the so-called 'Theory of the Offensive' and the fallacies of the 'March Action'. The Congress also recognised a new turn in the international situation that had arisen. The first great revolutionary wave had now ebbed and capitalism had succeeded temporarily in stabilising itself. 'In 1919', stated Trotsky, 'we said it (the revolution) was a question of months, and now we say it is a question perhaps of years.' As the immediate struggle for power had been temporarily postponed, the tactics of the Comintern had to be concentrated on the united front policy: fighting in day to day struggles on wages, conditions etc., bringing around it the ranks of the reformist organisations. The united front was used to unify the workers' organisations in action against a common enemy. It did not mean the abandoning of any programme or mutual criticism under the guise of a spurious unity. In essence, it meant: 'March separately under your own banners, but strike together'. It was precisely through this joint action of the mass parties that the KPD could demonstrate the superiority of militant struggles over the limitations of reformism. In this new period of temporary, relative stability, the communist parties had to step up their activities in partial struggles to win the majority of the working class to their programme. In a nutshell, it was not a question of the Conquest of Power, but the Conquest of the Masses. The new KPD slogan became: 'Towards the Masses!'.
The turn of the German Communists towards united front work saw a steady revival in the party's influence. The annual report presented to the Leipzig party conference in 1922 described the considerable progress: amongst women, youth and children's sections, the co-operatives and trade unions. Alongside its press agency, the party now had 38 daily newspapers and numerous periodicals. They possessed over 12,000 councillors, with an absolute majority in 80 town councils and were the biggest party in a further 170. In the trade unions they possessed nearly 1000 organised fractions with 400 members in leadership positions.
Even according to the ultra-left Ruth Fischer, 'In the second half of 1922 the party was gaining in numbers and influence. In the third quarter of 1922 it had 218,555 members. It showed a sharp rise from the 180,443 of the previous year, just after the March Action.' The KPD was by far the biggest communist party in Western Europe.
On 24 June 1922, the foreign minister Walter Rathenau was murdered by the extreme right wing 'Organisation Consul', a gang of ex-army officers. There was widespread revulsion - as with the Kapp putsch and moves towards united working class action, which the KPD used to the maximum effect. On 4 July a monster demonstration organised by all the workers' organisations proved an outstanding success. It provided the KPD with the opportunity to prove in action the superiority of militant leadership and policies. Yet, because of this, the SPD broke off relations with the Communists four days later.
POLITICAL MURDERS COMMITTED (January 1919 - June 1922) BY PERSONS BELONGING TO THE
RIGHT LEFT
Number of political murders committed 354 22
Number of persons sentenced for these murders 24 38
Death sentences - 10
Confessed assassins found 'Not Guilty' 23 -
Political assassins subsequently promoted in the Army 3 -
Average length of prison term per murder four months fifteen years
Average fine per murder two marks -
(Source: Vier Jahre Politischer Mord, EJ Gumbel)
At this time inflation began to take off. Years of successive governments reverting to the printing press to plug their budget deficits had completely undermined the currency. It took 300 marks to buy one dollar in June: by December it was 8000 marks, and by January 1923, 18,000 marks to the dollar. This had a shattering effect not only on the workers but the middle classes, particularly those on fixed incomes, who faced absolute ruin.
By this stage the German bourgeois became increasingly determined to regain all the concessions won by the proletariat in the November revolution. In 1918 under the threat of revolution, the capitalist class were prepared to grant huge concessions: trade union recognition, agreement to withdraw support from company unions, establishment of shop stewards' committees, universal suffrage, all de-mobbed soldiers to be able to return to their former employment and the shortening of the working day to 8 hours. In October 1922 as inflation reached new heights, the German bourgeoisie prepared their offensive. The powerful industrialist Fritz Thyssen addressed an open letter to the government which stated 'Germany's salvation can only come from a return to the 10-hour working day.' The former Minister Dernburg fumed: 'every 8-hour day is a nail in Germany's coffin'!
Two weeks later another leading industrialist, Hugo Stinnes, declared:
"I do not hesitate to say that I am convinced that the German people will have to work two extra hours per day for the next 10 or 15 years...the preliminary conditions for any successful stabilisation is, in my opinion, that wage struggles and strikes be excluded for a long period...we must have the courage to say to the people: 'for the present and for some time to come you will have to work overtime without overtime payment.'"
The battle lines were drawn. Living standards were to be driven down to starvation levels to put German capitalism back on its feet. With hyper-inflation and the state facing bankruptcy, the SPD-Liberal coalition of Wirth collapsed, giving way to the right wing bourgeois government led by Wilhelm Cuno, director of the Hamburg-Amerika Line.
*From The Marx-Engels Internet Archives- Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (1850)
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states for background on the lessons that Marx is discussing in this article .
Markin comment:
It has always been, and is, a tradition in the Communist movement to try to "draw the lessons" of various experiences in the international labor movement. And that tradition started back with our early leaders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Feast on this one.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League
London, March 1850
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Transcribed: by gearhart@ccsn.edu;
Proofed: and corrected by Alek Blain 2006;
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Brothers!
In the two revolutionary years of 1848-49 the League proved itself in two ways. First, its members everywhere involved themselves energetically in the movement and stood in the front ranks of the only decisively revolutionary class, the proletariat, in the press, on the barricades and on the battlefields. The League further proved itself in that its understanding of the movement, as expressed in the circulars issued by the Congresses and the Central Committee of 1847 and in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, has been shown to be the only correct one, and the expectations expressed in these documents have been completely fulfilled. This previously only propagated by the League in secret, is now on everyone’s lips and is preached openly in the market place. At the same time, however, the formerly strong organization of the League has been considerably weakened. A large number of members who were directly involved in the movement thought that the time for secret societies was over and that public action alone was sufficient. The individual districts and communes allowed their connections with the Central Committee to weaken and gradually become dormant. So, while the democratic party, the party of the petty bourgeoisie, has become more and more organized in Germany, the workers’ party has lost its only firm foothold, remaining organized at best in individual localities for local purposes; within the general movement it has consequently come under the complete domination and leadership of the petty-bourgeois democrats. This situation cannot be allowed to continue; the independence of the workers must be restored. The Central Committee recognized this necessity and it therefore sent an emissary, Joseph Moll, to Germany in the winter of 1848-9 to reorganize the League. Moll’s mission, however, failed to produce any lasting effect, partly because the German workers at that time had not enough experience and partly because it was interrupted by the insurrection last May. Moll himself took up arms, joined the Baden-Palatinate army and fell on 29 June in the battle of the River Murg. The League lost in him one of the oldest, most active and most reliable members, who had been involved in all the Congresses and Central Committees and had earlier conducted a series of missions with great success. Since the defeat of the German and French revolutionary parties in July 1849, almost all the members of the Central Committee have reassembled in London: they have replenished their numbers with new revolutionary forces and set about reorganizing the League with renewed zeal.
This reorganization can only be achieved by an emissary, and the Central Committee considers it most important to dispatch the emissary at this very moment, when a new revolution is imminent, that is, when the workers’ party must go into battle with the maximum degree of organization, unity and independence, so that it is not exploited and taken in tow by the bourgeoisie as in 1848.
We told you already in 1848, brothers, that the German liberal bourgeoisie would soon come to power and would immediately turn its newly won power against the workers. You have seen how this forecast came true. It was indeed the bourgeoisie which took possession of the state authority in the wake of the March movement of 1848 and used this power to drive the workers, its allies in the struggle, back into their former oppressed position. Although the bourgeoisie could accomplish this only by entering into an alliance with the feudal party, which had been defeated in March, and eventually even had to surrender power once more to this feudal absolutist party, it has nevertheless secured favourable conditions for itself. In view of the government’s financial difficulties, these conditions would ensure that power would in the long run fall into its hands again and that all its interests would be secured, if it were possible for the revolutionary movement to assume from now on a so-called peaceful course of development. In order to guarantee its power the bourgeoisie would not even need to arouse hatred by taking violent measures against the people, as all of these violent measures have already been carried out by the feudal counter-revolution. But events will not take this peaceful course. On the contrary, the revolution which will accelerate the course of events, is imminent, whether it is initiated by an independent rising of the French proletariat or by an invasion of the revolutionary Babel by the Holy Alliance.
The treacherous role that the German liberal bourgeoisie played against the people in 1848 will be assumed in the coming revolution by the democratic petty bourgeoisie, which now occupies the same position in the opposition as the liberal bourgeoisie did before 1848. This democratic party, which is far more dangerous for the workers than were the liberals earlier, is composed of three elements: 1) The most progressive elements of the big bourgeoisie, who pursue the goal of the immediate and complete overthrow of feudalism and absolutism. This fraction is represented by the former Berlin Vereinbarer, the tax resisters; 2) The constitutional-democratic petty bourgeois, whose main aim during the previous movement was the formation of a more or less democratic federal state; this is what their representative, the Left in the Frankfurt Assembly and later the Stuttgart parliament, worked for, as they themselves did in the Reich Constitution Campaign; 3) The republican petty bourgeois, whose ideal is a German federal republic similar to that in Switzerland and who now call themselves ‘red’ and ’social-democratic’ because they cherish the pious wish to abolish the pressure exerted by big capital on small capital, by the big bourgeoisie on the petty bourgeoisie. The representatives of this fraction were the members of the democratic congresses and committees, the leaders of the democratic associations and the editors of the democratic newspapers.
After their defeat all these fractions claim to be ‘republicans’ or ’reds’, just as at the present time members of the republican petty bourgeoisie in France call themselves ‘socialists’. Where, as in Wurtemberg, Bavaria, etc., they still find a chance to pursue their ends by constitutional means, they seize the opportunity to retain their old phrases and prove by their actions that they have not changed in the least. Furthermore, it goes without saying that the changed name of this party does not alter in the least its relationship to the workers but merely proves that it is now obliged to form a front against the bourgeoisie, which has united with absolutism, and to seek the support of the proletariat.
The petty-bourgeois democratic party in Germany is very powerful. It not only embraces the great majority of the urban middle class, the small industrial merchants and master craftsmen; it also includes among its followers the peasants and rural proletariat in so far as the latter has not yet found support among the independent proletariat of the towns.
The relationship of the revolutionary workers’ party to the petty-bourgeois democrats is this: it cooperates with them against the party which they aim to overthrow; it opposes them wherever they wish to secure their own position.
The democratic petty bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to a change in social conditions which will make the existing society as tolerable and comfortable for themselves as possible. They therefore demand above all else a reduction in government spending through a restriction of the bureaucracy and the transference of the major tax burden into the large landowners and bourgeoisie. They further demand the removal of the pressure exerted by big capital on small capital through the establishment of public credit institutions and the passing of laws against usury, whereby it would be possible for themselves and the peasants to receive advances on favourable terms from the state instead of from capitalists; also, the introduction of bourgeois property relationships on land through the complete abolition of feudalism. In order to achieve all this they require a democratic form of government, either constitutional or republican, which would give them and their peasant allies the majority; they also require a democratic system of local government to give them direct control over municipal property and over a series of political offices at present in the hands of the bureaucrats.
The rule of capital and its rapid accumulation is to be further counteracted, partly by a curtailment of the right of inheritance, and partly by the transference of as much employment as possible to the state. As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain wage labourers as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers, and hope to achieve this by an extension of state employment and by welfare measures; in short, they hope to bribe the workers with a more or less disguised form of alms and to break their revolutionary strength by temporarily rendering their situation tolerable. The demands of petty-bourgeois democracy summarized here are not expressed by all sections of it at once, and in their totality they are the explicit goal of only a very few of its followers. The further particular individuals or fractions of the petty bourgeoisie advance, the more of these demands they will explicitly adopt, and the few who recognize their own programme in what has been mentioned above might well believe they have put forward the maximum that can be demanded from the revolution. But these demands can in no way satisfy the party of the proletariat. While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one. There is no doubt that during the further course of the revolution in Germany, the petty-bourgeois democrats will for the moment acquire a predominant influence. The question is, therefore, what is to be the attitude of the proletariat, and in particular of the League towards them:
1) While present conditions continue, in which the petty-bourgeois democrats are also oppressed;
2) In the coming revolutionary struggle, which will put them in a dominant position;
3) After this struggle, during the period of petty-bourgeois predominance over the classes which have been overthrown and over the proletariat.
1. At the moment, while the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach to the proletariat general unity and reconciliation; they extend the hand of friendship, and seek to found a great opposition party which will embrace all shades of democratic opinion; that is, they seek to ensnare the workers in a party organization in which general social-democratic phrases prevail while their particular interests are kept hidden behind, and in which, for the sake of preserving the peace, the specific demands of the proletariat may not be presented. Such a unity would be to their advantage alone and to the complete disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose all its hard-won independent position and be reduced once more to a mere appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This unity must therefore be resisted in the most decisive manner. Instead of lowering themselves to the level of an applauding chorus, the workers, and above all the League, must work for the creation of an independent organization of the workers’ party, both secret and open, and alongside the official democrats, and the League must aim to make every one of its communes a center and nucleus of workers’ associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence. How serious the bourgeois democrats are about an alliance in which the proletariat has equal power and equal rights is demonstrated by the Breslau democrats, who are conducting a furious campaign in their organ, the Neue Oder Zeitung, against independently organized workers, whom they call ‘socialists’. In the event of a struggle against a common enemy a special alliance is unnecessary. As soon as such an enemy has to be fought directly, the interests of both parties will coincide for the moment and an association of momentary expedience will arise spontaneously in the future, as it has in the past. It goes without saying that in the bloody conflicts to come, as in all others, it will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory. As in the past, so in the coming struggle also, the petty bourgeoisie, to a man, will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, to return to work and to prevent so-called excesses, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. It does not lie within the power of the workers to prevent the petty-bourgeois democrats from doing this; but it does lie within their power to make it as difficult as possible for the petty bourgeoisie to use its power against the armed proletariat, and to dictate such conditions to them that the rule of the bourgeois democrats, from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction, and its subsequent displacement by the proletariat will be made considerably easier. Above all, during and immediately after the struggle the workers, as far as it is at all possible, must oppose bourgeois attempts at pacification and force the democrats to carry out their terroristic phrases. They must work to ensure that the immediate revolutionary excitement is not suddenly suppressed after the victory. On the contrary, it must be sustained as long as possible. Far from opposing the so-called excesses – instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated – the workers’ party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give them direction. During and after the struggle the workers must at every opportunity put forward their own demands against those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers as soon as the democratic bourgeoisie sets about taking over the government. They must achieve these guarantees by force if necessary, and generally make sure that the new rulers commit themselves to all possible concessions and promises – the surest means of compromising them. They must check in every way and as far as is possible the victory euphoria and enthusiasm for the new situation which follow every successful street battle, with a cool and cold-blooded analysis of the situation and with undisguised mistrust of the new government. Alongside the new official governments they must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments, either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers’ clubs or committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lost the support of the workers but find themselves from the very beginning supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers. In a word, from the very moment of victory the workers’ suspicion must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party but against their former ally, against the party which intends to exploit the common victory for itself.
2. To be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organized. The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. The destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible – these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising.
3. As soon as the new governments have established themselves, their struggle against the workers will begin. If the workers are to be able to forcibly oppose the democratic petty bourgeois it is essential above all for them to be independently organized and centralized in clubs. At the soonest possible moment after the overthrow of the present governments, the Central Committee will come to Germany and will immediately convene a Congress, submitting to it the necessary proposals for the centralization of the workers’ clubs under a directorate established at the movement’s center of operations. The speedy organization of at least provincial connections between the workers’ clubs is one of the prime requirements for the strengthening and development of the workers’ party; the immediate result of the overthrow of the existing governments will be the election of a national representative body. Here the proletariat must take care: 1) that by sharp practices local authorities and government commissioners do not, under any pretext whatsoever, exclude any section of workers; 2) that workers’ candidates are nominated everywhere in opposition to bourgeois-democratic candidates. As far as possible they should be League members and their election should be pursued by all possible means. Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body. If the forces of democracy take decisive, terroristic action against the reaction from the very beginning, the reactionary influence in the election will already have been destroyed.
The first point over which the bourgeois democrats will come into conflict with the workers will be the abolition of feudalism as in the first French revolution, the petty bourgeoisie will want to give the feudal lands to the peasants as free property; that is, they will try to perpetrate the existence of the rural proletariat, and to form a petty-bourgeois peasant class which will be subject to the same cycle of impoverishment and debt which still afflicts the French peasant. The workers must oppose this plan both in the interest of the rural proletariat and in their own interest. They must demand that the confiscated feudal property remain state property and be used for workers’ colonies, cultivated collectively by the rural proletariat with all the advantages of large-scale farming and where the principle of common property will immediately achieve a sound basis in the midst of the shaky system of bourgeois property relations. Just as the democrats ally themselves with the peasants, the workers must ally themselves with the rural proletariat.
The democrats will either work directly towards a federated republic, or at least, if they cannot avoid the one and indivisible republic they will attempt to paralyze the central government by granting the municipalities and provinces the greatest possible autonomy and independence. In opposition to this plan the workers must not only strive for one and indivisible German republic, but also, within this republic, for the most decisive centralization of power in the hands of the state authority. They should not let themselves be led astray by empty democratic talk about the freedom of the municipalities, self-government, etc. In a country like Germany, where so many remnants of the Middle Ages are still to be abolished, where so much local and provincial obstinacy has to be broken down, it cannot under any circumstances be tolerated that each village, each town and each province may put up new obstacles in the way of revolutionary activity, which can only be developed with full efficiency from a central point. A renewal of the present situation, in which the Germans have to wage a separate struggle in each town and province for the same degree of progress, can also not be tolerated. Least of all can a so-called free system of local government be allowed to perpetuate a form of property which is more backward than modern private property and which is everywhere and inevitably being transformed into private property; namely communal property, with its consequent disputes between poor and rich communities. Nor can this so-called free system of local government be allowed to perpetuate, side by side with the state civil law, the existence of communal civil law with its sharp practices directed against the workers. As in France in 1793, it is the task of the genuinely revolutionary party in Germany to carry through the strictest centralization. [It must be recalled today that this passage is based on a misunderstanding. At that time – thanks to the Bonapartist and liberal falsifiers of history – it was considered as established that the French centralised machine of administration had been introduced by the Great Revolution and in particular that it had been used by the Convention as an indispensable and decisive weapon for defeating the royalist and federalist reaction and the external enemy. It is now, however, a well-known fact that throughout the revolution up to the eighteenth Brumaire c the whole administration of the départements, arrondissements and communes consisted of authorities elected by, the respective constituents themselves, and that these authorities acted with complete freedom within the general state laws; that precisely this provincial and local self-government, similar to the American, became the most powerful lever of the revolution and indeed to such an extent that Napoleon, immediately after his coup d’état of the eighteenth Brumaire, hastened to replace it by the still existing administration by prefects, which, therefore, was a pure instrument of reaction from the beginning. But no more than local and provincial self-government is in contradiction to political, national centralisation, is it necessarily bound up with that narrow-minded cantonal or communal self-seeking which strikes us as so repulsive in Switzerland, and which all the South German federal republicans wanted to make the rule in Germany in 1849. – Note by Engels to the 1885 edition.]
We have seen how the next upsurge will bring the democrats to power and how they will be forced to propose more or less socialistic measures. it will be asked what measures the workers are to propose in reply. At the beginning, of course, the workers cannot propose any directly communist measures. But the following courses of action are possible:
1. They can force the democrats to make inroads into as many areas of the existing social order as possible, so as to disturb its regular functioning and so that the petty-bourgeois democrats compromise themselves; furthermore, the workers can force the concentration of as many productive forces as possible – means of transport, factories, railways, etc. – in the hands of the state.
2. They must drive the proposals of the democrats to their logical extreme (the democrats will in any case act in a reformist and not a revolutionary manner) and transform these proposals into direct attacks on private property. If, for instance, the petty bourgeoisie propose the purchase of the railways and factories, the workers must demand that these railways and factories simply be confiscated by the state without compensation as the property of reactionaries. If the democrats propose a proportional tax, then the workers must demand a progressive tax; if the democrats themselves propose a moderate progressive tax, then the workers must insist on a tax whose rates rise so steeply that big capital is ruined by it; if the democrats demand the regulation of the state debt, then the workers must demand national bankruptcy. The demands of the workers will thus have to be adjusted according to the measures and concessions of the democrats.
Although the German workers cannot come to power and achieve the realization of their class interests without passing through a protracted revolutionary development, this time they can at least be certain that the first act of the approaching revolutionary drama will coincide with the direct victory of their own class in France and will thereby be accelerated. But they themselves must contribute most to their final victory, by informing themselves of their own class interests, by taking up their independent political position as soon as possible, by not allowing themselves to be misled by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute the necessity of an independently organized party of the proletariat. Their battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution.
Markin comment:
It has always been, and is, a tradition in the Communist movement to try to "draw the lessons" of various experiences in the international labor movement. And that tradition started back with our early leaders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Feast on this one.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League
London, March 1850
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcribed: by gearhart@ccsn.edu;
Proofed: and corrected by Alek Blain 2006;
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Brothers!
In the two revolutionary years of 1848-49 the League proved itself in two ways. First, its members everywhere involved themselves energetically in the movement and stood in the front ranks of the only decisively revolutionary class, the proletariat, in the press, on the barricades and on the battlefields. The League further proved itself in that its understanding of the movement, as expressed in the circulars issued by the Congresses and the Central Committee of 1847 and in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, has been shown to be the only correct one, and the expectations expressed in these documents have been completely fulfilled. This previously only propagated by the League in secret, is now on everyone’s lips and is preached openly in the market place. At the same time, however, the formerly strong organization of the League has been considerably weakened. A large number of members who were directly involved in the movement thought that the time for secret societies was over and that public action alone was sufficient. The individual districts and communes allowed their connections with the Central Committee to weaken and gradually become dormant. So, while the democratic party, the party of the petty bourgeoisie, has become more and more organized in Germany, the workers’ party has lost its only firm foothold, remaining organized at best in individual localities for local purposes; within the general movement it has consequently come under the complete domination and leadership of the petty-bourgeois democrats. This situation cannot be allowed to continue; the independence of the workers must be restored. The Central Committee recognized this necessity and it therefore sent an emissary, Joseph Moll, to Germany in the winter of 1848-9 to reorganize the League. Moll’s mission, however, failed to produce any lasting effect, partly because the German workers at that time had not enough experience and partly because it was interrupted by the insurrection last May. Moll himself took up arms, joined the Baden-Palatinate army and fell on 29 June in the battle of the River Murg. The League lost in him one of the oldest, most active and most reliable members, who had been involved in all the Congresses and Central Committees and had earlier conducted a series of missions with great success. Since the defeat of the German and French revolutionary parties in July 1849, almost all the members of the Central Committee have reassembled in London: they have replenished their numbers with new revolutionary forces and set about reorganizing the League with renewed zeal.
This reorganization can only be achieved by an emissary, and the Central Committee considers it most important to dispatch the emissary at this very moment, when a new revolution is imminent, that is, when the workers’ party must go into battle with the maximum degree of organization, unity and independence, so that it is not exploited and taken in tow by the bourgeoisie as in 1848.
We told you already in 1848, brothers, that the German liberal bourgeoisie would soon come to power and would immediately turn its newly won power against the workers. You have seen how this forecast came true. It was indeed the bourgeoisie which took possession of the state authority in the wake of the March movement of 1848 and used this power to drive the workers, its allies in the struggle, back into their former oppressed position. Although the bourgeoisie could accomplish this only by entering into an alliance with the feudal party, which had been defeated in March, and eventually even had to surrender power once more to this feudal absolutist party, it has nevertheless secured favourable conditions for itself. In view of the government’s financial difficulties, these conditions would ensure that power would in the long run fall into its hands again and that all its interests would be secured, if it were possible for the revolutionary movement to assume from now on a so-called peaceful course of development. In order to guarantee its power the bourgeoisie would not even need to arouse hatred by taking violent measures against the people, as all of these violent measures have already been carried out by the feudal counter-revolution. But events will not take this peaceful course. On the contrary, the revolution which will accelerate the course of events, is imminent, whether it is initiated by an independent rising of the French proletariat or by an invasion of the revolutionary Babel by the Holy Alliance.
The treacherous role that the German liberal bourgeoisie played against the people in 1848 will be assumed in the coming revolution by the democratic petty bourgeoisie, which now occupies the same position in the opposition as the liberal bourgeoisie did before 1848. This democratic party, which is far more dangerous for the workers than were the liberals earlier, is composed of three elements: 1) The most progressive elements of the big bourgeoisie, who pursue the goal of the immediate and complete overthrow of feudalism and absolutism. This fraction is represented by the former Berlin Vereinbarer, the tax resisters; 2) The constitutional-democratic petty bourgeois, whose main aim during the previous movement was the formation of a more or less democratic federal state; this is what their representative, the Left in the Frankfurt Assembly and later the Stuttgart parliament, worked for, as they themselves did in the Reich Constitution Campaign; 3) The republican petty bourgeois, whose ideal is a German federal republic similar to that in Switzerland and who now call themselves ‘red’ and ’social-democratic’ because they cherish the pious wish to abolish the pressure exerted by big capital on small capital, by the big bourgeoisie on the petty bourgeoisie. The representatives of this fraction were the members of the democratic congresses and committees, the leaders of the democratic associations and the editors of the democratic newspapers.
After their defeat all these fractions claim to be ‘republicans’ or ’reds’, just as at the present time members of the republican petty bourgeoisie in France call themselves ‘socialists’. Where, as in Wurtemberg, Bavaria, etc., they still find a chance to pursue their ends by constitutional means, they seize the opportunity to retain their old phrases and prove by their actions that they have not changed in the least. Furthermore, it goes without saying that the changed name of this party does not alter in the least its relationship to the workers but merely proves that it is now obliged to form a front against the bourgeoisie, which has united with absolutism, and to seek the support of the proletariat.
The petty-bourgeois democratic party in Germany is very powerful. It not only embraces the great majority of the urban middle class, the small industrial merchants and master craftsmen; it also includes among its followers the peasants and rural proletariat in so far as the latter has not yet found support among the independent proletariat of the towns.
The relationship of the revolutionary workers’ party to the petty-bourgeois democrats is this: it cooperates with them against the party which they aim to overthrow; it opposes them wherever they wish to secure their own position.
The democratic petty bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to a change in social conditions which will make the existing society as tolerable and comfortable for themselves as possible. They therefore demand above all else a reduction in government spending through a restriction of the bureaucracy and the transference of the major tax burden into the large landowners and bourgeoisie. They further demand the removal of the pressure exerted by big capital on small capital through the establishment of public credit institutions and the passing of laws against usury, whereby it would be possible for themselves and the peasants to receive advances on favourable terms from the state instead of from capitalists; also, the introduction of bourgeois property relationships on land through the complete abolition of feudalism. In order to achieve all this they require a democratic form of government, either constitutional or republican, which would give them and their peasant allies the majority; they also require a democratic system of local government to give them direct control over municipal property and over a series of political offices at present in the hands of the bureaucrats.
The rule of capital and its rapid accumulation is to be further counteracted, partly by a curtailment of the right of inheritance, and partly by the transference of as much employment as possible to the state. As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain wage labourers as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers, and hope to achieve this by an extension of state employment and by welfare measures; in short, they hope to bribe the workers with a more or less disguised form of alms and to break their revolutionary strength by temporarily rendering their situation tolerable. The demands of petty-bourgeois democracy summarized here are not expressed by all sections of it at once, and in their totality they are the explicit goal of only a very few of its followers. The further particular individuals or fractions of the petty bourgeoisie advance, the more of these demands they will explicitly adopt, and the few who recognize their own programme in what has been mentioned above might well believe they have put forward the maximum that can be demanded from the revolution. But these demands can in no way satisfy the party of the proletariat. While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one. There is no doubt that during the further course of the revolution in Germany, the petty-bourgeois democrats will for the moment acquire a predominant influence. The question is, therefore, what is to be the attitude of the proletariat, and in particular of the League towards them:
1) While present conditions continue, in which the petty-bourgeois democrats are also oppressed;
2) In the coming revolutionary struggle, which will put them in a dominant position;
3) After this struggle, during the period of petty-bourgeois predominance over the classes which have been overthrown and over the proletariat.
1. At the moment, while the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach to the proletariat general unity and reconciliation; they extend the hand of friendship, and seek to found a great opposition party which will embrace all shades of democratic opinion; that is, they seek to ensnare the workers in a party organization in which general social-democratic phrases prevail while their particular interests are kept hidden behind, and in which, for the sake of preserving the peace, the specific demands of the proletariat may not be presented. Such a unity would be to their advantage alone and to the complete disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose all its hard-won independent position and be reduced once more to a mere appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This unity must therefore be resisted in the most decisive manner. Instead of lowering themselves to the level of an applauding chorus, the workers, and above all the League, must work for the creation of an independent organization of the workers’ party, both secret and open, and alongside the official democrats, and the League must aim to make every one of its communes a center and nucleus of workers’ associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence. How serious the bourgeois democrats are about an alliance in which the proletariat has equal power and equal rights is demonstrated by the Breslau democrats, who are conducting a furious campaign in their organ, the Neue Oder Zeitung, against independently organized workers, whom they call ‘socialists’. In the event of a struggle against a common enemy a special alliance is unnecessary. As soon as such an enemy has to be fought directly, the interests of both parties will coincide for the moment and an association of momentary expedience will arise spontaneously in the future, as it has in the past. It goes without saying that in the bloody conflicts to come, as in all others, it will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory. As in the past, so in the coming struggle also, the petty bourgeoisie, to a man, will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, to return to work and to prevent so-called excesses, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. It does not lie within the power of the workers to prevent the petty-bourgeois democrats from doing this; but it does lie within their power to make it as difficult as possible for the petty bourgeoisie to use its power against the armed proletariat, and to dictate such conditions to them that the rule of the bourgeois democrats, from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction, and its subsequent displacement by the proletariat will be made considerably easier. Above all, during and immediately after the struggle the workers, as far as it is at all possible, must oppose bourgeois attempts at pacification and force the democrats to carry out their terroristic phrases. They must work to ensure that the immediate revolutionary excitement is not suddenly suppressed after the victory. On the contrary, it must be sustained as long as possible. Far from opposing the so-called excesses – instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated – the workers’ party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give them direction. During and after the struggle the workers must at every opportunity put forward their own demands against those of the bourgeois democrats. They must demand guarantees for the workers as soon as the democratic bourgeoisie sets about taking over the government. They must achieve these guarantees by force if necessary, and generally make sure that the new rulers commit themselves to all possible concessions and promises – the surest means of compromising them. They must check in every way and as far as is possible the victory euphoria and enthusiasm for the new situation which follow every successful street battle, with a cool and cold-blooded analysis of the situation and with undisguised mistrust of the new government. Alongside the new official governments they must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments, either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers’ clubs or committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lost the support of the workers but find themselves from the very beginning supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers. In a word, from the very moment of victory the workers’ suspicion must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party but against their former ally, against the party which intends to exploit the common victory for itself.
2. To be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory, the workers must be armed and organized. The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed. Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers. Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard. Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary. The destruction of the bourgeois democrats’ influence over the workers, and the enforcement of conditions which will compromise the rule of bourgeois democracy, which is for the moment inevitable, and make it as difficult as possible – these are the main points which the proletariat and therefore the League must keep in mind during and after the approaching uprising.
3. As soon as the new governments have established themselves, their struggle against the workers will begin. If the workers are to be able to forcibly oppose the democratic petty bourgeois it is essential above all for them to be independently organized and centralized in clubs. At the soonest possible moment after the overthrow of the present governments, the Central Committee will come to Germany and will immediately convene a Congress, submitting to it the necessary proposals for the centralization of the workers’ clubs under a directorate established at the movement’s center of operations. The speedy organization of at least provincial connections between the workers’ clubs is one of the prime requirements for the strengthening and development of the workers’ party; the immediate result of the overthrow of the existing governments will be the election of a national representative body. Here the proletariat must take care: 1) that by sharp practices local authorities and government commissioners do not, under any pretext whatsoever, exclude any section of workers; 2) that workers’ candidates are nominated everywhere in opposition to bourgeois-democratic candidates. As far as possible they should be League members and their election should be pursued by all possible means. Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body. If the forces of democracy take decisive, terroristic action against the reaction from the very beginning, the reactionary influence in the election will already have been destroyed.
The first point over which the bourgeois democrats will come into conflict with the workers will be the abolition of feudalism as in the first French revolution, the petty bourgeoisie will want to give the feudal lands to the peasants as free property; that is, they will try to perpetrate the existence of the rural proletariat, and to form a petty-bourgeois peasant class which will be subject to the same cycle of impoverishment and debt which still afflicts the French peasant. The workers must oppose this plan both in the interest of the rural proletariat and in their own interest. They must demand that the confiscated feudal property remain state property and be used for workers’ colonies, cultivated collectively by the rural proletariat with all the advantages of large-scale farming and where the principle of common property will immediately achieve a sound basis in the midst of the shaky system of bourgeois property relations. Just as the democrats ally themselves with the peasants, the workers must ally themselves with the rural proletariat.
The democrats will either work directly towards a federated republic, or at least, if they cannot avoid the one and indivisible republic they will attempt to paralyze the central government by granting the municipalities and provinces the greatest possible autonomy and independence. In opposition to this plan the workers must not only strive for one and indivisible German republic, but also, within this republic, for the most decisive centralization of power in the hands of the state authority. They should not let themselves be led astray by empty democratic talk about the freedom of the municipalities, self-government, etc. In a country like Germany, where so many remnants of the Middle Ages are still to be abolished, where so much local and provincial obstinacy has to be broken down, it cannot under any circumstances be tolerated that each village, each town and each province may put up new obstacles in the way of revolutionary activity, which can only be developed with full efficiency from a central point. A renewal of the present situation, in which the Germans have to wage a separate struggle in each town and province for the same degree of progress, can also not be tolerated. Least of all can a so-called free system of local government be allowed to perpetuate a form of property which is more backward than modern private property and which is everywhere and inevitably being transformed into private property; namely communal property, with its consequent disputes between poor and rich communities. Nor can this so-called free system of local government be allowed to perpetuate, side by side with the state civil law, the existence of communal civil law with its sharp practices directed against the workers. As in France in 1793, it is the task of the genuinely revolutionary party in Germany to carry through the strictest centralization. [It must be recalled today that this passage is based on a misunderstanding. At that time – thanks to the Bonapartist and liberal falsifiers of history – it was considered as established that the French centralised machine of administration had been introduced by the Great Revolution and in particular that it had been used by the Convention as an indispensable and decisive weapon for defeating the royalist and federalist reaction and the external enemy. It is now, however, a well-known fact that throughout the revolution up to the eighteenth Brumaire c the whole administration of the départements, arrondissements and communes consisted of authorities elected by, the respective constituents themselves, and that these authorities acted with complete freedom within the general state laws; that precisely this provincial and local self-government, similar to the American, became the most powerful lever of the revolution and indeed to such an extent that Napoleon, immediately after his coup d’état of the eighteenth Brumaire, hastened to replace it by the still existing administration by prefects, which, therefore, was a pure instrument of reaction from the beginning. But no more than local and provincial self-government is in contradiction to political, national centralisation, is it necessarily bound up with that narrow-minded cantonal or communal self-seeking which strikes us as so repulsive in Switzerland, and which all the South German federal republicans wanted to make the rule in Germany in 1849. – Note by Engels to the 1885 edition.]
We have seen how the next upsurge will bring the democrats to power and how they will be forced to propose more or less socialistic measures. it will be asked what measures the workers are to propose in reply. At the beginning, of course, the workers cannot propose any directly communist measures. But the following courses of action are possible:
1. They can force the democrats to make inroads into as many areas of the existing social order as possible, so as to disturb its regular functioning and so that the petty-bourgeois democrats compromise themselves; furthermore, the workers can force the concentration of as many productive forces as possible – means of transport, factories, railways, etc. – in the hands of the state.
2. They must drive the proposals of the democrats to their logical extreme (the democrats will in any case act in a reformist and not a revolutionary manner) and transform these proposals into direct attacks on private property. If, for instance, the petty bourgeoisie propose the purchase of the railways and factories, the workers must demand that these railways and factories simply be confiscated by the state without compensation as the property of reactionaries. If the democrats propose a proportional tax, then the workers must demand a progressive tax; if the democrats themselves propose a moderate progressive tax, then the workers must insist on a tax whose rates rise so steeply that big capital is ruined by it; if the democrats demand the regulation of the state debt, then the workers must demand national bankruptcy. The demands of the workers will thus have to be adjusted according to the measures and concessions of the democrats.
Although the German workers cannot come to power and achieve the realization of their class interests without passing through a protracted revolutionary development, this time they can at least be certain that the first act of the approaching revolutionary drama will coincide with the direct victory of their own class in France and will thereby be accelerated. But they themselves must contribute most to their final victory, by informing themselves of their own class interests, by taking up their independent political position as soon as possible, by not allowing themselves to be misled by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute the necessity of an independently organized party of the proletariat. Their battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution.
*Artist's Corner - The Master Works Of Michaelangelo Caravaggio -On The 400th Anniversary Of His Death
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the great Italian Renaissance artist Michaelangelo Caravaggio
Markin comment:
No this artist's work is not "socialist realism" but it is "Renaissance realism" or high "Catholic realism". Whatever, this guy knew his way around paint and canvas. Just look at the exquisite color detail and that eerie sense of being right there in the picture. Oh, and by the way, his work represents a very important addition to the sum of our common human culture. I believe that some of his work is now being exhibited in one of the New York museums.
Markin comment:
No this artist's work is not "socialist realism" but it is "Renaissance realism" or high "Catholic realism". Whatever, this guy knew his way around paint and canvas. Just look at the exquisite color detail and that eerie sense of being right there in the picture. Oh, and by the way, his work represents a very important addition to the sum of our common human culture. I believe that some of his work is now being exhibited in one of the New York museums.
Monday, May 24, 2010
*A Jeff Bridges Retospective- "Cutter's Way" - A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the end of "Cutter's Way". Hey, I already told you about the end I just want to show you how Cutter gets Bone off dead-center.
DVD Review
Cutter’s Way, Jeff Bridges, John Heard, Lisa Eichhorn, Columbia Pictures, 1981
In a recent review of “Crazy Hearts”, the vehicle for Jeff Bridges’ Oscar-winning performance as down and out country singer/songwriter Bad Blake, I noted that, in a sense, he had been preparing for and playing up to, in one form or another, that role since the start of his career. The line from Duane in “The Last Picture Show” to Bad in “Crazy”, although not a straight, one-dimensional line, has exhibited some familiar mannerism and acting tics. Like, for example, that sense that you come away with after watching Bridges, or rather his characters, that he is always ready to walk away from a bad situation at the drop of a hat. And not look back, and with no regrets. Except, of course, when duty calls for him to “take it on the chin” for the good guys. “Cutter’s Way”, a film toward the beginning of Bridges long career is an exemplar of just that idea.
In the aftermath of Bridges’ Oscar a number of art theaters are putting together and presenting a retrospective of his work. A local theater in the Boston area is one such venue. “Cutter’s Way, while no means his best work, is worthy of inclusion in such efforts. Here Bridges plays beach bum, hanging-around guy, semi gigolo, Richard Bone, who seeming cannot be moved off a dead pan, dead-center of existence. Except he has this quirky friend, Cutter, a dysfunctional, psychically and physically wounded Vietnam vet looking for a quick hit at success. The plot line here provides amble opportunity for that after Bone is tangentially involved in a murder case. Needless to say old Cutter means to, come hell or high water, get a pay off from a rich guy who seems to have done the deed. And it goes from there.
Now here is the odd part. Bridges puts in an adequate performance as the blasé roustabout Bone and displays those mannerisms mentioned above that are his trademark. However, old gravelly-voiced, gritty-etched, eye-patched John Heard steals the whole show with his bravado performance. Although Cutter is, in the end, unsuccessful, trying to save his marriage to his long-suffering wife and does not win the prize that he so frantically seeks at that same end able to get Bone off dead-center. Kudos, Cutter/John Heard.
DVD Review
Cutter’s Way, Jeff Bridges, John Heard, Lisa Eichhorn, Columbia Pictures, 1981
In a recent review of “Crazy Hearts”, the vehicle for Jeff Bridges’ Oscar-winning performance as down and out country singer/songwriter Bad Blake, I noted that, in a sense, he had been preparing for and playing up to, in one form or another, that role since the start of his career. The line from Duane in “The Last Picture Show” to Bad in “Crazy”, although not a straight, one-dimensional line, has exhibited some familiar mannerism and acting tics. Like, for example, that sense that you come away with after watching Bridges, or rather his characters, that he is always ready to walk away from a bad situation at the drop of a hat. And not look back, and with no regrets. Except, of course, when duty calls for him to “take it on the chin” for the good guys. “Cutter’s Way”, a film toward the beginning of Bridges long career is an exemplar of just that idea.
In the aftermath of Bridges’ Oscar a number of art theaters are putting together and presenting a retrospective of his work. A local theater in the Boston area is one such venue. “Cutter’s Way, while no means his best work, is worthy of inclusion in such efforts. Here Bridges plays beach bum, hanging-around guy, semi gigolo, Richard Bone, who seeming cannot be moved off a dead pan, dead-center of existence. Except he has this quirky friend, Cutter, a dysfunctional, psychically and physically wounded Vietnam vet looking for a quick hit at success. The plot line here provides amble opportunity for that after Bone is tangentially involved in a murder case. Needless to say old Cutter means to, come hell or high water, get a pay off from a rich guy who seems to have done the deed. And it goes from there.
Now here is the odd part. Bridges puts in an adequate performance as the blasé roustabout Bone and displays those mannerisms mentioned above that are his trademark. However, old gravelly-voiced, gritty-etched, eye-patched John Heard steals the whole show with his bravado performance. Although Cutter is, in the end, unsuccessful, trying to save his marriage to his long-suffering wife and does not win the prize that he so frantically seeks at that same end able to get Bone off dead-center. Kudos, Cutter/John Heard.
*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor Liberation Fighter Margaret Fuller On The 200th Anniversary Of Her Birth
Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for women's liberation fighter and slavery abolitionist Margaret Fuller.
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
*From The "Green Left Global News & Info" Blog-Al Jazeera Interview with Noam Chomsky: "We were denied entry"
Click on the headline to link to a "Green Left Global News & Info" Blog entry-"Al Jazeera Interview with Noam Chomsky: "We were denied entry."
Markin comment:
On a day when I an reviewing a Noam Chomsky documentary (Noam Chomsky: "Rebel Without a Pause) it seems right to give the devil his due.
Markin comment:
On a day when I an reviewing a Noam Chomsky documentary (Noam Chomsky: "Rebel Without a Pause) it seems right to give the devil his due.
*Victory To The Shaw's Workers- The "March For Justice" To Boston In Defense Of The Shaw's Workers Schedule
Click on the headline to link to a "UJP" Website entry for a "March to Boston"(from Methuen, from the Shaw's warehouse for where the workers were fired) schedule in support of the Shaw's supermarket distribution workers strike.
Markin comment:
Okay, great swing band leader Artie Shaw had his moment, on the occasion of his birthday centenary, in this space today. Now back to the class struggle. Victory To The Shaw's Supermarkets Distribution Workers!
Markin comment:
Okay, great swing band leader Artie Shaw had his moment, on the occasion of his birthday centenary, in this space today. Now back to the class struggle. Victory To The Shaw's Supermarkets Distribution Workers!
*The Emergence of The Black Bloc and The Movement Towards Anarchism -A Guest Commentary
Click on the headline to link to a "Boston Indy Media" post from "The Black Bloc."
Markin comment:
I am always interested in what the young anarchists are up to and this article is a good presentation of what has happened to that movement, or parts of it, over the past decade or so. I might add that the reemergence of youthful anarchism, of one sort or another, is the "sin" that we communists have had to pay for by not creating that necessary socialist society by now. Let's get moving
Markin comment:
I am always interested in what the young anarchists are up to and this article is a good presentation of what has happened to that movement, or parts of it, over the past decade or so. I might add that the reemergence of youthful anarchism, of one sort or another, is the "sin" that we communists have had to pay for by not creating that necessary socialist society by now. Let's get moving
*On Artie Shaw's Centenary- Swingman Shaw On Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust"
Click on headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Artie Shaw blowing a mean clarinet on Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust." Wow!
Markin comment:
This is the kind of music that was on the radio in my house when I was a kid, the music of my parents' generation. At least that was the music on the radio that I heard and is etched from the memory bank of ancient childhood before I "expropriated" the radio for Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee and the rock and rollers of the 1950s.
Markin comment:
This is the kind of music that was on the radio in my house when I was a kid, the music of my parents' generation. At least that was the music on the radio that I heard and is etched from the memory bank of ancient childhood before I "expropriated" the radio for Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee and the rock and rollers of the 1950s.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
*Books To While Away The Class Struggle By- The God That Failed- Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness At Noon”
Click on the headline ot link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the writer and novelist, Arthur Koestler.
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
Darkness At Noon, Arthur Koestler, Bantam Book, 1941
In what seems, politically, a long time ago, and concerning events that today seemingly took place on a different planet for the average reader, the book under review represented one of the first of a long succession of works on the subject of the “god that failed.” For those too young, like me, to remember back to the first wave of such disillusionment or who were not born at the time this subject centered on, in one form or another, of the breaking by a steady stream of Western intellectuals, writers, and other creative figures with an association, as they knew it, of the “communist experiment” in the Soviet Union (and later, as they attached themselves to other revolutions, in places like China and Cuba), Not the worst among them was the author here, Arthur Koestler, who had at least the distinction of having been in Spain when it mattered.
For some, few actually, that disillusionment might have occurred around the notorious Moscow Trials of the late 1930s where Stalin attempted, successfully, to liquidate his political enemies, the remnants of the Bolshevik Old Guard, their supporters in various Soviet state institutions, including the military, and their international allies in the communist movement. For others it was the noxious Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, the source of virtually all the subsequent false ideological linking of fascism and communism as twin ideologies. Later, in the post-World War II period, it was the Khrushchev revelations of Stalin’s crimes, or Hungary 1956, of Czechoslovakia, or…Afghanistan 1979. Whatever the pretext, whatever the validity of the outrageous behavior the net effect of the “break” was an overwhelmingly retrenchment back into the arms of the “god that didn’t fail”- Western imperialism. While those of us who have followed the teachings of Stalin’s great revolutionary nemesis, Leon Trotsky, have our own catalogue of crimes, and our own cries for vengeance against the historic legacy of Stalinism we, unconditionally, preferred not to “outsource” that task to world imperialism.
And the thrust of the last sentence is the central political and moral conundrum not only of writers like Arthur Koestler, who supported the Soviet Union and then backed off when the heat got too high, but of the central character in this novel, Nicolas Rubashov. Rubashov, an Old Guard Bolshevik leading figure, who had lost favor with “Number One” (Stalin), for opposing him in the past, and, more importantly, in the present through acts of political opposition, including actions outside the party. The action of the novel, such as it is, centers of Rubashov’s struggle to capitulate to “Number One” during these upheavals of the Moscow Trials period, on his own terms. Of course, there are no “own terms”, as we know from Khrushchev’s later revelations, except abject grovelings and debasement. The real moral query for Rubashov, who after all was no fool and had been at his revolutionary trade for four decades, much long than the younger element that populated the Stalinist bureaucracy and that has no clue to the heroic struggles of the pre-revolutionary period, is whether this capitulation will be of service, even if a last service to the party. In the end, however, he went down to the “killing” cellars for no good purpose.
It is at that last point that this novel, real enough in the facts behind the scenes of the action, is “unreal”. I mentioned above the name of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky. In the early Soviet period in the 1920s he, in the heat of a polemic, made a comment that no individual could be right against the party; the historic vehicle for the liberation of humankind. Many political opponents, of various hues, have used that statement, among others, to tar him with a quasi-Stalinist brush. But that is wrong, at least if one looks at his later career of opposition to Stalin and the Stalin regime, unto the death. And that is the contrast to be drawn between his political actions and those of Koestler/Rubashov. They mixed up the notion of duty to some political organizational form over the truths of the Marxist perspective in the struggle for our communist future. They could never resolve their moral dilemma either by a fruitless death or of a meaningless submission to world imperialism, an imperialism that really had other weapons, real weapons, to fight the “god that failed”. Learn that lesson, and learn it well.
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
Darkness At Noon, Arthur Koestler, Bantam Book, 1941
In what seems, politically, a long time ago, and concerning events that today seemingly took place on a different planet for the average reader, the book under review represented one of the first of a long succession of works on the subject of the “god that failed.” For those too young, like me, to remember back to the first wave of such disillusionment or who were not born at the time this subject centered on, in one form or another, of the breaking by a steady stream of Western intellectuals, writers, and other creative figures with an association, as they knew it, of the “communist experiment” in the Soviet Union (and later, as they attached themselves to other revolutions, in places like China and Cuba), Not the worst among them was the author here, Arthur Koestler, who had at least the distinction of having been in Spain when it mattered.
For some, few actually, that disillusionment might have occurred around the notorious Moscow Trials of the late 1930s where Stalin attempted, successfully, to liquidate his political enemies, the remnants of the Bolshevik Old Guard, their supporters in various Soviet state institutions, including the military, and their international allies in the communist movement. For others it was the noxious Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, the source of virtually all the subsequent false ideological linking of fascism and communism as twin ideologies. Later, in the post-World War II period, it was the Khrushchev revelations of Stalin’s crimes, or Hungary 1956, of Czechoslovakia, or…Afghanistan 1979. Whatever the pretext, whatever the validity of the outrageous behavior the net effect of the “break” was an overwhelmingly retrenchment back into the arms of the “god that didn’t fail”- Western imperialism. While those of us who have followed the teachings of Stalin’s great revolutionary nemesis, Leon Trotsky, have our own catalogue of crimes, and our own cries for vengeance against the historic legacy of Stalinism we, unconditionally, preferred not to “outsource” that task to world imperialism.
And the thrust of the last sentence is the central political and moral conundrum not only of writers like Arthur Koestler, who supported the Soviet Union and then backed off when the heat got too high, but of the central character in this novel, Nicolas Rubashov. Rubashov, an Old Guard Bolshevik leading figure, who had lost favor with “Number One” (Stalin), for opposing him in the past, and, more importantly, in the present through acts of political opposition, including actions outside the party. The action of the novel, such as it is, centers of Rubashov’s struggle to capitulate to “Number One” during these upheavals of the Moscow Trials period, on his own terms. Of course, there are no “own terms”, as we know from Khrushchev’s later revelations, except abject grovelings and debasement. The real moral query for Rubashov, who after all was no fool and had been at his revolutionary trade for four decades, much long than the younger element that populated the Stalinist bureaucracy and that has no clue to the heroic struggles of the pre-revolutionary period, is whether this capitulation will be of service, even if a last service to the party. In the end, however, he went down to the “killing” cellars for no good purpose.
It is at that last point that this novel, real enough in the facts behind the scenes of the action, is “unreal”. I mentioned above the name of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky. In the early Soviet period in the 1920s he, in the heat of a polemic, made a comment that no individual could be right against the party; the historic vehicle for the liberation of humankind. Many political opponents, of various hues, have used that statement, among others, to tar him with a quasi-Stalinist brush. But that is wrong, at least if one looks at his later career of opposition to Stalin and the Stalin regime, unto the death. And that is the contrast to be drawn between his political actions and those of Koestler/Rubashov. They mixed up the notion of duty to some political organizational form over the truths of the Marxist perspective in the struggle for our communist future. They could never resolve their moral dilemma either by a fruitless death or of a meaningless submission to world imperialism, an imperialism that really had other weapons, real weapons, to fight the “god that failed”. Learn that lesson, and learn it well.
*From The "Renegade Eye" Blog- Revolution And Counter-Revolution In Thailand- A Guest Commentary From The International Marxist Tendency
Click on the headline to link to the "Renegade Eye" blog entry- "Revolution And Counter-Revolution In Thailand"- A Guest Commentary From The International Marxist Tendency.
*From The SteveLendmanBlog" On The Growing Homeless In America
Click on the headline to link to a "SteveLendmanBlog" entry on the growing homelessness in America.
Markin comment:
I suppose the Obama administration will want to call them "Bushvilles" (after the "Hoovervilles" of the early 1930s in the other Great Depression) to shift the blame back but I like "Obamavilles" just fine. In any case, we need to fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government to begin to seriously address this issue.
Markin comment:
I suppose the Obama administration will want to call them "Bushvilles" (after the "Hoovervilles" of the early 1930s in the other Great Depression) to shift the blame back but I like "Obamavilles" just fine. In any case, we need to fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government to begin to seriously address this issue.
*From The "HistoMat" Blog- The Skewering Of "Bad Boy" (ex) Christopher Hitchens
Click on the headline to link to the "HistoMat" blog for a little well-served and well-placed skewering of one Christopher Hitchens-poster boy for ?.
*From The "Socialist Worker" Website- On The Tea Party
Click on the headline to link to a "Socialist Workers. org" Website entry on the latest on the Tea Party movement in America.
Markin comment:
Hearty and heartfelt thanks for this article since that means that I don't have to write on the subject. I think that I would rather, much rather, face the Stalinist prison camps and show trials that I am writing about in a review of Arthur Koestler's "Darkness At Noon" today than on the intricacies of bourgeois political techniques. Except to keep a very close watch on this movement not for what it stands for but for the madness and mad people that it will bring out in its wake. It will not be pretty if the results so far are any indication. On that, be alert.
Markin comment:
Hearty and heartfelt thanks for this article since that means that I don't have to write on the subject. I think that I would rather, much rather, face the Stalinist prison camps and show trials that I am writing about in a review of Arthur Koestler's "Darkness At Noon" today than on the intricacies of bourgeois political techniques. Except to keep a very close watch on this movement not for what it stands for but for the madness and mad people that it will bring out in its wake. It will not be pretty if the results so far are any indication. On that, be alert.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Books To While Away The Class Struggle By- James Baldwin's-"Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone"-Get On The Train To The Liberation Struggle
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for James Baldwin's "Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone"
Get On The Train- To Black Liberation Struggle
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
"Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone", James Baldwin, The Dial Press, New York, 1968
Recently I started a review of a film documentary, “Lenny Bruce: Without Tears”, using the following lines that I found appropriate to use to set the same kind of tone in reviewing James Baldwin’s his 1974 novel, “If Beale Street Could Talk”. I also find it useful to do so here as well in reviewing "Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone":
“Okay, the average black male kid on the average ghetto city block today 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 block pretty much knows that same thing, again usually on some bogus drug charge. And nowadays young black and Latina women are getting that same message coded into their psyches.”
And that sums up the message behind almost all of Baldwin’s’ best work, at least the message that will last and that should be etched in the memory of every fighter for social justice.
Now I have been, as is my wont when I get “hooked” on some writer, on something of a James Baldwin tear of late, reading or re-reading everything I can get my hands on. At the time of this review I have already looked at “Go Tell It On The Mountain”, the play “Blues For Mr. Charlie”, and "If Beale Street Could Talk. Frankly, those works, caught my attention more so that this work of "black uplift". Although it is well-written and powerful in spots it did not remind me why I was crazy to read everything that Baldwin wrote when I was a kid.
Why? Well, while I could definitely relate to the main character, Leo's, struggle to make a career for himself in the very white theater of his day and I could also sympathize with his struggle against the ingrained racism that he faced in daily life, even when he was successful, there was just a little too much self-satisfaction to move me into his direction. I will say that Baldwin's use, as on previous occasions, of the two-tier past and present interspersed literary format to tell Leo's early story (and his brother Caleb's and his white paramour Barbara's as well) and his current ill-health induced dilemma makes the novel move better than expected when I started reading the book.
That said, Baldwin is at his best when he creates situations where his characters have to confront the hard, hard reality of up-front racism in American. Little scenes like "being black" while in small town New Jersey, being black while in big time Broadway, and being black while dealing with a white (female) lover bring home the point nicely. And of those racial nodal points the strongest is when Baldwin has the bi-sexual Leo's male paramour, Black Christopher, who represents the "new" post- civil rights movement young black draws just the right historical parallel to the Jewish experience in World War II when he states, in effect- we will not go sheepishly into the concentration camps that the whites have ready for us when things get too hot. Powerful stuff. To bad it got buried in a story line that in the end has Leo traipsing off to Europe and not worthy of such insights.
Get On The Train- To Black Liberation Struggle
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
"Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone", James Baldwin, The Dial Press, New York, 1968
Recently I started a review of a film documentary, “Lenny Bruce: Without Tears”, using the following lines that I found appropriate to use to set the same kind of tone in reviewing James Baldwin’s his 1974 novel, “If Beale Street Could Talk”. I also find it useful to do so here as well in reviewing "Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone":
“Okay, the average black male kid on the average ghetto city block today 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 block pretty much knows that same thing, again usually on some bogus drug charge. And nowadays young black and Latina women are getting that same message coded into their psyches.”
And that sums up the message behind almost all of Baldwin’s’ best work, at least the message that will last and that should be etched in the memory of every fighter for social justice.
Now I have been, as is my wont when I get “hooked” on some writer, on something of a James Baldwin tear of late, reading or re-reading everything I can get my hands on. At the time of this review I have already looked at “Go Tell It On The Mountain”, the play “Blues For Mr. Charlie”, and "If Beale Street Could Talk. Frankly, those works, caught my attention more so that this work of "black uplift". Although it is well-written and powerful in spots it did not remind me why I was crazy to read everything that Baldwin wrote when I was a kid.
Why? Well, while I could definitely relate to the main character, Leo's, struggle to make a career for himself in the very white theater of his day and I could also sympathize with his struggle against the ingrained racism that he faced in daily life, even when he was successful, there was just a little too much self-satisfaction to move me into his direction. I will say that Baldwin's use, as on previous occasions, of the two-tier past and present interspersed literary format to tell Leo's early story (and his brother Caleb's and his white paramour Barbara's as well) and his current ill-health induced dilemma makes the novel move better than expected when I started reading the book.
That said, Baldwin is at his best when he creates situations where his characters have to confront the hard, hard reality of up-front racism in American. Little scenes like "being black" while in small town New Jersey, being black while in big time Broadway, and being black while dealing with a white (female) lover bring home the point nicely. And of those racial nodal points the strongest is when Baldwin has the bi-sexual Leo's male paramour, Black Christopher, who represents the "new" post- civil rights movement young black draws just the right historical parallel to the Jewish experience in World War II when he states, in effect- we will not go sheepishly into the concentration camps that the whites have ready for us when things get too hot. Powerful stuff. To bad it got buried in a story line that in the end has Leo traipsing off to Europe and not worthy of such insights.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
*From The Communist International Internet Archives- Lenin On The Twenty One Conditions For Admission To The Communist International
Click on the headline to link to a "The Communist International Internet Archives" entry - "Lenin On The Twenty One Conditions For Admission To The Communist International."
Markin comment:
Every once in a while it is worthwhile to go back and take a good long, long look at what being a communist, and fighting for our communist future, meant to those forbears who put the Communist International together. As recent developments on the international left bear witness to- it is easy to lose your way, especially in ideologically and politically hard times for communists.
Markin comment:
Every once in a while it is worthwhile to go back and take a good long, long look at what being a communist, and fighting for our communist future, meant to those forbears who put the Communist International together. As recent developments on the international left bear witness to- it is easy to lose your way, especially in ideologically and politically hard times for communists.
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