Click on the headline to link to the John Reed Internet Archive for an online copy of his seminal book, Ten Days That Shook The World, about the unfolding Bolshevik-led Russian October 1917 revolution.
******
Markin comment:
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.
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Additional Markin comment:
In the December 3, 2010 edition of Workers Vanguard there is an article about the results of their annual Fall subscription drive. The article mentions that during the drive their comrades ran into some militants who were interested in subscribing to the newspaper based on an interest in the Russian Revolution of 1917, Be still my heart in 2010. For those who share that perspective John Reed’s seminal, Ten Days That Shook The World, is a good place to start. And I have linked to that work above.
***********
Workers Vanguard No. 970
3 December 2010
John Reed on Imperialist “Aid”
From the Archives of Marxism
Radical American journalist John Reed was won to Bolshevism while reporting on the 1917 Russian Revolution in Petrograd. His classic Ten Days That Shook the World is a vivid eyewitness account of the insurrectionary days of the October Revolution. After his return from Russia, Reed was instrumental in the founding of the American Communist movement. As a delegate from the U.S. and as a member of the Executive Committee of the Third (Communist) International, he attended the First Congress of the Peoples of the East, held in September 1920 in Baku, capital of Soviet Azerbaijan. The Congress was convened to advance the revolutionary struggles of the exploited and the oppressed in the colonial and semicolonial world under the banner of Marxism and with the aid of the Soviet workers and those in the imperialist countries.
We print below a speech (undelivered due to time constraints) that Reed prepared for the Baku Congress warning against illusions in the American rulers’ promises of aid. At the time, the Bolshevik government was fighting a bloody civil war against counterrevolutionary forces backed by an imperialist blockade and an invasion by the armies of 14 capitalist states, including the U.S. Reed, stricken with typhus, died in Moscow soon after he returned from Baku.
Reed’s speech was originally published as an appendix to the Russian edition of the Baku Congress proceedings. The translation below was by Brian Pearce and was printed in Baku: Congress of the Peoples of the East (New Park, 1977).
* * *
I represent here the revolutionary workers of one of the great imperialist powers, the United States of America, which exploits and oppresses the peoples of the colonies.
You, the peoples of the East, the peoples of Asia, have not yet experienced for yourselves the rule of America. You know and hate the British, French and Italian imperialists, and probably you think that “free America” will govern better, will liberate the peoples of the colonies, will feed and defend them.
No. The workers and peasants of the Philippines, the peoples of Central America and the islands of the Caribbean, they know what it means to live under the rule of “free America.”
Take, for example, the peoples of the Philippines. In 1898 the Filipinos rebelled against the cruel colonial government of Spain, and the Americans helped them. But after the Spaniards had been driven out the Americans did not want to go away.
Then the Filipinos rose against the Americans, and this time the “liberators” started to kill them, their wives and children: they tortured them and eventually conquered them. They seized their land and forced them to work and make profits for American capitalists.
The Americans have promised the Filipinos independence. Soon an independent Filipino republic will be proclaimed. But this does not mean that the American capitalists will leave or that the Filipinos will not continue to work to make profits for them. The American capitalists have given the Filipino leaders a share of their profits—they have given them government jobs, land and money—they have created a Filipino capitalist class which also lives on the profits created by the workers—and in whose interest it is to keep the Filipinos in slavery.
This has also happened in Cuba, which was freed from Spanish rule with the help of the Americans. It is now an independent Republic. But American millionaire trusts own all the sugar plantations, apart from some small tracts which they have let the Cuban capitalists have: the latter also administer the country. And the moment that the workers of Cuba try to elect a government which is not in the interests of the American capitalists, the United States of America sends soldiers into Cuba to compel the people to vote for their oppressors.
Or let us take the example of the republics of Haiti and San Domingo, where the peoples won freedom a century ago. Since this island was fertile and the people living on it could be put to use by the American capitalists, the government of the U.S. sent soldiers and sailors there on the pretext of maintaining order and smashed these two republics, setting up in their place a military dictatorship worse than the British tyrants.
Mexico is another rich country which is close to the USA. In Mexico live a backward people who were enslaved for centuries, first by the Spaniards and then by foreign capitalists. There, after many years of civil war, the people formed their own government, not a proletarian government but a democratic one, which wanted to keep the wealth of Mexico for the Mexicans and tax the foreign capitalists. The American capitalists did not concern themselves with sending bread to the hungry Mexicans. No, they initiated a counter-revolution in Mexico, in which Madero, the first revolutionary President, was killed. Then, after a three-year struggle, the revolutionary regime was restored, with Carranza as President. The American capitalists made another counter-revolution and killed Carranza, establishing once more a government friendly to themselves.
In North America itself there are ten million Negroes who possess neither political or civil rights, despite the fact that by law they are equal citizens. With the purpose of distracting the attention of the American workers from the capitalists, their exploiters, the latter stir up hatred against the Negroes, provoking war between the white and black races. The Negroes, whom they lawlessly burn alive, are beginning to see that their only hope lies in armed resistance to the white bandits.
At the present time the American capitalists are addressing friendly words to the peoples of the East, with a promise of aid and food. This applies especially to Armenia. Millions of dollars have been collected by the American millionaires in order to send bread to the starving Armenians. And many Armenians are now looking for help to Uncle Sam.
These same American capitalists incite the American workers and farmers against each other: they starve and exploit the peoples of Cuba and the Philippines, they savagely kill and burn alive American Negroes, and in America itself American workers are obliged to work under frightful conditions, receiving low wages for a long work-day. When they are exhausted they are thrown out on to the street, where they die of hunger.
The same gentleman who is now in charge of bringing aid to the starving Armenians, Mr. Cleveland Dodge, who writes emotional articles about how the Turks have driven the Armenians into the desert, is the owner of big copper mines where thousands of American workers are exploited, and when these workers dared to go on strike the guards protecting Mr. Dodge’s mines drove them at the point of the bayonet out into the desert—just as was done to the Armenians.
Many Armenians are grateful to America for its attitude to the Armenians who suffered from the brutality of the Turks during the war. But what has America done for the Armenians apart from issuing wordy declarations? Nothing. I was in Constantinople at that time, in 1915, and I know that the missionaries refused to make any serious protest against the atrocities, saying that they had a lot of property in Turkey and so did not want to bring pressure to bear on the Turks. The American ambassador, Mr. Strauss, himself a millionaire who exploited thousands of workers in his enterprises in America, proposed that the entire Armenian people be shipped to America, and himself donated quite a large sum for this project to be carried out; but his plan was to make the Armenians work in American factories and provide cheap labour so as to increase the profits of Mr. Strauss and his friends.
But why do the American capitalists promise aid and food to Armenia? Is it out of pure philanthropy? If so, let them feed the peoples of Central America and help the Negroes of America itself.
No. The main reason is that there is mineral wealth in Armenia, and that it is a big reservoir of cheap labour which can be exploited by American capitalists.
The American capitalists want to win the confidence of the Armenians with a view to getting their claws into Armenia and enslaving the Armenian nation. It is with this aim that American missionaries have established schools in the Near East.
But there is also another very important reason: the American capitalists, together with the other capitalist nations, united in the League of Nations, are afraid that the workers and peasants of Armenia will follow the example of Soviet Russia and Soviet Azerbaidzhan, will take power and their country’s resources into their own hands, and will work for themselves, making a united front with the workers and peasants of the whole world against world imperialism. The American capitalists are afraid of a revolution in the East.
Promising food to starving peoples and at the same time organizing a blockade of the Soviet Republics—that is the policy of the United States. The blockade of Soviet Russia has starved to death thousands of Russian women and children. This same method of blockade was applied in order to turn the Hungarian people against their Soviet Government. The same tactic is now being used in order to draw the people of White Hungary into war against Soviet Russia. This method is also being used in the small countries bordering on Russia—Finland, Estonia, Latvia. But now all these small countries have been obliged to make peace with Soviet Russia: they are bankrupt and starving. Now the American Government no longer offers them food; they are no longer of any use to America, and so their peoples can starve.
The American capitalists promise bread to Armenia. This is an old trick. They promise bread but they never give it. Did Hungary get bread after the fall of the Soviet Government? No. The Hungarian people are still starving today. Did the Baltic countries get bread? No. At a time when the starving Estonians had nothing but potatoes, the American capitalists sent them ships laden with rotten potatoes which could not be sold at a profit in America. No, comrades, Uncle Sam is not one ever to give anybody something for nothing. He comes along with a sack stuffed with straw in one hand and a whip in the other. Whoever takes Uncle Sam’s promises at their face value will find himself obliged to pay for them with blood and sweat. The American workers are demanding an ever larger share of the product of their labour; with a view to preventing revolution at home, the American capitalists are forced to seek out colonial peoples to exploit, peoples who will furnish sufficient profit to keep the American workers in obedience and so make them participants in the exploitation of the Armenians. I represent thousands of revolutionary American workers who know this, and who understand that, acting together with the Armenian workers and peasants, with the toiling masses of the whole world, they will overthrow capitalism. World capitalism will be destroyed, and all the peoples will be free. We appreciate the need for solidarity between all the oppressed and toiling peoples, for unity of the revolutionary workers of all the countries of Europe and America under the leadership of the Russian Bolsheviks, in the Communist International. And we say to you, peoples of the East: Do not believe the promises of the American capitalists!
There is only one road to freedom. Unite with the Russian workers and peasants who have overthrown their capitalists and whose Red Army has beaten the foreign imperialists! Follow the red star of the Communist International!
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Boston Protest In Defense Of Private Bradley Manning And Wikileaks- Free Pvt. Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange!
Click on the headline to link to a Boston Indymedia post for of demonstration in defense of Army Private Bradley Manning and Wikileaks and its leader, Julian Assange.
Markin comment:
Free Pvt. Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange!
The defense of these individuals who are under American and world governmental attack for simply doing honorable things in the old democratic tradition is important in the struggle to preserve all our dwindling democratic rights. The defense of the public square that I have been at pains to talk about lately, post-Arizona January shoot-out massacre, starts for us with the defense of Manning and Assange. I would also point out that in Boston this defense was, unlike the issue of opposition to the the Obama Afghanistan war policies, led by young people. Hooray!
Markin comment:
Free Pvt. Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange!
The defense of these individuals who are under American and world governmental attack for simply doing honorable things in the old democratic tradition is important in the struggle to preserve all our dwindling democratic rights. The defense of the public square that I have been at pains to talk about lately, post-Arizona January shoot-out massacre, starts for us with the defense of Manning and Assange. I would also point out that in Boston this defense was, unlike the issue of opposition to the the Obama Afghanistan war policies, led by young people. Hooray!
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-What Has Been Revealed By the Trial of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Duma Group
Markin comment:
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
*******
V. I. Lenin
What Has Been Revealed By the Trial of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Duma Group[1]
Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 40, March 29, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 171-177.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2003 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The trial, by the tsar’s court, of five members of the R.S.D.L. Duma group and six other Social-Democrats seized on November 4, 1914 at a conference near Petrograd has ended. They have all been sentenced to life exile in Siberia. The censor has deleted from accounts of the trial published in the legal press all the passages that may be unpleasant to tsarism and the patriots. The “internal enemies” have been rapidly dealt with and again nothing is to be seen or heard on the surface of public life except the savage howling of a pack of bourgeois chauvinists, echoed by some handfuls of social-chauvinists.
What, then, has the trial of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour group proved?
First of all, it has shown that this advance contingent of revolutionary Social-Democracy in Russia failed to display sufficient firmness at the trial. It was the aim of the accused to prevent the State Prosecutor from finding out the names of the members of the Central Committee in Russia and of the Party’s representatives in its contacts with workers’ organisations. That aim has been achieved. To continue achieving that aim in the future, we muse resort to a method long recommended officially by the Party, i.e., refuse to give evidence. However, to attempt to prove one’s solidarity with the social-patriot Mr. Yordansky, as Rosenfeld did, or one’s disagreement with the Central Committee, is a wrong method, one that is inexcusable from the standpoint of a revolutionary Social-Democrat.
We shall note that, according to a Dyen report (No. 40)[2]—there is no official or complete record of the trial—Comrade Petrovsky stated: “In the same period [November] I received the Central Committee resolution . . . and besides I was given resolutions adopted by workers in seven various places concerning their attitude towards the war, resolutions coinciding with the Central Committee’s attitude. ”
This declaration does Petrovsky credit. The tide of chauvinism was running high on all sides. In Petrovsky’s diary there is an entry to the effect that even the radical-minded Chkheidze spoke with enthusiasm of a war for “liberty”. This chauvinism was resisted by the R.S.D.L. group deputies when they were free, but it was also their duty, at the trial, to draw a line of distinction between themselves and chauvinism.
The Cadet Rech[3] had servilely “thanked” the tsar’s court for “dispelling the legend” that the Russian Social-Democratic deputies wanted the defeat of the tsar’s armies. Taking advantage of the fact that in Russia the Social-Democrats are tied hand and foot in their activities, the Cadets are pretending to take seriously the so-called “conflict” between the Party and the Duma group, and declare that the accused gave their evidence without the least compulsion. What innocent babes? They pretend ignorance of the threat of a court-martial and the death sentence that hung over the deputies in the early stage of the trial.
The comrades should have refused to give evidence concerning the illegal organisation, and, in view of the historic importance of the moment, they should have taken advantage of a public trial to openly set forth the Social-Democratic views, which are hostile, not only to tsarism in general, but also to social-chauvinism of all and every shade.
Let the government and bourgeois press wrathfully attack the R.S.D.L. group; let the Social-Revolutionaries, liquidators and social-chauvinists (who must fight us somehow, if they cannot fight us on the issue of principles!) with gleeful malice “discover” signs of weakness or of fictitious “disagreement with the Central Committee”. The Party of the revolutionary proletariat is strong enough to openly criticise itself, and unequivocally call mistakes and weaknesses by their proper names. The class-conscious workers of Russia have created a party and have placed in the forefront an advance contingent which, during a world war and the world-wide collapse of international opportunism have revealed more than anyone else the ability to perform their duty as internationalist revolutionary Social-Democrats. The road we have been travelling has been tested by the greatest of all crises, and has proved, over and over again, the only correct road. We shall follow it still more firmly and resolutely; we shall throw out fresh advance contingents, and shall see to it that they not only carry out the same work, but carry it through more correctly.
Secondly, the trial has revealed a picture without precedent in world socialism—that of revolutionary Social-Democracy making use of parliamentarianism. More than any speeches, this example will appeal to the minds and hearts of the proletarian masses; more convincingly than any arguments, it will refute the legalist opportunists and anarchist phrase-mongers. The report on Muranov’s illegal work and Petrovsky’s notes will long remain a model of that kind of work carried out by our deputies, which we have had diligently to conceal, and the meaning of which will give all class-conscious workers in Russia more and more food for thought. At a time when nearly all “socialist”(forgive the debasement of the word!) deputies in Europe have proved chauvinists and servants of chauvinists, when the famous “Europeanism” that once charmed our liberals and liquidators has proved an obtuse habitude of slavish legality, there was to be found in Russia a workers’ party whose deputies excelled, not in high-flown speech, or being “received” in bourgeois, intellectualist salons, or in the business acumen of the “European” lawyer and parliamentarian, but in ties with the working masses, in dedicated work among those masses, in carrying on modest, unpretentious, arduous, thankless and highly dangerous duties of illegal propagandists and organisers. To climb higher, towards the rank of a deputy or minister influential in “society” such has been the actual meaning of “European” (i.e., servile) “socialist” parliamentarism. To go into the midst of the masses, to help enlighten and unite the exploited and the oppressed—such is the slogan advanced by the examples set by Muranov and Petrovsky.
This slogan will acquire historic significance. In no country in the world will a single thinking worker agree to confine himself to the old legality of bourgeois parliamentarism, when that legality has been abolished with a stroke of the pen in all the advanced countries, and has led to merely a closer actual alliance between the opportunists and the bourgeoisie. Whoever dreams of “unity” between revolutionary Social-Democratic workers and the “European” Social-Democratic legalists of yesterday, and of today, has learned nothing and forgotten everything, and is in fact an ally of the bourgeoisie and an enemy of the proletariat. Whoever has to this day failed to realise why the R.S.D.L. group broke away from the Social-Democratic group that was making its peace with legalism and opportunism can now learn a lessen from the activities of Muranov and Petrovsky as described in the report on the trial. It was not only by these two deputies that this work was conducted, and only hopelessly naïve people can dream of a compatibility between such work and a “friendly and tolerant attitude” towards Nasha Zarya or Severnaya Rabochaya Gazeta,[4] towards Sovremennik, the Organising Committee, or the Bund.
Do the government hope to intimidate the workers by sending the members of the R.S.D.L. group to Siberia? They will find themselves mistaken. The workers will not be intimidated, but will the better understand their aims, those of a workers’ party as distinct from the liquidators and the social-chauvinists. The workers will learn to elect to the Duma only men such as the members of the R.S.D.L. group, and for similar and ever more extensive work, such that will be conducted among the masses with still more secrecy. Do the government intend to do away with “illegal parliamentarianism” in Russia? They will merely consolidate the links between the proletariat exclusively with that kind of parliamentarism.
Thirdly, and most important, the court proceedings against the R.S.D.L. group have, for the first time, produced open and objective material, disseminated all over Russia in millions of copies, concerning the most fundamental, the most significant and most vital question of the attitude of the various classes in Russian society towards the war. Have we not had enough of nauseating intellectualist jabber about the compatibility between “defence of the fatherland” and internationalism “in principle”(i.e., purely verbal and hypocritical internationalism)? Has not the time come to examine the facts that bear upon classes, i.e., millions of living people, not some dozens of phrase-mongers?
Over half a year has passed since the outbreak of war. The press, both legal and illegal, and expressing all trends, has had its say; all the party groups in the Duma have defined their stands—a highly insufficient index of our class groupings, but the only objective one. The trial of the R.S.D.L. group and the press comment on it have summed up all this material. The trial has shown that the finest representatives of the proletariat in Russia are not only hostile to chauvinism in general but, in particular, share the stand of our Central Organ. The deputies were arrested on November 4, 1914. Consequently, they had been conducting their work for over two months. How and with whom did they carry it on? Which currents in the working class did they reflect and express? The answer is found in the fact that the “theses” and Sotsial-Demokrat provided the material for the conference, and that, on several occasions, the Petrograd Committee of our Party issued leaflets of the same nature. There was no other material at the conference. The deputies had no intention of reporting to the conference on other currents in the working class, because no other currents existed.
Perhaps the members of the R.S.D.L. group were expressing the opinion of a mere minority of, the workers? We have no grounds to suppose so, since, in the two and a half years, between the spring of 1912 and the autumn of 1914, four-fifths of the class-conscious workers of Russia rallied around Pravda, with which these deputies were working in complete ideological solidarity. That is a fact. Had there been a more or less appreciable protest among the workers against the Central Committee’s stand, that protest would have surely found expression in the resolutions proposed. Nothing of the kind emerged at the trial, though the latter, it might be said, did “reveal” much of the work done by the R.S.D.L. group. The corrections made in Petrovsky’s handwriting do not reveal even the slightest hint at any difference of opinion.
The facts show that, in the very first months after the outbreak of the war, the class-conscious vanguard of the workers of Russia rallied, in deed, about the Central Committee and the Central Organ. However unpleasant this fact may be to certain “groups”, it is undeniable. Thanks to the trial, the words cited in the indictment: “The guns should be directed, not against our brothers, the wage slaves of other countries, but against the reactionary and bourgeois governments and parties of all countries"—these words will spread—and have already done so—all over Russia as a call for proletarian internationalism, for the proletarian revolution. Thanks to the trial, the class slogan of the vanguard of the workers of Russia has reached the masses of the workers.
An epidemic of chauvinism among the bourgeoisie and a certain section of the petty bourgeoisie, vacillation in the other section of the latter, and a working class call of this nature—such is the actual and objective picture of our political divisions. It is to this actual situation, not to the pious wishes of intellectuals and founders of grouplets, that one must gear one’s “prospects”, hopes, and slogans.
The Pravdist papers and the “Muranov type” of work have brought about the unity of four-fifths of the class-conscious workers of Russia. About forty thousand workers have been buying Pravda ; far more read it. Even if war, prison, Siberia, and hard labour should destroy five or even ten times as many—this section of the workers cannot be annihilated. It is alive. It is imbued with the revolutionary spirit, is anti-chauvinist. It alone stands in the midst of the masses, with deep roots in the latter, as the champion of the internationalism of the toilers, the exploited, and the oppressed. It alone has held its ground in the general debâcle. It alone is leading the semi-proletarian elements away from the social-chauvinism of the Cadets, the Trudoviks, Plekhanov and Nasha Zarya, and towards socialism. Its existence, its ideas, its work, and its call for the “brotherhood of wage slaves of other countries” have been revealed to the whole of Russia by the trial of the R.S.D.L. group.
It is with this section that we must work, and its unity must be defended against social-chauvinists. That is the only road along which the working-class movement of Russia can develop towards social revolution, and not towards national-liberalism of the “European” type.
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Notes
[1] The trial of the Bolshevik deputies to the Fourth Duma (A. E. Badayev, M. K. Muranov, G. I. Petrovsky, F. N. Samoilov, N. R. Shagov) and other Social-Democrats, who took part in the illegal Party Conference in Ozerki, took place on February 10 (23), 1915. The case was tried by the Special Court in Petrograd. They were charged under Article 102, i.e. accused of participation in an organisation aiming at the overthrow of the existing state system. The main circumstantial evidence against the Bolshevik deputies was Lenin’s theses The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War and the C.C. R.S.D.L.P. manifesto The War and Russian Social-Democracy, which were confiscated during the search.
The five Bolshevik deputies were exiled for life to Turukhansk Territory {Eastern Siberia).
[2] Dyen (Day )—a daily of a bourgeois-liberal trend, which began publication in St. Petersburg in 1912. Among its contributors were Menshevik liquidators, who took over complete control of the paper after February 1917. Closed down by the Revolutionary-Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet on October 26 (November 8), 1917.
[3] Rech (Speech )—the central daily newspaper of the Cadet Party, published in St. Petersburg from February 1906 onwards. It was suppressed by the Revolutionary-Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet on October 26 (November 8), 1917, but continued to appear under other names until August 1918.
[4] Severnaya Rabochaya Gazeta (Workers’ Northern Gazette)—a legal daily of the Menshevik liquidators, published in St. Petersburg from January to May 1914.
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
*******
V. I. Lenin
What Has Been Revealed By the Trial of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Duma Group[1]
Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 40, March 29, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 171-177.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2003 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The trial, by the tsar’s court, of five members of the R.S.D.L. Duma group and six other Social-Democrats seized on November 4, 1914 at a conference near Petrograd has ended. They have all been sentenced to life exile in Siberia. The censor has deleted from accounts of the trial published in the legal press all the passages that may be unpleasant to tsarism and the patriots. The “internal enemies” have been rapidly dealt with and again nothing is to be seen or heard on the surface of public life except the savage howling of a pack of bourgeois chauvinists, echoed by some handfuls of social-chauvinists.
What, then, has the trial of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour group proved?
First of all, it has shown that this advance contingent of revolutionary Social-Democracy in Russia failed to display sufficient firmness at the trial. It was the aim of the accused to prevent the State Prosecutor from finding out the names of the members of the Central Committee in Russia and of the Party’s representatives in its contacts with workers’ organisations. That aim has been achieved. To continue achieving that aim in the future, we muse resort to a method long recommended officially by the Party, i.e., refuse to give evidence. However, to attempt to prove one’s solidarity with the social-patriot Mr. Yordansky, as Rosenfeld did, or one’s disagreement with the Central Committee, is a wrong method, one that is inexcusable from the standpoint of a revolutionary Social-Democrat.
We shall note that, according to a Dyen report (No. 40)[2]—there is no official or complete record of the trial—Comrade Petrovsky stated: “In the same period [November] I received the Central Committee resolution . . . and besides I was given resolutions adopted by workers in seven various places concerning their attitude towards the war, resolutions coinciding with the Central Committee’s attitude. ”
This declaration does Petrovsky credit. The tide of chauvinism was running high on all sides. In Petrovsky’s diary there is an entry to the effect that even the radical-minded Chkheidze spoke with enthusiasm of a war for “liberty”. This chauvinism was resisted by the R.S.D.L. group deputies when they were free, but it was also their duty, at the trial, to draw a line of distinction between themselves and chauvinism.
The Cadet Rech[3] had servilely “thanked” the tsar’s court for “dispelling the legend” that the Russian Social-Democratic deputies wanted the defeat of the tsar’s armies. Taking advantage of the fact that in Russia the Social-Democrats are tied hand and foot in their activities, the Cadets are pretending to take seriously the so-called “conflict” between the Party and the Duma group, and declare that the accused gave their evidence without the least compulsion. What innocent babes? They pretend ignorance of the threat of a court-martial and the death sentence that hung over the deputies in the early stage of the trial.
The comrades should have refused to give evidence concerning the illegal organisation, and, in view of the historic importance of the moment, they should have taken advantage of a public trial to openly set forth the Social-Democratic views, which are hostile, not only to tsarism in general, but also to social-chauvinism of all and every shade.
Let the government and bourgeois press wrathfully attack the R.S.D.L. group; let the Social-Revolutionaries, liquidators and social-chauvinists (who must fight us somehow, if they cannot fight us on the issue of principles!) with gleeful malice “discover” signs of weakness or of fictitious “disagreement with the Central Committee”. The Party of the revolutionary proletariat is strong enough to openly criticise itself, and unequivocally call mistakes and weaknesses by their proper names. The class-conscious workers of Russia have created a party and have placed in the forefront an advance contingent which, during a world war and the world-wide collapse of international opportunism have revealed more than anyone else the ability to perform their duty as internationalist revolutionary Social-Democrats. The road we have been travelling has been tested by the greatest of all crises, and has proved, over and over again, the only correct road. We shall follow it still more firmly and resolutely; we shall throw out fresh advance contingents, and shall see to it that they not only carry out the same work, but carry it through more correctly.
Secondly, the trial has revealed a picture without precedent in world socialism—that of revolutionary Social-Democracy making use of parliamentarianism. More than any speeches, this example will appeal to the minds and hearts of the proletarian masses; more convincingly than any arguments, it will refute the legalist opportunists and anarchist phrase-mongers. The report on Muranov’s illegal work and Petrovsky’s notes will long remain a model of that kind of work carried out by our deputies, which we have had diligently to conceal, and the meaning of which will give all class-conscious workers in Russia more and more food for thought. At a time when nearly all “socialist”(forgive the debasement of the word!) deputies in Europe have proved chauvinists and servants of chauvinists, when the famous “Europeanism” that once charmed our liberals and liquidators has proved an obtuse habitude of slavish legality, there was to be found in Russia a workers’ party whose deputies excelled, not in high-flown speech, or being “received” in bourgeois, intellectualist salons, or in the business acumen of the “European” lawyer and parliamentarian, but in ties with the working masses, in dedicated work among those masses, in carrying on modest, unpretentious, arduous, thankless and highly dangerous duties of illegal propagandists and organisers. To climb higher, towards the rank of a deputy or minister influential in “society” such has been the actual meaning of “European” (i.e., servile) “socialist” parliamentarism. To go into the midst of the masses, to help enlighten and unite the exploited and the oppressed—such is the slogan advanced by the examples set by Muranov and Petrovsky.
This slogan will acquire historic significance. In no country in the world will a single thinking worker agree to confine himself to the old legality of bourgeois parliamentarism, when that legality has been abolished with a stroke of the pen in all the advanced countries, and has led to merely a closer actual alliance between the opportunists and the bourgeoisie. Whoever dreams of “unity” between revolutionary Social-Democratic workers and the “European” Social-Democratic legalists of yesterday, and of today, has learned nothing and forgotten everything, and is in fact an ally of the bourgeoisie and an enemy of the proletariat. Whoever has to this day failed to realise why the R.S.D.L. group broke away from the Social-Democratic group that was making its peace with legalism and opportunism can now learn a lessen from the activities of Muranov and Petrovsky as described in the report on the trial. It was not only by these two deputies that this work was conducted, and only hopelessly naïve people can dream of a compatibility between such work and a “friendly and tolerant attitude” towards Nasha Zarya or Severnaya Rabochaya Gazeta,[4] towards Sovremennik, the Organising Committee, or the Bund.
Do the government hope to intimidate the workers by sending the members of the R.S.D.L. group to Siberia? They will find themselves mistaken. The workers will not be intimidated, but will the better understand their aims, those of a workers’ party as distinct from the liquidators and the social-chauvinists. The workers will learn to elect to the Duma only men such as the members of the R.S.D.L. group, and for similar and ever more extensive work, such that will be conducted among the masses with still more secrecy. Do the government intend to do away with “illegal parliamentarianism” in Russia? They will merely consolidate the links between the proletariat exclusively with that kind of parliamentarism.
Thirdly, and most important, the court proceedings against the R.S.D.L. group have, for the first time, produced open and objective material, disseminated all over Russia in millions of copies, concerning the most fundamental, the most significant and most vital question of the attitude of the various classes in Russian society towards the war. Have we not had enough of nauseating intellectualist jabber about the compatibility between “defence of the fatherland” and internationalism “in principle”(i.e., purely verbal and hypocritical internationalism)? Has not the time come to examine the facts that bear upon classes, i.e., millions of living people, not some dozens of phrase-mongers?
Over half a year has passed since the outbreak of war. The press, both legal and illegal, and expressing all trends, has had its say; all the party groups in the Duma have defined their stands—a highly insufficient index of our class groupings, but the only objective one. The trial of the R.S.D.L. group and the press comment on it have summed up all this material. The trial has shown that the finest representatives of the proletariat in Russia are not only hostile to chauvinism in general but, in particular, share the stand of our Central Organ. The deputies were arrested on November 4, 1914. Consequently, they had been conducting their work for over two months. How and with whom did they carry it on? Which currents in the working class did they reflect and express? The answer is found in the fact that the “theses” and Sotsial-Demokrat provided the material for the conference, and that, on several occasions, the Petrograd Committee of our Party issued leaflets of the same nature. There was no other material at the conference. The deputies had no intention of reporting to the conference on other currents in the working class, because no other currents existed.
Perhaps the members of the R.S.D.L. group were expressing the opinion of a mere minority of, the workers? We have no grounds to suppose so, since, in the two and a half years, between the spring of 1912 and the autumn of 1914, four-fifths of the class-conscious workers of Russia rallied around Pravda, with which these deputies were working in complete ideological solidarity. That is a fact. Had there been a more or less appreciable protest among the workers against the Central Committee’s stand, that protest would have surely found expression in the resolutions proposed. Nothing of the kind emerged at the trial, though the latter, it might be said, did “reveal” much of the work done by the R.S.D.L. group. The corrections made in Petrovsky’s handwriting do not reveal even the slightest hint at any difference of opinion.
The facts show that, in the very first months after the outbreak of the war, the class-conscious vanguard of the workers of Russia rallied, in deed, about the Central Committee and the Central Organ. However unpleasant this fact may be to certain “groups”, it is undeniable. Thanks to the trial, the words cited in the indictment: “The guns should be directed, not against our brothers, the wage slaves of other countries, but against the reactionary and bourgeois governments and parties of all countries"—these words will spread—and have already done so—all over Russia as a call for proletarian internationalism, for the proletarian revolution. Thanks to the trial, the class slogan of the vanguard of the workers of Russia has reached the masses of the workers.
An epidemic of chauvinism among the bourgeoisie and a certain section of the petty bourgeoisie, vacillation in the other section of the latter, and a working class call of this nature—such is the actual and objective picture of our political divisions. It is to this actual situation, not to the pious wishes of intellectuals and founders of grouplets, that one must gear one’s “prospects”, hopes, and slogans.
The Pravdist papers and the “Muranov type” of work have brought about the unity of four-fifths of the class-conscious workers of Russia. About forty thousand workers have been buying Pravda ; far more read it. Even if war, prison, Siberia, and hard labour should destroy five or even ten times as many—this section of the workers cannot be annihilated. It is alive. It is imbued with the revolutionary spirit, is anti-chauvinist. It alone stands in the midst of the masses, with deep roots in the latter, as the champion of the internationalism of the toilers, the exploited, and the oppressed. It alone has held its ground in the general debâcle. It alone is leading the semi-proletarian elements away from the social-chauvinism of the Cadets, the Trudoviks, Plekhanov and Nasha Zarya, and towards socialism. Its existence, its ideas, its work, and its call for the “brotherhood of wage slaves of other countries” have been revealed to the whole of Russia by the trial of the R.S.D.L. group.
It is with this section that we must work, and its unity must be defended against social-chauvinists. That is the only road along which the working-class movement of Russia can develop towards social revolution, and not towards national-liberalism of the “European” type.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] The trial of the Bolshevik deputies to the Fourth Duma (A. E. Badayev, M. K. Muranov, G. I. Petrovsky, F. N. Samoilov, N. R. Shagov) and other Social-Democrats, who took part in the illegal Party Conference in Ozerki, took place on February 10 (23), 1915. The case was tried by the Special Court in Petrograd. They were charged under Article 102, i.e. accused of participation in an organisation aiming at the overthrow of the existing state system. The main circumstantial evidence against the Bolshevik deputies was Lenin’s theses The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War and the C.C. R.S.D.L.P. manifesto The War and Russian Social-Democracy, which were confiscated during the search.
The five Bolshevik deputies were exiled for life to Turukhansk Territory {Eastern Siberia).
[2] Dyen (Day )—a daily of a bourgeois-liberal trend, which began publication in St. Petersburg in 1912. Among its contributors were Menshevik liquidators, who took over complete control of the paper after February 1917. Closed down by the Revolutionary-Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet on October 26 (November 8), 1917.
[3] Rech (Speech )—the central daily newspaper of the Cadet Party, published in St. Petersburg from February 1906 onwards. It was suppressed by the Revolutionary-Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet on October 26 (November 8), 1917, but continued to appear under other names until August 1918.
[4] Severnaya Rabochaya Gazeta (Workers’ Northern Gazette)—a legal daily of the Menshevik liquidators, published in St. Petersburg from January to May 1914.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International:The Evolution of Pabloist Liquidationism-Appendix I &II-The British Revolutionary Communist Party
Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
***********
Markin comment on this article:
As has been detailed in other pieces in this space about the fate of the cadre of the Fourth International, including the leading figure, Leon Trotsky, assassinated by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940, that organization was decimated by various forces by the end of World War II and left it without strong theoretical leadership the post-war period. Not strong enough at a time when the seemingly improbable situation developed where non-Leninist (in the early Bolshevik sense) parties were leading overturns of capitalist regimes from Eastern Europe to Asia. This inability to sift through the historic facts was most forcefully felt in the immediate case of Yugoslavia. But, frankly, the post- World War II methodological problems still haunt those of us who stand on the history of the Fourth International, mainly today around the question of whether China is capitalist or not. That makes this pamphlet worthwhile reading to order to try to sort that problem out.
*******
Appendix I
The British Revolutionary Communist Party
Written: 1993
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 2000
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
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In digging up the history of the discussion in the Fourth International about Yugoslavia and East Europe, we have discovered that the positions of the Haston/Grant RCP were not only ignored, they were systematically distorted. Thus Morris Stein claimed, during the continuation of the discussion on East Europe in the SWP leadership, that “To the RCP, Stalinist control of state power also amounts to an automatic social change but they term it a workers’ state.”[1] Ernest Germain (Mandel) likewise claimed that, for the RCP, “Since from all evidence the bourgeoisie of the buffer countries no longer controls the state apparatus which has now fallen into the hands of the Stalinists...it logically follows that the state has ceased being a bourgeois state.”[2]
Following this same characterization we have ourselves written that
...the analysis of the British Haston-Grant RCP majority, borrowed by the SWP’s Los Angeles Vern-Ryan grouping, achieved the beginning (but only the beginning) of wisdom in recognizing that in the immediate post-war period an examination of native property forms would hardly suffice since the state power in Eastern Europe was a foreign occupying army, the Red Army.[3]
Yet the RCP's amendments at the FI's Second World Congress (which were never published by the SWP) did not say that the countries of East Europe became deformed workers states with the Red Army victory in 1945 (as Vern-Ryan did), but rather that this was a process still under way in 1948. As the basis for the overthrow of capitalist rule, the amendments listed not only the preponderance of Soviet military force, but also “the balance of forces between the workers and Stalinist forces and the residues of the ruling class.”[4] Moreover, Bill Hunter's May 1949 document, written for the RCP majority, noted that it was the change in the international situation—namely, the onset of the Cold War—that led Stalin to change his policy from coddling the East European bourgeoisies to expropriating them:
True, for a period there existed Stalinist coalitions with the bourgeoisie, or with the shadow of the bourgeoisie.... In the first period following the war, the shadow of the bourgeoisie could have gained and was gaining substance. Given a different relationship of forces internationally, developments could have been entirely different to those which actually took place. However, because it could not afford to share the power, and because of its struggle against world imperialism, the bureaucracy, calling on the pressure of the masses, shattered the bourgeoisie completely. [5]
It is indeed unfortunate that the RCP's writings on East Europe and Yugoslavia were ignored, dismissed and largely suppressed. The Haston/Grant grouping was characterized by impressionism, earlier supporting the rightist Goldman/Morrow opposition in 1945-46 and later liquidating into the Labour Party. Moreover, a political tendency is more than just its stated program—and there is much we don't know about the actual functioning of the Haston/Grant-led RCP. But the struggle in the Fourth International might have followed a different course had their voices been around in 1951-53 to add theoretical understanding to the fight against Pabloism—and Pablo's bureaucratic treatment of them certainly foreshadowed the organizational methods he was to use again on the French PCI, and attempt to use on the American SWP. It is suggestive that, explaining the “impasse” of the RCP in 1950, Ted Grant pointed first of all to the “capitulation to Tito-Stalinism internationally.” Among the factors which permitted the rise of Stalinist-ruled, bureaucratically deformed workers states in the postwar period, he listed:
The fact that the revolution in China and Yugoslavia could be developed in a distorted and debased character is due to the world factors of
(a) The crisis of world capitalism
(b) The existence of a strong, deformed workers state adjacent to these countries and powerfully influencing the workers' movement.
(c) The weakness of the Marxist current of the IVth International.
These factors have resulted in an unparalleled development which could not have been foreseen by any of the Marxist teachers: the extension of Stalinism as a social phenomenon over half Europe, over the Chinese sub-continent and with the possibility of spreading over the whole of Asia.
This poses new theoretical problems to be worked out by the Marxist movement. Under conditions of isolation and of paucity of forces, new historical factors could not but result in a theoretical crisis of the movement, posing the problem of its very existence and survival.[6]
These comments could have been the beginning of wisdom, and they foreshadow in many respects the Spartacist analysis of the formation of a deformed workers state in Cuba a decade later. But by then the ravages of Pabloism had destroyed the Fourth International.
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NOTES
1 “Stenogram of Discussion in the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party on the Buffer Countries,“ SWP Internal Bulletin, Vol. XI, No. 5, October 1949, 23.
2 Ernest Germain (Mandel), “The Yugoslav Question, the Question of the Soviet Buffer Zone, and Their Implications for Marxist Theory,” SWP, International Information Bulletin, January 1950, 15.
3 “Genesis of Pabloism.”
4 “RCP Amendments to the Thesis on Russia and Eastern Europe.”
5 Bill Hunter, “The I.S. and Eastern Europe,” 8.
6 Unsigned (Ted Grant), “Statement to the BSFI [British Section of the Fourth International].”
********
Appendix II
Workers Power:
New International, New Program, New World Reality
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Written: 1993
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 1993
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
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In The Death Agony of the Fourth International, Workers Power snootily remarks, “The fighting propaganda group is not, for the Spartacists, a vehicle for programmatic re-elaboration (they do not do any)....”[1] Workers Power’s own “creative re-elaboration” of Trotskyism leads them quite far afield. Having pronounced the death of the Fourth International due to political degeneration and calling for a new, undefined “revolutionary communist international,” Workers Power has also rejected the program of Trotsky’s FI. In a 1988 article WP honcho Mark Hoskisson called for “re-elaborating the Transitional Programme” on the grounds that since it was written “much has occurred that Trotsky’s programme neither foresaw nor prepared for.”[2]
But this is no mere “updating.” Hoskisson’s article rejects the key premise of Trotsky’s strategy of world socialist revolution, which was also that of the Communist International in the days of Lenin, to wit:
The economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already in general achieved the highest point of fruition that can be reached under capitalism. Mankind’s productive forces stagnate.[3]
Yet, claims Hoskisson, “in the metropolitan countries the second imperialist war was followed by an unprecedented economic boom for almost twenty years.” Judging that Trotsky “and the FI as a whole” had “an inadequate understanding” of political economy, this arrogant twit proclaims: “Now, with the reality of the post-war boom behind us, only an idiot, or perhaps a charlatan like Gerry Healy, would describe Trotsky’s categorical declaration as correct.”[4]
We demonstrated two decades ago that the “long postwar boom,” with its periodic crises, is a revisionist myth.[5] But the statement that the productive forces had ceased to grow was not a conjunctural prognosis, it was a characterization of the entire imperialist epoch and the basis for the Fourth International’s program for world socialist revolution. Trade unions “can no longer be reformist,” wrote Trotsky, “because the objective conditions leave no room for any serious and lasting reforms.”[6] WP, in contrast, claims that the alleged “boom created the conditions for the resurgence of social-democratic reformism.”[7] Trotsky argued that “the independence of the trade unions in the class sense, in their relations to the bourgeois state, can, in the present conditions, be assured only by a completely revolutionary leadership, that is, the leadership of the Fourth International.”[8] Workers Power calls instead for “developing the tactic of the rank and file movement” as “the united front in the unions.”[9]
The Hoskisson article solidarizes with Felix Morrow, who led a rightist social-democratic opposition in the SWP after World War II. While Morrow’s immediate economic prognosis turned out to be more accurate than Cannon’s prediction of imminent economic crisis, he derived from this a program of democratic demands. Similarly Hoskisson calls for a “strategic retreat” in the postwar period:
The failure to carry out a “strategic retreat” for the imperialist countries by formulating a policy for the unions was mirrored by the failure to re-elaborate the programme to deal with the resurgence of reformism....In place of the Transitional Programme’s general denunciation of reformism a programme of action utilising the tactics of the united front was required.[10]
Hoskissen then claims that the absence of such a program for a “united front with reformism” was the problem in the Belgian general strike of 1961 and in France 1968. But contrary to the WP myth of a “long boom” filling the sails of reformism and requiring a “strategic retreat” into united-front tactics, what was lacking in Brussels in 1961 and in Paris in 1968 was precisely a revolutionary program for the struggle for power!
Rejecting the Transitional Program’s central premise and its central conclusion, Workers Power launches a frontal assault on the founding document of the Fourth International as a program preparing the revolutionary struggle for power. In its stead WP elaborates a “method of transitional demands” leading to a “system of workers control”—that is, dual power in the factories—while relegating socialist revolution to the sweet by-and-by. “Transitional demands...could introduce a reformist led proletariat to the very need for revolution,” writes Hoskisson, and at some later date, when “the working class, or its vanguard, are fighting in this manner, the transitional programme will be transformed into the programme of soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat.”[11] Wrong. The Transitional Program is the program for the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Trotsky wrote, transitional demands are to organize the struggle of the proletariat leading it to the conquest of power: “It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of revolution.”[12]
Hoskisson’s article was the lead-up; The Trotskyist Manifesto, published in 1989 by Workers Power’s “League for a Revolutionary Communist International,” is the result. Declaring that “the FI was politically destroyed” in 1951 as the result of “the adoption of a systematic centrist method” whose “first and most dramatic example was that of Yugoslavia,” the WP/LRCI’s new program declares:
Trotsky, in the Transitional Programme, remarked that “Mankind’s productive forces stagnate.” This statement was part of a correct perspectival analysis of the 1930s, culminating in the cataclysm of the Second World War. However, no conjunctural or periodic characterisation holds good for an indefinite period....
In a number of major and minor imperialist powers “economic miracles” marked the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s....
During the long boom in the imperialist countries, a prolonged period of relative social peace reigned. This was based on rising real wages, near full employment and, in Europe at least, an unprecedented social welfare system. The Labour and Social Democratic bureaucracies tied the mass workers’ organisations to imperialism.[13]
Here you have the old New Left view of the bought-off working class and the new rise of reformism producing a prolonged social peace. Just to take the one example of France, this ignores the mammoth 1953 general strike, the miners strike and possibility of a working-class uprising against De Gaulle’s coup in 1958, extensive workers’ unrest over the Algerian War in the early ’60s, and the prerevolutionary situation of May 1968.
Rejection of Trotsky’s premise is followed by rejection of Trotsky’s revolutionary conclusion as well, writing it off as peculiar to the pre-WWII period. The WP/LRCI program states:
Trotsky’s Transitional Programme, written in these years, pronounced that the crisis of humanity was reduced to the crisis of leadership. However, today it would be wrong simply to repeat that all contemporary crises are “reduced to a crisis of leadership.”
The proletariat worldwide does not yet face the stark alternative of either taking power or seeing the destruction of all its past gains.[14]
Try telling that brazen lie to American unionists who have seen a massive onslaught against the unions, whose real wages have fallen steadily for the last two decades; tell it to ghetto black youth, an entire generation that capitalism has thrown on the scrap heap with no hope of ever getting jobs; tell it to British, French and West German workers who have suffered almost a decade of double-digit unemployment; tell it to the working people of east Germany, fully half (and even more among women) of whom have been thrown out of work as a result of the counterrevolution of capitalist reunification; tell it to the immigrant workers, who are the target of racist terror and suffer the sharpest blows of capitalist austerity; tell it to the masses of East Europe, reduced to starvation wages and soup kitchens; tell it to the interpenetrated peoples of Yugoslavia being ripped apart in bloody nationalist war; tell it to the masses of the “Third World,” including tens of millions of industrial workers producing for the imperialist markets, who are sinking ever deeper into immiseration! What profound confidence in capitalism Workers Power has.
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Notes
1. Workers Power, Death Agony, 63-64.
2. Mark Hoskisson, “The Transitional Programme Fifty Years On,” Permanent Revolution No. 7, Spring 1988, 74.
3. Leon Trotsky, Transitional Program, 111.
4. Mark Hoskisson, op. cit., 74, 84.
5. See “Myth of Neo-Capitalism,” Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter No. 10, January-February 1972.
6. Leon Trotsky, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” (August 1940), Leon Trotsky on the Trade Unions (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1969), 71.
7. Mark Hoskisson, op. cit., 74.
8. Leon Trotsky, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” 75.
9. Mark Hoskisson, op. cit., 97-98.
10. Ibid., 97.
11. Ibid., 90-91.
12. Leon Trotsky, Transitional Program, 114.
13. LRCI, The Trotskyist Manifesto, op. cit., 10-12.
14. Ibid., 19.
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on this article:
As has been detailed in other pieces in this space about the fate of the cadre of the Fourth International, including the leading figure, Leon Trotsky, assassinated by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940, that organization was decimated by various forces by the end of World War II and left it without strong theoretical leadership the post-war period. Not strong enough at a time when the seemingly improbable situation developed where non-Leninist (in the early Bolshevik sense) parties were leading overturns of capitalist regimes from Eastern Europe to Asia. This inability to sift through the historic facts was most forcefully felt in the immediate case of Yugoslavia. But, frankly, the post- World War II methodological problems still haunt those of us who stand on the history of the Fourth International, mainly today around the question of whether China is capitalist or not. That makes this pamphlet worthwhile reading to order to try to sort that problem out.
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Appendix I
The British Revolutionary Communist Party
Written: 1993
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 2000
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
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In digging up the history of the discussion in the Fourth International about Yugoslavia and East Europe, we have discovered that the positions of the Haston/Grant RCP were not only ignored, they were systematically distorted. Thus Morris Stein claimed, during the continuation of the discussion on East Europe in the SWP leadership, that “To the RCP, Stalinist control of state power also amounts to an automatic social change but they term it a workers’ state.”[1] Ernest Germain (Mandel) likewise claimed that, for the RCP, “Since from all evidence the bourgeoisie of the buffer countries no longer controls the state apparatus which has now fallen into the hands of the Stalinists...it logically follows that the state has ceased being a bourgeois state.”[2]
Following this same characterization we have ourselves written that
...the analysis of the British Haston-Grant RCP majority, borrowed by the SWP’s Los Angeles Vern-Ryan grouping, achieved the beginning (but only the beginning) of wisdom in recognizing that in the immediate post-war period an examination of native property forms would hardly suffice since the state power in Eastern Europe was a foreign occupying army, the Red Army.[3]
Yet the RCP's amendments at the FI's Second World Congress (which were never published by the SWP) did not say that the countries of East Europe became deformed workers states with the Red Army victory in 1945 (as Vern-Ryan did), but rather that this was a process still under way in 1948. As the basis for the overthrow of capitalist rule, the amendments listed not only the preponderance of Soviet military force, but also “the balance of forces between the workers and Stalinist forces and the residues of the ruling class.”[4] Moreover, Bill Hunter's May 1949 document, written for the RCP majority, noted that it was the change in the international situation—namely, the onset of the Cold War—that led Stalin to change his policy from coddling the East European bourgeoisies to expropriating them:
True, for a period there existed Stalinist coalitions with the bourgeoisie, or with the shadow of the bourgeoisie.... In the first period following the war, the shadow of the bourgeoisie could have gained and was gaining substance. Given a different relationship of forces internationally, developments could have been entirely different to those which actually took place. However, because it could not afford to share the power, and because of its struggle against world imperialism, the bureaucracy, calling on the pressure of the masses, shattered the bourgeoisie completely. [5]
It is indeed unfortunate that the RCP's writings on East Europe and Yugoslavia were ignored, dismissed and largely suppressed. The Haston/Grant grouping was characterized by impressionism, earlier supporting the rightist Goldman/Morrow opposition in 1945-46 and later liquidating into the Labour Party. Moreover, a political tendency is more than just its stated program—and there is much we don't know about the actual functioning of the Haston/Grant-led RCP. But the struggle in the Fourth International might have followed a different course had their voices been around in 1951-53 to add theoretical understanding to the fight against Pabloism—and Pablo's bureaucratic treatment of them certainly foreshadowed the organizational methods he was to use again on the French PCI, and attempt to use on the American SWP. It is suggestive that, explaining the “impasse” of the RCP in 1950, Ted Grant pointed first of all to the “capitulation to Tito-Stalinism internationally.” Among the factors which permitted the rise of Stalinist-ruled, bureaucratically deformed workers states in the postwar period, he listed:
The fact that the revolution in China and Yugoslavia could be developed in a distorted and debased character is due to the world factors of
(a) The crisis of world capitalism
(b) The existence of a strong, deformed workers state adjacent to these countries and powerfully influencing the workers' movement.
(c) The weakness of the Marxist current of the IVth International.
These factors have resulted in an unparalleled development which could not have been foreseen by any of the Marxist teachers: the extension of Stalinism as a social phenomenon over half Europe, over the Chinese sub-continent and with the possibility of spreading over the whole of Asia.
This poses new theoretical problems to be worked out by the Marxist movement. Under conditions of isolation and of paucity of forces, new historical factors could not but result in a theoretical crisis of the movement, posing the problem of its very existence and survival.[6]
These comments could have been the beginning of wisdom, and they foreshadow in many respects the Spartacist analysis of the formation of a deformed workers state in Cuba a decade later. But by then the ravages of Pabloism had destroyed the Fourth International.
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NOTES
1 “Stenogram of Discussion in the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party on the Buffer Countries,“ SWP Internal Bulletin, Vol. XI, No. 5, October 1949, 23.
2 Ernest Germain (Mandel), “The Yugoslav Question, the Question of the Soviet Buffer Zone, and Their Implications for Marxist Theory,” SWP, International Information Bulletin, January 1950, 15.
3 “Genesis of Pabloism.”
4 “RCP Amendments to the Thesis on Russia and Eastern Europe.”
5 Bill Hunter, “The I.S. and Eastern Europe,” 8.
6 Unsigned (Ted Grant), “Statement to the BSFI [British Section of the Fourth International].”
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Appendix II
Workers Power:
New International, New Program, New World Reality
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Written: 1993
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 1993
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
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In The Death Agony of the Fourth International, Workers Power snootily remarks, “The fighting propaganda group is not, for the Spartacists, a vehicle for programmatic re-elaboration (they do not do any)....”[1] Workers Power’s own “creative re-elaboration” of Trotskyism leads them quite far afield. Having pronounced the death of the Fourth International due to political degeneration and calling for a new, undefined “revolutionary communist international,” Workers Power has also rejected the program of Trotsky’s FI. In a 1988 article WP honcho Mark Hoskisson called for “re-elaborating the Transitional Programme” on the grounds that since it was written “much has occurred that Trotsky’s programme neither foresaw nor prepared for.”[2]
But this is no mere “updating.” Hoskisson’s article rejects the key premise of Trotsky’s strategy of world socialist revolution, which was also that of the Communist International in the days of Lenin, to wit:
The economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already in general achieved the highest point of fruition that can be reached under capitalism. Mankind’s productive forces stagnate.[3]
Yet, claims Hoskisson, “in the metropolitan countries the second imperialist war was followed by an unprecedented economic boom for almost twenty years.” Judging that Trotsky “and the FI as a whole” had “an inadequate understanding” of political economy, this arrogant twit proclaims: “Now, with the reality of the post-war boom behind us, only an idiot, or perhaps a charlatan like Gerry Healy, would describe Trotsky’s categorical declaration as correct.”[4]
We demonstrated two decades ago that the “long postwar boom,” with its periodic crises, is a revisionist myth.[5] But the statement that the productive forces had ceased to grow was not a conjunctural prognosis, it was a characterization of the entire imperialist epoch and the basis for the Fourth International’s program for world socialist revolution. Trade unions “can no longer be reformist,” wrote Trotsky, “because the objective conditions leave no room for any serious and lasting reforms.”[6] WP, in contrast, claims that the alleged “boom created the conditions for the resurgence of social-democratic reformism.”[7] Trotsky argued that “the independence of the trade unions in the class sense, in their relations to the bourgeois state, can, in the present conditions, be assured only by a completely revolutionary leadership, that is, the leadership of the Fourth International.”[8] Workers Power calls instead for “developing the tactic of the rank and file movement” as “the united front in the unions.”[9]
The Hoskisson article solidarizes with Felix Morrow, who led a rightist social-democratic opposition in the SWP after World War II. While Morrow’s immediate economic prognosis turned out to be more accurate than Cannon’s prediction of imminent economic crisis, he derived from this a program of democratic demands. Similarly Hoskisson calls for a “strategic retreat” in the postwar period:
The failure to carry out a “strategic retreat” for the imperialist countries by formulating a policy for the unions was mirrored by the failure to re-elaborate the programme to deal with the resurgence of reformism....In place of the Transitional Programme’s general denunciation of reformism a programme of action utilising the tactics of the united front was required.[10]
Hoskissen then claims that the absence of such a program for a “united front with reformism” was the problem in the Belgian general strike of 1961 and in France 1968. But contrary to the WP myth of a “long boom” filling the sails of reformism and requiring a “strategic retreat” into united-front tactics, what was lacking in Brussels in 1961 and in Paris in 1968 was precisely a revolutionary program for the struggle for power!
Rejecting the Transitional Program’s central premise and its central conclusion, Workers Power launches a frontal assault on the founding document of the Fourth International as a program preparing the revolutionary struggle for power. In its stead WP elaborates a “method of transitional demands” leading to a “system of workers control”—that is, dual power in the factories—while relegating socialist revolution to the sweet by-and-by. “Transitional demands...could introduce a reformist led proletariat to the very need for revolution,” writes Hoskisson, and at some later date, when “the working class, or its vanguard, are fighting in this manner, the transitional programme will be transformed into the programme of soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat.”[11] Wrong. The Transitional Program is the program for the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Trotsky wrote, transitional demands are to organize the struggle of the proletariat leading it to the conquest of power: “It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of revolution.”[12]
Hoskisson’s article was the lead-up; The Trotskyist Manifesto, published in 1989 by Workers Power’s “League for a Revolutionary Communist International,” is the result. Declaring that “the FI was politically destroyed” in 1951 as the result of “the adoption of a systematic centrist method” whose “first and most dramatic example was that of Yugoslavia,” the WP/LRCI’s new program declares:
Trotsky, in the Transitional Programme, remarked that “Mankind’s productive forces stagnate.” This statement was part of a correct perspectival analysis of the 1930s, culminating in the cataclysm of the Second World War. However, no conjunctural or periodic characterisation holds good for an indefinite period....
In a number of major and minor imperialist powers “economic miracles” marked the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s....
During the long boom in the imperialist countries, a prolonged period of relative social peace reigned. This was based on rising real wages, near full employment and, in Europe at least, an unprecedented social welfare system. The Labour and Social Democratic bureaucracies tied the mass workers’ organisations to imperialism.[13]
Here you have the old New Left view of the bought-off working class and the new rise of reformism producing a prolonged social peace. Just to take the one example of France, this ignores the mammoth 1953 general strike, the miners strike and possibility of a working-class uprising against De Gaulle’s coup in 1958, extensive workers’ unrest over the Algerian War in the early ’60s, and the prerevolutionary situation of May 1968.
Rejection of Trotsky’s premise is followed by rejection of Trotsky’s revolutionary conclusion as well, writing it off as peculiar to the pre-WWII period. The WP/LRCI program states:
Trotsky’s Transitional Programme, written in these years, pronounced that the crisis of humanity was reduced to the crisis of leadership. However, today it would be wrong simply to repeat that all contemporary crises are “reduced to a crisis of leadership.”
The proletariat worldwide does not yet face the stark alternative of either taking power or seeing the destruction of all its past gains.[14]
Try telling that brazen lie to American unionists who have seen a massive onslaught against the unions, whose real wages have fallen steadily for the last two decades; tell it to ghetto black youth, an entire generation that capitalism has thrown on the scrap heap with no hope of ever getting jobs; tell it to British, French and West German workers who have suffered almost a decade of double-digit unemployment; tell it to the working people of east Germany, fully half (and even more among women) of whom have been thrown out of work as a result of the counterrevolution of capitalist reunification; tell it to the immigrant workers, who are the target of racist terror and suffer the sharpest blows of capitalist austerity; tell it to the masses of East Europe, reduced to starvation wages and soup kitchens; tell it to the interpenetrated peoples of Yugoslavia being ripped apart in bloody nationalist war; tell it to the masses of the “Third World,” including tens of millions of industrial workers producing for the imperialist markets, who are sinking ever deeper into immiseration! What profound confidence in capitalism Workers Power has.
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Notes
1. Workers Power, Death Agony, 63-64.
2. Mark Hoskisson, “The Transitional Programme Fifty Years On,” Permanent Revolution No. 7, Spring 1988, 74.
3. Leon Trotsky, Transitional Program, 111.
4. Mark Hoskisson, op. cit., 74, 84.
5. See “Myth of Neo-Capitalism,” Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter No. 10, January-February 1972.
6. Leon Trotsky, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay” (August 1940), Leon Trotsky on the Trade Unions (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1969), 71.
7. Mark Hoskisson, op. cit., 74.
8. Leon Trotsky, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” 75.
9. Mark Hoskisson, op. cit., 97-98.
10. Ibid., 97.
11. Ibid., 90-91.
12. Leon Trotsky, Transitional Program, 114.
13. LRCI, The Trotskyist Manifesto, op. cit., 10-12.
14. Ibid., 19.
*From The “Catholic Worker” Website- A Washington Demonstration Today On The 20th Anniversary Of The American “Presence” In Iraq
Click on the headline to link to a Catholic Worker website entry for a demonstration and other events in Washington, D.C. scheduled for today, January 15, 2011, to mark the 20th anniversary of America's Iraq war.
Markin comment:
In the nature of my political work, and having a little time to do such things, I am responsible in my circle for “surfing” the blogosphere. Most of the time it comes up dry for an idea for a commentary but today I have one from a seemingly unusual source, at least for me, the Catholic Worker. This organization, founded in the 1930s by Dorothy Day among others, is no stranger to this blogger. I will discuss that below in a separate note. What is important here is that they are organizing a demonstration and other events today to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the American “presence” in Iraq. That event is worthy of some comment.
Of course, tracing back the American occupation in Iraq to the first George Bush administration’s murderous rampage in Iraq, complete with saturation bombing beginning on the night of January 15, 1991 at about 7:00PM EST, is exactly right. Although in general memory most people split the first Bush (41) Iraq War from the second Bush (43) March 2003 Iraq War that is wrong. The “interlude” Clinton Democratic administration’s savage and murderous economic blockade, no fly zone, and occasional bombings count as well. The days of counting wars in a few years and done are, apparently, over. The notion of the age thirty and hundred years wars that we read about in our old childhood history books and that we thought were well done and over is still with us. Although I cannot support the pacifist and religiously-derived philosophical non-violent thrust of the Catholic Worker program for this day as set forth in their announcement I can appreciate their efforts in commemorating the nature of modern war, and war-makers. And just in case it is not clear who they are and what they are doing- Obama-Immediate. Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Iraq And Afghanistan!
Note: The Catholic Worker spirit hovered, and hovered profusely in every room, around my growing up households both when we lived down at the edge, the flotsam and jetsam edge, of society in the old public housing projects when we were grindingly poor-struck and later when we moved an inch up to the regular poor, downwardly-mobile working class neighborhood of my teen years. I may have known the name Dorothy Day (and a little later, Ammon Hennessey, from out in Utah desert country, Joe Hill House Catholic outpost to Western bums, tramps, and hoboes, and also drifters, grifters, and midnight sifters he turned none away, as far as I knew) better than the pope’s. Well, maybe not as well, but close. Why? Well, for one, old grandma, crippled-up, house-bound , sweet, high saint Roman Catholic grandma, beatified grandma, no, not that “beat” beatified but beatitude-worthy, primo tuna fish sandwich on Friday- making grandma who was “hip” to the Catholic Worker movement in the 1930s when New York-based Ms. Day came to Boston to spread the non-communist (although not anti-communist, remember those were "popular front" days) good tidings. And that fuse was carried over in my mother’s generation, although not the tuna-fish sandwich stuff (at least she was not as good as grandma at it, no way). Lesson: the meek may not inherit the earth, but they sure as hell should. And you and I, being “hip,” can show the way. How? By fighting for a workers party (an earthly workers party) that fights for a workers government (ditto, on the earthy thing). Here and now.
Markin comment:
In the nature of my political work, and having a little time to do such things, I am responsible in my circle for “surfing” the blogosphere. Most of the time it comes up dry for an idea for a commentary but today I have one from a seemingly unusual source, at least for me, the Catholic Worker. This organization, founded in the 1930s by Dorothy Day among others, is no stranger to this blogger. I will discuss that below in a separate note. What is important here is that they are organizing a demonstration and other events today to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the American “presence” in Iraq. That event is worthy of some comment.
Of course, tracing back the American occupation in Iraq to the first George Bush administration’s murderous rampage in Iraq, complete with saturation bombing beginning on the night of January 15, 1991 at about 7:00PM EST, is exactly right. Although in general memory most people split the first Bush (41) Iraq War from the second Bush (43) March 2003 Iraq War that is wrong. The “interlude” Clinton Democratic administration’s savage and murderous economic blockade, no fly zone, and occasional bombings count as well. The days of counting wars in a few years and done are, apparently, over. The notion of the age thirty and hundred years wars that we read about in our old childhood history books and that we thought were well done and over is still with us. Although I cannot support the pacifist and religiously-derived philosophical non-violent thrust of the Catholic Worker program for this day as set forth in their announcement I can appreciate their efforts in commemorating the nature of modern war, and war-makers. And just in case it is not clear who they are and what they are doing- Obama-Immediate. Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Iraq And Afghanistan!
Note: The Catholic Worker spirit hovered, and hovered profusely in every room, around my growing up households both when we lived down at the edge, the flotsam and jetsam edge, of society in the old public housing projects when we were grindingly poor-struck and later when we moved an inch up to the regular poor, downwardly-mobile working class neighborhood of my teen years. I may have known the name Dorothy Day (and a little later, Ammon Hennessey, from out in Utah desert country, Joe Hill House Catholic outpost to Western bums, tramps, and hoboes, and also drifters, grifters, and midnight sifters he turned none away, as far as I knew) better than the pope’s. Well, maybe not as well, but close. Why? Well, for one, old grandma, crippled-up, house-bound , sweet, high saint Roman Catholic grandma, beatified grandma, no, not that “beat” beatified but beatitude-worthy, primo tuna fish sandwich on Friday- making grandma who was “hip” to the Catholic Worker movement in the 1930s when New York-based Ms. Day came to Boston to spread the non-communist (although not anti-communist, remember those were "popular front" days) good tidings. And that fuse was carried over in my mother’s generation, although not the tuna-fish sandwich stuff (at least she was not as good as grandma at it, no way). Lesson: the meek may not inherit the earth, but they sure as hell should. And you and I, being “hip,” can show the way. How? By fighting for a workers party (an earthly workers party) that fights for a workers government (ditto, on the earthy thing). Here and now.
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-What Next?-On the Tasks Confronting the Workers’ Parties with Regard to Opportunism and Social-Chauvinism (1915)
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)
Markin comment:
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
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V. I. Lenin
What Next?
On the Tasks Confronting the Workers’ Parties with Regard to Opportunism and Social-Chauvinism
Published: Sotsial-DemokratNo. 36, January 9, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 107-114.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
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The tremendous crisis created within European socialism by the world war has (as is always the case in great crises) resulted first in enormous confusion; it then led to a series of new groupings taking shape among representatives of various currents, shades and views in socialism; finally, it raised, with particular acuteness and insistence, the question of what changes in the foundations of socialist policy follow from the crisis and are demanded by it. Between August and December 1914, the socialists of Russia also passed through these three “stages” in a marked fashion. We all know that there was no little confusion at the beginning; the confusion was increased by the tsarist persecutions, by the behaviour of the “Europeans”, and by the war alarm. In Paris and Switzerland, where there was the greatest number of political exiles, the greatest links with Russia, and the greatest degree of freedom, a new definite line of demarcation between the various attitudes towards problems raised by the war was being drawn, during September and October, at discussions, lectures, and in the press. It can safely be said that there is not a single shade of opinion in any current (or group) of socialism (and near-socialism) in Russia which has not found expression and been analysed. The general feeling is that the time has come for precise and positive conclusions capable of serving as the basis of systematic and practical activity, propaganda, agitation, and organisation. The situation is clear, all have expressed themselves. Let us now see who is with whom, and whither the courses have been taken.
On November 23 (N. S.), on the day following the publication in Petrograd of a government communique on the arrest of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour group in the Duma,[4] an event took place at the congress of the Swedish Social-Democratic Party in Stockholm, which finally and irrevocably placed on the order of the day the two questions just emphasised.[5] Readers will find below a description of this event, namely, a full translation, from the official Swedish Social-Democratic report, of the speeches both of Belenin (representing the Central Committee) and of Larin (representing the Organising Committee),[6] and also the debate on the question raised by Branting.
For the first time since the outbreak of war, a representative of our Party, of its Central Committee, and a representative of the liquidationist Organising Committee met at a congress of socialists of a neutral country. What did their speeches differ in? Belenin took a most definite stand regarding the grave, painful but momentous issues of the present-day socialist movement; quoting Sotsial-Demokrat,[7] the Party’s Central Organ, he came out with a resolute declaration of war against opportunism, branding the behaviour of the German Social-Democratic leaders (and “many others”) as treachery. Larin took no stand at all; he passed over the essence of the question in silence, confining himself to those hackneyed, hollow and moth-eaten phrases that always win hand-claps from opportunists and social-chauvinists in all countries. But then, Belenin said nothing at all about our attitude towards the other Social-Democratic parties or groups in Russia, as though intimating: “Such is our stand; as for the others, we shall not express ourselves as yet, but shall wait and see which course they will take.” Larin, on the contrary, unfurled the banner of “unity”, shed a tear over the “bitter fruit of the split in Russia”, and depicted in gorgeous colours the “work of unification” carried on by the Organising Committee, which, be said, had united Plekhanov, the Caucasians, the Bundists, the Poles,[8] and so forth. Larin’s intentions will be dealt with elsewhere (see below: The Kind of Unity Larin Proclaimed”[1] ). What interests us here is the fundamental question of unity.
We have before us two slogans. One is: war against the opportunists and the social-chauvinists, who are traitors. The other is: unity in Russia, in particular with Plekhanov (who, we shall state parenthetically, is behaving with us in exactly the same way as Südekum[2] with the Germans, Hyndman with the British, etc.). Is it not obvious that, though he is afraid to call things by their proper names, Larin has in fact come out as advocate of the opportunists and social-chauvinists?
Let us, however, consider in general and in the light of present-day events the meaning of the “unity” slogan. The proletariat’s unity is its greatest weapon in the struggle for the socialist revolution. From this indisputable truth it follows just as indisputably that, when a proletarian party is joined by a considerable number of petty-bourgeois elements capable of hampering the struggle for the socialist revolution, unity with such elements is harmful and perilous to the cause of the proletariat. Present-day events have shown that, on the one hand, the objective conditions are ripe for an imperialist war (i.e., a war reflecting the last and highest stage of capitalism), and, on the other hand, that decades of a so-called peaceful epoch have allowed an accumulation of petty-bourgeois and opportunist junk within the socialist parties of all the European countries. Some fifteen years ago, during the celebrated “Bernsteiniad” in Germany—and even earlier in many other countries—the question of the opportunist and alien elements within the proletarian parties had become a burning issue. There is hardly a single Marxist of note who has not recognised many times and on various occasions that the opportunists are in fact a non-proletarian element hostile to the socialist revolution. The particularly rapid growth of this social element of late years is beyond doubt: it includes officials of the legal labour unions, parliamentarians and the other intellectuals, who have got themselves easy and comfort able posts in the legal mass movement, some sections of the better paid workers, office employees, etc., etc. The war has clearly proved that at a moment of crisis (and the imperialist era will undoubtedly be one of all kinds of crises) a sizable mass of opportunists, supported and often directly guided by the bourgeoisie (this is of particular importance!), go over to the latter’s camp, betray socialism, damage the workers’ cause, and attempt to ruin it. In every crisis the bourgeoisie will always aid the opportunists, will always try to suppress the revolutionary section of the proletariat, stopping short of nothing and employing the most unlawful and savage military measures. The opportunists are bourgeois enemies of the proletarian revolution, who in peaceful times carry on their bourgeois work in secret, concealing themselves within the workers’ parties, while in times of crisis they immediately prove to be open allies of the entire united bourgeoisie, from the conservative to the most radical and democratic part of the latter, from the free thinkers, to the religious and clerical sections. Anyone who has failed to understand this truth after the events we have gone through is hopelessly deceiving both himself and the workers. Individual desertions are inevitable under the present conditions, but their significance, it should be remembered, is determined by the existence of a section and current of petty-bourgeois opportunists. Such social-chauvinists, as Hyndman, Vandervelde, Guesde, Plekhanov and Kautsky, would be of no significance whatever if their spineless and banal speeches in defence of bourgeois patriotism were not taken up by the entire social strata of opportunists and by swarms of bourgeois papers and bourgeois politicians.
Typical of the socialist parties of the epoch of the Second International was one that tolerated in its midst an opportunism built up in decades of the “peaceful” period, an opportunism that kept itself secret, adapting itself to the revolutionary workers, borrowing their Marxist terminology, and evading any clear cleavage of principles. This type has outlived itself. If the war ends in 1915, will any thinking socialist be found willing to begin, in 1916, restoring the workers’ parties together with the opportunists, knowing from experience that in any new crisis all of them to a man (plus many other spineless and muddle-headed people) will be for the bourgeoisie, who will of course find a pretext to ban any talk of class hatred and the class struggle?
In Italy, the party was the exception for the period of the Second International; the opportunists, headed by Bissolati, were expelled from the party. In the present crisis, the results have proved excellent : people of various trends of opinion have not deceived the workers or blinded them with pearls of eloquence regarding “unity"; each of them followed his own road. The opportunists (and deserters from the workers’ party such as Mussolini) practised social-chauvinism, lauding (as Plekhanov did) “gallant Belgium”, thereby shielding the policies, not of a gallant, but of a bourgeois Italy, which would plunder the Ukraine and Galicia . . . I mean, Albania, Tunisia, etc., etc. Meanwhile, the socialists were waging against them a war against war, in preparation of a civil war. We are not at all idealising the Italian Socialist Party and in no way guarantee that it will stand firm should Italy enter the war. We are speaking not of the future of that party, but only of the present. We are stating the indisputable fact that the workers in most European countries have been deceived by the fictitious unity of the opportunists and the revolutionaries, Italy being the happy exception, a country where no such deception exists at present. What was a happy exception for the Second International should and shall become the rule for the Third International. While capitalism persists, the proletariat will always be a close neighbour to the petty bourgeoisie. It is sometimes unwise to reject temporary alliances with the latter, but unity with them, unity with the opportunists can be defended at present only by the enemies of the proletariat or by hoodwinked traditionalists of a bygone period.
Today, following 1914, unity of the proletarian struggle for the socialist revolution demands that the workers’ parties separate themselves completely from the parties of the opportunists. What we understand by opportunism has been clearly said in the Manifesto of the Central Committee (No. 33, “The War and Russian Social-Democracy”[3] ).
But what do we see in Russia? Is it good or bad for the working-class movement of our country to have unity between people who, in one way or another and with more or less consistency, are combating chauvinism—of both the Purishkevich and the Cadet brand—and people who echo that chauvinism, like Maslov, Plekhanov and Smirnov? Is it good to have unity between people engaged in anti-war action and such that declare that they will not oppose the war, like-the influential authors of “Document” (No. 34)[9]? Only those who wish to turn a blind eye to things will find difficulty in answering this question.
The objection may be made that Martov has polemised with Plekhanov in Golos and, together with a number of other friends and partisans of the Organising Committee, has battled against social-chauvinism. We do not deny this, and had words of praise for Martov in No. 33 of the Central Organ. We would be very glad if Martov were not “turned about”(see the article, “Martov Turns About”); we would very much like a decisive anti-chauvinist line to become the line of the Organising Committee. That, however, does not depend upon our wishes, or upon any one else’s. What are the objective facts? First, Larin, the Organising Committee’s official representative, is for some reason silent about Golos, while naming the social-chauvinist Plekhanov, and also Axelrod, who wrote an article (in Berner Tagwacht[10]) so as not to say a single definite word there. Moreover, Larin, apart from his official position, is more than geographically close to the influential central group of the liquidators in Russia. Secondly, there is the European press. In France and Germany, the papers are saying nothing about Golos, while speaking of Rubanovich, Plekhanov, and Chkheidze. (In its issue of December 12, Hamburger Echo, one of the most jingoist organs of the jingoist “Social-Democratic” press of Germany, called Chkheidze an adherent of Maslov and Plekhanov; this has also been hinted at by certain papers in Russia. It is clear that all fellow-thinkers of the Südekums fully appreciate the ideological aid Plekhanov has given to the Südekums.) In Russia, millions of copies of bourgeois papers have brought the “people” tidings of Maslov-Plekhanov-Smirnov—but no news of the trend represented by Golos. Thirdly, the experience of the legal workers’ press of 1912-14 has definitely proved that the source of a certain degree of social strength and influence enjoyed by the liquidationist movement lies, not in the working class, but in that section of bourgeois-democratic intelligentsia, which has brought the central group of legalist writers to the fore. The national-chauvinist temper of this section as a section is testified to by the entire press of Russia, as revealed in the letters of the Petrograd worker (Sotsial-Demokrat Nos. 33 and 35) and in the “Document”(No. 34). Considerable personal re-groupings within that section are quite possible, but it is absolutely improbable that, as a section, it should not be “patriotic” and opportunist.
Such are the objective facts. Since we take them into account and are aware that it is to the advantage of all bourgeois parties that wish for influence over the workers, to have a Left wing for display (particularly when that wing is unofficial), we must declare the idea of unity with the Organising Committee an illusion detrimental to the workers’ cause.
The policy of the Organising Committee who, in far-away Sweden, on November 23, proclaimed their unity with Plekhanov and spoke words sweet to the hearts of all social-chauvinists, while in Paris and in Switzerland they did not bother to make their existence known either on September 13 (when Golos appeared) or on November 23 or to this day (December 23), strongly resembles political chicanery of the worst kind. The hope that Otkliki,[11] scheduled to appear in Zurich, would be of an official Party nature has been destroyed by a forthright statement in Berner Tagwacht (December 12), to the effect that this paper will not be of such a nature. (Incidentally, the editors of Golos declared in issue No. 52 that to continue at present the rift with the liquidators would be “nationalism” of the worst kind. This phrase, which is devoid of grammatical meaning, has only political meaning that the editors of Golos prefer having unity with the social-chauvinists to drawing closer to those who are irreconcilably hostile to social-chauvinism. The editors of Golos have made a bad choice.)
To make the picture complete, it remains for us to add a few words about Mysl,[12] organ of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, which is published in Paris. This paper also lauds “unity”, while it shields (cf. Sotsial-Demokrat No. 34) the social-chauvinism of Rubanovich, its party leader, defends the Franco-Belgian opportunists and ministerialists, says nothing of the patriotic motives of the speech by Kerensky, one of the extreme radicals among the Russian Trudoviks,[13] and prints well-worn petty-bourgeois vulgarities on the revision of Marxism, in a Narodnik and opportunist spirit. What the resolution of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party’s summer conference of 1913[14] said of the Socialist-Revolutionaries has been fully and particularly proved by this behaviour of Mysl.
Some Russian socialists seem to think that internationalism consists in a readiness to welcome a resolution containing an international vindication of social-chauvinism in all countries, such as is to be drawn up by Plekhanov and Südekum, Kautsky and Hervé, Guesde and Hyndman, Vandervelde and Bissolati, etc. We permit ourselves the thought that internationalism consists only in an unequivocal internationalist policy within one’s party. A genuinely proletarian internationalist policy cannot be pursued, active opposition to the war cannot be preached, and forces for such action cannot be mustered while we are in the company of the opportunists and the social-chauvinists. To find refuge in silence, or to wave this truth aside which, though bitter, is necessary to the socialist, is detrimental and ruinous to the working-class movement.
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Notes
[1] See pp. 115-17 of this volume.—Ed.
[2] Plekhanov’s pamphlet, On the War (Paris, 1914), which we have just received, confirms very convincingly the truth of the assertions made in the text. We shall return to this pamphlet later on. —Lenin
[3] See pp. 25–34 of this volume.—Ed.
[4] The Bolshevik deputies to the Fourth Duma were arrested on the night of November 5-6 (18-19),1914. The pretext for their arrest was their participation in a conference they convened in the village of Ozerki, near Petrograd.
Held on November 2-4 (15-17), the conference was attended by representatives of the Bolshevik organisations of Petrograd, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kharkov and Riga, as well as by the Duma Bolshevik deputies.
Warned by an agent provocateur the police swooped down on Ozerki when the conference had just completed its work. During the search of G. I. Petrovsky, A. Y. Badayev and other Duma Bolshevik deputies, the police found Lenin’s theses on the war and the newspaper Sotsial-Demokrat No. 33, which carried the manifesto of the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. “The War and Russian Social-Democracy”. All participants in the conference were arrested, but the Duma Bolshevik deputies, who enjoyed parliamentary immunity, escaped arrest. Two days later, however, they too were arrested, tried and exiled for life to Eastern Siberia. Lenin devoted to the trial of the Bolshevik deputies the article “What Has Been Revealed by the Trial of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Duma Group” , which was published in Sotsial-Demokrat No. 40, March 29, 1915 (see this volume, pp. 171-77).
[5] The Congress of the Swedish Social-Democratic Party was held in Stockholm on November 23,1914. The main item on the agenda dealt with the attitude towards the war. A. G. Shlyapnikov, who brought the Congress a message of greetings from the R.S.D.L.P’s Central Committee, read a declaration calling for a struggle to be waged against the imperialist war and branding the treachery of the leaders of the German Social-Democrats and the socialist parties of other countries, who had turned social-chauvinist. Branting, leader of the Swedish Social-Democratic Party’s Right wing, moved that regret be expressed at the section of the declaration condemning the conduct of German Social-Democracy, asserting that “it does not befit” the Congress “to reprehend other parties”. Höglund, leader of the Left Social-Democrats, came out against Branting’s proposal, and declared that many Swedish Social-Democrats shared the view expressed in the declaration of the R.S.D.L.P.’s Central Committee. However, Branting’s proposal was carried by a majority of votes. Y. Larin addressed the Congress on behalf of the Menshevik Organising Committee. A report on the Congress was published in Sotsial-Demokrat No. 36, January 9, 1915.
[6] The Organizing Committee—the Menshevik guiding centre, was established at a conference of the Menshevik liquidators and all anti-Party groups and trends, held in August 1912. It existed until the election of the Central Committee of the Menshevik party in August 1917.
Belenin—A. G. Shlyapnikov.
[7] Sotsial-Demokrat—Central Organ of the R.S.D.L.P., published illegally from February 1908 to January 1917. In all, 58 issues appeared. The first issue was published in Russia, and the rest abroad, first in Paris and then in Geneva. According to the decision of the R.S.D.L.P.’s Central Committee, the editorial board was composed of representatives of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Polish Social-Democrats.
The newspaper published over 80 articles and items by Lenin. While on the editorial board, Lenin maintained a consistent Bolshevik stand. Some editors (including Kamenev and Zinoviev) took a conciliatory attitude towards the liquidators and tried to disrupt Lenin’s line. The Menshevik editors Martov and Dan sabotaged the work of the editorial board and openly defended liquidationism in their factional newspaper Golos Sotsial-Demokrata.
Because of Lenin’s uncompromising struggle against the liquidators Martov and Dan walked out of the editorial board, in June 1911. Beginning with December 1911 Lenin became editor of Sotsial-Demokrat.
[8] Lenin is referring to the Caucasian Menshevik liquidators, the Bund (The General Jewish Workers’ Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia), and representatives of the Social-Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania, who supported the liquidators.
[9] The reference is to the reply of the St. Petersburg liquidators (Potresov, Maslov, Cherevanin and others) to Vandervelde’s telegram urging Russian Social-Democrats to abstain from opposing the war. In their reply, the Russian liquidators approved Belgian, French and English socialists joining bourgeois governments, and declared that in their activities in Russia they were not opposed to the war.
[10] Berner Tagwacht—a daily newspaper, organ of the Swiss Social-Democratic Party, founded in Berne in 1893. In the early days of the First World War, it published articles by Karl Liebknecht Franz Mehring and other Left Social-Democrats. Following 1917 the newspaper openly supported social-chauvinists.
Today the newspaper’s line coincides on the main issues with that of the bourgeois press.
[11] The Menshevik Organising Committee announced the forthcoming publication of its organ Otkliki (Echoes ), which, however, never appeared.
[12] Mysl(Thought )—a daily Socialist-Revolutionary newspaper published in Paris from November 1914 to March 1915.
[13] Trudoviks—a group of petty-bourgeois democrats in the State Duma consisting of peasants and intellectuals of a Narodnik trend. The Trudovik group was formed in April 1906 of peasant deputies to the First Duma. In the Duma the Trudoviks vacillated between the Cadets and the Social-Democrats.
During the First World War, most of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Popular Socialists and Trudoviks took a social-chauvinist stand.
[14] Lenin is referring to the resolution “The Narodniks” which he wrote and which was adopted by the joint Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. Central Committee and Party officials held between September 23 and October 1 (October 6-14), 1913, in the village of Poronin (near Cracow). For reasons of secrecy, the conference was called the “Summer” or “August” Conference. See the resolution in Volume 19 of the present edition, pp. 429-31.
Markin comment:
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
*******
V. I. Lenin
What Next?
On the Tasks Confronting the Workers’ Parties with Regard to Opportunism and Social-Chauvinism
Published: Sotsial-DemokratNo. 36, January 9, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 107-114.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
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The tremendous crisis created within European socialism by the world war has (as is always the case in great crises) resulted first in enormous confusion; it then led to a series of new groupings taking shape among representatives of various currents, shades and views in socialism; finally, it raised, with particular acuteness and insistence, the question of what changes in the foundations of socialist policy follow from the crisis and are demanded by it. Between August and December 1914, the socialists of Russia also passed through these three “stages” in a marked fashion. We all know that there was no little confusion at the beginning; the confusion was increased by the tsarist persecutions, by the behaviour of the “Europeans”, and by the war alarm. In Paris and Switzerland, where there was the greatest number of political exiles, the greatest links with Russia, and the greatest degree of freedom, a new definite line of demarcation between the various attitudes towards problems raised by the war was being drawn, during September and October, at discussions, lectures, and in the press. It can safely be said that there is not a single shade of opinion in any current (or group) of socialism (and near-socialism) in Russia which has not found expression and been analysed. The general feeling is that the time has come for precise and positive conclusions capable of serving as the basis of systematic and practical activity, propaganda, agitation, and organisation. The situation is clear, all have expressed themselves. Let us now see who is with whom, and whither the courses have been taken.
On November 23 (N. S.), on the day following the publication in Petrograd of a government communique on the arrest of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour group in the Duma,[4] an event took place at the congress of the Swedish Social-Democratic Party in Stockholm, which finally and irrevocably placed on the order of the day the two questions just emphasised.[5] Readers will find below a description of this event, namely, a full translation, from the official Swedish Social-Democratic report, of the speeches both of Belenin (representing the Central Committee) and of Larin (representing the Organising Committee),[6] and also the debate on the question raised by Branting.
For the first time since the outbreak of war, a representative of our Party, of its Central Committee, and a representative of the liquidationist Organising Committee met at a congress of socialists of a neutral country. What did their speeches differ in? Belenin took a most definite stand regarding the grave, painful but momentous issues of the present-day socialist movement; quoting Sotsial-Demokrat,[7] the Party’s Central Organ, he came out with a resolute declaration of war against opportunism, branding the behaviour of the German Social-Democratic leaders (and “many others”) as treachery. Larin took no stand at all; he passed over the essence of the question in silence, confining himself to those hackneyed, hollow and moth-eaten phrases that always win hand-claps from opportunists and social-chauvinists in all countries. But then, Belenin said nothing at all about our attitude towards the other Social-Democratic parties or groups in Russia, as though intimating: “Such is our stand; as for the others, we shall not express ourselves as yet, but shall wait and see which course they will take.” Larin, on the contrary, unfurled the banner of “unity”, shed a tear over the “bitter fruit of the split in Russia”, and depicted in gorgeous colours the “work of unification” carried on by the Organising Committee, which, be said, had united Plekhanov, the Caucasians, the Bundists, the Poles,[8] and so forth. Larin’s intentions will be dealt with elsewhere (see below: The Kind of Unity Larin Proclaimed”[1] ). What interests us here is the fundamental question of unity.
We have before us two slogans. One is: war against the opportunists and the social-chauvinists, who are traitors. The other is: unity in Russia, in particular with Plekhanov (who, we shall state parenthetically, is behaving with us in exactly the same way as Südekum[2] with the Germans, Hyndman with the British, etc.). Is it not obvious that, though he is afraid to call things by their proper names, Larin has in fact come out as advocate of the opportunists and social-chauvinists?
Let us, however, consider in general and in the light of present-day events the meaning of the “unity” slogan. The proletariat’s unity is its greatest weapon in the struggle for the socialist revolution. From this indisputable truth it follows just as indisputably that, when a proletarian party is joined by a considerable number of petty-bourgeois elements capable of hampering the struggle for the socialist revolution, unity with such elements is harmful and perilous to the cause of the proletariat. Present-day events have shown that, on the one hand, the objective conditions are ripe for an imperialist war (i.e., a war reflecting the last and highest stage of capitalism), and, on the other hand, that decades of a so-called peaceful epoch have allowed an accumulation of petty-bourgeois and opportunist junk within the socialist parties of all the European countries. Some fifteen years ago, during the celebrated “Bernsteiniad” in Germany—and even earlier in many other countries—the question of the opportunist and alien elements within the proletarian parties had become a burning issue. There is hardly a single Marxist of note who has not recognised many times and on various occasions that the opportunists are in fact a non-proletarian element hostile to the socialist revolution. The particularly rapid growth of this social element of late years is beyond doubt: it includes officials of the legal labour unions, parliamentarians and the other intellectuals, who have got themselves easy and comfort able posts in the legal mass movement, some sections of the better paid workers, office employees, etc., etc. The war has clearly proved that at a moment of crisis (and the imperialist era will undoubtedly be one of all kinds of crises) a sizable mass of opportunists, supported and often directly guided by the bourgeoisie (this is of particular importance!), go over to the latter’s camp, betray socialism, damage the workers’ cause, and attempt to ruin it. In every crisis the bourgeoisie will always aid the opportunists, will always try to suppress the revolutionary section of the proletariat, stopping short of nothing and employing the most unlawful and savage military measures. The opportunists are bourgeois enemies of the proletarian revolution, who in peaceful times carry on their bourgeois work in secret, concealing themselves within the workers’ parties, while in times of crisis they immediately prove to be open allies of the entire united bourgeoisie, from the conservative to the most radical and democratic part of the latter, from the free thinkers, to the religious and clerical sections. Anyone who has failed to understand this truth after the events we have gone through is hopelessly deceiving both himself and the workers. Individual desertions are inevitable under the present conditions, but their significance, it should be remembered, is determined by the existence of a section and current of petty-bourgeois opportunists. Such social-chauvinists, as Hyndman, Vandervelde, Guesde, Plekhanov and Kautsky, would be of no significance whatever if their spineless and banal speeches in defence of bourgeois patriotism were not taken up by the entire social strata of opportunists and by swarms of bourgeois papers and bourgeois politicians.
Typical of the socialist parties of the epoch of the Second International was one that tolerated in its midst an opportunism built up in decades of the “peaceful” period, an opportunism that kept itself secret, adapting itself to the revolutionary workers, borrowing their Marxist terminology, and evading any clear cleavage of principles. This type has outlived itself. If the war ends in 1915, will any thinking socialist be found willing to begin, in 1916, restoring the workers’ parties together with the opportunists, knowing from experience that in any new crisis all of them to a man (plus many other spineless and muddle-headed people) will be for the bourgeoisie, who will of course find a pretext to ban any talk of class hatred and the class struggle?
In Italy, the party was the exception for the period of the Second International; the opportunists, headed by Bissolati, were expelled from the party. In the present crisis, the results have proved excellent : people of various trends of opinion have not deceived the workers or blinded them with pearls of eloquence regarding “unity"; each of them followed his own road. The opportunists (and deserters from the workers’ party such as Mussolini) practised social-chauvinism, lauding (as Plekhanov did) “gallant Belgium”, thereby shielding the policies, not of a gallant, but of a bourgeois Italy, which would plunder the Ukraine and Galicia . . . I mean, Albania, Tunisia, etc., etc. Meanwhile, the socialists were waging against them a war against war, in preparation of a civil war. We are not at all idealising the Italian Socialist Party and in no way guarantee that it will stand firm should Italy enter the war. We are speaking not of the future of that party, but only of the present. We are stating the indisputable fact that the workers in most European countries have been deceived by the fictitious unity of the opportunists and the revolutionaries, Italy being the happy exception, a country where no such deception exists at present. What was a happy exception for the Second International should and shall become the rule for the Third International. While capitalism persists, the proletariat will always be a close neighbour to the petty bourgeoisie. It is sometimes unwise to reject temporary alliances with the latter, but unity with them, unity with the opportunists can be defended at present only by the enemies of the proletariat or by hoodwinked traditionalists of a bygone period.
Today, following 1914, unity of the proletarian struggle for the socialist revolution demands that the workers’ parties separate themselves completely from the parties of the opportunists. What we understand by opportunism has been clearly said in the Manifesto of the Central Committee (No. 33, “The War and Russian Social-Democracy”[3] ).
But what do we see in Russia? Is it good or bad for the working-class movement of our country to have unity between people who, in one way or another and with more or less consistency, are combating chauvinism—of both the Purishkevich and the Cadet brand—and people who echo that chauvinism, like Maslov, Plekhanov and Smirnov? Is it good to have unity between people engaged in anti-war action and such that declare that they will not oppose the war, like-the influential authors of “Document” (No. 34)[9]? Only those who wish to turn a blind eye to things will find difficulty in answering this question.
The objection may be made that Martov has polemised with Plekhanov in Golos and, together with a number of other friends and partisans of the Organising Committee, has battled against social-chauvinism. We do not deny this, and had words of praise for Martov in No. 33 of the Central Organ. We would be very glad if Martov were not “turned about”(see the article, “Martov Turns About”); we would very much like a decisive anti-chauvinist line to become the line of the Organising Committee. That, however, does not depend upon our wishes, or upon any one else’s. What are the objective facts? First, Larin, the Organising Committee’s official representative, is for some reason silent about Golos, while naming the social-chauvinist Plekhanov, and also Axelrod, who wrote an article (in Berner Tagwacht[10]) so as not to say a single definite word there. Moreover, Larin, apart from his official position, is more than geographically close to the influential central group of the liquidators in Russia. Secondly, there is the European press. In France and Germany, the papers are saying nothing about Golos, while speaking of Rubanovich, Plekhanov, and Chkheidze. (In its issue of December 12, Hamburger Echo, one of the most jingoist organs of the jingoist “Social-Democratic” press of Germany, called Chkheidze an adherent of Maslov and Plekhanov; this has also been hinted at by certain papers in Russia. It is clear that all fellow-thinkers of the Südekums fully appreciate the ideological aid Plekhanov has given to the Südekums.) In Russia, millions of copies of bourgeois papers have brought the “people” tidings of Maslov-Plekhanov-Smirnov—but no news of the trend represented by Golos. Thirdly, the experience of the legal workers’ press of 1912-14 has definitely proved that the source of a certain degree of social strength and influence enjoyed by the liquidationist movement lies, not in the working class, but in that section of bourgeois-democratic intelligentsia, which has brought the central group of legalist writers to the fore. The national-chauvinist temper of this section as a section is testified to by the entire press of Russia, as revealed in the letters of the Petrograd worker (Sotsial-Demokrat Nos. 33 and 35) and in the “Document”(No. 34). Considerable personal re-groupings within that section are quite possible, but it is absolutely improbable that, as a section, it should not be “patriotic” and opportunist.
Such are the objective facts. Since we take them into account and are aware that it is to the advantage of all bourgeois parties that wish for influence over the workers, to have a Left wing for display (particularly when that wing is unofficial), we must declare the idea of unity with the Organising Committee an illusion detrimental to the workers’ cause.
The policy of the Organising Committee who, in far-away Sweden, on November 23, proclaimed their unity with Plekhanov and spoke words sweet to the hearts of all social-chauvinists, while in Paris and in Switzerland they did not bother to make their existence known either on September 13 (when Golos appeared) or on November 23 or to this day (December 23), strongly resembles political chicanery of the worst kind. The hope that Otkliki,[11] scheduled to appear in Zurich, would be of an official Party nature has been destroyed by a forthright statement in Berner Tagwacht (December 12), to the effect that this paper will not be of such a nature. (Incidentally, the editors of Golos declared in issue No. 52 that to continue at present the rift with the liquidators would be “nationalism” of the worst kind. This phrase, which is devoid of grammatical meaning, has only political meaning that the editors of Golos prefer having unity with the social-chauvinists to drawing closer to those who are irreconcilably hostile to social-chauvinism. The editors of Golos have made a bad choice.)
To make the picture complete, it remains for us to add a few words about Mysl,[12] organ of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, which is published in Paris. This paper also lauds “unity”, while it shields (cf. Sotsial-Demokrat No. 34) the social-chauvinism of Rubanovich, its party leader, defends the Franco-Belgian opportunists and ministerialists, says nothing of the patriotic motives of the speech by Kerensky, one of the extreme radicals among the Russian Trudoviks,[13] and prints well-worn petty-bourgeois vulgarities on the revision of Marxism, in a Narodnik and opportunist spirit. What the resolution of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party’s summer conference of 1913[14] said of the Socialist-Revolutionaries has been fully and particularly proved by this behaviour of Mysl.
Some Russian socialists seem to think that internationalism consists in a readiness to welcome a resolution containing an international vindication of social-chauvinism in all countries, such as is to be drawn up by Plekhanov and Südekum, Kautsky and Hervé, Guesde and Hyndman, Vandervelde and Bissolati, etc. We permit ourselves the thought that internationalism consists only in an unequivocal internationalist policy within one’s party. A genuinely proletarian internationalist policy cannot be pursued, active opposition to the war cannot be preached, and forces for such action cannot be mustered while we are in the company of the opportunists and the social-chauvinists. To find refuge in silence, or to wave this truth aside which, though bitter, is necessary to the socialist, is detrimental and ruinous to the working-class movement.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] See pp. 115-17 of this volume.—Ed.
[2] Plekhanov’s pamphlet, On the War (Paris, 1914), which we have just received, confirms very convincingly the truth of the assertions made in the text. We shall return to this pamphlet later on. —Lenin
[3] See pp. 25–34 of this volume.—Ed.
[4] The Bolshevik deputies to the Fourth Duma were arrested on the night of November 5-6 (18-19),1914. The pretext for their arrest was their participation in a conference they convened in the village of Ozerki, near Petrograd.
Held on November 2-4 (15-17), the conference was attended by representatives of the Bolshevik organisations of Petrograd, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kharkov and Riga, as well as by the Duma Bolshevik deputies.
Warned by an agent provocateur the police swooped down on Ozerki when the conference had just completed its work. During the search of G. I. Petrovsky, A. Y. Badayev and other Duma Bolshevik deputies, the police found Lenin’s theses on the war and the newspaper Sotsial-Demokrat No. 33, which carried the manifesto of the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. “The War and Russian Social-Democracy”. All participants in the conference were arrested, but the Duma Bolshevik deputies, who enjoyed parliamentary immunity, escaped arrest. Two days later, however, they too were arrested, tried and exiled for life to Eastern Siberia. Lenin devoted to the trial of the Bolshevik deputies the article “What Has Been Revealed by the Trial of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Duma Group” , which was published in Sotsial-Demokrat No. 40, March 29, 1915 (see this volume, pp. 171-77).
[5] The Congress of the Swedish Social-Democratic Party was held in Stockholm on November 23,1914. The main item on the agenda dealt with the attitude towards the war. A. G. Shlyapnikov, who brought the Congress a message of greetings from the R.S.D.L.P’s Central Committee, read a declaration calling for a struggle to be waged against the imperialist war and branding the treachery of the leaders of the German Social-Democrats and the socialist parties of other countries, who had turned social-chauvinist. Branting, leader of the Swedish Social-Democratic Party’s Right wing, moved that regret be expressed at the section of the declaration condemning the conduct of German Social-Democracy, asserting that “it does not befit” the Congress “to reprehend other parties”. Höglund, leader of the Left Social-Democrats, came out against Branting’s proposal, and declared that many Swedish Social-Democrats shared the view expressed in the declaration of the R.S.D.L.P.’s Central Committee. However, Branting’s proposal was carried by a majority of votes. Y. Larin addressed the Congress on behalf of the Menshevik Organising Committee. A report on the Congress was published in Sotsial-Demokrat No. 36, January 9, 1915.
[6] The Organizing Committee—the Menshevik guiding centre, was established at a conference of the Menshevik liquidators and all anti-Party groups and trends, held in August 1912. It existed until the election of the Central Committee of the Menshevik party in August 1917.
Belenin—A. G. Shlyapnikov.
[7] Sotsial-Demokrat—Central Organ of the R.S.D.L.P., published illegally from February 1908 to January 1917. In all, 58 issues appeared. The first issue was published in Russia, and the rest abroad, first in Paris and then in Geneva. According to the decision of the R.S.D.L.P.’s Central Committee, the editorial board was composed of representatives of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Polish Social-Democrats.
The newspaper published over 80 articles and items by Lenin. While on the editorial board, Lenin maintained a consistent Bolshevik stand. Some editors (including Kamenev and Zinoviev) took a conciliatory attitude towards the liquidators and tried to disrupt Lenin’s line. The Menshevik editors Martov and Dan sabotaged the work of the editorial board and openly defended liquidationism in their factional newspaper Golos Sotsial-Demokrata.
Because of Lenin’s uncompromising struggle against the liquidators Martov and Dan walked out of the editorial board, in June 1911. Beginning with December 1911 Lenin became editor of Sotsial-Demokrat.
[8] Lenin is referring to the Caucasian Menshevik liquidators, the Bund (The General Jewish Workers’ Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia), and representatives of the Social-Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania, who supported the liquidators.
[9] The reference is to the reply of the St. Petersburg liquidators (Potresov, Maslov, Cherevanin and others) to Vandervelde’s telegram urging Russian Social-Democrats to abstain from opposing the war. In their reply, the Russian liquidators approved Belgian, French and English socialists joining bourgeois governments, and declared that in their activities in Russia they were not opposed to the war.
[10] Berner Tagwacht—a daily newspaper, organ of the Swiss Social-Democratic Party, founded in Berne in 1893. In the early days of the First World War, it published articles by Karl Liebknecht Franz Mehring and other Left Social-Democrats. Following 1917 the newspaper openly supported social-chauvinists.
Today the newspaper’s line coincides on the main issues with that of the bourgeois press.
[11] The Menshevik Organising Committee announced the forthcoming publication of its organ Otkliki (Echoes ), which, however, never appeared.
[12] Mysl(Thought )—a daily Socialist-Revolutionary newspaper published in Paris from November 1914 to March 1915.
[13] Trudoviks—a group of petty-bourgeois democrats in the State Duma consisting of peasants and intellectuals of a Narodnik trend. The Trudovik group was formed in April 1906 of peasant deputies to the First Duma. In the Duma the Trudoviks vacillated between the Cadets and the Social-Democrats.
During the First World War, most of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Popular Socialists and Trudoviks took a social-chauvinist stand.
[14] Lenin is referring to the resolution “The Narodniks” which he wrote and which was adopted by the joint Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. Central Committee and Party officials held between September 23 and October 1 (October 6-14), 1913, in the village of Poronin (near Cracow). For reasons of secrecy, the conference was called the “Summer” or “August” Conference. See the resolution in Volume 19 of the present edition, pp. 429-31.
Friday, January 14, 2011
From The Minnesota Hand Off Honduras Coaliton-Espias del FBI en Movimientos de Minneapolis:
Click on headline for the video ESpias del FBI en Movimientos de Minneapolis from the Minnesota Hands Off Honduras Coaliton website.
From The UJP Website- A Report-Government Informer Infiltrated Minnesota Activist Groups- And A Case Study
Markin comment:
It seems impossible that this government, this monstrously over-fed imperialist government, with more security agencies than it knows what to do with, would seriously bother with the doings of the minuscule organized extra-parliamentary left in America , or in this case just some, mainly, ad hoc anti-war committees. But they are, and as long as the class struggle goes on, in today‘s low tide doldrums or when our time comes, they will continue to do so.
This “interest” reminds me of the heyday of the anti-communist “red scare” of the 1950s when the long gone and unlamented FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, had so many of his agents undercover in the American Communist Party that they were reporting on each other. That was another time when one had reason to wonder about the why of such as interest by governmental bureaucrats since the party had been decimated by the purges from the trades unions, academia, and the entertainment industries, and by the internal problems caused by the contradictions of Stalinism after the death of Stalin (chiefly Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin and the Hungarian events of 1956).
All this report tells us though, really, is what we already knew. That the government, no matter the administration, has always done, is doing, and will continue to do infiltrations of left groups. All we can do is be cautious, not get catch up in some hare-brained scheme hatched by anybody, known or unknown, and, frankly, in these quasi-democratic times just do our business of anti-capitalist, anti-war propaganda as best we can in the open. For as long as we can.
*****
Government Informer Infiltrated Minnesota Activist Groups
Submitted by ujpadmin on Wed, 01/12/2011 - 10:15pm.
By Nick Pinto - January. 12 2011 - City Pages
The Twin Cities activists who had their homes raided by the FBI last September are starting to learn more about why they're being investigated by a Chicago grand jury in relation to material support of terrorism.
Lawyers for the activists have learned from prosecutors that the feds sent an undercover law enforcement agent to infiltrate the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee in April 2008, just as the group was planning its licensed protests at the Republican National Convention. Going by the name "Karen Sullivan," the agent blended in with the many new faces the Committee was seeing at meetings in the lead-up to the RNC. But she stayed active afterward, attending virtually every meeting.
"She presented herself as a lesbian with a teenage daughter, and said she had a difficult relationship with her daughter's father, which is one of the reasons she gave us for not being more transparent about her story," says Jess Sundin, a member of the Anti-War Committee and one of the activists who has received a subpoena from the Chicago grand jury. "It was a sympathetic story for a lot of us."
Sullivan told the group she was originally from Boston but that she had had a rough childhood and was estranged from her family. She said she had spent some time in Northern Ireland working with Republican solidarity groups.
Sullivan at first said that she didn't have any permanent address in the area, but she eventually got an apartment in the Seward neighborhood. She claimed to be employed by a friend's small business, checking out foreclosed properties that he might buy. The cover story of a flexible job schedule let her attend all the meetings she wanted to, and to have individual lunches with other activists.
"She really took an interest," Sundin said. "It raised some suspicions among other members at first, but after the other undercover agents from the RNC Welcoming Committee came out, and no in our organization did, we figured we didn't have any. Besides, we didn't think we had anything we needed to be secretive about."
Sullivan began to take on more responsibilities with the organization, chairing meetings, handling the group's bookkeeping, and networking with dozens of other organizations.
In the summer of 2009, Sullivan joined two other Twin Cities activists in a trip to visit Palestine. Somehow, when they landed in Tel Aviv, Israeli security forces knew they were coming, and that they were headed to Palestine.
The three women were told they could get on the next plane back home or they could face detention. Sullivan took the flight. The other two women chose detention and were ultimately deported.
Attorneys for the activists have also learned that prosecutors are especially interested in a small donation the women intended to give to their host organization in Palestine, the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees. The group is registered as an NGO with the Palestinian Authority and not listed as a terrorist group by the United States.
Last fall, Sullivan disappeared from the Twin Cities, telling her fellow activists that she had some family business to take care of. She never came back. On September 24, the FBI launched a series of early morning raids on the homes of members of the Anti-War Committee and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
The FBI would not confirm or deny Sullivan's identity as a government agent or comment on this story by the time of publication. The U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago has said it will not comment on anything related to the grand jury investigation.
Last fall the Justice Department's Inspector General released a scathing report that criticized the FBI for invoking anti-terrorist laws to justify their investigations and harassment of groups including Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and the Catholic Worker.
"This is exactly what the Inspector General's report was talking about," Sundin told City Pages this morning. "The FBI doesn't have the right to spy on us. It's an abuse of our democratic rights. We're supposed to have freedom of association, not, 'You can associate but we're going to spy on you.'"
It seems impossible that this government, this monstrously over-fed imperialist government, with more security agencies than it knows what to do with, would seriously bother with the doings of the minuscule organized extra-parliamentary left in America , or in this case just some, mainly, ad hoc anti-war committees. But they are, and as long as the class struggle goes on, in today‘s low tide doldrums or when our time comes, they will continue to do so.
This “interest” reminds me of the heyday of the anti-communist “red scare” of the 1950s when the long gone and unlamented FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, had so many of his agents undercover in the American Communist Party that they were reporting on each other. That was another time when one had reason to wonder about the why of such as interest by governmental bureaucrats since the party had been decimated by the purges from the trades unions, academia, and the entertainment industries, and by the internal problems caused by the contradictions of Stalinism after the death of Stalin (chiefly Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin and the Hungarian events of 1956).
All this report tells us though, really, is what we already knew. That the government, no matter the administration, has always done, is doing, and will continue to do infiltrations of left groups. All we can do is be cautious, not get catch up in some hare-brained scheme hatched by anybody, known or unknown, and, frankly, in these quasi-democratic times just do our business of anti-capitalist, anti-war propaganda as best we can in the open. For as long as we can.
*****
Government Informer Infiltrated Minnesota Activist Groups
Submitted by ujpadmin on Wed, 01/12/2011 - 10:15pm.
By Nick Pinto - January. 12 2011 - City Pages
The Twin Cities activists who had their homes raided by the FBI last September are starting to learn more about why they're being investigated by a Chicago grand jury in relation to material support of terrorism.
Lawyers for the activists have learned from prosecutors that the feds sent an undercover law enforcement agent to infiltrate the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee in April 2008, just as the group was planning its licensed protests at the Republican National Convention. Going by the name "Karen Sullivan," the agent blended in with the many new faces the Committee was seeing at meetings in the lead-up to the RNC. But she stayed active afterward, attending virtually every meeting.
"She presented herself as a lesbian with a teenage daughter, and said she had a difficult relationship with her daughter's father, which is one of the reasons she gave us for not being more transparent about her story," says Jess Sundin, a member of the Anti-War Committee and one of the activists who has received a subpoena from the Chicago grand jury. "It was a sympathetic story for a lot of us."
Sullivan told the group she was originally from Boston but that she had had a rough childhood and was estranged from her family. She said she had spent some time in Northern Ireland working with Republican solidarity groups.
Sullivan at first said that she didn't have any permanent address in the area, but she eventually got an apartment in the Seward neighborhood. She claimed to be employed by a friend's small business, checking out foreclosed properties that he might buy. The cover story of a flexible job schedule let her attend all the meetings she wanted to, and to have individual lunches with other activists.
"She really took an interest," Sundin said. "It raised some suspicions among other members at first, but after the other undercover agents from the RNC Welcoming Committee came out, and no in our organization did, we figured we didn't have any. Besides, we didn't think we had anything we needed to be secretive about."
Sullivan began to take on more responsibilities with the organization, chairing meetings, handling the group's bookkeeping, and networking with dozens of other organizations.
In the summer of 2009, Sullivan joined two other Twin Cities activists in a trip to visit Palestine. Somehow, when they landed in Tel Aviv, Israeli security forces knew they were coming, and that they were headed to Palestine.
The three women were told they could get on the next plane back home or they could face detention. Sullivan took the flight. The other two women chose detention and were ultimately deported.
Attorneys for the activists have also learned that prosecutors are especially interested in a small donation the women intended to give to their host organization in Palestine, the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees. The group is registered as an NGO with the Palestinian Authority and not listed as a terrorist group by the United States.
Last fall, Sullivan disappeared from the Twin Cities, telling her fellow activists that she had some family business to take care of. She never came back. On September 24, the FBI launched a series of early morning raids on the homes of members of the Anti-War Committee and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
The FBI would not confirm or deny Sullivan's identity as a government agent or comment on this story by the time of publication. The U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago has said it will not comment on anything related to the grand jury investigation.
Last fall the Justice Department's Inspector General released a scathing report that criticized the FBI for invoking anti-terrorist laws to justify their investigations and harassment of groups including Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and the Catholic Worker.
"This is exactly what the Inspector General's report was talking about," Sundin told City Pages this morning. "The FBI doesn't have the right to spy on us. It's an abuse of our democratic rights. We're supposed to have freedom of association, not, 'You can associate but we're going to spy on you.'"
Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- Out In The Jukebox Night - A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube Film clip of Ben E. King performing Spanish Harlem.
CD Review
The Rock ‘N’ Roll Era: The ‘60s: Keep On Rockin’, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1988
Recently I, seemingly, have endlessly gone back to my early musical roots in reviewing various compilations of a Time-Life classic rock series that goes under the general title The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era. And while time and ear have eroded the sparkle of some of the lesser tunes it still seems obvious that those years, say 1955-62, really did form the musical jail break-out for my generation, the generation of ’68, who had just started to tune into music.
And we had our own little world, or as some hip sociologist trying to explain that Zeitgeist today might say, our own sub-group cultural expression. I have already talked about the pre 7/11 mom and pop corner variety store hangout with the tee-shirted, engineered-booted, cigarette (unfiltered) hanging from the lips, Coke, big sized glass Coke bottle at the side, pinball wizard guys thing. And about the pizza parlor juke box coin devouring, playing some “hot” song for the nth time that night, hold the onions I might get lucky tonight, dreamy girl might come in the door thing. Of course, the soda fountain, and…ditto, dreamy girl coming through the door thing, merely to share a sundae, please. And the same for the teen dance club, keep the kids off the streets even if we parents hate their damn rock music, the now eternal hope dreamy girl coming in the door, save the last dance for me thing.
Whee! That’s maybe enough memory lane stuff for a lifetime, especially for those with weak hearts. But, no, your intrepid messenger feels the need to go back again and take a little different look at that be-bop jukebox Saturday night scene as it unfolded in the early 1960s. Hey, you could have found the old jukebox in lots of places in those days. Bowling alleys, drugstores, pizza parlors, drive-in restaurants, and as shown in the cover art here at the daytime beach. While boy or girl watching. Basically any place where kids were hot for some special song and wanted to play it until the cows came home. And had the coins to satisfy their hunger.
A lot of it was to kill time waiting for this or that, although the basic reason was these were all places where you could show off your stuff, and maybe, strike up a conversation with someone who attracted your attention as they came in the door. The cover artwork on this compilation shows a dreamy girl waiting for her platters (records, okay) to work their way up the mechanism that took them from the stack and laid them out on the player. And tee-shirted sullen guy (could have been you, right?) just hanging around the machine waiting for just such a well-shaped brunette (or blond, but I favored brunettes in those days), maybe chatting idly was worth at least a date (or, more often, a telephone number to call). Not after nine at night though or before eight because that was when she was talking to her boy friend. Lucky guy, maybe.
But here is where the real skill came in, and where that white-tee-shirted guy on the cover seemed to be clueless. Just hanging casually around the old box, especially on a no, or low, dough day waiting on a twist (slang for girl in our old working class neighborhood) to come by and put her quarter in (giving three or five selections depending what kind of place the jukebox was located in) talking, usually to girlfriends, as she made those selections. Usually the first couple were easy, some old boy friend memory, or some wistful tryst remembrance, but then she got contemplative, or fidgety, over what to pick next.
Then you made your move-“Have you heard Spanish Harlem. NO! Well, you just have to hear that thing and it will cheer you right up. Or some such line. Of course, you wanted to hear the damn thing. But see, a song like that (as opposed to Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Rock and Roller, let’s say) showed you were a sensitive guy, and maybe worth talking to... for just a minute, I got to get back to my girlfriends, etc, etc. Oh, jukebox you baby. And guess what. On that self-same jukebox you were very, very likely to hear some of the compilations from this CD: Here’s the list and there are some stick outs (and a few that worked some of that “magic” just mentioned above on tough nights):
1)My Boyfriend's Back - The Angels; 2)Nadine (Is It You?) - Chuck Berry; 3)Spanish Harlem - Ben E. King; 4)Come & Get These Memories - Martha & the Vandellas; 5)Perfidia - The Ventures; 6)Lover's Island - The Blue Jays; 7)Playboy - The Marvelettes; 8)Little Latin Lupe Lu - The Righteous Brothers; 9)It's Gonna Work Out Fine - Ike & Tina Turner; 10)When We Get Married - The Dreamlovers; 11)The One Who Really Loves You - Mary Wells; 12)Little Diane - Dion; 13)Dear Lady Twist - Gary "U.S." Bonds; 14)Heartaches - The Marcels; 15)Feel So Fine (Feel So Good) - Johnny Preston; 16)If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody - James Ray; 17)All in My Mind - Maxine Brown; 18)Maybe I know - Lesley Gore; 19)Heart & Soul - The Cleftones; 20)Peanut Butter - The Marathons; 21)I Count the Tears - The Drifters; 22)Everybody Loves a Lover - The Shirelles
CD Review
The Rock ‘N’ Roll Era: The ‘60s: Keep On Rockin’, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1988
Recently I, seemingly, have endlessly gone back to my early musical roots in reviewing various compilations of a Time-Life classic rock series that goes under the general title The Rock ‘n’ Roll Era. And while time and ear have eroded the sparkle of some of the lesser tunes it still seems obvious that those years, say 1955-62, really did form the musical jail break-out for my generation, the generation of ’68, who had just started to tune into music.
And we had our own little world, or as some hip sociologist trying to explain that Zeitgeist today might say, our own sub-group cultural expression. I have already talked about the pre 7/11 mom and pop corner variety store hangout with the tee-shirted, engineered-booted, cigarette (unfiltered) hanging from the lips, Coke, big sized glass Coke bottle at the side, pinball wizard guys thing. And about the pizza parlor juke box coin devouring, playing some “hot” song for the nth time that night, hold the onions I might get lucky tonight, dreamy girl might come in the door thing. Of course, the soda fountain, and…ditto, dreamy girl coming through the door thing, merely to share a sundae, please. And the same for the teen dance club, keep the kids off the streets even if we parents hate their damn rock music, the now eternal hope dreamy girl coming in the door, save the last dance for me thing.
Whee! That’s maybe enough memory lane stuff for a lifetime, especially for those with weak hearts. But, no, your intrepid messenger feels the need to go back again and take a little different look at that be-bop jukebox Saturday night scene as it unfolded in the early 1960s. Hey, you could have found the old jukebox in lots of places in those days. Bowling alleys, drugstores, pizza parlors, drive-in restaurants, and as shown in the cover art here at the daytime beach. While boy or girl watching. Basically any place where kids were hot for some special song and wanted to play it until the cows came home. And had the coins to satisfy their hunger.
A lot of it was to kill time waiting for this or that, although the basic reason was these were all places where you could show off your stuff, and maybe, strike up a conversation with someone who attracted your attention as they came in the door. The cover artwork on this compilation shows a dreamy girl waiting for her platters (records, okay) to work their way up the mechanism that took them from the stack and laid them out on the player. And tee-shirted sullen guy (could have been you, right?) just hanging around the machine waiting for just such a well-shaped brunette (or blond, but I favored brunettes in those days), maybe chatting idly was worth at least a date (or, more often, a telephone number to call). Not after nine at night though or before eight because that was when she was talking to her boy friend. Lucky guy, maybe.
But here is where the real skill came in, and where that white-tee-shirted guy on the cover seemed to be clueless. Just hanging casually around the old box, especially on a no, or low, dough day waiting on a twist (slang for girl in our old working class neighborhood) to come by and put her quarter in (giving three or five selections depending what kind of place the jukebox was located in) talking, usually to girlfriends, as she made those selections. Usually the first couple were easy, some old boy friend memory, or some wistful tryst remembrance, but then she got contemplative, or fidgety, over what to pick next.
Then you made your move-“Have you heard Spanish Harlem. NO! Well, you just have to hear that thing and it will cheer you right up. Or some such line. Of course, you wanted to hear the damn thing. But see, a song like that (as opposed to Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Rock and Roller, let’s say) showed you were a sensitive guy, and maybe worth talking to... for just a minute, I got to get back to my girlfriends, etc, etc. Oh, jukebox you baby. And guess what. On that self-same jukebox you were very, very likely to hear some of the compilations from this CD: Here’s the list and there are some stick outs (and a few that worked some of that “magic” just mentioned above on tough nights):
1)My Boyfriend's Back - The Angels; 2)Nadine (Is It You?) - Chuck Berry; 3)Spanish Harlem - Ben E. King; 4)Come & Get These Memories - Martha & the Vandellas; 5)Perfidia - The Ventures; 6)Lover's Island - The Blue Jays; 7)Playboy - The Marvelettes; 8)Little Latin Lupe Lu - The Righteous Brothers; 9)It's Gonna Work Out Fine - Ike & Tina Turner; 10)When We Get Married - The Dreamlovers; 11)The One Who Really Loves You - Mary Wells; 12)Little Diane - Dion; 13)Dear Lady Twist - Gary "U.S." Bonds; 14)Heartaches - The Marcels; 15)Feel So Fine (Feel So Good) - Johnny Preston; 16)If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody - James Ray; 17)All in My Mind - Maxine Brown; 18)Maybe I know - Lesley Gore; 19)Heart & Soul - The Cleftones; 20)Peanut Butter - The Marathons; 21)I Count the Tears - The Drifters; 22)Everybody Loves a Lover - The Shirelles
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-The “Peace” Slogan Appraised(1915)
Markin comment:
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace the bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
*******
V. I. Lenin
The “Peace” Slogan Appraised
Written: Written in July–August 1915
Published: First published in the magazine Proletarskaya Revolutsia No. 5 (28), 1924. Published according to the manuscript.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 287-289.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In its issue of June 27, 1915, the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitwig, central organ of the Austrian Social-Democrats, cites a very instructive declaration contained in the German governmental Norddeutsche Aligemeine Zeitung.
The declaration deals with an article by one of the best known (and vilest) opportunists of the “Social-Democratic.” Party of Germany named Quarck, who said inter alia:
“We German Social-Democrats and our Austrian comrades have repeatedly declared ourselves ready to establish contacts (with the British and French Social-Democrats) for the purpose of beginning peace talks. The German Imperial Government know of this, and have not placed the slightest obstacle in our way.”
Nationalliberale Korrespondenz, a German national-liberal paper, has said that the concluding words permit of a double interpretation. The first is that the government have put no obstacles in the way of “international political action” by the Social-Democrats, insofar as it does not transgress the limits of legality and “is not dangerous to the State”. This, the paper says, is perfectly intelligible from the angle of “political freedom”.
The second interpretation is that the German Government “at least tacitly approve of the Social-Democratic internationalist peace propaganda, and even consider it a suitable means of laying down the initial basis for exploring the possibility of peace”.
The national-liberal paper naturally considers this latter interpretation out of the question. In this it has the official support of the government newspaper, which goes on to say that “the government have nothing in common with internationalist peace propaganda and have authorised neither Social-Democratic nor any other intermediaries to conduct that propaganda”.
An edifying farce, is it not? Will anybody believe that the German Government, who have forbidden Vorwärts to write about the class struggle, have introduced harsh military laws against popular meetings and veritable “military slavery” for the proletariat—that this government have, out of sheer liberalism, “put no obstacles” in the way of Messrs. Quarck and Südekum, or that they are not in constant communication with the latter gentlemen?
Is it not a thousand times more likely that Quarck inadvertently told the truth (namely, that the peace propaganda was started by the German Social-Democrats when they had reached a direct or indirect understanding with their government), and that he was “officially refuted” only for the purpose of concealing the truth.
This is a lesson to those phrase-lovers who, like Trotsky (see No. 105 of Nashe Slovo), defend—in opposition to us—the peace slogan, alleging among other things that “all Left-wingers” have united for the purpose of “action” under this very slogan! The Junker government have now demonstrated the correctness of our Berne resolution (Sotsial-Demokrat No. 40), which says that the propaganda of peace “unaccompanied by a call for revolutionary mass action” can only “sow illusions” and “turn the proletariat into a plaything in the hands of the secret diplomacy of the belligerent countries”.[1]
This has been literally proved!
In a few years diplomatic history will prove that there was an understanding, direct or indirect, between the opportunists and the governments on peace palaver and this, not in Germany alone! Diplomacy may conceal such things, but murder will out!
When the Lefts began to unite under the peace slogan, this deserved encouragement, provided it was the first step in protest against the chauvinists, in the same fashion as the Gaponade was the Russian worker’s first timid protest against the tsar. But since the Lefts are even now confining themselves to this slogan (slogans are the business of intelligent political leaders), they are shoddy Lefts, there is consequently not a grain of “action” in their resolutions, and they are consequently a plaything in the hands of the Sudekums, Quarcks, Sembats, Hyndmans, Joffres, and Hindenburgs.
Anyone who fails to understand this even today, when the peace slogan ("unaccompanied by a call for revolutionary mass action") has been prostituted by the Vienna Conference[2] of Bernstein, Kautsky and Co. with the Scheidernanns (the German Vorstand, their Executive), is simply an unwitting participant in the social-chauvinist humbugging of the people.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] See p. 163 of this volume.—Ed.
[2] The reference is to the Conference of Socialists of Germany and Austria-Hungary, held in Vianna in April 1915. The Conference approved of the social-chauvinist stand taken by the leadership of the German and Austrian socialist parties, wich justified the war and stated, in their resolutions, that this did not run counter to proletarian unity and to the workers’ international solidarity in the struggle for peace.
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace the bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
*******
V. I. Lenin
The “Peace” Slogan Appraised
Written: Written in July–August 1915
Published: First published in the magazine Proletarskaya Revolutsia No. 5 (28), 1924. Published according to the manuscript.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 287-289.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In its issue of June 27, 1915, the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitwig, central organ of the Austrian Social-Democrats, cites a very instructive declaration contained in the German governmental Norddeutsche Aligemeine Zeitung.
The declaration deals with an article by one of the best known (and vilest) opportunists of the “Social-Democratic.” Party of Germany named Quarck, who said inter alia:
“We German Social-Democrats and our Austrian comrades have repeatedly declared ourselves ready to establish contacts (with the British and French Social-Democrats) for the purpose of beginning peace talks. The German Imperial Government know of this, and have not placed the slightest obstacle in our way.”
Nationalliberale Korrespondenz, a German national-liberal paper, has said that the concluding words permit of a double interpretation. The first is that the government have put no obstacles in the way of “international political action” by the Social-Democrats, insofar as it does not transgress the limits of legality and “is not dangerous to the State”. This, the paper says, is perfectly intelligible from the angle of “political freedom”.
The second interpretation is that the German Government “at least tacitly approve of the Social-Democratic internationalist peace propaganda, and even consider it a suitable means of laying down the initial basis for exploring the possibility of peace”.
The national-liberal paper naturally considers this latter interpretation out of the question. In this it has the official support of the government newspaper, which goes on to say that “the government have nothing in common with internationalist peace propaganda and have authorised neither Social-Democratic nor any other intermediaries to conduct that propaganda”.
An edifying farce, is it not? Will anybody believe that the German Government, who have forbidden Vorwärts to write about the class struggle, have introduced harsh military laws against popular meetings and veritable “military slavery” for the proletariat—that this government have, out of sheer liberalism, “put no obstacles” in the way of Messrs. Quarck and Südekum, or that they are not in constant communication with the latter gentlemen?
Is it not a thousand times more likely that Quarck inadvertently told the truth (namely, that the peace propaganda was started by the German Social-Democrats when they had reached a direct or indirect understanding with their government), and that he was “officially refuted” only for the purpose of concealing the truth.
This is a lesson to those phrase-lovers who, like Trotsky (see No. 105 of Nashe Slovo), defend—in opposition to us—the peace slogan, alleging among other things that “all Left-wingers” have united for the purpose of “action” under this very slogan! The Junker government have now demonstrated the correctness of our Berne resolution (Sotsial-Demokrat No. 40), which says that the propaganda of peace “unaccompanied by a call for revolutionary mass action” can only “sow illusions” and “turn the proletariat into a plaything in the hands of the secret diplomacy of the belligerent countries”.[1]
This has been literally proved!
In a few years diplomatic history will prove that there was an understanding, direct or indirect, between the opportunists and the governments on peace palaver and this, not in Germany alone! Diplomacy may conceal such things, but murder will out!
When the Lefts began to unite under the peace slogan, this deserved encouragement, provided it was the first step in protest against the chauvinists, in the same fashion as the Gaponade was the Russian worker’s first timid protest against the tsar. But since the Lefts are even now confining themselves to this slogan (slogans are the business of intelligent political leaders), they are shoddy Lefts, there is consequently not a grain of “action” in their resolutions, and they are consequently a plaything in the hands of the Sudekums, Quarcks, Sembats, Hyndmans, Joffres, and Hindenburgs.
Anyone who fails to understand this even today, when the peace slogan ("unaccompanied by a call for revolutionary mass action") has been prostituted by the Vienna Conference[2] of Bernstein, Kautsky and Co. with the Scheidernanns (the German Vorstand, their Executive), is simply an unwitting participant in the social-chauvinist humbugging of the people.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] See p. 163 of this volume.—Ed.
[2] The reference is to the Conference of Socialists of Germany and Austria-Hungary, held in Vianna in April 1915. The Conference approved of the social-chauvinist stand taken by the leadership of the German and Austrian socialist parties, wich justified the war and stated, in their resolutions, that this did not run counter to proletarian unity and to the workers’ international solidarity in the struggle for peace.
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