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
On the Struggle Against Social-Chauvinism
Published: Supplement to Sotsial-Demokrat No. 42, June 1, 1915. Published according to the text of the Supplement.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 199-204.
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
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The most interesting and most recent material for this topical problem has been provided by the International Conference of Socialist Women, which adjourned recently in Berne.[1] The readers will find below an account of the Conference and the texts of two resolutions-the one adopted and the one rejected. In the present article we would like to discuss only one aspect of the question.
Representatives of the women’s organisations attached to the Organising Committee; women members of Troelstra’s party in Holland; women from the Swiss organisations that are hostile to Berner Tagwacht for its allegedly excessive Leftist leanings; the French representative, who is unwilling to disagree on any important point with the official party, which is known to adhere to the social-chauvinist point of view; the women of Britain, who are hostile to the idea of a clear line of division between pacifism and revolutionary proletarian tactics-all these agreed with the “Left” German Social-Democrat women on one resolution. The representatives of women’s organisations connected with our Party’s Central Committee disagreed with them, preferring to remain in isolation for the time being rather than join a bloc of this kind.
What is the gist of this disagreement? What principles and general political significance are involved in this conflict?
At first glance, the middle-of-the-road resolution, which has united the opportunists and part of the Left wing looks very fitting and correct in principle. The war has been declared an imperialist one, the “defence of the fatherland” idea has been condemned, the workers have been called upon to hold mass demonstrations, etc., etc. It might seem that our resolution was different only in the use of several sharper expressions such as “betrayal”, “opportunism”, “withdrawal from bourgeois governments”, etc.
It is undoubtedly from this standpoint that criticism will he levelled against the withdrawal of the representatives of the women’s organisations connected with our Party’s Central Committee.
However, if we give the matter more attention, without confining ourselves to a purely “formal” recognition of one truth or another, we will realise that such criticism is quite groundless.
Two world-outlooks, two appraisals of the war and the tasks of the International, two tactics of the proletarian parties clashed at the Conference. One view holds that there has been no collapse of the international; no deep and grave obstacles to a return from chauvinism to socialism; no strong “internal enemy” in the shape of opportunism; no direct and obvious betrayal of socialism by opportunism. The conclusion to be drawn might be worded as follows: let us condemn nobody; let us “amnesty” those who have violated the Stuttgart and the Basic resolutions; let us merely advise that the course followed should be more to the left and that the masses be called upon to hold demonstrations.
The other, view is diametrically opposed to the former on each of the points enumerated above. Nothing is more harmful or more disastrous to the proletarian cause than a continuation of inner-Party diplomacy towards the opportunists and social-chauvinists. The majority resolution proved acceptable to the opportunist delegates and to the adherents of the present-day official parties just because it is imbued with the spirit of diplomacy. Such diplomacy is being used to throw dust in the eyes of the working masses, which at present are led by the official social-patriots. An absolutely erroneous and harmful idea is being inculcated upon the working masses, the idea that the present-day SocialDemocratic parties, with their present Executives, are capable of changing their course from an erroneous to a correct one.
That is not the case. It is a most egregious and pernicious illusion. The present-day Social-Democratic parties and their Executives are incapable of seriously changing their course. In practice everything will remain as before; the “Left” wishes expressed in the majority resolution will remain innocent wishes; an unerring political instinct prompted this in the adherents of Troelstra’s party and of the present Executive of the French party, when they voted for such a resolution. It is only when it is most actively supported by the present Executives of the Social-Democratic parties that an appeal for mass demonstrations can acquire a serious and practical significance.
Can one expect such support? Obviously not, It is common knowledge that such an appeal will meet, not with support, but with stubborn (and mostly covert) resistance from the Executives.
If the workers were told this in a straightforward way, they would know the truth; they would know that to give effect to “Left” wishes, a radical change is necessary in the line of the Social-Democratic parties; a most stubborn struggle is necessary against the opportunists with their “Centrist” friends. As it is, the workers have been lulled by “Left” wishes, while the Conference re/used to call by name, loudly and clearly, the evil which must be combated if those wishes are to be realised.
The diplomatic leaders, who are at present conducting a chauvinist policy within the Social-Democratic parties, will make excellent use of the weakness, the indecision and the insufficient clarity of the majority resolution. Astute parliamentarians that they are, they will distribute the roles among themselves: some of them will say that the “serious” arguments of Kautsky and Co. were not appreciated or analysed, and that therefore they must be discussed in a wider gathering; others will say, “Were we not right when we said that no deep-seated differences existed, if the women adherents of the Troelstra and Guesde-Sembat parties were able to agree with the Left-wing German women?”
The Women’s Conference should not have aided Scheidemann, Haase, Kautsky, Vandervelde, Hyndman, Guesde, Sembat, Plekhanov and others to blunt the vigilance of the working masses. On the contrary, it should have tried to rouse them and declared a decisive war against opportunism. Only in that case would the result have been, not a hope that the “leaders” named above would “reform”, but a mustering of forces for an arduous and bitter struggle.
Consider the way the opportunists and the “Centrists” violated the Stuttgart and Basle resolutions. That is the crux of the matter. Try to visualise, clearly and without diplomacy, what has actually taken place.
Foreseeing war, the International convenes and unanimously decides, should war break out, to work “to hasten the downfall of capitalism”; to work in the spirit of the Commune, of October and December 1905 (the exact words of the Basle resolution!); to work in a spirit that will consider it a “crime” if “the workers of one country shoot at the workers of another country”.
A line of action in an internationalist, proletarian, and revolutionary spirit is indicated here with perfect clarity, a clarity that cannot be improved within the limits of legality.
Then war broke out—the very kind of war and exactly along the lines foreseen at Basic. The official parties acted in an absolutely contrary spirit: not like internationalists but like nationalists; not in a proletarian but in a bourgeois way; not in a revolutionary direction but in the direction of ultra-opportunism. If we say to the workers that this was downright treachery to the socialist cause, we thereby reject all evasions and subterfuges, all sophisms a la Kautsky and Axeirod. We clearly indicate the extent and the power of the evil; we clearly call for a struggle against that evil, not for conciliation with it.
What about the majority resolution? It does not contain a word of censure for the traitors, or a single word about opportunism, but merely a simple repetition of the ideas expressed in the Basle resolution! One might think that nothing serious has happened, that an accidental and minor error has been made which calls merely for a repetition of the old decision, or that a disagreement has arisen which is inconsequent and not of principle, and can be papered over!
This is downright mockery of the International’s decisions, mockery of the workers. As a matter of fact, the social-chauvinists wish nothing else but a simple repetition of the old decisions, if only nothing changes in practice. This is, in fact, a tacit and hypocritically disguised amnesty for the social-chauvinist adherents of most of the present parties. We know that there are many who would follow this path and confine themselves to several Left phrases. However, their road is not for us. We have followed a different road, and will go on following it; we want to help the working-class movement and the actual construction of a working class party, in the spirit of irreconcilability towards opportunism and social-chauvinism.
Part of the German women delegates seem to have been afraid of a very clear resolution for reasons relating only to the tempo of the development of the struggle against chauvinism within a single party, namely, their own. Such reasoning was obviously out of place and erroneous, since the international resolution did not and could not deal with either the speed or the concrete conditions of the struggle against social-chauvinism within the individual countries; in this respect, the autonomy of the various parties is beyond dispute. The proclamation was needed, from an international tribune, of an irrevocable break with social-chauvinism in the entire direction and character of Social-Democratic work. Instead of that, the majority resolution once more reiterated the old error, that of the Second International, which diplomatically veiled opportunism and the gap between word and deed. We repeat: this is a road we shall not take.
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Notes
[1] The International Conference of Socialist Women held in Berne on March 26-28, 1915, dealt with the attitude to the war. It was convened on the initiative of the women organisations attached to the C.C. R.S.D.L.P., with the active participation of Clara Zetkin, loader of the international women’s movement. Twenty-nine delegates from Britain, Germany, France, Holland, Switzerland, Russia and Poland attended the Conference, the Russian delegation including N. K. Krupskaya and Inessa Arrnand.
The report on the International Conference of Socialist Women was published in the Supplement to Sotsial-Demokrat No. 42 of June 1, 1915.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
***Artist's Corner- Bottecelli's "The Birth Of Venus"
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Botticelli's The Birth Of Venus.
Markin comment:
Personally, my tastes run more to modern art but every once in a while those early Renaissance artists, as here, take your breathe away and you stand, rightly, humbled before their creativity and mastery.
Markin comment:
Personally, my tastes run more to modern art but every once in a while those early Renaissance artists, as here, take your breathe away and you stand, rightly, humbled before their creativity and mastery.
Monday, January 17, 2011
*Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- The Teen Queens’ “Eddie My Love” (1956) - A 55th Anniversary, Of Sorts- An Alternate Take- For Those Who Waited By The Midnight Phone
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Teen Queens performing the classic Eddie My Love.
Markin comment:
This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of my interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hard working, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn my attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back in the day.
EDDIE MY LOVE
(Aaron Collins / Maxwell Davis / Sam Ling)The Teen Queens - 1956
The Fontane Sisters - 1956
The Chordettes - 1956
Dee Dee Sharp - 1962
Also recorded by:
Lillian Briggs; Jo Ann Campbell; The Sweethearts.
Eddie, my love, I love you so
How I wanted for you, you'll never know
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait to long
Eddie, please write me one line
Tell me your love is still only mine
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
You left me last September
To return to me before long
But all I do is cry myself to sleep
Eddie, since you've been gone
Eddie, my love, I'm sinking fast
The very next day might be my last
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
You left me last September
To return to me before long
But all I do is cry myself to sleep
Eddie, since you've been gone
Eddie, my love, I'm sinking fast
The very next day might be my last
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
(Transcribed from the Teen Queens
recording by Mel Priddle - May 2006)
**********
Come closer will you, because I have got a story to tell, come on away from that midnight phone waiting and maybe put on The Teen Queens’ Eddie My Love like I have on right now or some other teen trauma tune, sad, sad tune to help drown your sorrows while I’m telling the story,
Yes, get away from that midnight telephone call wait by your bedside table and listen up a minute or two because I’ve got a story to tell, a 1950s teen story to tell, or let’s make it a 1950s teen story, and if it works out for 1960s, 1970s, 2000s teens except the techno-gadgets ways to wait, to wait that midnight call are different, well, well there you have it,
and let’s make it a boy-girl story, although I know, and you know I know, that it could have been a boy-boy, girl-girl, whatever story and that’s okay by me, except that it wouldn’t be okay, okay as a public 1950s story,
and let’s make it a Saturday night, a hard by the phone, waiting Saturday night, maybe midnight, maybe not, maybe you cried or brooded yourself to sleep before that hour, that teen dread hour when all dreams came crashing to the floor, like a million guys and girls know about, and if you don’t then, maybe move on, but I think I know who I’m talking to,
and let’s make it a winter night, a long hard winter night, wind maybe blowing up a little, maybe a little dusting of snow, and just that many more dark hours until the dawn and facing another day without…,
and let’s make it, oh the hell with that let’s make it get to the story and we’ll work out the scenic details as we go along.
I’ll tell you, Betty’s got it bad, yes, Betty from across the way, from the house across the way where right now I can see her in her midnight waiting bedroom window, staring off, staring off somewhere but I know, I know, what ‘s wrong with her. Her Eddie’s flown the coop, and has not been heard from for a while.
Yes, Betty’s got it bad, and it’s too bad because she deserves better. Let me tell you the story behind the story, although I can already see that you might know what’s coming. Yes, I know the story because Betty’s best friend, Sue, gave me the details when I saw Betty moping around, moping around day after day like there was going to be no tomorrow, especially after school with her head down, head moping down after the mailman came.
Yes, I know, I know Sue, old best friend Sue, is nothing but a mantrap and has flirted with more guys in this town than you could shake a stick at, including Eddie (keep that between us, please). Hell, now that I think about it, I’ll get this thing all balled up. Let Betty, old true to Eddie, Betty tell her story herself, or at least through Sue, and I’ll just write it down my way, and you be the judge.
“Last summer, oh sweet sixteen last summer, old innocent girlish sweet paper dream last summer, Eddie, Eddie Cooper, Eddie with the hot cherry red, dual exhaust, heavy silver chrome, radio- blasting, ’55 Chevy (my brother Timmy told me about cars and their doo-dads, I just like to look good in them and the ’55 is the “boss”), that I knew I would be just crazy to sit in, and give the “look”, the superior “I’m with a hot guy, and sitting in a hot car , bow down peasants look,” came rumbling and tumbling into town.
Summer beach time, soaking up the sun down between the yacht clubs beach time, summer not a care in the world time , Sue, my best friend Sue, my best friend Sue and all that stuff they say about her and the boys is just fantasy, men fantasy, and I were sitting just talking about this and that, oh well, about boys, and I was telling her the latest about Billy, Billy from the neighborhood, who I had been going out with for ages, more or less, Billy with the reading too many books and wanting to talk poetry or “beat” stuff, Billy, Billy with the no car, or sometimes car but no “boss” car, never, when Eddie, Eddie, Eddie John Cooper, parked his honey Chevy and came over to us, through all that sand and all,
Eddie gave Sue the once over, like guys will do automatically, even though I secretly thrill to know that that once over is just a game because even as he came over the sand I could see he had eyes, big blue eyes, for me, only me,
We talked, idle talk, sex in the air talk, but don’t talk about talk, still talk a lot for a summer beach day, and I knew, I swear I knew he wanted to ask me out for later, or maybe right there to ride in his car but three’s company, and for once I couldn’t shake Sue, my best friend Sue, Sue with the million boyfriends so she says, who I could see was taken in by his big blued-eyed, black haired, tight tee-shirt, blue jean-ed charm too.
Truce, Sue truce, as we walked home, Eddie-less, a few blocks away. Truce, except that I heard a big engine, a big “boss” car engine, coming up behind me as I hit the sidewalk in front of my house, and dream, dream wake me up, it was Eddie, Eddie John Cooper and that cherry ’57 Chevy. He said, and I will never forget this, “Hop in,” and opened the door. I was suppose to have a “date”, some donk poetry reading date with Billy, ah, Billy who. We were off as soon as I close that cherry door.
And we were off, off for a sweet summer of love, ’55 Chevy love and okay, truth, because I know that Sue probably blabbed it around but I let Eddie take me to the back seat of that warm-bodied Chevy one night, and some nights after that. But let me just tell you this about Sue, my best friend Sue, honest, she’s the one who told me what to do with a boy, ya, she told me everything.
Come late August as summer beach love drew to an end and those damn school bells seemed ready to ring, Eddie, out of school Eddie my love, told me he had a job offer in another state and he needed to take the job to support his mother and his ’57 Chevy.
I started crying, crying like crazy, trying to make him stay, stay with his ever-lovin’ Betty but no he had to go. He didn’t know about a phone, or a phone call, but he said he would write and I haven’t heard from him since even though I wear out the mailman every day.”
Christ my heart bleeds for Betty every time I think about what Eddie has done, and see, I know Eddie, no I don’t know Eddie personally but I know Eddie stuff, stuff that has been going on since Adam and Eve, hell, probably before that.
But Betty, Betty, sweet Betty, I hate to break it to you but Eddie, Eddie John Cooper ain’t coming back. And old Eddie ain’t writing and it ain’t because he doesn’t have the three cents for a stamp, no Eddie, well, enough of that, let's just say Eddie’s moved on.
And Betty, Betty hold onto your Eddie My Love dream for a moment. But Betty, tomorrow, not tomorrow tomorrow but some tomorrow you‘ve got to move on. And Betty then why don’t you call your Billy. I’ll be here by the phone, the midnight phone.
Markin comment:
This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of my interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hard working, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn my attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back in the day.
EDDIE MY LOVE
(Aaron Collins / Maxwell Davis / Sam Ling)The Teen Queens - 1956
The Fontane Sisters - 1956
The Chordettes - 1956
Dee Dee Sharp - 1962
Also recorded by:
Lillian Briggs; Jo Ann Campbell; The Sweethearts.
Eddie, my love, I love you so
How I wanted for you, you'll never know
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait to long
Eddie, please write me one line
Tell me your love is still only mine
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
You left me last September
To return to me before long
But all I do is cry myself to sleep
Eddie, since you've been gone
Eddie, my love, I'm sinking fast
The very next day might be my last
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
You left me last September
To return to me before long
But all I do is cry myself to sleep
Eddie, since you've been gone
Eddie, my love, I'm sinking fast
The very next day might be my last
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
(Transcribed from the Teen Queens
recording by Mel Priddle - May 2006)
**********
Come closer will you, because I have got a story to tell, come on away from that midnight phone waiting and maybe put on The Teen Queens’ Eddie My Love like I have on right now or some other teen trauma tune, sad, sad tune to help drown your sorrows while I’m telling the story,
Yes, get away from that midnight telephone call wait by your bedside table and listen up a minute or two because I’ve got a story to tell, a 1950s teen story to tell, or let’s make it a 1950s teen story, and if it works out for 1960s, 1970s, 2000s teens except the techno-gadgets ways to wait, to wait that midnight call are different, well, well there you have it,
and let’s make it a boy-girl story, although I know, and you know I know, that it could have been a boy-boy, girl-girl, whatever story and that’s okay by me, except that it wouldn’t be okay, okay as a public 1950s story,
and let’s make it a Saturday night, a hard by the phone, waiting Saturday night, maybe midnight, maybe not, maybe you cried or brooded yourself to sleep before that hour, that teen dread hour when all dreams came crashing to the floor, like a million guys and girls know about, and if you don’t then, maybe move on, but I think I know who I’m talking to,
and let’s make it a winter night, a long hard winter night, wind maybe blowing up a little, maybe a little dusting of snow, and just that many more dark hours until the dawn and facing another day without…,
and let’s make it, oh the hell with that let’s make it get to the story and we’ll work out the scenic details as we go along.
I’ll tell you, Betty’s got it bad, yes, Betty from across the way, from the house across the way where right now I can see her in her midnight waiting bedroom window, staring off, staring off somewhere but I know, I know, what ‘s wrong with her. Her Eddie’s flown the coop, and has not been heard from for a while.
Yes, Betty’s got it bad, and it’s too bad because she deserves better. Let me tell you the story behind the story, although I can already see that you might know what’s coming. Yes, I know the story because Betty’s best friend, Sue, gave me the details when I saw Betty moping around, moping around day after day like there was going to be no tomorrow, especially after school with her head down, head moping down after the mailman came.
Yes, I know, I know Sue, old best friend Sue, is nothing but a mantrap and has flirted with more guys in this town than you could shake a stick at, including Eddie (keep that between us, please). Hell, now that I think about it, I’ll get this thing all balled up. Let Betty, old true to Eddie, Betty tell her story herself, or at least through Sue, and I’ll just write it down my way, and you be the judge.
“Last summer, oh sweet sixteen last summer, old innocent girlish sweet paper dream last summer, Eddie, Eddie Cooper, Eddie with the hot cherry red, dual exhaust, heavy silver chrome, radio- blasting, ’55 Chevy (my brother Timmy told me about cars and their doo-dads, I just like to look good in them and the ’55 is the “boss”), that I knew I would be just crazy to sit in, and give the “look”, the superior “I’m with a hot guy, and sitting in a hot car , bow down peasants look,” came rumbling and tumbling into town.
Summer beach time, soaking up the sun down between the yacht clubs beach time, summer not a care in the world time , Sue, my best friend Sue, my best friend Sue and all that stuff they say about her and the boys is just fantasy, men fantasy, and I were sitting just talking about this and that, oh well, about boys, and I was telling her the latest about Billy, Billy from the neighborhood, who I had been going out with for ages, more or less, Billy with the reading too many books and wanting to talk poetry or “beat” stuff, Billy, Billy with the no car, or sometimes car but no “boss” car, never, when Eddie, Eddie, Eddie John Cooper, parked his honey Chevy and came over to us, through all that sand and all,
Eddie gave Sue the once over, like guys will do automatically, even though I secretly thrill to know that that once over is just a game because even as he came over the sand I could see he had eyes, big blue eyes, for me, only me,
We talked, idle talk, sex in the air talk, but don’t talk about talk, still talk a lot for a summer beach day, and I knew, I swear I knew he wanted to ask me out for later, or maybe right there to ride in his car but three’s company, and for once I couldn’t shake Sue, my best friend Sue, Sue with the million boyfriends so she says, who I could see was taken in by his big blued-eyed, black haired, tight tee-shirt, blue jean-ed charm too.
Truce, Sue truce, as we walked home, Eddie-less, a few blocks away. Truce, except that I heard a big engine, a big “boss” car engine, coming up behind me as I hit the sidewalk in front of my house, and dream, dream wake me up, it was Eddie, Eddie John Cooper and that cherry ’57 Chevy. He said, and I will never forget this, “Hop in,” and opened the door. I was suppose to have a “date”, some donk poetry reading date with Billy, ah, Billy who. We were off as soon as I close that cherry door.
And we were off, off for a sweet summer of love, ’55 Chevy love and okay, truth, because I know that Sue probably blabbed it around but I let Eddie take me to the back seat of that warm-bodied Chevy one night, and some nights after that. But let me just tell you this about Sue, my best friend Sue, honest, she’s the one who told me what to do with a boy, ya, she told me everything.
Come late August as summer beach love drew to an end and those damn school bells seemed ready to ring, Eddie, out of school Eddie my love, told me he had a job offer in another state and he needed to take the job to support his mother and his ’57 Chevy.
I started crying, crying like crazy, trying to make him stay, stay with his ever-lovin’ Betty but no he had to go. He didn’t know about a phone, or a phone call, but he said he would write and I haven’t heard from him since even though I wear out the mailman every day.”
Christ my heart bleeds for Betty every time I think about what Eddie has done, and see, I know Eddie, no I don’t know Eddie personally but I know Eddie stuff, stuff that has been going on since Adam and Eve, hell, probably before that.
But Betty, Betty, sweet Betty, I hate to break it to you but Eddie, Eddie John Cooper ain’t coming back. And old Eddie ain’t writing and it ain’t because he doesn’t have the three cents for a stamp, no Eddie, well, enough of that, let's just say Eddie’s moved on.
And Betty, Betty hold onto your Eddie My Love dream for a moment. But Betty, tomorrow, not tomorrow tomorrow but some tomorrow you‘ve got to move on. And Betty then why don’t you call your Billy. I’ll be here by the phone, the midnight phone.
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-On Young Vanguardism (1972)
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
******
Markin comment on this article:
As far as I know the youth group of this organization, the Workers League, no longer exits (I will stand corrected if the case is otherwise) but that is not as important as the question posed in the article about youth vanguardism. In America that question, the question of who would lead the revolution, has been resolved by time and history. Not the youth, at least not youth as an undifferentiated mass, and certainly not youth as Ipod/facebook/myspace/sidekick/whatever nation. Nevertheless, as the student upsurges in Europe, especially France and Great Britain, portent this question could come up again. Moreover, this article is a nice exposition on the relationship between the revolutionary party and its youth auxiliary, and what it should not be.
********
From The Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter (forbears of the Young Spartacus Youth Clubs), Number 10-January/February 1972
Workers League Youth Vanguardism: Fake Youth Conference
NEW YORK--The Workers League "Conference for Youth to Fight Back" held December 18 re¬presented yet another in the WL's long series of attempts to set up a youth front group in the U.S. ("Revolt,” "YoungWorkers League, “etc.) Tim Wohlforth followed the precedent set by his mentor, Gerry Healy of the British Socialist Labour League, right down the line in setting up his youth conference just like the British Young Socialists, the street-demonstration, rock-band low-level youth group Healy personally runs.
Wohlforth himself set the tone of the conference, which was youth vanguardist through and through. "Youth will bring consciousness to the working class, " "Youth will force the trade unions to take up the struggle, " he drummed into his audience, which consisted mostly of high school students, most of whom have probably never attended a radical political meeting before. The other speeches given, one by a member of the Young Socialists, who in her opening remarks attacked the Spartacist League, and one by a Peruvian attacking the Partido Obrero Revolucionario of Bolivia, went over the heads of most of the audience, whose questions were naive ones such as "Will we lose our freedom under socialism?, " "What is Stalinism?, " etc. When the question of unity of the left was raised, Lucy St. John said, “We are the only revolutionary tendency in the world!" The young audience was thus whipped into shape, warned to avoid other groups on the left—all of which, according to the WL, embody betrayal itself-revisionism, Stalinism or reformism.
What was omitted is as important as what was said. During the hour or so of audience questions about "unity,” Wohlforth and Co. never used, much less explained, the term "united front.” Such vital questions as racial and sex¬ual oppression and imperialism were not even marginally mentioned.
In order to appeal to youth militancy, Wohlforth exaggerated fascistic elements in the U. S. today. He warned, “We'll all be in concentration camps in a few years if something isn't done—that's how far they'll go!"
The entire conference was run in extreme bureaucratic fashion, with questions left inadequately answered or unanswered altogether. Political opponents were excluded on sight. One speaker, suspected of being a supporter of the Labor Committee, was ordered to sit down in the middle of asking a question.
Youth Manipulation
At the end of the speeches, voting took place. On what, one may well ask--on the "program" (the leaflet handed out for the conference), on having a steering committee (for what?), and to have an "action" sometime in March. There was no discussion, there was no explanation of what this voting meant, of whether it is the founding of a youth organization, of the relation of youth to the party, no explanation of anything.
This "democratic" gesture—the vote—was a cynical and disgusting manipulation of potentially serious young militants. To ram through this "program,” to manipulate young militants who lack the experience to see through this trickery--or if they do, who will walk out disgusted by what they believe to be "socialism"--is a crime against the revolutionary movement.
Of course, we realize the WL could not afford discussion on its "program,” could not afford comparison to other radical groups, particularly to the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY), the youth section of the Spartacist League. The RCY is not a front group, but a Trotskyist youth group affiliated to the SL along Leninist lines of organization. The RCY sees the working class, not the undifferentiated "youth" as the vanguard of the revolution. The SL-RCY passed out a leaflet criticizing the "program" and had available the RCY program, organizational rules and youth-party relations document in pamphlet form. (Our founding conference spent two full days going over these documents, following two months of pre-conference discussion, and only after this thorough and democratic discussion, voted and approved them!)
WL Youth "Program"
The WL "program" is notable for its lack of Trotskyist politics—the word "socialist" ap¬pears only once, and then as the unspecified program for the future "labor party,” which is called for without a single reference to the strug¬gle against the reactionary trade union bureaucracy. The "program" is largely economist in content; for example, the section on the Vietnam war does not even mention military support to the NLF against imperialism! Its primary purpose is stated as building "the widest campaign among the youth"—which youth, Wohlforth made clear at the conference, is "all youth who want to fight back, " recruited at the dances, at the sporting events, off the streets, anywhere and everywhere! This assumes the undifferentiated "youth" to be inherently revolutionary, a capitulation to petty-bourgeois misconceptions. (In typical flip-flop fashion, Wohlforth took the opposite position a few nights earlier at Stony Brook, where driven to a rage by opposition questions from the floor, he screamed, "The WL is entirely hostile to the middle class!", also a thoroughly un-Marxist position, since the middle class is an intermediate social class and in periods of social crisis elements drawn from the middle class can be won to the proletarian revolutionary cause.)
The WL youth conference represented a profound capitulation to the petty-bourgeois mood of youth vanguardism~-the idea that "the youth,” who are in fact drawn from all social classes, are. inherently revolutionary. Given strong working-class leadership, other oppressed groups (youth, ethnic minorities, women, etc.) can be a valuable component of the revolutionary movement. But without deep political and organizational ties to the Trotskyist proletarian van¬guard organization, the militant radicalism of other social groupings only reinforces New Left, poly-vanguardist illusions.
The WL's approach to building a youth group is not just an aberration, but flows directly and consistently from the real "method" of the WL which sacrifices Marxist principle to the opportunities of the moment. We have assembled a few of the more glaring examples of the opportunism of the WL which have led us to characterize this group as counterfeit Trotskyists and what Lenin called "political bandits. "
Some Questions for the WL
The WL supported the reactionary and racist strike of NYC police in Jan. 1971, claiming that cops are workers too, and in fact-were leading the struggle of all NYC labor. How can they simultaneously defend the Panthers or the Attica prisoners, most of whom were put there by the same cops? If there hadn't been a riot, would they have supported the demands of the Attica Correction Officers—all AFSCME members—for better riot equipment?
The WL characterized the Panthers as a black version of the Weathermen and "proto-fascist" in Oct. 1969, and thereby on the other side of the class line. Yet a year later the WL hailed Huey Newton for embracing "dialectics"(shortly before he embraced the church).
While now attacking the Mao Tse Tung government of China for its criminal support of the West Pakistan government for cheap diplomatic advantage, they fail to mention that the WL called for support to Mao during the Cultural Revolution because "Mao's line has not been one of capitulation to imperialism.”
Instead of a policy of revolutionary defeatism on both sides in the India-Pakistani war, the WL urges support for India, thereby subordinating the just Bengali struggle to the ambitions of the Indian bourgeoisie, and abandoning Trot¬sky's theory of Permanent Revolution which states that only through proletarian revolution can even bourgeois-democratic demands be real¬ized in the colonial countries.
The WL denounces the Bolivian Partido Obrero Revolucionaro for its popular frontist maneuvers. Yet the WL itself called for support to the Allende Popular Front in Chile, claiming "as a step in this understanding the workers must hold Allende to his promises.” (21 Sept '70). This formulation "to support insofar as... “was the same rationale used by Stalin to support Kerensky in 1917, and was fought by Lenin.
The WL condemned any participation in the NPAC April 24 demonstration as class collaboration, then turned around and defended the right of imperialist U. S. Senator Hartke to speak "against the war" at the July 4 NPAC conference, joining with goon squads of the reformist SWP to beat up and expel Spartacists, RCYers and others who oppose class collaboration in the anti-war movement.
Does the WL still defend excluding any reference to either racial oppression or the Vietnam war from their "labor party" program as they did in 1968 when they formed "Trade Unionists for a Labor Party"?
For years the WL touted its cynical toadying to Gerry Healy's SLL in England as "internationalism" and passed off the "International Committee"—a rotten bloc between the SLL and the French OCI, along with their respective satellites—as a disciplined international organization. The IC split has now ripped away this "internationalist" facade from what was all along a non-aggression pact papering over basic and long-standing differences.
Don't Be Fooled!
These are only a selection of the twists and turns and 180 degree shifts in line of the WL in the recent past. They are typical of the entire history of this group since its inception. The Spartacist League wrote in 1970: "Faced with such a history, the much vaunted 'Marxist method' that Wohlforth teaches his members is of necessity a profound cynicism which cannot but erode and destroy the backbone of those who start out by seeking revolution and end up following Wohlforth ever deeper into the mire, " We say to young militants seeking the path of revolutionary communism: do not take the "fools gold" of the Workers League for good coin. There is a lot more than loud speeches and big banners involved in becoming a professional revolutionist.
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
******
Markin comment on this article:
As far as I know the youth group of this organization, the Workers League, no longer exits (I will stand corrected if the case is otherwise) but that is not as important as the question posed in the article about youth vanguardism. In America that question, the question of who would lead the revolution, has been resolved by time and history. Not the youth, at least not youth as an undifferentiated mass, and certainly not youth as Ipod/facebook/myspace/sidekick/whatever nation. Nevertheless, as the student upsurges in Europe, especially France and Great Britain, portent this question could come up again. Moreover, this article is a nice exposition on the relationship between the revolutionary party and its youth auxiliary, and what it should not be.
********
From The Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter (forbears of the Young Spartacus Youth Clubs), Number 10-January/February 1972
Workers League Youth Vanguardism: Fake Youth Conference
NEW YORK--The Workers League "Conference for Youth to Fight Back" held December 18 re¬presented yet another in the WL's long series of attempts to set up a youth front group in the U.S. ("Revolt,” "YoungWorkers League, “etc.) Tim Wohlforth followed the precedent set by his mentor, Gerry Healy of the British Socialist Labour League, right down the line in setting up his youth conference just like the British Young Socialists, the street-demonstration, rock-band low-level youth group Healy personally runs.
Wohlforth himself set the tone of the conference, which was youth vanguardist through and through. "Youth will bring consciousness to the working class, " "Youth will force the trade unions to take up the struggle, " he drummed into his audience, which consisted mostly of high school students, most of whom have probably never attended a radical political meeting before. The other speeches given, one by a member of the Young Socialists, who in her opening remarks attacked the Spartacist League, and one by a Peruvian attacking the Partido Obrero Revolucionario of Bolivia, went over the heads of most of the audience, whose questions were naive ones such as "Will we lose our freedom under socialism?, " "What is Stalinism?, " etc. When the question of unity of the left was raised, Lucy St. John said, “We are the only revolutionary tendency in the world!" The young audience was thus whipped into shape, warned to avoid other groups on the left—all of which, according to the WL, embody betrayal itself-revisionism, Stalinism or reformism.
What was omitted is as important as what was said. During the hour or so of audience questions about "unity,” Wohlforth and Co. never used, much less explained, the term "united front.” Such vital questions as racial and sex¬ual oppression and imperialism were not even marginally mentioned.
In order to appeal to youth militancy, Wohlforth exaggerated fascistic elements in the U. S. today. He warned, “We'll all be in concentration camps in a few years if something isn't done—that's how far they'll go!"
The entire conference was run in extreme bureaucratic fashion, with questions left inadequately answered or unanswered altogether. Political opponents were excluded on sight. One speaker, suspected of being a supporter of the Labor Committee, was ordered to sit down in the middle of asking a question.
Youth Manipulation
At the end of the speeches, voting took place. On what, one may well ask--on the "program" (the leaflet handed out for the conference), on having a steering committee (for what?), and to have an "action" sometime in March. There was no discussion, there was no explanation of what this voting meant, of whether it is the founding of a youth organization, of the relation of youth to the party, no explanation of anything.
This "democratic" gesture—the vote—was a cynical and disgusting manipulation of potentially serious young militants. To ram through this "program,” to manipulate young militants who lack the experience to see through this trickery--or if they do, who will walk out disgusted by what they believe to be "socialism"--is a crime against the revolutionary movement.
Of course, we realize the WL could not afford discussion on its "program,” could not afford comparison to other radical groups, particularly to the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY), the youth section of the Spartacist League. The RCY is not a front group, but a Trotskyist youth group affiliated to the SL along Leninist lines of organization. The RCY sees the working class, not the undifferentiated "youth" as the vanguard of the revolution. The SL-RCY passed out a leaflet criticizing the "program" and had available the RCY program, organizational rules and youth-party relations document in pamphlet form. (Our founding conference spent two full days going over these documents, following two months of pre-conference discussion, and only after this thorough and democratic discussion, voted and approved them!)
WL Youth "Program"
The WL "program" is notable for its lack of Trotskyist politics—the word "socialist" ap¬pears only once, and then as the unspecified program for the future "labor party,” which is called for without a single reference to the strug¬gle against the reactionary trade union bureaucracy. The "program" is largely economist in content; for example, the section on the Vietnam war does not even mention military support to the NLF against imperialism! Its primary purpose is stated as building "the widest campaign among the youth"—which youth, Wohlforth made clear at the conference, is "all youth who want to fight back, " recruited at the dances, at the sporting events, off the streets, anywhere and everywhere! This assumes the undifferentiated "youth" to be inherently revolutionary, a capitulation to petty-bourgeois misconceptions. (In typical flip-flop fashion, Wohlforth took the opposite position a few nights earlier at Stony Brook, where driven to a rage by opposition questions from the floor, he screamed, "The WL is entirely hostile to the middle class!", also a thoroughly un-Marxist position, since the middle class is an intermediate social class and in periods of social crisis elements drawn from the middle class can be won to the proletarian revolutionary cause.)
The WL youth conference represented a profound capitulation to the petty-bourgeois mood of youth vanguardism~-the idea that "the youth,” who are in fact drawn from all social classes, are. inherently revolutionary. Given strong working-class leadership, other oppressed groups (youth, ethnic minorities, women, etc.) can be a valuable component of the revolutionary movement. But without deep political and organizational ties to the Trotskyist proletarian van¬guard organization, the militant radicalism of other social groupings only reinforces New Left, poly-vanguardist illusions.
The WL's approach to building a youth group is not just an aberration, but flows directly and consistently from the real "method" of the WL which sacrifices Marxist principle to the opportunities of the moment. We have assembled a few of the more glaring examples of the opportunism of the WL which have led us to characterize this group as counterfeit Trotskyists and what Lenin called "political bandits. "
Some Questions for the WL
The WL supported the reactionary and racist strike of NYC police in Jan. 1971, claiming that cops are workers too, and in fact-were leading the struggle of all NYC labor. How can they simultaneously defend the Panthers or the Attica prisoners, most of whom were put there by the same cops? If there hadn't been a riot, would they have supported the demands of the Attica Correction Officers—all AFSCME members—for better riot equipment?
The WL characterized the Panthers as a black version of the Weathermen and "proto-fascist" in Oct. 1969, and thereby on the other side of the class line. Yet a year later the WL hailed Huey Newton for embracing "dialectics"(shortly before he embraced the church).
While now attacking the Mao Tse Tung government of China for its criminal support of the West Pakistan government for cheap diplomatic advantage, they fail to mention that the WL called for support to Mao during the Cultural Revolution because "Mao's line has not been one of capitulation to imperialism.”
Instead of a policy of revolutionary defeatism on both sides in the India-Pakistani war, the WL urges support for India, thereby subordinating the just Bengali struggle to the ambitions of the Indian bourgeoisie, and abandoning Trot¬sky's theory of Permanent Revolution which states that only through proletarian revolution can even bourgeois-democratic demands be real¬ized in the colonial countries.
The WL denounces the Bolivian Partido Obrero Revolucionaro for its popular frontist maneuvers. Yet the WL itself called for support to the Allende Popular Front in Chile, claiming "as a step in this understanding the workers must hold Allende to his promises.” (21 Sept '70). This formulation "to support insofar as... “was the same rationale used by Stalin to support Kerensky in 1917, and was fought by Lenin.
The WL condemned any participation in the NPAC April 24 demonstration as class collaboration, then turned around and defended the right of imperialist U. S. Senator Hartke to speak "against the war" at the July 4 NPAC conference, joining with goon squads of the reformist SWP to beat up and expel Spartacists, RCYers and others who oppose class collaboration in the anti-war movement.
Does the WL still defend excluding any reference to either racial oppression or the Vietnam war from their "labor party" program as they did in 1968 when they formed "Trade Unionists for a Labor Party"?
For years the WL touted its cynical toadying to Gerry Healy's SLL in England as "internationalism" and passed off the "International Committee"—a rotten bloc between the SLL and the French OCI, along with their respective satellites—as a disciplined international organization. The IC split has now ripped away this "internationalist" facade from what was all along a non-aggression pact papering over basic and long-standing differences.
Don't Be Fooled!
These are only a selection of the twists and turns and 180 degree shifts in line of the WL in the recent past. They are typical of the entire history of this group since its inception. The Spartacist League wrote in 1970: "Faced with such a history, the much vaunted 'Marxist method' that Wohlforth teaches his members is of necessity a profound cynicism which cannot but erode and destroy the backbone of those who start out by seeking revolution and end up following Wohlforth ever deeper into the mire, " We say to young militants seeking the path of revolutionary communism: do not take the "fools gold" of the Workers League for good coin. There is a lot more than loud speeches and big banners involved in becoming a professional revolutionist.
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-The Question of the Unity of Internationalists(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 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 Question of the Unity of Internationalists
Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 41, May 1, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 188-191.
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 war has led to a grave crisis in the whole of international socialism. Like any other crisis, the present crisis of socialism has revealed ever more clearly the inner contradictions lying deep within it; it has torn off many a false and conventional mask, and has shown up in the sharpest light what is outmoded and rotten in socialism, and what its further growth and advance towards victory will depend on.
Practically all Social-Democrats in Russia realise that. the old divisions and groupings are, if not obsolescent, then at least undergoing a transformation. In the forefront is the division on the main issue raised by the war, viz., the division into “internationalists” and “social-patriots”. We have taken these terms from the editorial in Nashe Slovo No. 42, and for the time being shall not deal with the question of whether they should be supplemented by contrasting revolutionary Social-Democrats with national liberal-labour politicians.
It is not a matter of names, to be sure; the gist of the main present-day division has been correctly indicated in Nashe Slovo . The internationalists, it says, are “united in their negative attitude towards social-patriotism as represented by Plekhanov”. The editors call upon the “now disunited groups” “to come to an understanding and unite for at least a single act-expressing the attitude of Russian Social-Democrats towards the present. war and Russian social-patriotism”.
Besides this appeal through the press, the editors of Nashe Slovo have sent a letter to us and the Organising Committee, proposing that, with their participation, a conference be called to discuss the matter. In our reply we spoke of the necessity “to clarify certain preliminary questions, so as to know whether we are at one in the main issue”. We stressed two such preliminary questions: (1) no declaration would help unmask the “social-patriots” (the editors naming Plekhanov, Alexinsky, and the well-known group of Petrograd liquidationist writers who support the XYZ journal[1] who “falsify the will of the advanced proletariat of Russia” (the expression used by the editors of Nashe Slovo); to unmask the social-patriots, a protracted struggle is necessary; (2) what grounds were there to count the Organising Committee among the “internationalists”?
On the other hand, the Organising Committee’s secretariat abroad sent us a copy of its reply to Nashe Slovo, which, in short, asserted that a “preliminary” selection of certain groups and the “exclusion of others” were out of the question; and that “invitations to the conference should be sent to the representatives abroad of all party centres and groups that attended ... the Brussels Conference of the International Socialist Bureau before the war” (letter of March 25, 1915).
Thus, the Organising Committee has declined on principle to confer with the internationalists alone, since it wishes also to confer with the social-patriots (the Plekhanov and the Alexinsky trends are known to have been represented at Brussels). The same spirit marked the resolution of the Social-Democrats gathered in Nervi (Nashe Slovo No. 53), which was adopted following Yonov’s report (and obviously expressed the views of this representative of the most radical and internationalist elements in the Bund).
This resolution, which is highly characteristic and valuable in helping us specify the “middle road” being sought by many socialists living abroad, expresses sympathy with Nashe Slovo’s “principles”, but at the same time expresses disagreement with Nashe S/ova’s stand, “which consists in creating organisational divisions, uniting internationalist socialists alone, and defending the necessity of splits within socialist proletarian parties that have historically come into being”. In the opinion of the gathering, Nashe Slovo’s “one-sided handling” (of these questions) is “highly detrimental to clarification of problems connected with the restoration of the International”.
We have already pointed out that the views of Axeirod, the Organising Committee’s official representative, are social-chauvinist. Neither in the press nor in its correspondence has Nashe Slovo made any reply to this. We have pointed out that the Burid’s stand is the same, with a bias towards Germanophile chauvinism. The Nervi resolution has born this out in a manner which, if indirect, is highly significant: it has declared that unification of internationalists alone is harmful and schismatic. The question has been presented with a clarity that is most praiseworthy.
Still clearer is the Organising Committee’s reply, which expresses, not an oblique attitude towards the issue, but one that is straightforward and formal. We must confer, it says, not without the social-patriots, but with them.
We should be thankful to the Organising Committee for its letter to Nashe Slovo, confirming the correctness of our opinion of that body.
Does that mean that Nashe Slovo’s entire idea of uniting the internationalists has been wrecked? No, it does not. While there exist ideological solidarity and a sincere desire to combat social-patriotism, no failure of any conferences can check unity among internationalists. At the disposal of the editors of Nashe Slovo is the great instrument of a daily paper. They can do something immeasurably more businesslike and serious than calling conferences and issuing declarations; they can invite all groups, and themselves start: (1) to immediately evolve full, precise, unequivocal and perfectly clear definitions of the content of internationalism (it being a fact that Vandervelde, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lensch, and Haenisch also call themselves internationalists!), of opportunism, the collapse of the Second International, the tasks and the methods of combating socialpatriotism, etc.; (2) to rally forces for a severe struggle for certain principles, not only abroad, but mainly in Russia.
Indeed, can anyone deny that there is no other way towards the victory of internationalism over social-patriotism, and that there can be none? Half a century of Russian political emigration (and thirty years of Social-Democratic emigration)-have these not shown that all declarations, conferences, etc., abroad are powerless, insignificant, and empty, unless they are supported by a lasting movement of some social stratum in Russia? Does not the present war also teach us that everything that is immature or decaying, everything that is conventional or diplomatic, will collapse at the first blow?
During the eight months of war, all Social-Democratic centres, groups, currents, and shades of opinion have held conferences with all and sundry, and have come out with “declarations”, i.e., made their opinions known to the public. Today the task is different, and closer to action: more distrust of resonant declarations and spectacular conferences; more energy in evolving precise replies and advice to writers, propagandists, agitators, and all thinking workers, written in a way that cannot but be understood; more clarity and purposefulness in mustering the forces for a long-term effort to give effect to such advice.
Much has been given to the editors of Nashe Slovo—after all, they are a daily paper!—and they will have much to answer for if they fail to carry out even this “minimum programme”.
A final remark: in May 1910, exactly five years ago, we made mention, in our press abroad, of a highly outstanding political fact, of “far greater significance” than the conferences and declarations of many very “powerful” Social-Democratic centres, i. e., the fact of the formation in Russia of a group of legalist writers working in the selfsame XYZ journal. What has been shown by the facts during these five years, so eventful in the history of the labour movement in Russia and the whole world? Have not the facts shown that in Russia we have a certain social nucleus to rally the elements of a national liberal-labour party (after the “European” pattern)? What are the conclusions forced on all Social-Democrats by the circumstance that, with the exception of Voprosy Strakhovaniya,[2] we see, in Russia, the open expression only of this current, Nashe Dyelo, Strahhovaniye Rabochikh, Severny Gobs,[3] Maslov and Plekhanov?
So we repeat: more distrust of resonant declarations, and more courage in facing grave political realities.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] Lenin is referring to Nasha Zarya, a journal of the Menshevik liquidators.
[2] Voprosy Strakhovaniya (Problems of Insurance)—a Bolshevik legal journal, published at intervals in St. Petersburg from October 1913 to March 1918. It worked, not only for the achievement of workers’ insurance, but also for the Bolshevik “uncurtailed slogans” of an eight-hour day, confiscation of the landed estates, and a democratic republic. The Bolsheviks A. N. Vinokurov, N. A. Skripnik, P. I. Stuka, N. M. Shvernik and others contributed to the journal.
[3] Severny Gales (Voice of the North)—Menshevik weekly, publshed in Petrograd from January to March 1915.
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
The Question of the Unity of Internationalists
Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 41, May 1, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 188-191.
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
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The war has led to a grave crisis in the whole of international socialism. Like any other crisis, the present crisis of socialism has revealed ever more clearly the inner contradictions lying deep within it; it has torn off many a false and conventional mask, and has shown up in the sharpest light what is outmoded and rotten in socialism, and what its further growth and advance towards victory will depend on.
Practically all Social-Democrats in Russia realise that. the old divisions and groupings are, if not obsolescent, then at least undergoing a transformation. In the forefront is the division on the main issue raised by the war, viz., the division into “internationalists” and “social-patriots”. We have taken these terms from the editorial in Nashe Slovo No. 42, and for the time being shall not deal with the question of whether they should be supplemented by contrasting revolutionary Social-Democrats with national liberal-labour politicians.
It is not a matter of names, to be sure; the gist of the main present-day division has been correctly indicated in Nashe Slovo . The internationalists, it says, are “united in their negative attitude towards social-patriotism as represented by Plekhanov”. The editors call upon the “now disunited groups” “to come to an understanding and unite for at least a single act-expressing the attitude of Russian Social-Democrats towards the present. war and Russian social-patriotism”.
Besides this appeal through the press, the editors of Nashe Slovo have sent a letter to us and the Organising Committee, proposing that, with their participation, a conference be called to discuss the matter. In our reply we spoke of the necessity “to clarify certain preliminary questions, so as to know whether we are at one in the main issue”. We stressed two such preliminary questions: (1) no declaration would help unmask the “social-patriots” (the editors naming Plekhanov, Alexinsky, and the well-known group of Petrograd liquidationist writers who support the XYZ journal[1] who “falsify the will of the advanced proletariat of Russia” (the expression used by the editors of Nashe Slovo); to unmask the social-patriots, a protracted struggle is necessary; (2) what grounds were there to count the Organising Committee among the “internationalists”?
On the other hand, the Organising Committee’s secretariat abroad sent us a copy of its reply to Nashe Slovo, which, in short, asserted that a “preliminary” selection of certain groups and the “exclusion of others” were out of the question; and that “invitations to the conference should be sent to the representatives abroad of all party centres and groups that attended ... the Brussels Conference of the International Socialist Bureau before the war” (letter of March 25, 1915).
Thus, the Organising Committee has declined on principle to confer with the internationalists alone, since it wishes also to confer with the social-patriots (the Plekhanov and the Alexinsky trends are known to have been represented at Brussels). The same spirit marked the resolution of the Social-Democrats gathered in Nervi (Nashe Slovo No. 53), which was adopted following Yonov’s report (and obviously expressed the views of this representative of the most radical and internationalist elements in the Bund).
This resolution, which is highly characteristic and valuable in helping us specify the “middle road” being sought by many socialists living abroad, expresses sympathy with Nashe Slovo’s “principles”, but at the same time expresses disagreement with Nashe S/ova’s stand, “which consists in creating organisational divisions, uniting internationalist socialists alone, and defending the necessity of splits within socialist proletarian parties that have historically come into being”. In the opinion of the gathering, Nashe Slovo’s “one-sided handling” (of these questions) is “highly detrimental to clarification of problems connected with the restoration of the International”.
We have already pointed out that the views of Axeirod, the Organising Committee’s official representative, are social-chauvinist. Neither in the press nor in its correspondence has Nashe Slovo made any reply to this. We have pointed out that the Burid’s stand is the same, with a bias towards Germanophile chauvinism. The Nervi resolution has born this out in a manner which, if indirect, is highly significant: it has declared that unification of internationalists alone is harmful and schismatic. The question has been presented with a clarity that is most praiseworthy.
Still clearer is the Organising Committee’s reply, which expresses, not an oblique attitude towards the issue, but one that is straightforward and formal. We must confer, it says, not without the social-patriots, but with them.
We should be thankful to the Organising Committee for its letter to Nashe Slovo, confirming the correctness of our opinion of that body.
Does that mean that Nashe Slovo’s entire idea of uniting the internationalists has been wrecked? No, it does not. While there exist ideological solidarity and a sincere desire to combat social-patriotism, no failure of any conferences can check unity among internationalists. At the disposal of the editors of Nashe Slovo is the great instrument of a daily paper. They can do something immeasurably more businesslike and serious than calling conferences and issuing declarations; they can invite all groups, and themselves start: (1) to immediately evolve full, precise, unequivocal and perfectly clear definitions of the content of internationalism (it being a fact that Vandervelde, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lensch, and Haenisch also call themselves internationalists!), of opportunism, the collapse of the Second International, the tasks and the methods of combating socialpatriotism, etc.; (2) to rally forces for a severe struggle for certain principles, not only abroad, but mainly in Russia.
Indeed, can anyone deny that there is no other way towards the victory of internationalism over social-patriotism, and that there can be none? Half a century of Russian political emigration (and thirty years of Social-Democratic emigration)-have these not shown that all declarations, conferences, etc., abroad are powerless, insignificant, and empty, unless they are supported by a lasting movement of some social stratum in Russia? Does not the present war also teach us that everything that is immature or decaying, everything that is conventional or diplomatic, will collapse at the first blow?
During the eight months of war, all Social-Democratic centres, groups, currents, and shades of opinion have held conferences with all and sundry, and have come out with “declarations”, i.e., made their opinions known to the public. Today the task is different, and closer to action: more distrust of resonant declarations and spectacular conferences; more energy in evolving precise replies and advice to writers, propagandists, agitators, and all thinking workers, written in a way that cannot but be understood; more clarity and purposefulness in mustering the forces for a long-term effort to give effect to such advice.
Much has been given to the editors of Nashe Slovo—after all, they are a daily paper!—and they will have much to answer for if they fail to carry out even this “minimum programme”.
A final remark: in May 1910, exactly five years ago, we made mention, in our press abroad, of a highly outstanding political fact, of “far greater significance” than the conferences and declarations of many very “powerful” Social-Democratic centres, i. e., the fact of the formation in Russia of a group of legalist writers working in the selfsame XYZ journal. What has been shown by the facts during these five years, so eventful in the history of the labour movement in Russia and the whole world? Have not the facts shown that in Russia we have a certain social nucleus to rally the elements of a national liberal-labour party (after the “European” pattern)? What are the conclusions forced on all Social-Democrats by the circumstance that, with the exception of Voprosy Strakhovaniya,[2] we see, in Russia, the open expression only of this current, Nashe Dyelo, Strahhovaniye Rabochikh, Severny Gobs,[3] Maslov and Plekhanov?
So we repeat: more distrust of resonant declarations, and more courage in facing grave political realities.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] Lenin is referring to Nasha Zarya, a journal of the Menshevik liquidators.
[2] Voprosy Strakhovaniya (Problems of Insurance)—a Bolshevik legal journal, published at intervals in St. Petersburg from October 1913 to March 1918. It worked, not only for the achievement of workers’ insurance, but also for the Bolshevik “uncurtailed slogans” of an eight-hour day, confiscation of the landed estates, and a democratic republic. The Bolsheviks A. N. Vinokurov, N. A. Skripnik, P. I. Stuka, N. M. Shvernik and others contributed to the journal.
[3] Severny Gales (Voice of the North)—Menshevik weekly, publshed in Petrograd from January to March 1915.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Early American Communist Party Leader John Reed -On Imperialist "Aid"
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.
*********
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!
******
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.
*********
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!
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
***********
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
*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.
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