From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- "Lenin And The Vanguard Party"-Part One- "Kautskyism & the Origins of Russian Social Democracy"

Lenin And The Vanguard Party

Markin comment on this series of articles:

Oddly enough, when I first became serious about making a revolution in the early 1970s, a socialist working class-led revolution, in the eternal quest for a more just and equitable society, there were plenty (no enough, there are never enough, but plenty) of kindred spirits who were also finding out that it was not enough to “pray” such a revolution into existence but that one had to build a party, a vanguard party in order to do so. The name "Lenin," the designation "Bolshevik," and the term "world socialist revolution" flowed easily from the tongue in the circles that I began to hang around in. As I write this general introduction, right this minute in 2011, to an important series of historical articles about the actual creation, in real time, of a Leninist vanguard working class party (and International, as well) there are few kindred, fewer still in America, maybe, fewest still, and this is not good, among the youth, to carry the message forward. Nevertheless, whatever future form the next stage in the struggle for the socialist revolution takes the question of the party, the vanguard party really, will still press upon the heads of those who wish to make it.

Although today there is no mass Bolshevik-style vanguard party (or International)-anywhere-there are groups, grouplets, leagues, tendencies, and ad hoc committees that have cadre from which the nucleus for such a formation could be formed-if we can keep it. And part of the process of being able to “keep it” is to understand what Lenin was trying to do back in the early 1900s (yes, 1900s) in Russia that is applicable today. Quite a bit, actually, as it turns out. And for all those think that the Leninist process, and as the writer of these articles is at pains to point it was an unfolding process, was simple and the cadre that had to be worked with was as pure as the driven snow I would suggest this thought. No less an august revolutionary figure that Leon Trotsky, once he got “religion” on the Bolshevik organizational question (in many ways the question of the success of the revolution), did not, try might and main, have success in forming such a mass organization. We can fight out the details from that perspective learning from the successes and failures, and fight to get many more kindred.
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Markin comment on this article:

The key point to be taken from this article is that the vanguard party idea, while embedded in all that Bolshevism stood for from the start in the disputes of the Russian Social Democracy, only had its parameters defined over time, and in the process of the class struggle first in Russia (in both 1905 and 1917) and later, after the formation of the Communist International in 1919, internationally. Additionally, as the recent events in the Middle East point out, once again, without a vanguard party, against a vanguard party, over the head of a vanguard party (meaning some anarchist “free for all” notion of revolution) the working masses and their allies cannot take power and institute the necessary socialist reconstruction of society. There are no short-cuts if you are serious about revolutionary change. If not, then you do not need a vanguard party, no question. But what do you have, as the Middle east situation again points out, after all those struggles?
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From-Lenin and The Vanguard Party-Preface To The Second Edition And Part One

Preface to the Second Edition

Lenin and the Vanguard Party, first issued as a Spartacist pamphlet in 1978, comprises articles by SL/U.S. Central Committee member Joseph Seymour originally published in 1977 and 1978 as a series in Workers Vanguard, newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S. The articles take up Lenin's fight to forge a revolutionary leadership, an internationalist vanguard party, to lead the proletariat to the conquest of state power through socialist revolution. The pamphlet also includes, under the title "In Defense of Democratic Centralism," excerpts from a speech by SL/U.S. national chairman James Robertson given to a national conference of the West German group, Spartacus (Bolschewiki-Leninisten), in February 1973.

In this second, slightly edited edition of Lenin and the Vanguard Party we have added the transcript of a presentation by SL/U.S. Central Committee member Al Nelson to a Spartacus Youth Club gathering in the San Francisco Bay Area which appeared originally in Workers Vanguard No. 634, 1 December 1995. Titled "The Fight for a Leninist Vanguard Party," this presentation provides an overall historical and political summation of the crucial importance of the "party question."

A number of the organizations which nominally claimed the heritage of Leninism and whose positions are polemi-cized against in comrade Seymour's series, no longer exist as such. The British International Marxist Group (IMG), an affiliate of the "United Secretariat of the Fourth International" (USec) and in the 1970s one of the largest groups on the British left, has long since ceased to exist. Under the impact of the imperialist anti-Soviet Cold War II of the 1980s, the IMG liquidated into the pro-imperialist Labour Party. The shattered remnants regrouped into a number of much smaller organizations, including Socialist Outlook which claims affiliation to the USec.

The hallmark of the USec has long been its liquidation of the need for a revolutionary party and its corresponding pur¬suit of social forces other than the proletariat and vehicles other than a Leninist vanguard party to further the cause of human emancipation. Having spent the 1980s tailing after the social democrats and championing the cause of capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe, today the USec is in a state of near-terminal disintegration. With the destruction of the bureaucratically deformed workers states in East Europe and the Soviet Union and the triumphalism of the world's bourgeois rulers over the "death of communism," the USec, together with much of the rest of the left, has repudiated even the pretense of Leninism as it seeks "regroupment" with social democrats, ex-Stalinists, Greens, other so-called "progressives" and even openly cap¬italist forces, within larger reformist organizations.

In the 1970s, Gerry Healy's International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) postured as the defender of Trotskyist orthodoxy against the USec. Healy's organization imploded in 1985 amidst a welter of exposes of its bought-and-paid-for services on behalf of a number of oil-rich Arab regimes in the Middle East (see Spartacist No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86). The criminal political machinations of the Healy-ites—which grotesquely included cheering the 1979 murder of members of the Iraqi Communist Party by the strongman regime of Saddam Hussein—were matched internally by a brutal bureaucratic regime. The Healyites practiced gangsterism, cop-baiting and a deranged interpretation of "dialectics." The purpose of these techniques was to ensure the membership's cowed acceptance of whatever line the leader¬ship divined in the pursuit of its own opportunist advantage.

It was a biographical rendition of Lenin as a Menshevik, written by British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) head Tony Cliff, which impelled us to write the Lenin and the Van¬guard Party series. Today, the SWP continues to peddle its reformist wares as a so-called "socialist alternative." The origins of the SWP lie in Cliff's rejection of the Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense of the gains of the October Revolution—which continued to be represented in the proletarian property forms of the Soviet Union, how¬ever bureaucratically deformed, and of the deformed workers states of East Europe, China, North Korea, Cuba and Vietnam—at the time of the Korean War. Born of capitulation to the anti-communism of the imperialist rulers, the politics of the SWP and its international satellites continue to be defined by an accommodation to the rule of capital whose "excesses" they seek merely to alleviate. Thus the Cliffites are a modern-day expression of the Kautskyite/ Menshevik rejection of the struggle for a Leninist vanguard party.

Today, in the aftermath of the final betrayal of the gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution by the Stalinist misrulers who opened the gates for the destruction of the former Soviet Union by the forces of world imperialism, the idea that the key to the liberation of mankind lies through a proletarian socialist revolution like that successfully pursued by Lenin's Bolshevik Party seems rather esoteric even to sub¬jective leftists. This is due in no small measure to the crimes of the Stalinists, who made a mockery of the ideals of revolutionary Marxism and the instrument for achieving their realization, a Leninist vanguard party.

We of the International Communist League fight for new October Revolutions. In reissuing Lenin and the Vanguard Party we intend to arm those who seek to oppose this system, which is based on the exploitation and oppression of the many by the few, with the program desperately needed to eradicate it. Serving as the memory of the working class, imbuing the proletariat and the new generations of youth with the historic lessons of those who fought before them, is a vital purpose of the vanguard party, necessary to lead the working class to new victories.
—5 August 1997
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Kautskyism & the Origins of Russian Social Democracy

Recently the British International Marxist Group (IMG) and the International Socialists (now Socialist Workers Party—SWP/IS), two of the largest groups of the British "far left," have taken to revising the history of the Bolsheviks. These groups have attempted to deny or obfuscate the principle of a democratic-centralist vanguard party by pointing to those elements of classic Social Democracy retained by the pre-1914 Bolsheviks as well as to Lenin's tactical maneuvers against the Mensheviks.

The IMG, British section of the pseudo-Trotskyist United Secretariat, has performed the remarkable feat of making Lenin out to be a unity-above-all conciliator on the grounds that until 1912 the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were formally factions within a unitary Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP). The aim of this particular revisionism is to justify a grand unity maneuver for the British left. Their line is that "the political differences which Lenin and Trotsky considered could be contained within a united organization were vastly greater than those which divide the revolutionary left in Britain today" (Red Weekly, 11 November 1976). For an extended treatment of the IMG's revisionism and its shabby tactical purpose, see "IMG Turns Lenin into a Menshevik," Workers Vanguard No. 164, 1 July 1977.

The most ambitious rewriting of Bolshevik history is that of Tony Cliff, longtime leader of the workerist-reformist SUT/IS. The Cliff tendency today sports a "left" veneer" sometimes they even parade around with portraits of Lenin anc Trotsky. But this group had its 4th of August long ago, in 1950, under the pressure of intensely anti-Communist public opinion, it refused to defend North Korea ---' U.S. imperialism and broke with the Trotskyist movement over this question. And yet this utterly shameless CIA "socialist" now presumes to lecture on what Lenin reallly meant to say in What Is To Be Done?

In the past, Cliff has been a prominent, explicitly anti-Leninist purveyor of Menshevism. His 1959 pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg states: "For Marxists in the advanced industrial countries Lenin's original position can much less serve as a guide than Rosa Luxemburg's." This bald statement was the second (1968) edition, but Cliff's substantive position remained the same.

However the Cliffites are nothing if not trendy. And in contrast to the 1950s and '60s, "hard" Bolshevism is now "in" among young leftists. So recently Cliff has written a seemingly sympathetic biography of Lenin, of which two of three projected volumes have appeared. Here Cliff presents Lenin in his own image as a nationally limited, workerist eclectic. Cliff's central message is that there are no Leninist principles or even norms on the organization question:

"Lenin's attitude to organisational forms was always historically concrete, hence its strength. He was never taken in by abstract, dogmatic schemes of organisation, but always ready to change the organisational structure of the party to reflect the development of the class struggle.

"Organisation is subordinate to politics. This does not mean that it has no independent influence on politics. But it is, and must be, subordinated to the concrete policies of the day. The truth is always concrete, as Lenin reiterated again and again. And this also applies to the organisational forms needed to undertake the concrete tasks." [emphasis in original]
In other words, whatever works at the time, do it.

Genuine Leninists recognize the primacy of the principles embodied in the first four congresses of the Communist International over pre-1914 Bolshevik practice. Furthermore, Trotsky in building the Fourth International systematized and deepened Leninist concepts developed in rudimentary form during the revolutionary turmoil of 1917-23. To deny the evolution of Bolshevism from 1903 to 1917 is to obliterate the principled opposition of Leninism to Kautskyism. To appeal to pre-1914 Bolshevik practice against the democratic centralism of Trotsky's Fourth International is equivalent to citing Lenin's "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry" against Trotsky's "permanent revolution."

The Kautskyan Party of the Whole Class

The first volume of Cliff's biography, subtitled "Building the Party," ends in 1914. This work mentions Kautsky exactly twice and the Second International not at all! Such an incredible omission warrants dismissing Cliff's book out of hand as a serious study of Lenin's position on the party question.

From August Bebel's offer in 1905 to mediate the Bolshevik-Menshevik split to the "unity conference" arranged by the International Socialist Bureau on the eve of World War I, the International leadership played a significant role in the internal life of the RSDRP. The pro-unity elements in particular, above all Luxemburg and Trotsky, sought to achieve through the German-centered International what they could not attain within the Russian movement.

Lenin was a revolutionary social democrat and, as Cliff himself notes in his second volume, Kautsky "had been the only living socialist leader whom Lenin revered." (This is actually an overstatement: in 1905 when Kautsky supported the Mensheviks, Lenin was harshly critical of him.) An understanding of Lenin's position on the party question must therefore begin with the orthodox Kautskyan position; this was the doctrine of the "party of the whole class," or "one class—one party." Kautsky's "party of the whole class" did not mean the recruitment of the entire proletarian population to the party. He recognized that the political activists within the working class would be an elite minority. No social democrat denied that membership standards involved some level of socialist consciousness, activism and discipline. What the Kautskyan doctrine did mean was that all tendencies regard¬ing themselves as socialist should be in a unitary party. Kautsky maintained that revolutionary social democrats could unite and even have comradely collaboration with non-Marxist reformists. Thus the leadership of the German Social Democracy (SPD) at various times collaborated closely with the avowedly reformist, eclectic French socialist, Jean Jaures.

The SPD leadership was immensely proud of their party's disciplined unity, which they regarded as the main source of its strength. Bebel/Kautsky played a decisive role in the 1905 reunification of the French socialists, overcoming the split between the Marxist Parti Socialiste de France led by Jules Guesde and the reformist Parti Socialiste Francais of Jaures. During the campaign to reunite the French, the Interna¬tional adopted the doctrine of "one class—one party" in resolution form at its 1904 Amsterdam Congress:

"In order that the working class may put forth all its strength in the struggle against capitalism it is necessary that in every country there exist vis a vis the bourgeois parties, only one socialist party, as there exists only one proletariat. Therefore, it is the imperative duty of all comrades and socialist organiza¬tions to make every effort to bring about this unity on the basis of the principles established by the international congresses, a unity necessary in the interests of the proletariat before which they are responsible for all fatal consequences of a continued breach." [emphasis in original]

—reproduced in Olga Hess Gankin and H.H. Fisher, eds., The Bolsheviks and the World War (1940)

Before World War I, Lenin never challenged the above principle and on occasion affirmed it. When in 1909 the Bol¬sheviks expelled the ultraleft Otzovists (the "Ultimatists") from their ranks, Lenin justified this by contrasting the exclusiveness of a faction to the inclusiveness of a social-democratic party:

"In our Party Bolshevism is represented by the Bolshevik section. But a section is not a party. A party can contain a whole gamut of opinions and shades of opinion, the extremes of which may be sharply contradictory. In the German party, side by side with the pronouncedly revolutionary wing of Kautsky, we see the ultra-revisionist wing of Bernstein." [emphasis in original]
—"Report on the Conference of the Extended Editorial
Board of Proletary" (July 1909)

In practice in Russia, Lenin strove to create a disciplined, programmatically homogeneous revolutionary vanguard. Until World War I, however, he did not break in principle with the Kautskyan doctrine of "the party of the whole class." The resolution of that dialectical contradiction was one of the important elements creating Leninism as a world-historic doctrine, as the Marxism of our epoch.

Kautsky's Analysis of Opportunism

The Kautskyan doctrine of the inclusive party was predicated on a particular historico-sociological theory oppor tunism. Opportunist tendencies, it was argued, were a survival of petty-bourgeois democracy carried mainly by the intelli¬gentsia and conditioned by the economic and ideological backwardness or immaturity of the working masses. The growth of the proletariat and of its organization would eventually strengthen revolutionary social democracy. Thus, Kautsky could tolerate a current like Jauresism as a kind of inevitable transition from radical democracy to revolutionary Marxism.

Kautsky's identification of opportunism with pre-Marxist tendencies delved from the history of the European left in the decades following the revolutions of 1848. The principal tendencies opposed to Marxism (e.g., Proudhonism, Lassalleanism, Bakuninism) all expressed the desire of the artisan class to prevent its descent into the industrial proletariat. Marx and Engels understood that artisan Utopian socialism could not be defeated simply through propaganda and agitation but required the actual development of capitalist society. It was recognized in the Second International that Marxism superseded such primitivist tendencies as Lassalleanism in Germany and Proudhonism in France primarily through the transformation of the urban artisan classes into a modern proletariat. The process by which Marxism overcame Lassalleanism, Proudhonism, Bakuninism, etc. became for Kautsky a paradigm of the strug¬gle against opportunism in general.

The view of reformism as a historic lag or regression accounts for Kautsky's limited aims in the "revisionist" con¬troversy with Bernstein. He drew a sharp line between naive, pre-Marxian reformists, like Jaures, and the conscious revisers of Marxism. In a letter of 23 May 1902 to Victor Adler, Kautsky defended the Belgian Socialist leadership from the charge of revisionism on the grounds that they were never Marxists to begin with, nor did they pretend to be:

"I maintain an entirely unprejudiced attitude towards them; the talk about their revisionism leaves me cold. They have nothing to revise, for they have no theory. The eclectic vulgar socialism to which the revisionists would like to reduce Marxism is something beyond which they [the Belgian Socialists] have not even begun to advance. Proudhon, Schaffle, Marx—it is all one to them, it was always like that, they have not retrogressed in theory, and I have nothing to reproach them with." —quoted in George Lichtheim, Marxism (1961)

Kautsky's aim in the "revisionist" controversy was not to purge the Second International of reformist tendencies or even practices, but to preserve the doctrinal integrity of the Marxist camp. If this were achieved, believed Kautsky, the development of the class struggle would eventually ensure the triumph of revolutionary social democracy.

Kautsky located the weakness of revolutionary social democracy in the backwardness of the proletariat, which reflected either a continued identification with the petty bourgeoisie or a lack of confidence in the strength of the workers movement:

"To a large degree hatched out of the small capitalist and small farmer class, many proletarians long carry the shells of these classes about with them. They do not feel themselves proletar¬ians, but as would-be property owners.... Others, again, have gone further, and have come to recognize the necessity of fighting the capitalists that stand in antagonism to them, but do not feel themselves secure enough and strong enough to For Kautsky, the growth of the proletariat, of the trade unions, etc. strengthened the objectively revolutionary forces in society. What was required of Social Democracy was a patient, pedagogical attitude toward backward workers, although Kautsky also recognized that class consciousness could leap ahead during a revolutionary crisis.

With the partial exception of Luxemburg, no pre-war social democrat located the main source of reformism in the conservatism of the socially privileged bureaucracy created by the growth and strength of the labor movement, of the social-democratic parties and their trade-union affiliates.

Lenin's Sociological Analysis of Menshevism

Lenin, following Kautsky's methodology, regarded Menshevism as an extension of 19th-century petty-bourgeois radicalism into the workers movement. Because he considered the Mensheviks an "intellectualist" tendency, in a sense standing outside of the workers movement, he could split from them without positing the.existence of two competing social-democratic parties, the one revolutionary, the other reformist. Lenin was convinced that the growth of social democratic organization among the Russian proletariat would ensure the triumph of Bolshevism.

Lenin regarded the 1903 Martovite grouping as an expression and the attitudes and values of the old, freewheeling, individualistic revolutionary intelligentsia, as a rebellion of the circle spirit against against the construction of a real workers party:

Nonetheless, we regard the Party's sickness as a matter of growing pains.
We consider that the underlying cause of the crisis the transition from the circle form to party forms of the life of the Social Deemocracy; the essence of its internal struggle is a conflict between the circle spirit and the party spirit. And, consequently, only by shaking off this sickness can our Party become a real party....

Lastly, the opposition cadres have in general been drawn chiefly form those elements of our Party which consist primarily of intellectulas. The intelligentsia is always more individualistic than the proletariat, owing to its very conditions of life and work which do not directly involve a large-scale combination of efforts, which do not directly educate it through organised collective labor. The intellectual elements therefore find it harder to adapt themselves to the discipline of Party life, and those of them who ar enot equal to it naturally raise the standard
organisational limitations."

-"To The Party" (August 1904)

Lenin likewise analyzed Menshevik Liquidationism during the 1908-12 period (opposition to the underground party) in terms of intellectuals versus the proletariat:

"The first to flee from the underground were the bourgeois intellectuals who succumbed to the counter-revolutionary mood, those'fellow-travellers' of the Social-Democratic working-class movement who, like those in Europe, had been attracted by the liberating role played by the proletariat...in the bourgeois revolution. It is a well-known fact that a mass of Marxists left the underground after 1905 and found places for themselves in all sorts of legal cozy corners for intellectuals."

—"How Vera Zasulich Demolishes Liquidationism" (September 1913)

Lenin's sociological analysis of Menshevism was valid as far as it went. The Martovite grouping in 1903 did represent in part the habits of the old revolutionary intelligentsia; one thinks of Vera Zasulich in this regard. Menshevik Liquida¬tionism did represent in part the fleeing of intellectuals from the RSDRP toward bourgeois respectability during a period of reaction. But Menshevism was not primarily a tendency external to the labor movement. The Russian Mensheviks antici¬pated the labor reformism of the Second International as a whole, including particularly its mass parties. It was only dur¬ing World War I, in the studies which led to Imperialism, that Lenin located the source of social-democratic opportunism within the workers movement—in a labor bureaucracy resting on the upper stratum of the working class.

Iskraism

Organized Russian Marxism originated in 1883 when Plekhanov broke from the dominant populist current to form the tiny exile Emancipation of Labor group. During the late 1880s-early '90s, Marxism in Russia consisted of localized propaganda circles designed to educate a thin layer of advanced workers. In the mid-1890s, the Marxist propaganda circles turned toward mass agitation intersecting a major strike wave. This turn was in part inspired by the Jewish Bund. Ethnic solidarity enabled the Jewish Marxist intelli¬gentsia to reach and organize Jewish workers in advance of Russian Social Democracy as a whole.

In part because of the imprisonment of the more experienced Marxist leaders (e.g., Lenin, Martov), the turn towatd mass agitation rapidly degenerated into reformism. This tendency, dubbed Economism by a hostile Plekhanov, limited its agitation to elementary trade-union demands, while passively supporting the bourgeois liberal efforts to reform tsarist absolutism. In terms of international Social Democracy, the Economists were hostile to orthodox Marxism and consequently were loosely associated with Bernsteinism in Germany and possibilisme in France. In the later 1890s, Economism was the dominant tendency among Russian social democrats.

In 1900, the second generation of Russian Marxists (Lenin, Martov) coalesced with the founding fathers (Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich) to return Russian Social Democracy to its revolutionary traditions as embodied in the original Emancipation of Labor program. The revolutionary Marxist tendency was organized around the paper Iskra. Lenin was the organizer of the Iskra group. He ran the agents in Russia whose task was to win over the local social-democratic committees or if necessary split them. Iskra provided, for the first time, an organizing center for a Russian social-democratic party.

In polemicizing against Lenin's successful splitting tactics, the Economists pointed out that the German center did not seek to exclude the Bernsteinians. Lenin did not and in a sense could not argue for the exclusion of opportunists from the social-democratic party as a principle. Rather he justified his splitting tactics by a series of arguments based on the particularities of the Russian party situation. Right up to World War I, Lenin would appeal to one or another aspect of Russian particularism to justify constructing a programmatically homogeneous, revolutionary vanguard.

What were Lenin's arguments for building the RSDRP without and against the Economists? The German party had strong revolutionary traditions and an authoritative leadership. The Russian party was embryonic and could easily fall prey to opportunism. The German leadership, Bebel/Kautsky, were revolutionary while the Bernsteinians were a small minority; in contrast, the Economists were temporarily the dominant trend in Russian Social Democracy. The German "revisionists" accepted party discipline, the Russian Economists were incapable of accepting party discipline. And in any case, the RSDRP did not exist as a centralized organization. These arguments are presented in What Is To Be Done? (1902):

"The important thing to note is that the opportunist attitude towards revolutionary Social-Democrats in Russia is the very opposite of that in Germany. In Germany...revolutionary Social-Democrats are in favor of preserving what is: they stand in favor of the old program and tactics which are universally known.... The 'critics' desire to introduce changes, and as these critics represent an insignificant minority, and as they are very shy and halting in their revisionist efforts, one can under¬stand the motives of the majority in confining themselves to the dry rejection of 'innovation.' In Russia, however, it is the critics and Economists who are in favor of what is; the 'critics' wish us to continue to regard them as Marxists, and to guarantee them the 'freedom of criticism' which they enjoyed to the full (for, as a matter of fact, they never recognized any kind of Party ties, and, moreover, we never had a generally recognized Party organ which could 'restrict' freedom of criti¬cism even by giving advice)." [emphasis in original]

As is generally recognized, Lenin's 1902 What Is To Be Done? was the authoritative statement of Iskraism. Despite his supposed sympathy toward Lenin, Cliff is much too much a workerist and Menshevik to accept What Is To Be Done? In fact, a central purpose of his biography is to argue that the 1902 polemic is an exaggerated, one-sided statement which in substance Lenin subsequently repudiated.

First Cliff vulgarizes Lenin's position and then polemi-cizes against his own straw-man creation:

"In general the dichotomy between economic and political struggle is foreign to Marx. An economic demand, if it is sectional, is defined as 'economic' in Marx's terms. But if the same demand is made of the state it is 'political'.... In many cases economic (sectional) struggles do not give rise to political (class-wide) struggles, but there is no Chinese wall between the two, and many economic struggles do spill over into political ones." [emphasis in original]

Lenin did not attack the Economists for being indifferent to governmental policy. The Russian Economists agitated for state-initiated economic reforms and supported democratic rights, particularly the right to organize. In this purpose they passively supported the liberals. In What Is To Be Done? Lenin attacks the Economists' political program as encapsulated in the slogan "giving the economic struggle itself a political character":

"Giving 'the economic struggle itself a political character' means, therefore, striving to secure satisfaction for these trade demands, the improvement of conditions of labor in each separate trade by means of 'legislative and administrative measures'.... This is exactly what the trade unions do and have always done....

"Thus, the pompous phrase 'giving the economic struggle itself a political character' which sounds so 'terrifically' profound and revolutionary, serves as a screen to conceal what is in fact the traditional striving to degrade Social-Democratic politics to the level of trade union politics!" [emphasis in original]

For Lenin political class consciousness, or socialist consciousness, was the recognition by the proletariat of the need to become the ruling class and reconstruct society on socialist foundations. Anything less was trade-union consciousness.

Like all other current workerists and social democrats, Cliff must attack Lenin's famous statement that socialist consciousness is brought to the workers from without by revolutionary intellectuals, that political class consciousness does not arise simply through the proletariat's struggles to improve its conditions. Here are Cliff's fatuous remarks on this question:

"There is no doubt that this formulation overemphasized the difference between spontaneity and consciousness. For in fact the complete separation of spontaneity from consciousness is mechanical and non-dialectical. Lenin, as we shall see later, admitted this. Pure spontaneity does not exist in life.... "The logic of the mechanical juxtaposition of spontaneity and consciousness was the complete separation of the patty from the actual elements of working-class leadership that had already risen in the struggle. It assumed that the party had answers to all the questions that spontaneous struggle might bring forth. The blindness of the embattled many is the obverse of the omniscience of the few." [emphasis in original]

It is important to quote Lenin's statement in full to under¬stand what it means and does not mean:

"We said that there could not yet be Social-Democratic con¬sciousness among the workers. This consciousness could only be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., it may itself realize the necessity of combining in unions, for fighting against the employers and for striving to compel the govern¬ment to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals. Accord¬ing to their social status, the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bour¬geois intelligentsia. Similarly in Russia, the theoretical doc¬trine of Social-Democracy arose quite independently of the spontaneous growth of the labor movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of ideas among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia." [emphasis in original]

—What Is To Be Done?

This is not a programmatic statement, but rather a historical analysis with implications for the organizational question. The socialist movement predated the development of mass economic organizations of the industrial proletariat. The socialist movement arose out of the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary currents (the Babouvist tradition represented by Blanquism in France and the League of the Just in Germany). Except for Britain, the earliest trade unions arose through the transformation of the old mercantilist artisan guild system.

For example, in the German revolution of 1848 Stephan Bora's mass trade-union movement, the Workers Brotherhood, was largely based on the traditional guild structure. The leaders of the embryonic trade unions were generally the traditional authority figures of the plebeian community. Methodist ministers, like the Tory radical J.R. Stephens, played a significant leadership role in the early 19th-century British workers movement. Catholic priests played a similar role in the first French trade unions, for example among the rebellious silk workers of Lyons. In most countries the emergence of a socialist labor movement resulted from the political victory of the revolutionary intelligentsia over the traditionalist leaders of the early workers organizations. When Lenin wrote What Is To Be Done? the mass economic organizations of the Russian working class were the police-led unions (Zubatovite) whose most prominent leader was the priest Gapon.

Lenin was a dialectician who understood that the consciousness and leadership of the working class underwent qualitative changes historically. With the important exception of the U.S., trade-union economism (associated with bourgeois liberal illusions and religious obscurantism) is no longer the dominant ideology of the world's proletariat. In the advanced capitalist countries, it is socialist reformism, carried through the social-democratic and Stalinist labor bureaucracies, which binds the working class to the bourgeois order. In backward countries, populist nationalism with a socialist coloration (e.g., Peronism, Nasserism) is the characteristic form of bourgeois ideological dominance over the working masses.

In the Russia of 1902, a small, homogeneous Marxist vanguard, composed of declassed intellectuals with a thin layer of advanced workers, was able to break the mass of the workers from police trade unionism and the Orthodox church. Today it requires an international Trotskyist vanguard, necessarily composed in its first stages of declassed intellectuals with relatively few advanced workers, to break the world's working classes from the domination of social-democratic and Stalinist reformism and populist nationalism. In exactly the opposite sense of Cliff, What Is To Be Done? cannot be regarded as the definitive Leninist statement on the party question. Despite the angularity of its formulations, the 1902 polemical work does not go beyond the bounds of orthodox, pre-1914 Social Democracy. If this work had represented a radical break with Social Democracy, Plekhanov, Martov et al. would never have endorsed it. It was only after the split in 1903 that Martov, Axelrod and other Menshevik leaders discovered in What Is To Be Done? alleged substitutionalist and Blanquist conceptions. It was Lenin's intransigent attitude in practice toward opportunism, circle-spirit cliquism and all obstacles to building a revolu¬tionary RSDRP that caused the Menshevik split, not particularly the ideas expressed in What Is To Be Done? If Cliff finds What Is To Be Done? too Leninist for his liking, it is because his hostility to Bolshevism is so strong that he must reject Lenin even when the latter was still a revolutionary social democrat. In reality the 1902 work is an anticipation, not a full-blown exposition, of post-1917 communism.

It is common in left-wing circles to regard What Is To Be Done? as the definitive Leninist statement on the party question. For example, the American Shachtmanite Bruce Landau, in a critical review of Cliff's biography (Revolutionary Marxist Papers No. 8), concentrates on the Iskra period. He justifies this narrow focus by quoting Trotsky on Lenin's development:

"It was precisely during this short time that Lenin became the Lenin he was to remain. This does not mean that he did not develop further. On the contrary. He grew in stature...until October and after; but this was really organic growth." —On Lenin: Notes for a Biography (1924)

Trotsky is here referring to the development of Lenin's political personality, not to his ideas and their programmatic expression. The decisive period for the development of Leninist communist doctrine was 1914-17, not 1900-03.

Part Two Will Appear On March 20, 2011.

Rally to Support WGBH Workers In Boston- Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm

Rally to Support WGBH Workers In Boston- Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm

Rally to Support WGBH Workers
Submitted by ujpadmin1 on Fri, 03/11/2011 - 8:26am.
When: Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Where: 10 Guest St • Brighton
Start: 2011 Mar 15 - 4:00pm


From Wisconsin to Boston, show your support for workers' rights!

Please join us to show support for WGBH’s AEEF/CWA Local 1300 in their current struggle.

Workers at WGBH, our local public television station, are fighting for the basic right to have a union in their workplace. Workers are members of AEEF/CWA Local 1300, and have been organized for nearly 40 years.

In the past, WGBH has bargained in good faith with their workers. Management and the union have been in negotiations since August, and management has recently decided to end collective bargaining. The union now faces the implementation of an unfair contract, and needs your support today!

Keep the union-busting in Wisconsin out of Massachusetts.

Sponsored by AEEF/CWA Local 1300, Greater Boston Labor Council, Massachusetts Jobs with Justice.

For more information contact Jennifer at jennifer@massjwj.net.

*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 92nd Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919) And The 90th Anniversary Of The Third World Congress (1921)- From The Marxist Studies Series- "Elaboration Of Communist Tactics And Organization"

Honor The 92nd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Historic Third World Congress Of The CI (1921)

Markin comment:

Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.

No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.

The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
*********
The Third Congress (1921):
Elaboration of Communist Tactics and Organization
by Reuben Samuels New York, 5 September 1998

The Second Congress of the Communist International [17 July-7 August 1920] that Steve dealt with took place at what in hindsight turned out to be the peak of a revolutionary wave that followed World War I and was inspired by the Bolshevik Revolu¬tion. As you will recall, a great map was hung at the Congress charting the progress of the Red Army and its march on Warsaw. But the Red Army was unable to take Warsaw.

The massive scope of the postwar class war reached the point of revolutionary crisis in countries like Hungary, Germany and Italy. It contributed decisively to the Red Army victory over the White Guard forces and their imperialist allies. The imperialists were unable to crush the Soviet workers state, but despite heroic battles, without a tempered and authoritative revolutionary party, the combative working classes of Hungary, Germany and Italy were unable to overthrow their own bourgeoisies.
As Lenin stated at the Third Congress in the summer of 1921:

"The result is a state of equilibrium which, although highly unstable and precarious enables the Socialist republic to exist—not for long—of course, within the capitalist encirclement."

—"Theses for a Report on Tactics of the R.C.P.", Collected Works (CW), Vol. 32, p. 454, First Eng¬lish Edition (Progress Publishers, 1965)

The defeats of this period demonstrated both the immaturity of the newly formed communist parties and the ability of the Social Democracy—despite its role in WWI mobilizing the proletariat for the imperialist slaughter, and despite its vanguard role in the imperialist expeditions against the Soviet Union—to maintain its base among the organized working class in the advanced industrial countries. So we had in the period leading up to the Third Congress a mighty coal miners strike in Britain that was betrayed by the Labour Party and the trade-union bureaucracy. A very similar development took place in the fall of 1920 in Italy, which was the mightiest upsurge of the working people in all of Europe in that period, which was also betrayed by Social Democracy. Then there was the defeat of the German proletariat in Saxony, March 1921, crushed by social-democratic governments. In each case, the defeat was a confirmation of what Trotsky wrote in the Lessons of October (1924): "Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, with a substitute for the party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer" (The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1923-25, p. 252).

At the Third Congress, Trotsky, in concluding the opening report that he gave on the economic situation and the prospects for proletarian revolution, stated:

"Now for the first time we see and feel that we are not so immediately near to the goal, to the conquest of power, to the world revolution. At that time, in 1919, we said to ourselves: 'It is a question of months.' Now we say: 'It is perhaps a question of years'."

—quoted in E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, Vol. 3, p. 385 (Macmillan, 1953)

The Third Congress was devoted to using this period of precarious equilibrium to prepare the communist parties that were often communist parties only in name and stated goals, but not in their activity and organization.

In summing up the work of the Third Congress, Trotsky made what I think is an important point about historical materialism, about the crises of the bourgeoisies such as developed directly out of WWI. This point was important to counteract crisis-mongers like the Healyites in the '60s—or for that matter the Stalinists in the Third Period—who claimed that there were crises so severe that their own dynamic alone would bring down the bour¬geoisie. The bourgeoisie would create a form of social suicide. And Trotsky responded to this in light of his report to the Third Congress where he had emphasized the temporary stability of capitalism: "History has provided the basic premise for the success of this [proletarian] revolution—in the sense that society cannot any longer develop its productive forces on bourgeois foundations. But history does not at all assume upon itself— in place of the working class, in place of the politicians of the working class, in place of the Communists—the solutions of this entire task. No, History seems to say to the proletarian van¬guard...History says to the working class, 'You must know that unless you cast down the bour¬geoisie, you will perish beneath the ruins of civ¬ilization. Try, solve this task!'"

—"School of Revolutionary Strategy," The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. 2, p. 6 (Monad Press, 1972)

So it was clear to the Bolsheviks—at least it was clear to Lenin and Trotsky going into the Third Congress—that it was no longer sufficient to lay out the broad outlines in principles of the Bolshevik Revolution. Equally important was transmitting the strategy of revolutionary struggle for the conquest of power. The two decades of experience of building the Bolshevik Party, the instrument for the proletarian revolution, had to be made available to these fledgling communist parties that had gathered around the Comintern. This experience had to be made accessible to them and had to be applied by them to the specific circumstances in their own countries.

The debates that took place at this Congress, the debates over tactics, party building, the relationship to the trade unions, communist work among women and youth, could not have taken place without the programmatic ground-breaking work of the First and Second Congresses: the "Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World," the "Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," the "21 Conditions for Admission to the CI." These documents sought to draw the hard programmatic line against the centrists and opportunists who sought to destroy the new revolutionary international from within with their own brand of anti-revolutionary entrism. This was the framework in which this discussion could take place. It was not going to be a discussion with the centrists who would not split with the reformists.

Now this doesn't mean there was a cleavage between these Congresses. Lenin and Trotsky realized from the very beginning the necessity to impart their organizational and tactical experience to these revolutionaries who had been won to the October Revolution, but not yet won to Bolshevism. Lenin wrote the manual on tactics, "Left-Wing" Communism-An Infantile Disorder, so that it was in the hands of all the delegates to the Second Congress of the CI. But it was still necessary at this Congress to devote significant time to the struggle against the centrists and opportunists who were seeking to "get on the bandwagon" of the then extremely authoritative and popular October Revolution and its new International, offering a clean banner on which they could wipe their blood-besmirched hands.

To give you an example of the problems that the Comintern and the Bolsheviks faced, take the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Like the German party, in Czechoslovakia, the Comintern won a substantial section of the old Social Democracy and a party with hundreds of thousands of members. Now, the tradition of this party, very much like the French and German, was very reformist, very much in the tradition of Noske and the French Social Democ¬racy. As late as 1919, a social-democratic coalition government sent Czech troops in to crush the Hun¬garian Soviet. However, this actually had a radicalizing influence on the base of the Social Democracy.

A substantial left wing took over the party headquarters and newspapers. The social-democratic leadership responded by calling in the troops. This resulted in a political general strike of one million workers in December 1920, just before the Third Congress of the Comintern. The most militant sec¬tions of this working class, however, were organized into separate national parties. Czechoslovakia was put together from the remnants of the Habsburg Empire, and the Slovaks and Sudeten Germans each had their own parties with substantial minori¬ties of Jews, Gypsies, Hungarians—you name it, they had it. The parties were divided along national lines. And the strongest, the Bohemian-Moravian party, was also the most reformist and the last to declare its agreement with the Comintern and the 21 Conditions.

This was an anomalous situation: a country with two parties that said: 'We're ready, take us in!' And hanging back was a third party that says: 'We're almost ready! We agree with the 21 Condi¬tions. We agree with getting together and having a united party.' Finally they held what many thought would be their unification congress in the middle of May, just one month before the Third Comintern Congress. But instead of unifying, the congress set up a "Committee of Action" for this purpose. It was really a delaying tactic to prevent the consolidation of a united communist party in Czechoslovakia. Going into the Comintern Congress, maybe there was a party, maybe there were three parties, but, then again, maybe no party. So, when you read reports and exchanges at the Congress, very angry about the leadership of the Czech Communist Party, you can understand why.

And this was not atypical. So much of the discredited Social Democracy was drawn in the wake of the authority and enthusiasm for the Bolshevik Revolution that the sorting-out process was not easy.

NEP: A Necessary Retreat

Now, within the Soviet Union itself, the Soviet workers had successfully defended themselves from domestic counterrevolution backed by the intervention of 17 imperialist armies. The dictatorship of the proletariat was triumphant, but the prole¬tariat was shattered as a class. It was at the expense of the physical existence of the working class that this victory was won.

In 1921, famine swept Russia. Even cannibalism reappeared. The proletariat, already a small minority of three million at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, was reduced by half. And very often this proletariat was subsidized, supported by the state simply to maintain intact remnants of the class, the basis for the dictatorship. This is graphically described in Deutscher's, The Prophet Unarmed:

"...[B]y the end of the civil war, Russia's national income amounted to only one-third of her income in 1913...industry produced less than one-fifth of the goods produced before the war...the coal-mines turned out less than one-tenth and the iron foundries only one-fortieth of their normal output...the railways were destroyed." —p. 4

All the stocks, reserves and the exchange of goods and services on which the economy depended for its work were utterly destroyed. Russian cities and towns became so depopulated after 1921 that Moscow had only one-half and Petrograd one-third of their former inhabitants. And the people of the two capitals had for many months lived on a food ration of two ounces of bread and a few frozen potatoes.

What was the situation in the military? There were five million soldiers in 1920. There was a policy of demobilization, but how? What to do with five million armed men and women? There were no trains to transport the demobilized troops home. There was no fuel for them in the barracks. Many of these troops demobilized themselves and became bandit partisans. They would simply roam the countryside and the cities and try to forage food and a little bit of clothing to stay alive. This became such a significant problem that the Cheka, which is often mis-translated as secret police but was actually the Commission for the Suppression of Counterrevolution, Sabotage and Speculation, formed a special section to combat banditism.

Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, worked in what was called the Department of Enlightenment and a lot of her "enlightenment" had to do with teenage bands that had no other way to survive than to act like gangs. They went out and foraged and stole what they could, by any means they could, to stay alive! At the time of the 1921 June-July Third Congress of the Comintern, bandit partisan warfare is still going on throughout the Soviet Union. I just mention one district, Temblov. In Temblov the old Socialist Revolutionaries had gotten together an armed band of 21,000, and this was just in one district. This was happening while the Third Congress was going on. If you read The Trotsky Papers (1917-1922), volume 2, put out by the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam you'll see more paper is devoted to Temblov than is devoted to the Third Congress.

This problem was increasingly taking the form of a civil war of the countryside against the cities. How to deal with it? As Lenin said: 'the easy part was expropriating the bourgeoisie. Difficult was defeating the imperialist-backed counterrevolution. But we did that too. Now we've hit the real bedrock of capitalism: the petty proprietors, the peasants. Without their food the cities cannot be rebuilt. There cannot be any kind of reconstruction under this devastation of civil war.'

It was necessary to make what was openly called a retreat: introducing a tax in kind for the peas¬antry. This is what became known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). The tax in kind meant instead of having all their grain and foodstuffs taken by the state, they had to pay a certain amount in the form of taxes. Then they could market the rest. That is the restoration—within the context of state owner¬ship of land—of market trade. Likewise, there was encouragement—not with a lot of success—of foreign concessions and foreign investment in Soviet industry.

Now, this policy was attacked by various oppo¬sitions within the Bolshevik Party. And Lenin's speeches and the reports to the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party deal with these positions in trying to hammer out a policy to deal with the catastrophic economic and social collapse. Under these conditions, the Kronstadt sailors revolt. This was a different generation from the Kronstadt sailors who formed the Red Guard and a cornerstone of the Red Army. Another generation had gone into the military, very closely tied to the countryside, which represented the peasant unrest there.

It was fundamentally a counterrevolutionary uprising. The main demand was: "Soviets without Bolsheviks!" This was also one of the main demands of the Workers Opposition. In a situation where the proletariat itself was shattered as a class, its only cohesive identity as an instrument of pro¬letarian class-consciousness was the party, which itself, of course, was devastated. In the middle of this Congress it was necessary to take every delegate with military training and send them to Kron¬stadt to put down the uprising. That's what you call a working congress.

The reaction of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) right wing, Dittmann and Crispien, was to say, 'You see, we're for the dictatorship of the proletariat. But in dark, backward Slavic Russia, to take power, to take responsibility for rebuilding from the devastation of the imperialist war, that is the source of all these problems. So, you see, yes we're for the dictatorship of the proletariat, but not where it exists, not where it is struggling to survive.'

These policies were also attacked by the ultra-lefts in Germany and Holland. They were also attacked by the Italian Socialist leader Serrati— remember him from the Second Congress? He's the guy that kept interrupting John Reed's report on the black question. 'Let's get on to the real proletariat.' I guess he didn't know what was happening to America.

So, NEP and economic reconstruction was one of the important, fighting issues of the Third Congress of the Comintern. This was a retreat and it was necessary to lay this out before the Tenth Party Congress, but also before the highest tribunal of the Communist movement, the CI, at the Third Congress. Lenin treated the Comintern as an international soviet that would render the final judgment on the policies not only for Germany, not only for Italy, but also for the Soviet Union. He of course fought so that the policies he thought should win would win.

Lenin was orchestrating just about everything that happened at the Congress insofar as it was possible, as he was a sick man by this time. But his principal report was on the tactics of the Russian Communist Party. He tied these questions together with the policies that were necessary in Western Europe, especially in the advanced industrial coun¬tries, but not only there.

If you read Carr and Deutscher—especially Carr is very strong on this point—they basically see the Third Congress as a whole chapter called the "Congress of Retreat." Carr's point is that with the defeat of the march on Warsaw, with the defeats in Hungary and Italy, the Soviet Union was forced to be "reasonable" and "statesmanlike," forced to adopt Realpolitih, the politics of national interest, to which the policies of the Comintern would be sub¬ordinate. If you want trade and investment from the capitalists of other countries you have to tone down overthrowing them, don't you? Which is exactly what Serrati charged about the NEP.

But the reality was that the Bolshevik Revolution was made for the world revolution, and its survival depended on world revolution. With its delay the Bolsheviks were compelled on the one hand to take certain measures to buy time within the Soviet Union, and at the same time to struggle for the preparation of these new parties of the Comintern so that they could fulfill their task.

Split at Halle Wins Mass Base for KPD

So what's happening in Germany? The USPD, which had considerable authority—it claimed at least on paper 700,000 to 800,000 members-had a congress in Halle in October 1920 to decide on affiliation to the Comintern on the basis of the 21 Conditions that had been adopted at the Second Congress. The USPD split, a majority going with the KPD and Comintern, a minority retaining the "Independent" label for another year while fading back into the SPD. The Communist Party brought 40,000 members to this unification, the USPD left wing brought about 300,000 to 400,000. So the number of Communists after the fusion increased tenfold.

It was not accidental that this congress was held in Halle. Halle was a left-wing stronghold of the workers movement in Germany. It was the center of a region, the province of Saxony, which contained a strong component of radical miners. Like American miners, they lived in relatively backward, isolated communities. Nevertheless, radicalized by their experiences in the blood-soaked trenches of WWI, they very often came back left-wing Social Democrats, members of the USPD.

Also, the war had accelerated the development of a petrochemical industry in Halle-Merseberg. In 1895 there were a thousand workers. By the end of WWI there were 35,000 workers, 23,000 of whom worked in the Leuna Werke [plant] near Halle. It was the biggest industrial plant then in Germany. It was a real stronghold of the USPD that claimed a membership in this one district of 80,000. Not only did the Communist Party and the USPD have a sub¬stantial base there, but so did the ultraleft syndicalists of the KAPD.
This was reflected in the class struggle in this region as well. Now, you might have read in your history books that in the Weimar Republic, with that wonderful, democratic constitution, workers got the eight-hour day. But it was a six-day or 48-hour workweek, so don't get so excited. And it was not implemented anywhere but in some sections of the civil service and in this region. Everywhere else people were working 54 hours a week. That was the norm. Wages were higher in this region. People got a third more vacation. And if I told you how little vacation you got you'd think you must be in America! Nev¬ertheless they got a third more in this region and this represented some sharp class struggle.

I'll just give you one example. In January the mine bosses decided, 'We're gonna bring in a special police to be guards in the mines.' And workers just walked out and said, 'We're gonna hire our own guards, they're gonna be war veterans and workers who've been injured working in the mines, and they're gonna be beholden to us and not the mine chiefs.' And they won.

This was a militant section of the working class with a huge industrial base that had, just like in Rus¬sia, grown up in a period of less than 15 or 20 years. It had won substantial gains and was strongly Communist.
On 20 February 1921, there were elections to the Prussian parliament (called the Landtag). In these elections to the Prussian state parliament the SPD got 70,000 votes. What was left of the USPD got 75,000 and the Communist Party got 197,000 votes. That is one-third more than the combined votes of the SPD and USPD.

This didn't go unnoticed to the rest of the ruling class in Germany and is the background to the 1921 March Action, that took place mainly in this region.

This was a red sore in the eyes of the German bourgeoisie at a time when they had to pay substantial reparations to the victors of WWI, especially France and Britain. In fact one of the demands raised by the Communists was, "Make the bourgeoisie pay for Versailles!" Lenin's attitude was, 'We don't care about Versailles, we've got other things on the agenda. If we took power in Germany, we might also be compelled to pay reparations. But the main thing is to get the power.' He drew a very hard line in this regard against the kind of nationalist propaganda that came out in this period, including from the Communist Party. This problem worsens and will be dealt with in greater detail in the next class.

Back to 1921: What's going on in the KPD? After the fusion they had two chairmen: one from the old USPD left wing, Ernst Daumig, and the other who was the chairman of the Communist Party after Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Jogiches were murdered, Paul Levi. Paul Levi was an attorney who had defended Luxemburg and Liebknecht before the Kaiser's court. He joined the Spartacists and the left wing of the Zimmerwald Movement during WWI. He was known to Lenin, so he had some authority, but he also had some other less sterling qualities which we'll get to in a moment.

Radek was the Comintern rep in Germany, or seemed to be. They have a phrase in German—"the man for all things." So he was the all-purpose representative for this and that. Imprisoned by the Social Democrats, he met in jail with one of Ger¬many's foremost industrialists, Walter Rathenau, to discuss trade relations with Russia. Rathenau organized Germany's industrial supply line for WWI. He also happened to be Jewish. (Rathenau paid with his life for his trade and military negotiations with the Soviet Union, gunned down the following year by two fascist army officers.)

"Open Letter": Precursor to the United Front

One of the more intelligent things Levi and Radek came up with was the "Open Letter," which was drafted and printed in the beginning of January 1921, right after the fusion of the KPD and the USPD left wing. It was short, punchy and to the point. It consisted of a bunch of what we would call economic and transitional demands: for example, higher wages; the unemployed should be paid at the standard wage rate of the industry from which they have been laid off; pensions for the old people; distribution of cheap food; workers control, etc. Germany went through all these wars and the castles still stand, right? Throw out the princes, bring in the homeless.

The "Open Letter" was an appeal to all the workers' organizations—from the SPD and the big trade-union federation to the KAPD (a left split from the KPD) and its little union organization called the "one big union." This document was published in the KPD newspaper Rote Fahne [Red Flag] in January 1921. It anticipated the "Theses on Tactics" that would be discussed at the Third CI Congress and the united-front tactic that was elaborated at the Fourth. And it anticipated the Transitional Program upon which the Fourth International was founded.

I've always believed this document had no impact except with people like Lenin and Trotsky. Wrong. The Social Democrats did not go rushing to endorse this document and to sign up to throw the princes out of the palaces and to seize the shutdown factories. But a big congress of metalworkers held in Berlin at the end of January unanimously adopted the demands of this document. No social-democratic representative from the union movement could vote against it, at most they could abstain, because the document was too powerful. There were meetings of what was called the trade-union Kartell or federation for Greater Berlin. The same thing happened, it was unanimously adopted. It was extremely popular.

It turns out the place where it had no impact was in the KPD, because the tactic was never fought out. Levi had a bright idea. He got together with Radek, they wrote it up—after all he's the Chairman, right—so it appears in their newspaper Rote Fahne, bang, that's it! Are we going to implement it? How are we going to implement it? Were there any dis¬cussions to that effect? No.

Livorno: "Unity" That Strangled Italian Revolution

Now the next thing that shapes the history of the German party doesn't happen in Germany, it happens in Italy. And we get back to our old friend, Serrati. The Italian Socialist Party called a congress in Livorno in January 1921. This is after this party, through its reformist right wing and the trade-union bureaucrats, had sabotaged this great indus¬trial and agrarian workers uprising. Because it didn't lead to workers revolution, they had in effect opened the road to the fascists. So now they're going to have a congress and decide what they're going to do about the Comintern and those 21 Conditions.

And everybody's there from Turati and Serrati to Bordiga—they're all there. What the Comintern wanted was for Serrati to break with the reformists. He refused. The Comintern sent two representatives—the Hungarian, Rakosi, and a Bulgarian, Kabakchiev. It was very hard to get people into Italy at this point. They traveled there under extreme difficulties. Comintern agents did not get the red carpet treatment from border guards.

Zinoviev, who opens the Third Congress with one of his usual pithy four-hour reports on the work of the ECCI, describes what happens to these guys when they get to Livorno. They walk into the Congress and are greeted with delegates yelling, "Long live the Pope!" This is in Italy! You thought the Pope lived in Rome? No, the Vatican is in Moscow. If you didn't know, you found out at this congress. Zinoviev even claims somebody released a bird at this point, a dove, into the congress. The Comintern reps come this great distance at great peril to be heckled and mistreated. This is internationalism?

Paul Levi got better treatment. He went down there in part at the initiative of Clara Zetkin. He pursued an entirely different policy, a policy counterposed to the Comintern. He argued, 'Well, if you've got a party that is outside the Comintern like the USPD, then it's okay to split it. But if you have a party that's already in the Comintern, like the Italian Socialist Party (the whole party had formally joined the Comintern), then how can you splinter them? It's like cutting off a part of the body, say the arm, to have such a split.'

And we're talking about 1921, that is several months after these same people that are sitting in the same hall had sabotaged the general strikes, the plant occupations, the occupation of land by agrarian workers, so magnificent and so betrayed. The bourgeoisie got scared enough that they then backed the fascists: 'We can't just rely on Serrati and Turati to keep this working class under control. Time to go for the surgical operation and apply the knife.'

Levi goes back to Berlin really proud of himself and makes a report to the Central Committee or Zentralausschuss—hls report is counterposed to the
policy of the Comintern. Everybody knows that. His report is put up for a vote. He loses, narrowly. At this point, Levi, who is the chairman of the Party, Clara Zetkin, Daumig, who is co-chairman, and two other members of the Zentmlausschuss resign, like it's a parliamentary vote of no confidence: 'You didn't vote for me, so I'm not going to be on your Zentralausschuss anymore. I'm taking a powder.' So they leave. However, they don't resign their actual seats in parliament. These they keep.

Now you had a party that was very much divided between the so-called left wing and a right wing of which Levi, and Zetkin, to a certain extent, were representative. They wanted to do things like the "Open Letter." They also wanted to do things like support Serrati at Livorno. But these issues were never fought out.

Lenin writes a personal letter to Levi and Zetkin in April 1921, after the March Action. And he says, 'On the Italian Question I think you're wrong. But I'm mad at you because you walked out of the central committee simply because you lost a vote. How are we ever going to build a collective leadership if we can't even have political struggle within the leadership? So, by doing this 1) you undermined the "Open Letter," which was never fought for anyway in the party, and 2) you opened the road to the so-called leftists in the party.' The leftists now felt they had a free hand.

Indeed they had. A funny thing, how often today's ultraleftists are tomorrow's rightists. Levi was replaced as chairman by Heinrich Brandler, who would go from being a leader of the so-called lefts to a leader of the Right Opposition associated with Bukharin in Soviet Russia. He was a construction worker, a union official from the age of 16, and an early supporter of the Spartacists. He would be chairman of the party again in the crucial months of 1923 when the KPD blew a final decisive revolutionary opportunity.

In Berlin the so-called leftists were represented by the Fischer-Maslow-Reuter group. You may have already heard of Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow. Ernst Reuter would go on to a short tenure as General Secretary of the KPD before following the road blazed by Levi back into the SPD.

Comrades who have visited Berlin may recall that in the center of the West part there is a traffic circle bordered by the Technical University called Ernst Reuter Platz. This was not named after Reuter for his service or disservice to German communis'm. At the beginning of the Cold War in 1947 when Berlin was under four-power occupation, Reuter was elected "Lord Mayor" of Berlin. Notorious for his anti-communist views, Reuter was vetoed by the Soviets. The Lord Mayor returned the compliment, calling the country which freed Europe from fascism "a nation of slaves."

The German bourgeoisie has a long history of dealing with revolution—in Germany, in France, in Hungary and elsewhere. It has a lot of experience and it augmented its experience by recruiting a number of ex-leftists through the instrumentality of the Social Democracy.

The March Action

Back to Germany, early 1921. Who shows up in Germany but Bela Kun and Kim's sidekick, Jozsef Pogany, a.k.a. John Pepper, who in the United States steered the CP into the Farmer-Labor Party mess. These people messed up the 1919 Hungarian Revolution—they fused with the Social Democrats and refused to give land to the peasants. They made every mistake you could make, for which the working class, as always, paid. Based on this authority they were sent as Comintern agents to Germany. How this happened is not well documented and remains a mystery.

Bela Kun was big on the "Revolutionary Offensive." What is offensive about it we'll find out shortly. Backed by Kun and Pepper, suddenly Rote Fahne started raising a lot of abstract propaganda: "Overthrow the bourgeoisie! Down with the regime!"

Lenin's letters to the KPD after the Third Congress and Trotsky's remarks in "School of Revolutionary Strategy" underlined the German bour¬geoisie's method of operation. The rulers set up the German proletariat where they are most left-wing and provoke a premature, isolated uprising and chop off its head. Then they send the armed forces and Nazi gangs city to city, chop, chop, decapitating the party, its work facilitated by the KPD's federated structure. That's what we saw in 1919, first in Janu¬ary and later in March. That's what we saw in March of 1920 following the Kapp Putsch and what we see again in March of 1921. The architects of the bour¬geoisie's "March Action" were the very experienced social-democratic Prussian minister of police Carl Severing and Saxon President Otto Horsing.

In war-devastated Germany, working conditions were terrible. Miners, in order to survive, got to take a couple of bags of scrap coal home. That was stopped. No more free coal; buy it on the market like everybody else. Then the bosses claimed that the workers were stealing. That's always a big, explo¬sive issue. The workers are the thieves, not the capitalists?

After WWI, most workers kept their guns. They thought they might come in handy for another kind of war. During the Kapp Putsch in the previous
year, armed workers militias sprouted up through¬out Germariy. Although their arms were pathetic compared to the state arsenal, they could deter fas¬cist gangs and some paramilitary forces. Now the capitalist rulers declared they were going to disarm the workers and put an end to "unrest"—the code¬word for class struggle.

For this purpose they created a new paramilitary police force, the Schutzpolizei (Schupos) and organized it into groups of a hundred, or Hun-dertschaften. They were going to occupy the mines around Halle and search the homes of workers to suppress "stealing" and disarm the workers.
The Communist Party was also thinking of having a March offensive. Now, in Germany, everything revolves around holidays, like Easter. The country totally shuts down for the four-day Easter weekend. They wanted to have their general strike after Easter.

The bourgeoisie wouldn't cooperate. They started their offensive before Easter. Around the 16-17 of March they started moving Schupos into Halle. The workers were outraged and looked to the Communist Party for leadership. The Communist Party was not prepared, even though they'd been calling for a "general strike" and to "overthrow the bour¬geoisie" for two months. The secret police raided the CP headquarters in February and reported: 'we can't find the evidence that they're preparing anything!' They hadn't prepared a damn thing.

Still the CP calls for a general strike. And it does get a response. In many of these small mining communities the workers took over, formed armed guards and set up committees that were embryonic Soviets. You had dual power in this one little region. In the Leuna Werke solidarity demonstrations increased in size to some 18,000 before all hell broke loose.
The government purposely didn't send enough troops to do the job. As the Schupos approached the Leuna Werke, the workers responded by occu¬pying the plant and forming a workers militia and a commissary. So Red Leuna is born; followed by Red Merseburg, then Red Ammendorf.

Communists were subjected to savage persecution in all capitalist countries and had to take cer¬tain elementary measures of self-defense. Recall the Palmer Raids-mass deportation of foreign-born leftists and mass imprisonment of many more here. That edifice to bourgeois democracy, the Weimar Republic, was built over the broken and bullet-riddled bodies of Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Jogiches and thousands of the finest fighters. The KPD also took to heart the attack of many Communists throughout the world that they had not adequately protected Karl and Rosa. The Comintern, in its statutes and the 21 Conditions for Membership, insisted that Communist Parties must conduct such defensive measures and must work even when they have been declared "illegal" by reactionary, witch-hunting laws or when work must be conducted "underground" due to persecution by the state or fascist bands.

For this work the KPD had set up military and counter-espionage organizations, the Militarrat and Nachrichtendienst. However, in the KPD this, like all work, was highly federated. Much was left to local initiative which sometimes got completely out of control. In the midst of all this, you've got the anarcho-syndicalist KAPD and a substantial current in the KPD that believes the philistine German working class isn't going to respond unless we give them a kick in the ass.

And the KAPD had some assistance from Max Hoelz, the Robin Hood of the German proletariat. Hoelz was a very interesting guy. He was a very high-grade technician in the repair and servicing of railroads. He formed a workers militia in the November Revolution. The revolution was sup¬pressed but his militia lived on. He would do bank jobs and distribute funds to the poor, in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht's question: is it a greater crime to rob a bank or own one? Usually he'd pick targets that were often justly hated by the prole¬tariat, like courthouses. He is reputed to have derailed just plain personnel trains that had nothing to do with the movement of military goods. If so, we would have opposed this. All of this was based on the "Theory of the Offensive," that the working class cannot be motivated by consciousness of its own political interests and historical destiny; we need to ignite the working class with deeds of great daring. There was nothing new about this theory, it was not invented by Radek and Bela Kun. The Marxist movement had combated some anarcho-syndicalist tendencies since its birth in the 1840s.

The KPD with its own theory of the "Revolutionary Offensive" was not in too good a position to combat this—on the contrary. So the KPD sent Hugo Eberlein down to Halle to help out. He was the KPD representative at the founding Congress of the Comintern. A fine comrade, but he was a bit loony, and known among his comrades and fellow workers as "Hugo the Fuse," as he was behind some of the military activity of the KPD. His advice was, 'to really get workers moving here what we ought to do is take the two regional party sec¬retaries, who seemed like pretty good guys, kidnap them and say the police did it. If that doesn't work, then we'll blow up a couple of party headquarters and blame that on the police!'

I think those two regional party secretaries spiked Eberlein's inventive proposals. But the main problem was that the action in the March Action was restricted to Saxony and Halle. The KPD did try to extend the strike into other sections of Ger¬many. In Berlin they had almost no support and their appeal for a general strike resulted in fist-fights with workers in front of AEG and other big industrial plants. The KPD did write an appeal to social-democratic workers. It was called, "Either you're for us or against us." Paul Levi said this was a declaration of war on four-fifths of the working class. He was not wrong. It also had another charming quality. It called on them to hang their leaders from the lampposts. You might call this an early version of the united front from below. As comrade Robertson said, their hearts were in the right place. But as you can imagine, this didn't make much of an impact in extending the strike to the social-democratic workers.

Hamburg was even more tragic. On the docks you had a division among longshoremen very much like the United States. You had steady guys who were social-democratic and then you had the casuals who were Communists. The steady guys had the jobs—there was high unemployment at that point in Hamburg. So the CP organized the unemployed to seize the docks. There were big physical fights, but the CP mobilized enough forces so they were able to occupy the docks. There was no attempt to win over the SPD workers except by the threat: "join us or else."

The Hamburg KPD liked showy demonstrations so they marched off the docks and down to the nearby Fish Market while the police and the Social Democrats took back the docks. This was burned into the memory of the social-democratic work force. (In October 1923 when Thalmann tried to bring about the uprising not knowing it had been canceled—it had been voted down in Chem¬nitz again—many of the social-democratic workers joined the police as volunteers to suppress the KPD-led uprising.)

In other cities, where the CP had a base, there were short, one-day general strikes, such as Essen. But workers in the Ruhr and elsewhere were not aware of what was happening in Saxony. So there was no preparation and no apparatus to pull them into a struggle.

The KPD "Revolutionary Offensive" played right into the hands of the bourgeoisie, so that the general strike could be suppressed militarily. To take the Leuna Werke 1,200 Schupos backed up by the Reichswehr and artillery were used. They shot into the plant that made ammonia knowing that it could set off an explosion. They captured several hundred workers, locked them up in a silo and kept them there for two weeks. Two dozen Communist youth who sought to liberate these workers—very courageous individuals—were all murdered, massa¬cred. The number of dead is hard to estimate-there was a cover-up. The number of arrested is public record—6,000. Special courts were set up to deal with this. The Rote Hilfe, or Red Aid [the first Communist-affiliated defense league and an inspiration for the International Labor Defense], got its start providing legal defense and material support to the prisoners and their families, in many cases widows and families who had lost the breadwinner to this action. That was the March Action, which ended with the end of March.
Comrades asked me in Chicago, "What would have been a correct policy for Communists?" In fact in the "School of Revolutionary Strategy" Trotsky answers:

"The offensive was in reality launched by the Social-Democratic policeman Hoersing. This should have been utilized in order to unite all the workers for defense, for self-protection, even if, to begin with, a very modest resistance. Had the soil proved favorable, had the agitation met with a favorable response, it would then have been possible to pass over to the general strike. If the events continue to unfold further, if the masses rise, if the ties among the workers grow stronger, if their temper lifts, while indecision and demoralization seize the camp of the foe—then comes the time for issuing the slogan to pass over to the offensive."
-p. 21

As this essay shows, there was a discussion in the Comintern of what should have been done and how the Party should be prepared to avoid a similar situation. That was a crucial fight.

Levi, as you'll recall, had resigned as chairman of the party. And knowing that the March Action was about to happen—because Clara Zetkin made Bela go talk to him about it—he did the responsible thing...and went on vacation. He was in Vienna on his way to Italy where he seemed to enjoy spending time. Then the March Action started and he did come back. In the beginning of April he issued a brochure entitled "Our Way." It contained many just criticisms of the March Action. But it also claimed that the March Action was the greatest putsch in history, that the CP had acted like General Ludendorff in WWI, sending endless waves of youth into a bloodbath on the front lines. It was a critique that lacked any solidarity whatso¬ever with the party but offered much material to the prosecutors. It was used, as he must have known it would be, by those special courts that had been set upvto sit in judgment on the Communists and their supporters. For this he was expelled from the Communist Party and the expulsion was confirmed at the Comintern Congress.

It's clear in his 16 April letter to Clara Zetkin and Levi that Lenin didn't know even at that late date what had happened in Germany. But he quickly figures it out. He calls Bela Kun back from Germany. Lenin calls him in for a talk, which, according to Bela Kun's Hungarian biographer, resulted in Bela Kun, upon leaving Lenin's office, having a heart attack.

But the problem was not just Bela Kun. The KPD claimed the March Action was nothing less than a great victory. It was hailed by the "ultralefts" listed in "Left-Wing" Communism, by the Amsterdam Bureau of the Comintern, by the Vienna Bureau, and by the Young Communist League. Everyone was on the March Action bandwagon, including Zinoviev, who was head of the Com¬intern, Radek, who was—insofar as he was official anything—official Comintern representative in Germany, and Bukharin. Lenin and Trotsky realized that they were about to lose the Comintern, that they were a minority, at least among the leading elements, probably in the IEC and several Euro¬pean parties.

Part of this was an understandable reaction against Social Democracy. But part of it was what Lenin described as infantile leftism: playing with phrases as a surrogate for the more arduous but essential task of forging a communist vanguard that wins the allegiance of a majority of the working class. Many "leftists" who attacked the necessary conces¬sions to the peasantry for the survival of the Soviet workers state were the loudest champions of the "Revolutionary Offensive" and the March Action.

This fight had to take place simultaneously in the Russian delegation which had six members and was split evenly on the question of the March Action—between Lenin, Trotsky and Kamenev on one side and Radek, Bukharin and Zinoviev on the other. That is the background to the Third Congress that is best described in the Prometheus Research Series bulletin on the Organizational Resolution passed at the Third Congress (Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work [New York, 1988]).

Third Congress: School of Revolutionary Stategy

The Congress is approaching: what is to be done? I encouraged comrades to read Lenin's "Letter to Zinoviev" on the "Thesis on Tactics" (CW, Vol. 42, pp. 319-323) because it shows how the fight would be waged before, during and after the Congress. Lenin decided that the cause of proletarian justice as well as Marxist clarity would best be served by having one of the principal malefactors, Radek, incorporate the lessons of the March Action defeat into his report "On Tactics" which would inform and guide all of the sections of the CI. Radek did a draft. As the delegates arrived Radek showed the draft to his buddies from Germany: Thalheimer, Brandler and Maslow. They suggested changes: 'You see, where it says "conquest of the majority of the working class," why don't you take that out and put in "important sections of the working class," or "decisive sections of the working class."' Just tone down the main thing that was supposed to be emphasized at this Congress! And if that wasn't enough, they got together with a recovered Bela Kun to draw up their own amendments.

On 1 June they ship this all to Lenin in an envelope. He opens it, reads the contents and furiously makes notes on the envelope, which are in the Russian edition, but alas, not the English. These notes are then developed in the letter to Zinoviev which opens: "The crux of the matter is that Levi in very many respects is right politically. Unfortunately, he is guilty of a number of breaches of discipline for which the Party has expelled him" ("Letter to Zinoviev," p. 319). Lenin is categorical that the "Open Letter" tactic was correct and important:

"...[W]averings in regard to The 'Open Letter' are extremely harmful, shameful, and extremely widespread. We may as well admit this. All those who have failed to grasp the necessity of the Open Letter tactic should be expelled from the Communist International within a month after its Third Congress."
-ibid., p. 321

To show how carefully crafted this congress was, it begins with an appeal to the German proletariat on behalf of Max Hoelz, who had just been captured and sentenced to life imprisonment. While fully incorporating the Marxist critique of individual terror, the resolution passed by the Con¬gress declares: "But his actions emanated from his love of the proletariat and his hatred of the bourgeoisie," and "instructs the German proletariat to defend him." It was as if you say, 'OK young hot¬heads and ultralefts, we will pound you politically, but we applaud your elan and seek only to give it Marxist direction and purpose.'

For the "rightists" you might say, there was also a celebration of Clara Zetkin's 65th birthday. Naturally a KPD "leftist," Fritz Heckert, gave a wonderful valedictory speech for Clara. The guy that did the presentation on the organizational resolution was another KPD left-winger, Koenen.

If some of this seems mildly perverse, Lenin was trying to make a point here. He was struggling for genuine homogeneity, not by hiding the issues but by fighting them out among comrades. He felt that 'we have gotten rid of the people—or they have gotten rid of themselves—that we don't want in this Communist International. Now we've got to fight to forge cadre.' The lesson you get, how this Congress was orchestrated, is a lesson in party building.

If the "Theses on Tactics" read a little vacuous in parts, it's not accidental. At the last minute Lenin couldn't get Radek to do all that many changes. There are passages that read like: 'When there's a defeat, it's necessary to retreat.' Except, that was bold language for some in this Congress. But, there is one section that runs from page 285 to 286 (Theses, Res¬olutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International [Ink Links, London, 1980]) which is a description of the role of transitional demands that motivates Trotsky's Transitional Pro¬gram. It is a very powerful statement.

Trotsky's "School of Revolutionary Strategy" is his summary and analysis of the key debates of the Third Congress. They are relevant to fights that we've had in our own party around the general strike in Italy and Germany. When I was in the SpAD we were advocating an adventurist policy on paper. We didn't do much except put out propa¬ganda filled with phrases about "general strikes" and "mass strikes" in precisely the region where the March Action took place—the mining, industrial region that includes Bischofferode, Wolfen (which had also developed a big chemical industry), the Halle Leuna Werke.

The problem is that by 1990-91, when we started to make this general strike agitation, these plants were finished. The bourgeoisie had decided to close them down. In the case of Bischofferode the workers were only fighting over who would get the last paycheck to turn off the lights. The empty propaganda we put out at that time was counter-posed to explaining to the workers what was hap¬pening and what had happened to them because of capitalist counterrevolution.

In "School of Revolutionary Strategy," Trotsky has a devastating indictment of the Italian SP. He said: 'Yes, you called for the revolution. You called for mass strikes. You called for all these good things and you prepared nothing. You set these people up and led to a disaster.' In his criticism of the Comintern's draft program for the Sixth Congress Trotsky writes:

"The slogan of the Third Congress did not simply read 'To the masses]' but: 'To power through a previous conquest of the massesl' After the fac¬tion fight led by Lenin (which he characterized demonstratively as the 'Right' wing)...Lenin arranged a private conference toward the end of the Congress in which he warned prophetically: 'Remember, it is only a question of getting a good running start for the revolutionary leap. The struggle for the masses is the struggle for power.'"

—The Third International After Lenin, pp. 90-91

These documents for us are living documents. When you read the Third Congress "Resolution on Communist Work among Women" you should know that there was a fight in the SL about this question when we had the opportunity to recruit from radical, feminist collectives in the early '70s. These documents became for us a living reference point and are reprinted in the early issues of Women and Revolution. The same thing with the document on the youth question. The communist youth theses lay out very clearly the motivating principles that became fighting issues in the very birth, first of the Revolutionary Tendency and then, after another kind of faction fight over our orientation to SDS, the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus.

Because we claim the tradition of the October Revolution as ours, it is our obligation to examine critically our work and perspectives by the standards set at the first four congresses of the Comintern. I really appreciate the way Trotsky concluded Lessons of October. That is: revolutionary tradition is not a museum display, it's not an internet search engine. He writes:
"The party should and must know the whole of the past, so as to be able to estimate it correctly and assign each event to its proper place. The tradition of a revolutionary party is not built on evasions, but on critical clarity."

Summary following discussion

I have not included the summmary portion because it relates to questions asked in the discussion period and is thus rather helter-skelter. Markin

Rally to Support WGBH Workers In Boston- Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm

Rally to Support WGBH Workers In Boston- Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm

Rally to Support WGBH Workers
Submitted by ujpadmin1 on Fri, 03/11/2011 - 8:26am.
When: Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Where: 10 Guest St • Brighton
Start: 2011 Mar 15 - 4:00pm


From Wisconsin to Boston, show your support for workers' rights!

Please join us to show support for WGBH’s AEEF/CWA Local 1300 in their current struggle.

Workers at WGBH, our local public television station, are fighting for the basic right to have a union in their workplace. Workers are members of AEEF/CWA Local 1300, and have been organized for nearly 40 years.

In the past, WGBH has bargained in good faith with their workers. Management and the union have been in negotiations since August, and management has recently decided to end collective bargaining. The union now faces the implementation of an unfair contract, and needs your support today!

Keep the union-busting in Wisconsin out of Massachusetts.

Sponsored by AEEF/CWA Local 1300, Greater Boston Labor Council, Massachusetts Jobs with Justice.

For more information contact Jennifer at jennifer@massjwj.net.

From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The Lines Are Further Drawn- The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It

Markin comment:

Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011

On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note

Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.

Markin comment:

Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.

That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.

And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.

Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.

How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.

Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!

The Anti-War Protest Season Continues-New York City Anti-War Rally April 9

Markin comment:

During this February and March I have called for and placed a number posts in this space in support of a March 19th Veterans For Peace-led march and action in Washington, D.C. I also gave my reasons for such support in commentary in those posts. Mainly from a sense of solidarity with my fellow veterans and because they were ramping up their opposition to Obama's wars beylond yet another march. This march in New York on April 9th, while necessary as an action to oppose Obama's wars, is a more traditional one and while we will attend it does not have the dramatic impact and bonds of solidarity attached to it of the Veterans' march.


March and Rally: Bring the Troops Home Now!

When: Saturday, April 9, 2011, 12:00 pm

Where: Union Square • New York, NY

Start: 2011 Apr 9 - 12:00pm

Endorse the call to action from the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)

Bring the Troops Home Now!

March and Rally

April 9th, 2011

New York City and San Francisco

(Union Sq. at noon) (Time and place to be announced)


Bring U.S. Troops Now: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza!

Trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for all, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.

End FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.

immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads

*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 92nd Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919) And The 90th Anniversary Of The Third World Congress (1921)-ECCI Appeal to the Proletariat of All Countries

Honor The 92nd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Historic Third World Congress Of The CI (1921)

Markin comment:

Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.

No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.

The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
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*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future- Neither People's Peace Nor People's War: INDOCHINA MUST CO COMMUNIST! (1971)

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.
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Markin comment on this article:

Aside from a bit of nostalgia in hearing about “people’s war”, a term not much heard from recently as its major, mostly Maoist, proponents have long given that notion up as China steams ahead on a path of more and more pro-imperialist accommodation (and increased internal capitalist forbearance) so I don’t have anything right now to say about that part of the article. Except to say people’s war, in any case, is not good for such business as the Chinese are embarked upon. Such documents are now locked, with seven seals, under the walls of the Forbidden Palace.

What is of interest is the notion of the “people’s peace treaty.” I admit that in 1971 I was interested in such a proposition for a while. But just for a while. Why? Well, as raw and new as I was to the Marxist movement that I was beginning to take seriously, very seriously at that point, I knew from many past encounters that this idea in the hands of the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party was a shill. That it was merely served up by them to give the liberals and others a chance to feel good without having to leave home. See, and I have mentioned this before, in those days (early 1970s) nobody who was seriously interested in Marxism, at least in the circles that I ran in, gave any thought to what the SWP or CP were, or were not, up to in those days. Except their programs had nothing to do with revolution.

That said, the notion of a people’s peace treaty or people’s referendum on war, and the like are not inherently tools only reformists can use. In the late 1930s the then revolutionary SWP projected just such a program, as a tactic in the struggle against the build-up to the on-coming imperialist war in America. (They also projected the just plain wrong Proletarian Military Program a little later but that is a separate issue.) In retrospect I would question whether in 1971, after several years of hard American military bombardment and destruction in Vietnam and the rest of Indochina, that such a concept would have much tactical use even for revolutionaries. Hell, some of us were waving NLF banners in the America streets. Where was there serious room, even propagandistic room, for a pacifistic thing like a people’s peace treaty.
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From the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter, forebear of Young Spartacus, July 1971.

Neither People's Peace Nor People's War:
INDOCHINA MUST CO COMMUNIST!

Many radicals, disillusioned with the flag-waving patriotism of the clergy-liberal CP-SWP led antiwar movement, were drawn to the People's Peace Treaty as a positive way to show their solidarity with the Vietnamese Revolution. But the People's Peace Treaty embodies precisely those politics which have prevented the Vietnamese Revolution from reaching a victorious conclusion. Twice the Viet Minh, predecessor of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (DRV) and the National Liberation Front (NLF), won complete military victory only to snatch political defeat from the jaws of military victory through a People's Peace Treaty-type settlement. The March 6 accords of 1946, signed by Ho Chi Minh, allowed French troops back into Indo-China. The 1954 Geneva accords, backed both by the Soviet Union and Communist China, gave back South Viet Nam, which the Viet Minh held, in exchange for elections which were of course never held.

People's Peace

The People's Peace Treaty asks that the Americans and Vietnamese recognize the "independence, peace and neutrality" of Laos and Cambodia, along the lines of the 1954 and 1962 Geneva Conventions. But the Geneva accords recognized, not the Cambodian and Laotian Communists and national liberation fighters, but their butchers, members of the royal families handpicked for their ruthlessness in dealing with real independence fighters and for their subservience to French imperialism.

The People's Peace Treaty calls for a "provisional coalition government to organize democratic elections. " Coalition governments by their very nature are unstable formations in which either the Communists throw everybody else out (DRV) or else are tossed out themselves, which is more likely. Those who would learn from history, instead of endlessly repeating mistakes, would do well to study the Laotian events from 1956 to 1958, which parallel almost exactly what the PPT projects for South Viet Nam after the withdrawal of U. S. troops. The Pathet Lao did quite well in the elections held after the Vientiane Agreements (1957), whereupon they were thrown out of government, and following various "democratic" maneuvers the U.S. resumed aid to the Royal Laotian army, which became the only foreign army in the world wholly supported by U. S. taxpayers. Coalition governments only serve to confuse, disarm and retard the class struggle, as recent examples, Allende in Chile and Bandaranaike in Ceylon, demonstrate.

People's War

People's War is merely the extension of the class-collaborationism and nationalism embodied in the People's Peace. Lin Piao describes People's War as: "To rely on the peasants, build rural base areas and use the countryside to encircle and finally capture the cities. " Thus, People's War is a war waged without the participation of the working class. People's War is also a strategy for the "rural areas of the world" (the under-developed countries), not the "cities of the world"(the industrial countries). Further, the1 revolution in the "rural areas of the world" is divided by Lin Piao into two distinct stages: the national-democratic revolution and the socialist revolution. The two stages must be kept distinct since the national-democratic revolution "embraces in its ranks not only the workers, peasants , and the urban petty bourgeoisie, but also the national bourgeoisie and other patriot¬ic and anti-imperialist democrats. "Obviously if the national-democratic revolution began to perform socialist tasks such as the expropriation of the national bourgeoisie, then the national bourgeoisie would soon depart from its ranks. People's War is a military strategy for a war of the national-democratic revolution (including the national bourgeoisie in its ranks), fought without the workers, in the countryside of underdeveloped countries. Nowhere do Mao, Lin Piao or Giap claim that People's War is a strategy for workers, for revolutionary work in the cities or in the industrial countries or during a socialist revolution. In fact, none of these "revolutionaries" or their co-thinkers have any strategy for a proletarian socialist revolution.

According to Lin Piao "the socialist revolution is the inevitable sequel to the national-democratic revolution. " But if the socialist revolution, which means the destruction of the national bourgeoisie as a class were truly an inevitable sequel to the national-democrat revolution, then the national bourgeoisie will not join a movement which promises, if successful, their destruction. No matter how oppressive the national bourgeoisie may find colonial or neo-colonial subjugation, it knows that its survival is contingent on the continuance of that subjugation. Therefore, for national independence to be consolidated after anything resembling People's War, the national bourgeoisie must be smashed !
Even where People's War has been militarily successful, the democratic tasks still remain on the agenda and the socialist revolution is anything but inevitable. The price paid for "using the countryside to first encircle, then capture the cities" has been economic mismanagement and stagnation even within tt context of a planned economy and socialized production, and the complete absence of wor ers democracy (for which Maothought and six hour Castroite tirades are no substitute) and the isolation of the revolution in one country
Who are the "People"?


The fundamental flaw of the People's Peace Treaty is that it ignores the class reality of the struggle in Indochina. It states that the "American and Vietnamese people are not enemies. " Then why did the war happen? Th "People" is not the enemy precisely because in modern society, torn by class conflict, ir dividuals and groups act and react as classes. The undifferentiated "People" can be neithei enemies nor allies because they have no social reality. "Power to the People" is as meaningless a formulation as "Amen". Marx, in his Critique of the Gotha Program is a trenchant critic of such formulations as "People's Party, "People's State" and "international brotherhood of Peoples" which confuse and hide the reality of the class struggle, which is a struggle between different classes of "People".

The Socialist Workers Party has built a consciously anti-class peace movement. By basing the peace movement on "the masses" (another euphemism for "the People") the SWP attempts to cover over its welcoming of bourgeois politicians into the movement. The SWP is consciously class-collaborationist and must be politically destroyed as an obstacle in the road of proletarian revolution, along with the CPUSA and the People's Peace Treaty.

Class War
Instead of People's Peace or People's War, Trotskyists advocate class war. Trotskyists believe that the urban working class must lead the peasants. What is required is a proletarian vanguard party with a program for international working-class revolution, not a Stalinist party with a peasant-based and nationally-limited program. The proletariat in "rural areas" as well as in industrial centers, following in the footsteps of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, must raise once again the banners of the October Revolution and the Fourth International of Trotsky!

From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The Lines Are Further Drawn- The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It

Markin comment:

Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
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Friday, March 04, 2011

On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note

Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.

Markin comment:

Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.

That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.

And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.

Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.

How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.

Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!

*On The 8th Anniversary of The Iraq War (Really 20th) A March 19th Veterans-Led March In Washington To Stop The Wars In Afghanistan And Iraq-All Out In Support Of The Vets

Click on the headline to link to the Stop These Wars Website.

Markin comment:

In the lead up to the December 16, 2010 Veterans For Peace led-civil disobedience action in Washington, D. C. where 131 people were arrested (many of whom later had the charges against them dropped) I motivated my support for that action as described below in a blog entry that I am re-posting today. That same general motivation applies (with a caveat noted just below) as another Veterans For Peace-led planned civil disobedience action is scheduled for March 19th 2011, the 8th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War II. (Although as noted in the headline to this entry it really is the 20th year as the theme of the Catholic Worker-led demonstrations in Washington on January 15, 2011 made clear, correctly clear.)

I note here that while I support and will attend the March 19th actions (with as many of the local ad hoc anti-imperialist group that I belong to as can come that day) because they are very important symbolic actions on an important anti-war occasion I am worried, at least a little worried, that if we do not take more arrests (more than 131 that is) this action will be seen as a failure. Not by the media, of course, as they hardly paid attention on December 16th. Not the Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama government, of course, they haven’t paid attention at all, ever. But militants, and potential militants, who will dismiss such actions out of hand and write off street actions as the work of cranky old men and women. In short, we do not want to get civil disobedience-itis any more than we wanted to keep doing those endless dwindling mass marches. So to do this right-All out in support of the Vets- All out to resist these wars- All out to end Obama’s Iraq and Afghan Wars.
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December 1, 2010

A December 16th Veterans-Led March In Washington To Stop The Wars In Afghanistan And Iraq-All Out In Support Of The Vets

On November 11, 2010, Veterans Day, I marched with a contingent of Veterans For Peace in the Boston Veterans Day parade and posted an entry in this space about my take on the event. (See, A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!, dated November 11, 2010). As part of that commentary I noted the following:

“Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.”

Now comes word (click on headline for similar March 19th action) that veterans are leading an action in Washington, D.C. on December 16, 2010 in front of the White House under the rubric of "Peace On Earth." There is no question that I, the anti-imperialist committee that I am a member of in Boston, any self-respecting radical or, hell, any self-respecting little old lady in tennis sneakers for that matter, could endorse this thing. If for no other reason that it begs, literally begs, Warmonger-In-Chief Obama (of the double troop escalations in Afghanistan with nobody holding a gun to his head remember) to “do the right thing.”

That said, the sentiment expressed above in that Veterans Day commentary still holds true. So I, and all I can gather to go with me, will be in Washington on December 16th. I will hold my nose in doing so, although not my tongue, trying to get my fellow vets to change course. In my hand I will hold this slogan-Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan! And I won’t be begging him about it, no way.