From The Bob Feldman Blog- Music To While Away The Class Struggle By-"Eugene Debs"

From The Bob Feldman Blog- Music To While Away The Class Struggle By-"Eugene Debs"

From the American Left Historyblog:

*The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs- Professor Currie's View

BOOK REVIEW

Eugene V. Debs, Harold W. Currie, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1976

Every January militants of the left wing of the international labor movement, the European sections more than the American, honor the Three L’s, the key leaders of the movement in the early 20th century- Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Since opening this space in early 2006 I have paid individual honor to all three in successive years. In that same spirit for this year’s, and for future January observances, I will highlight some other lesser figures of the revolutionary pantheon or those who contributed in some way to the development of this movement, mainly American at first as befits the title of this blog but eventually others in the international movement as well. This year’s first honoree was the Trotskyist founder and organization leader James P. Cannon. Cannon represented that first American generation who formed the core of cadre directly influenced to the left by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Here I take a step back to the pre-World War I period and honor probably the most well-known socialist of that period, Eugene V. Debs.

For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature o the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed ‘root and branch’ and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, as is very well described in this little book, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.

Professor Currie has here done the very valuable service of outlining the highlights of Debs’ political career and of his inner ideological turmoil for those who need a short course on what set Debs, above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. The professor makes clear that his is a political profile and not the extensive detailed informational one of traditional biography. For that, if one is so inclined in that direction after reading this primer, then it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.

If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.

One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests’ of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state.

For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). Professor Currie details this transformation very nicely, including the seemingly inevitable thrashing about that every political person does when a politically transformative experience occurs. In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the ‘hippie’ experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.

Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day.
The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.

Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.

If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. Professor Currie goes into some detail here about the demands on these campaigns personally on the aging Debs and of the internal political oppositions to his candidacies. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially, as the good professor as noted, since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.

As the American Socialist party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).

Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.

That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920. Professor Currie does a good job here giving the narrative of the basis of his conviction, the tenor of the times, the appeals process and his eventual release by President Harding.

I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.

As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.

No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, esoterica and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Professor Currie, and not he alone among academic students of Debs, has pointed out that Debs had a life long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialism movement have shown sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.

That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Professor Currie also has several sections at the end of his book on Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinism argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal page his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. That said, Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, gets a fair exposition here. And should get a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.

From "Between The Lines"-Calls Grow for Government to Account for "Mistreatment" of Accused WikiLeaks Source Bradley Manning -Free Private Bradley Manning Now!

Click on the headline to link to a Between The Lines entry on class-war prisoner, Private Bradley Manning.

Markin comment:

Free Bradley Manning Now! Join the chorus of protest against his outrageous treatment by the Bush (oops) Obama administration (some things never change no matter the name on the white house door).

On The 150th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The American Civil War Honor Governor John Andrews -Organizer Of The Massachusetts Regiments (Including The 6th, 10th, 20th, 54th, And 55th)

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Massachusetts Civil War Governor John Andrews.

Markin comment:

This year, the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War, an event that ended chattel slavery in this country, some of the entries used to celebrate Black History Month in February can serve double-duty to honor those militants who fought, and in some cases, laid down their heads on some lonesome battlefield for black freedom. But also, as here for those civilians who 'stepped to the plate' and organized the military units that needed to fight for that victory. And stepped up fast in this case when President Lincoln made the call for troops.

From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)-"Lenin And The Vanguard Party"- Part Seven-"Toward The Communist International"

Lenin And The Vanguard Party-Part Seven-Toward The Communist International

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 used from the anniversary of the Communist International series:

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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To read about the overall purpose of this pamphlet series and other information about the history of the document go the the American Left History Archives From-Lenin and The Vanguard Party-Preface To The Second Edition And Part One, dated March 15, 2011.

The event which transformed Lenin from a Russian revolutionary social democrat into the founding leader of the world communist movement can be precisely dated—4 August 1914. With the start of World War I the parliamentary fraction of the German SPD voted unanimously in favor of war credits for the Reich. Having now experienced more than 60 years of later social-democratic and then Stalinist betrayals of socialist principle, it is difficult today for us to appreciate the absolutely shocking impact of August 4th upon the revolutionaries in the Second International. Luxemburg suffered a nervous collapse in reaction to the wave of national chauvinism which swept the German social-democratic movement. Lenin at first refused to believe the report of the Reichstag vote in the SPD's organ, Vorwarts, dismissing that issue as a forgery by the Kaiser's government.

For revolutionary social democrats, August 4th did not simply destroy their illusions in a particular party and its leadership but challenged their entire political worldview. For Marxists of Lenin's and Luxemburg's generation, the progress of Social Democracy, best represented in Germany, had seemed steady, irreversible and inexorable.

The Historic Significance of the Second International

The era of the Socialist (Second) International (1889-1914) represented the extraordinarily rapid growth of the European labor movement and of the Marxist current within it. Except for the British trade unions (which supported the bourgeois liberals), the organizations making up the First International (1864-74) were propaganda groups numbering at most in the thousands. By 1914, the parties of the Socialist International were mass parties with millions of supporters throughout Europe.

In the period of the First International, there were perhaps a thousand Marxists on the face of the globe, overwhelmingly concentrated in Germany. Significantly, there were no French Marxists in the Paris Commune of 1871, only the Hungarian Leo Franckel. By 1914, Marxism was the most important ten¬dency in the international workers movement, the official doc¬trine of mass proletarian parties in Central and East Europe. It is understandable therefore that Kautsky and the social democrats should regard Marxism as the natural, inevitable political expression of the modern labor movement.
Britain, it is true, had a mass labor movement which was politically liberal and openly class-collaborationist. However, Marx and Engels themselves had explained the political backwardness of the British labor movement as the product of particular historic circumstances (e.g., Britain's dominance in the world economy, English-Irish national antagonism, the Empire). Furthermore, Marxists in the Second International, including Lenin, regarded the founding of the Labour Party in 1905 as a significant progressive step toward a mass proletarian socialist party in Britain. Thus the relative political backwardness of the British workers movement did not fundamentally challenge the orthodox social-democratic (i.e., Kautskyan) worldview.

To be sure, the pre-1914 Marxist movement was familiar with renegades and revisionists—the Bernsteinians in Germany, Struve and the "legal Marxists" in Russia. Lenin would have added Plekhanov and the Mensheviks to this list. But these retrogressions toward liberal reformism appeared to affect only the intellectual elements in the social-democratic movement. The SPD as a whole seemed solidly Marxist in its policies, while Marxism gained against old-fashioned socialist radicalism (e.g., Jauresism) in other sections of the International (e.g., the French, Italian).

August 4th was the first great internal counterrevolution in the workers movement, and all the more destructive because it was so unexpected. The triumph of chauvinism and class collaborationism in the major parties of the Socialist International shattered the shallow, passive optimism of Kaut-skyanized Marxism. After the SPD's great betrayal, going over to the side of its "own" bourgeoisie, revolutionary Marxists could no longer regard opportunism in the workers movement as a marginal or episodic phenomenon or as a product of particular historic political backwardness (e.g., Britain).
The established leaderships of most mass socialist parties could hardly be dismissed as unstable, petty-bourgeois democratic intellectuals, as fellow-travelers of Social Democracy. This is how Kautsky had characterized the Bernsteinian revisionists and how Lenin had dismissed the Mensheviks. But the chauvinist leaders of the SPD in 1914—Friedrich Ebert, Gus-tav Noske, Philipp Scheidemann—had worked their way up from the party's ranks beginning as young men. All three had been workers: Ebert had been a saddler, Noske a butcher and Scheidemann a typesetter. Ebert and Noske began their SPD careers as local trade-union functionaries, Scheidemann as a journalist for a local party paper. The leading chauvinists and opportunists were thus very much of the flesh and blood of the German Social Democracy.

Nor could the actions of the SPD leadership be explained as a reflection of the historic political backwardness of the German working class. Ebert, Noske and Scheidemann had been trained as Marxists by the personal followers of Marx and Engels. They had voted time and time again for revolutionary socialist resolutions. In supporting the war, the SPD leaders knew they were violating their party's longstanding socialist principles.
Right up to the fateful Reichstag vote, the SPD engaged in mass antiwar agitation. On 25 July 1914 the party execu¬tive issued a proclamation which concluded:

"Comrades, we appeal to you to express at mass meetings without delay the German proletariat's firm determination to maintain peace.... The ruling classes who in time of peace gag you, despise you and exploit you, would misuse you as food for cannon. Everywhere there must sound in the ears of those in power: 'We will have no war! Down with war! Long live the international brotherhood of peoples!'"
—reproduced in William English Walling, ed., The Socialists and the War (1915)

In considering the social-chauvinist betrayal of the German Social Democracy, Lenin came to realize that the Bolsheviks were not simply a Russian counterpart of the SPD with a principled revolutionary leadership. The selection, testing and training of cadre in Lenin's party were fundamentally different from Bebel's and Kautsky's party. And in that difference lay the reason why in August 1914 the parliamentary repre¬sentatives of the SPD supported "their" Kaiser, while their counterparts in the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) were instead clapped in the tsar's prisons.

Lenin Breaks with Social Democracy

Lenin's basic policy toward the war and the international socialist movement was developed within a few weeks after the outbreak of hostilities. This policy had three main elements. One, socialists must stand for the defeat, above all of their "own" bourgeois state. Two, the war demonstrated that capitalism in the imperialist epoch threatened to destroy civilization. Socialists must therefore work to transform the imperialist war into civil war, into proletarian revolution And three, the Second International had been destroyed by social-chauvinism. A new, revolutionary international must be built through a complete split with the opportunists in the social-democratic movement.

These policies, which remained central to Lenin's activities right up to the October Revolution, were clearly ex¬pressed in his very first articles on the war:

"It is the duty of every socialist to conduct propaganda of the class struggle... work directed towards turning a war of nations into a civil war is the only socialist activity in an era of an imperialist armed conflict of the bourgeoisie of all nations Let us raise high the banner of civil war! Imperialism sets at hazard the fate of European culture: this war will be followed by others unless there are a series of successful revolutions... "The Second International is dead, overcome by opportunism Down with opportunism, and long live the Third International purged not only of 'turncoats'...but of opportunists as well. "The Second International did its share of useful preparatory work in preliminarily organizing the proletarian masses during the long, 'peaceful' period of the most brutal capitalist slavery and most rapid capitalist progress in the last third of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. To the Inird International falls the task of organizing the proletarian forces for a revolutionary onslaught against the capitalist governments, for civil war against the bourgeoisie of all coun¬tries for the capture of political power, for the triumph of socialism!"
—"The Position and Tasks of the Socialist
International" (November 1914)

While Lenin was optimistic about winning over the mass base of the official social-democratic parties, he understood that he was advocating splitting the workers movement into two antagonistic parties, the one revolutionary, the other reformist. Thus Lenin's demand for a Third International encoun¬tered far more opposition among antiwar social democrats than his impassioned denunciation of social-chauvinism. In fact, most of Lenin's polemics in this period (1914-16) were not directed at the outright social-chauvinists (Scheidemann Vandervelde, Plekhanov), but rather at the centrists who apologized for the social-chauvinists (Kautsky) or refused to split with them (Martov).

Thus Lenin was forced to confront and explicitly reject the orthodox social-democratic position on the party ques¬tion, the Kautskyan "party of the whole class":

"The crisis created by the great war has torn away all coverings, swept away all conventions, exposed an abscess that has long come to a head, and revealed opportunism in its true role ot ally of the bourgeoisie. The complete organisational sever¬ance of this element from the workers' parties has become imperative.... The old theory that opportunism is a 'legitiiEato shade' in a single party that knows no 'extremes' has now turned into a tremendous deception of the workers and a tremendous hindrance to the working-class movement. Undisguised opportunism, which immediately repels the working masses, is not so frightful and injurious as this theory of the golden mean.... Kautsky, the most outstanding spokesman of this theory, and also the leading authority in the Second Inter¬national, has shown himself a consummate hypocrite and a past master in the art of prostituting Marxism."
—"The Collapse of the Second International"
(May-June 1915) .

In considering the growth of opportunism in the West European social-democratic parties, Lenin naturally reviewed the history of the Russian movement and of Bolshevism. He realized that the Bolshevik organization had not, in fact, been built according to the Kautskyan formula. It had completely organizationally separated formally from the Russian opportunists, the Mensheviks, two and a half years before the outbreak of war and in practice long before 1912. Lenin now took the Bolshevik Party as a model for a new, revolutionary international: "The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party has long parted company with its opportunists. Besides, the Russian opportunists have now become chauvinists. This only fortifies us in our opinion that a split with them is essential in the interests ot socialism.... We are firmly convinced that, in the present state of affairs, a split with the opportunists and chauvinists is the prime duty of revolutionaries, just as a split with the yellow trade unions, the anti-Semites, the liberal workers' unions, was essential in helping speed the enlightenment of backward workers and draw them into the ranks of the Social-Democratic Party.

"In our opinion, the Third International should be built up on that kind of revolutionary basis. To our Party, the question of the expediency of a break with the social-chauvinists does not exist, it has been answered with finality. The only question that exists for our Party is whether this can be achieved on an international scale in the immediate future."
—V. I. Lenin and G. Zinoviev, Socialism and War (July-August 1915)

We have maintained in this series that Leninism as a qualitative extension of Marxism arose in 1914-17, when Lenin responded in a revolutionary manner to the imperialist war and the collapse of the Second International into hostile social-chauvinist parties. This view has been contested, on the one hand, by Stalinists who project the cult of the infallibly clairvoyant revolutionary leader back to the beginning ofLenin's political career and, on the other, by various centrist and left-reformists who want to eradicate or blur the line between Leninism and pre-1914 orthodox Social Democracy
(Kautskyism).

Among the Bolsheviks, however, it was generally recognized that Leninism originated in 1914 and not before. In a commemorative article following Lenin's death, Evgenyi Preobrazhensky, one of the leading Bolshevik intellectuals, wrote:

"In Bolshevism or Leninism we must make a strict distinction between two periods—the period roughly before the world war and the period ushered in by the world war. Before the world war, Comrade Lenin, although he held to the real, genuine, undistorted, revolutionary Marxism,*did not yet consider the social-democrats to be the agents of capital in the ranks of the proletariat. During this period, you will find more than one article by Comrade Lenin in which he defends this German social-democracy in the face of those accusations and reproaches which it received, for instance, from the camp of the populists, syndicalists, etc., for unrevolutionary opportunism, for betrayal of the revolutionary spirit of Marxism.... "If, to our misfortune, Comrade Lenin had died before the world war, it would never have entered anyone's head to speak of 'Leninism,' as some kind of special version of Marxism, as it was subsequently to become. Lenin was the most consistent revolutionary Marxist.... But there was nothing specific in our Bolshevism in the realm of theory...to distinguish it in any way from the traditional, but truly revolutionary, Marxism.... "If Comrade Lenin had not lived to see this [post-1914] period, he would have entered history as the most eminent leader of the left wing of the Russian social-democracy.... Only the year 1914 transformed him into an international leader. He was the first to pose the basic question: what in a broad sense does this war mean? He replied: this war signifies the beginning of the crash of capitalism and thus the tactics of the workers' move¬ment must be directed towards turning the imperialist war into a civil war."
—"Marxism and Leninism," Molodoya Gvardiya, 1924 [our translation]

What Did Social-Chauvinism Signify?

Within a few weeks after the outbreak of war, Lenin determined to split with the social-chauvinists and to work for a new, revolutionary international. But he did not immediately present a theoretical (i.e., historical and sociological) explanation as to why and how the mass parties of the West European proletariat had succumbed to opportunism.
Here one might contrast Marx and Lenin as revolutionary politicians. Marx often arrived at theoretical generalizations well in advance of the immediate programmatic, tactical and organizational conclusions which flowed from his new socio-historical premises. Thus in late 1848, after nine months of revolution, Marx concluded that the German bourgeoisie was incapable of overthrowing absolutism. However, it was only a year later in exile that Marx developed a new strategy corresponding to his changed view of German society. In contrast, Lenin's revolutionary thrust frequently led him to break with opportunism and false policies well before he attained corresponding theoretical generalizations.

1914-16 was a period when Lenin's theoretical analysis lagged behind his political conclusions and actions. Lenin's earliest writings on war and the International identified social-democratic opportunism only as a political-ideological current. The only attempt to relate the growth of opportunism to objective historical conditions was the observation that the West European socialist parties functioned under a long period of bourgeois legality.The absence of a sociological and historical explanation for
social-democratic opportunism was a serious weakness in Lenin's campaign for a Third International. For it had to be demonstrated that August 4th was not an opportunist episode or a reversible false policy to fully justify splitting interna¬tional Social Democracy. Lenin's fight with the centrists— Kautsky/Haase/Ledebour in Germany, Martov/Axelrod in Russia, the leadership of the Italian Socialist Party—focused on the historic significance of national defensism in the world war and on the depth of opportunism in the social-democratic movement. The centrists maintained that "defense of the fatherland" was a monumental opportunist error, but nothing more. The policy of national defensism could be reversed, the Second International reformed (literally as well as figuratively). Some of the extreme chauvinists would probably have to go, but basically the "good old International" could be restored as of July 1914. Lenin regarded the pre-1914 International as diseased with opportunism; with the war the dis¬ease worsened into social-chauvinism and became fatal. For the centrists, the pre-war International was basically a healthy body. It was now passing through the sickness of social-chauvinism. The task of socialists was to cure the sickness and save the patient.

The main spokesman for amnestying the social-chauvinists and minimizing the problem of opportunism was, of course, Kautsky. In Neue Zeit (15 February 1915) he advocated an attitude of comradely tolerance for those who "erred" in defending German imperialism:

"It is true I saw since the 4th of August that a number of members of the party were continuously evolving more and more in the direction of imperialism, but I believed these were only exceptions and took an optimistic view. I did this in order to give the comrades confidence and to work against pessimism. And it was equally important to urge the comrades to tolerance, following the example of [Wilhelm] Liebknecht in 1870."
—William English Walling, ed., The Socialists and the War (1915)

Centrist softness toward the Second International also expressed itself within the Bolshevik Party early in the war. The head of the Bolshevik group in Switzerland, V.A. Karpinsky, objected to Lenin's position that the Second International had collapsed and a new, revolutionary interna¬tional must be built. In a letter (27 September 1914) to Lenin he wrote:

"We believe that it would be an exaggeration to define all that happened within the International as its 'ideological-political collapse.' Neither by volume or content would this definition correspond to the real happenings. The International...has suffered an ideological-political collapse, if you like, but on one question only, the military question. With regard to the rest there is no reason to consider that the ideological-political position of the International has wavered or, moreover, that it has been completely destroyed. This would mean that after los¬ing only one redoubt we are unnecessarily surrendering all forts."
—Olga Hess Gankin and H.H. Fisher, eds., The Bolsheviks and the World War (1940)

To overcome such centrist attitudes, Lenin had to demonstrate that August 4th was the culmination of opportunist tendencies profoundly rooted in the nature and history of West European Social Democracy.

Imperialism, Social-Chauvinism and the Labor Bureaucracy

Lenin's analysis of the social bases of opportunism in the Second International was first presented in a resolution ("Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International") for a Bolshevik conference in Berne, Switzerland in March 1915:

"Certain strata of the working class (the bureaucracy of the labor movement and the labor aristocracy, who get a fraction of the profits from the exploitation of the colonies and from the privileged position of their 'fatherlands' in the world market), as well as petty-bourgeois sympathizers within the socialist parties, have proved the social mainstay of these [opportunist] tendencies, and channels of bourgeois influence over the proletariat."

This capsule analysis was not developed in any theoretical or empirical depth until the following year, principally in Lenin's pamphlet, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism (written in early 1916), and his article, "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism" (October 1916), and in Zinoviev's book, The War and the Crisis of Socialism (August 1916).
Given the Stalinist cult of Lenin and the individualistic interpretations of bourgeois historiography, it is not generally recognized that Lenin worked as part of a collective. During the war years, he had a literary division of labor with Zinoviev in which the latter concentrated on the German movement. Reading only Lenin's writings of this period, one gets a seriously incomplete picture of the Bolshevik position on the imperialist war and international socialist movement. That is why in 1916 both Lenin's and Zinoviev's war writings were collected in a single volume published in German, entitled Against the Stream. The principal Leninist analysis of opportunism in the German Social Democracy is Zinoviev's The War and the Crisis of Socialism, which contains a long section titled "The Social Roots of Opportunism." This key section of Zinoviev's important work was reproduced in English in the American Shachtmanite jour¬nal, New International (March-June 1942).

Marxists had long recognized the existence of a pro-bourgeois, pro-imperialist labor bureaucracy in Britain. Engels had condemned the bourgeoisified leaders of the British trade unions more than a little, relating this phenomenon to Britain's world dominance economically. However, Marxists in the Second International regarded the class-collaborationist British labor movement as a historic anomaly, a stage which European Social Democracy had happily skipped over. In beginning his section on the labor bureaucracy in Germany, Zinoviev states that Marxists had regarded Social Democracy as immune from this corrupt social caste:

"When we spoke of labor bureaucracy before the war we understood by that almost exclusively the British trade unions. We had in mind the fundamental work of the Webbs, the caste spirit, the reactionary role of the bureaucracy in the old British trade unionism, and we said to ourselves: how fortunate that we have not been created in that image, how fortunate that this cup of grief has been spared our labor movement on the continent.
"But we have been drinking for a long time out of this very cup. In the labor movement of Germany—a movement which served as a model for socialists of all countries before the war—there has arisen just as numerous and just as reactionary a cast of labor bureaucrats." [our emphasis]

The triumph of social-chauvinism in the Second International caused Lenin to reconsider the historic significance of the pro-imperialist British Labour leadership. He came to the conclusion that the class-collaborationist trade unionism of Victorian England anticipated tendencies that would come to the fore when other countries, above all Germany, caught up with Britain economically and became competing imperialist powers.
Germany's very rapid industrial growth, following its victorious war in 1870, simultaneously created a powerful mass social-democratic labor movement and transformed the country into an aggressive imperialist world power. Germany's expansionist goals could only be realized through a major war. And Germany could not win a major war if faced with the active opposition of its powerful labor movement. Thus the objective needs of German imperialism required the cooperation of the social-democratic leadership. The defeat of the German bourgeois-democratic revolution in 1848 and the resulting semi-autocratic class-political struc¬ture made a rapprochement between the ruling circles and labor bureaucracy more difficult, less evolutionary than in Britain. Hence the shock effect of August 4th.

But Lenin recognized that the underlying historical process which led in 1914 to the SPD's vote for war credits and to British Labour Party cabinet ministers was similar. In Imperialism he wrote:

"It must be observed that in Great Britain the tendency of imperialism to split the workers, to strengthen opportunism among them and to cause temporary decay in the working-class movement, revealed itself much earlier than the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.... "The distinctive feature of the present situation is the preva¬lence of such economic and political conditions that are bound to increase the irreconcilability between opportunism and the general and vital interests of the working-class movement.... "Opportunism cannot now be completely triumphant in the working-class movement of one country for decades as it was in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century; but in a number of countries it has grown ripe, overripe and rotten, and has become completely merged with bourgeois policy in the form of 'social-chauvinism'." [our emphasis]

Lenin's Imperialism deals with those changes in the world capitalist system which strengthened opportunist forces in the workers movement internationally. It is Zinoviev's 1916 work that concretely analyzes the forces of opportunism in the German Social Democracy.

Zinoviev showed that the SPD's huge treasury supported a vast number of functionaries who led comfortable petty-bourgeois lives far removed from the workers they supposedly represented. In addition to a relatively high standard of living, the social-democratic officialdom had begun to enjoy a priviliged social status. The German ruling elite began to treat the SPD and trade-union leaders with respect, differentiating etween the "moderates" and radicals like Karl Liebknecht. The corrupting effect on an ex-printer or an ex-saddler of being treated as an important personage by the Junker aris¬tocracy was considerable. Referring to Scheidemann's memoirs of the war period, Carl Schorske in his excellent German Social Democracy 1905-1917 (1955) comments: "No reader of Scheidemann can miss the genuine pleasure which he felt in being invited to discuss matters on an equal footing with the ministers of state." The German Social Democracy had become an institution through which able, ambitious young workers could reach the top of a highly class- and caste-stratified society.
Zinoviev's major 1916 work corrects the emphasis on ideological revisionism as the cause of opportunism which is found in Lenin's earliest war writings. In fact, the SPD's official doctrine and program failed to reflect its increasingly reformist practice. Many of the social-democratic leaders, overwhelmingly of working-class background, retained a sentimental attachment to the socialist cause long after they ceased believing in it as practical politics. Only the war forced the SPD to break openly with socialist principle.

Zinoviev recognized that social-chauvinist ideology was false consciousness arising from the SPD officialdom's actual role in Wilhelminian German society:

"When we speak of the 'treachery of the leaders' we do not say by this that it was a deep-laid plot, that it was a con¬sciously perpetrated sell-out of the workers' interests. Far from it. But consciousness is conditioned by existence, not vice versa. The entire social essence of this caste of labor bureaucrats led inevitably, through the outmoded pace set for the movement in the 'peaceful' pre-war period, to complete bourgeoisification of their 'consciousness.' The entire social position into which this numerically strong caste of leaders had climbed over the backs of the working class made them a social group which objectively must be regarded as an agency of the imperialist bourgeoisie." [emphasis in original] The anarcho-syndicalists applauded the revolutionary Marxists' attack on the social-democratic bureaucracy and proclaimed: we told you so. Thus the Bolsheviks in attacking official Social Democracy carefully distinguished their posi¬tion from the anarcho-syndicalists. Zinoviev pointed out that the existence of a powerful reformist bureaucracy was, in one sense, a product of the development and strength of the mass labor movement. The anarcho-syndicalists' answer to bureaucratism amounted to self-liquidation of the workers movement as an organized force objectively capable of over¬throwing capitalism. If the reformist bureaucracy suppressed the revolutionary potential of the workers movement, the anarcho-syndicalists proposed to disorganize that movement into impotence.

Zinoviev maintained that a bureaucracy was not identical with a large organization of party and trade-union functionaries. On the contrary, such an apparatus was necessary to lead the working class to power. The decisive task was the subor¬dination of the leaders and functionaries of the labor move¬ment to the historic interests of the international proletariat: "At the time of the crisis over the war, the labor bureaucracy played the role of a reactionary factor. That is undoubtedly correct. But that does not mean the labor movement will be able to get along without a big organizational apparatus, without an entire spectrum of people devoted especially to service the proletarian organization. We do not want to go back to the time when the labor movement was so weak that it could get along without its own employees and functionaries, but to go forward to the time when the labor movement will be something different, in which the strong movement of the proletariat will subordinate the stratum of functionaries to itself, in which routine will be destroyed, bureaucratic corrosion wiped out; which will bring new men to the surface, infuse them with fighting courage, fill them with a new spirit." There is no mechanical organizational solution to bureaucratism in the workers movement or even in its vanguard party. Combatting bureaucratism and reformism involves continual political struggle against the many-sided influences and pressures bourgeois society brings to bear upon the workers movement, its various strata and its vanguard.

The Leninist Position on the Labor Aristocracy


The Marxists of the Second International were fully aware that the entire working class did not support socialism. Many workers adhered to bourgeois ideology (e.g., religion) and supported the capitalist parties. Pre-1914 social democrats generally associated political backwardness with social backwardness. In particular, they saw that workers newly drawn from the peasantry and other small proprietors tended to retain the outlook of their former class. Thus Kautsky in his 1909 The Road to Power wrote:
"To a large degree hatched out of the small capitalist and small farmer class, many proletarians long carry the shells of these classes around with them. They do not feel themselves proletarians, but as would-be property owners." In other words, the classic social-democratic position was that those workers who had a low cultural level, were unskilled, unorganized, came from a rural background, etc., would be most submissive toward bourgeois authority. In the context of late 19th-century Germany and France, this political-sociological generalization was valid.

However, with the development of a strong trade-union movement, social and political conservatism appeared at the top of the working class and not only at the bottom. Skilled workers in strong craft unions insulated themselves to a certain degree from the labor market and cyclical unemployment and tended to express a narrow corporate outlook.
The phenomenon of a labor aristocratic caste, like that of the labor bureaucracy, first manifested itself in Victorian England. The narrow corporate spirit of the British craft unions was well known. Furthermore, the upper stratum of the British working class was almost exclusively English and Scotish, while the Irish were a significant part of the unskilled labor force.

The composition of pre-war German Social Democracy consisted largely of skilled, better-off workers. Zinoviev saw in this sociological composition an important source of reformism:

"The predominant mass of the membership of the Berlin social-democratic organization is composed of trained, of skilled workers. In other words, the predominant mass of the membership of the social-democratic organization consists of the better-paid strata of labor—of those strata from which the greatest section of the labor aristocracy arises, [emphasis in original]
—The War and the Crisis of Socialism

Zinoviev makes no attempt to demonstrate empirically that the labor aristocracy provided the base for the SPD right wing; he merely asserts it. He can therefore be criticized for mechanically transposing the political sociology of Edwardian Britain onto the very different terrain of Wilhelminian Germany. Craft unionism never played as important a role in Germany as in Britain. On the other hand, rural backwardness loomed large in the political life of Germany right up until the war. The rock-solid base of the SPD right wing was the party's provincial organizations. Right-wing bureaucrats tried to counter the radicals, who were always concentrated in the big cities, by gerrymandering the party's electoral dis¬tricts in favor of the small towns. A farmer's son working as an unskilled laborer in a South German town was more likely to support the SPD right, represented by Bernstein and Eduard David, than was a Berlin master machinist.

However, if Zinoviev was too mechanical in imposing a British model of the sociological bases of opportunism on the SPD, the basic Leninist position on the stratification of the working class in the imperialist epoch remains valid. In advanced capitalist countries with a large, well-established labor movement, the upper strata of the working class will frequently tend toward social and political conservatism relative to the mass of the proletariat. Moreover, within certain economic limits, the bourgeoisie and labor bureaucracy can widen the gap between the labor aristocracy and the class as a whole. Zinoviev is certainly correct when he writes:

"To foster splits between the various strata of the working class, to promote competition among them, to segregate the upper stratum from the rest of the proletariat by corrupting it and making it an agency for bourgeois 'respectability'—that is entirely in the interests of the bourgeoisie.... They [the social-chauvinists] split the working class inside of every country and thereby intensify and aggravate the split between the working classes of various countries." —Zinoviev (op. cit.)

The uppermost stratum of the working class is not always and everywhere politically to the right of the mass of the proletariat. Sometimes the greater economic security of highly skilled workers produces a situation where they main¬tain a more radical political attitude than the mass of organ¬ized workers, who are more concerned with their day-to-day material needs. Thus in Weimar Germany in the 1920s, Communist support among skilled workers was relatively greater than among the basic factory labor force, which looked to the Social Democrats for immediate reforms. Franz Borkenau wrote of the German Communist Party membership in 1927:

"Skilled workers and people who have been skilled workers make up two-fifths of the party membership; if their womenfolk were added they would probably make up nearly half.... If there is any such thing as a worker's aristocracy, here it is." —World Communism (1939)

Lenin's position on the labor aristocracy was an important corrective to the traditional, positive social-democratic orien¬tation to that stratum, an orientation which was in part a con¬servative reaction to the rapid growth of the unskilled labor force from among a politically conservative and socially back¬ward peasantry. While workers from a rural background can be extremely militant, they are highly volatile and difficult to organize on a stable basis. For example, migrant farm labor and similar groups (e.g., lumberjacks) drawn into the syndicalist American Industrial Workers of the World before World War I demonstrated great combativity, but also great organizational instability.

No self-professed Marxist today maintains as positive an orientation to the highly skilled, well-paid sections of the working class as did the Social Democracy. On the contrary, during the past period New Left "Marxism" has gone to the opposite extreme, dismissing the entire organized proletariat in the advanced capitalist countries as a "labor aristocracy" bought off by the spoils of imperialism. Just as at one time the revolutionary Marxists' attack on the social-democratic bureaucracy was exploited by the anarcho-syndicalists, so in our day Lenin's critical analysis of the role of the labor aristocracy is distorted and exploited in the service of anti-proletarian petty-bourgeois radicalism, particularly nationalism.

A leading intellectual inspirer of New Left Third. World-ism (more or less associated with Maoism) has been Paul Sweezy of Monthly Review. His revisionist distortion of Lenin's analysis of the labor aristocracy is presented with especial angularity in a centenary article on the publication of ic first volume of Capital, "Marx and the Proletariat"
Monthly Review, December 1967). Here Sweezy claims
Benin's Imperialism for the proposition that the principal
social force for revolution in our epoch has shifted to the
rural masses in the backward countries:

"His [Lenin's] major contribution was his little book Imperial¬ism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism which, having been published in 1917, is exactly half as old as the first volume of Capital. There he argued that 'Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial stran¬gulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world by a handful of "advanced" countries....' He also argued that the capitalists of the imperialist countries could and do use part of their 'booty' to bribe and win over to their side an aris¬tocracy of labor. As far as the logic of the argument is concerned, it could be extended to a majority or even all the workers in the industrialized countries. In any case it is clear that taking into account the global character of the capitalist system provides strong additional reasons for believing that the tendency in this stage of capitalist development will be to gen¬erate a less rather than a more revolutionary proletariat." [our emphasis]

The New Left is quite wrong in simply identifying the labor aristocracy with the better-paid sectors of the proletariat. In the first place, many of the relatively higher-paid workers (e.g., auto workers or truckers in the U.S.) are members of industrial unions of the unskilled and semi-skilled, who won their wage levels through militant struggle against the bosses rather than imperialist bribery or job-trusting. Nor can all craft unions be counted among the labor aristocracy. The needle trades, organized along craft lines, are among the lowest-paid unionized workers in the U.S.
In Imperialism and related writings, Lenin emphasized again and again that the labor aristocracy represented a small minority of the proletariat. And this was not an empirical estimate but a basic sociological proposition. A group can occupy a privileged social position only in relation to the working masses of the society of which it is a part. The New Left Third Worldist notion that the proletariat in the imperialist centers is a labor aristocracy in relation to the impoverished colonial masses denies that the European and North American working class is centrally defined by its exploita¬tion at the hands of "its" bourgeoisie. It is methodologically similar to the argument of apologists for apartheid in South Africa that black workers in that country are better off than those in the rest of Africa.

However, Sweezy's revisionism is not limited to extending the category of labor aristocracy to the majority of workers in the advanced capitalist countries. He also distorts Lenin's attitude toward the actual labor aristocracy, which is a sociological not a political category. For the uppermost stratum of the working class, defense of its petty privileges often dominates its consciousness and action. It is thus a culture medium for the false consciousness which sees the workers' interests as tied to those of "their" bourgeoisie (support for imperialist war, protectionism, "profit-sharing" schemes, etc.). But the labor aristocracy is also a part of the working class, sharing common class interests with the rest of the proletariat, and thus cannot be considered as ultimately inherently pro-imperialist. Under normal capitalist conditions, the labor aristocracy may well seek short-term economic advantages at the expense of the class as a whole. However, under the impact of a major depression, a devastating war, etc., the long-term interests of this stratum as a section of the proletariat will tend to come to the fore. Leninists even seek to win over exploited sectors of the petty bourgeoisie proper (e.g., teachers, small farmers) to the cause of revolutionary socialism. Therefore they can scarcely consign a section of the working class, albeit a relatively privileged, petty-bourgeoisified section, to the camp of bourgeois counterrevolution. Labor aristocratic groups can end up on the wrong side of the barricades in a revolutionary situation. In the October Revolution, the relatively privileged railway workers provided a base for the Mensheviks' counterrevolutionary activities. However, the oil workers in Mexico, likewise an elite proletarian group in a backward country, have long been among the most advanced sections of that country's labor movement.

In an important article written shortly after Imperialism, Lenin explicitly states that what fraction of the proletariat will eventually side with the bourgeoisie can only be determined through political struggle:

"Neither we nor anyone else can calculate precisely what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will be revealed only by the struggle, it will definitely be decided only by the socialist revolution."
—"Imperialism and the Split in Socialism" (October 1916)

The Leninist attitude toward the labor aristocracy is significantly different than toward its leadership, the labor bureaucracy. In the imperialist epoch, the age of capitalist decay, successful reformism is impossible. Thus whatever their background and original motivation, unless they explic¬itly adopt a revolutionary course the leaders of the labor movement are forced by their social role to subordinate the workers' interests to the bourgeoisie. As Lenin later wrote of the "labor lieutenants of the bourgeoisie":

"Present-day (twentieth-century) imperialism has given a few advanced countries an exceptionally privileged position, which, everywhere in the Second International, has produced a certain type of traitor, opportunist, and social-chauvinist leaders, who champion the interests of their own craft, their own section of the labour aristocracy.... The revolutionary pro¬letariat cannot be victorious unless this evil is combated, unless the opportunist, social-traitor leaders are exposed, discredited and expelled."
—"Left Wing" Communism, An Infantile Disorder (1920)

In contrast, skilled, well-paid workers, while more susceptible to conservative bourgeois ideology, are not "agents of the bourgeoisie in the workers movement" (Ibid.). Like the rest of the proletariat, they must be won away from their treach¬erous misleaders.

Classic Marxism and the Leninist Vanguard Party

By 1916, Lenin had developed both the programmatic and theoretical basis for a split with official social democracy and the creation of an international vanguard party modeled on the Bolsheviks. The actual formation of the Communist International in 1919 was, of course, decisively affected by the Bolshevik Revolution and establishment of the Soviet state. However, this series concerns the evolution of Lenin's position on the organizational question away from traditional revolutionary Social Democracy. And that process was essentially completed before the Russian Revolution. We therefore conclude with a discussion of the relationship of the Leninist vanguard party to the previous Marxist experi¬ence around the organizational question.

With respect to the vanguard party, the history of the Marxist movement appears paradoxical. The first Marxist organization, the Communist League of 1847-52, was a vanguard propaganda group which clearly demarcated itself from all other tendencies in the socialist and workers movements (e.g., from Blan-quism, Cabet's Icarians, German "true" socialism, British Chartism). By contrast, the International Work-ingmen's Association (First Interna¬tional), established a generation later, sought to be an inclusive body embracing all working-class organi¬zations. A central pillar of the First International was the British trade-union movement, which politically supported the bourgeois liberals. The Socialist (Second) International, although its dominant section was the Marxist German Social Democracy, sought to be inclusive of all proletar¬ian socialist parties. In 1908, the Second International even admitted the newly formed British Labour Party which did not claim to be socialist.Thus the Communist International of 1919 was in a sense a resurrection of the Communist League of 1848 on a mass foundation.

How does one account for the absence of the vanguard party principle in classic, late 19th-century Marxism? Stalinist writers sometimes deny this fact, distorting history so as to make Marx/Engels out as advocates of Leninist organizational prin¬ciples. On the other hand, it would be a historic idealism to criticize Marx/Engels for their organizational policies and to maintain that the equivalent of the Communist International could and should have been established in the 1860s-90s.

The formation of the Communist League of 1847 was predicated on an imminent bourgeois-democratic revolution. The task of organizing the people, including the urban artisan-proletariat, was being accomplished by the broader revolu¬tionary democratic movement. The task of the Communist League was to vie for leadership of an existing revolutionary movement against the bourgeois democrats (as well as Utopian socialists). The Communist League thus defined itself as the proletarian socialist vanguard of the revolutionary bourgeois-democratic movement. With the definitive end of the 1848 revolutionary period (signaled by the 1852 Cologne Communist trial), Marx's strategy and its organizational component became unviable.
Between the revolutions of 1848 and the Russian Revolution of 1905, the possibilities of a successful bourgeois-democratic revolution had been exhausted while the economic bases for a proletarian-socialist revolution were still immature in the principal countries of West Europe. (Britain presented its own exceptional problems in this regard. However, even though Britain was far more advanced than France or Germany, in the 1850s house servants still outnumbered industrial workers.) The task of socialists was to create the precondition for a socialist revolution through the organization of the pro¬letariat from an atomized condition. Furthermore, in the decades immediately following the defeat of 1848, mass, stable working-class organizations in Germany and France were impeded by effective state repression.

A Leninist-type vanguard party in Germany or France in the 1860s-90s would have existed in a political vacuum unrelated to any broader potentially revolutionary movement. Thus in the period following the dissolution of the First International, Marx opposed the re-establishment of an international center as a diversion from the task of building a workers movement actually capable of overthrowing capital¬ism. In a letter (22 February 1881) to the Dutch anarchist Ferdinand Domela-Nieuwenhuis, he wrote:

"It is my conviction that the critical juncture for a new International Working Men's Association has not yet arrived and for that reason I regard all workers' congresses or socialist congresses, in so far as they are not directly related to the conditions existing in this or that particular nation, as not merely useless but actually harmful. They will always ineffectually end in endlessly repeated general banalities."
— Marx/Engels, Selected Correspondence (1975)

In West Europe, the transition from the revolutionary bourgeois-democratic movement to mass proletarian socialist parties required an entire epoch involving decades of preparatory activity.

The situation facing Marxists in tsarist Russia was fundamentally different. There a bourgeois-democratic revolution appeared a short-term prospect. A revolutionary bourgeois-democratic movement existed in the form of radical (socialistic) populism with broad support among the intelligentsia. In important respects, the conditions facing Plekhanov's Emancipation of Labor group in the 1880s paralleled those facing the Communist League before the revolution of 1848. Plekhanov projected a proletarian party (initiated by the socialist intelligentsia) which would act as a vanguard in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, while sharply demarcating itself from all petty-bourgeois radical currents. This vanguardist conception is clearly stated in the 1883 program of the Emancipation of Labor group:

"One of the most harmful consequences of the backward state of production was and still is the underdevelopment of the middle class, which, in our country, is incapable of taking the initiative in the struggle against absolutism. "That is why our socialist intelligentsia has been obliged to head the present-day emancipation movement, whose direct task must be to set up free political institutions in our country, the socialists on their side being under the obligation to provide the working class with the possibility to take an active and fruitful part in the future political life of Russia." [empha¬sis in original]
—G. Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works, Volume 1 (1961)

In Bismarckian and Wilhelminian Germany, all bourgeois parties were hostile to Social Democracy, which represented both the totality of the workers movement and by far the most significant force for democratic political change. The Catholic Center Party, National-Liberals and Progressives were only episodically viewed as a challenge to the semi-autocratic government. By contrast, Russian social democrats had to compete for cadre and for popular influence, including among the industrial proletariat, with the radical populists and at times even with the liberals. Moreover, since Russia was a multinational state, the social democrats also had to compete with left nationalist parties like the Ukrainian Radical Democratic Party and the Polish Socialist Party, and similar parties in the Baltic region and Transcaucasus.

The organizational principles of Plekhanovite Social Democracy thus had a dual character. With respect to the proletariat, early Russian social democrats sought to become "the party of the whole class" emulating the SPD. But they also sought to become the vanguard of all the diverse anti-tsarist forces in the Russian empire.

From Plekhanovite Social Democracy Lenin inherited vanguardist conceptions absent in the West European socialist parties. The significance of the fight against Economism, which was initiated by Plekhanov not Lenin, was in preserving the vanguard role of Social Democracy in relation to the broad, heterogeneous bourgeois-democratic forces. Because Lenin split Russian Social Democracy (in 1903) before it achieved a mass base, he did not fully recognize the significance of what he had done. He regarded the split with the Mensheviks as a legitimate continuation of the struggle to separate proletarian socialism from petty-bourgeois democracy. In reality, he had separated the revolutionary socialists from the reformists, both seeking a working-class base.

The world-historic significance of pre-1914 Bolshevism was that it anticipated the organizational principles required for victory in the epoch of imperialist capitalism and of proletarian revolution. As the epoch of capitalist degeneration opened up with World War I, the principal obstacle to proletarian revolution was no longer the underdevelopment of bourgeois society and of the workers movement. It was now the reactionary labor bureaucracy, resting upon a powerful workers movement, which preserved an obsolete social system. The first task of revolutionary socialists was henceforth defeating and replacing the reformists as the leadership of the mass workers movement, the precondition to leading that movement to victory over capitalism and laying the basis for a socialist society. This task has a dual character. The establishment of a revolutionary vanguard party splits the working class politically. However, a vanguard party seeks to lead the mass of the proletariat through united economic organizations of class struggle, the trade unions. In a revolutionary situation, a vanguard party seeks to lead a united working class to power through Soviets, the organizational basis of a workers government.

*******
Bibliography for this series of articles.

Baron, Samuel H., Plekhanov, Father of Russian Marxism
(Stanford, 1963) Cliff, Tony, Lenin, Volume 1: Building the Party (London,
1975)
Dan, Theodore, The Origins of Bolshevism (New York, 1970) G., Barbara, Democratic Centralism (Chicago, 1972) Gankin, Olga Hess and Fisher, H.H., eds., The Bolsheviks
and the World War (Stanford, 1940) Getzler, Israel, Martov: Political Biography of a Russian
Social Democrat (London, 1967) Geyer, Dietrich, "Die russische Parteispaltung im Urteil der
deutschen Sozialdemokratie 1903-1905," International
Review of Social History, 1958 Haimson, Leopold H., The Russian Marxists and the Origins
of Bolshevism (Cambridge, 1955) Kautsky, Karl, The Road to Power (New York, 1909) Keep, J.L.H., The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia
(London, 1963)
Lenin, V.I., Collected Works (Moscow, 1960) Luxemburg, Rosa, Leninism or Marxism? (Ann Arbor, 1961) McNeal, Robert H., ed., Resolutions and Decisions of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Volume 1:
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Social-Democratic Party, 1890-1914," Journal of Modern
History, 1939

Nettl, J.P., Rosa Luxemburg (New York, 1966)
Piatnitsky, Osip, Memoirs of a Bolshevik (Westport, Con¬necticut, 1973)
Plekhanov, G.V., Selected Philosophical Works, Volume 1 (Moscow, 1961)
Preobrazhensky, Evgenyi, "Marxism and Leninism," Molo-doya Gvardiya (Moscow), 1924, special commemorative issue
Red Weekly (London), 11 November 1976, "The Bolshevik Faction and the Fight for the Party"
Schapiro, Leonard, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York, 1971)
Schorske, Carl, German Social Democracy 1905-1917 (Cambridge, 1955)
Slaughter, Cliff, Lenin on Dialectics (New York, 1971)
Trotsky, Leon, In Defense of Marxism (New York, 1973); My Life (New York, 1970); Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influences (New York, 1970); "Unsere politis-chen Aufgaben," Schriften zur revolutionaren Organisa¬tion (Hamburg, 1970)
Walling, William English, ed., The Socialists and the War (New York, 1915)
Wolfe, Bertram, Three Who Made a Revolution (New York, 1948)
Zinoviev, Gregori, History of the Bolshevik Party: From th'e Beginnings to February 1917 (London, 1973); Der Krieg unddie Krise des Sozialismus (Vienna, 1924); [excerpted in the New International (New York) 1939-1942]

Part Eight Of This Series Will Be Dated April 20, 2011

From The Bob Feldman 68 Blog- They Sentenced Lynne Stewart- Free Class-War Prisoner Lynne Stewart Now!

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bob Feldman performing his They Sentenced Lynne Stewart in honor of class-war prisoner Attorney Lynne Stewart.

From The Bob Feldman 68 Blog-ROTC Must Still Be Banned At Columbia University In 2011: Excerpt from a Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Interview

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

ROTC Must Still Be Banned At Columbia University In 2011: Excerpt from a Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Interview

In a recent interview with a journalism student at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, I indicated why the Columbia University Administration should not bring ROTC or NROTC back to Columbia University's campus in 2011:

What objections, if any, do you have regarding the return of the ROTC today?

Bob Feldman [BF]:The return of a ROTC program to Columbia’s campus would represent a decision by the Columbia Administration to, on an institutional level, contribute to the Pentagon’s military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2011. If you think it’s moral for the U.S. government to continue waging war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, then it probably would seem o.k. morally to you for Columbia University to start training U.S. military officers on its campus.

But what if, like me, you think that it’s immoral for the U.S. government to continue waging war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? Then wouldn’t it also be then immoral for Columbia University to contribute to prolonging this U.S. military intervention by training U.S. military officers who will be participating in this unjust and endless war?

In recent years, for example, 80 percent of all students who were trained on Cornell University’s campus by that Ivy League School’s ROTC program have served as U.S. military officers in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, if you check out the Wikipedia entry for “Reserve Officers Training Corps,” it seems to indicate that in recent years U.S. university ROTC programs have been producing 39 percent of all active-duty officers for the Pentagon—20 percent of all active duty U.S. Navy officers, 41 percent of all officers for the U.S. Air Force which has dropped bombs that kill civilians on Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and 56 percent of all active duty U.S. Army officers (many of whom have—after being trained by U.S. universities—been involved in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example).

Or to put my objections another way. Imagine that you were a German student at a German university in late 1940 and you were examining the ways that German universities were contributing to the German war effort and occupation in Poland and France, for example. One way might be that science professors at German universities were doing research for the German Ministry of Defense. And another way might be that German universities were training some of their students to serve as German military officers in the German war machine that bombed and occupied Poland, France and other countries.

And imagine that you had discovered in 1940 that thousands of civilians had been killed in Poland and elsewhere by the same German military that the science professors at the German university you attended were doing research for; and that the German university you attended was training some of its students to be military officers for the German military? Wouldn’t you then feel that you had an internationalist moral and humanitarian obligation to do all that you could to stop the German university that you attended from training officers for the German military on your campus?

In addition, even if you don’t object to what’s been done overseas to foreign civilians and to the foreign soldiers, foreign insurgents and U.S. soldiers who have been casualties of the endless Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan military intervention by the U.S. government, an objection to the return of ROTC can be made on the philosophical basis that U.S. universities should be in the business of the pursuit of knowledge and the promotion of humanism and pacifism; and not be involved in training its students in ROTC courses like “the art of war” and the killing of the people that the U.S. government decides is now “the enemy.”

Before the DADT law was in place, what were the guidelines barring ROTC from being a campus activity: in other words, what do you see was the reason for its absence in the 1970s and 1980s?

BF:The official grounds for barring ROTC from being a campus activity before the DADT by most of the Ivy League administrations and their faculty committees may sometimes have been that the ROTC courses may not have conformed to the academic course accreditation criteria required by some of these Ivy League schools. But I think the real reason for ROTC’s absence in the 1970s and 1980s from places like Columbia was because anti-militarist student and faculty sentiment was still high, due to the campus political consciousness that had developed during the Vietnam War Era. And administrators at places like Columbia probably felt it made no political sense to disturb the relative campus calm of the post-1973 era by provoking its by then generally politically passive anti-war student body and politically passive anti-war professors into a potential new wave of campus protest--comparable to what happened in the 1960s—by trying to push ROTC back onto their campuses.

What do you think would happen if the ROTC was allowed to return to campus—at Columbia and elsewhere?

BF: Both the Pentagon and the U.S. corporate media—including the New York Times—would probably highlight it as an historical reversal of one of the legacies of the Vietnam War Era and the 1968 Columbia Anti-War Student Strike fall-out and the Sixties Anti-War Movement. And it would probably be utilized by the U.S. government as evidence that—under the Democratic Obama Administration—the alienation of U.S. college students from the U.S. military has decreased and that current U.S. college students—even at a bastion of anti-war sentiment historically like Columbia and Barnard—now have less objection to the continued endless U.S. military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan than did U.S. college students during the Republican Bush Administration.

The folks on the U.S. right-wing who don’t see anything morally questionable about the militarism of U.S. foreign policy will probably also feel more emboldened about bringing their pro-militarist agenda onto Columbia’s campus and re-militarizing Columbia to the point where they would eventually demand that the ban on secret military research on Columbia’s campus also be lifted.

And I suspect that some more juicy, lucrative Department of Defense research contracts would tend to get thrown Columbia’s way much more, if ROTC were now allowed to return to Columbia’s campus. So Columbia might once again, eventually, become “The MIT of West Harlem”—in terms of the degree to which it once again started to become dependent on Pentagon contracts for nearly half its budget, like it was in the mid-1960s.

Of course, once students wearing ROTC uniforms started marching around on campus and holding military-oriented ceremonies again on Columbia’s campus, it’s also possible that eventually—if the endless U.S. military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan isn’t ended or if an additional U.S. military intervention in Iran, North Korea or Venezuela is eventually started over the next few years—some anti-war students at Barnard College and Columbia College might mobilize eventually in larger numbers to again demand that Columbia stop training U.S. military officers for the U.S. power elite’s endless wars abroad.

What is your perspective on the acceptance, with faculty, alumni and current students?

BF: If you check out the chapter, titled “The Military Ascendancy,” in former Columbia University Professor C. Wright Mills’ book The Power Elite, J.W. Fulbright’s The Pentagon Propaganda Machine book or the CBS documentary The Selling of the Pentagon from the 1970s—and also Al Jazeera TV’s recent documentary on YouTube on the way the Pentagon uses Hollywood to promote support for U.S. military adventurism around the globe—you’ll see that since World War II there’s always been a big public relations effort by the Pentagon and the U.S. military-industrial-university-media complex to get people in the USA to feel that it’s “unpatriotic” to be opposed to the militarization of U.S. society and a U.S. foreign policy that is militaristic or to call for huge cuts in the Pentagon’s defense budget. And U.S. supporters of a pacifist U.S. foreign policy and the demilitarization of U.S. society and of U.S. universities like Columbia generally don’t get much mass media TV exposure—except when anti-war and anti-racist students occupy buildings in large numbers at places like Columbia in 1968 or when anti-war activists—like the Chicago 8—went on trial in Chicago during the 1969-1970 academic year.

So it wouldn’t be unexpected if current Barnard College, Columbia College students and faculty—as well as current Columbia Journalism School students and faculty—end up accepting passively the return of ROTC to places like Columbia in 2011. Especially if it’s marketed as “a way to influence the U.S. military in a more humanitarian direction”; or as something that only students and professors who are “soft on terrorism” or “stuck in a 1960s mentality,” or “politically naïve pacifists” would have moral objections about.

On the other hand it could be that the now-imprisoned Private Manning’s morally courageous de-classification of those Wikileaks cables and documents have revealed to enough people on campuses like Columbia that what the U.S. military is doing around the world contradicts the humanistic values and democratic moral values that most students and professors and workers at Columbia and Barnard have, historically, been brought up to adhere to. And that, therefore, the U.S. military still does not belong on Columbia University’s campus in 2011

Posted by b.f. at 10:51 AM
Labels: Columbiagate Scandal, ROTC, university complicity, university complicity-ida

From Cindy Sheehan's Soap Box Blog- Cindy Sheehan's Speech At The April 9th New York City Anti-War Rally

Click on the headline to link to the Cindy Sheehan's Soap Box blog entry- Cindy Sheehan's Speech At The April 9th New York City Anti-War Rally

On The 150th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The American Civil War – Karl Marx On The American Civil War-In Honor Of The Union Side

Markin comment:

I am always amazed when I run into some younger leftists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. In the age of advanced imperialism, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we are almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in our eyes. Read on.
***********
Works of Frederick Engels 1861

Lessons of the American War


Written: November, 1861;
Source: Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 19;
Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964;
First Published: The Volunteer Journal, for Lancashire and Cheshire No. 66, December 6, 1861;
Online Version: Marxists.org 1999;
Transcribed: S. Ryan;
HTML Markup: Tim Delaney.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


When, a few weeks back, we drew attention to the process of weeding which had become necessary in the American volunteer army, we were far from exhausting the valuable lessons this war is continually giving to the volunteers on this side of the Atlantic. We therefore beg leave again to revert to the subject.

The kind of warfare which is now carried on in America is really without precedent. From the Missouri to Chesapeake Bay, a million of men, nearly equally divided into two hostile camps, have now been facing each other for some six months without coming to a single general action. In Missouri, the two armies advance, retire, give battle, advance, and retire again in turns, without any visible result; even now, after seven months of marching and counter-marching, which must have laid the country waste to a considerable degree, things appear as far from any decision as ever. In Kentucky, after a lengthened period of apparent neutrality, but real preparation, a similar state of things appears to be impending; in Western Virginia, constant minor actions occur without any apparent result; and on the Potomac, where the greatest masses on both sides are concentrated, almost within sight of each other, neither party cares to attack, proving that, as matters stand, even a victory would be of no use at all. And unless circumstances foreign to this state of things cause a great change, this barren system of warfare may be continued for months to come.

How are we to account for this?

The Americans have, on either side, almost nothing but volunteers. The little nucleus of the former United States' regular army has either dissolved, or it is too weak to leaven the enormous mass of raw recruits which have accumulated at the seat of war. To shape all these men into soldiers, there are not even drill-sergeants enough. Teaching, consequently, must go on very slow, and there is really no telling how long it may take until the fine material of men collected on both shores of the Potomac will be fit to be moved about in large masses, and to give or accept battle with its combined forces.

But even if the men could be taught their drill in some reasonable time, there are not enough officers to lead them. Not to speak of the company officers -- who necessarily cannot be taken from among civilians -- there are not enough officers to make commanders of battalions even if every lieutenant and ensign of the regulars were appointed to such a post. A considerable number of civilian colonels are therefore unavoidable; and nobody who knows our own volunteers will think either McClellan or Beauregard over timid if they decline entering upon aggressive action or complicated strategical manoeuvres with civilian colonels of six months' standing to execute their orders.

We will suppose, however, that this difficulty was, upon the whole, overcome; that the civilian colonels, with their uniforms, had also acquired the knowledge, experience, and tact required in the performance of their duties -- at least, as far as the infantry is concerned. But how will it be for the cavalry? To train a regiment of cavalry, requires more time, and more experience in the training officers, than to get a regiment of infantry into shape. Suppose the men join their corps, all of them, with a sufficient knowledge of horsemanship -- that is to say, they can stick on their horses, have command over them, and know how to groom and feed them -- this will scarcely shorten the time required for training. Military riding, that control over your horse by which you make him go through all the movements necessary in cavalry evolutions, is a very different thing from the riding commonly practised by civilians. Napoleon's cavalry, which Sir William Napier (History of the Peninsular War) considered almost better than the English cavalry of the time, notoriously consisted of the very worst riders that ever graced a saddle; and many of our best cross-country riders found, on entering mounted volunteer corps, that they had a deal to learn yet. We need not be astonished, then, to find that the Americans are very deficient in cavalry, and that what little they have consists of a kind of Cossacks or Indian irregulars (rangers), unfit for a charge in a body.

For artillery, they must be worse off still; and equally so for engineers. Both these are highly scientific arms, and require a long and careful training in both officers and non-commissioned officers, and certainly more training in the men too, than infantry does. Artillery, moreover, is a more complicated arm than even cavalry; you require guns, horses broken in for this kind of driving, and two classes of trained men -- gunners and drivers; you require, besides, numerous ammunition-waggons, and large laboratories for the ammunition, forges, workshops, &c.; the whole provided with complicated machinery. The Federals are stated to have, altogether, 600 guns in the field; but how these may be served, we can easily imagine, knowing that it is utterly impossible to turn out 100 complete, well-appointed, and well-served batteries out of nothing in six months.

But suppose, again, that all these difficulties had been overcome, and that the fighting portion of the two hostile sections of Americans was in fair condition for their work, could they move even then? Certainly not. An army must be fed; and a large army in a comparatively thinly-populated country such as Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, must be chiefly fed from magazines. Its supply of ammunition has to be replenished; it must be followed by gunsmiths, saddlers, joiners, and other artisans, to keep its fighting tackle in good order. All these requisites shone by their absence in America; they had to be organised out of almost nothing; and we have no evidence whatever to show that even now the commissariat and transport of either army has emerged from babyhood.

America, both North and South, Federal and Confederate, had no military organisation, so to speak. The army of the line was totally inadequate, by its numbers, for service against any respectable enemy; the militia was almost non-existent. The former wars of the Union never put the military strength of the country on its mettle; England, between 1812 and 1814, had not many men to spare, and Mexico defended herself chiefly by the merest rabble. The fact is, from her geographical position, America had no enemies who could anywhere attack her with more than 30,000 or 40,000 regulars at the very worst; and to such numbers the immense extent of the country would soon prove a more formidable obstacle than any troops America could bring against them; while her army was sufficient to form a nucleus for some 100,000 volunteers, and to train them in reasonable time. But when a civil war called forth more than a million of fighting men, the whole system broke down, and everything had to be begun at the beginning. The results are before us. Two immense, unwieldy bodies of men, each afraid of the other, and almost as afraid of victory as of defeat, are facing each other, trying, at an immense cost, to settle down into something like a regular organisation. The waste of money, frightful as it is, is quite unavoidable, from the total absence of that organised groundwork upon which the structure could have been built. With ignorance and inexperience ruling supreme in every department, how could it be otherwise? On the other hand, the return for the outlay, in efficiency and organisation, is extremely poor; and could that be otherwise?

The British volunteers may thank their stars that they found, on starting, a numerous, well-disciplined, and experienced army to take them under its wings. Allowing for the prejudices inherent to all trades, that army has received and treated them well. It is to be hoped that neither the volunteers nor the public will ever think that the new service can ever supersede, in any degree, the old one. If there are any such, a glance at the state of the two American volunteer armies ought to prove to them their own ignorance and folly. No army newly formed out of civilians can ever subsist in an efficient state unless it is trained and supported by the immense intellectual and material resources which are deposited at the hands of a proportionately strong regular army, and principally by that organisation which forms the chief strength of the regulars. Suppose an invasion to threaten England, and compare what would be then done with what is unavoidably done in America. In England, the War-office, with the assistance of a few more clerks, easily to be found among trained military men, would be up to the transaction of all the additional labour an army of 300,000 volunteers would entail; there are half-pay officers enough to take, say three or four battalions of volunteers each under their special inspection, and, with some effort, every battalion might be provided with a line-officer as adjutant and one as colonel. Cavalry, of course, could not be improvised; but a resolute reorganisation of the artillery volunteers -- with officers and drivers from the Royal Artillery -- would help to man many a field-battery. The civil engineers in the country only wait for an opportunity to receive that training in the military side of their profession which would at once turn them into first-rate engineer officers. The commissariat and transport services are organised, and may soon be made to supply the wants of 400,000 men quite as easily as those of 100,000. Nothing would be disorganised, nothing upset; everywhere there would be aid and assistance for the volunteers, who would nowhere have to grope in the dark; and -- barring some of those blunders which England cannot do without when first she plunges into a war -- we can see no reason why in six weeks everything should not work pretty smoothly.

Now, look to America, and then say what a regular army is worth to a rising army of volunteers