Lenin And The Vanguard Party-Part Eight-The Fight (Today) For the Leninist Vanguard Party
Markin comment on this series of articles:
Oddly enough, when I first became serious about making a revolution in the early 1970s, a socialist working class-led revolution, in the eternal quest for a more just and equitable society, there were plenty (no enough, there are never enough, but plenty) of kindred spirits who were also finding out that it was not enough to “pray” such a revolution into existence but that one had to build a party, a vanguard party in order to do so. The name "Lenin," the designation "Bolshevik," and the term "world socialist revolution" flowed easily from the tongue in the circles that I began to hang around in. As I write this general introduction, right this minute in 2011, to an important series of historical articles about the actual creation, in real time, of a Leninist vanguard working class party (and International, as well) there are few kindred, fewer still in America, maybe, fewest still, and this is not good, among the youth, to carry the message forward. Nevertheless, whatever future form the next stage in the struggle for the socialist revolution takes the question of the party, the vanguard party really, will still press upon the heads of those who wish to make it.
Although today there is no mass Bolshevik-style vanguard party (or International)-anywhere-there are groups, grouplets, leagues, tendencies, and ad hoc committees that have cadre from which the nucleus for such a formation could be formed-if we can keep it. And part of the process of being able to “keep it” is to understand what Lenin was trying to do back in the early 1900s (yes, 1900s) in Russia that is applicable today. Quite a bit, actually, as it turns out. And for all those think that the Leninist process, and as the writer of these articles is at pains to point it was an unfolding process, was simple and the cadre that had to be worked with was as pure as the driven snow I would suggest this thought. No less an august revolutionary figure that Leon Trotsky, once he got “religion” on the Bolshevik organizational question (in many ways the question of the success of the revolution), did not, try might and main, have success in forming such a mass organization. We can fight out the details from that perspective learning from the successes and failures, and fight to get many more kindred.
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Markin comment on this article:
The most important point in this presentation is the notion of the continuing validity of the need for a vanguard party in order to lead the struggle for the socialist revolution. If you are not interested in socialist revolution as the solution to the crisis of human organization then you do not need a vanguard party. All others pay attention.
Moreover, if Leon Trotsky saw that, in the age of imperialism, his previously Russia-specific theory of permanent revolution about the necessity for the working class to lead that revolution (in alliance with the poor and non-owning classes and other allies) needed to be extended internationally then the same was true for the Leninist concept of the vanguard party as the organization of that struggle. If that fact was true at the time of the 1995 presentation in the immediate aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union here in 2011 it looks like the absolute beginning of wisdom.
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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.
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The following presentation by comrade Al Nelson of the Spartacist League Central Committee was first published in Workers Vanguard No. 634, 1 December 1995.
The first sentence of the founding document of the Fourth International, written by Leon Trotsky, who was the co-leader of the Russian Revolution with Lenin, reads, "The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterized by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat." Writing on the eve of the slaughter of World War II, the second interimperialist war, which ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs by U.S. imperialism that destroyed two whole Japanese cities, Trotsky said that, "The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only 'ripened'; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a social revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind."
The construction of revolutionary leadership capable of leading the working class internationally—that's what we mean by the "party question." Without a revolutionary party no socialist revolution can succeed, no matter how favorable the circumstances. Until the working class solves the problem of creating the revolutionary party as the conscious expression of the historic process, the issue remains undecided. For Marxists, therefore, it is the most important question of all—the question of the party.
Everywhere you look today you can see the effects of the absence of revolutionary leadership. There's Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, which is both a perverted response to rising black oppression and also very similar in its reactionary patriarchal ideology to the very large and mainly white male Christian "Promise Keepers," currently holding mass meetings around the country. Or look at the very important Detroit newspaper strike. The workers have shown no lack of combativity and courage yet have been systematically betrayed and demobilized by a treacherous union bureaucracy that fundamentally believes in the interests of U.S. capitalism and knows that strikes are not in the interest of capitalism.
Or look at South Africa. If you read Workers Vanguard, it's clear that we aim to construct a section of the International Communist League, a Trotskyist party, in South Africa. Reports of the various comrades who have been traveling through in the last couple of years have had the same theme: the extreme contradiction between revolutionary-minded workers who yearn for fundamental social changes that can only be brought about by social revolution and the leaders of their parties and trade unions who say, "No, no, revolution is not necessary, nor is it possible; we can accomplish our
goals gradually by supporting the African National Congress." Meanwhile the ANC's real goal is to stabilize South Africa politically so that foreign capital can exploit black South Afri¬can labor even more intensely than has been the case in the past.
Stalinism finally succeeded in destroying the Soviet Union and ushering in capitalist counterrevolution in the land of the first workers revolution, a historic defeat for the world proletariat. No longer having a common enemy, the major imperialist powers are drifting apart like great tectonic plates as they seek to divide up the world into competing trade blocs. We've had two interimperialist world wars that prove that trade wars lead inevitably to shooting wars for the redivision of the world markets.
Why the Working Class Is Key
Only the industrial proletariat, led by Bolshevik-type vanguard parties, can prevent another world war by destroying the rule of capital once and for all. So what does it actually mean when we say that the revolutionary party is the "conscious expression of the historic process"? The Manifesto of the Communist Parly was written in 1848 by two young revolutionists named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They were, respectively, 29 and 27 years old at the time—just to give a little perspective. With the addition of an updating of the Manifesto, written by Trotsky in 1937, many of the Manifesto's most important sections read as though they were written yesterday.
Its fundamental propositions can be summarized in brief as follows: in every historical epoch the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange and the social organization following from it form the basis upon which the political and intellectual history of that epoch is built up. In other words, con¬sciousness is formed in an environment of social institutions created and controlled by the ruling class of that period.
The whole history of mankind, from the period of slavery through feudalism through the emergence of capitalism, has been a history of class struggles—con¬tests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes. As a propertied new class arising initially in the Middle Ages, the nascent bourgeoisie was able to develop its own economy, its own culture, religion, schools and so on, i.e., its own social institutions expressing its own social consciousness, within feudal society itself. The bourgeois class was able to develop organically within the feudal order. It was driven to overthrow the feudal political system and its social order only when the institutions of the old regime—the monarchy, the nobility, the church—prevented the natural expansion of the institutions of capital. The famous "Rights of Man," one of the main documents coming out of the great French Revolution of 1789, meant at that time the rights of the capitalist class to buy and sell all property, including land, as opposed to the hereditary rights of the old feudal order. It was an assertion of a new property-owning class for which competition was the driving force.
But the proletariat is not a propertied class, and therefore it is not able to construct the' institutions of a new society within the framework of capitalism. All it possesses is its labor power which it must sell piecemeal to the owners of industry in order not to starve. With all other productive classes driven out, the proletariat is the special and essential product of capitalism. So society has been split into two great and hostile camps: the working class and the bourgeoisie. They are the main forces in modern society.
Capitalism has concentrated workers in large factories and created great urban concentrations. In so doing it has created the instrument of its own destruction as an exploiting class. The working class cannot therefore emancipate itself from the yoke of capitalist exploitation without at the same time emancipating society at large from all exploitation, all class distinctions. This is what Marx referred to as the materialist conception of history.
Socialist Consciousness vs. Trade-Union Consciousness
To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. But the history of all countries has shown that the working class, exclusively by its own effort and day-to-day experiences, is not able spontaneously to develop a consciousness any higher than trade-union consciousness, the need to unite in unions for economic struggle against the employers and the government. But trade-union consciousness is bourgeois conscious-ness. Unionism in and of itself does not challenge the capital¬ist mode of production but only seeks to better the immediate conditions and wages of the workers in struggles with individual employers.
Revolutionary class consciousness, represented by the theories of scientific socialism, has to be brought into the working class from the outside through the instrumentality of a revolutionary party which embodies a higher consciousness of these historically necessary tasks than the working class possesses itself. That is the only way the struggles of the workers become class struggle, when the most advanced workers become conscious of themselves as a single class whose actions are directed against the entire class of capitalists and their government.
The founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and their followers like Plekhanov, Lenin and Trotsky, in fact most of the Bolshevik leadership, all came from the educated classes. As such they were the bearers of scientific socialism into the workers movement because they were educated and were able to study history and study economics and put together the understanding of historical materialism. These revolutionists were the instruments for bringing the theories of scientific socialism into the working class from the outside.
As long as the working class is not mobilized by a party based on revolutionary theory, its consciousness remains determined by bourgeois ideology and culture, leading it to see capitalist society as fixed and not open to fundamental change by workers revolution. This "false consciousness," as Marx called it, is what we see and confront every day, all over the world. Furthermore, the working class is not some uniform average but is itself very stratified, ranging from very advanced, knowledgeable workers to the most backward layers, blinded by racism, ethnic hatreds and general social piggishness. For the working class to move from an existence as a class in itself—that is to say, simply defined objectively by its relationship to the means of production—to a class for
itself—one that is fully conscious of its historic task to overthrow the capitalist order—requires revolutionary leadership.
These are the classic Marxist propositions that Lenin argues for in What Is To Be Done? (1902) against a current then called Economism. The Economists belittled the role of the conscious factor. Instead they projected class consciousness arising "organically" and "spontaneously" out of the day-to-day economic struggles of the workers. This infatuation with spontaneity was paralleled by a movement to criticize the revolutionary principles of Marxism as dogmatic and obsolete. Essentially, Lenin said, these socialists are adapting bourgeois criticisms of Marxism in order to transform the struggle for social revolution into a struggle for social reforms. In practice this meant tailing and seeking to pressure the bourgeois liberals while limiting the struggle of the workers to union struggles.
Lenin made a particularly powerful argument against the Economists that is fully applicable today, especially in the United States. For socialists to adapt to the existing trade-union consciousness of the workers keeps the workers in a lower state of consciousness insufficient for revolutionary activity and results. Whether intended or not, this adaptation strengthens the authority of the existing union bureaucracy and thereby strengthens the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the working class. In other words, if you don't break out of the framework of simple trade unionism, you simply reinforce the authority of the treacherous misleaders of the trade-union bureaucracy.
This basic lesson is not remote in time, by the way. It is, for example, at the heart of our criticism of the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL) in the current Workers Vanguard regarding their role in the recent newspaper strike in Detroit. They formed an ad hoc committee external to the union which based itself purely on a call for more militant strike tactics: mass picketing, defying injunctions, etc. That's all very fine; these are necessary tactics. But the RWL omits completely any political characterization of the union bureaucracy and any political explanation of why the union misleaders were consciously and deliberately seeking to defuse the militancy of the workers and to wear them down and suffocate them with legal restrictions. Therefore the RWL never raised the workers' consciousness above union consciousness and actually sowed illusions that a new leadership simply has to be "more militant."
But in many unions the existing bureaucratic leaderships were the militants of yesterday. Look at the president of the Teamsters union, Ron Carey. He's supported by an outfit called the TDU, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which is an organization created by the International Socialists a long time ago. Or in the mine workers union, the Trumka leadership was hailed by all manner of fake socialists as representing a new, more militant leadership. And now he's got min¬ers—who used to know how to deal very effectively with strikebreakers—out on the tracks holding hands, singing, "We Shall Overcome." Disgusting.
And the reason that these militants of yesterday become the careerists of today is because they share and have never broken from the same pro-capitalist outlook of their predecessors. So for the RWL or anyone else to simply keep their criticisms of a given strike on the level of strike tactics and not characterize politically the existing leadership retards and damages the consciousness of the workers. Nothing is learned out of these defeated strikes except demoralization and cynicism.
Socialist consciousness therefore does not simply grow out of the economic struggle. In reality they exist side by side. The role of the revolutionary party is to saturate the working class with the consciousness of its social position and historic tasks in order to mobilize its most advanced layers in a revolutionary assault on the capitalist system itself. Against the attempt to degrade revolutionary Marxism, Lenin called for the building of a new kind of party, a combat party composed entirely of professional revolutionists. Such a party was not counterposed to the unions. The unions, he said, should be the mass organizations—a kind of united front of the mass of the workers—seeking to build as broadly as possible, to unite the greatest number of workers in defensive struggles against the employers.
But to build the kjnd of highly disciplined, professional organization necessary to lead the proletariat in the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism required that the party recruit only the most advanced workers, who would -then be systematically trained in all the necessary intellectual skills to be effective organizers and agitators able to travel broadly and organize other units of the party. In this party, he said, there shall be no distinctions between worker-Bolsheviks and the revolutionary intellectuals. This requires on the part of the intellectuals that they leave their class and come all the way over to the side of the proletarian party, where their intellectual skills are most valuable.
The 1903 Split Between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
This period from 1899 to 1902 was the beginning of Lenin's campaign to build a centralized party based on a comprehensive political program. His desire for a narrower definition of membership was motivated in those early days by a general desire to exclude opportunists and to weed out dilettantes who had been attracted to the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party because of its very loose circle nature.
Later, in 1903 a split took place over Lenin's insistence on an organizational rule that party membership be limited to those who are willing to actually participate in an organization of the party, as opposed to the much looser criteria advanced by the right wing of the party of someone who merely renders personal assistance to the party—basically describing a kind of a sympathizer. Lenin wanted members who were going to devote their lives to the cause of proletarian revolution.
This split was the origin of the Bolshevik (Russian for "majority") faction and the Mensheviks ("minority"). While the split corresponded roughly to a left and right wing, the clarifying issues did not occur until later. It is a commonplace error to state that in 1902-1903 Lenin was fully conscious that his conception of the party was a definite break from social democracy and that Bolshevism began after the split in 1903.
In fact, the forming of the Iskra group in 1900 (around the newspaper of the same name), of which Lenin was the organizer, was the coming together of some of the older Russian Marxists, like George Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich, with younger members like Lenin, as a revolutionary grouping within Social Democracy to defend and restore the basic revolutionary principles of Marxism. The period from the forming of the Iskra group to the final split with Mensheviks and the founding of the Bolshevik Party as such in 1912 marked the transformation of the Bolshevik faction from a revolutionary social-democratic one into an embryonic communist organization.
When reading What Is To Be Done?, it's not immediately obvious that until the February Revolution in 1917 Russia was ruled by the Romanov absolutist monarchy, and all Marxists agreed that the immediate tasks were essentially
democratic, the overthrow of tsarism. However, there was an assumption on the part of the Menshevik right wing that this necessarily meant an extended period of capitalism. Basically, this rejected a revolutionary proletarian perspective in favor of a parliamentary opposition in a capitalist government.
Lenin agreed that overthrowing tsarism was the immediate task. But he vehemently disagreed with the perspective that the Marxists should form a bloc with the liberal bourgeoisie. What he posited was an alliance between the revolu¬tionary proletariat and the poor peasantry. As opposed to the Mensheviks, he was trying to draw a class line between the proletariat, and the toiling classes in general, and the capitalist class. However, this theory that Lenin called "the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry" was essentially flawed in the sense that it posited a dictatorship, a state power, of two classes, one of which—the peasantry—is a property-owning class. But it did serve his main purpose of drawing a line against the Mensheviks and their purely democratic perspective. So that was the framework in which these arguments took place.
Lenin's perspective was that the overthrow of tsarism in Russia by the revolutionary proletariat and peasantry would serve as a spark for proletarian revolution in the more advanced countries, where the situation was much more ripe for socialist revolution. He saw the democratic revolution in Russia leading rather immediately to socialist revolution in West Europe, especially in Germany.
In this period up through 1912, Lenin's consistently revolutionary thrust frequently led him to break with opportunism well before he had generalized it theoretically or internationally. Until 1912, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were sometimes forced to exist as factions in the same party. While building his Bolshevik faction in a very disciplined manner, Lenin had not yet broken in principle with Karl Kautsky's conception of "the party of the whole class." This conception meant that the movement should not be split and that all shades of difference, including opportunism, could exist in one party. Karl Kautsky was the pre-eminent leader of German Social Democracy at the time. The German party was far and away the largest party in Europe. Lenin greatly respected Kautsky, and in fact in What Is To Be Done? you'll find Lenin quoting Kautsky on the basic propositions of Marxism.
War and Revolution
It was not until the outbreak of the first interimperialist war in 1914 and the total political collapse of the Socialist (Second) International that Lenin began to realize in hindsight the implications and effects of his earlier course. With the start of World War I, the parliamentary fraction of the German Social Democratic Party, on August 4, 1914, voted unanimously in favor of war credits for the government, supporting the German bourgeoisie in the war. This act had an absolutely shocking impact upon the revolutionists in the Second International. Lenin at first refused to believe the report.
But this single event was to transform Lenin from the left-wing leader of Russian Social Democracy and an embryonic communist into the founding leader of the world communist movement. Following the collapse of the German party, all the other socialist parties in Europe collapsed in the same orgy of social-chauvinism, each one urging the working class in each country to support the war aims of their own ruling class, totally ignoring thejr historical opposition to imperialist war. World War I was the most horrible slaughter yet seen on the face of the earth. Millions of the working class of each country were killed. German workers killing French and English workers and Russian workers and vice versa, all being urged on to fight for their respective fatherlands. It was a shocking betrayal of fundamental socialist principles.
Lenin's basic policy toward the war and the international socialist movement was developed within a few weeks. His policy had three elements: 1) Socialists must stand for the defeat, above all, of their own bourgeois state. 2) The war demonstrated that capitalism in the imperialist epoch threatened to destroy civilization itself. Socialists therefore must work to transform the imperialist war into revolutionary civil war, into proletarian revolution. 3) The Second International has been destroyed by social-chauvinism. A new revolution¬ary international must be built through a complete split with the opportunists in the socialist movement. These principles, these three policies remained central to Lenin's activities right up to the Russian Revolution of October 25, 1917.
Lenin understood that he was advocating splitting the international workers movement into two antagonistic parties: one revolutionary, the other reformist. While in 1903 he had split Russian Social Democracy before it had acquired a mass base, he did not at that time fully realize what he had done. Previously, he saw it as a split of proletarian socialism from petty-bourgeois democracy, i.e., that the influence for opportunism was coming from outside the party. Understanding the material basis for opportunism within social democracy was one of the main conclusions of his book, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916. It is in this period, from 1914 to 1917, that Leninism arose as a qualitative extension of Marxism.
Examining the total collapse of the German Social Democratic Party, Lenin came to understand that the source of opportunism came from within the German party itself. Its top leadership was based on a labor aristocracy—a privileged layer that was enjoying the benefits of imperialist exploitation of colonies all around the world. The political outlook of the party leadership had become totally bourgeoi-sified as a result of their social position in German society.
Now Lenin realized that in practice his Bolshevik organization had in fact not been built according to the Kautskyan formula. The selecting, testing and training of Bolshevik cadre was fundamentally different than the social-democratic model of Germany. In 1912 they had completely broken politically and organizationally from the Russian opportunists, the Mensheviks—two and a half years before the outbreak of the war. Lenin now took the Bolshevik Party as a model for the new Third International that he was calling for. Following the victory of the Russian Revolution, the Third, Communist International was founded in 1919. All over the world, including in the United States, the Socialist parties split and the left wings founded new Communist parties, organized on the principles, program and practices of the Russian Bolsheviks. That is our model and ultimately where we come from.
The 1917 Russian Revolution
To see in reality the crucial role of leadership and the role of the revolutionary party, you should examine the course of the Russian Revolution between February and October 1917. Trotsky made the statement that the leadership is to the party what the party is to the class. Many years later Trotsky looked back to 1917 and asked, could the Russian Revolution have happened without Lenin? And he said, I would have to say "no."
There was considerable confusion and disorientation in the Bolshevik Party itself at the outbreak of the February Revolution when the tsar abdicated and a capitalist Provisional Government was formed. Side by side with that gov¬ernment were the Soviets ("soviet" is the Russian word for workers council). These were mass organizations which sprang up in the 1905 Revolution. Delegates to the Soviets were elected from the factories and ranks of the army.
So between February 1917 and the October insurrection, Lenin waged a furious political struggle on several fronts simultaneously. On the one hand, to expose and defeat the authority of the petty-bourgeois parties, the Mensheviks and the peasant-based Social Revolutionaries, who in the beginning had a majority in the Soviets. On the other, struggling within his own party against a persistent right wing that was adapting to the opportunist parties who in turn supported the capitalist government. Trotsky said that it was only Lenin's far-sightedness and his considerable authority with the party cadre that enabled the Bolsheviks to seize the moment and lead the insurrection.
In a revolutionary situation, the consciousness of the workers goes through very rapid changes from day to day, and often even the Bolsheviks lagged behind. But finally there comes a time that Trotsky refers to as the revolutionary moment, when the working class has rejected by experience all other possibilities and now has come to be fully conscious that there is no other, lesser course: We must take the power ourselves! Now they looked to the Bolsheviks to lead them.
The other prerequisite for a successful insurrection is the temporary exhaustion and confusion of the ruling class itself and a situation where it is denied the instruments of its own state power, essentially the army. You can't have an insurrection while the powers of the capitalist state remain intact. The capitalist state, as explained by Lenin, is the special bodies of armed men whose purpose is to defend the property forms of capitalism. The state, any state, is an instrument of coercion of one class over another. So you cannot have an insurrection without being able to split the army and take away the power of the bourgeoisie to militarily crush the revolution.
By early October 1917, all of these factors came together. The army garrisons in Petrograd refused to take orders from the Provisional Government. They would only take orders from the Soviets. Thus the insurrection itself, and the seizure of power, was extraordinarily bloodless.
But as Trotsky says, woe unto any party that flinches at this moment and begins to overestimate the forces of the bourgeoisie or simultaneously underestimates the revolutionary capacity of the working class at the crucial moment. This is what led to the failure of the German Revolution in Octo¬ber 1923, and that failure closed the door for extending the revolution to industrialized Germany and opened the door for German fascism. A frightened ruling class is a very dangerous opponent. Having almost had their power taken away from them, they were going to see that that was not going to happen again. They started financing fascist thugs to break up first the Communist Party and then the labor unions. Then they went after the Jews.
The failure of the German Revolution also ended the revolutionary period that had begun in Russia in October 1917 and left the economically devastated and exhausted young Soviet Republic completely isolated. Lenin and Trotsky knew that for the revolution to survive in backward Russia it must immediately extend to industrialized Western Europe. That was the basic understanding of classical Marxism: You cannot have a revolution remain isolated in one country, especially a backward one; you will be attacked immediately by the other imperialist powers. Therefore, you must take the revolution into the camp of the imperialists.
The closing of that door to Germany demoralized the Russian workers and sections of the Communist Party itself, resulting in a political counterrevolution led by Stalin and his faction in 1924 against the program and leadership of the October Revolution.
Democratic Centralism
The organizational practice of a Leninist party is based on the principle of democratic centralism, which means full freedom in internal discussion, complete discipline and unity in action. As Trotsky put it, without inner democracy, no revolutionary education. Without discipline, no revolutionary action. I couldn't do any better than to read a section from our founding documents to describe the basic conceptions of democratic centralism:
"The Spartacist League takes its organizational forms and practices from the evolved institutions and experiences of the Leninist movement, and seeks to function according to the best traditions of Leninism. We seek to make use of the widest amount of internal democracy and discussion which is compatible with functioning in an effective and disciplined way. Unlike many organizations, which give only lip service to the idea of factional democracy, the SL recognizes that the right to factions is basic and that factional struggle is not only educational but is, in cases of sharp difference, the only way in which the party can arrive at the correct political line....
"The SL must be primarily an action organization, not a discussion group. Once a position is arrived at, it may always be overturned by a higher body or later reversal, but until then it must be carried out."
Or, as James Cannon put it, "Only a self-acting and critical minded membership is capable of forging and consolidating the revolutionary party and of solving its problems by collective discussion and decision. A loosely knit, heterogeneous, undisciplined, untrained organization is utterly incapable."
Basically, democratic centralism is a simple principle. If there are disputes or differences in the party, they are discussed and debated up through the national conference, which is the highest body of the organization. But after a decision is reached by majority vote, the minority is bound by that decision in the public actions of the party, includ¬ing in its press. This does not mean that you have to abandon or give up your opinions. That was the bureaucratic and destructive practice instituted by Stalinism. They called this practice "criticism, self-criticism," culminating in the concept of unanimity. What it really meant was that if you came up on the wrong side of a question, that wrong side being decided by the leadership, you were required to stand up before the membership and criticize yourself for holding the wrong views. In other words, you had to get up and explain what kind of a bad person you were, some sort of petty-bourgeois dilettante or whatever.
But this kind of false confession, this abdication of one's views, simply guts you as a revolutionist. And that mechanism selected people out. What remained were those that learned to live within the framework of a bureaucratic organization where they were expected not to do their own think¬ing. Whereas we value the critical thinking of our own membership, and encourage it.
In fact that's the fundamental reason for the creation of a separate youth organization, so that it can be a training ground for the party, learning how to build a local, learning how to run local executive committees, how to be sales directors and organizers and writers and put out a paper and run a whole national organization parallel to the adult party itself. And they do so in a way where they're not surrounded by 20-year members of the party, which makes youth feel like they're the dumbest guys in the room, but amongst their peers. This encourages the fullest kind of critical discussion to take place. This is how you build critical thinking and higher consciousness.
Bolshevism vs. Bureaucratism
Social-democratic organizations, because they do not have a perspective of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, but rather seek to pressure its so-called liberal wing, denounce Leninist democratic centralism as being the forerunner of Stalinist bureaucratism. That's the standard anti-Communist syllogism, which you hear all the time now since the bankruptcy of Stalinism caused the collapse of the Soviet Union: Stalinist bureaucratism flowed from Leninist democratic centralism.
Anybody can say almost anything they want in a social-democratic organization, reflecting their completely heterogeneous political composition. Except, there is a party line. It is carried in the newspaper and someone creates it, generally the ruling clique of the moment, which tends to change without any particular democratic discussions. Centrist and social-democratic organizations are always in practice bureaucratic organizations. Centrism is defined as that current which exists between the poles of revolution and refor¬mism. Even in the most left-sounding of the centrist groups there is a conflict between their stated aims—their paper positions—and their real practice.
Another definition of centrism is: revolutionary in words, opportunist in deeds. In fact this contradiction is the source of all bureaucratism. The Stalinists, from 1924 until the 1989-91 collapse of bureaucratic rule, were a living lie. They published the Collected Works of Lenin while seeking to conciliate imperialism by preventing workers revolutions. That profound contradiction was the basis for the police state and for the bureaucratism.
The understanding that the consciousness of the revolutionary party is higher than the consciousness of the work¬ing class means that we do not go outside the party seeking to mobilize more backward workers to pressure the party internally. Many years ago, we wrote "that the fundamental principle for communists is that one struggles among one's comrades to gain a majority for one's program, and that anyone who seeks to mobilize backward forces and alien class elements from outside a revolutionary Marxist organization in order to struggle for ascendancy inside that organization is no communist." Building and maintaining the party requires the highest level of conscious effort.
To ensure the revolutionary integrity of the whole party, the leadership must scrupulously guard the rights of all comrades or groupings in the party who have differences with the party. After all, they may be right. We were a left-wing opposition known as the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) in the Socialist Workers Party in the early 1960s. The SWP greatly abused our democratic rights. They kept us from doing public work in arenas of our differences. They kept us off the leading bodies of the party, they denied our right to exist as a faction in the party, and we constantly struggled to simply exist as an organized group trying to bring our views to the party members.
So we learned from this experience, being on the short end of a very bureaucratic stick, and that reflects itself in our organizational rules and guidelines where the rights of factions are codified, the right to proportional representation on leading bodies if the differences are not resolved at a national conference. Once during a debate in the New York local of the Socialist Workers Party, the national secretary, Farrell Dobbs, looked at me, a young supporter of the RT, and said, "The majority is the party!" And that was dead wrong, that was a fundamentally bureaucratic statement. The party is both the majority and the minority.
So we learned from this negative experience. We also understood that these departures from the norms of Leninism were because the SWP had lost its revolutionary perspective and was very rapidly moving toward reformism. They no longer required the practices necessary for a revolutionary party.
I welcome those of you who are joining the youth club this weekend. It is the first important step toward devoting your life to the cause of the proletariat. There is no higher form of service to humanity.
This article concludes this Lenin and The Vanguard Party series.
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Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
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-"The American Civil War" -A Key Analysis
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.
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Articles by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in Die Presse 1862
The American Civil War
Source: MECW Volume 19, p. 186
Written: between March 7 and 22, 1862;
First published: in Die Presse, 85, March 26 and 27, 1862.
From whatever standpoint one regards it, the American Civil War presents a spectacle without parallel in the annals of military history. The vast extent of the disputed territory; the far-flung front of the lines of operation; the numerical strength of the hostile armies, the creation of which hardly drew any support from a prior organisational basis; the fabulous cost of these armies; the manner of commanding them and the general tactical and strategic principles in accordance with which the war is being waged, are all new in the eyes of the European onlooker.
The secessionist conspiracy, organised, patronised and supported long before its outbreak by Buchanan’s administration, gave the South a head-start, by which alone it could hope to achieve its aim. Endangered by its slave population and by a strong Unionist element among the whites themselves, with two-thirds less free men than in the North, but readier to attack, thanks to the multitude of adventurous idlers that it harbours — for the South everything depended on a swift, bold, almost foolhardy offensive. If the Southerners succeeded in taking St. Louis, Cincinnati, Washington, Baltimore, and perhaps Philadelphia, they might then count on a panic, during which diplomacy and bribery could secure recognition of the independence of all the slave states. If this first onslaught failed, at least at the decisive points, their position must then become worse from day to day, while the North was gaining in strength. This point was rightly understood by the men who in truly Bonapartist spirit had organised the secessionist conspiracy. They opened the campaign in the corresponding manner. Their bands of adventurers overran Missouri and Tennessee, while their more regular troops invaded eastern Virginia and prepared a coup de main against Washington. If this coup were to miscarry, the Southern campaign was lost from a military point of view.
The North came to the theatre of war reluctantly, sleepily, as was to be expected considering its higher industrial and commercial development. The social machinery there was far more complicated than in the South, and it required far more time to get it moving in this unusual direction. The enlistment of volunteers for three months was a great, but perhaps unavoidable mistake. It was the policy of the North to remain on the defensive in the beginning at all decisive points, to organise its forces, to train them through operations on a small scale and without risk of decisive battles, and, as soon as the organisation had become sufficiently strong and the traitorous element had simultaneously been more or less removed from the army, to go on to an energetic, unflagging offensive and, above all, to reconquer Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina. The transformation of civilians into soldiers was bound to take more time in the North than in the South. Once effected, one could count on the individual superiority of the Northern men.
By and large, and allowing for the mistakes that arose more from political than from military sources, the North acted in accordance with those principles. The guerilla warfare in Missouri and West Virginia, while protecting the Unionist population, accustomed the troops to field service and to fire without exposing them to decisive defeats. The great disgrace of Bull Run was, to a certain extent, the result of the earlier error of enlisting volunteers for three months. It was absurd to let raw recruits attack a strong position, on difficult terrain and having an enemy scarcely inferior in numbers. The panic, which seized the Union army at the decisive moment, and the cause of which has yet to be established could surprise no one who was at all familiar with the history of people’s wars. Such things happened to the French troops very often from 1792 to 1795; this did not, however, prevent these same troops from winning the battles of Jemappes and Fleurus, Montenotte, Castiglione and Rivoli. The only excuse for the silliness of the jests of the European press with regard to the Bull Run panic is the previous bragging of a section of the North American press.
The six months’ respite that followed the defeat at Manassas was utilised to better advantage by the North than by the South. Not only were the Northern ranks replenished in greater measure than the Southern ones. Their officers received better instructions; the discipline and training of the troops did not encounter the same obstacles as in the South. Traitors and incompetent interlopers were increasingly removed, and the period of the Bull Run panic is a thing of the past. The armies on both sides are naturally not to be measured by the standard of the great European armies or even of the former regular army of the United States. Napoleon could in fact train battalions of raw recruits in the depots during the first month, have them on the march during the second and during the third lead them against the enemy, but then every battalion received a sufficient reinforcement of experienced officers and non-commissioned officers, every company some old soldiers, and on the day of the battle the new troops were brigaded together with veterans and, so to speak, framed by the latter. All these conditions were lacking in America. Without the considerable amount of people of military experience who had immigrated to America in consequence of the European revolutionary unrest of 1848-49, the organisation of the Union army would have required a much longer time still. The very small number of killed and wounded in proportion to the total of the troops engaged (usually one in every twenty) proves that most of the engagements, even the most recent ones in Kentucky and Tennessee, were fought mainly with firearms at fairly long range, and that the occasional bayonet charges either soon halted in the face of enemy fire or put the adversary to flight before it came to a hand-to-hand encounter. Meanwhile, the new campaign has been opened under more favourable auspices with the successful a advance of Buell and Halleck through Kentucky and Tennessee.
After the reconquest of Missouri and West Virginia, the Union opened the campaign with the advance on Kentucky. Here the secessionists held three strong positions, fortified camps: Columbus on the Mississippi to their left, Bowling Green in the centre, and Mill Springs on the Cumberland River to the right. Their line stretched for 300 miles from west to east. The extent of this line prevented the three corps from rendering each other support and offered the Union troops the chance of attacking each individually with superior forces. The great mistake in the disposition of the secessionists sprang from their attempt to occupy all the ground.
A single fortified, strong central camp, chosen as the battlefield for a decisive engagement and held by the main body of the army, would have defended Kentucky far more effectively. It was bound either to attract the main force of the Unionists or put them in a dangerous position, had they attempted to march on, disregarding so strong a concentration of troops.
Under the given circumstances the Unionists resolved to attack those three camps one after another, to manoeuvre their enemy out of them and force him to fight in open country. This plan, which conformed to all the rules of the art of war, was carried out with energy and dispatch. Towards the middle of January a corps of about 15,000 Unionists marched on Mill Springs, which was held by 10,000 secessionists. The Unionists manoeuvred in a manner that led the enemy to believe he only had to deal with a weak reconnoitring body. General Zollicoffer at once fell into the trap, sallied from his fortified camp and attacked the Unionists. He soon realised that a superior force confronted him. He fell and his troops suffered as complete a defeat as the Unionists at Bull Run. This time, however, the victory was exploited in quite another fashion. The defeated army was hard pressed until it arrived broken, demoralised, without field artillery or baggage, in its encampment at Mill Springs. This camp was pitched on the north bank of the Cumberland River, so that in the event of another defeat the troops had no retreat open to them save across the river by way of a few steamers and river boats. We find in general that almost all the secessionist camps were pitched on the enemy side of the river. To take up such a position is not only according to rule, but also very practical if there is a bridge in the rear. In such a case, the encampment serves as the bridgehead and gives its holders the chance of throwing their fighting forces at will on both banks of the river and so maintaining complete command of these banks. Without a bridge in the rear a camp on the enemy side of the river, on the contrary, cuts off the retreat after an unsuccessful engagement and compels the troops to capitulate, or exposes them to massacre and drowning, a fate that befell the Unionists at Ball’s Bluff on the enemy side of the Potomac, whither the treachery of General Stone had sent them.
When the beaten secessionists reached their camp at Mill Springs, they at once understood that an enemy attack on their fortifications must be repulsed or capitulation must follow in a very short time. After the experience of the morning, they had lost confidence in their powers of resistance. Accordingly, when the Unionists advanced to attack the camp next day, they found that the enemy had taken advantage of the night to cross the river, leaving the camp, the baggage, the artillery and stores behind him. In this way, the extreme right of the secessionist line was pushed back to Tennessee, and east Kentucky, where the mass of the population is hostile to the slaveholders’ party, was reconquered for the Union.
At about the same time — towards the middle of January — the preparations for dislodging the secessionists from Columbus and Bowling Green commenced. A strong fleet of mortar vessels and ironclad gunboats was held in readiness, and the news was spread in all directions that it was to serve as a convoy to a large army marching along the Mississippi from Cairo to Memphis and New Orleans. All the demonstrations on the Mississippi, however, were merely mock manoeuvres. At the decisive moment, the gunboats were brought to the Ohio and thence to the Tennessee, up which they sailed as far as Fort Henry. This place, together with Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River, formed the second line of defence of the secessionists in Tennessee. The position was well chosen, for in case of a retreat beyond the Cumberland the latter river would have covered its front, the Tennessee its left flank, while the narrow strip of land between the two rivers was sufficiently covered by the two forts mentioned above. But the swift action of the Unionists broke through even the second line before the left wing and the centre of the first line had been attacked.
In the first week of February the Unionists’ gunboats appeared in front of Fort Henry, which surrendered after a short bombardment. The garrison escaped to Fort Donelson, since the land forces of the expedition were not strong enough to encircle the spot. The gunboats now sailed down the Tennessee again, upstream to the Ohio and thence up the Cumberland as far as Fort Donelson. A single gunboat sailed boldly up the Tennessee through the very heart of the State of Tennessee, skirting the State of Mississippi and pushing on as far as Florence in northern Alabama, where a series of swamps and banks (known by the name of the Muscle Shoals) prevented further navigation. The fact that a single gunboat made this long voyage of at least 150 miles and then returned, without experiencing any attack, proves that Union sentiment prevails along the river and will be very useful to the Union troops should they push forward as far as that.
The. boat expedition on the Cumberland now combined its movements with those of the land forces under generals Halleck and Grant. The secessionists at Bowling Green were deceived over the movements of the Unionists. Accordingly they remained quietly in their camp, while a week after the fall of Fort Henry, Fort Donelson was surrounded on the land side by 40,000 Unionists and threatened on the river side by a strong fleet of gunboats. Just as in the case of the camp at Mill Springs and Fort Henry, the river lay beyond Fort Donelson, without a bridge for retreat. It was the strongest place the Unionists had attacked up to the present. The works had been carried out with greater care; moreover, the place was capacious enough to accommodate the 20,000 men who occupied it. On the first day of the attack the gunboats silenced the fire of the batteries trained towards the river side and bombarded the interior of the defence works, while the land troops drove back the enemy outposts and forced the main body of the secessionists to seek shelter close under the guns of their own defence works. On the second day, the gunboats, which had suffered severely the day before, appear to have accomplished but little. The land troops, on the other hand, had to fight a long and, in places, hard battle with the columns of the garrison, which sought to break through the right wing of the enemy in order to secure their line of retreat to Nashville. However, an energetic attack by the Unionist right wing on the left wing of the secessionists and considerable reinforcements received by the left wing of the Unionists decided the victory in favour of the assailants. Various outworks had been stormed. The garrison, pressed back into its inner lines of defence, without the chance of retreat and manifestly not in a position to withstand an assault next morning, surrendered unconditionally on the following day.
II
With Fort Donelson the enemy’s artillery, baggage and military stores fell into the hands of the Unionists; 13,000 secessionists surrendered on the day of its capture ; 1,000 more the next day, and as soon as the advance guard of the victors appeared before Clarksville, a town that lies further up the Cumberland River, it opened its gates. Here, too, considerable supplies had been accumulated for the secessionists.
The capture of Fort Donelson presents only one riddle: the flight of General Floyd with 5,000 men on the second day of the bombardment. These fugitives were too numerous to be smuggled away in steamers during the night. If certain precautions had been taken by the assailants, they could not have got away.
Seven days after the surrender of Fort Donelson, Nashville was occupied by the Federals. The distance between the two places is about 100 English miles, and a march of 15 miles a day, on very bad roads and in the most unfavourable season of the year, redounds to the honour of the Unionist troops. On receipt of the news that Fort Donelson had fallen, the secessionists evacuated Bowling Green; a week later, they abandoned Columbus and withdrew to a Mississippi island, 45 miles south. Thus, Kentucky was completely reconquered for the Union. Tennessee, however, can be held by the secessionists only if they give and win a big battle. They are said in fact to have concentrated 65,000 men for this purpose. Meanwhile, nothing prevents the Unionists from bringing a superior force against them.
The leadership of the Kentucky campaign from Somerset to Nashville deserves the highest praise. The reconquest of so extensive a territory, the advance from the Ohio to the Cumberland in a single month, evidence energy, resolution and speed such as have seldom been attained by regular armies in Europe.
One may compare, for example, the slow advance of the Allies from Magenta to Solferino in 1859 — without pursuit of the retreating enemy, without endeavour to cut off his stragglers or in any way to outflank and encircle whole bodies of his troops.
Halleck and Grant, in particular, offer good examples of resolute military leadership. Without the least regard either for Columbus or Bowling Green, they concentrate their forces on the decisive points, Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, launch a swift and energetic attack on these and precisely thereby render Columbus and Bowling Green untenable. Then they march at once to Clarksville and Nashville, without allowing the retreating secessionists time to take up new positions in northern Tennessee. During this rapid pursuit the corps of secessionist troops in Columbus remains completely cut off from the centre and right wing of its army. The English papers have criticised this operation unjustlyEven if the attack on Fort Donelson had failed, the secessionists kept busy by General Buell at Bowling Green could not dispatch sufficient men to enable the garrison to follow the repulsed Unionists into the open country or to endanger their retreat. Columbus, on the other hand, lay so far off that it could not interfere with Grant’s movements at all. In fact, after the Unionists had cleared Missouri of the secessionists, Columbus became an entirely useless post for the latter. The troops that formed its garrison had greatly to hasten their retreat to Memphis or even to Arkansas in order to escape the danger of ingloriously laying down their arms.
In consequence of the clearing of Missouri and the reconquest of Kentucky, the theatre of war has so far narrowed that the different armies can co-operate to a certain extent along the whole line of operations and work to achieve definite results. In other words, for the first time the war is now assuming a strategic character, and the geographical configuration of the country is acquiring a new interest. It is now the task of the Northern generals to find the Achilles’ heel of the cotton states.
Before the capture of Nashville, no concerted strategy between the army of Kentucky and the army on the Potomac was possible. They were too far apart from each other. They stood in the same front line, but their lines of operation were entirely different. Only with the victorious advance into Tennessee did the movements of the army of Kentucky become important for the entire theatre of war.
The American papers influenced by McClellan are full of talk about the “anaconda” envelopment plan. According to it, an immense line of armies is to wind round the rebellion, gradually tighten its coils and finally strangle the enemy. This is sheer childishness. It is a rehash of the so-called cordon system... devised in Austria about 1770, which was employed against the French from 1792 to 1797 with such great obstinacy and with such constant failure. At Jemappes, Fleurus and, more especially, at Montenotte, Millesimo, Dego, Castiglione and Rivoli, the final blow was dealt at this system. The French cut the “anaconda” in two by attacking at a point where they had concentrated superior forces. Then the coils of the “anaconda” were cut to pieces one after another.
In densely populated and more or less centralised states there is always a centre, with the occupation of which by the enemy the national resistance would be broken. Paris is a brilliant example. The slave states, however, possess no such centre. They are sparsely populated, with few large towns and all these on the seacoast. The question therefore arises: Does a military centre of gravity nevertheless exist, with the capture of which the backbone of their resistance will be broken, or are they, just as Russia still was in 1812, not to be conquered without occupying every village and every plot of land, in short, the entire periphery?
Cast a glance at the geographical shape of the secessionists’ territory, with its long stretch of coast on the Atlantic Ocean and its long stretch of coast on the Gulf of Mexico. So long as the Confederates held Kentucky and Tennessee, the whole formed a great compact mass. The loss of both these states drives an enormous wedge into their territory, separating the states on the North Atlantic Ocean from the States on the Gulf of Mexico. The direct route from Virginia and the two Carolinas to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and even, in part, to Alabama leads through Tennessee, which is now occupied by the Unionists. The sole route that, after the complete conquest of Tennessee by the Union, connects the two sections of the slave states goes through Georgia. This proves that Georgia is the key to the secessionists’ territory. With the loss of Georgia the Confederacy would be cut into two sections, which would have lost all connection with one another. A reconquest of Georgia by the secessionists, however, would be almost unthinkable, for the Unionist fighting forces would be concentrated in a central position, while their adversaries, divided into two camps, would have scarcely sufficient forces to put in the field for a joint attack.
Would the conquest of all Georgia, with the seacoast of Florida, be required for such an operation? By no means. In a land where communication, particularly between distant points, depends much more on railways than on highways, the seizure of the railways is sufficient. The southernmost railway line between the States on the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast goes through Macon and Gordon near Milledgeville.
The occupation of these two points would accordingly cut the secessionists’ territory in two and enable the Unionists to beat one part after another. At the same time, one gathers from the above that no Southern republic is viable without the possession of Tennessee. Without Tennessee, Georgia’s vital spot lies only eight or ten days’ march from the frontier; the North would constantly have its hand at the throat of the South, and, at the slightest pressure, the South would have to yield or fight for its life anew, under circumstances in which a single defeat would cut off every prospect of success.
From the foregoing considerations it follows:
The Potomac is not the most important position in the war theatre. The seizure of Richmond and the advance of the Potomac army further south — difficult on account of the many rivers that cut across the line of march -could produce a tremendous moral effect. From a purely military standpoint, they would decide nothing.
The outcome of the campaign depends on the Kentucky army, now in Tennessee. On the one hand, this army is nearest to the decisive points; on the other hand, it occupies a territory without which secession cannot survive. This army would accordingly have to be strengthened at the expense of all the rest and the sacrifice of all minor operations. Its next points of attack would be
Chattanooga and Dalton on the Upper Tennessee, the most important railway junctions of the entire South. After their occupation, the link between the eastern and western states of Secessia would be limited to the lines of communication in Georgia. The further problem would then be to cut off another railway line, with Atlanta and Georgia, and finally to destroy the last link between the two sections by the capture of Macon and Gordon.
On the contrary, should the anaconda plan be followed, then, despite all the successes gained at particular points and even on the Potomac, the war may be prolonged indefinitely, while the financial difficulties together with diplomatic complications acquire fresh scope.
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.
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Articles by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in Die Presse 1862
The American Civil War
Source: MECW Volume 19, p. 186
Written: between March 7 and 22, 1862;
First published: in Die Presse, 85, March 26 and 27, 1862.
From whatever standpoint one regards it, the American Civil War presents a spectacle without parallel in the annals of military history. The vast extent of the disputed territory; the far-flung front of the lines of operation; the numerical strength of the hostile armies, the creation of which hardly drew any support from a prior organisational basis; the fabulous cost of these armies; the manner of commanding them and the general tactical and strategic principles in accordance with which the war is being waged, are all new in the eyes of the European onlooker.
The secessionist conspiracy, organised, patronised and supported long before its outbreak by Buchanan’s administration, gave the South a head-start, by which alone it could hope to achieve its aim. Endangered by its slave population and by a strong Unionist element among the whites themselves, with two-thirds less free men than in the North, but readier to attack, thanks to the multitude of adventurous idlers that it harbours — for the South everything depended on a swift, bold, almost foolhardy offensive. If the Southerners succeeded in taking St. Louis, Cincinnati, Washington, Baltimore, and perhaps Philadelphia, they might then count on a panic, during which diplomacy and bribery could secure recognition of the independence of all the slave states. If this first onslaught failed, at least at the decisive points, their position must then become worse from day to day, while the North was gaining in strength. This point was rightly understood by the men who in truly Bonapartist spirit had organised the secessionist conspiracy. They opened the campaign in the corresponding manner. Their bands of adventurers overran Missouri and Tennessee, while their more regular troops invaded eastern Virginia and prepared a coup de main against Washington. If this coup were to miscarry, the Southern campaign was lost from a military point of view.
The North came to the theatre of war reluctantly, sleepily, as was to be expected considering its higher industrial and commercial development. The social machinery there was far more complicated than in the South, and it required far more time to get it moving in this unusual direction. The enlistment of volunteers for three months was a great, but perhaps unavoidable mistake. It was the policy of the North to remain on the defensive in the beginning at all decisive points, to organise its forces, to train them through operations on a small scale and without risk of decisive battles, and, as soon as the organisation had become sufficiently strong and the traitorous element had simultaneously been more or less removed from the army, to go on to an energetic, unflagging offensive and, above all, to reconquer Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina. The transformation of civilians into soldiers was bound to take more time in the North than in the South. Once effected, one could count on the individual superiority of the Northern men.
By and large, and allowing for the mistakes that arose more from political than from military sources, the North acted in accordance with those principles. The guerilla warfare in Missouri and West Virginia, while protecting the Unionist population, accustomed the troops to field service and to fire without exposing them to decisive defeats. The great disgrace of Bull Run was, to a certain extent, the result of the earlier error of enlisting volunteers for three months. It was absurd to let raw recruits attack a strong position, on difficult terrain and having an enemy scarcely inferior in numbers. The panic, which seized the Union army at the decisive moment, and the cause of which has yet to be established could surprise no one who was at all familiar with the history of people’s wars. Such things happened to the French troops very often from 1792 to 1795; this did not, however, prevent these same troops from winning the battles of Jemappes and Fleurus, Montenotte, Castiglione and Rivoli. The only excuse for the silliness of the jests of the European press with regard to the Bull Run panic is the previous bragging of a section of the North American press.
The six months’ respite that followed the defeat at Manassas was utilised to better advantage by the North than by the South. Not only were the Northern ranks replenished in greater measure than the Southern ones. Their officers received better instructions; the discipline and training of the troops did not encounter the same obstacles as in the South. Traitors and incompetent interlopers were increasingly removed, and the period of the Bull Run panic is a thing of the past. The armies on both sides are naturally not to be measured by the standard of the great European armies or even of the former regular army of the United States. Napoleon could in fact train battalions of raw recruits in the depots during the first month, have them on the march during the second and during the third lead them against the enemy, but then every battalion received a sufficient reinforcement of experienced officers and non-commissioned officers, every company some old soldiers, and on the day of the battle the new troops were brigaded together with veterans and, so to speak, framed by the latter. All these conditions were lacking in America. Without the considerable amount of people of military experience who had immigrated to America in consequence of the European revolutionary unrest of 1848-49, the organisation of the Union army would have required a much longer time still. The very small number of killed and wounded in proportion to the total of the troops engaged (usually one in every twenty) proves that most of the engagements, even the most recent ones in Kentucky and Tennessee, were fought mainly with firearms at fairly long range, and that the occasional bayonet charges either soon halted in the face of enemy fire or put the adversary to flight before it came to a hand-to-hand encounter. Meanwhile, the new campaign has been opened under more favourable auspices with the successful a advance of Buell and Halleck through Kentucky and Tennessee.
After the reconquest of Missouri and West Virginia, the Union opened the campaign with the advance on Kentucky. Here the secessionists held three strong positions, fortified camps: Columbus on the Mississippi to their left, Bowling Green in the centre, and Mill Springs on the Cumberland River to the right. Their line stretched for 300 miles from west to east. The extent of this line prevented the three corps from rendering each other support and offered the Union troops the chance of attacking each individually with superior forces. The great mistake in the disposition of the secessionists sprang from their attempt to occupy all the ground.
A single fortified, strong central camp, chosen as the battlefield for a decisive engagement and held by the main body of the army, would have defended Kentucky far more effectively. It was bound either to attract the main force of the Unionists or put them in a dangerous position, had they attempted to march on, disregarding so strong a concentration of troops.
Under the given circumstances the Unionists resolved to attack those three camps one after another, to manoeuvre their enemy out of them and force him to fight in open country. This plan, which conformed to all the rules of the art of war, was carried out with energy and dispatch. Towards the middle of January a corps of about 15,000 Unionists marched on Mill Springs, which was held by 10,000 secessionists. The Unionists manoeuvred in a manner that led the enemy to believe he only had to deal with a weak reconnoitring body. General Zollicoffer at once fell into the trap, sallied from his fortified camp and attacked the Unionists. He soon realised that a superior force confronted him. He fell and his troops suffered as complete a defeat as the Unionists at Bull Run. This time, however, the victory was exploited in quite another fashion. The defeated army was hard pressed until it arrived broken, demoralised, without field artillery or baggage, in its encampment at Mill Springs. This camp was pitched on the north bank of the Cumberland River, so that in the event of another defeat the troops had no retreat open to them save across the river by way of a few steamers and river boats. We find in general that almost all the secessionist camps were pitched on the enemy side of the river. To take up such a position is not only according to rule, but also very practical if there is a bridge in the rear. In such a case, the encampment serves as the bridgehead and gives its holders the chance of throwing their fighting forces at will on both banks of the river and so maintaining complete command of these banks. Without a bridge in the rear a camp on the enemy side of the river, on the contrary, cuts off the retreat after an unsuccessful engagement and compels the troops to capitulate, or exposes them to massacre and drowning, a fate that befell the Unionists at Ball’s Bluff on the enemy side of the Potomac, whither the treachery of General Stone had sent them.
When the beaten secessionists reached their camp at Mill Springs, they at once understood that an enemy attack on their fortifications must be repulsed or capitulation must follow in a very short time. After the experience of the morning, they had lost confidence in their powers of resistance. Accordingly, when the Unionists advanced to attack the camp next day, they found that the enemy had taken advantage of the night to cross the river, leaving the camp, the baggage, the artillery and stores behind him. In this way, the extreme right of the secessionist line was pushed back to Tennessee, and east Kentucky, where the mass of the population is hostile to the slaveholders’ party, was reconquered for the Union.
At about the same time — towards the middle of January — the preparations for dislodging the secessionists from Columbus and Bowling Green commenced. A strong fleet of mortar vessels and ironclad gunboats was held in readiness, and the news was spread in all directions that it was to serve as a convoy to a large army marching along the Mississippi from Cairo to Memphis and New Orleans. All the demonstrations on the Mississippi, however, were merely mock manoeuvres. At the decisive moment, the gunboats were brought to the Ohio and thence to the Tennessee, up which they sailed as far as Fort Henry. This place, together with Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River, formed the second line of defence of the secessionists in Tennessee. The position was well chosen, for in case of a retreat beyond the Cumberland the latter river would have covered its front, the Tennessee its left flank, while the narrow strip of land between the two rivers was sufficiently covered by the two forts mentioned above. But the swift action of the Unionists broke through even the second line before the left wing and the centre of the first line had been attacked.
In the first week of February the Unionists’ gunboats appeared in front of Fort Henry, which surrendered after a short bombardment. The garrison escaped to Fort Donelson, since the land forces of the expedition were not strong enough to encircle the spot. The gunboats now sailed down the Tennessee again, upstream to the Ohio and thence up the Cumberland as far as Fort Donelson. A single gunboat sailed boldly up the Tennessee through the very heart of the State of Tennessee, skirting the State of Mississippi and pushing on as far as Florence in northern Alabama, where a series of swamps and banks (known by the name of the Muscle Shoals) prevented further navigation. The fact that a single gunboat made this long voyage of at least 150 miles and then returned, without experiencing any attack, proves that Union sentiment prevails along the river and will be very useful to the Union troops should they push forward as far as that.
The. boat expedition on the Cumberland now combined its movements with those of the land forces under generals Halleck and Grant. The secessionists at Bowling Green were deceived over the movements of the Unionists. Accordingly they remained quietly in their camp, while a week after the fall of Fort Henry, Fort Donelson was surrounded on the land side by 40,000 Unionists and threatened on the river side by a strong fleet of gunboats. Just as in the case of the camp at Mill Springs and Fort Henry, the river lay beyond Fort Donelson, without a bridge for retreat. It was the strongest place the Unionists had attacked up to the present. The works had been carried out with greater care; moreover, the place was capacious enough to accommodate the 20,000 men who occupied it. On the first day of the attack the gunboats silenced the fire of the batteries trained towards the river side and bombarded the interior of the defence works, while the land troops drove back the enemy outposts and forced the main body of the secessionists to seek shelter close under the guns of their own defence works. On the second day, the gunboats, which had suffered severely the day before, appear to have accomplished but little. The land troops, on the other hand, had to fight a long and, in places, hard battle with the columns of the garrison, which sought to break through the right wing of the enemy in order to secure their line of retreat to Nashville. However, an energetic attack by the Unionist right wing on the left wing of the secessionists and considerable reinforcements received by the left wing of the Unionists decided the victory in favour of the assailants. Various outworks had been stormed. The garrison, pressed back into its inner lines of defence, without the chance of retreat and manifestly not in a position to withstand an assault next morning, surrendered unconditionally on the following day.
II
With Fort Donelson the enemy’s artillery, baggage and military stores fell into the hands of the Unionists; 13,000 secessionists surrendered on the day of its capture ; 1,000 more the next day, and as soon as the advance guard of the victors appeared before Clarksville, a town that lies further up the Cumberland River, it opened its gates. Here, too, considerable supplies had been accumulated for the secessionists.
The capture of Fort Donelson presents only one riddle: the flight of General Floyd with 5,000 men on the second day of the bombardment. These fugitives were too numerous to be smuggled away in steamers during the night. If certain precautions had been taken by the assailants, they could not have got away.
Seven days after the surrender of Fort Donelson, Nashville was occupied by the Federals. The distance between the two places is about 100 English miles, and a march of 15 miles a day, on very bad roads and in the most unfavourable season of the year, redounds to the honour of the Unionist troops. On receipt of the news that Fort Donelson had fallen, the secessionists evacuated Bowling Green; a week later, they abandoned Columbus and withdrew to a Mississippi island, 45 miles south. Thus, Kentucky was completely reconquered for the Union. Tennessee, however, can be held by the secessionists only if they give and win a big battle. They are said in fact to have concentrated 65,000 men for this purpose. Meanwhile, nothing prevents the Unionists from bringing a superior force against them.
The leadership of the Kentucky campaign from Somerset to Nashville deserves the highest praise. The reconquest of so extensive a territory, the advance from the Ohio to the Cumberland in a single month, evidence energy, resolution and speed such as have seldom been attained by regular armies in Europe.
One may compare, for example, the slow advance of the Allies from Magenta to Solferino in 1859 — without pursuit of the retreating enemy, without endeavour to cut off his stragglers or in any way to outflank and encircle whole bodies of his troops.
Halleck and Grant, in particular, offer good examples of resolute military leadership. Without the least regard either for Columbus or Bowling Green, they concentrate their forces on the decisive points, Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, launch a swift and energetic attack on these and precisely thereby render Columbus and Bowling Green untenable. Then they march at once to Clarksville and Nashville, without allowing the retreating secessionists time to take up new positions in northern Tennessee. During this rapid pursuit the corps of secessionist troops in Columbus remains completely cut off from the centre and right wing of its army. The English papers have criticised this operation unjustlyEven if the attack on Fort Donelson had failed, the secessionists kept busy by General Buell at Bowling Green could not dispatch sufficient men to enable the garrison to follow the repulsed Unionists into the open country or to endanger their retreat. Columbus, on the other hand, lay so far off that it could not interfere with Grant’s movements at all. In fact, after the Unionists had cleared Missouri of the secessionists, Columbus became an entirely useless post for the latter. The troops that formed its garrison had greatly to hasten their retreat to Memphis or even to Arkansas in order to escape the danger of ingloriously laying down their arms.
In consequence of the clearing of Missouri and the reconquest of Kentucky, the theatre of war has so far narrowed that the different armies can co-operate to a certain extent along the whole line of operations and work to achieve definite results. In other words, for the first time the war is now assuming a strategic character, and the geographical configuration of the country is acquiring a new interest. It is now the task of the Northern generals to find the Achilles’ heel of the cotton states.
Before the capture of Nashville, no concerted strategy between the army of Kentucky and the army on the Potomac was possible. They were too far apart from each other. They stood in the same front line, but their lines of operation were entirely different. Only with the victorious advance into Tennessee did the movements of the army of Kentucky become important for the entire theatre of war.
The American papers influenced by McClellan are full of talk about the “anaconda” envelopment plan. According to it, an immense line of armies is to wind round the rebellion, gradually tighten its coils and finally strangle the enemy. This is sheer childishness. It is a rehash of the so-called cordon system... devised in Austria about 1770, which was employed against the French from 1792 to 1797 with such great obstinacy and with such constant failure. At Jemappes, Fleurus and, more especially, at Montenotte, Millesimo, Dego, Castiglione and Rivoli, the final blow was dealt at this system. The French cut the “anaconda” in two by attacking at a point where they had concentrated superior forces. Then the coils of the “anaconda” were cut to pieces one after another.
In densely populated and more or less centralised states there is always a centre, with the occupation of which by the enemy the national resistance would be broken. Paris is a brilliant example. The slave states, however, possess no such centre. They are sparsely populated, with few large towns and all these on the seacoast. The question therefore arises: Does a military centre of gravity nevertheless exist, with the capture of which the backbone of their resistance will be broken, or are they, just as Russia still was in 1812, not to be conquered without occupying every village and every plot of land, in short, the entire periphery?
Cast a glance at the geographical shape of the secessionists’ territory, with its long stretch of coast on the Atlantic Ocean and its long stretch of coast on the Gulf of Mexico. So long as the Confederates held Kentucky and Tennessee, the whole formed a great compact mass. The loss of both these states drives an enormous wedge into their territory, separating the states on the North Atlantic Ocean from the States on the Gulf of Mexico. The direct route from Virginia and the two Carolinas to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and even, in part, to Alabama leads through Tennessee, which is now occupied by the Unionists. The sole route that, after the complete conquest of Tennessee by the Union, connects the two sections of the slave states goes through Georgia. This proves that Georgia is the key to the secessionists’ territory. With the loss of Georgia the Confederacy would be cut into two sections, which would have lost all connection with one another. A reconquest of Georgia by the secessionists, however, would be almost unthinkable, for the Unionist fighting forces would be concentrated in a central position, while their adversaries, divided into two camps, would have scarcely sufficient forces to put in the field for a joint attack.
Would the conquest of all Georgia, with the seacoast of Florida, be required for such an operation? By no means. In a land where communication, particularly between distant points, depends much more on railways than on highways, the seizure of the railways is sufficient. The southernmost railway line between the States on the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast goes through Macon and Gordon near Milledgeville.
The occupation of these two points would accordingly cut the secessionists’ territory in two and enable the Unionists to beat one part after another. At the same time, one gathers from the above that no Southern republic is viable without the possession of Tennessee. Without Tennessee, Georgia’s vital spot lies only eight or ten days’ march from the frontier; the North would constantly have its hand at the throat of the South, and, at the slightest pressure, the South would have to yield or fight for its life anew, under circumstances in which a single defeat would cut off every prospect of success.
From the foregoing considerations it follows:
The Potomac is not the most important position in the war theatre. The seizure of Richmond and the advance of the Potomac army further south — difficult on account of the many rivers that cut across the line of march -could produce a tremendous moral effect. From a purely military standpoint, they would decide nothing.
The outcome of the campaign depends on the Kentucky army, now in Tennessee. On the one hand, this army is nearest to the decisive points; on the other hand, it occupies a territory without which secession cannot survive. This army would accordingly have to be strengthened at the expense of all the rest and the sacrifice of all minor operations. Its next points of attack would be
Chattanooga and Dalton on the Upper Tennessee, the most important railway junctions of the entire South. After their occupation, the link between the eastern and western states of Secessia would be limited to the lines of communication in Georgia. The further problem would then be to cut off another railway line, with Atlanta and Georgia, and finally to destroy the last link between the two sections by the capture of Macon and Gordon.
On the contrary, should the anaconda plan be followed, then, despite all the successes gained at particular points and even on the Potomac, the war may be prolonged indefinitely, while the financial difficulties together with diplomatic complications acquire fresh scope.
From The HistoMat Blog-Terry Eagleton on The Communist Manifesto- From a review of Eric Hobsbawm's How to Change the World
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Terry Eagleton on The Communist Manifesto
From a review of Eric Hobsbawm's How to Change the World
Few works have sung the praises of the middle classes with such embarrassing zest as The Communist Manifesto. In Marx’s view, they have been by far the most revolutionary force in human history, and without harnessing for its own ends the material and spiritual wealth they have accumulated, socialism will prove bankrupt. This, needless to say, was one of his shrewder prognostications. Socialism in the 20th century turned out to be most necessary where it was least possible: in socially devastated, politically benighted, economically backward regions of the globe where no Marxist thinker before Stalin had ever dreamed that it could take root. Or at least, take root without massive assistance from more well-heeled nations. In such dismal conditions, the socialist project is almost bound to turn into a monstrous parody of itself. All the same, the idea that Marxism leads inevitably to such monstrosities, as Hobsbawm observes, ‘has about as much justification as the thesis that all Christianity must logically and necessarily always lead to papal absolutism, or all Darwinism to the glorification of free capitalist competition’. (He does not consider the possibility of Darwinism leading to a kind of papal absolutism, which some might see as a reasonable description of Richard Dawkins.)
Hobsbawm, however, points out that Marx was actually too generous to the bourgeoisie, a fault of which he is not commonly accused. At the time of The Communist Manifesto, their economic achievements were a good deal more modest than he imagined. In a curious garbling of tenses, the Manifesto described not the world capitalism had created in 1848, but the world as it was destined to be transformed by capitalism. What Marx had to say was not exactly true, but it would become true by, say, the year 2000, and it was capitalism that would make it so. Even his comments on the abolition of the family have proved prophetic: about half of the children in advanced Western countries today are born to or brought up by single mothers, and half of all households in large cities consist of single persons.
Hobsbawm’s essay on the Manifesto speaks of its ‘dark, laconic eloquence’, and notes that as political rhetoric it has ‘an almost biblical force’. ‘The new reader,’ he writes, ‘can hardly fail to be swept away by the passionate conviction, the concentrated brevity, the intellectual and stylistic force of this astonishing pamphlet.’ The Manifesto initiated a whole genre of such declarations, most of them from avant-garde artists such as the Futurists and the Surrealists, whose outrageous wordplay and scandalous hyperbole turn these broadsides into avant-garde artworks in themselves. The manifesto genre represents a mixture of theory and rhetoric, fact and fiction, the programmatic and the performative, which has never been taken seriously enough as an object of study.
Marx, too, was an artist of sorts. It is often forgotten how staggeringly well read he was, and what painstaking labour he invested in the literary style of his works. He was eager, he remarked, to get shot of the ‘economic crap’ of Capital and get down to his big book on Balzac. Marxism is about leisure, not labour. It is a project that should be eagerly supported by all those who dislike having to work. It holds that the most precious activities are those done simply for the hell of it, and that art is in this sense the paradigm of authentic human activity. It also holds that the material resources that would make such a society possible already exist in principle, but are generated in a way that compels the great majority to work as hard as our Neolithic ancestors did. We have thus made astounding progress, and no progress at all.
In the 1840s, Hobsbawm argues, it was by no means improbable to conclude that society was on the verge of revolution. What was improbable was the idea that within a handful of decades the politics of capitalist Europe would be transformed by the rise of organised working-class parties and movements. Yet this is what came to pass. It was at this point that commentary on Marx, at least in Britain, began to shift from the cautiously admiring to the near hysterical. In 1885, no less devout a non-revolutionary than Balfour commended Marx’s writings for their intellectual force, and for their economic reasoning in particular. A whole raft of liberal or conservative commentators took his economic ideas with intense seriousness. Once those ideas took the form of a political force, however, a number of ferociously anti-Marxist works began to appear. Their apotheosis was Hugh Trevor-Roper’s stunning revelation that Marx had made no original contribution to the history of ideas. Most of these critics, I take it, would have rejected the Marxist view that human thought is sometimes bent out of shape by the pressure of political interests, a phenomenon commonly known as ideology. Only recently has Marxism been back on the agenda, placed there, ironically enough, by an ailing capitalism. ‘Capitalism in Convulsion’, a Financial Times headline read in 2008. When capitalists begin to speak of capitalism, you know the system is in dire trouble. They have still not dared to do so in the United States.
Terry Eagleton has a new book out entitled simply Why Marx was right and is speaking at Marxism 2011
Terry Eagleton on The Communist Manifesto
From a review of Eric Hobsbawm's How to Change the World
Few works have sung the praises of the middle classes with such embarrassing zest as The Communist Manifesto. In Marx’s view, they have been by far the most revolutionary force in human history, and without harnessing for its own ends the material and spiritual wealth they have accumulated, socialism will prove bankrupt. This, needless to say, was one of his shrewder prognostications. Socialism in the 20th century turned out to be most necessary where it was least possible: in socially devastated, politically benighted, economically backward regions of the globe where no Marxist thinker before Stalin had ever dreamed that it could take root. Or at least, take root without massive assistance from more well-heeled nations. In such dismal conditions, the socialist project is almost bound to turn into a monstrous parody of itself. All the same, the idea that Marxism leads inevitably to such monstrosities, as Hobsbawm observes, ‘has about as much justification as the thesis that all Christianity must logically and necessarily always lead to papal absolutism, or all Darwinism to the glorification of free capitalist competition’. (He does not consider the possibility of Darwinism leading to a kind of papal absolutism, which some might see as a reasonable description of Richard Dawkins.)
Hobsbawm, however, points out that Marx was actually too generous to the bourgeoisie, a fault of which he is not commonly accused. At the time of The Communist Manifesto, their economic achievements were a good deal more modest than he imagined. In a curious garbling of tenses, the Manifesto described not the world capitalism had created in 1848, but the world as it was destined to be transformed by capitalism. What Marx had to say was not exactly true, but it would become true by, say, the year 2000, and it was capitalism that would make it so. Even his comments on the abolition of the family have proved prophetic: about half of the children in advanced Western countries today are born to or brought up by single mothers, and half of all households in large cities consist of single persons.
Hobsbawm’s essay on the Manifesto speaks of its ‘dark, laconic eloquence’, and notes that as political rhetoric it has ‘an almost biblical force’. ‘The new reader,’ he writes, ‘can hardly fail to be swept away by the passionate conviction, the concentrated brevity, the intellectual and stylistic force of this astonishing pamphlet.’ The Manifesto initiated a whole genre of such declarations, most of them from avant-garde artists such as the Futurists and the Surrealists, whose outrageous wordplay and scandalous hyperbole turn these broadsides into avant-garde artworks in themselves. The manifesto genre represents a mixture of theory and rhetoric, fact and fiction, the programmatic and the performative, which has never been taken seriously enough as an object of study.
Marx, too, was an artist of sorts. It is often forgotten how staggeringly well read he was, and what painstaking labour he invested in the literary style of his works. He was eager, he remarked, to get shot of the ‘economic crap’ of Capital and get down to his big book on Balzac. Marxism is about leisure, not labour. It is a project that should be eagerly supported by all those who dislike having to work. It holds that the most precious activities are those done simply for the hell of it, and that art is in this sense the paradigm of authentic human activity. It also holds that the material resources that would make such a society possible already exist in principle, but are generated in a way that compels the great majority to work as hard as our Neolithic ancestors did. We have thus made astounding progress, and no progress at all.
In the 1840s, Hobsbawm argues, it was by no means improbable to conclude that society was on the verge of revolution. What was improbable was the idea that within a handful of decades the politics of capitalist Europe would be transformed by the rise of organised working-class parties and movements. Yet this is what came to pass. It was at this point that commentary on Marx, at least in Britain, began to shift from the cautiously admiring to the near hysterical. In 1885, no less devout a non-revolutionary than Balfour commended Marx’s writings for their intellectual force, and for their economic reasoning in particular. A whole raft of liberal or conservative commentators took his economic ideas with intense seriousness. Once those ideas took the form of a political force, however, a number of ferociously anti-Marxist works began to appear. Their apotheosis was Hugh Trevor-Roper’s stunning revelation that Marx had made no original contribution to the history of ideas. Most of these critics, I take it, would have rejected the Marxist view that human thought is sometimes bent out of shape by the pressure of political interests, a phenomenon commonly known as ideology. Only recently has Marxism been back on the agenda, placed there, ironically enough, by an ailing capitalism. ‘Capitalism in Convulsion’, a Financial Times headline read in 2008. When capitalists begin to speak of capitalism, you know the system is in dire trouble. They have still not dared to do so in the United States.
Terry Eagleton has a new book out entitled simply Why Marx was right and is speaking at Marxism 2011
From The Renegade Eye Blog-The Stalinization of Post-Revolutionary Soviet Art and Architecture
The Stalinization of Post-Revolutionary Soviet Art and Architecture
Panteleimon (brother of Il'ia) Golosov's Submission for the Narkomtiazhprom Competition
The vibrant artistic culture that existed in post-revolutionary Russia thrived up until the early 1930s. During that time, the Soviet government allowed a great deal of creative liberty, with a number of independent artistic and architectural movements sprouting up in the aftermath of October. Some state oversight existed in the capacity of Narkompros, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment. Its Fine Arts division sponsored some projects, but gave no special preference to any particular group or style. Narkompros’ director (and Lenin’s old friend) Anatolii Lunacharskii may have been more fond of the classics of Western civilization than he was of the modernists’ brash iconoclasm, but he was remarkably tolerant of any group that displayed enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks’ social and political revolution.
Post-revolutionary art and architecture can be disaggregated into three main categories: the modernist, the atavistic, and the “proletarian.” This third category traced its origins to Aleksandr Bogdanov, one of leading figures in Russian Social-Democracy and Lenin’s early rival within the Bolshevik party. Modernism had emerged in pre-war Russia out of the fragmentation of Symbolism in the fields of literature, poetry, and art, but absorbed international influences as well. The traditionalist eclecticism of artistic and architectural atavism was passed on through the Imperial Academy system, which had been imported from Western Europe some two hundred years before.
Tatlin's Tower (1919) Digitally Superimposed on the Petersburg Skyline
Out of these three groups, the modernists were the first to lend their support to the Bolshevik cause during the Revolution. Only months after October 1917, Maiakovskii and others declared their solidarity with Lenin’s party. They saw the social and political revolution carried out by the communists as a parallel to the artistic revolution that they were attempting to realize. But the Soviet avant-garde was far from being a unitary movement. In the fifteen years following the October Revolution, numerous avant-garde currents were established, each with their own agendas and often antagonisms against one another. They shared a rejection of the ways of the past, and they tended to be more internationalist and experimental in orientation. There were the Russian Futurists (very different from their Italian counterparts), painterly and architectural Suprematists, Productivists, artistic and architectural Constructivists, and Formalists in architecture and literary theory, etc. These various groups also invited modernists from other countries to join in the project of building a new society.
Eclectic Architecture from 1924
At the same time, however, there was the more conservative brand of eclectic art and architecture inherited from the old academy system. These artists and architects were generally referred to as the academicians, and were generally despised by the avant-gardists. They saw artistic and architectural history as a sort of inventory of recognized styles that could be arbitrarily combined or juxtaposed at the whim of the artist or architect. This is why their style was often referred to as “historicist.”
Anti-Capital (1920)
Alongside this, there was the Proletkult/proleterian art movement that Lenin and Trotskii were so uncomfortable with, that tended to be more realist and “heroic” in its representation of workers, Bolshevik leaders, and revolutionary battle scenes. They believed that there would emerge a new form of art and architecture that was both created by and legible to the revolutionary proletariat. They believed that the working masses had already established their own essential culture in opposition to bourgeois taste and high society under capitalism. Lenin and Trotskii criticized them for believing that the culture of the proletariat would be that drastically different than the culture that had predominated under capitalism. The other aspect that disturbed them was that the Bolshevik Revolution was meant to create a classless society, not a specifically proletarian society. Nevertheless, Proletkult and proletarian art merged with elements of a strange brand of monumentalist avant-gardism that in architecture banded together in the group VOPRA, and this led to the Stalinist synthesis of Socialist realism.
Around 1931-1933, Stalin and his henchmen intervened and wanted to put an end to the various competing groups and form an official style that would be run by forcibly unionizing the different art and architectural groups together. Once all the groups had been subsumed into All-Union appendages of the state, bureaucratized and monitored closely, the decision was made to institute Socialist realism. This way, all artists and architects had to be registered with and licensed by the state and made to conform to union mandates handed down from above, by the Stalinist hierarchy. Those who did not join with the state-funded unions would not have their work supported or even recognized by the Soviet government, and would not receive the regular income that the union provided.
Works now had to be:
Proletarian: art relevant to the workers and understandable to them.
Typical: scenes of every day life of the people.
Realistic: in the representational sense.
Partisan: supportive of the aims of the State and the Party.
Socialist realism literally killed all the vibrant creative energies that had been unleashed after the Revolution, in the following ways:
Aleksandr Fadeev's "The Young Guard"
1. In literature, it meant that books predictably had to have some sort of conflicted petit-bourgeois or intellectual who was nostalgic for the old order and thus initially resisted socialism or collectivization. A protagonist, usually a virtuous, handsome young worker who was enthralled by the revolution, either helped lead his conflicted comrade to embrace the glorious new regime of Stalinist collectivization or was set up in contrast to the greedy, wily supporter of the old order as an example of the New Man — industrious, courageous, and heroic. Every book was supposed to have either a happy ending or an ending that taught a moral lesson.
Vladimirskii's "Roses for Stalin" (1934)
2. In the visual arts, it meant an end to the daring work of abstract painting and creative photomontage experimentation and a return to representational verisimilitude. It would characteristically paint noble portraits of wise Uncle Stalin, gazing out with a look of kindliness and resolve. It would portray scenes of Stakhanovite workers dutifully toiling away inside of the factory or happy, smiling peasants pleased with the joys of collectivization. Of course, it was all fantasy, but the figures portrayed in the paintings were made to look like real people.
Official Design for the Palace of the Soviets (1932)
3. In architecture, perhaps the strangest blend was arrived at through the combination of monumentalist gigantism and neoclassical stylization — columns, arches, and decorative facades on an enormous scale. It resulted in what was later sometimes called the “Stalinist Gothic,” towering buildings that almost looked like gigantic wedding cakes set against gray skies. One of the final deathblows to modernism in Soviet architecture was the design chosen as the winner for the competition for the Palace of the Soviets in 1932. Google “Palace of the Soviets” and you’ll see the enormous wedding-cake building with a huge stature of Lenin on top.
King Kong atop the Empire State Building (1931)
**Post-script: Susan Buck-Morss hilariously compared the choice for the Palace of the Soviets with Lenin atop a towering pedestal to King Kong, perched up on the Empire State Building in eponymous movie.
~ by Ross Wolfe on April 16, 2011.
Panteleimon (brother of Il'ia) Golosov's Submission for the Narkomtiazhprom Competition
The vibrant artistic culture that existed in post-revolutionary Russia thrived up until the early 1930s. During that time, the Soviet government allowed a great deal of creative liberty, with a number of independent artistic and architectural movements sprouting up in the aftermath of October. Some state oversight existed in the capacity of Narkompros, the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment. Its Fine Arts division sponsored some projects, but gave no special preference to any particular group or style. Narkompros’ director (and Lenin’s old friend) Anatolii Lunacharskii may have been more fond of the classics of Western civilization than he was of the modernists’ brash iconoclasm, but he was remarkably tolerant of any group that displayed enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks’ social and political revolution.
Post-revolutionary art and architecture can be disaggregated into three main categories: the modernist, the atavistic, and the “proletarian.” This third category traced its origins to Aleksandr Bogdanov, one of leading figures in Russian Social-Democracy and Lenin’s early rival within the Bolshevik party. Modernism had emerged in pre-war Russia out of the fragmentation of Symbolism in the fields of literature, poetry, and art, but absorbed international influences as well. The traditionalist eclecticism of artistic and architectural atavism was passed on through the Imperial Academy system, which had been imported from Western Europe some two hundred years before.
Tatlin's Tower (1919) Digitally Superimposed on the Petersburg Skyline
Out of these three groups, the modernists were the first to lend their support to the Bolshevik cause during the Revolution. Only months after October 1917, Maiakovskii and others declared their solidarity with Lenin’s party. They saw the social and political revolution carried out by the communists as a parallel to the artistic revolution that they were attempting to realize. But the Soviet avant-garde was far from being a unitary movement. In the fifteen years following the October Revolution, numerous avant-garde currents were established, each with their own agendas and often antagonisms against one another. They shared a rejection of the ways of the past, and they tended to be more internationalist and experimental in orientation. There were the Russian Futurists (very different from their Italian counterparts), painterly and architectural Suprematists, Productivists, artistic and architectural Constructivists, and Formalists in architecture and literary theory, etc. These various groups also invited modernists from other countries to join in the project of building a new society.
Eclectic Architecture from 1924
At the same time, however, there was the more conservative brand of eclectic art and architecture inherited from the old academy system. These artists and architects were generally referred to as the academicians, and were generally despised by the avant-gardists. They saw artistic and architectural history as a sort of inventory of recognized styles that could be arbitrarily combined or juxtaposed at the whim of the artist or architect. This is why their style was often referred to as “historicist.”
Anti-Capital (1920)
Alongside this, there was the Proletkult/proleterian art movement that Lenin and Trotskii were so uncomfortable with, that tended to be more realist and “heroic” in its representation of workers, Bolshevik leaders, and revolutionary battle scenes. They believed that there would emerge a new form of art and architecture that was both created by and legible to the revolutionary proletariat. They believed that the working masses had already established their own essential culture in opposition to bourgeois taste and high society under capitalism. Lenin and Trotskii criticized them for believing that the culture of the proletariat would be that drastically different than the culture that had predominated under capitalism. The other aspect that disturbed them was that the Bolshevik Revolution was meant to create a classless society, not a specifically proletarian society. Nevertheless, Proletkult and proletarian art merged with elements of a strange brand of monumentalist avant-gardism that in architecture banded together in the group VOPRA, and this led to the Stalinist synthesis of Socialist realism.
Around 1931-1933, Stalin and his henchmen intervened and wanted to put an end to the various competing groups and form an official style that would be run by forcibly unionizing the different art and architectural groups together. Once all the groups had been subsumed into All-Union appendages of the state, bureaucratized and monitored closely, the decision was made to institute Socialist realism. This way, all artists and architects had to be registered with and licensed by the state and made to conform to union mandates handed down from above, by the Stalinist hierarchy. Those who did not join with the state-funded unions would not have their work supported or even recognized by the Soviet government, and would not receive the regular income that the union provided.
Works now had to be:
Proletarian: art relevant to the workers and understandable to them.
Typical: scenes of every day life of the people.
Realistic: in the representational sense.
Partisan: supportive of the aims of the State and the Party.
Socialist realism literally killed all the vibrant creative energies that had been unleashed after the Revolution, in the following ways:
Aleksandr Fadeev's "The Young Guard"
1. In literature, it meant that books predictably had to have some sort of conflicted petit-bourgeois or intellectual who was nostalgic for the old order and thus initially resisted socialism or collectivization. A protagonist, usually a virtuous, handsome young worker who was enthralled by the revolution, either helped lead his conflicted comrade to embrace the glorious new regime of Stalinist collectivization or was set up in contrast to the greedy, wily supporter of the old order as an example of the New Man — industrious, courageous, and heroic. Every book was supposed to have either a happy ending or an ending that taught a moral lesson.
Vladimirskii's "Roses for Stalin" (1934)
2. In the visual arts, it meant an end to the daring work of abstract painting and creative photomontage experimentation and a return to representational verisimilitude. It would characteristically paint noble portraits of wise Uncle Stalin, gazing out with a look of kindliness and resolve. It would portray scenes of Stakhanovite workers dutifully toiling away inside of the factory or happy, smiling peasants pleased with the joys of collectivization. Of course, it was all fantasy, but the figures portrayed in the paintings were made to look like real people.
Official Design for the Palace of the Soviets (1932)
3. In architecture, perhaps the strangest blend was arrived at through the combination of monumentalist gigantism and neoclassical stylization — columns, arches, and decorative facades on an enormous scale. It resulted in what was later sometimes called the “Stalinist Gothic,” towering buildings that almost looked like gigantic wedding cakes set against gray skies. One of the final deathblows to modernism in Soviet architecture was the design chosen as the winner for the competition for the Palace of the Soviets in 1932. Google “Palace of the Soviets” and you’ll see the enormous wedding-cake building with a huge stature of Lenin on top.
King Kong atop the Empire State Building (1931)
**Post-script: Susan Buck-Morss hilariously compared the choice for the Palace of the Soviets with Lenin atop a towering pedestal to King Kong, perched up on the Empire State Building in eponymous movie.
~ by Ross Wolfe on April 16, 2011.
From The Cindy Sheehan Soap Box Blog-Take California: Call for March & Strike on Sacramento
Take California: Call for March & Strike on Sacramento
Take California: Call for March & Strike on Sacramento
Peace of the Action (POTA), CodePINK, Cindy Sheehan, several other entities, and all Vulnerable Folks are calling on us to march, strike, and occupy Sacramento and beyond beginning May Day, 2011.
We seek your endorsement for - and participation in - this march/strike to strengthen our approach, our numbers, and our will.
Strike: No Business As Usual
No More Taxes for Wars & Occupations
No More Tax Breaks for the Rich & Their Corporations
To be clear, this is a march and strike in direct challenge to Governor Jerry Brown and the legislature’s austerity measures in California. The budget “fixes” proposed will come down on the backs of the most vulnerable, while continuing to provide corporate welfare, funds and use of California National Guard in wars of aggression, and a regressive tax structure.
We believe there is a better way.
Close Corporate Tax Loopholes & Incentives
Fully fund education and other social programs
End state funding for National Guard Units leaving California
Raise Taxes (Employ Austerity) on California’s 650,000 Millionaire Households
Employ Massive Prison Reform & Drastically alter Criminalization Codes
All this is to say: End the financial and discriminatory wars on women, workers, unions, immigrants, indigenous peoples, disabled, and people of color, the poor, and homeless communities.
All this is to say: End the ecocidal war against the state and the planet.
All this is to say: End the cycle of perpetual war, occupation, and terrorism being conducted around the globe.
We recognize the work we do in California now can be a model employed in other states and nations, and likewise seek your support to galvanize the effort and spread the word to your members, friends, allies, and colleagues. We will share our successes and failures every step of the way, and will help organize in every other state and nation as appropriate.
The Plan: March. Strike. Occupy.
May Day - International Workers Day: Begin Marches across the state to Sacramento.
San Francisco, Bay Area: 1130am, 24th and Mission, March with Coalition of Immigrants & Workers to Civic Center (100pm); Depart on March to Ferry Building (300pm); Ferry to Vallejo (600pm)
May 2 - May 8: March through American Canyon, Napa, Suisun, Fairfield, Vacaville, Winters, Woodland, and Davis.
Theme/Issue/Focus for each overnight location
Regular press conferences with Rallies at each location
Flyering, Bannering, Actions at each location
May 9 & Beyond: Arrive Sacramento, Join Teacher’s Union Occupation of Capitol, Occupy
Set up Tent City occupation of Capitol grounds
“Refuse to Move”
Manage logistics, expand our ranks, employ tactics
Teach-Ins, Die-Ins, Human Be-Ins, and more
We encourage and urge everyone to bring your strength, your issue, and your expertise to directly challenge California’s corporatocracy right where it presides: Sacramento.
We will not set an end date. We don’t intend to leave. We will not back down.
To endorse, email or call:
Peace of the Action (POTA)
unitedrevs@gmail.com or gregory@gregoryvickrey.com
202.487.1201 (name, number, organization, email)
Cindy Sheehan
Cindy@CindySheehansSoapbox.com
Bay Area Code Pink
info@bayareacodepink.org
510.540.7007 (name, number, organization, email)
Posted by Cindy Sheehan at 3:37 PM
Take California: Call for March & Strike on Sacramento
Peace of the Action (POTA), CodePINK, Cindy Sheehan, several other entities, and all Vulnerable Folks are calling on us to march, strike, and occupy Sacramento and beyond beginning May Day, 2011.
We seek your endorsement for - and participation in - this march/strike to strengthen our approach, our numbers, and our will.
Strike: No Business As Usual
No More Taxes for Wars & Occupations
No More Tax Breaks for the Rich & Their Corporations
To be clear, this is a march and strike in direct challenge to Governor Jerry Brown and the legislature’s austerity measures in California. The budget “fixes” proposed will come down on the backs of the most vulnerable, while continuing to provide corporate welfare, funds and use of California National Guard in wars of aggression, and a regressive tax structure.
We believe there is a better way.
Close Corporate Tax Loopholes & Incentives
Fully fund education and other social programs
End state funding for National Guard Units leaving California
Raise Taxes (Employ Austerity) on California’s 650,000 Millionaire Households
Employ Massive Prison Reform & Drastically alter Criminalization Codes
All this is to say: End the financial and discriminatory wars on women, workers, unions, immigrants, indigenous peoples, disabled, and people of color, the poor, and homeless communities.
All this is to say: End the ecocidal war against the state and the planet.
All this is to say: End the cycle of perpetual war, occupation, and terrorism being conducted around the globe.
We recognize the work we do in California now can be a model employed in other states and nations, and likewise seek your support to galvanize the effort and spread the word to your members, friends, allies, and colleagues. We will share our successes and failures every step of the way, and will help organize in every other state and nation as appropriate.
The Plan: March. Strike. Occupy.
May Day - International Workers Day: Begin Marches across the state to Sacramento.
San Francisco, Bay Area: 1130am, 24th and Mission, March with Coalition of Immigrants & Workers to Civic Center (100pm); Depart on March to Ferry Building (300pm); Ferry to Vallejo (600pm)
May 2 - May 8: March through American Canyon, Napa, Suisun, Fairfield, Vacaville, Winters, Woodland, and Davis.
Theme/Issue/Focus for each overnight location
Regular press conferences with Rallies at each location
Flyering, Bannering, Actions at each location
May 9 & Beyond: Arrive Sacramento, Join Teacher’s Union Occupation of Capitol, Occupy
Set up Tent City occupation of Capitol grounds
“Refuse to Move”
Manage logistics, expand our ranks, employ tactics
Teach-Ins, Die-Ins, Human Be-Ins, and more
We encourage and urge everyone to bring your strength, your issue, and your expertise to directly challenge California’s corporatocracy right where it presides: Sacramento.
We will not set an end date. We don’t intend to leave. We will not back down.
To endorse, email or call:
Peace of the Action (POTA)
unitedrevs@gmail.com or gregory@gregoryvickrey.com
202.487.1201 (name, number, organization, email)
Cindy Sheehan
Cindy@CindySheehansSoapbox.com
Bay Area Code Pink
info@bayareacodepink.org
510.540.7007 (name, number, organization, email)
Posted by Cindy Sheehan at 3:37 PM
Remembering Vittorio Arrigoni - by Stephen Lendman-From The SteveLendmanBlog
Monday, April 18, 2011
Remembering Vittorio Arrigoni
Remembering Vittorio Arrigoni - by Stephen Lendman
On April 15, International Solidarity Movement (ISM) members grieved for one of their own, their press release headlining, "Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank unite in mourning of slain activist Vittorio Arrigoni," saying:
"People will gather in Al Manara square in Ramallah and at Al Jundi al Majhull, (Gaza's) unknown soldier park," honoring the death of their comrade, slain and abandoned in a house north of Gaza. More on his death below.
Other events took place throughout Palestine, including protests following Friday's prayers across from the UN's Gaza headquarters. Bil'in and Al Masara also dedicated their weekly demonstrations to Vittorio, Vic to his friends.
On Saturday, the Popular Committee in Nablus held a commemoration with political parties in Nablus center, celebrating his work and condemning his killing.
ISM explained his activism for Palestinian liberation and justice for almost 10 years, including the past two and a half years in Gaza with ISM:
-- monitoring Israeli human rights violations;
-- supporting Palestinian resistance against occupation, and siege; and
-- daily violations of international law and democratic values.
Moreover, as a journalist, he wrote for the Italian newspaper IL Manifesto and Peacereporter, providing information about Gaza to a worldwide audience. The next Freedom Flotilla was renamed "Stay Human," honoring him and his book titled, "Gaza Stay Human."
Weeks earlier, he wrote comments like:
"The mighty flow of blood and hope from Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Algeria and Libya also washed over young Palestinian minds in Gaza. What started as a stream has become a torrent and will soon spill its banks....Palestinians are working hard to mobilize thousands of people (on March 15) to the squares of Ramallah and Gaza on the day (now) named "The Day of Reconciliation" rather than "The Day of Anger."
He also participated in the Free Gaza Movement's August 2008 siege-breaking flotilla. Established that month, it visited Gaza nine times by sea "to break Israel's illegal stranglehold on 1.5 million Palestinian civilians," suffocating under siege.
However, it never was clear sailing. In 2008, Free Gaza succeeded five times, but were "violently intercepted on the(ir) past four voyages," including the lethal May 31 massacre, killing nine or more activists and injuring many more. One of several earlier articles explained, accessed through the following link:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/05/brave-israeli-commandos-slaughter-aid.html
Free Gaza and its coalition partners are the only organizations "sen(ding) boats directly to Gaza in defiance of Israel's criminal" blockade. They "sail as an expression of citizen nonviolent, direct action, confronting" Israeli lawlessness, together with:
-- the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza;
-- IHH - the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights;
-- Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief;
-- the International Committee to End the Siege on Gaza;
-- Ship to Gaza Sweden; and
-- Ship to Gaza Greece.
Ahead, missions from growing numbers of countries plan to deliver vitally needed aid, sending a message that Israeli lawlessness won't stand.
During Cast Lead, Arrigoni helped medics and reported on IDF attacks to a worldwide audience. As a result, Israeli forces arrested him many times for his writing, activism, and support for Palestinian liberation and justice. His last arrest and deportation came after he reported on Israel's lawless confiscation of Gazan fishing vessels in Palestinian waters, one of many other times they've done it.
On April 15, a Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) press release headlined, "With Great Shock and Sorrow, PCHR Condemns the Murder of Italian Activist, Vittorio Arrigoni," saying:
That day his "body was found in an abandoned house in the north of the Gaza Strip, following his murder at the hands of kidnappers."
According to its own investigation, extremists called "Group of the Companion Mohammed Bin Maslamah" announced his kidnapping on April 14, demanding the release of its detained members affiliated with the so-called "Salafist Jihadist Group." If authorities didn't release them within 30 hours, they threatened to kill him, a threat fulfilled as broadcast on You Tube.
His face showed clear signs of beating, as well as handcuffs and strangulation marks on his neck. A Gaza Ministry of Interior press release condemned the crime, announcing the arrest of two of the group's members, as well as efforts to find the others.
On April 15, London Guardian writer Conal Urquhart headlined, "Palestinians rally to mourn kidnapped Italian activist murdered by extremists," saying:
He was abducted to force authorities to release Sheikh Abu Walid-al-Maqdas. The New York Times named Hisham Saidani as their imprisoned Tawhid and Jihad (TJ) leader, saying "details of the crime remain muddled," especially with TJ denying responsibility.
Luigi Ripamonti, deputy mayor of his hometown of Bulciago, told Italy's Sky 24 Television:
"Today we los(t) an Italian citizen, a citizen of Bulciago, and also a Palestinian citizen, because he married a Palestinian."
Egidia Beretta, Bulciago's mayor and Arrigoni's mother said he first arrived in The Territories in 2002, where "(h)e was taken with Palestine and Palestine took to him."
At first Hamas was reluctant to accuse anyone of the crime, suggesting possible Israeli involvement, spokesman Mahmoud Zahar saying:
"We cannot deny the relation between this incident and an international campaign by the Zionist enemy to restrict the arrival of pro-Palestinian activists. This crime is not in line with our norms as Muslims and Palestinians."
He added that "(s)uch an awful crime cannot take place without arrangements between all the parties concerned to keep the blockade imposed."
In Rome, the Italian Foreign Ministry said the killing was a "barbaric murder and vile and irrational gesture of violence on the part of extremists indifferent to the value of a human life."
Haaretz said a group calling itself Monotheism and Holy War released a video showing Arrigoni blindfolded with cuts on his face. It demanded authorities free its leaders and two others or they'd kill him. Despite the video, the group denied responsibility, raising suspicions of its origin.
The Guardian said a fellow US activist, Nathan Stuckey, said he spent most of his time as a journalist, but was involved in promoting the rights of Gaza fishermen to work freely in their own waters, adding:
"At the moment, he was particularly focused on the launch of our new boat, which we will use to monitor (Israel's navy) violation of the rights of the fishermen. He often said that he now felt more at home in Gaza than in Italy and he was strongly committed to the Palestinian cause."
Arrigoni's death comes days after a gunman killed Juliano Mer-Khamis, an Israeli actor who ran a Jenin refugee camp theater. He also supported Palestinian liberation and justice. His mother, Arna Mer, was a Jewish activist for Palestinian rights. His father, Saliba Khamis, was born and raised in Nazareth.
In 2006, he opened the Jenin Freedom Theater with Zakariya Zubeidi, former local Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades military leader. He was threatened numerous times, and his theater was torched twice previously. Jenin's Governor Qadura Moussa called him a great Palestinian supporter.
Haaretz's senior editor and theater critic called him a "great actor and extraordinary human being whose life-story is part of the tragic reality of this country," who in death, became "another tragic victim of life in the Middle East."
Shot dead on April 4, he's remembered as one of the best along with Arrigoni and Rachael Corrie, a 23-year old American peace activist, murdered in Gaza on March 16, 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer operator when she tried to stop it from demolishing a Rafah refugee camp home.
According to witnesses, she climbed up on it, spoke to the driver, climbed down, knelt 10 - 20 meters in front in clear view, blocking its path with her body. With activists there screaming for it to stop, the soldier-operator crushed her to death deliberately by running her over twice to be sure.
For many years, Israel killed numerous other peace activists, including Tom Hurndall, a 21-year old photojournalist shot in the head by an Israeli sniper in April 2003, trying to rescue Palestinian children under fire. He clung to life in a vegetative state until succumbing on January 13, 2004, another victim of Israeli barbarity and contempt for human life, a testimony to an out-of-control rogue state.
Like Arrigoni, Corrie and Hurndell were also ISM members, heroic peace activists for Palestinian liberation and justice.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
posted by Steve Lendman @ 1:12 AM
Remembering Vittorio Arrigoni
Remembering Vittorio Arrigoni - by Stephen Lendman
On April 15, International Solidarity Movement (ISM) members grieved for one of their own, their press release headlining, "Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank unite in mourning of slain activist Vittorio Arrigoni," saying:
"People will gather in Al Manara square in Ramallah and at Al Jundi al Majhull, (Gaza's) unknown soldier park," honoring the death of their comrade, slain and abandoned in a house north of Gaza. More on his death below.
Other events took place throughout Palestine, including protests following Friday's prayers across from the UN's Gaza headquarters. Bil'in and Al Masara also dedicated their weekly demonstrations to Vittorio, Vic to his friends.
On Saturday, the Popular Committee in Nablus held a commemoration with political parties in Nablus center, celebrating his work and condemning his killing.
ISM explained his activism for Palestinian liberation and justice for almost 10 years, including the past two and a half years in Gaza with ISM:
-- monitoring Israeli human rights violations;
-- supporting Palestinian resistance against occupation, and siege; and
-- daily violations of international law and democratic values.
Moreover, as a journalist, he wrote for the Italian newspaper IL Manifesto and Peacereporter, providing information about Gaza to a worldwide audience. The next Freedom Flotilla was renamed "Stay Human," honoring him and his book titled, "Gaza Stay Human."
Weeks earlier, he wrote comments like:
"The mighty flow of blood and hope from Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Algeria and Libya also washed over young Palestinian minds in Gaza. What started as a stream has become a torrent and will soon spill its banks....Palestinians are working hard to mobilize thousands of people (on March 15) to the squares of Ramallah and Gaza on the day (now) named "The Day of Reconciliation" rather than "The Day of Anger."
He also participated in the Free Gaza Movement's August 2008 siege-breaking flotilla. Established that month, it visited Gaza nine times by sea "to break Israel's illegal stranglehold on 1.5 million Palestinian civilians," suffocating under siege.
However, it never was clear sailing. In 2008, Free Gaza succeeded five times, but were "violently intercepted on the(ir) past four voyages," including the lethal May 31 massacre, killing nine or more activists and injuring many more. One of several earlier articles explained, accessed through the following link:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/05/brave-israeli-commandos-slaughter-aid.html
Free Gaza and its coalition partners are the only organizations "sen(ding) boats directly to Gaza in defiance of Israel's criminal" blockade. They "sail as an expression of citizen nonviolent, direct action, confronting" Israeli lawlessness, together with:
-- the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza;
-- IHH - the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights;
-- Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief;
-- the International Committee to End the Siege on Gaza;
-- Ship to Gaza Sweden; and
-- Ship to Gaza Greece.
Ahead, missions from growing numbers of countries plan to deliver vitally needed aid, sending a message that Israeli lawlessness won't stand.
During Cast Lead, Arrigoni helped medics and reported on IDF attacks to a worldwide audience. As a result, Israeli forces arrested him many times for his writing, activism, and support for Palestinian liberation and justice. His last arrest and deportation came after he reported on Israel's lawless confiscation of Gazan fishing vessels in Palestinian waters, one of many other times they've done it.
On April 15, a Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) press release headlined, "With Great Shock and Sorrow, PCHR Condemns the Murder of Italian Activist, Vittorio Arrigoni," saying:
That day his "body was found in an abandoned house in the north of the Gaza Strip, following his murder at the hands of kidnappers."
According to its own investigation, extremists called "Group of the Companion Mohammed Bin Maslamah" announced his kidnapping on April 14, demanding the release of its detained members affiliated with the so-called "Salafist Jihadist Group." If authorities didn't release them within 30 hours, they threatened to kill him, a threat fulfilled as broadcast on You Tube.
His face showed clear signs of beating, as well as handcuffs and strangulation marks on his neck. A Gaza Ministry of Interior press release condemned the crime, announcing the arrest of two of the group's members, as well as efforts to find the others.
On April 15, London Guardian writer Conal Urquhart headlined, "Palestinians rally to mourn kidnapped Italian activist murdered by extremists," saying:
He was abducted to force authorities to release Sheikh Abu Walid-al-Maqdas. The New York Times named Hisham Saidani as their imprisoned Tawhid and Jihad (TJ) leader, saying "details of the crime remain muddled," especially with TJ denying responsibility.
Luigi Ripamonti, deputy mayor of his hometown of Bulciago, told Italy's Sky 24 Television:
"Today we los(t) an Italian citizen, a citizen of Bulciago, and also a Palestinian citizen, because he married a Palestinian."
Egidia Beretta, Bulciago's mayor and Arrigoni's mother said he first arrived in The Territories in 2002, where "(h)e was taken with Palestine and Palestine took to him."
At first Hamas was reluctant to accuse anyone of the crime, suggesting possible Israeli involvement, spokesman Mahmoud Zahar saying:
"We cannot deny the relation between this incident and an international campaign by the Zionist enemy to restrict the arrival of pro-Palestinian activists. This crime is not in line with our norms as Muslims and Palestinians."
He added that "(s)uch an awful crime cannot take place without arrangements between all the parties concerned to keep the blockade imposed."
In Rome, the Italian Foreign Ministry said the killing was a "barbaric murder and vile and irrational gesture of violence on the part of extremists indifferent to the value of a human life."
Haaretz said a group calling itself Monotheism and Holy War released a video showing Arrigoni blindfolded with cuts on his face. It demanded authorities free its leaders and two others or they'd kill him. Despite the video, the group denied responsibility, raising suspicions of its origin.
The Guardian said a fellow US activist, Nathan Stuckey, said he spent most of his time as a journalist, but was involved in promoting the rights of Gaza fishermen to work freely in their own waters, adding:
"At the moment, he was particularly focused on the launch of our new boat, which we will use to monitor (Israel's navy) violation of the rights of the fishermen. He often said that he now felt more at home in Gaza than in Italy and he was strongly committed to the Palestinian cause."
Arrigoni's death comes days after a gunman killed Juliano Mer-Khamis, an Israeli actor who ran a Jenin refugee camp theater. He also supported Palestinian liberation and justice. His mother, Arna Mer, was a Jewish activist for Palestinian rights. His father, Saliba Khamis, was born and raised in Nazareth.
In 2006, he opened the Jenin Freedom Theater with Zakariya Zubeidi, former local Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades military leader. He was threatened numerous times, and his theater was torched twice previously. Jenin's Governor Qadura Moussa called him a great Palestinian supporter.
Haaretz's senior editor and theater critic called him a "great actor and extraordinary human being whose life-story is part of the tragic reality of this country," who in death, became "another tragic victim of life in the Middle East."
Shot dead on April 4, he's remembered as one of the best along with Arrigoni and Rachael Corrie, a 23-year old American peace activist, murdered in Gaza on March 16, 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer operator when she tried to stop it from demolishing a Rafah refugee camp home.
According to witnesses, she climbed up on it, spoke to the driver, climbed down, knelt 10 - 20 meters in front in clear view, blocking its path with her body. With activists there screaming for it to stop, the soldier-operator crushed her to death deliberately by running her over twice to be sure.
For many years, Israel killed numerous other peace activists, including Tom Hurndall, a 21-year old photojournalist shot in the head by an Israeli sniper in April 2003, trying to rescue Palestinian children under fire. He clung to life in a vegetative state until succumbing on January 13, 2004, another victim of Israeli barbarity and contempt for human life, a testimony to an out-of-control rogue state.
Like Arrigoni, Corrie and Hurndell were also ISM members, heroic peace activists for Palestinian liberation and justice.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
posted by Steve Lendman @ 1:12 AM
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 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.
Monday, April 18, 2011
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).
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).
Sunday, April 17, 2011
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.
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.
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