Monday, June 27, 2011
Breaching Gaza's Siege Update
Breaching Gaza's Siege Update - by Stephen Lendman
Israel keeps exerting pressure to block humanitarian efforts to deliver vital to life and other essential aid to besieged Gazans.
Endorsing Israeli lawlessness, the State Department issued a June 22 "Travel Warning - Israel, the West Bank and Gaza," saying in part:
"The Department of State warns US citizens of the risks of traveling to Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, and about threats to themselves and to US interests in those locations," adding "avoid all travel to the Gaza Strip."
Access the full statement through the following link:
http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_5511.html
On June 23, Secretary of State Clinton added:
"We do not believe that the flotilla is a necessary or useful effort to try to assist the people of Gaza. And we think that it's not helpful for there to be flotillas that try to provoke actions by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves."
Defend against whom she didn't explain or that Gazan waters belong to Palestine, not Israel. Moreover, delivering humanitarian aid is essential until Gaza's blockade is ended, a crime against humanity Washington funds and supports.
This week, "Freedom Flotilla II - Stay Human" sails to Gaza. Neither Israel nor Clinton will stop it, but they're trying by blocking its departure or planned interdiction surprises if it comes.
The US Boat to Gaza (The Audacity of Hope) is one of 10 participating ships, now blocked by Greek officials, saying the vessel is unseaworthy, a spurious claim with no validity.
A June 26 US Boat to Gaza press release asked "Greek government officials to clarify whether (their leased boat) is being blocked....because of an anonymous request of a private citizen....or whether (Greece) made a political decision....in response to US and Israeli" pressure.
Specifically they want to know if bailout help is contingent on succumbing to blackmail, besides Greece already surrendering its sovereignty to foreign bankers.
A previous article explained, accessed through the following link:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/06/banker-occupation-of-greece.html
On June 27, a US Boat to Gaza press release responded to reports that an Israeli "Lawfare" group (Shurat HaDin) complaint is delaying the boat's departure.
Israel, Washington, AIPAC, and the Shurat HaDin Law Center (SH) are directly involved. In fact, SH's web site claims it's "bankrupting terrorism one lawsuit at a time," adding on June 19:
"I am happy to report that we have achieved some important victories in the struggle to block the anti-Israel Flotilla from 'smuggling contraband' to the Hamas controlled Gaza Strip."
Specifically, it referred to a French insurance company succumbing to intimidation not to cover a French boat from Marseilles, and the Turkish ship pressured by Ankara to cancel its participation.
On June 15, SH announced a Manhattan federal court lawsuit to "confiscate 14 ships outfitted with funds unlawfully raised in the United States by anti-Israeli groups, including the Free Gaza Movement."
SH, the Obama administration, AIPAC and other Israeli Lobby members clearly support state terrorism in violation of international, US and Israeli law. Nonetheless, America's "Audacity of Hope" is confident it will sail, saying:
SH is notorious for filing "frivolous legal complaints against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. We reiterate that the boat we are leasing....was surveyed by a professional surveyor and successfully completed its sea trials."
At noon Athens time June 27, a press conference will announce its readiness to sail, but expect continued pressure to stop it - criminal co-conspirators determined to lawlessly suffocate besieged Gazans.
On June 27, a Haaretz editorial headlined, "Let the flotilla go," saying:
Israel equates "flotilla" with terrorism or "a declaration of war," no matter that cargo includes food, medicines, educational materials and other humanitarian aid raised by private donations.
Nonetheless, Israel "seems to be as frightened of the flotilla as one would think it would be of an attack by an armed naval fleet." As a result, it's "preparing to fight an enemy" comprised of unarmed, nonviolent men and women who care enough to risk their safety to deliver vital aid and symbolically oppose Israeli lawlessness.
Thirteen months after the Mavi Marmara massacre, "Israel is showing that it has learned just one lesson: the military lesson....The country is not willing to give up a display of power, thereby no doubt contributing to inflating the flotilla's importance" and Israel as a rogue terror state. "From Israel, we can at least demand that it let the flotilla get through....without once again endangering the country's position in the world."
On June 27, Israel National News said former US Ecuador ambassador Samuel Hart (a 27-year Foreign Service veteran) will participate in the Flotilla mission.
In a 1992 Foreign Affairs Oral History Project for the Association for Diplomatic Studies interview, Hart said:
"I've always felt that Israel has been a little bit of a burr in the saddle in our foreign policy. Here is a small country with no particular interest to us in any real strategic terms, yet it sort of jerks us around because it has not only a very vocal Jewish population, but also supporters of Israel from non-Jewish groups."
He also once wrote an essay calling Israel "an exhausting place to live (because) the tension, anxiety and intensity wear you out."
Now aged 77, he told a Jacksonville, FL newspaper he joined the Flotilla because he "missed" participating in the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement to end segregation. "I see great similarities between this and the civil rights movement," he said. "I am pleased to be part of it."
He also asked, "What did the residents of Gaza do to deserve such punishment? The honest answer is they" elected Hamas in 2006 democratically and now suffer lawlessly.
On June 26, New York Times writer Ethan Bronner headlined, "Avoid Gaza Flotilla, Israel Warns Foreign Journalists," saying:
"Israel threatened Sunday to bar for up to a decade any foreign journalist who boards a flotilla seeking to challenge an Israeli naval blockade of Gaza."
Moreover, Israel's Government Press Office director Oren Helman said their equipment will be impounded and they'll be subjected to "additional sanctions." He sent a warning letter to registered foreign correspondents, stopping short of saying they'll be arrested and jailed.
Perhaps all Flotilla participants will be mistreated, imprisoned, their personal possessions confiscated, then summarily deported the way Flotilla I activists were treated after being attacked, beaten and otherwise abused, besides nine on board massacred in cold blood.
On June 26, Israel's Foreign Press Association responded, saying:
Journalists "covering a legitimate news event should be allowed to do their jobs without threat and intimidation. (Helman's letter) sends a chilling message to the international media and raises serious questions about Israel's commitment to freedom of the press."
Bronner said an unnamed New York Times journalist would participate, joining other international correspondents.
Further updates will follow, highlighting courageous activism against lawless Israeli brutality, complicit with its Washington paymaster/partner.
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 @ 5:26 AM
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Boston Protest Of U.S./NATO Attacks On Libya- Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack!
Click on the headline to link to a UJP post on a demonstration in Boston at Senator John Kerry's office protesting the U.S./NATO attacks on Libya. Defend Libya against imperialist attacks! Even if we have have to hold ours noses to do so! The Libyan masses will have to settle with "the colonel" on their own terms.
The Business of America is War - by Stephen Lendman
The Business of America Is War
The Business of America is War - by Stephen Lendman
Noted trends analyst Gerald Celente said it, and it's true. In fact, America's business is war, more war, multiple wars, permanent wars, pillaging one nation after another for wealth, power, and dominance, while homeland needs go begging.
America never was and isn't now the "land of the free and home of the brave." In fact, it's become a "Let 'em eat cake" society.
Whether or not Marie Antoinette actually said it, France's 1789-99 revolution was very real, delivering guillotine justice, not promised "Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite," a status now destroying what's left of American freedom, heading for the trash bin of history if not already there.
Earlier articles discussed Washington's wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Yemen, as well as numerous proxy ones in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and at home against Muslims, Latino immigrants, and working households.
Combined, they represent a shocking contempt for rule of law justice, democratic values and humanity, notions now mere artifacts long ago abandoned to advance America's imperium.
As previous articles explained, out-of-control imperialism is heading America for tyranny and ruin. In her 1951 book, "The Origins of Totalitarianism," Hannah Arendt said it's "never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within."
She called it dictatorship based on:
"(1) an elaborate ideology;
(2) a single mass party;
(3) terror;
(4) a technologically conditioned monopoly of communication;
(5) a monopoly of weapons; (and)
(6) a centrally controlled economy."
Duplicitously called a democracy, today's America nearly qualifies:
(1) Its ideology is concentrated wealth and power.
(2) It's governed by a two-party duopoly - the money or property party, excluding alternative choices.
(3) It's the world's leading purveyor of state terrorism, waging global wars against nations, groups or individuals, including targeted assassinations of its own citizens.
(4) Major media managed news gives it dominant (not monopoly) communication control, but efforts to subvert Internet discourse and debate may undermine its free and open content.
(5) Corporate-run society makes it centrally controlled for bottom line priorities, excluding other choices.
In her book, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil," Arendt said crimes of state aren't committed by fanatics or sociopaths, just "terrifyingly normal" (people)....neither perverted or sadistic....who accepted the premises of their superiors and their state" to continue current and/or longstanding policies.
In his book, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," Ward Churchill agreed, explaining what he called the "technocrats of empire," functioning as "little Eichmanns," banally serving imperial interests, no matter how lawless or evil. They could say "no," of course, but go along to get along, including at the highest levels. For them, it's to share spoils, no matter the harm or human misery globally.
Churchill's many books and writings discussed 500 genocidal years against America's indigenous peoples, as well as its global imperial apparatus. Touching the right nerves persuasively, the University of Colorado disgracefully fired him in summer 2007, a pattern repeated elsewhere against other activist professors, notably targeting Israeli critics like Norman Finkelstein, Joel Kovel, Denis Rancourt, and Sami Al-Arian among others.
Al-Arian was also lawlessly arrested, tried, acquitted, imprisoned, brutalized, then freed, but remains under house arrest awaiting dismissal of spurious charges against him.
Imperial America's War Machine
The empire never sleeps or tolerates anti-war activism, threatening its quest for unchallengeable "full spectrum dominance" over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively.
September 11, 2001 served as pretext to consolidate power, destroy civil liberties and human rights, and wage permanent wars against invented enemies for global dominance over world markets, resources, and cheap labor - notably at home and throughout
Eurasia, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Asia at the expense of democratic freedoms and social justice.
In its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the Pentagon called it the "long war." Dick Cheney said wars won't end in our lifetime, and former CIA Director James Woolsey said America "is engaged in World War IV, and it could continue for years....This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us."
In his 1990 address to a joint session of Congress, GHW Bush called it a "New World Order," preparing the public for Operation Desert Storm and years of war and occupation of Iraq, perhaps knowing Serbia/Kosovo, Afghanistan, and other targeted states would follow.
Obama is America's latest warrior president, succeeding numerous past ones, including Washington, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, F. Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush preceding him.
Today's stakes, however are far greater and riskier because of Pentagon grand plans, including militarizing space as a platform for future wars. A previous article explained, accessed through the following link:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/09/americas-grand-strategy-militarizing.html
It discussed plans to position nuclear, other state-of-the-art weapons, and delivery systems to wage multiple wars from space anywhere on short notice. Under Obama, the policy remains in place. His May 2010 National Security Strategy:
"reserve(s) the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend our nation and our interests." In other words, to wage preemptive wars, using first-strike nuclear and other destructive weapons "to keep the American people safe (and advance the nation's) values and ideals," pursuing unchallengeable global/space dominance, ruling by intimidation and war, making the world safe for capital.
During the Cold War, MAD (mutually assured destruction) held both sides at bay. Today's strategy includes "more flexible options (for) a wider range of contingencies (with weapons) to optimize performance." It means destroy an adversary's capabilities preemptively, then target others to eliminate all challenges to US dominance.
With America on a nuclear hair-trigger, it reinvented MAD in new form, threatening potential global nuclear winter, defined as "a long period of darkness and extreme cold that scientists predict would follow a full-scale nuclear war, a layer of dust and smoke in the atmosphere cover(ing) the earth and block(ing) the rays of the sun, (causing) most living organisms (to) perish."
Anti-nuclear expert Helen Caldicott says "one single failure of nuclear deterrence could end human history (quickly). Once initiated, it would take one hour to trigger a swift, sudden end to life on this planet." Only nuclear disarmament and abolition of nuclear weapons can stop it, what's never discussed or considered.
On January 17, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower coined the phrase "military industrial complex" in his farewell address, saying:
"....we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
As he prepared to leave office, he could hardly imagine the difference 50 years would make, transforming fortress America into a colossus, waging permanent global wars, spending unconscionable amounts on militarism and threatening planetary survival in the process.
On April 17, 2010, Independent Institute analyst Robert Higgs said annual "defense-related spending greatly exceeds the amounts budgeted by the Department of Defense," presenting FY 2009 data, the most recent figures available.
The official $636.5 billion spent way understated a growing annual total even Higgs can't fully identify, given enormous black budgets and hidden add-ons, likely totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. What's known for FY 2009, however, in billions of dollars includes the following:
-- Department of Defense: $636.5
-- Department of Energy (nuclear weapons and environmental cleanup): $16.7
-- Department of State: $36.3
-- Department of Veterans Affairs: $95.5
-- Department of Homeland Security: $51.7
-- Department of the Treasury (for Military Retirement Fund): $54.9
-- Half of NASA's budget: $9.6
-- Net interest attributable to past-debt-financed defense outlays: $126.3
Total: $1,027.5 trillion
Moreover, the National Priorities Project's analysis of FY 2010 discretionary spending showed 62% spent for military-related purposes, including 4% for veterans' benefits.
For FY 2012, the House approved $690.1 billion, an 8.4% increase (though below the $725 FY 2011 budget, a temporary drop, likely compensated for with add-ons). The Senate will approve a similar amount. If the entire $1,027.5 trillion increases by the same amount, it raises known FY 2012 defense-related spending to $1,113.8 trillion.
In fact, with supplemental and hidden add-ons, as well as Pentagon, intelligence, and other unknown amounts, the grand total likely exceeds $1.5 trillion, a figure rising most years while popular needs go begging.
Higgs also cites the unreliability of official numbers. He believes it's more accurate to take the Pentagon's basic budget and double it because as much as 40% of it is black or hidden. Moreover, as Pentagon power grows, more spending accrues to congressional districts. As a result, Congress willingly goes along as jobs are allegedly created. In addition, generous campaign contributions follow - bribes to keep funding the war machine.
Congressional Affirmation of Permanent War
The current House bill, HR 1540 includes a worrisome/duplicitous Sec. 1034: Affirmation of Armed Conflict with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Associated Forces, affirming:
"(1) the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces and that those entities continue to pose a threat to the United States and its citizens, both domestically and abroad;
(2) the President has the authority to use all necessary and appropriate force during the current armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40);
(3) the current armed conflict includes nations, organization(s), and persons, who --
(A) are part of, or are substantially supporting al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or
(B) have engaged in hostilities or have engaged in hostilities or have directly supported hostilities in aid of a nation, organization, or person described in subparagraph (A); and
(4) the President's authority pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force....includes the authority to detain belligerents, including persons described in paragraph (3), until the termination of hostilities."
In September 2001, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) for "the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States." Still in force today, it began the "war on terror," giving George Bush carte blanche authority to wage global wars in violation of international and constitutional laws. A 2002 AUMF against Iraq followed.
The House (and likely the Senate) FY 2012 Defense Authorization bill affirms that authority, letting Obama as commander and chief, wage wars anywhere at his discretion. He's taking full advantage, duplicitous congressional posturing notwithstanding.
On June 24, in fact, House Republicans and 70 Democrats rejected support for Obama's Libya war, but defeated a measure to defund it. In other words, they authorized war at the same time symbolically rejecting it, exposing their gross hypocrisy.
America's Permanent War Agenda
In inflation adjusted dollars, annual defense spending more than doubled under George Bush and keeps rising under Obama despite growing budget cutting pressures, given a much greater national debt burden than reported.
Officially it's nearly $14.3 trillion (headed for an estimated $15.5 trillion by September 30), exceeding 100% of GDP at that time. Omitted, however, is another $7.6 trillion owed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other government agencies, besides future trillion dollar or more amounts added annually.
It hardly matters, given the military/industrial complex's power to demand what it wants and get it. Today, in fact, it comprises:
-- defense, technology, energy, financial, private military contractor (PMCs), and other corporate interests;
-- Congress;
-- America's media;
-- prominent think tanks and other pressure groups;
-- various others benefitting from militarism; and
-- the Pentagon colossus, a frightening power unto itself, threatening humanity's survival.
The Defense Department's FY 2010 Base Structure Report shows how large it's become, even with important information omitted:
DOD is the world's largest landlord with over 539,000 facilities (buildings, structures, and linear structures) located on nearly 5,000 sites, covering more than 28 million acres and over two billion square feet of space in America, its territories and overseas. In fact, these numbers way understate much higher totals as many Pentagon facilities are secret and/or unreported.
They include over 1,000 overseas bases in 150 or more countries, as well as additional secret ones shared with or leased from host countries. As of April 2009, Congressional Research Service data includes 1,402,000 total active duty US military personnel worldwide, 73,000 National Guard, and 208,000 Selected Reserves, for a 1,683,000 total.
Add to them America's private military contractor (PMC) army, corporate mercenaries profiting from US imperialism. They perform a wide range of functions from combat to consulting to logistics, virtually anything once done by the Pentagon. Moreover, America's intelligence agencies, State Department, Homeland Security, and other branches also use PMCs.
Overall, they're unregulated, unaccountable, and often out-of-control, involved in some of the most controversial aspects of war from over-billing to ritual slaughter of unarmed civilians. Yet they're not prosecuted, convicted or imprisoned, just rewarded with fat contracts costing far more for services military personnel once performed. Moreover, the more they're used, the greater they influence war making, sustaining their bottom line priorities at the expense of a free society and vital homeland needs.
America's New Military Industrial Complex
On March 1, 2003 Business 2.0 magazine writers Ian Mount, Matthew Maier and David Freedman headlined, "The New Military Industrial Complex" for digital age war, describing the Pentagon's "revolution in military affairs (RMA)," comprised of "faster, lighter, smarter" cutting-edge technology warfare. Readying for it, they're building an unchallengeable high-tech arsenal, more advanced now than then.
The old one remains and gets huge contracts for new and more traditional weapons. The result is an influential "iron triangle" of Congress, the Pentagon and defense industry. Besides major media support, conservative think tanks also like:
-- the Project for a New American Century (PNAC); its "Rebuilding America's Defenses" scheme promotes US global hegemony;
-- the Center for Security Policy (CSP) headed by super-hawk Frank Gaffney endorses a policy of "Peace through Strength" and perpetual wars for perpetual peace;
-- the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) composed of hard right leaders and members, "fighting terrorism and the ideologies that drive it;"
-- the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP), focusing on defense issues, tied to the nuclear weapons industry; and
-- the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), emphasizing national security and "advancing (US) global interests;" specializing in crisis management, it's connected to the highest levels in government and the Pentagon.
The nation's 16 intelligence agencies, including CIA, NSA, DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), FBI, Army, Navy and Air Force Intelligence, DHS (Department of Homeland Security), and Department of State comprise another component destroying a free society. They comprise a multi-billion dollar funded, largely off-the-books, clandestine anti-democratic network. Interconnected with thousands of private contractors, they're tied to world governments and their intelligence services.
Moreover, they comprise a government/military/industrial/intelligence service/media/think tank colossus, waging global wars, bankrupting the nation, wrecking the remnants of a free society. Plagued by the same dynamic that doomed past empires unwilling to change, they also pursue the misguided notion that militarism sustains growth.
In fact, it erodes it by sacrificing industrial America, shifting production and other high-paying service operations abroad to focus on war making. As a result, essential homeland needs go begging, including healthcare, education, job creation, and the nation's infrastructure, crumbling from years of neglect.
In his farewell address, Eisenhower said:
"Every gun that is made, every war ship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and not clothed."
In his November 2003 Harper's article titled, "The War Business," Chalmers Johnson said:
"(M)unitions and war profiteering have (become) the most efficient means for well-connected capitalists to engorge themselves at the public trough." Even Wall Street profits hugely. "To call these companies 'private,' though, is mere ideology. (Weapons and) munitions making in the United States today (and related industries profiting from them are) not really private enterprise. It is state socialism."
They also destroy constitutional freedoms, what George Washington in 1796 warned about, saying "overgrown military establishments (are) inauspicious to liberty." Johnson called it America's future, now more the present, saying, "When war becomes the most profitable course of action, we can certainly expect more of it," sacrificing a free society for private interests reaping short-term gains.
In his book titled, "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War," Andrew Bacevich discussed America's "trinity," its global military presence, power projection, and intervention, creating a "permanent national security crisis....propell(ing) the United States into a condition approximating perpetual war." However, "(no) evidence exists - none - to suggest that US efforts advance the cause of global peace," just the opposite. As a result, "(o)ver the horizon, a shipwreck of epic proportions awaits."
It's coming perhaps when least expected. Nations that live by the sword, die by it. America is no exception, nor any other.
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/.
The Business of America is War - by Stephen Lendman
Noted trends analyst Gerald Celente said it, and it's true. In fact, America's business is war, more war, multiple wars, permanent wars, pillaging one nation after another for wealth, power, and dominance, while homeland needs go begging.
America never was and isn't now the "land of the free and home of the brave." In fact, it's become a "Let 'em eat cake" society.
Whether or not Marie Antoinette actually said it, France's 1789-99 revolution was very real, delivering guillotine justice, not promised "Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite," a status now destroying what's left of American freedom, heading for the trash bin of history if not already there.
Earlier articles discussed Washington's wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Yemen, as well as numerous proxy ones in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and at home against Muslims, Latino immigrants, and working households.
Combined, they represent a shocking contempt for rule of law justice, democratic values and humanity, notions now mere artifacts long ago abandoned to advance America's imperium.
As previous articles explained, out-of-control imperialism is heading America for tyranny and ruin. In her 1951 book, "The Origins of Totalitarianism," Hannah Arendt said it's "never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within."
She called it dictatorship based on:
"(1) an elaborate ideology;
(2) a single mass party;
(3) terror;
(4) a technologically conditioned monopoly of communication;
(5) a monopoly of weapons; (and)
(6) a centrally controlled economy."
Duplicitously called a democracy, today's America nearly qualifies:
(1) Its ideology is concentrated wealth and power.
(2) It's governed by a two-party duopoly - the money or property party, excluding alternative choices.
(3) It's the world's leading purveyor of state terrorism, waging global wars against nations, groups or individuals, including targeted assassinations of its own citizens.
(4) Major media managed news gives it dominant (not monopoly) communication control, but efforts to subvert Internet discourse and debate may undermine its free and open content.
(5) Corporate-run society makes it centrally controlled for bottom line priorities, excluding other choices.
In her book, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil," Arendt said crimes of state aren't committed by fanatics or sociopaths, just "terrifyingly normal" (people)....neither perverted or sadistic....who accepted the premises of their superiors and their state" to continue current and/or longstanding policies.
In his book, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," Ward Churchill agreed, explaining what he called the "technocrats of empire," functioning as "little Eichmanns," banally serving imperial interests, no matter how lawless or evil. They could say "no," of course, but go along to get along, including at the highest levels. For them, it's to share spoils, no matter the harm or human misery globally.
Churchill's many books and writings discussed 500 genocidal years against America's indigenous peoples, as well as its global imperial apparatus. Touching the right nerves persuasively, the University of Colorado disgracefully fired him in summer 2007, a pattern repeated elsewhere against other activist professors, notably targeting Israeli critics like Norman Finkelstein, Joel Kovel, Denis Rancourt, and Sami Al-Arian among others.
Al-Arian was also lawlessly arrested, tried, acquitted, imprisoned, brutalized, then freed, but remains under house arrest awaiting dismissal of spurious charges against him.
Imperial America's War Machine
The empire never sleeps or tolerates anti-war activism, threatening its quest for unchallengeable "full spectrum dominance" over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively.
September 11, 2001 served as pretext to consolidate power, destroy civil liberties and human rights, and wage permanent wars against invented enemies for global dominance over world markets, resources, and cheap labor - notably at home and throughout
Eurasia, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Asia at the expense of democratic freedoms and social justice.
In its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the Pentagon called it the "long war." Dick Cheney said wars won't end in our lifetime, and former CIA Director James Woolsey said America "is engaged in World War IV, and it could continue for years....This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us."
In his 1990 address to a joint session of Congress, GHW Bush called it a "New World Order," preparing the public for Operation Desert Storm and years of war and occupation of Iraq, perhaps knowing Serbia/Kosovo, Afghanistan, and other targeted states would follow.
Obama is America's latest warrior president, succeeding numerous past ones, including Washington, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, F. Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush preceding him.
Today's stakes, however are far greater and riskier because of Pentagon grand plans, including militarizing space as a platform for future wars. A previous article explained, accessed through the following link:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/09/americas-grand-strategy-militarizing.html
It discussed plans to position nuclear, other state-of-the-art weapons, and delivery systems to wage multiple wars from space anywhere on short notice. Under Obama, the policy remains in place. His May 2010 National Security Strategy:
"reserve(s) the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend our nation and our interests." In other words, to wage preemptive wars, using first-strike nuclear and other destructive weapons "to keep the American people safe (and advance the nation's) values and ideals," pursuing unchallengeable global/space dominance, ruling by intimidation and war, making the world safe for capital.
During the Cold War, MAD (mutually assured destruction) held both sides at bay. Today's strategy includes "more flexible options (for) a wider range of contingencies (with weapons) to optimize performance." It means destroy an adversary's capabilities preemptively, then target others to eliminate all challenges to US dominance.
With America on a nuclear hair-trigger, it reinvented MAD in new form, threatening potential global nuclear winter, defined as "a long period of darkness and extreme cold that scientists predict would follow a full-scale nuclear war, a layer of dust and smoke in the atmosphere cover(ing) the earth and block(ing) the rays of the sun, (causing) most living organisms (to) perish."
Anti-nuclear expert Helen Caldicott says "one single failure of nuclear deterrence could end human history (quickly). Once initiated, it would take one hour to trigger a swift, sudden end to life on this planet." Only nuclear disarmament and abolition of nuclear weapons can stop it, what's never discussed or considered.
On January 17, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower coined the phrase "military industrial complex" in his farewell address, saying:
"....we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
As he prepared to leave office, he could hardly imagine the difference 50 years would make, transforming fortress America into a colossus, waging permanent global wars, spending unconscionable amounts on militarism and threatening planetary survival in the process.
On April 17, 2010, Independent Institute analyst Robert Higgs said annual "defense-related spending greatly exceeds the amounts budgeted by the Department of Defense," presenting FY 2009 data, the most recent figures available.
The official $636.5 billion spent way understated a growing annual total even Higgs can't fully identify, given enormous black budgets and hidden add-ons, likely totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. What's known for FY 2009, however, in billions of dollars includes the following:
-- Department of Defense: $636.5
-- Department of Energy (nuclear weapons and environmental cleanup): $16.7
-- Department of State: $36.3
-- Department of Veterans Affairs: $95.5
-- Department of Homeland Security: $51.7
-- Department of the Treasury (for Military Retirement Fund): $54.9
-- Half of NASA's budget: $9.6
-- Net interest attributable to past-debt-financed defense outlays: $126.3
Total: $1,027.5 trillion
Moreover, the National Priorities Project's analysis of FY 2010 discretionary spending showed 62% spent for military-related purposes, including 4% for veterans' benefits.
For FY 2012, the House approved $690.1 billion, an 8.4% increase (though below the $725 FY 2011 budget, a temporary drop, likely compensated for with add-ons). The Senate will approve a similar amount. If the entire $1,027.5 trillion increases by the same amount, it raises known FY 2012 defense-related spending to $1,113.8 trillion.
In fact, with supplemental and hidden add-ons, as well as Pentagon, intelligence, and other unknown amounts, the grand total likely exceeds $1.5 trillion, a figure rising most years while popular needs go begging.
Higgs also cites the unreliability of official numbers. He believes it's more accurate to take the Pentagon's basic budget and double it because as much as 40% of it is black or hidden. Moreover, as Pentagon power grows, more spending accrues to congressional districts. As a result, Congress willingly goes along as jobs are allegedly created. In addition, generous campaign contributions follow - bribes to keep funding the war machine.
Congressional Affirmation of Permanent War
The current House bill, HR 1540 includes a worrisome/duplicitous Sec. 1034: Affirmation of Armed Conflict with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Associated Forces, affirming:
"(1) the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces and that those entities continue to pose a threat to the United States and its citizens, both domestically and abroad;
(2) the President has the authority to use all necessary and appropriate force during the current armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40);
(3) the current armed conflict includes nations, organization(s), and persons, who --
(A) are part of, or are substantially supporting al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners; or
(B) have engaged in hostilities or have engaged in hostilities or have directly supported hostilities in aid of a nation, organization, or person described in subparagraph (A); and
(4) the President's authority pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force....includes the authority to detain belligerents, including persons described in paragraph (3), until the termination of hostilities."
In September 2001, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) for "the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States." Still in force today, it began the "war on terror," giving George Bush carte blanche authority to wage global wars in violation of international and constitutional laws. A 2002 AUMF against Iraq followed.
The House (and likely the Senate) FY 2012 Defense Authorization bill affirms that authority, letting Obama as commander and chief, wage wars anywhere at his discretion. He's taking full advantage, duplicitous congressional posturing notwithstanding.
On June 24, in fact, House Republicans and 70 Democrats rejected support for Obama's Libya war, but defeated a measure to defund it. In other words, they authorized war at the same time symbolically rejecting it, exposing their gross hypocrisy.
America's Permanent War Agenda
In inflation adjusted dollars, annual defense spending more than doubled under George Bush and keeps rising under Obama despite growing budget cutting pressures, given a much greater national debt burden than reported.
Officially it's nearly $14.3 trillion (headed for an estimated $15.5 trillion by September 30), exceeding 100% of GDP at that time. Omitted, however, is another $7.6 trillion owed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other government agencies, besides future trillion dollar or more amounts added annually.
It hardly matters, given the military/industrial complex's power to demand what it wants and get it. Today, in fact, it comprises:
-- defense, technology, energy, financial, private military contractor (PMCs), and other corporate interests;
-- Congress;
-- America's media;
-- prominent think tanks and other pressure groups;
-- various others benefitting from militarism; and
-- the Pentagon colossus, a frightening power unto itself, threatening humanity's survival.
The Defense Department's FY 2010 Base Structure Report shows how large it's become, even with important information omitted:
DOD is the world's largest landlord with over 539,000 facilities (buildings, structures, and linear structures) located on nearly 5,000 sites, covering more than 28 million acres and over two billion square feet of space in America, its territories and overseas. In fact, these numbers way understate much higher totals as many Pentagon facilities are secret and/or unreported.
They include over 1,000 overseas bases in 150 or more countries, as well as additional secret ones shared with or leased from host countries. As of April 2009, Congressional Research Service data includes 1,402,000 total active duty US military personnel worldwide, 73,000 National Guard, and 208,000 Selected Reserves, for a 1,683,000 total.
Add to them America's private military contractor (PMC) army, corporate mercenaries profiting from US imperialism. They perform a wide range of functions from combat to consulting to logistics, virtually anything once done by the Pentagon. Moreover, America's intelligence agencies, State Department, Homeland Security, and other branches also use PMCs.
Overall, they're unregulated, unaccountable, and often out-of-control, involved in some of the most controversial aspects of war from over-billing to ritual slaughter of unarmed civilians. Yet they're not prosecuted, convicted or imprisoned, just rewarded with fat contracts costing far more for services military personnel once performed. Moreover, the more they're used, the greater they influence war making, sustaining their bottom line priorities at the expense of a free society and vital homeland needs.
America's New Military Industrial Complex
On March 1, 2003 Business 2.0 magazine writers Ian Mount, Matthew Maier and David Freedman headlined, "The New Military Industrial Complex" for digital age war, describing the Pentagon's "revolution in military affairs (RMA)," comprised of "faster, lighter, smarter" cutting-edge technology warfare. Readying for it, they're building an unchallengeable high-tech arsenal, more advanced now than then.
The old one remains and gets huge contracts for new and more traditional weapons. The result is an influential "iron triangle" of Congress, the Pentagon and defense industry. Besides major media support, conservative think tanks also like:
-- the Project for a New American Century (PNAC); its "Rebuilding America's Defenses" scheme promotes US global hegemony;
-- the Center for Security Policy (CSP) headed by super-hawk Frank Gaffney endorses a policy of "Peace through Strength" and perpetual wars for perpetual peace;
-- the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) composed of hard right leaders and members, "fighting terrorism and the ideologies that drive it;"
-- the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP), focusing on defense issues, tied to the nuclear weapons industry; and
-- the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), emphasizing national security and "advancing (US) global interests;" specializing in crisis management, it's connected to the highest levels in government and the Pentagon.
The nation's 16 intelligence agencies, including CIA, NSA, DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), FBI, Army, Navy and Air Force Intelligence, DHS (Department of Homeland Security), and Department of State comprise another component destroying a free society. They comprise a multi-billion dollar funded, largely off-the-books, clandestine anti-democratic network. Interconnected with thousands of private contractors, they're tied to world governments and their intelligence services.
Moreover, they comprise a government/military/industrial/intelligence service/media/think tank colossus, waging global wars, bankrupting the nation, wrecking the remnants of a free society. Plagued by the same dynamic that doomed past empires unwilling to change, they also pursue the misguided notion that militarism sustains growth.
In fact, it erodes it by sacrificing industrial America, shifting production and other high-paying service operations abroad to focus on war making. As a result, essential homeland needs go begging, including healthcare, education, job creation, and the nation's infrastructure, crumbling from years of neglect.
In his farewell address, Eisenhower said:
"Every gun that is made, every war ship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, from those who are cold and not clothed."
In his November 2003 Harper's article titled, "The War Business," Chalmers Johnson said:
"(M)unitions and war profiteering have (become) the most efficient means for well-connected capitalists to engorge themselves at the public trough." Even Wall Street profits hugely. "To call these companies 'private,' though, is mere ideology. (Weapons and) munitions making in the United States today (and related industries profiting from them are) not really private enterprise. It is state socialism."
They also destroy constitutional freedoms, what George Washington in 1796 warned about, saying "overgrown military establishments (are) inauspicious to liberty." Johnson called it America's future, now more the present, saying, "When war becomes the most profitable course of action, we can certainly expect more of it," sacrificing a free society for private interests reaping short-term gains.
In his book titled, "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War," Andrew Bacevich discussed America's "trinity," its global military presence, power projection, and intervention, creating a "permanent national security crisis....propell(ing) the United States into a condition approximating perpetual war." However, "(no) evidence exists - none - to suggest that US efforts advance the cause of global peace," just the opposite. As a result, "(o)ver the horizon, a shipwreck of epic proportions awaits."
It's coming perhaps when least expected. Nations that live by the sword, die by it. America is no exception, nor any other.
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/.
Strikes can stop Tory pension thieves- From Socialist Worker (UK)On-Line
Strikes can stop Tory pension thieves
by Judith Orr
The Tories are out to rob the poor to pay the rich.
They want to cut the pensions of millions of working class people to fill the hole left after the bank bailouts.
Workers will be left to grow old in poverty while bankers still live the high life on their obscene bonuses.
Workers are told they will have to work longer, pay more and receive less when they do finally retire.
Yet none of the super-rich public schoolboys who dominate the Tory-Lib Dem cabinet will have to worry about their old age.
We won’t let them get away with it. They are facing a huge fightback.
Beacon
This week 750,000 public sector workers have come together in a magnificent show of strength to tell the Tories to back off.
The NUT and ATL teachers’ unions, alongside the civil service PCS union and a section of the UCU lecturers’ union were set to join the national one-day strike this Thursday.
Their strike is a beacon of hope for millions who want to see the Tories beaten.
Thousands of council workers were also set to join the fight on 30 June. And across the country workers, students and activists have organised solidarity with the strikers.
People have seen the wave of struggles across Europe, the general strikes in Greece and the city occupations in Spain.
They are longing for a bit of that struggle here in Britain.
This week is just the beginning.
The unity that has been forged across the working class can be the basis for even greater mass strikes in the autumn.
Our greatest strength is our unity. The Tories are terrified of the prospect of millions of workers taking action together.
They want to divide us and make us blame each other for poverty, low pay and unemployment.
We can’t let them get away with it.
That’s why every trade unionist and activist must go all-out to build on this week’s strikes for the sort of action in the autumn that can stop the Tories’ attacks—and bring this government down.
by Judith Orr
The Tories are out to rob the poor to pay the rich.
They want to cut the pensions of millions of working class people to fill the hole left after the bank bailouts.
Workers will be left to grow old in poverty while bankers still live the high life on their obscene bonuses.
Workers are told they will have to work longer, pay more and receive less when they do finally retire.
Yet none of the super-rich public schoolboys who dominate the Tory-Lib Dem cabinet will have to worry about their old age.
We won’t let them get away with it. They are facing a huge fightback.
Beacon
This week 750,000 public sector workers have come together in a magnificent show of strength to tell the Tories to back off.
The NUT and ATL teachers’ unions, alongside the civil service PCS union and a section of the UCU lecturers’ union were set to join the national one-day strike this Thursday.
Their strike is a beacon of hope for millions who want to see the Tories beaten.
Thousands of council workers were also set to join the fight on 30 June. And across the country workers, students and activists have organised solidarity with the strikers.
People have seen the wave of struggles across Europe, the general strikes in Greece and the city occupations in Spain.
They are longing for a bit of that struggle here in Britain.
This week is just the beginning.
The unity that has been forged across the working class can be the basis for even greater mass strikes in the autumn.
Our greatest strength is our unity. The Tories are terrified of the prospect of millions of workers taking action together.
They want to divide us and make us blame each other for poverty, low pay and unemployment.
We can’t let them get away with it.
That’s why every trade unionist and activist must go all-out to build on this week’s strikes for the sort of action in the autumn that can stop the Tories’ attacks—and bring this government down.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Out In The Be-Bop Doo Wop Night- The Night Red Rock Doo Wopped
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Don & Juan performing their doo wop classic, What's Your Name?
CD Review
25 All-Time Doo Wop Hits, various artists, Varese Sarabonde Records, 2002
Road weary, yes, road weary all right that is what Fritz Taylor said to himself repeatedly as he waited, waited his third hour waited, by this god-forsaken exit just off Interstate 40 heading west out of Albuquerque on the seemingly endless hitchhike road. This trip had more than its fair share of mishaps. Road weary let’s just call it that, and let’s call it also a sudden realization by Fritz that something was not right in the world, the hitchhike world. For example, a couple of years back there was no way in hell, or god’s good green earth, have it your way, that poster hippie hitchhike boy, Fritz Taylor, would be standing for his third hour, christ, his third hour, on a major highway west looking for a ride.
Not Fritz, decked out in obligatory olive drab army jacket (World War II version, bought at some ubiquitous Army-Navy surplus store not earned by military duty, although he did serve it was just that he couldn’t bear to wear anything that reminded him of ‘Nam), slightly faded, faded from too much washing and wear blue jeans, sturdy, reliable, purposeful work boots (although sometimes they felt like lead, heavy atomic lead, when he had to walk to some more practical road in search of a ride), bedroll nicely slung over one shoulder, a small green knapsack over the other carrying, in toto, all his worldly goods. Something was definitely off-kilter in his world in this year, this 1974 year that had started out with so much promise. Now in hard August, hard hitchhike road August, no girl, no home except the road, no real dough, and no prospects, add in no sense of order in his universe and there you have it. A serious recipe for road weariness.
Deep in those bleak house thoughts Fritz almost missed the Volkswagen mini-bus that was slowing down just ahead of him. Or maybe, reflecting on the bleak road idea, he no longer believed, except as apparitions, old time mini-buses, or converted yellow brick multi-colored school buses that trolled the roads in great profusion just a couple of years back still existed. This trip had been dealt out, been pushed forward, mainly, by tired big-load cross-country truckers looking for white-line road company, a son’s company really, and by an occasional curious tourist-type wondering, probably wondering hard, why a good looking, although oddly dressed, young man who looked like he knew what he was doing was out on some no job, no home, no prospects road in Muncie, Indiana, Moline, Illinois, Omaha, Nebraska, Dallas, Texas or a million other just names stops on the road west.
“Hey, brother where are you heading?” came a question for the front passenger seat of the now fully stopped van. And the question, once Fritz came to his road senses, was uttered by a very sweet-looking woman all dressed in Native American regalia. “Los Angeles, and then Big Sur” answered Fritz. “Oh, we are going to the Intertribal gathering just up the road at Red Rock for a few days and then heading to Joshua Tree, does that help you?,” came the sing-song response. Fritz, for just a minute, thought that he would thank them for stopping but that he needed a longer ride and needed to make faster time pass but that sing-song voice, that van apparition, and just that flat-out road weariness made him say “Hell, yes, it’s good to see fellow freaks on the road, it has been a while. What are you guys the lost tribe that they are always talking about in the books?” That brought a chuckle from the occupants of the van as the side door slid open and Fritz threw his gear on to a mattress, maybe two mattresses, that filled the floor of the whole back portion of the van. And on that matting were two kindred guys, and a youngish woman, a girl really. “Hi, I’m Fritz,” he said as he closed the door and the van started up. “Hi, I’m Zeke,” Hi, I’m Benjy,” yelled the two kindred over the roar of the engine. ‘I’m Moonbeam,” whispered the girl, who actually, on closer inspection was older than a girl and also clearly deep in some mystical drug experience, either coming down or going up Fritz could not tell. From the front the sing-song voice called out her name, “I’m Sally Running Water and I am one-sixteenth Hopi,” and the driver yelled out, “Hi, I’m Doc and I know how to cure you,” as he passed back a pipe filled with some herb. “We are the Pink Fogs and we’ve just finished a rock concert in Austin and Sally wanted to go to the Intertribal to see some of her people before we head to Joshua Tree for the big alterno-rock jam that will put us on the rock ‘n’ rock map.” Just them Doc, steady, rock-like Doc, who was the obvious leader of this group, maybe more like a flock shepard turned the tape deck up and the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter came blasting away at us and they all, collectively, started blasting away at it in response-yes, "it’s just a shot away, just a shot away." Fritz, now a little high from that passed pipe, thought yes I finally made a right decision, these are my people, lost tribe or not.
Between this and that it was dark, very dark but also star-bright dark, where they got to Red Rock, found their assigned site and started to set up kitchen stuff for a meal, and prepare the van for sleeping, if sleeping time ever came. Doc, as Docs will do, started a fire from some heavy brush gathered in the area, and Fritz noticed as he hadn’t before in the dark that the campsite was adjacent to a high cavern wall and as the flames of the fire grew stronger he could see shadows, almost human form shadows bouncing off those walls. And in the distance, although he, to be honest was too stoned to know how distant, he could hear the steady, slow, rhythmic pounding of the war drums, or rain drums, or just plain entertaining drums that provided an almost mesmerizing effect. Fritz also noticed that Sally and Doc seemed to be sitting together just now, her head on his shoulder, listening to that same incessant hypnotic sound. And Zeke and Moonbeam were doing the same. Benjy was sitting by himself, off to the side just a little, and maybe a little miffed that he had “lost” the girl wars. And of course Fritz, new boy Fritz, was left to fend for himself. And just that moment he wished, he wished to high heaven, that he had not been girl-less and wished that Cindy was here with him.
Suddenly the air was filled not only with the tattoo of drums but sounds of rattles and some almost bass guitar sound. And that sudden change brought the little Pink Fog campsite to life. Because, for whatever reason, Doc started singing out in a very strong bass the words to that old time doo- wop rock song by the Five Satins, In The Still Of The Night, and his fellow Pink Fogs joined in on the harmony, even Benjy. Hell, even Fritz did a low-slung harmony just to help fill the air. And Doc, or Doc and Sally, or just Sally, Fritz never did quite figure it out after than song was over, started up on The Penquins Earth Angel and that really got Fritz kind of weepy for Cindy, and for his not so long ago lost youth.
But here is the real funny, funny odd, part. Fritz noticed as the flames flickered from the campfire that on the walls he could see human figures, women’s figures, a couple anyway, and when he looked over in the dark he noticed that a couple of young women, twenty-ish women from what he could tell, women who in any case knew, knew as well as he did the words, and, more importantly, the spirit and growing up absurd meaning behind the songs, and were moving closer to the circle. Then, like it was contagious, Zeke started in on the Capris’ There’s A Moon Out Tonight (and there was) and all joined in. Fritz waved the two shadowy women toward the circle and noticed that in the meantime they had been joined by two other youngish, twenty-ish women.
Benjy got into the act having also noticed the bevy of women standing in some ill-defined outer circle and bellowed out Don & Juan’s What’s Your Name and backed it up with Robert & Johnny’s We Belong Together. The other members of the troupe backing him up, backing him up big time. Now they are all in one circle, even Benjy is in tight, and with the drums and other instruments still beating time for them Fritz starts out low-voiced just above a whisper Johnnie & Joe’s Over The Mountain; Across The Sea as one of the women moved over to sit right next to him, almost on his lap. And that night, that ancient flame, ancient sounds starry night, was the night Red Rock did indeed doo-wop.
CD Review
25 All-Time Doo Wop Hits, various artists, Varese Sarabonde Records, 2002
Road weary, yes, road weary all right that is what Fritz Taylor said to himself repeatedly as he waited, waited his third hour waited, by this god-forsaken exit just off Interstate 40 heading west out of Albuquerque on the seemingly endless hitchhike road. This trip had more than its fair share of mishaps. Road weary let’s just call it that, and let’s call it also a sudden realization by Fritz that something was not right in the world, the hitchhike world. For example, a couple of years back there was no way in hell, or god’s good green earth, have it your way, that poster hippie hitchhike boy, Fritz Taylor, would be standing for his third hour, christ, his third hour, on a major highway west looking for a ride.
Not Fritz, decked out in obligatory olive drab army jacket (World War II version, bought at some ubiquitous Army-Navy surplus store not earned by military duty, although he did serve it was just that he couldn’t bear to wear anything that reminded him of ‘Nam), slightly faded, faded from too much washing and wear blue jeans, sturdy, reliable, purposeful work boots (although sometimes they felt like lead, heavy atomic lead, when he had to walk to some more practical road in search of a ride), bedroll nicely slung over one shoulder, a small green knapsack over the other carrying, in toto, all his worldly goods. Something was definitely off-kilter in his world in this year, this 1974 year that had started out with so much promise. Now in hard August, hard hitchhike road August, no girl, no home except the road, no real dough, and no prospects, add in no sense of order in his universe and there you have it. A serious recipe for road weariness.
Deep in those bleak house thoughts Fritz almost missed the Volkswagen mini-bus that was slowing down just ahead of him. Or maybe, reflecting on the bleak road idea, he no longer believed, except as apparitions, old time mini-buses, or converted yellow brick multi-colored school buses that trolled the roads in great profusion just a couple of years back still existed. This trip had been dealt out, been pushed forward, mainly, by tired big-load cross-country truckers looking for white-line road company, a son’s company really, and by an occasional curious tourist-type wondering, probably wondering hard, why a good looking, although oddly dressed, young man who looked like he knew what he was doing was out on some no job, no home, no prospects road in Muncie, Indiana, Moline, Illinois, Omaha, Nebraska, Dallas, Texas or a million other just names stops on the road west.
“Hey, brother where are you heading?” came a question for the front passenger seat of the now fully stopped van. And the question, once Fritz came to his road senses, was uttered by a very sweet-looking woman all dressed in Native American regalia. “Los Angeles, and then Big Sur” answered Fritz. “Oh, we are going to the Intertribal gathering just up the road at Red Rock for a few days and then heading to Joshua Tree, does that help you?,” came the sing-song response. Fritz, for just a minute, thought that he would thank them for stopping but that he needed a longer ride and needed to make faster time pass but that sing-song voice, that van apparition, and just that flat-out road weariness made him say “Hell, yes, it’s good to see fellow freaks on the road, it has been a while. What are you guys the lost tribe that they are always talking about in the books?” That brought a chuckle from the occupants of the van as the side door slid open and Fritz threw his gear on to a mattress, maybe two mattresses, that filled the floor of the whole back portion of the van. And on that matting were two kindred guys, and a youngish woman, a girl really. “Hi, I’m Fritz,” he said as he closed the door and the van started up. “Hi, I’m Zeke,” Hi, I’m Benjy,” yelled the two kindred over the roar of the engine. ‘I’m Moonbeam,” whispered the girl, who actually, on closer inspection was older than a girl and also clearly deep in some mystical drug experience, either coming down or going up Fritz could not tell. From the front the sing-song voice called out her name, “I’m Sally Running Water and I am one-sixteenth Hopi,” and the driver yelled out, “Hi, I’m Doc and I know how to cure you,” as he passed back a pipe filled with some herb. “We are the Pink Fogs and we’ve just finished a rock concert in Austin and Sally wanted to go to the Intertribal to see some of her people before we head to Joshua Tree for the big alterno-rock jam that will put us on the rock ‘n’ rock map.” Just them Doc, steady, rock-like Doc, who was the obvious leader of this group, maybe more like a flock shepard turned the tape deck up and the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter came blasting away at us and they all, collectively, started blasting away at it in response-yes, "it’s just a shot away, just a shot away." Fritz, now a little high from that passed pipe, thought yes I finally made a right decision, these are my people, lost tribe or not.
Between this and that it was dark, very dark but also star-bright dark, where they got to Red Rock, found their assigned site and started to set up kitchen stuff for a meal, and prepare the van for sleeping, if sleeping time ever came. Doc, as Docs will do, started a fire from some heavy brush gathered in the area, and Fritz noticed as he hadn’t before in the dark that the campsite was adjacent to a high cavern wall and as the flames of the fire grew stronger he could see shadows, almost human form shadows bouncing off those walls. And in the distance, although he, to be honest was too stoned to know how distant, he could hear the steady, slow, rhythmic pounding of the war drums, or rain drums, or just plain entertaining drums that provided an almost mesmerizing effect. Fritz also noticed that Sally and Doc seemed to be sitting together just now, her head on his shoulder, listening to that same incessant hypnotic sound. And Zeke and Moonbeam were doing the same. Benjy was sitting by himself, off to the side just a little, and maybe a little miffed that he had “lost” the girl wars. And of course Fritz, new boy Fritz, was left to fend for himself. And just that moment he wished, he wished to high heaven, that he had not been girl-less and wished that Cindy was here with him.
Suddenly the air was filled not only with the tattoo of drums but sounds of rattles and some almost bass guitar sound. And that sudden change brought the little Pink Fog campsite to life. Because, for whatever reason, Doc started singing out in a very strong bass the words to that old time doo- wop rock song by the Five Satins, In The Still Of The Night, and his fellow Pink Fogs joined in on the harmony, even Benjy. Hell, even Fritz did a low-slung harmony just to help fill the air. And Doc, or Doc and Sally, or just Sally, Fritz never did quite figure it out after than song was over, started up on The Penquins Earth Angel and that really got Fritz kind of weepy for Cindy, and for his not so long ago lost youth.
But here is the real funny, funny odd, part. Fritz noticed as the flames flickered from the campfire that on the walls he could see human figures, women’s figures, a couple anyway, and when he looked over in the dark he noticed that a couple of young women, twenty-ish women from what he could tell, women who in any case knew, knew as well as he did the words, and, more importantly, the spirit and growing up absurd meaning behind the songs, and were moving closer to the circle. Then, like it was contagious, Zeke started in on the Capris’ There’s A Moon Out Tonight (and there was) and all joined in. Fritz waved the two shadowy women toward the circle and noticed that in the meantime they had been joined by two other youngish, twenty-ish women.
Benjy got into the act having also noticed the bevy of women standing in some ill-defined outer circle and bellowed out Don & Juan’s What’s Your Name and backed it up with Robert & Johnny’s We Belong Together. The other members of the troupe backing him up, backing him up big time. Now they are all in one circle, even Benjy is in tight, and with the drums and other instruments still beating time for them Fritz starts out low-voiced just above a whisper Johnnie & Joe’s Over The Mountain; Across The Sea as one of the women moved over to sit right next to him, almost on his lap. And that night, that ancient flame, ancient sounds starry night, was the night Red Rock did indeed doo-wop.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
*From The "Spartacist" Journal Archives-Leon Trotsky's "What is a 'Mass Paper'?"
Markin comment:
This article below is still a pretty good general Communist exposition on this subject.
Note: In the interest of political clarity please be aware that the material provided here from the early issues of the Spartacist theoretical journal archives of what is now the International Communist League (ICL, formerly International Spartacist Tendency, ISpT) is posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website. I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, although, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense- legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
*********
What is a "Mass Paper"?
By Leon Trotsky, 30 November 1935, published in The Crisis of the French Section (1935-36)
To the Members of the Bolshevik-Leninist Group:
I have just learned that my letter to the Political Bureau on the new "mass paper" ["Turn to the Masses!"] was read to the general meeting. I can only rejoice if it succeeded in clarifying the situation a little. I addressed myself first to the Political Bureau in the hope that the question could be solved without a new discussion on the foundations determined by the last national conference. But it developed that the initiators of La Commune, after having prepared their undertaking outside the organization, and in fact against both the national and international organizations, decided to provoke a discussion after the fait accompli. In these circumstances it would perhaps not be without value if I enlarged in a more precise manner upon the criticisms and suggestions contained in my letter to the Political Bureau.
1. What is a "mass paper"? The question is not new. It can be said that the whole history of the revolutionary movement has been filled with discussions on the "mass paper." It is the elementary duty of a revolutionary organization to make its political newspaper as accessible as possible to the masses. This task cannot be effectively solved except as a function of the growth of the organization and its cadres, who must pave the way to the masses for the newspaper--since it is not enough, of course, to call a publication a "mass paper" for the masses to really accept it. But quite often revolutionary impatience (which becomes transformed easily into opportunist impatience) leads to this conclusion: The masses do not come to us because our ideas are too complicated and our slogans too advanced. It is therefore necessary to simplify our program, water down our slogans--in short, to throw out some ballast. Basically, this means: Our slogans must correspond not to the objective situation, not to the relation of classes, analyzed by the Marxist method, but to subjective assessments (extremely superficial and inadequate ones) of what the "masses" can or cannot accept. But what masses? The mass is not homogeneous. It develops. It feels the pressure of events. It will accept tomorrow what it will not accept today. Our cadres will blaze the trail with increasing success for our ideas and slogans, which will be shown to be correct, because they are confirmed by the march of events and not by subjective and personal assessments.
2. A mass paper is distinguished from a theoretical review or from a journal for cadres not by the slogans but by the manner in which they are presented. The cadre journal unfolds for its readers all the steps of the Marxist analysis. The mass paper presents only its results, basing itself at the same time on the immediate experience of the masses themselves. It is far more difficult to write in a Marxist manner for the masses than it is to write for cadres.
3. Let us suppose for a moment that the GBL consented to "simplify" our program, to renounce the slogans for the new party and for the Fourth International, to renounce implacable criticism of the social patriots (naming them by name), to renounce systematic criticism of the Revolutionary Left and of Pivert personally. I do not know if this newspaper would become, with the help of a magic wand, a mass paper. I doubt it. But it would in any event become a SAPist or Pivertist paper. The essence of the Pivert tendency is just that: to accept "revolutionary" slogans, but not to draw from them the necessary conclusions, which are the break with Blum and Zyromsky, the creation of the new party and the new International. Without that, all the "revolutionary" slogans become null and void. At the present stage the Pivert agitation is a sort of opium for the revolutionary workers. Pivert wants to teach them that one can be for revolutionary struggle, for "revolutionary action" (to borrow a phrase now in vogue), and remain at the same time on good terms with chauvinist scum. Everything depends on your "tone," you see? It is the tone that makes the music. If the tiger cooed like a pigeon the whole world would be enchanted. But we, with our rude language, we must say that the leaders of the Revolutionary Left are demoralizing and prostituting revolutionary consciousness.
I ask you: If we renounced the slogans which are dictated by the objective situation, and which constitute the very essence of our program, in what shall we be distinguished from the Pivertists? In nothing. We would only be second-rate Pivertists. But if the "masses" should have to decide for the Pivertists, they would prefer the first-rate to the second.
4. I take up the little appeal printed for "La Commune--organ of revolutionary (?) action (?)." This document provides us with a striking demonstration (unsought by its authors) of some of the ideas expressed above. "La Commune will speak the language of the factories and the fields. It will tell of the misery which reigns there; it will express its passions and rouse to revolt."
This is a very laudable intention, although the masses know perfectly well their own misery and their feelings of revolt (stifled by the patriotic apparatuses with the aid of the Pivertists). What the masses can demand of a newspaper is a clear program and a correct orientation. But precisely on this question the appeal is utterly silent. Why? Because it wants more to conceal its ideas than to express them. It accepts the SAPist (centrist) recipe: in seeking the line of least resistance do not say what is. The program of the Fourth International, that’s for "us," for the big shots of the leadership. And the masses? What are the masses? They can rest content with a quarter, or even a tenth, of the program. This mentality we call elitism, of both an opportunist and, at the same time, an adventurist type. It is a very dangerous attitude, comrades. It is not the attitude of a Marxist.
We find in the appeal, after the sentence quoted, a number of historical reminiscences: "To the sons and grandsons of the fighters of the Croix-Rousse, of those who manned the barricades of June 1848, of the Communards of 1871, La Commune says," etc. (followed by rhetoric à la Magdeleine Paz). I do not know, truly, if the rebelling masses need literary reminiscences and somewhat hollow rhetoric disguised as a program.
But here is where the most important part begins: "La Commune is not going to add itself to the multiplicity of tendencies in the workers’ movement." What sovereign scorn for the "multiplicity" of existing tendencies! What does that mean? If all the tendencies are wrong or insufficient, a new one has to be created, the true one, the correct one. If there are true and false tendencies, then the workers must be taught to distinguish among them. The masses must be called on to join the correct tendency to fight the false ones. But no, the initiators of La Commune, somewhat like Romain Rolland, place themselves "above the battle." Such a procedure is absolutely unworthy of Marxists.
After this a number of names are proclaimed in order to particularize, however little, the utterly vague character of the new paper. I set aside my own name, which La Commune claims without the slightest justification. Being among the living, I can at least defend myself. But the others, our common teachers, the real leaders of revolutionary socialism? Unfortunately, they are defenseless. The appeal names Marx and Blanqui. What does that mean? Do they want to create a new "synthesis" of Marxism and Blanquism? How will the masses disentangle themselves from the combination of these two names? A little farther on we find Lenin. But the Stalinists claim him also. If you do not explain to the masses that you are against the Stalinist tendency, they will have to prefer l’Humanité to La Commune. This combination of names explains nothing. It only extends and deepens the ambiguity.
And here is the high point: "La Commune is launched by militants belonging to various tendencies to bring about the rise of a great army of communards." What does this mean, this unknown crew of anonymous, unknown "various tendencies"? What tendencies are involved? Why are they (still unknown) grouped outside and against the other tendencies? The purpose of creating a "great army of communards" is laudable. But it is necessary not to forget that this army, once created (1871), suffered a terrific catastrophe because that magnificent army lacked a program and a leadership.
The conclusion: The appeal could have been written by Marceau Pivert (in collaboration with Magdeleine Paz) except for one point--the name of the author of these lines. But as for me, I repeat, I am implacably opposed to this equivocal and anti-Marxist appeal.
5. The adherence of the GBL to the SFIO has proved absolutely correct. It was a step forward. The Mulhouse congress was the high point of the Bolshevik-Leninist influence in the SFIO. It was necessary to understand that the limit of the possibilities within the Socialist Party was being reached (at least for the adults). It was necessary to utilize the newly won and fresh authority to influence new and virgin elements outside the Socialist Party, whose social composition is miserable. It is this suggestion which I expressed in a letter since published in an internal bulletin of the GBL (no. 6, letter of June 10), and which I permit myself to recommend to the comrades for rereading in connection with the present letter. Passing through Paris [on the way to Norway] I met with several comrades, especially some of the future promoters of La Commune, who were in strong opposition to the idea of a new turn. These comrades had taken a liking to their activity in reformist and centrist circles and hoped to be able to progress further and further. It was a mistake. Time and strength were wasted fruitlessly instead of emulating the youth, whose orientation was more correct because it was directed toward the young workers outside the Socialist Party.
Then came the expulsions at Lille. I, for my part, regarded them as an act of liberation, because they expressed the reality: the impossibility of fruitful future activity in the ranks of the SFIO, especially with the approach of war and fusion with the Stalinists. It seemed that the fact of the expulsion was so eloquent as to spare us the need for any discussion as to what road to take. It was necessary to open up a vigorous and implacable offensive against the expellers, not as "splitters" (that’s the small talk of Pivert), but primarily as the valets of French imperialism. It was necessary at the same time to criticize Pivert openly, since he had taken the place of Zyromsky in covering the left wing of the People’s Front. It was necessary to develop the program of committees of action, to oppose collaboration with the Radicals, and to proclaim openly the necessity for preparing a new party to save the proletariat and its younger generation. Instead of that, the Commune group sought above all to win the sympathies of the Revolutionary Left by personal maneuvering, by combinations in the lobbies, and above all by abdication of our slogans and of criticism of the centrists. Marceau Pivert declared two or three months ago that the struggle against "Trotskyism" is the sign of a reactionary tendency. But now he himself, led by the SAP people, represents this reactionary tendency. The Revolutionary Left has become the most immediate and most noxious obstacle in the development of the revolutionary vanguard. That is what has to be said openly and everywhere, i.e., especially in a mass newspaper. But the Commune group has gone so far in its romance with the Pivertists that one is forced to ask if these comrades are still with us or if they have passed over to centrist positions. That is where one gets when one throws principles overboard and adapts oneself longer than is necessary to the reformist apparatus and its centrist valets.
6. We may ask: and Révolution? It is also not the paper of our tendency. Nevertheless we participate in it. That is correct, but Révolution is the paper of an organization which everybody knows--the Young Socialists. The newspaper is led by two tendencies which are drawing close and which must inevitably fuse. The progressive character of the Revolutionary Socialist Youth is determined precisely by this fact: that they are turning toward the Bolshevik-Leninists and not toward the Revolutionary Left. (The episodic adherence of Comrade Zeller to the Revolutionary Left, after all that had happened, was a mistake the responsibility for which must be shared by the Commune group.)
Révolution is a living, moving paper which can become the paper of the proletarian youth. To accomplish this task, however, Révolution must not fall into the shadows of La Commune’s confusion, but must concretize its position—i.e., definitively accept the slogans of the Bolshevik-Leninists.
7. La Vérité is an absolute necessity. But it must liberate itself from the centrist influences which resulted in the appeal of La Commune. La Vérité must resume its fighting, intransigent character. The most important object of its criticism is Pivertism, which is opposed to Leninism and has thus become, by its own characterization, a reactionary tendency.
8. I do not want to analyze in this letter the extraordinary methods employed by the Commune group vis-Ã -vis its own national and international tendency. It is a very important question but nevertheless secondary in comparison with the question of program and banner.
I believe, dear comrades, that you have the greatest opportunities before you. You are at last going to reap the fruits of your efforts up to now, but on one condition: that you do not permit a confusion of tendencies, of ideas and banners; that you practice Leninist intransigence more than ever and orient yourselves openly and vigorously toward the new party and the Fourth International.
L. Trotsky
This article below is still a pretty good general Communist exposition on this subject.
Note: In the interest of political clarity please be aware that the material provided here from the early issues of the Spartacist theoretical journal archives of what is now the International Communist League (ICL, formerly International Spartacist Tendency, ISpT) is posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website. I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, although, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense- legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
*********
What is a "Mass Paper"?
By Leon Trotsky, 30 November 1935, published in The Crisis of the French Section (1935-36)
To the Members of the Bolshevik-Leninist Group:
I have just learned that my letter to the Political Bureau on the new "mass paper" ["Turn to the Masses!"] was read to the general meeting. I can only rejoice if it succeeded in clarifying the situation a little. I addressed myself first to the Political Bureau in the hope that the question could be solved without a new discussion on the foundations determined by the last national conference. But it developed that the initiators of La Commune, after having prepared their undertaking outside the organization, and in fact against both the national and international organizations, decided to provoke a discussion after the fait accompli. In these circumstances it would perhaps not be without value if I enlarged in a more precise manner upon the criticisms and suggestions contained in my letter to the Political Bureau.
1. What is a "mass paper"? The question is not new. It can be said that the whole history of the revolutionary movement has been filled with discussions on the "mass paper." It is the elementary duty of a revolutionary organization to make its political newspaper as accessible as possible to the masses. This task cannot be effectively solved except as a function of the growth of the organization and its cadres, who must pave the way to the masses for the newspaper--since it is not enough, of course, to call a publication a "mass paper" for the masses to really accept it. But quite often revolutionary impatience (which becomes transformed easily into opportunist impatience) leads to this conclusion: The masses do not come to us because our ideas are too complicated and our slogans too advanced. It is therefore necessary to simplify our program, water down our slogans--in short, to throw out some ballast. Basically, this means: Our slogans must correspond not to the objective situation, not to the relation of classes, analyzed by the Marxist method, but to subjective assessments (extremely superficial and inadequate ones) of what the "masses" can or cannot accept. But what masses? The mass is not homogeneous. It develops. It feels the pressure of events. It will accept tomorrow what it will not accept today. Our cadres will blaze the trail with increasing success for our ideas and slogans, which will be shown to be correct, because they are confirmed by the march of events and not by subjective and personal assessments.
2. A mass paper is distinguished from a theoretical review or from a journal for cadres not by the slogans but by the manner in which they are presented. The cadre journal unfolds for its readers all the steps of the Marxist analysis. The mass paper presents only its results, basing itself at the same time on the immediate experience of the masses themselves. It is far more difficult to write in a Marxist manner for the masses than it is to write for cadres.
3. Let us suppose for a moment that the GBL consented to "simplify" our program, to renounce the slogans for the new party and for the Fourth International, to renounce implacable criticism of the social patriots (naming them by name), to renounce systematic criticism of the Revolutionary Left and of Pivert personally. I do not know if this newspaper would become, with the help of a magic wand, a mass paper. I doubt it. But it would in any event become a SAPist or Pivertist paper. The essence of the Pivert tendency is just that: to accept "revolutionary" slogans, but not to draw from them the necessary conclusions, which are the break with Blum and Zyromsky, the creation of the new party and the new International. Without that, all the "revolutionary" slogans become null and void. At the present stage the Pivert agitation is a sort of opium for the revolutionary workers. Pivert wants to teach them that one can be for revolutionary struggle, for "revolutionary action" (to borrow a phrase now in vogue), and remain at the same time on good terms with chauvinist scum. Everything depends on your "tone," you see? It is the tone that makes the music. If the tiger cooed like a pigeon the whole world would be enchanted. But we, with our rude language, we must say that the leaders of the Revolutionary Left are demoralizing and prostituting revolutionary consciousness.
I ask you: If we renounced the slogans which are dictated by the objective situation, and which constitute the very essence of our program, in what shall we be distinguished from the Pivertists? In nothing. We would only be second-rate Pivertists. But if the "masses" should have to decide for the Pivertists, they would prefer the first-rate to the second.
4. I take up the little appeal printed for "La Commune--organ of revolutionary (?) action (?)." This document provides us with a striking demonstration (unsought by its authors) of some of the ideas expressed above. "La Commune will speak the language of the factories and the fields. It will tell of the misery which reigns there; it will express its passions and rouse to revolt."
This is a very laudable intention, although the masses know perfectly well their own misery and their feelings of revolt (stifled by the patriotic apparatuses with the aid of the Pivertists). What the masses can demand of a newspaper is a clear program and a correct orientation. But precisely on this question the appeal is utterly silent. Why? Because it wants more to conceal its ideas than to express them. It accepts the SAPist (centrist) recipe: in seeking the line of least resistance do not say what is. The program of the Fourth International, that’s for "us," for the big shots of the leadership. And the masses? What are the masses? They can rest content with a quarter, or even a tenth, of the program. This mentality we call elitism, of both an opportunist and, at the same time, an adventurist type. It is a very dangerous attitude, comrades. It is not the attitude of a Marxist.
We find in the appeal, after the sentence quoted, a number of historical reminiscences: "To the sons and grandsons of the fighters of the Croix-Rousse, of those who manned the barricades of June 1848, of the Communards of 1871, La Commune says," etc. (followed by rhetoric à la Magdeleine Paz). I do not know, truly, if the rebelling masses need literary reminiscences and somewhat hollow rhetoric disguised as a program.
But here is where the most important part begins: "La Commune is not going to add itself to the multiplicity of tendencies in the workers’ movement." What sovereign scorn for the "multiplicity" of existing tendencies! What does that mean? If all the tendencies are wrong or insufficient, a new one has to be created, the true one, the correct one. If there are true and false tendencies, then the workers must be taught to distinguish among them. The masses must be called on to join the correct tendency to fight the false ones. But no, the initiators of La Commune, somewhat like Romain Rolland, place themselves "above the battle." Such a procedure is absolutely unworthy of Marxists.
After this a number of names are proclaimed in order to particularize, however little, the utterly vague character of the new paper. I set aside my own name, which La Commune claims without the slightest justification. Being among the living, I can at least defend myself. But the others, our common teachers, the real leaders of revolutionary socialism? Unfortunately, they are defenseless. The appeal names Marx and Blanqui. What does that mean? Do they want to create a new "synthesis" of Marxism and Blanquism? How will the masses disentangle themselves from the combination of these two names? A little farther on we find Lenin. But the Stalinists claim him also. If you do not explain to the masses that you are against the Stalinist tendency, they will have to prefer l’Humanité to La Commune. This combination of names explains nothing. It only extends and deepens the ambiguity.
And here is the high point: "La Commune is launched by militants belonging to various tendencies to bring about the rise of a great army of communards." What does this mean, this unknown crew of anonymous, unknown "various tendencies"? What tendencies are involved? Why are they (still unknown) grouped outside and against the other tendencies? The purpose of creating a "great army of communards" is laudable. But it is necessary not to forget that this army, once created (1871), suffered a terrific catastrophe because that magnificent army lacked a program and a leadership.
The conclusion: The appeal could have been written by Marceau Pivert (in collaboration with Magdeleine Paz) except for one point--the name of the author of these lines. But as for me, I repeat, I am implacably opposed to this equivocal and anti-Marxist appeal.
5. The adherence of the GBL to the SFIO has proved absolutely correct. It was a step forward. The Mulhouse congress was the high point of the Bolshevik-Leninist influence in the SFIO. It was necessary to understand that the limit of the possibilities within the Socialist Party was being reached (at least for the adults). It was necessary to utilize the newly won and fresh authority to influence new and virgin elements outside the Socialist Party, whose social composition is miserable. It is this suggestion which I expressed in a letter since published in an internal bulletin of the GBL (no. 6, letter of June 10), and which I permit myself to recommend to the comrades for rereading in connection with the present letter. Passing through Paris [on the way to Norway] I met with several comrades, especially some of the future promoters of La Commune, who were in strong opposition to the idea of a new turn. These comrades had taken a liking to their activity in reformist and centrist circles and hoped to be able to progress further and further. It was a mistake. Time and strength were wasted fruitlessly instead of emulating the youth, whose orientation was more correct because it was directed toward the young workers outside the Socialist Party.
Then came the expulsions at Lille. I, for my part, regarded them as an act of liberation, because they expressed the reality: the impossibility of fruitful future activity in the ranks of the SFIO, especially with the approach of war and fusion with the Stalinists. It seemed that the fact of the expulsion was so eloquent as to spare us the need for any discussion as to what road to take. It was necessary to open up a vigorous and implacable offensive against the expellers, not as "splitters" (that’s the small talk of Pivert), but primarily as the valets of French imperialism. It was necessary at the same time to criticize Pivert openly, since he had taken the place of Zyromsky in covering the left wing of the People’s Front. It was necessary to develop the program of committees of action, to oppose collaboration with the Radicals, and to proclaim openly the necessity for preparing a new party to save the proletariat and its younger generation. Instead of that, the Commune group sought above all to win the sympathies of the Revolutionary Left by personal maneuvering, by combinations in the lobbies, and above all by abdication of our slogans and of criticism of the centrists. Marceau Pivert declared two or three months ago that the struggle against "Trotskyism" is the sign of a reactionary tendency. But now he himself, led by the SAP people, represents this reactionary tendency. The Revolutionary Left has become the most immediate and most noxious obstacle in the development of the revolutionary vanguard. That is what has to be said openly and everywhere, i.e., especially in a mass newspaper. But the Commune group has gone so far in its romance with the Pivertists that one is forced to ask if these comrades are still with us or if they have passed over to centrist positions. That is where one gets when one throws principles overboard and adapts oneself longer than is necessary to the reformist apparatus and its centrist valets.
6. We may ask: and Révolution? It is also not the paper of our tendency. Nevertheless we participate in it. That is correct, but Révolution is the paper of an organization which everybody knows--the Young Socialists. The newspaper is led by two tendencies which are drawing close and which must inevitably fuse. The progressive character of the Revolutionary Socialist Youth is determined precisely by this fact: that they are turning toward the Bolshevik-Leninists and not toward the Revolutionary Left. (The episodic adherence of Comrade Zeller to the Revolutionary Left, after all that had happened, was a mistake the responsibility for which must be shared by the Commune group.)
Révolution is a living, moving paper which can become the paper of the proletarian youth. To accomplish this task, however, Révolution must not fall into the shadows of La Commune’s confusion, but must concretize its position—i.e., definitively accept the slogans of the Bolshevik-Leninists.
7. La Vérité is an absolute necessity. But it must liberate itself from the centrist influences which resulted in the appeal of La Commune. La Vérité must resume its fighting, intransigent character. The most important object of its criticism is Pivertism, which is opposed to Leninism and has thus become, by its own characterization, a reactionary tendency.
8. I do not want to analyze in this letter the extraordinary methods employed by the Commune group vis-Ã -vis its own national and international tendency. It is a very important question but nevertheless secondary in comparison with the question of program and banner.
I believe, dear comrades, that you have the greatest opportunities before you. You are at last going to reap the fruits of your efforts up to now, but on one condition: that you do not permit a confusion of tendencies, of ideas and banners; that you practice Leninist intransigence more than ever and orient yourselves openly and vigorously toward the new party and the Fourth International.
L. Trotsky
Saturday, June 25, 2011
From The Archives Of The International Communist League- The Stalinist School Of Falsification Revisited- A Reply To The "Guardian"- Part Four- The Popular Front
Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973
Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
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The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited
These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]
Reply to the Guardian
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED
4. THE POPULAR FRONT
The turn toward the "Popular Front" came toward the end of 1933 as the Stalinized Communist International made a quick about-face from its ultra-left "Third Period" policies. With the triumph of Hitler and the renewed threat of imperialist attack the panic-stricken Soviet bureaucracy set about lining up allies for defense of the Soviet fatherland. Russia entered the League of Nations and signed a Franco-Soviet military assistance pact. Throughout this period the Comintern sought to ingratiate itself with the bourgeoisies of the democratic imperialist powers through calculated containment of revolutionary proletarian movements in Europe. The method: class-collaborationist alliances with and participation in the governments of the bourgeoisie. The cover: the struggle against fascism.
The popular front found theoretical expression in the report of Georgi Dimitrov to the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in August 1935. According to Dimitrov the main danger now threatening the workers was fascism. But fascism threatened not only the working class, but also the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie in general and even sections of the bourgeoisie. In consequence, the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism are removed from the agenda during the present period:
"Now the toiling masses in a number of capitalist countries are faced with the necessity of making a definite choice, and of making it today, not between proletarian dictatorship and bourgeois democracy, but between bourgeois democracy and fascism."
To defend bourgeois democracy, the proletariat must aim to ally with all other social groups threatened by fascism, including the "anti-fascist" sections of the bourgeoisie in a vast "People's Front":
"Under certain conditions, we can and must bend our efforts to the task of drawing these parties and organizations or certain sections of them to the side of the anti-fascist people's front, despite their bourgeois leadership. Such, for instance, is today the situation in France with the Radical Party...."
--G. Dimitrov, "Report to the Seventh Comintern Congress," 1935
During the Third Period the Communists refused to bloc with the German Social Democrats in a united front against Hitler, dubbing them "social-fascists." Now the Communists are not only willing to make ongoing alliances with the social democracy, but to form a government with the anti-fascist sectors of the bourgeoisie itself! Subsequently, in Italy during the late 1930's this "broad alliance" was still further broadened to include appeals to "honest" fascists!
The popular front is nothing more than an expression of the theories and practices of class collaboration--a bloc of organizations and parties representing various classes on the basis of a common program, the defense of bourgeois democracy. Though the name was new, the content was not. The German Social Democrats formed "left bloc" coalition governments with the democratic bourgeoisie (in the form of the Center Party) throughout the 1920's. The only difference was that the Communists occasionally made a pretense of being revolutionary, while the Social Democrats were more open about their reformism.
The Stalinists try to claim that the popular front is simply the logical extension of the united front to a higher plane. Nothing could be further from the truth. The "working-class united front" was formed under the banner of "class against class" and was raised precisely in order to break the Social Democrats away from their perennial class-collaborationist alliances with the "democratic" bourgeoisie:
"The tactic of the United Front is the call for the united struggle of Communists and of all other workers, either belonging to other parties and groups, or belonging to no party whatever, for the defense of the elementary and vital interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie."
--Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), "Theses on the United Front," 1922
The united front served both to join the forces of the various workers organizations in action and also to expose the reformists who would participate in struggles for working-class interests only when forced to do so by pressure from their base, and who would desert at the earliest possible moment. Since the Bolshevik party alone represented the true historical interests of the working class, it was crucial that there be no common program with the reformists, since this could only mean the abandonment of the Leninist program. Nor could there be any restrictions on the right to criticize the other parties to the front. Hence the second main slogan of the united front, "freedom of criticism, unity in action" or, as Trotsky put it, "march separately, strike together."
In the popular front, however, the proletarian parties renounce their class independence and give up their working-class program. Earl Browder summed this up succinctly in his report to the Central Committee of the CPUSA on 4 December 1936:
"We can organize and rouse them [the majority of "the people"] provided we do not demand of them that they agree with our socialist program, but unite with them on the basis of their program which we also make our own." [!]
The popular front conformed with the Menshevik theory of the "two-stage revolution." First the struggle for bourgeois democracy, then the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism. The Stalinists proceeded from the absolutely false conception that a basic social conflict existed between bourgeois democracy and fascism. Fascism appeared in Europe following World War I as a necessary development of bourgeois rule in a period of severe economic decline. It is a last resort of the capitalists to preserve their system when it is no longer possible through normal parliamentary measures. The Stalinists at one point even tried to justify their two-stage schema by claiming that fascism actually had its roots in feudalism, not capitalism!
In point of fact, the popular front was simply another bourgeois solution to the conditions which led to fascism. The Communists or Social Democrats are invited to participate in a capitalist government under conditions in which no existing bourgeois parliamentary combination can effectively rule over a restive mass of workers and peasants. The price of the coalition is Communist support to strikebreaking and similar measures by the governments in which they participate.
During the 1930's popular-front governments were realized during pre-revolutionary periods in France and Spain. There the coalition with the "democratic" bourgeoisie was able to head off powerful mass upsurges by diverting the general strikes and even insurrections into the dead-end of defending bourgeois democracy. In colonial countries, such as Vietnam, the popular-front policies led to dropping the demand for independence! To the Stalinists' class collaboration, the Trotskyists counterposed a working-class united front to smash the fascists. Instead of depending on the republican generals and the police, they called for the formation of workers militias based on the trade unions. Weak in numbers and subject to vicious slander campaigns by the Comintern, the Trotskyists, were unable to gain sufficient influence to break through the reformist stranglehold on the workers movement. Time and again the positions of the Bolshevik-Leninists were proved correct, but in a negative way, by the ignominious defeat of promising revolutionary situations. Stalin certainly earned the nickname Trotsky had given him--the Great Organizer of Defeats.
France 1934-1936
In France fascist agitation made more headway than in any other of the "great democracies." Fascist leagues appeared in open imitation of the Italian and German fascist organizations. After years of ignoring or downplaying the fascist danger the Communist (PCF) and Socialist (SFIO) leaders panicked after the February 1934 attack on parliament by the Croix de Feu (Cross of Fire) band. Under tremendous pressure from the ranks, the Socialist and Communist-led trade-union federations held a massive joint demonstration on 12 February whose very size served effectively to throw back the fascists for months. Trotsky's struggle of the past four years for a workers united front against fascism had been vindicated against the sectarian-defeatist idiocies of the Third Period.
In June 1934 PCF leader Maurice Thorez proposed a united front with the SFIO, The united front did not adopt the Leninist slogan of "march separately, strike together," but instead took the form of a "nonaggression pact." Both parties renounced their programmatic independence and ceased to criticize each other. Trotsky criticized the united front for limiting its actions to parliamentary maneuvers and electoral alliances and refusing to seek to arouse the workers in extra-parliamentary struggle against fascism, a struggle which might have opened up the prospect for proletarian revolution.
In the midst of acute social crisis, mass strike waves and readiness to fight of the workers, the PCF refused to struggle for power on the basis that the situation was "not revolutionary." Instead, the PCF put forth a program of "immediate economic demands" which served to disorient and disorganize the proletariat and speed the growth of fascism since the capitalists felt increasing threat from the working class. The PCF renounced the struggle for nationalization, opposed the call for workers militias as provocative and refused arms to the workers, while trying to preserve a fig-leaf of revolutionism by absurdly calling for "soviets everywhere," the immediate precondition for an armed insurrection.
In July 1935 the French Stalinists expanded the coalition to include the bourgeois Radical Socialists. The Radical Socialists, based on the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie, advocated progressive social changes but were firmly committed to private enterprise and private ownership. In order to save unity with the Radicals the PCF insisted that the popular-front program be restricted to defense of the republic against fascism, measures against the depression and labor reforms. The popular front swept the March 1936 elections. The SFIO became the leading party in the Chamber of Deputies, and their chief, Leon Blum, became premier of a coalition cabinet of Socialists and Radical Socialists. The Communists refused to enter the government in order to avoid scaring the bourgeoisie but supported it in parliament.
As frequently occurs at the beginning of a popular-front government, the masses saw the elections as a victory for the working class and unleashed a tremendous wave of militancy culminating in the May-June general strike. While the initial demands were mainly defensive, centering on a 15 percent wage increase, the strikes almost all involved the militant sit-down tactic. The bourgeoisie panicked, demanding that the Blum government take office immediately in order to contain the strike. Blum and the CGT labor bureaucrats negotiated an initial settlement which provided some gains, but on the condition of the immediate evacuation of the factories. The pact was solidly voted down by Parisian metal workers.
Fearing that, as Trotsky wrote, "the French Revolution has begun," the PCF ordered its militants to support the agreements. Thorez declared, "There can be no question of taking power at this time" and "one must know how to end a strike." The Socialist-Radical government did its part by seizing the issue of the Trotskyist newspaper (Lutte Ouvrière) which called for extending the strike. By the middle of June the combined efforts of the reformists had succeeded in scuttling the resistance.
This was the high point of the popular front, for it was in breaking the 1936 general strike that the Blum government accomplished the basic task set for it by the bourgeoisie--stopping the drift toward revolution. The few significant social reforms, such as the 40-hour week, were soon reversed. In 1937, after a year in office and having lost the confidence of the working masses, the Blum government was toppled by the Senate. In mid-1938 the Radical Socialists formed a conservative ministry under Edouard Daladier. Daladier's announcement that fall of a return to the 48-hour week provoked a new mass strike wave. The response of the PCF: a call for a one-day protest strike! Daladier declared martial law and sent troops to the factories. The labor movement collapsed, millions of workers tore up their union cards in disgust. By January the PCF had been banned, and all Communist led unions were banned from the UGT labor federation. In June 1940 the bourgeois parties, as well as some SFIO delegates, voted to create the Vichy regime. Thus, far from stopping fascism, the popular front proved to be just one more "peaceful road" to barbarism.
The Popular Front in Spain, 1936-1939
The consequences of the Stalin-Dimitrov popular front policies were equally counterrevolutionary in Spain. The overthrow of the monarchy in 1931 had led to the establishment of a bourgeois republic, but the social policies of the Radical/Socialist coalition government were hardly more liberal than those of the military dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera during the late 1920's (also supported by the Socialists). In October 1934 an insurrection broke out in the mining region of Asturias in reaction to the rightist policies of the government. Despite bloody repression (thousands of miners were machine-gunned by the military), the heroic uprising awakened the Spanish working masses and led to the widespread formation of united-front workers committees (alianzas obreras).
In response, the leaders of the major workers parties moved to set up a popular front similar to that in France, including the Socialists (right and left wings), the Communists and also the POUM (the Workers Party of Marxist Unification). The POUM had been formed by the fusion of a right split-off from the CP (Maurin's "Workers and Peasants Bloc" which Trotsky had referred to as the "Spanish Kuomintang," i.e., a two-class party) and the former Communist Left headed by Nin. As a result of forming an unprincipled bloc with Maurin and signing the popular-front agreement, the ties between Nin and the Trotskyist movement were broken.
The popular-front agreement signed in January 1936 was a classic document of the abandonment of working-class politics. It pledged:
"The republicans do not accept the principle of the nationalization of the land and its free reversion to the peasants....The republican parties do not accept measures for nationalization of the banks...[and] workers control claimed by the delegation of the Socialist Party."
The republican/worker alliance won a plurality in the February 1936 elections, however, and formed a government under the bourgeois lawyer Azana. As in France, the masses interpreted this as a victory and began a wave of land and factory occupations which the government was unable to contain. Inconsequence, on 17 July General Franco and a group of leading military officers issued a proclamation for an authoritarian Catholic state and went into rebellion. The response of the Azana government was to attempt to negotiate with the insurgent generals, meanwhile refusing to arm the masses!
This temporizing might have succeeded if the masses of workers had not taken matters into their own hands. In Barcelona, a stronghold of the Anarchists and the POUM, workers took over numerous factories and stormed the army barracks with pistols. In less than a day they had complete control of the city. This sparked similar revolts elsewhere, and the republican government was forced to reverse itself, arm the masses and attempt a half-hearted struggle against Franco.
The alternative was a proletarian revolution which was possible at any moment. In Catalonia transport and industry were almost entirely in the hands of the CNT (Anarchist) workers committees, while in much of the northeast (Catalonia and Aragon) the peasant associations and agricultural workers unions had set up collective farms. The old municipal governments disappeared, replaced by committees giving representation to all anti-fascist parties and unions. The most important was the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias of Catalonia which, although it had bourgeois members, was thoroughly dominated by the workers organizations. Yet on top of this sat the "shadow of the bourgeoisie," a popular-front government of Catalonia headed by another bourgeois lawyer, Companys. As in Russia from February to October 1917 there was a situation of dual power, but with the workers still giving tacit support to the shaky bourgeois government."
In this situation, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had demanded, "Down with the Provisional Government, All Power to the Soviets"! The Spanish workers parties, however, from the Stalinists to the POUM and even the Anarchists (who supposedly opposed even a workers government!) joined the bourgeois government in September 1936. The Stalinists assured their bourgeois friends that they had no intention of leading the workers to power. In August 1936 the PCF newspaper L'Humanité stated:
"The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Spain requests us to inform the public...that the Spanish people are not striving for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but know only one aim: the defense of the republican order while respecting private property."
With support of the Stalinists and Socialists guaranteed, Azana and Companys began moving to re-establish bourgeois law and order. The first step was censorship of the workers press. The Catalan government followed this up with a decree dissolving the revolutionary committees which had arisen in July, and in late October it ordered the disarming of the workers in the rear. The POUM and CNT leaders were subsequently expelled from the cabinet, even though they had gone along with all these anti-worker measures. A secret police was organized, under the control of the Stalinist and GPU agents from the Soviet Union.
But this was not enough to break the back of the worker's resistance. A provocation was required. This came on 3 May 1937 when the Stalinists attacked the Barcelona telephone exchange held by CNT workers. Within hours barricades were erected throughout the city and the workers were once again in a position to take power. Instead the POUM and Anarchist leaders capitulated to the central government, trusting in Azana's pledge of no reprisals. Two days later the Assault Guards arrived and occupied the exchange, killing hundreds and jailing tens of thousands. Within a month the POUM was outlawed, at the demand of the Stalinists, and its leaders arrested and eventually shot. In short order the CP led the Assault Guards in dissolving the collective farms and workers militias. Although the war dragged on for another year and one half, the result was already decided--since the workers and peasants no longer had anything to fight for, they became rapidly demoralized and the superior armaments of the fascists carried the day.
In all this the Spanish CP had acted as the guarantor of bourgeois order, leading the offensive against the Anarchists and the POUM, the collective farms and the workers militias. In his desperate desire to achieve an alliance with--the "democratic" imperialist powers, Stalin was absolutely opposed to revolution in Spain--even if this meant that fascist victory was the alternative. The Great Organizer of Defeats was also the Butcher of the Spanish Revolution.
But the responsibility for the debacle does not stop here. Nin and the other leaders of the Communist Left had once fought for the class independence of the proletariat. At one time they were a larger party than the Spanish CP itself. But by capitulating to the popular front, these centrists were as responsible for the defeat of the Spanish revolution as Stalin. Had they known how to swim against the stream in moments when the popular front had mass support they could have earned the leadership of the workers movement when the masses later came to see that they had been betrayed. As it was the POUM went along with the betrayals, protesting only when it was too late.
The Popular Front in World War II
It is remarkable that in Davidson's attack on Trotskyism, in addition to virtually ignoring the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the ignominious defeat of Stalin's policies in Germany, he does not mention Stalin's policies in Spain and France at all. And with good reason! But as a good Stalinist he must defend the popular front somehow, preferably with a more popular example. He chose World War II. According to the Stalinists, this was a war against fascism and in defense of the Soviet fatherland. Their political conclusion was a broad popular front "including even the temporary and wavering allies to be found in the camp of the bourgeois-democratic capitalist governments" (Guardian, 9 May 1973).
Davidson gives a somewhat accurate account of the Trotskyist position on the war, presuming that nobody could have opposed the great anti-fascist crusade except counterrevolutionary Trotskyists. But while the Stalinist policy was certainly more popular at the time, it will not wash so easily with a new generation of worker-militants who have far less illusions about the "democratic" character of U.S. imperialism. The Trotskyist position on the war was revolutionary defeatism in the capitalist countries in this inter-imperialist war. At the same time they gave unconditional support to the military defense of the Soviet Union. This was no academic question, for Trotsky fought a sharp battle against the Shachtman group (in the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party) which was opposed to defense of the USSR, and eventually left the SWP taking 40 percent of the membership with it.
During the war the numerically weak Trotskyist cadre by and large carried out an internationalist line, despite social-patriotic bulges in some of the sections. The French section, for instance, organized a Trotskyist cell in the German navy. In the process, however, many of the leaders of the Fourth International were executed either by the Nazis or, like Nin in Spain, at the hands of the Stalinists. In the U.S. the SWP concentrated its work on fighting the no strike agreement supported by the CIO leadership and the CP.
The Stalinists had the opposite policy. According to CPUSA leader Earl Browder:
"In the United States we have to win the war under the capitalist system....Therefore, we have to find out how to make the capitalist system work....We have to help the capitalists to learn how to run their system."
The Daily Worker of 25 December 1941 implemented this policy by hailing the CIO no-strike pledge as a "definite contribution to national unity." What this meant in practice was strike-breaking. During the 1943 mine workers' strike, CP labor leader William Z. Foster traveled the Pennsylvania mining districts trying to organize scabs and a "back-to-work" movement. On the West Coast, CP-sympathizer Bridges of the ILWU called for speed-up.
Thus throughout the 1930's and 1940's the popular front policy led to the identical practical result: strikebreaking and counterrevolution. The strangulation of the Spanish revolution, the defeat of the French general strike, scabbing in the U.S. miners' strike--these were the fruits of class collaboration. Drawing the logical conclusion, Stalin made another concession to his bourgeois friends by dissolving the Communist International in 1943 because it hindered a united effort to win the war!
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973
Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
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The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited
These articles were originally serialized in Workers Vanguard, in 1973, starting in the 22 June issue [No.23] and concluding in the 10 October issue [No. 30]
Reply to the Guardian
THE STALIN SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION REVISITED
4. THE POPULAR FRONT
The turn toward the "Popular Front" came toward the end of 1933 as the Stalinized Communist International made a quick about-face from its ultra-left "Third Period" policies. With the triumph of Hitler and the renewed threat of imperialist attack the panic-stricken Soviet bureaucracy set about lining up allies for defense of the Soviet fatherland. Russia entered the League of Nations and signed a Franco-Soviet military assistance pact. Throughout this period the Comintern sought to ingratiate itself with the bourgeoisies of the democratic imperialist powers through calculated containment of revolutionary proletarian movements in Europe. The method: class-collaborationist alliances with and participation in the governments of the bourgeoisie. The cover: the struggle against fascism.
The popular front found theoretical expression in the report of Georgi Dimitrov to the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in August 1935. According to Dimitrov the main danger now threatening the workers was fascism. But fascism threatened not only the working class, but also the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie in general and even sections of the bourgeoisie. In consequence, the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism are removed from the agenda during the present period:
"Now the toiling masses in a number of capitalist countries are faced with the necessity of making a definite choice, and of making it today, not between proletarian dictatorship and bourgeois democracy, but between bourgeois democracy and fascism."
To defend bourgeois democracy, the proletariat must aim to ally with all other social groups threatened by fascism, including the "anti-fascist" sections of the bourgeoisie in a vast "People's Front":
"Under certain conditions, we can and must bend our efforts to the task of drawing these parties and organizations or certain sections of them to the side of the anti-fascist people's front, despite their bourgeois leadership. Such, for instance, is today the situation in France with the Radical Party...."
--G. Dimitrov, "Report to the Seventh Comintern Congress," 1935
During the Third Period the Communists refused to bloc with the German Social Democrats in a united front against Hitler, dubbing them "social-fascists." Now the Communists are not only willing to make ongoing alliances with the social democracy, but to form a government with the anti-fascist sectors of the bourgeoisie itself! Subsequently, in Italy during the late 1930's this "broad alliance" was still further broadened to include appeals to "honest" fascists!
The popular front is nothing more than an expression of the theories and practices of class collaboration--a bloc of organizations and parties representing various classes on the basis of a common program, the defense of bourgeois democracy. Though the name was new, the content was not. The German Social Democrats formed "left bloc" coalition governments with the democratic bourgeoisie (in the form of the Center Party) throughout the 1920's. The only difference was that the Communists occasionally made a pretense of being revolutionary, while the Social Democrats were more open about their reformism.
The Stalinists try to claim that the popular front is simply the logical extension of the united front to a higher plane. Nothing could be further from the truth. The "working-class united front" was formed under the banner of "class against class" and was raised precisely in order to break the Social Democrats away from their perennial class-collaborationist alliances with the "democratic" bourgeoisie:
"The tactic of the United Front is the call for the united struggle of Communists and of all other workers, either belonging to other parties and groups, or belonging to no party whatever, for the defense of the elementary and vital interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie."
--Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), "Theses on the United Front," 1922
The united front served both to join the forces of the various workers organizations in action and also to expose the reformists who would participate in struggles for working-class interests only when forced to do so by pressure from their base, and who would desert at the earliest possible moment. Since the Bolshevik party alone represented the true historical interests of the working class, it was crucial that there be no common program with the reformists, since this could only mean the abandonment of the Leninist program. Nor could there be any restrictions on the right to criticize the other parties to the front. Hence the second main slogan of the united front, "freedom of criticism, unity in action" or, as Trotsky put it, "march separately, strike together."
In the popular front, however, the proletarian parties renounce their class independence and give up their working-class program. Earl Browder summed this up succinctly in his report to the Central Committee of the CPUSA on 4 December 1936:
"We can organize and rouse them [the majority of "the people"] provided we do not demand of them that they agree with our socialist program, but unite with them on the basis of their program which we also make our own." [!]
The popular front conformed with the Menshevik theory of the "two-stage revolution." First the struggle for bourgeois democracy, then the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism. The Stalinists proceeded from the absolutely false conception that a basic social conflict existed between bourgeois democracy and fascism. Fascism appeared in Europe following World War I as a necessary development of bourgeois rule in a period of severe economic decline. It is a last resort of the capitalists to preserve their system when it is no longer possible through normal parliamentary measures. The Stalinists at one point even tried to justify their two-stage schema by claiming that fascism actually had its roots in feudalism, not capitalism!
In point of fact, the popular front was simply another bourgeois solution to the conditions which led to fascism. The Communists or Social Democrats are invited to participate in a capitalist government under conditions in which no existing bourgeois parliamentary combination can effectively rule over a restive mass of workers and peasants. The price of the coalition is Communist support to strikebreaking and similar measures by the governments in which they participate.
During the 1930's popular-front governments were realized during pre-revolutionary periods in France and Spain. There the coalition with the "democratic" bourgeoisie was able to head off powerful mass upsurges by diverting the general strikes and even insurrections into the dead-end of defending bourgeois democracy. In colonial countries, such as Vietnam, the popular-front policies led to dropping the demand for independence! To the Stalinists' class collaboration, the Trotskyists counterposed a working-class united front to smash the fascists. Instead of depending on the republican generals and the police, they called for the formation of workers militias based on the trade unions. Weak in numbers and subject to vicious slander campaigns by the Comintern, the Trotskyists, were unable to gain sufficient influence to break through the reformist stranglehold on the workers movement. Time and again the positions of the Bolshevik-Leninists were proved correct, but in a negative way, by the ignominious defeat of promising revolutionary situations. Stalin certainly earned the nickname Trotsky had given him--the Great Organizer of Defeats.
France 1934-1936
In France fascist agitation made more headway than in any other of the "great democracies." Fascist leagues appeared in open imitation of the Italian and German fascist organizations. After years of ignoring or downplaying the fascist danger the Communist (PCF) and Socialist (SFIO) leaders panicked after the February 1934 attack on parliament by the Croix de Feu (Cross of Fire) band. Under tremendous pressure from the ranks, the Socialist and Communist-led trade-union federations held a massive joint demonstration on 12 February whose very size served effectively to throw back the fascists for months. Trotsky's struggle of the past four years for a workers united front against fascism had been vindicated against the sectarian-defeatist idiocies of the Third Period.
In June 1934 PCF leader Maurice Thorez proposed a united front with the SFIO, The united front did not adopt the Leninist slogan of "march separately, strike together," but instead took the form of a "nonaggression pact." Both parties renounced their programmatic independence and ceased to criticize each other. Trotsky criticized the united front for limiting its actions to parliamentary maneuvers and electoral alliances and refusing to seek to arouse the workers in extra-parliamentary struggle against fascism, a struggle which might have opened up the prospect for proletarian revolution.
In the midst of acute social crisis, mass strike waves and readiness to fight of the workers, the PCF refused to struggle for power on the basis that the situation was "not revolutionary." Instead, the PCF put forth a program of "immediate economic demands" which served to disorient and disorganize the proletariat and speed the growth of fascism since the capitalists felt increasing threat from the working class. The PCF renounced the struggle for nationalization, opposed the call for workers militias as provocative and refused arms to the workers, while trying to preserve a fig-leaf of revolutionism by absurdly calling for "soviets everywhere," the immediate precondition for an armed insurrection.
In July 1935 the French Stalinists expanded the coalition to include the bourgeois Radical Socialists. The Radical Socialists, based on the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie, advocated progressive social changes but were firmly committed to private enterprise and private ownership. In order to save unity with the Radicals the PCF insisted that the popular-front program be restricted to defense of the republic against fascism, measures against the depression and labor reforms. The popular front swept the March 1936 elections. The SFIO became the leading party in the Chamber of Deputies, and their chief, Leon Blum, became premier of a coalition cabinet of Socialists and Radical Socialists. The Communists refused to enter the government in order to avoid scaring the bourgeoisie but supported it in parliament.
As frequently occurs at the beginning of a popular-front government, the masses saw the elections as a victory for the working class and unleashed a tremendous wave of militancy culminating in the May-June general strike. While the initial demands were mainly defensive, centering on a 15 percent wage increase, the strikes almost all involved the militant sit-down tactic. The bourgeoisie panicked, demanding that the Blum government take office immediately in order to contain the strike. Blum and the CGT labor bureaucrats negotiated an initial settlement which provided some gains, but on the condition of the immediate evacuation of the factories. The pact was solidly voted down by Parisian metal workers.
Fearing that, as Trotsky wrote, "the French Revolution has begun," the PCF ordered its militants to support the agreements. Thorez declared, "There can be no question of taking power at this time" and "one must know how to end a strike." The Socialist-Radical government did its part by seizing the issue of the Trotskyist newspaper (Lutte Ouvrière) which called for extending the strike. By the middle of June the combined efforts of the reformists had succeeded in scuttling the resistance.
This was the high point of the popular front, for it was in breaking the 1936 general strike that the Blum government accomplished the basic task set for it by the bourgeoisie--stopping the drift toward revolution. The few significant social reforms, such as the 40-hour week, were soon reversed. In 1937, after a year in office and having lost the confidence of the working masses, the Blum government was toppled by the Senate. In mid-1938 the Radical Socialists formed a conservative ministry under Edouard Daladier. Daladier's announcement that fall of a return to the 48-hour week provoked a new mass strike wave. The response of the PCF: a call for a one-day protest strike! Daladier declared martial law and sent troops to the factories. The labor movement collapsed, millions of workers tore up their union cards in disgust. By January the PCF had been banned, and all Communist led unions were banned from the UGT labor federation. In June 1940 the bourgeois parties, as well as some SFIO delegates, voted to create the Vichy regime. Thus, far from stopping fascism, the popular front proved to be just one more "peaceful road" to barbarism.
The Popular Front in Spain, 1936-1939
The consequences of the Stalin-Dimitrov popular front policies were equally counterrevolutionary in Spain. The overthrow of the monarchy in 1931 had led to the establishment of a bourgeois republic, but the social policies of the Radical/Socialist coalition government were hardly more liberal than those of the military dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera during the late 1920's (also supported by the Socialists). In October 1934 an insurrection broke out in the mining region of Asturias in reaction to the rightist policies of the government. Despite bloody repression (thousands of miners were machine-gunned by the military), the heroic uprising awakened the Spanish working masses and led to the widespread formation of united-front workers committees (alianzas obreras).
In response, the leaders of the major workers parties moved to set up a popular front similar to that in France, including the Socialists (right and left wings), the Communists and also the POUM (the Workers Party of Marxist Unification). The POUM had been formed by the fusion of a right split-off from the CP (Maurin's "Workers and Peasants Bloc" which Trotsky had referred to as the "Spanish Kuomintang," i.e., a two-class party) and the former Communist Left headed by Nin. As a result of forming an unprincipled bloc with Maurin and signing the popular-front agreement, the ties between Nin and the Trotskyist movement were broken.
The popular-front agreement signed in January 1936 was a classic document of the abandonment of working-class politics. It pledged:
"The republicans do not accept the principle of the nationalization of the land and its free reversion to the peasants....The republican parties do not accept measures for nationalization of the banks...[and] workers control claimed by the delegation of the Socialist Party."
The republican/worker alliance won a plurality in the February 1936 elections, however, and formed a government under the bourgeois lawyer Azana. As in France, the masses interpreted this as a victory and began a wave of land and factory occupations which the government was unable to contain. Inconsequence, on 17 July General Franco and a group of leading military officers issued a proclamation for an authoritarian Catholic state and went into rebellion. The response of the Azana government was to attempt to negotiate with the insurgent generals, meanwhile refusing to arm the masses!
This temporizing might have succeeded if the masses of workers had not taken matters into their own hands. In Barcelona, a stronghold of the Anarchists and the POUM, workers took over numerous factories and stormed the army barracks with pistols. In less than a day they had complete control of the city. This sparked similar revolts elsewhere, and the republican government was forced to reverse itself, arm the masses and attempt a half-hearted struggle against Franco.
The alternative was a proletarian revolution which was possible at any moment. In Catalonia transport and industry were almost entirely in the hands of the CNT (Anarchist) workers committees, while in much of the northeast (Catalonia and Aragon) the peasant associations and agricultural workers unions had set up collective farms. The old municipal governments disappeared, replaced by committees giving representation to all anti-fascist parties and unions. The most important was the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias of Catalonia which, although it had bourgeois members, was thoroughly dominated by the workers organizations. Yet on top of this sat the "shadow of the bourgeoisie," a popular-front government of Catalonia headed by another bourgeois lawyer, Companys. As in Russia from February to October 1917 there was a situation of dual power, but with the workers still giving tacit support to the shaky bourgeois government."
In this situation, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had demanded, "Down with the Provisional Government, All Power to the Soviets"! The Spanish workers parties, however, from the Stalinists to the POUM and even the Anarchists (who supposedly opposed even a workers government!) joined the bourgeois government in September 1936. The Stalinists assured their bourgeois friends that they had no intention of leading the workers to power. In August 1936 the PCF newspaper L'Humanité stated:
"The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Spain requests us to inform the public...that the Spanish people are not striving for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but know only one aim: the defense of the republican order while respecting private property."
With support of the Stalinists and Socialists guaranteed, Azana and Companys began moving to re-establish bourgeois law and order. The first step was censorship of the workers press. The Catalan government followed this up with a decree dissolving the revolutionary committees which had arisen in July, and in late October it ordered the disarming of the workers in the rear. The POUM and CNT leaders were subsequently expelled from the cabinet, even though they had gone along with all these anti-worker measures. A secret police was organized, under the control of the Stalinist and GPU agents from the Soviet Union.
But this was not enough to break the back of the worker's resistance. A provocation was required. This came on 3 May 1937 when the Stalinists attacked the Barcelona telephone exchange held by CNT workers. Within hours barricades were erected throughout the city and the workers were once again in a position to take power. Instead the POUM and Anarchist leaders capitulated to the central government, trusting in Azana's pledge of no reprisals. Two days later the Assault Guards arrived and occupied the exchange, killing hundreds and jailing tens of thousands. Within a month the POUM was outlawed, at the demand of the Stalinists, and its leaders arrested and eventually shot. In short order the CP led the Assault Guards in dissolving the collective farms and workers militias. Although the war dragged on for another year and one half, the result was already decided--since the workers and peasants no longer had anything to fight for, they became rapidly demoralized and the superior armaments of the fascists carried the day.
In all this the Spanish CP had acted as the guarantor of bourgeois order, leading the offensive against the Anarchists and the POUM, the collective farms and the workers militias. In his desperate desire to achieve an alliance with--the "democratic" imperialist powers, Stalin was absolutely opposed to revolution in Spain--even if this meant that fascist victory was the alternative. The Great Organizer of Defeats was also the Butcher of the Spanish Revolution.
But the responsibility for the debacle does not stop here. Nin and the other leaders of the Communist Left had once fought for the class independence of the proletariat. At one time they were a larger party than the Spanish CP itself. But by capitulating to the popular front, these centrists were as responsible for the defeat of the Spanish revolution as Stalin. Had they known how to swim against the stream in moments when the popular front had mass support they could have earned the leadership of the workers movement when the masses later came to see that they had been betrayed. As it was the POUM went along with the betrayals, protesting only when it was too late.
The Popular Front in World War II
It is remarkable that in Davidson's attack on Trotskyism, in addition to virtually ignoring the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the ignominious defeat of Stalin's policies in Germany, he does not mention Stalin's policies in Spain and France at all. And with good reason! But as a good Stalinist he must defend the popular front somehow, preferably with a more popular example. He chose World War II. According to the Stalinists, this was a war against fascism and in defense of the Soviet fatherland. Their political conclusion was a broad popular front "including even the temporary and wavering allies to be found in the camp of the bourgeois-democratic capitalist governments" (Guardian, 9 May 1973).
Davidson gives a somewhat accurate account of the Trotskyist position on the war, presuming that nobody could have opposed the great anti-fascist crusade except counterrevolutionary Trotskyists. But while the Stalinist policy was certainly more popular at the time, it will not wash so easily with a new generation of worker-militants who have far less illusions about the "democratic" character of U.S. imperialism. The Trotskyist position on the war was revolutionary defeatism in the capitalist countries in this inter-imperialist war. At the same time they gave unconditional support to the military defense of the Soviet Union. This was no academic question, for Trotsky fought a sharp battle against the Shachtman group (in the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party) which was opposed to defense of the USSR, and eventually left the SWP taking 40 percent of the membership with it.
During the war the numerically weak Trotskyist cadre by and large carried out an internationalist line, despite social-patriotic bulges in some of the sections. The French section, for instance, organized a Trotskyist cell in the German navy. In the process, however, many of the leaders of the Fourth International were executed either by the Nazis or, like Nin in Spain, at the hands of the Stalinists. In the U.S. the SWP concentrated its work on fighting the no strike agreement supported by the CIO leadership and the CP.
The Stalinists had the opposite policy. According to CPUSA leader Earl Browder:
"In the United States we have to win the war under the capitalist system....Therefore, we have to find out how to make the capitalist system work....We have to help the capitalists to learn how to run their system."
The Daily Worker of 25 December 1941 implemented this policy by hailing the CIO no-strike pledge as a "definite contribution to national unity." What this meant in practice was strike-breaking. During the 1943 mine workers' strike, CP labor leader William Z. Foster traveled the Pennsylvania mining districts trying to organize scabs and a "back-to-work" movement. On the West Coast, CP-sympathizer Bridges of the ILWU called for speed-up.
Thus throughout the 1930's and 1940's the popular front policy led to the identical practical result: strikebreaking and counterrevolution. The strangulation of the Spanish revolution, the defeat of the French general strike, scabbing in the U.S. miners' strike--these were the fruits of class collaboration. Drawing the logical conclusion, Stalin made another concession to his bourgeois friends by dissolving the Communist International in 1943 because it hindered a united effort to win the war!
When Polemic Ruled The Leftist Life- Trotskyism vs. Stalinism In It Maoism Phase, Circa 1973 -Carl Davidson's "Left in Form, Right in Essence:The national liberation struggle"
Markin comment on this series:
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
*********
Carl Davidson's "Left in Form, Right in Essence:The national liberation struggle"
“The strength of Marxism,” writes Leon Trotsky in The Third International After Lenin, “lies in its ability to foretell.”
Trotsky made the remark in a 1928 commentary on the Chinese revolution. In the same work he also made a number of predictions which, if he is measured by his own standard, place him considerably outside and opposed to the camp of those who deserve to be called Marxists.
Everyone knows, for instance, of the magnificent and heroic role of the Chinese peasant masses as the main force of the revolution, as the backbone of the Red Army and, under the proletarian leadership of the Chinese Communist party, as a vital component part of socialist construction in China today.
What did Trotsky “foretell?”
“Numerically the Chinese peasantry constitutes an even more overwhelming mass than the Russian peasantry,” he writes in the same work. “But ... the Chinese peasantry is even less capable of playing a leading role than the Russian At present this is no longer a matter of theoretical forecast, but a fact verified completely in all its aspects.”
It is also a matter of fact that the Chinese revolution was characterized by a protracted period of dual power for nearly two decades. “Red political power,” sustained by the Red Army and organized by the CPC, was established in a number of liberated zones stretching over vast areas and incorporating scores of millions of people. The governments of the base areas rallied the masses and step-by-step carried out the democratic tasks of the revolution, including land reform and the struggle against the Japanese imperialists.
New Democracy
Mao Tsetung termed the character of the state power and economy in these areas as “new democracy,” or a proletarian-led “dictatorship of all revolutionary classes over the counterrevolutionaries and traitors.” Their existence was seen as the first stage of the Chinese revolution, which would be completed in the main when they were extended over the entire country. At that time the revolution would immediately and uninterruptedly pass over to its second stage of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Such a development was possible, Mao said, because of the moribund character of imperialism and the fact that the October revolution in 1917 had placed the bourgeois-democratic revolutions in the colonial countries on the side of the proletarian socialist world revolution. “It is no longer a revolution of the old type,” Mao stated in 1940, “led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat ...” What Mao had done, in effect, was to creatively apply and further develop Lenin’s theory of the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” to the concrete conditions in China.
Again, what did Trotsky “foretell?”
The formula of the democratic dictatorship has hopelessly outlived its usefulness ... the third Chinese revolution, despite the great backwardness of China, or more correctly, because of this great backwardness as compared with Russia, will not have a “democratic” period, not even such a six-month period as the October Revolution had (November 1917 to July 1918) but it will be compelled from the very outset to effect the most decisive shake-up and abolition of bourgeois property in city and village.
Lashing out at “some metaphysics-mongers plus a few Trotskyites who, brandishing their pens like lances, are tilting in all directions and creating bedlam,” Mao said in a 1940 summary:
It is a utopian view rejected by true revolutionaries to say that the democratic revolution does not have a specific task and period of its own but can be merged and accomplished simultaneously with another task, i.e., the socialist task (which can only be carried out in another period), and this is what they call “accomplishing both at one stroke.”
History has proved Mao correct. But rather than face the bankruptcy of their mentor, the present-day Trotskyists are reduced to slandering the Chinese revolution and rewriting history in a manner worthy of the Kuomintang. The U.S. Socialist Workers party’s 1955 resolution on the Chinese revolution, for instance, sums up the new democratic period that mobilized the Chinese masses to resist Japan and to future victories against Chiang Kai-shek in the following manner:
After the defeat of the second Chinese revolution, they withdrew from the cities and established an armed peasant base. For a span of over 20 years, they used this armed power to rule over the backward and scattered peasant masses. In this manner the uncontrolled, cynical, self-willed bureaucracy consolidated. They applied to the revolution the methods of deceit and ultimatism, in order, at every stage, to safeguard their interests, their power, their privileges. Each success rendered them more contemptuous and fearful of the masses, more convinced they could cheat the class struggle with impunity.
Contrary to the SWP, however, this was the most daring and dramatic period in Chinese history. Hundreds of millions of Chinese, inspired by the leadership of Mao Tsetung and the CPC, “stood up” and turned over centuries of feudal domination. Tens of thousands flocked from the Kuomintang areas to the liberated zones, where the CPC had established, for the first time, an uncorrupted and democratic system of rule that, by all accounts, won the hearts and minds of the Chinese people. By all accounts, that is, except three: those of the Chiang Kai-shek reactionaries, the Japanese fascists and the Trotskyists.
Given its evaluation of the CPC, how does the SWP think the proletarian dictatorship ever managed to come to be in China? Apart from being counter-revolutionary, the reasoning is nothing short of bizarre. By their logic, it could only have been done spontaneously by the peasants. without the leading role of the proletariat, in opposition to the CPC every step of the way and, most decisively, because of Soviet prestige and the U.S. invasion of Korea!
SWP hits “Mao & Co.”
“Throughout the revolution,” states the SWP resolution, “Mao & Co. continued to impose arbitrary restrictions and limits upon its course. The agrarian reform was carried out ‘in stages’ and was completed only when the assault of American imperialism stimulated the opposition of the landlords during and after Korea. The Chinese Stalinists were able to ride into power because the Chinese working class had been demoralized by the continuous defeats it suffered during and after the second Chinese revolution, and. by the deliberate policy of the CPC, which subordinated the cities, above all, the proletariat, to the military struggle in the countryside and thereby blocked the emergence of the workers as an independent political force. The CPC thus appeared in the eyes of the masses as the only organization with political cadres and knowledge, backed, moreover, by military force.”
The SWP has another interesting facet. It characterizes the periods of 1925-27 and 1936-47 as years of “Maoist crimes.” What happened between 1928 and 1935? Why does this period get off the hook? One reason could be that this was the time when Mao still did not have hegemony within the CPC, when its central committee was dominated by the “three ‘left’ lines,” most disastrously by the ultra-leftism of the Li Li-san line.
Li Li-san’s attack
Li Li-san attacked Mao for “right opportunism” because he made distinctions between his enemies, because he didn’t oppose the entire bourgeoisie all at once, because he built rural base areas rather than launching frontal attacks on the cities all at once, and because Mao refused to expropriate the millions of “rich” peasants and petit bourgeoisie and “force” them into the revolution. Trotsky would have agreed. “The drive on the rich peasants,” he stated in 1923, “will be the first and not the second step of the Chinese October.” The SWP would have sympathized with Li Li-san, too. “The armies and regime of Chiang,” states their resolution, “could have been knocked down like rotten pieces of wood had the CPC at any time summoned the masses in the cities to rise.”
What was the cumulative result of the “three ‘left’ lines” in China? Disaster. All except one of more than a dozen base areas were lost. The Red Army, which Mao’s influence had carefully built up. was reduced to a fragment of its former size and power. The situation was only reversed by Mao’s assumption of leadership and his political direction of the unprecedented epic of the Long March.
How could Trotsky be so mistaken that his views led both him and his followers into the camp of counter-reVolution? The essence of the matter is found in Trotsky’s liquidation of the national question.
“What is the most important, the fundamental idea of our theses?” Lenin asked at the Comintern’s Second Congress. “The distinction between oppressed nations and oppressing nations. We emphasize this distinction – in contrast to the Second International and bourgeois democracy.
The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonies and backward countries,” he also noted, “but must not merge with it, and must unfailingly preserve the independence of the proletarian movement ...”
Trotsky’s view
Trotsky made the same distinction, all right, hut arrived at the opposite conclusion: “The Russian bourgeoisie was the bourgeoisie of an imperialist oppressor state; the Chinese bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie of an oppressed colonial country. The overthrow of feudal Tsarism was a progressive task in old Russia. The overthrow of the imperialist yoke is a progressive historical task in China. However. The conduct of the Chinese bourgeoisie in relation to imperialism, the proletariat and the peasantry, was not more revolutionary than the attitude of the Russian bourgeoisie towards Tsarism and the revolutionary classes in Russia, but, if anything, viler and more reactionary. That is the only way to pose the question.”
Didn’t the Chinese national bourgeoisie at times conduct armed struggle against the imperialists? Yes, Trotsky notes, but then countered this by stating that the Russian capitalists, too, fought foreign imperialists. Trotsky forgets one “minor” point. The Russian capitalists fought in an inter-imperialist war to subjugate backward nations; the Chinese fought a war of national liberation.
Rejects alliance
Despite the experience of the Chinese revolution, the present-day Trotskyists continue to uphold their reactionary views. “Any perspective of collaborating with the ‘national’ bourgeoisie or certain of its so-called progressive sectors must be rejected,” states the resolutions of the 1968 World Congress of the so-called Fourth International. “Parallel to this, all equivocal conceptions or formulas on the nature of the revolution such as ‘national democracy,’ ‘people’s democracy,’ ‘anti-imperialist revolution,’ or ‘bloc of four classes,’ which have been irretrievably refuted ... must be rejected.”
This is the real reason why the SWP refused to support the political program of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam and stood with Washington in their refusal to support the demand, “Sign the Treaty Now!”
As succinctly stated in Forward Along the Path Charted By Karl Marx, written by the Vietnamese revolutionary Truong Chinh, the Vietnamese revolution is precisely a two-stage revolution, passing through a “new-type bourgeois-democratic revolution,” comprising at that stage an alliance of “four revolutionary forces,” including the “national bourgeoisie.” It has conducted the “national democratic” revolution in the liberated zones, conducted a people’s war based on the principle of self- reliance and on its completion, will uninterruptedly pass over to the socialist revolution.
Hiding behind “leftism”
The SWP opposes all this as so much “counterrevolution,” but has tried to hide its real views on Vietnam from the masses of anti-imperialist activists behind “left” phrases. For the SWP to come out in the open with its views on the line summed up by Truong Thinh would only lead to a greater self-exposure of~the renegade character of the Trotskyist line.
“The Trotskyite theory of permanent revolution,” states the Albanian commentator Agim Popa, “is also the theory of the negation of the national movement in the development of the revolutionary, movement, the theory of the overestimation of the external factor and the negation of the internal factor as decisive in the revolution and, in the last analysis, a theory of the ‘export’ of revolution.” These concepts also apply to the Trotskyist line on China’s view of the united front and the cultural revolution.
No question today, 2011 today, Marxists in this wicked old world are as scarce as hen’s teeth. Leninists and Trotskyists even fewer. And to be sure there are so many open social and political wounds in the world from the struggle against imperialism in places like Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, just to name the obvious America imperial adventures that come quickly off the tip of the tongue, to the struggles in America just for working people to keep heads above water in the riptide of rightist reaction on the questions of unemployment, unionism, social services, racial inequality and the like that it is almost hard to know where to start. Nevertheless, however dismal the situation may seem, the need for political clarity, for polemic between leftist tendencies, is as pressing today as it was going back to Marx’s time. Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, after all, is nothing but a long polemic against all the various misguided notions of socialist reconstruction of society of their day. And Marxists were as scarce as hen’s teeth then, as well.
When I first came under the influence of Marx in the early 1970s, as I started my search for some kind of strategy for systemic social change after floundering around with liberalism, left-liberalism, and soft social-democracy, one of the things that impressed me while reading the classics was the hard polemical edge to the writings. That same thing impressed me with Lenin and Trotsky (although as the “prince of the pamphleteers” I found that Trotsky was the more fluent writer of the two). That edge, and the fact that they all spent more time, much more time, polemicizing against other leftists than with bourgeois democrats in order to clarify the tasks confronting revolutionaries. And, frankly, I miss that give and take that is noticeably absent from today’s leftist scene. Or is dismissed as so much ill-will, malice, or sectarian hair-splitting when what we need to do is “make nice” with each other. There actually is a time to make nice, in a way, it is called the united front in order for the many to fight on specific issues. Unless there is a basic for a revolutionary regroupment which, frankly, I do not see on the horizon then this is proper vehicle, and will achieve all our immediate aims in the process.
So call me sentimental but I am rather happy to post these entries that represent the old time (1973, now old time) polemics between the Spartacist brand of Trotskyism and the now defunct Guardian trend of Maoism that the now far less radical Carl Davidson was then defending. Many of the issues, political tendencies, and organizations mentioned may have passed from the political scene but the broader questions of revolutionary strategy, from the implications of Trotsky’ s theory of permanent revolution to the various guises of the popular front still haunt the leftist night. Argue on.
*********
Carl Davidson's "Left in Form, Right in Essence:The national liberation struggle"
“The strength of Marxism,” writes Leon Trotsky in The Third International After Lenin, “lies in its ability to foretell.”
Trotsky made the remark in a 1928 commentary on the Chinese revolution. In the same work he also made a number of predictions which, if he is measured by his own standard, place him considerably outside and opposed to the camp of those who deserve to be called Marxists.
Everyone knows, for instance, of the magnificent and heroic role of the Chinese peasant masses as the main force of the revolution, as the backbone of the Red Army and, under the proletarian leadership of the Chinese Communist party, as a vital component part of socialist construction in China today.
What did Trotsky “foretell?”
“Numerically the Chinese peasantry constitutes an even more overwhelming mass than the Russian peasantry,” he writes in the same work. “But ... the Chinese peasantry is even less capable of playing a leading role than the Russian At present this is no longer a matter of theoretical forecast, but a fact verified completely in all its aspects.”
It is also a matter of fact that the Chinese revolution was characterized by a protracted period of dual power for nearly two decades. “Red political power,” sustained by the Red Army and organized by the CPC, was established in a number of liberated zones stretching over vast areas and incorporating scores of millions of people. The governments of the base areas rallied the masses and step-by-step carried out the democratic tasks of the revolution, including land reform and the struggle against the Japanese imperialists.
New Democracy
Mao Tsetung termed the character of the state power and economy in these areas as “new democracy,” or a proletarian-led “dictatorship of all revolutionary classes over the counterrevolutionaries and traitors.” Their existence was seen as the first stage of the Chinese revolution, which would be completed in the main when they were extended over the entire country. At that time the revolution would immediately and uninterruptedly pass over to its second stage of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Such a development was possible, Mao said, because of the moribund character of imperialism and the fact that the October revolution in 1917 had placed the bourgeois-democratic revolutions in the colonial countries on the side of the proletarian socialist world revolution. “It is no longer a revolution of the old type,” Mao stated in 1940, “led by the bourgeoisie with the aim of establishing a capitalist society and a state under bourgeois dictatorship. It belongs to the new type of revolution led by the proletariat ...” What Mao had done, in effect, was to creatively apply and further develop Lenin’s theory of the “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” to the concrete conditions in China.
Again, what did Trotsky “foretell?”
The formula of the democratic dictatorship has hopelessly outlived its usefulness ... the third Chinese revolution, despite the great backwardness of China, or more correctly, because of this great backwardness as compared with Russia, will not have a “democratic” period, not even such a six-month period as the October Revolution had (November 1917 to July 1918) but it will be compelled from the very outset to effect the most decisive shake-up and abolition of bourgeois property in city and village.
Lashing out at “some metaphysics-mongers plus a few Trotskyites who, brandishing their pens like lances, are tilting in all directions and creating bedlam,” Mao said in a 1940 summary:
It is a utopian view rejected by true revolutionaries to say that the democratic revolution does not have a specific task and period of its own but can be merged and accomplished simultaneously with another task, i.e., the socialist task (which can only be carried out in another period), and this is what they call “accomplishing both at one stroke.”
History has proved Mao correct. But rather than face the bankruptcy of their mentor, the present-day Trotskyists are reduced to slandering the Chinese revolution and rewriting history in a manner worthy of the Kuomintang. The U.S. Socialist Workers party’s 1955 resolution on the Chinese revolution, for instance, sums up the new democratic period that mobilized the Chinese masses to resist Japan and to future victories against Chiang Kai-shek in the following manner:
After the defeat of the second Chinese revolution, they withdrew from the cities and established an armed peasant base. For a span of over 20 years, they used this armed power to rule over the backward and scattered peasant masses. In this manner the uncontrolled, cynical, self-willed bureaucracy consolidated. They applied to the revolution the methods of deceit and ultimatism, in order, at every stage, to safeguard their interests, their power, their privileges. Each success rendered them more contemptuous and fearful of the masses, more convinced they could cheat the class struggle with impunity.
Contrary to the SWP, however, this was the most daring and dramatic period in Chinese history. Hundreds of millions of Chinese, inspired by the leadership of Mao Tsetung and the CPC, “stood up” and turned over centuries of feudal domination. Tens of thousands flocked from the Kuomintang areas to the liberated zones, where the CPC had established, for the first time, an uncorrupted and democratic system of rule that, by all accounts, won the hearts and minds of the Chinese people. By all accounts, that is, except three: those of the Chiang Kai-shek reactionaries, the Japanese fascists and the Trotskyists.
Given its evaluation of the CPC, how does the SWP think the proletarian dictatorship ever managed to come to be in China? Apart from being counter-revolutionary, the reasoning is nothing short of bizarre. By their logic, it could only have been done spontaneously by the peasants. without the leading role of the proletariat, in opposition to the CPC every step of the way and, most decisively, because of Soviet prestige and the U.S. invasion of Korea!
SWP hits “Mao & Co.”
“Throughout the revolution,” states the SWP resolution, “Mao & Co. continued to impose arbitrary restrictions and limits upon its course. The agrarian reform was carried out ‘in stages’ and was completed only when the assault of American imperialism stimulated the opposition of the landlords during and after Korea. The Chinese Stalinists were able to ride into power because the Chinese working class had been demoralized by the continuous defeats it suffered during and after the second Chinese revolution, and. by the deliberate policy of the CPC, which subordinated the cities, above all, the proletariat, to the military struggle in the countryside and thereby blocked the emergence of the workers as an independent political force. The CPC thus appeared in the eyes of the masses as the only organization with political cadres and knowledge, backed, moreover, by military force.”
The SWP has another interesting facet. It characterizes the periods of 1925-27 and 1936-47 as years of “Maoist crimes.” What happened between 1928 and 1935? Why does this period get off the hook? One reason could be that this was the time when Mao still did not have hegemony within the CPC, when its central committee was dominated by the “three ‘left’ lines,” most disastrously by the ultra-leftism of the Li Li-san line.
Li Li-san’s attack
Li Li-san attacked Mao for “right opportunism” because he made distinctions between his enemies, because he didn’t oppose the entire bourgeoisie all at once, because he built rural base areas rather than launching frontal attacks on the cities all at once, and because Mao refused to expropriate the millions of “rich” peasants and petit bourgeoisie and “force” them into the revolution. Trotsky would have agreed. “The drive on the rich peasants,” he stated in 1923, “will be the first and not the second step of the Chinese October.” The SWP would have sympathized with Li Li-san, too. “The armies and regime of Chiang,” states their resolution, “could have been knocked down like rotten pieces of wood had the CPC at any time summoned the masses in the cities to rise.”
What was the cumulative result of the “three ‘left’ lines” in China? Disaster. All except one of more than a dozen base areas were lost. The Red Army, which Mao’s influence had carefully built up. was reduced to a fragment of its former size and power. The situation was only reversed by Mao’s assumption of leadership and his political direction of the unprecedented epic of the Long March.
How could Trotsky be so mistaken that his views led both him and his followers into the camp of counter-reVolution? The essence of the matter is found in Trotsky’s liquidation of the national question.
“What is the most important, the fundamental idea of our theses?” Lenin asked at the Comintern’s Second Congress. “The distinction between oppressed nations and oppressing nations. We emphasize this distinction – in contrast to the Second International and bourgeois democracy.
The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonies and backward countries,” he also noted, “but must not merge with it, and must unfailingly preserve the independence of the proletarian movement ...”
Trotsky’s view
Trotsky made the same distinction, all right, hut arrived at the opposite conclusion: “The Russian bourgeoisie was the bourgeoisie of an imperialist oppressor state; the Chinese bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie of an oppressed colonial country. The overthrow of feudal Tsarism was a progressive task in old Russia. The overthrow of the imperialist yoke is a progressive historical task in China. However. The conduct of the Chinese bourgeoisie in relation to imperialism, the proletariat and the peasantry, was not more revolutionary than the attitude of the Russian bourgeoisie towards Tsarism and the revolutionary classes in Russia, but, if anything, viler and more reactionary. That is the only way to pose the question.”
Didn’t the Chinese national bourgeoisie at times conduct armed struggle against the imperialists? Yes, Trotsky notes, but then countered this by stating that the Russian capitalists, too, fought foreign imperialists. Trotsky forgets one “minor” point. The Russian capitalists fought in an inter-imperialist war to subjugate backward nations; the Chinese fought a war of national liberation.
Rejects alliance
Despite the experience of the Chinese revolution, the present-day Trotskyists continue to uphold their reactionary views. “Any perspective of collaborating with the ‘national’ bourgeoisie or certain of its so-called progressive sectors must be rejected,” states the resolutions of the 1968 World Congress of the so-called Fourth International. “Parallel to this, all equivocal conceptions or formulas on the nature of the revolution such as ‘national democracy,’ ‘people’s democracy,’ ‘anti-imperialist revolution,’ or ‘bloc of four classes,’ which have been irretrievably refuted ... must be rejected.”
This is the real reason why the SWP refused to support the political program of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam and stood with Washington in their refusal to support the demand, “Sign the Treaty Now!”
As succinctly stated in Forward Along the Path Charted By Karl Marx, written by the Vietnamese revolutionary Truong Chinh, the Vietnamese revolution is precisely a two-stage revolution, passing through a “new-type bourgeois-democratic revolution,” comprising at that stage an alliance of “four revolutionary forces,” including the “national bourgeoisie.” It has conducted the “national democratic” revolution in the liberated zones, conducted a people’s war based on the principle of self- reliance and on its completion, will uninterruptedly pass over to the socialist revolution.
Hiding behind “leftism”
The SWP opposes all this as so much “counterrevolution,” but has tried to hide its real views on Vietnam from the masses of anti-imperialist activists behind “left” phrases. For the SWP to come out in the open with its views on the line summed up by Truong Thinh would only lead to a greater self-exposure of~the renegade character of the Trotskyist line.
“The Trotskyite theory of permanent revolution,” states the Albanian commentator Agim Popa, “is also the theory of the negation of the national movement in the development of the revolutionary, movement, the theory of the overestimation of the external factor and the negation of the internal factor as decisive in the revolution and, in the last analysis, a theory of the ‘export’ of revolution.” These concepts also apply to the Trotskyist line on China’s view of the united front and the cultural revolution.
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