Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy May 1st website. Occupy May Day which has called for an international General Strike on May Day 2012. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
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Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Last fall there were waves of politically-motivated repressive police attacks on, and evictions of, various Occupy camp sites throughout the country including where the movement started in Zucotti (Liberty) Park. But even before the evictions and
repression escalated, questions were being asked: what is the way forward for the movement? And, from friend and foe alike, the ubiquitous what do we want. We have seen since then glimpses of organizing and action that are leading the way for the rest of us to follow: the Oakland General Strike on November 2nd, the West Coast Port Shutdown actions of December 12th, Occupy Foreclosures, including, most recently, renewed support for the struggles of the hard-pressed longshoremen in Longview, Washington. These actions show that, fundamentally, all of the strategic questions revolve around the question of power. The power, put simply, of the 99% vs. the power of the 1%.
Although the 99% holds enormous power -all wealth is generated, and the
current society is built and maintained through, the collective labor
(paid and unpaid) of the 99%-, we seldom exercise this vast collective power in our own interests. Too often, abetted and egged on by the 1%, we fruitlessly fight among ourselves driven by racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, occupational elitism, geographical prejudice, heterosexism, and other forms of division, oppression and prejudice.
This consciously debilitating strategy on its part is necessary, along with its control of politics, the courts, the prisons, the cops, and the military in order for the 1% to maintain control over us in order not to have to worry about their power and wealth. Their ill-gotten power is only assured by us, actively or passively, working against ours our best interests. Moreover many of us are not today fully aware of, nor organized to utilize, the vast collective power we have. The result is that many of us - people of color, women, GLBTQ, immigrants, those with less formal educational credentials, those in less socially respected occupations or unemployed, the homeless, and the just plain desperate- deal with double and triple forms of oppression and societal prejudice.
Currently the state of the economy has hit all of us hard, although as usual the less able to face the effects are hit the hardest like racial minorities, the elderly, the homeless and those down on their luck due to prolonged un and under- employment. In short, there are too many people out of work; wage rates have has barely kept up with rising costs or gone backwards to near historic post-World War II lows in real time terms; social services like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security have continued to be cut; our influence on their broken, broken for us, government has eroded; and our civil liberties have been seemingly daily attacked en masse. These trends have has been going on while the elites of this country, and of the world, have captured an increasing share of wealth; have had in essence a tax holiday for the past few decades; have viciously attacked our organizations of popular defense such as our public and private unions and community organizations; and have increase their power over us through manipulating their political system even more in their favor than previously.
The way forward, as we can demonstrate by building for the May Day actions, must involve showing our popular power against that of the entrenched elite. But the form of our power, reflecting our different concepts of governing, must be different from the elite’s. Where they have created powerful capitalist profit-driven top down organizations in order to dominate, control, exploit and oppress we must build and exercise bottom-up power in order to cooperate, liberate and collectively empower each other. We need to organize ourselves collectively and apart from these top down power relationships in our communities, schools and workplaces in order to to fight for our real interests. This must include a forthright rejection of the 1%’s attempts, honed after long use, to divide and conquer in order to rule us. A rejection of racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, elitism and other forms of oppression, and, importantly, a rejection of attempts by their electoral parties, mainly the Democrats and Republicans but others as well, powerful special interest groups, and others to co-opt and control our movement.
The Occupy freedom of assembly-driven encampments initially built the mass movement and brought a global spotlight to the bedrock economic and social concerns of the 99%. They inspired many of us, including those most oppressed, provided a sense of hope and solidarity with our fellow citizens and the international 99%, and brought the question of economic justice and the problems of inequality and political voiceless-ness grudgingly back into mainstream political conversation. Moreover they highlighted the need for the creation of cultures, societies, and institutions of direct democracy based on "power with"- not "power over"- each other; served as convivial spaces for sharing ideas and planning action; and in some camps, they even provided a temporary space for those who needed a home. Last fall the camp occupations served a fundamental role in the movement, but it is now time to move beyond the camp mentality and use our energies to struggle to start an offensive against the power of the 1%. On our terms.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Put the unemployed to work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
These actions, given the ravages of the capitalist economic system on individual lives, the continuing feelings of hopelessness felt by many, the newness of many of us to collective action, and the slender ties to past class and social struggles will, in many places, necessarily be a symbolic show of power. But let us take and use the day as a wake up call by a risen people.
And perhaps just as important as this year’s May Day itself , the massive organizing and outreach efforts in the months leading up to May 1st will allow us the opportunity to talk to our co-workers, families, neighbors, communities, and friends about the issues confronting us, the source of our power, the need for us to stand up to the attacks we are facing, the need to confront the various oppressions that keep most of us down in one way or another and keep all of us divided, and the need for us to stand in solidarity with each other in order to fight for our collective interests. In short, as one of the street slogans of movement says –“they say cut back, we say fight back.” We can build our collective consciousness, capacity, and confidence through this process; and come out stronger because of it.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out in Boston on May Day 2012.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
The Latest From The “Occupy May 1st” Website- March Separately, Strike Together –International General Strike- Down Tools! Down Computers! Down Books!- All Out On May Day 2012- Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston (And Eveywhere) -Stand Up!-Fight Back!
All Out For The Smedley Butler Brigade Veteran For Peace-Initiated Saint Patrick's Peace Parade, Sunday March 18th In South Boston!
All Out For The Smedley Butler Brigade Veteran For Peace-Initiated Saint Patrick's Peace Parade, Sunday March 18th In South Boston!
From The “West Coast Port Shutdown” Website-This Is Class War, We Say No More!- Support The Defense Of The Longview, Washington Longshoremen!
Click on the headline to link to the West Coast Port Shutdown website.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Boston Commune! Take The Offensive!- Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on that date this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as well get a better grip of the important of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
•
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing
a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on that date this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as well get a better grip of the important of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
•
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing
a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
*Out In The Be-Bop Night- In The Time Of The High School Hop, Circa 1960
Recently I have been in something of 1960s high school remembrance mode, mainly as a result of evaluating the influence of the “beats” (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady and the usual suspects), on my youthful political (not much), social (a fair amount), and cultural (lots) development, but also as a result of re-watching George Lucas’ American Graffiti, a 1960s coming-of-age film that fits comfortably in my own high school mode. I have reviewed the film as a whole elsewhere in this space but I wish to make a special point about the high school dance segment of the film (“Not Ready For Prime Time Class Struggle-The Baby-Boomer Birth Of The Search For The Blue-Pink American Western Night- “American Graffiti”-Film Review”, dated September, 8, 2010).
George Lucas’s inclusion of a local high school dance segment in this film was inspired. The segment is not central to the action, such as it is, of the film, but it certainly is calculated to evoke almost universal nostalgia for anyone (meaning almost everyone these days) who has very had to deal, in one way or another, with the question of this time-honored (if hoary) high school tradition. Each generation probably has its own take on what this experience was like, but most of the real action was behind the scenes. And in that sense the film caught the three high points. Women can fill in own blanks in reverse, but here are some of them from a man’s perspective.
First of all stag (single no way, with the guys, or not at all, although how many and who was always up for grabs, especially on the important “shotgun” question) or on a date (double-date, somebody’s left out sister, your sister, anything to not be a wallflower, a sickly wallflower among the ‘losers’ to boot, as those dance moments ticked slowly, so slowly by)? Many an ungodly hour was spent on that date question mulling over, no, not what you think, who to invite, no that was usually the easy part, but rather getting up enough nerve to make the call to make the invitation. And check this out, on more than one occasion, and I am sure the same was true for you, somehow your intelligence network had failed and it turns out that the certain she, your dreamy certain she, damn, her, had a “steady.” Christ, what a waste of time.
Secondly, grooming preparations- I will propose here, in best scientific method form (or at least quasi- scientific form for that is all this thing will hold) that there was an inverse relationship to the amount of time that one spent on this work, you know, shower, shave (in those days you had to, if you could), comb always at the ready, a little something for the underarms and some men’s fragrance to give the smell of being the least bit civilized, and the answer to the stag/date question. In this sense the inverse is the extra time spent in order to attract that certain she (remember women just reverse the gender, or today everyone fill in your own preference experience) so when the next goddam dance or mixed social event came up you were dated up with that certain she and you could just throw a little fatal after-shave on and fly out the door. Oh, by the way, I refuse, I totally refuse to go over the number of time that I cooled my heels while that occasional captured “she” made her grooming preparations, first date or any date, even if it was just to make preparations to the drugstore soda fountain. Mercifully, on that score I did not have a sister to scream at or else I might not be writing this screed today, at least this side of a cellblock.
Thirdly, the gathering of the dough, the always short of dough problem that plagued our poor working class household and that I noticed did not seem to be any kind of problem in that California suburban valley locale of “American Graffiti”. Money for exotic appearing (hey, it was California, remember, even the fast food drive-ins had to be retro-fine) double-dip hamburgers (with fries), cherry cokes, for two, for two, my god, plus some gas money, plus, plus, plus, you know a guy has got expenses in this world. The real problem was whether to borrow from parents, or pick up some chattel slave job. Getting it from the parents always came with some awful terms, usually worthy of some international diplomatic accord, and more grief than it was worth, unless I was desperate, or girl-hungry. Oh ya, and you had to hear the obligatory we do this and that to keep a roof over your head along with the bucks. You know the drill, probably.
And while we are on the subject of parents the inevitable question comes up about what time one should be home by. They say X, and make that loan, that hard-scrabble hideous loan that has more conditions and enforcements than a loan shark, contingent on the observance of a “reasonable” (parent reasonable) hour. I say Y, because in the back of my mind I, if I get lucky (no further discussion necessary, right?) then I need plenty of time and can’t be worried about curfews, or reasonable times. Come to think of it, even fifty years later, come on Ma you be reasonable (and it was always Ma on this one in our old working class neighborhoods, and maybe yours too. Dad was brought in, if he was brought in at all, at this point in our lives only for the heavy artillery stuff).
Once these preparations and battles have been settled then, and here is where American Graffiti is like from a dream, the question of transportation to the dance comes into play. Here I mean a car, and if you’ve read my review of American Graffiti you know I mean a “boss” car. You would have to go to an automobile museum to see such treasures these days. By the way don’t even utter the words public transportation for this occasion or I will think that you grew up in New York City or some place like than and that you have not really been paying attention after all my paeans to the California endless highways and the search of the elusive blue-pink great American Western night.
In any case, this car-less writer, this foot-sore, shoe leather-beaten, car-less writer, depended, sometimes cynically so, on cultivating friendships with guys who had such “boss” cars, particularly the renowned ’57 Chevy that still makes me quiver at the thought of. Needless to say, in expectation at least, of the night’s successes a stop at the local gas station for a fill-up (a couple of bucks then) check the oil and water, kick the tires and so on preceded our big entrance at the dance.
Part of the charm of the American Graffiti segment on the local high school dance is, as I have noted previously, once you get indoors it could have been anyplace U.S.A. (and I am willing to bet anytime U.S.A., as well. For this baby-boomer, that particular high school dance, could have taken place at my high school when I was a student in the early 1960s). From the throwaway crepe paper decorations that festooned the place to the ever-present gym bleachers to the chaperones to the platform the local band (a band that if it did not hit it big would go on to greater glory at our future weddings, birthday parties, and other important occasion) covering the top hits of the day performed on it was a perfect replica.
Also perfect replica were the classic boys’ attire for a casual dance, plaid or white sports shirt, chinos, stolid shoes, and short-trimmed hair (no beards, beads, bell-bottoms, its much to early in the decade for that) and for the girls blouses (or maybe sweaters, cashmere, if I recall being in fashion at the time, at least in the colder East), full swirling dresses, and, I think beehive hair-dos. Wow! Of course, perfect replica were the infinite variety of dances (frug, watusi, twist, stroll, etc) that blessed, no, twice blessed, rock and roll let us do in order to not to have to dance too waltz close. Mercy. And I cannot finish up this part without saying perfect replica hes looking at certain shes (if stag, of course, eyes straight forward if dated up, or else bloody hell) and also perfect replica wallflowers, as well.
Not filmed in American Graffiti, although a solo slow one highlighted the tensions between Steve and Laurie) Ron Howard and Cindy Williams) but ever present and certainly the subject of some comment in this space was that end of the night dance. I’ll just repeat what I have repeated elsewhere. This last dance was always one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
And after the dance? Well, I am the soul of discretion, and you should be too. Let’s put it this way. Sometimes I got home earlier than the Ma agreed time, but sometimes, not enough now that I think about it, I saw huge red suns rising up over the blue waters. Either way, my friends, worth every blessed minute of anguish, right?
George Lucas’s inclusion of a local high school dance segment in this film was inspired. The segment is not central to the action, such as it is, of the film, but it certainly is calculated to evoke almost universal nostalgia for anyone (meaning almost everyone these days) who has very had to deal, in one way or another, with the question of this time-honored (if hoary) high school tradition. Each generation probably has its own take on what this experience was like, but most of the real action was behind the scenes. And in that sense the film caught the three high points. Women can fill in own blanks in reverse, but here are some of them from a man’s perspective.
First of all stag (single no way, with the guys, or not at all, although how many and who was always up for grabs, especially on the important “shotgun” question) or on a date (double-date, somebody’s left out sister, your sister, anything to not be a wallflower, a sickly wallflower among the ‘losers’ to boot, as those dance moments ticked slowly, so slowly by)? Many an ungodly hour was spent on that date question mulling over, no, not what you think, who to invite, no that was usually the easy part, but rather getting up enough nerve to make the call to make the invitation. And check this out, on more than one occasion, and I am sure the same was true for you, somehow your intelligence network had failed and it turns out that the certain she, your dreamy certain she, damn, her, had a “steady.” Christ, what a waste of time.
Secondly, grooming preparations- I will propose here, in best scientific method form (or at least quasi- scientific form for that is all this thing will hold) that there was an inverse relationship to the amount of time that one spent on this work, you know, shower, shave (in those days you had to, if you could), comb always at the ready, a little something for the underarms and some men’s fragrance to give the smell of being the least bit civilized, and the answer to the stag/date question. In this sense the inverse is the extra time spent in order to attract that certain she (remember women just reverse the gender, or today everyone fill in your own preference experience) so when the next goddam dance or mixed social event came up you were dated up with that certain she and you could just throw a little fatal after-shave on and fly out the door. Oh, by the way, I refuse, I totally refuse to go over the number of time that I cooled my heels while that occasional captured “she” made her grooming preparations, first date or any date, even if it was just to make preparations to the drugstore soda fountain. Mercifully, on that score I did not have a sister to scream at or else I might not be writing this screed today, at least this side of a cellblock.
Thirdly, the gathering of the dough, the always short of dough problem that plagued our poor working class household and that I noticed did not seem to be any kind of problem in that California suburban valley locale of “American Graffiti”. Money for exotic appearing (hey, it was California, remember, even the fast food drive-ins had to be retro-fine) double-dip hamburgers (with fries), cherry cokes, for two, for two, my god, plus some gas money, plus, plus, plus, you know a guy has got expenses in this world. The real problem was whether to borrow from parents, or pick up some chattel slave job. Getting it from the parents always came with some awful terms, usually worthy of some international diplomatic accord, and more grief than it was worth, unless I was desperate, or girl-hungry. Oh ya, and you had to hear the obligatory we do this and that to keep a roof over your head along with the bucks. You know the drill, probably.
And while we are on the subject of parents the inevitable question comes up about what time one should be home by. They say X, and make that loan, that hard-scrabble hideous loan that has more conditions and enforcements than a loan shark, contingent on the observance of a “reasonable” (parent reasonable) hour. I say Y, because in the back of my mind I, if I get lucky (no further discussion necessary, right?) then I need plenty of time and can’t be worried about curfews, or reasonable times. Come to think of it, even fifty years later, come on Ma you be reasonable (and it was always Ma on this one in our old working class neighborhoods, and maybe yours too. Dad was brought in, if he was brought in at all, at this point in our lives only for the heavy artillery stuff).
Once these preparations and battles have been settled then, and here is where American Graffiti is like from a dream, the question of transportation to the dance comes into play. Here I mean a car, and if you’ve read my review of American Graffiti you know I mean a “boss” car. You would have to go to an automobile museum to see such treasures these days. By the way don’t even utter the words public transportation for this occasion or I will think that you grew up in New York City or some place like than and that you have not really been paying attention after all my paeans to the California endless highways and the search of the elusive blue-pink great American Western night.
In any case, this car-less writer, this foot-sore, shoe leather-beaten, car-less writer, depended, sometimes cynically so, on cultivating friendships with guys who had such “boss” cars, particularly the renowned ’57 Chevy that still makes me quiver at the thought of. Needless to say, in expectation at least, of the night’s successes a stop at the local gas station for a fill-up (a couple of bucks then) check the oil and water, kick the tires and so on preceded our big entrance at the dance.
Part of the charm of the American Graffiti segment on the local high school dance is, as I have noted previously, once you get indoors it could have been anyplace U.S.A. (and I am willing to bet anytime U.S.A., as well. For this baby-boomer, that particular high school dance, could have taken place at my high school when I was a student in the early 1960s). From the throwaway crepe paper decorations that festooned the place to the ever-present gym bleachers to the chaperones to the platform the local band (a band that if it did not hit it big would go on to greater glory at our future weddings, birthday parties, and other important occasion) covering the top hits of the day performed on it was a perfect replica.
Also perfect replica were the classic boys’ attire for a casual dance, plaid or white sports shirt, chinos, stolid shoes, and short-trimmed hair (no beards, beads, bell-bottoms, its much to early in the decade for that) and for the girls blouses (or maybe sweaters, cashmere, if I recall being in fashion at the time, at least in the colder East), full swirling dresses, and, I think beehive hair-dos. Wow! Of course, perfect replica were the infinite variety of dances (frug, watusi, twist, stroll, etc) that blessed, no, twice blessed, rock and roll let us do in order to not to have to dance too waltz close. Mercy. And I cannot finish up this part without saying perfect replica hes looking at certain shes (if stag, of course, eyes straight forward if dated up, or else bloody hell) and also perfect replica wallflowers, as well.
Not filmed in American Graffiti, although a solo slow one highlighted the tensions between Steve and Laurie) Ron Howard and Cindy Williams) but ever present and certainly the subject of some comment in this space was that end of the night dance. I’ll just repeat what I have repeated elsewhere. This last dance was always one of those slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, as I have noted before, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your sexual preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
And after the dance? Well, I am the soul of discretion, and you should be too. Let’s put it this way. Sometimes I got home earlier than the Ma agreed time, but sometimes, not enough now that I think about it, I saw huge red suns rising up over the blue waters. Either way, my friends, worth every blessed minute of anguish, right?
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-The Embryo Of An Alternate Government-Learn The Lessons Of History- From The Pages Of The French Revolution- Ernest Belfort Bax-The Last Episode of the French Revolution-Sources-Preface-Introduction
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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As part of my comment here, dated October 20, 2011, I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the “new world” we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work checks and balances form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one. In that sense previous historical models come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
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Recently (see October 22, 2011 comment above) I noted the following while arguing for the General Assembly concept as a form of alternate government using historic examples like the Paris Commune (1871), the early soviets in Russia (1905 and 1917), and the early days of the antifascist militias in the Spanish Civil War (1936-37):
“However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.”
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lesson Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
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Markin comment January 15, 2012
In several recent comments in this space (in late December) my old radical friend and alternative newspaper commentator, Josh Breslin, noted that the Occupy movement seemed to have lost energy and was , as he vividly described it, a movement of generals without an army. I, initially, argued with him about that characterization saying that this was just a period of growing pains and things would sort themselves out over the next several months. Then a series of disturbing events occurred topped off by what I will here call the “sex registry question” to make me thing that old Josh, once again, was right. Only I would characterize things, unlike Josh, as a succumbing to the circle spirit and as yet another example of the revolution devouring its own. In either case not a healthy situation.
With that said, I have long noted that although I believed that the General Assembly concept was potentially the embryo of an alternate form of government that would drive our vision for a new society there were some structural problems with the concept as practiced. Among those criticisms were the simple notions that majority rule and representative government based on political positions were concepts better suited to the struggle. Well, apparently others have, in the crucible of struggle, learned some of those lessons. Lessons that, perhaps, needed to be painfully worked through in practice before their shortcomings could be exposed. In any case this latest news from OB (consenting to a once a week strategic assembly) about a willingness to think about other governing forms is welcome news. Whether we remain generals without an army can now be hashed out but one thing seems certain this will go a long way toward breaking out of the circle spirit.
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Note on Authorities
As the principal sources that have been used in the preparation the following study may be mentioned:
(1) The careful and exhaustive Histoire de Gracchus Babeuf et du Babouvisme, largely based on hitherto unpublished documents, by M. Victor Advielle. 2 vols. (Paris, 1884).
(2) Gracchus Babeuf et le Conspiration des Egaux, by Philippe Buonarroti (Paris, 1830), a first-hand narrative by one of the principal actors in the drama he describes.
(3) Babeuf et le Socialisme en 1796, par Edouard Fleury (Paris, 1851), a book preserving some interesting details, but prejudiced and not altogether reliable.
(4) Among the contemporary sources for the history of the movement, the Copie des Pieces saisies dons le local que Babeuf occupait lors de son arrestation (Paris, Nivose, Ann. V.) occupies an important place. It consists in a volume officially published by the High Court immediately after the trial, containing a complete collection of the pieces de conviction which formed the basis of the prosecution.
(5) The collection of the numbers of Babeuf’s journals, the Journal de la Liberty de la Presse and the Tribun du Peuple, together with the few numbers of the Éclaireur, a journal published for a short time by Babeuf’s friend Sylvain Maréchal, to be found in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
Other, minor, references are given in the text.
Allusions to, and accounts of, the movement are, of course, to be found in all the journals of the time, but they are for the most part utterly prejudiced, and contain no facts of importance not given by Buonarroti or contained in the officially published documents.
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Preface
OF all the leading actors in the great drama of the French Revolution, there is probably none less known to the average reader of history than the subject of the present volume. All that has appeared in English in book form up to the present time consists, I believe, in Bronterre O’Brien’s translation of Buonaroti’s account of the Movement of the “Equals”, now long since out of print. The reason for this neglect, and for the lack of interest generally shown in Babeuf, is probably in part to be looked for in the fact that Babeuf’s public activity consisted of a kind of aftermath of the great historical events of the Revolution. The Revolution, properly speaking, had run its course before Babeuf appeared on the scene. The principal leaders were fallen or dispersed, the ragged levies of the people’s quarters of St Antoine and St Marceau had risen en masse for the last time, and had been beaten and disarmed by the forces of the new governing class that had installed itself in the seats of the old royal and feudal authorities. François Noel Babeuf, the subsequent Gracchus, played no political role of any importance while the Revolution was at its zenith. His name became first prominent in the year IV. (1795), when the Society, which later on met near the Pantheon, was formed. The usual fate of secret movements, of conspiracies, overtook Babeuf’s. It was killed by treachery – killed, as its promoters fondly believed, on the eve of success. In a word, the movement was a failure, and its memory with the great world soon tended to pass into oblivion. Nevertheless, for students of the earlier democratic movements, and of the precursors of modern Socialism, the agitation of Babeuf in the last decade of the eighteenth century must be of keen interest.
I may mention that the following monograph represents the carrying out of a wish, expressed some years before he died, of my old friend, William Morris, who thought that a clear and concise account of the Babeuf incident in English was wanted, and who urged me to undertake the task. Whether this little volume answers the requirements of the case must be left for the reader to judge.
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Introduction
To understand the history and the real significance of even the most prominent ideas of an epoch, it is necessary to realise what constitutes the mental background, as we may term it, of the period in question, for it is this that gives to the expressed ideas of a time their real significance. It has often been remarked that the same actual words or phrases may have a different meaning at different times. To take a familiar illustration – that of Dr Johnson’s well-known aphorism that “patriotism is the last resort of scoundrels.” The uneducated or half-educated man in the street of to-day would regard this mot as an attack by some “little Englander” on the Jingo or Imperialist with whom he is familiar, – the background of his mind, in the light of which he interprets it, consisting of the conditions of English politics that have grown up during the last generation. Needless to say, the expression to the mind of Dr Johnson, who first used it, had an entirely different, and in some respects even an opposite, meaning. He knew nothing of modern Imperialism, of the glorious British Empire upon which the sun never sets: what was in his mind was the antithesis, not between the advocate of an aggressive British Empire and a respecter of the rights of weaker peoples, but an advocate of the rights of the people of a given country against its ruling classes. This was the sense in which the eighteenth century, for the most part, understood the words “patriot” and “patriotism”, the great political antithesis of the eighteenth century being that between rulers and people. This is an obvious instance. But the capacity of the same form of words to express totally different meanings according to the age in which they appear, and the great danger of their entire falsification by reading into them the mind of a later period, can never be sufficiently present to the sense of the historian. Every form of ideas that belongs to a past period of history, no matter how modern it may look, we may be quite sure is not what it appears to us of the twentieth century at first sight. The intellectual background of the men who enunciated the ideas in question is so different, that the meaning present to them in the expressions used and the meaning they evoke in us cannot possibly be the same.
The above remarks apply to our estimation of eighteenth century thought generally, and, not least, to the thought of the French Revolution. To understand this thought properly, we have to investigate the conditions that reflected themselves in the mental background of the leading actors. One thing we have to do is to eliminate all conceptions having their origin in the doctrine of evolution from their mental framework. This it is somewhat difficult for the present generation effectually to accomplish. Our whole thought is so bound up with the notion of development, that it is difficult for us to realise the intellectual attitude of the man of intelligence to whom this idea has never presented itself. Yet, needless to say, to the eighteenth century thinker in general it was entirely absent. Very noticeable is this in the theories of society prevalent during the eighteenth century, and that formed the groundwork of the thought of the Revolution. The main principle upon which it all turned was that of conscious and arbitrary construction. Society, as it existed, was conceived as the outcome of a contract made in remote ages, and which might be unmade or altered at the will of its individual members at any time. The classics still bulked largely in the cultured man’s outlook on history, politics, and the world in general. In seventeenth-century England this was modified by the place the English Bible held in the imagination of all classes. Hence in the British political struggles of the seventeenth century we find the Old Testament the great storehouse of instances on which the popular imagination falls back. In France of the eighteenth century, on the contrary, the classical tradition held undisturbed sway, alike with the cultivated and the popular intelligence. The very names indicate this. In the place of Biblical names we have Anacharsis Clootz, Anaxagoras Chaumette, Gracchus Babeuf, and the like. Everyone with the smallest smattering of education talked Roman History, just as in the English political movements of the preceding century everyone talked Old Testament. As for the literary movement in France, this was derived mainly from English sources. Hobbes, Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Mandeville, Bolingbroke, and other less known English writers contributed to build up the theories of Condillac, Helvetius, D’Holbach, Voltaire, Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists.
Political and social ideas of the time were naturally dominated by the leading political forms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These were absolutism, working through a bureaucracy, on the one side, and an all but rightless people, composed more or less of a downtrodden peasantry in the country, and a middle – class, still largely composed of small masters, in the towns. A proletariat in the modern sense, which implies the existence of the great machine-industry, did not exist. But a population, not as yet relatively very numerous except in a few large towns, of journey-men and labourers, which was destined to become the groundwork of the modern proletariat, did undoubtedly obtain, but obtained only as an economic appendix of the small middle-class [in modern Marxist terms: petty bourgeoisie] to which reference has been made. The old feudal landowning class, which had come down from medieval times, had now in the main become an absentee landowning class, dancing attendance at courts and growing financially poorer. While still retaining many of its feudal privileges, it functioned for the most part through its members holding positions in the bureaucratic hierarchy which centred in the Crown. As a consequence of the foregoing conditions, the leading political category of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was that of Ruler and Subject. Similarly, the leading economic category was that of Rich and Poor. It may be said, of course, that these categories obtain also to-day. But they are no longer dominant as categories in their bare abstractness, as they were in the eighteenth century. In the Western Europe of modern times absolutism has uniformly broken down in favour of some form of popular representation. Hence there is, in theory at least, no longer a pure and unadulterated Ruler in the old sense, any more than there is a pure and unadulterated Subject in the old sense. In a word, with the dominance in the political sphere of some form of Constitutionalism, the edge of the old antithesis has become blunted. It has no longer, in its old and bare form, the incisive force that it once had.
Again, the corresponding leading antithesis of the eighteenth century in economics, that of Rich and Poor, has likewise in a measure lost its pregnancy in the modern world. The rich are no longer an approximately homogeneous class over against the poor, as also a relatively homogeneous section of society. There is no one class of rich men more or less completely dominating the economic situation of to-day, as did the French noble and higher ecclesiastic of the ancien régime. In the most recent developments of modern Capitalism, it is true that the financial Capitalist takes the lead. But he does not, as yet, completely dominate the economic situation. The Industrial Capitalist or Syndicate plays a scarcely less important part in the economic system of the modern world, while the old Landowner, who has come down from the ages of feudalism, still continues to exist, even if he no longer flourishes as of yore. The interests, moreover, of the Landowner as such, and of the Industrial Capitalist as such, are often in strong conflict. The same may be said of the small Capitalist and of the large Capitalist. In fact, the Capitalist class itself is not homogeneous. If there is no homogeneous rich class to-day, there is certainly no homogeneous poor class: the small middle-class is more or less decadent. The “Poor”, like the “People”, is, in short, an expression covering various distinct social groups to-day, with aims and interests by no means always harmonious, not to say identical. to-day the economic antithesis receives its most adequate expression, not in the vague and more or less amorphous concepts of “Rich” and “Poor”, but in the extreme poles of the antithesis, that of Capitalist on the one hand and Workman on the other.
The Capitalist System, which forms the economic basis of present society, points more and more to the possessor or effective controller of the means of production, on the one hand, and the workman who has nought but his labour power, on the other, as representing the salient economic antithesis of the world in which we live. It is, if one will, of course only a mode of the old time-honoured antithesis of Rich and Poor, but its importance consists in the fact that it is a mode which defines the relation with regard to contemporary conditions which the old, vague antithesis of Rich and Poor does not do. The latter sufficed for a time when the class conflicts of the modern world were in embryo, when the modern Proletariat, with its economic complement, the great Industrial Bourgeoisie, was in its infancy.
At that time the working classes of the towns, taking them in the bulk, were not yet readily distinguishable, as regards their interests, from the poorer sections of the middle-class. The whole question seemed only one of degree, from the well-to-do (for that time) large employer of labour like Reveillon or Santerre, a rara avis, of whom only a few specimens existed in Paris and in other large towns, through the small master working himself and employing a few journeymen to assist him, to the small independent craftsman who could not afford to employ labour, down to the journeyman labourer himself. There seemed no essential economic halting-place. At the top of the scale you had a man relatively rich, but still not rich as the noble was rich, and at the lower end of the scale you had various gradations of poverty. Outside this small industrial middle-class of the towns was to be found the man of the land, the peasant, who formed the bulk of the population of France. Here, in the peasant in his hut, as against the noble in his chateau, the lord of the countryside, was to be found the antithesis of rich and poor in its most direct and its sharpest form. Bad seasons and abject local conditions had driven numbers of the peasantry into the towns, both before and during the early years of the Revolution. These detached elements of the rural class formed a vagabond population, living from hand to mouth, and not fitting into any distinct section of society as then organised. In the France of the eighteenth century, the intellectual and bureaucratic middle-class, including the middle ranks of the clergy, attached by social and economic bonds to the smaller noblesse, and which formed the intellectual backbone of the moderate side of the Revolution, are not to be confounded, it should be observed, with the industrial middle-class. Though also men of the Third Estate, they must not be identified with the former. From them the ranks of the Constitutionalists and Girondists were mainly recruited.
From what has been said, it will be evident how the appeals of Babeuf and those who thought like him were necessarily to the poor in general, unlike the appeal of the modern Socialist agitation, which is pre-eminently to the working-classes of the great industry – to the modern proletariat. Similarly, from the political side, the appeal of the French Revolutionist was to man in general. He called upon him to claim his rights as citizen. The appeal of the modern Socialist is not so much to man in general, to man in the abstract, as to man as the producer of wealth; in other words, to the workman. He, the Socialist, calls upon the workman, as the producer of wealth, to claim his right as a class, to be at once possessor, controller, and organiser of production and the enjoyer of the wealth produced. The idea of citizenship is not sufficiently definite for modern use. All these considerations are necessary to be taken into account in judging the outlook of the men of the Revolution. Their sociological and political prospective was abstract. They regarded all things as dominated by abstractions – right, virtue, citizenship, man.
Even the great Revolutionary trinity, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, was conceived of in the abstract way of looking at things peculiar to the eighteenth century. In the absence of the idea of evolution it was inevitable that society should be regarded as governed by such abstract notions. Modern Socialist thought, on the other hand, seeks a realisation of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” in the concrete development of a new society from germs present in existing society. It takes its stand upon a social growth – economical, political, and ethical – which has in the past proceeded, in the main, independently of the conscious will of man. To the eighteenth century, liberty eras a formal pattern, to be applied as a label is applied in the most superficial manner. The modern mind sees that oftentimes a formal liberty, such as that, for example, comprised in so-called “liberty of contract” as between the possessor of the means of production and the propertyless workman, is a mere form and nothing more – a form concealing a content which is its very opposite. It is seen clearly by the modern revolutionary thinker that the superficial form of any idea may easily be only a blind, and that what we have to look to is its concrete embodiment in a given society. To this more than a mere label is necessary. The Paris of the French Revolution was enamoured of the bare word “liberty,” and felt it a revolutionary duty to apply it on every occasion and in every detail of life in its barest form, so that the Parisians of 1793 opened all the cages of their song-birds and let the inmates fly away, with the result that the streets of Paris were strewn with the dead bodies of canaries and other hapless victims. This is a trivial illustration of devotion to a term applied in its hard, formal abstraction, or as a label.
We are not free even in the present day from the worship of an abstract phrase connoting an idea regardless of its real content. This is very noticeable in the modern Feminist movement. We find the notion of chivalry, as implying consideration and deference for weakness, exploited to its fullest extent by the Feminist advocate, by using the notion of weakness as a superficial label applied to every member of the female sex, regardless of the facts or circumstances of any given case, or of the general social conditions obtaining to-day. As a matter of fact, the physical strength or weakness of the individual counts for very little in the present age, when disputes are decided, not by personal prowess, but by the power of the State, through its accredited organs. A woman in the power of the law or opposed by superior force could under no circumstances be in worse case than a man similarly situated. But the fact is, by virtue of this very sex weakness she is in a much stronger position than the man, and hence deserves much less pity than a man would do under like circumstances. A maudlin sentiment is sought to be aroused in the public mind by the employment of the notions of weakness and chivalry as the label, the justification for which is purely formal and abstract, and which is contradicted by the content of every given case, as determined by existing law and public opinion. Formal sex weakness and disability has thus been converted into real sex strength and domination. But by dint of ignoring this conversion, and taking his stand on physiological facts which under modern conditions have become purely irrelevant, the feminist can succeed in hoodwinking public opinion as to the reality embodied in the facts, and hence as to the true distribution of effective strength and weakness between the sexes in modern society.
Though the course of the French Revolution upo to the time of Gracchus Babeuf’s entry into the political arena, is one of those matters with which every modern representative of Macaulay’s schoolboy is supposed to be familiar, it may not be out of place for those readers whose Revolution lore is not altogether as fresh as it might be to devote a few pages to a short sketch of the course of events from the assembly of the States-General on May the 5th, 1789, to the Revolution of the 9th of Thermidor, July the 27th, 1794, consequent on which the political activity proper of Babeuf began.
The day after the opening of the States-General was signalised by the insistence of the Third Estate on its being joined by the other Estates in the large hall of Versailles. Wrangling as to the form the deliberations should take – the First and Second Estates, i.e. the nobility and higher clergy, with few exceptions, refusing to unite in the same council chamber with the Third Estate – continued till June the 15th, when, on the proposal of the Abbe Siéyès, the Third Estate proclaimed itself the representative assembly of the French nation. The title of National Assembly was adopted the next day. This action was followed on the 20th of the month by the closing of the great hall by the king and the adjournment of the Constituent National Assembly to the Tennis Court, where the famous oath was taken not to separate till a constitution had been given to France. The king in vain attempted to annul the action of the Third Estate, and finally, after some days, agreed to the union of the Estates as a National Assembly.
On the 11th of July the king refused to accede to the Assembly’s request to remove the troops then at Versailles, and at the same time dismissed the popular minister, Necker. The latter event aroused the whole of Paris, and was followed by meetings and tumults throughout the city. The next day a citizen guard was formed in Paris sixty thousand strong, pikes were forged and guns sought for. On the 14th, in the belief that a royal attack on the city from Versailles was imminent, the search for arms was redoubled, the Bastille was stormed and taken.
Emigration of nobles now began on a large scale, and at the same time the burning of chateaux went on throughout the countryside. On the celebrated night of the 4th of August the Assembly abolished all feudal rights, and established equality before the law and personal liberty, by decree. Within the next few days the lands and buildings of the Church were in principle declared national property. Necker, who had been recalled by the king after the taking of the Bastille, towards the end of September made vigorous but abortive attempts to raise by loan sufficient money to meet the situation.
Meanwhile starvation and want made fearful havoc in Paris, till on October the 5th several thousand women, followed by immense crowds, marched to Versailles, Lafayette following later on with his National Guards. The Assembly and the royal palace were invaded by the populace, the majority of whom remained in Versailles through out the night, renewing the attack on the palace the following day. The upshot of the whole affair was that on the afternoon of October 6th the royal family were forced to follow the crowd to Paris, taking up their residence in the Tuileries. The Assembly soon transferred itself also to Paris, where it continued its work of building up the constitution.
The map of France was now altered, the old provinces abolished, and their place taken by eighty-three departments, with corresponding administrative bodies. The old parliaments were abolished and new law courts established. The civil constitution of the clergy was now completed and promulgated. On November the 3rd the Assembly formally confiscated the effects of the clergy, abolishing them as a separate order.
About this time the Jacobin Club, so called from its meeting in the old Jacobin convent in the Rue St Honoré, began to exercise an important influence in public affairs. The work of federating the newly organised French nation in its new districts and departments now went on apace, but all the time plots were being hatched to get the king away to Metz, there to place himself at the head of an army that had been formed by the emigrant aristocrats. Some of the principal of these nobles were maintained at Trier, Turin, and other places in the neighbourhood of the French frontiers by the Court. The ecclesiastical estates were now sold, and served as the security for the new issue of paper money (assignats) inaugurated by Necker. On the 14th of July of this year, 1790, the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille, a great festival of the Federation of all France was held in Paris, on the Champs de Mars. Soon after this, fresh clubs sprang up in all directions, which became affiliated to the Jacobin Society of Paris. In Paris itself, the Club of the Cordeliers, which embraced Danton, Marat, and Hébert, was founded as a more democratic rival of the Jacobins.
In August occurred the famous affair of Nancy, which began by an outrage offered to two envoys of a Swiss regiment by French officers. This Swiss regiment became popular with French revolutionists everywhere. Bouille, the commander of the troops on the eastern frontier, ordered the Swiss to evacuate Nancy, where they were quartered. They refused, with the result that Bouillé, with the aid of some German regiments and seven hundred royalist guards, ordered a massacre, in which half of the Swiss regiment fell, after which twenty-one were hanged and fifty sent to the galleys. This affair of the “Nancy massacre”, as it was called, was an epoch-making event, fraught with important consequences to the Revolution. Henceforward the Assembly, which had played an equivocal role in the whole business, together with the king condoning Bouillé’s crime, became more and more distrusted by the popular party. The clubs developed an extraordinary activity, and rose to be of paramount importance in the political life of Paris and of France.
Early in September, soon after the news of the Nancy massacre arrived in Paris, Necker escaped from Paris and France, having become unpopular, and impossible any longer as Finance Minister. In January the clergy in the Assembly were challenged to take the oath to the Constitution. Many of them refused, thereby exacerbating the situation. On April the 2nd, Mirabeau, the most powerful mediating force between the old and the new regimes, died. This left an opening for the influence of Robespierre and other leaders of the Jacobin and Cordelier Clubs.
On the night of the 20th of June the famous attempted flight of the king took place, the idea being that Louis, together with his family, was to be received by Bouillé on the eastern frontier, prior to the latter marching on Paris with his army to suppress the Revolution. The king, as is well known, was recognised by the ex – dragoon and postmaster Drouet, who apprised the authorities at Varennes, the next town at which the royal party would have to change horses, with the result that Louis and his belongings were brought back to Paris. Henceforward the popular party was becoming more and more republican. The moderate party in the Assembly succeeded in getting the king reinstated after his virtual abdication, under conditions, which did not, however, satisfy the popular party, the latter demanding his summary dethronement, if not the establishment of a Republic. A gigantic petition to this effect, and claiming that the matter should be brought before the nation, was carried to the Champs de Mars by an immense crowd on July the 17th of this year (1791). Lafayette, accompanied by the mayor of Paris, Bailly, arrived on the ground at the head of a force of the National Guard: result, the notorious massacre of the Champs de Mars. This event produced consternation in the ranks of the popular party, and a temporary check to the Revolutionary movement.
At the end of September the Constituent Assembly, which, as we have seen, consisted of the members of the States – General elected in 1789, was dissolved. The newly elected Chamber, called the Legislative Assembly, met on the 1st of October. In this second parliament the party called at the time Brissotins, from their leader Brissot, but known subsequently by the name of Girondins, from the department of the Gironde, from which many of their chief orators came, was in the ascendancy. Pétion became mayor of Paris. Meanwhile the king vetoed various decrees passed by the Assembly. At the same time he was compelled formally to remonstrate to the central European Powers for harbouring and encouraging the émigrés who held a kind of court at Coblentz, and whose agents were active throughout Europe in their avowed intention of invading France at the first opportunity to restore the absolute monarchy. France remained in a state of seething discontent throughout the ensuing winter, and the relations with foreign powers were to the last degree strained.
Finally, in March 1792, Louis was forced to appoint a Girondin ministry, which promptly demanded explanations from the Austrian Court. The upshot was a kind of ultimatum on the part of the emperor, demanding a return to the ancien régime, including the restoration of Church property, and the cession of Alsace to the German princes.
War was at last declared on the 20th of April, on the proposition of the king, who hoped for a successful invasion of the country, resulting in the restoration of his own power, and also by this means to drain off into the army to a large extent the revolutionary elements of the home population. The declaration of war was greeted with enthusiasm in Paris, as affording a relief from the tension of the previous months. The French forces consisted of three armies – the army of the north under Richambeau, the army of the centre under Lafayette, and the army of the Rhine under Luckner. The war began by an unsuccessful invasion of Brabant. The Jacobins accused the counter – revolutionaries generally of plotting for the defeat of the French armies, and the officers of treachery. On June the 28th the Assembly decreed the formation of a military camp before Paris. This decree, together with another concerning the priests who refused to take the oath of loyalty to the constitution, Louis peremptorily vetoed.
On the 20th of June an insurrectionary movement took place in Paris, the populace breaking into the Tuileries. From this time the movement for the deposition of Louis and the abolition of the monarchy gained by leaps and bounds every day. On June the 28th, Lafayette, having left his army, appeared in Paris to demand the suppression and punishment of the Jacobin party for the riot of the 20th. He obtained no favourable hearing from anyone, and returned discomfited to his army, which he not long afterwards deserted, fleeing across the frontier.
Throughout France now the enrolling of volunteers went on; numbers of these came to Paris, ostensibly for the festival of the 14th of July. On the 22nd of July the country was declared in danger; the enrolment of volunteers received a double impetus. Recruits from the provinces arrived daily in Paris. The Paris wardships or sections declared themselves in permanent session. On the 25th, Brunswick launched his famous manifesto from Coblentz, and started on the march to Paris. Some members of the newly enrolled Federal guards formed a permanent committee at the Jacobins, while the forty – eight sections of the city appointed a central committee from their number to sit in the Hotel de Ville. On the 29th a newly created battalion of guards from Marseilles arrived in Paris, singing its war hymn, subsequently known as the Marseillaise. The demands for the dethronement of the king, by the Jacobin and popular party generally, became more clamorous and insistent than ever. Finally, on the 9th of August, a general assembly of the sections took place at the Hotel de Ville, at which it was agreed to demand the immediate abdication of the king, failing which, it was resolved to storm the palace of the Tuileries at midnight. The old municipal council, with its mayor, was then declared dissolved, and its place taken by a Revolutionary Commune.
The attack on the Tuileries took place actually in the early morning of the 10th of August, with the result that is well known. Louis was subsequently imprisoned with his family in the Temple, under the orders of the Revolutionary Commune. By the end of August news of the clerical and royalist outbreak in La Vendée reached Paris. The arrest of supposed royalist plotters within the capital took place wholesale. From the 3rd to the 6th of September the so – called September massacres were enacted by a body of persons between two and three hundred strong, who went from prison to prison killing supposed traitors. At about the same time Dumouriez, at the head of the raw levies of volunteers recently formed, drove back from the wooded ridges of the Argonne the armies of Brunswick. A week or two later a decisive victory of the French at Valmy relieved the situation.
The old Legislative Assembly having been dissolved, and a National Convention convoked on a basis of universal but indirect suffrage, the new legislative body opened its sittings on September the 21st. The dethronement of the king and the establishment of a Republic was immediately decreed. A committee to draw up the basis of a new constitution, founded on the sovereignty of the people, was nominated. Within the Convention, two distinct parties formed themselves, the old Girondist party reinforced, and the popular party, representing mainly the Paris deputies, called the Mountain, from the fact of its members sitting on the highest benches of the place of assembly. Outside these two parties were the mass of members called the Plain, or, in derision, the Marsh. The latter usually voted with the party which was for the time being in power. The famine in Paris, especially the scarcity of bread, now assumed serious proportions; bread riots were of daily occurrence. Within the Convention, exacerbation of parties grew daily more acute. The special bête noire of the Girondists was Marat, but they also dreaded Robespierre, as aiming at the Dictatorship. After weeks of wrangling, Louis was finally judged by the Convention and condemned to death without delay. On the 21st of January 1793 his execution took place on the Place de la Revolution, formerly Place Royale.
After the king’s death the feud between the Mountain and the Gironde grew more bitter. The Girondists, claiming to represent the provinces as against Paris, the stronghold of the Mountain, favoured a federal republic; the Mountain, on the other hand, insisted on an united and centralised republic, dominated by Paris. The large towns of the departments favoured the federal idea, and hence its exponents, the Girondists, while Paris remained faithful to the Mountain. Up to this time the executive power had, in the main, continued uninterruptedly in the hands of the Girondins. But the disasters now overtaking Dumouriez, the favourite general of the party, in his attempt to invade Holland, cast a suspicion of treachery, not only upon Dumouriez himself, but more or less affected the whole Girondist faction in the popular mind. Demands were made on various sides for the arrest and expulsion of twenty-two of the leading Girondists. In March, forty-four thousand communes throughout France now each appointed its permanent revolutionary committee to watch affairs, and especially to arrest and imprison suspected traitors and reactionaries.
The Girondists now succeeded in getting a commission appointed to inquire into alleged plots of the Jacobins and the popular party generally. They also obtained the indictment of Marat on a charge of inciting to disorder and breaches of the peace. Marat was tried, but triumphantly acquitted. These measures did not serve their authors, the Girondins, in any way, but merely helped to irritate their opponents. The rage of Paris, the Mountain, and the Jacobins against the party hitherto dominant in the Convention reached its climax in the last days of May, when the Commune took the lead in a popular insurrection against the Convention and the authorities. This ended on the 2nd of June in the arrest of twenty-two of the Girondist deputies, two ministers, and of the hated Commission of Twelve. The only hope for the Girondist faction lay now in the raising of the departments against what was represented as the dictatorship of Paris.
On the 14th of July, Charlotte Corday, egged on by Girondist misrepresentation, murdered Marat. The effect of this event throughout the country was immense. It roused the indignation of the whole of revolutionary France, vastly strengthening the position of the Mountain and the Jacobins. Up to this time the situation of the Girondists was not unfavourable. The chances of the Girondists’ insurrection seemed by no means hopeless. They had the bulk of the provinces with them, including the large cities of the south. But before the end of July the Girondist army melted away without having struck a blow. The cities Lyons, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Caen, etc., that still adhered to the Girondist cause, were taken by the National Forces of the Republic, and for the most part paid heavily for their partisanship. Meanwhile the committee for drawing up the new constitution had finished its labours. The draft was submitted to the forty-four thousand communes of France, and accepted by an enormous majority. On the 10th of August, the anniversary of the taking of the Tuileries, the constitution was promulgated in Paris with great rejoicings. This was the famous Constitution of 1793, which became the political sheet-anchor of the French democracy. Soon after the revolution which had placed the Mountain in power, the recently formed and now strengthened executive body, the Committee of Public Safety, had decided that a democratic constitution in accordance with the views of the Jacobins should be drawn up. The task of doing this was entrusted to a prominent member of the Convention, the ex-noble and friend of Danton, Hérault de Sechelles. He was assisted by four other Montagnards – St Just, Couthon, Ramel, and Mathieu. His draft was adopted by the Convention on June the 10th. It may be remarked that the question of the constitution had been prominently before the Convention, and more than one draft had been made by the Girondists, which had been received coldly by the Convention and public opinion, and actively opposed by the Mountain. The constitution of H6rault de Sechelles and his colleagues, called the Constitution of 1793, was the first and only constitution emanating officially from the Mountain and the Jacobins. This constitution, though adopted, as stated, by an enormous majority of the French people through their primary assemblies, was suspended immediately after it was promulgated, and never became operative.
Invasion now threatened France from all sides. It was in August 1793 that the two committees, that of Public Safety, sometimes called the Committee of Government, and that of General Security, concerned mainly with the executive functions of police, respectively, were given largely increased powers, amounting practically to those of a dictatorship. Superhuman efforts were now made to raise and equip more troops; everywhere were enlistments and requisitions. The Republic has been adequately described as presenting, in this autumn of 1793, the appearance of an armed camp. It was now that the “Reign of Terror” began in earnest. The Committee of Public Safety declared that the Republic was revolutionary, and must remain so until all danger from the enemy was past. The incriminated Girondists were tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal and guillotined. The rest of the party were either imprisoned or outlawed. Marie Antoinette, generals, ex-deputies of the constituent and legislative assemblies, nobles, and officials of the ancien régime fell beneath the national knife, now in daily operation.
In October 1793 the revolutionary government was proclaimed, the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety came into full force, and with it the power of its now strongest member, Robespierre. The Committee of Public Safety being installed as, de jure, the supreme authority in France, it found that it had to make up its account with the de facto authority of the day, to wit, the Paris Commune. At first it was the Commune that effectively dominated the situation. Chaumette and Hébert had just instituted the worship of Reason on the ruins of Catholicism. The Commune, by means of its revolutionary army, consisting of six or seven thousand men under the command of Rousin, the dramatic author, undertook the purification of the provinces from reactionary elements, although its immediate action was mainly confined to the departments around Paris. But throughout France at this time guillotining was going on. Carrier was sent to Nantes; Lebon to Arras; Maignet, Fouché, Barras, Fréron were despatched to the cities of the south; and everywhere the revolutionary committees were active in hunting down traitors or supposed traitors.
By the end of 1793 fourteen armies were in the field. The year closed amid the success of the French arms everywhere. Friction, however, between the two rival central powers, the Committee of Public Safety and the Paris Commune, had already begun. The attack on the Paris Commune, or the Hébertist faction, as it was now called, from Hébert, one of its chief members and editor of the Pere Duchesne journal, by the followers of Robespierre, was started by Robespierre himself on September the 5th. But the Commune was still strong. In October it inaugurated the new worship of Reason. Robespierre’s determination to crush the rival power was now formed. At the same time, within the Convention, the Mountain was, however, showing signs of getting out of hand. Two members, who expressed the view that the committees were terrorising over the Convention, were arrested and imprisoned in consequence. In the provinces the representatives “on mission” dominated the situation, acting in many cases as local dictators.
The friction between the Committee of Public Safety, whose soul was Robespierre, and the Commune of Paris, led by Chaumette and Hébert, continued throughout the early part of 1794. Of the two chief clubs, the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, the stronghold of Robespierre and his Committee was the Jacobins; that of the Commune, i.e. of Hébert and his followers, was the Cordeliers. But there was a third party already in the field. Danton and his friends had been for some time past “lying low”. Danton himself had been away at his home at Arcis, whence he was recalled by his political associates. The latter, with the approval of their leader, started a journal vehemently hostile to the Hébertists and the Terror, which was edited and mostly written by Camille Desmoulins. It was called Le vieux Cordelier, in allusion to the Cordeliers Club in the old days when Danton was its moving spirit. In their campaign against the Terror, the Dantonists hoped to find support in the Convention, but, as events proved, they were relying on a broken reed. Robespierre and his party had now two enemies to contend with. On the one hand he had the L’Énrages, as they were termed, namely, the Hébertists, and on the other the Pacivists, that is, Danton and his friends. It was not part of Robespierre’s purpose, or that of his committee, to relax the Terror at this moment. On the other hand, Robespierre was much concerned that the handling of the system of the Terror should not get into the control of his Extremist enemies on the opposite side.
Early in March matters reached a climax. One or other of the two rival powers had to succumb. The only course for the Hébertists and the Cordeliers lay in a successful insurrection, which would break the power of the committee and of Robespierre. The beginnings of an attempt were made, but miscarried. A panic seemed to seize the Cordeliers, and no more active measures were taken. Robespierre had now the upper hand, and lost no time in having the leaders of the “Hébertist faction” arrested and dragged before the Revolutionary Tribunal, there to be charged with conspiring to destroy the Revolution by discrediting it through the excesses of their doctrines and policy.
Accordingly, on March the 24th, the leaders of the Extremist party, Hébert, Ronsin, and Momoro, with others, went to the guillotine, Chaumette following a few days later. The revolutionary army was disbanded, and the Commune reorganised and filled with the creatures of Robespierre. Having crushed his Extremist rivals, it only remained for Robespierre to destroy his Moderate foes. This followed with little delay. On March the 30th, Desmoulins, Philippeaux, and Westermann, with other friends of Danton, were arrested. Danton himself in vain attempted to get a hearing in the Convention, Robespierre effectually succeeding in closing his mouth. On April the 3rd he, together with the members of his party, was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal, where he defended himself with such vigour that Robespierre had to extort a decree from the Convention depriving the accused of the right of speech. Two days later Danton and the remaining Dantonists were sent to the guillotine.
The power of Robespierre was now supreme. His next thought was the foundation of a deistic cult, of which he himself was to be the sovereign pontiff, as a counterblast to the atheistic worship of Reason inaugurated by the Hébertists. The Convention obediently voted his instructions in this respect, end the Festival of the Supreme Being was held on June the 8th, 1794, in the Tuileries gardens, the principal features of the ceremony being an oration from the high-priest Robespierre, following which he set fire to certain stage-property figures constructed to represent atheism and other doctrines of the Hebertists that he disliked. The Convention, which at Robespierre’s behest had shortly before decreed the existence of a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul, was, two days after the festival in honour of these dogmas, called upon by the same dictator to pass the celebrated law of Prairial, which enacted that no prisoner haled before the Revolutionary Tribunal should have the right of any defence whatever.
The next weeks saw a frightful increase in the activity of the guillotine, which every day received its holocausts. But at the same time an undercurrent of fear and detestation and indeterminate revolt was rising higher and higher every day. Meanwhile, on the 26th June, the battle of Fleurus was won by General Jourdan, and the enemy driven from the Austrian Netherlands. Thus was France freed from danger, and the last point of her threatened frontiers relieved. The imminent danger of a foreign invasion was now definitely conjured, and therewith the main excuse for the institution of the “Terror” crumbled to pieces. But nevertheless the Terror continued.
At last the reckoning came. It was on the 9th of Thermidor (27th of July) 1794. Robespierre, feeling himself with his little group of satellites daily becoming more and more isolated amid the hatred and imperfectly suppressed revolt of Convention and committee men, on the 8th of Thermidor (July the 26th) appeared in the Convention after a long absence, with a violent and threatening speech, demanding powers to purge the Convention and the committees alike. This, after a moment’s hesitation on the part of the Convention, started the open revolt against the Robespierrian dictatorship. At the sitting of the following day, Robespierre and his partisans, including his brother, Couthon, St Just, and Lebas, were decreed accused. In the early morning of the 28th, Robespierre and his partisans were surrounded in the Hotel de Ville. At four o’clock in the afternoon Robespierre himself and the other chiefs of the Robespierrian faction fell beneath the guillotine. Thus ended the celebrated revolution of the 9th of Thermidor (27th of July), year II (1794). The immediate upshot was the end of the system of the Terror, soon followed by serious modifications in the public authorities. Various economic measures passed by the Convention to relieve distress, among them the Law of Maximum, were repealed during the ensuing months. The Jacobin Club was closed in November, and the Convention began steadily and unmistakably to enter the pathway of reaction.
It was now, during this autumn of 1794, that the great political activity of Gracchus Babeuf in Paris began, and began in the sense of the Thermidoreans, as the makers of the recent revolution were termed. The earlier period of his Paris journalism was signalised, as the reader will see, by vehement attacks on the fallen régime of the Terror and all connected with it. His subsequent change of opinions in this connection must be directly attributed to the reactionary character assumed by the new government, which was manned by Thermidoreans, and by the Convention itself, dominated, as it was, by the members of the same party and other reactionary elements, such as the remnants of the Girondin faction which were allowed to regain possession of their seats in the national legislature. With his growing bitterness towards the new authorities and the daily increasing reaction generally, moreover, grew Babeuf’s clearness of vision as to the ends he ultimately had in view. The Constitution of 1793, and the other political objects for which he strove, he now regarded merely as a means towards a communistic state of society, which was necessarily conceived by him under the only guise possible for a man of the eighteenth century to envisage it.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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As part of my comment here, dated October 20, 2011, I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the “new world” we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work checks and balances form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one. In that sense previous historical models come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
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Recently (see October 22, 2011 comment above) I noted the following while arguing for the General Assembly concept as a form of alternate government using historic examples like the Paris Commune (1871), the early soviets in Russia (1905 and 1917), and the early days of the antifascist militias in the Spanish Civil War (1936-37):
“However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.”
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lesson Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
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Markin comment January 15, 2012
In several recent comments in this space (in late December) my old radical friend and alternative newspaper commentator, Josh Breslin, noted that the Occupy movement seemed to have lost energy and was , as he vividly described it, a movement of generals without an army. I, initially, argued with him about that characterization saying that this was just a period of growing pains and things would sort themselves out over the next several months. Then a series of disturbing events occurred topped off by what I will here call the “sex registry question” to make me thing that old Josh, once again, was right. Only I would characterize things, unlike Josh, as a succumbing to the circle spirit and as yet another example of the revolution devouring its own. In either case not a healthy situation.
With that said, I have long noted that although I believed that the General Assembly concept was potentially the embryo of an alternate form of government that would drive our vision for a new society there were some structural problems with the concept as practiced. Among those criticisms were the simple notions that majority rule and representative government based on political positions were concepts better suited to the struggle. Well, apparently others have, in the crucible of struggle, learned some of those lessons. Lessons that, perhaps, needed to be painfully worked through in practice before their shortcomings could be exposed. In any case this latest news from OB (consenting to a once a week strategic assembly) about a willingness to think about other governing forms is welcome news. Whether we remain generals without an army can now be hashed out but one thing seems certain this will go a long way toward breaking out of the circle spirit.
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Note on Authorities
As the principal sources that have been used in the preparation the following study may be mentioned:
(1) The careful and exhaustive Histoire de Gracchus Babeuf et du Babouvisme, largely based on hitherto unpublished documents, by M. Victor Advielle. 2 vols. (Paris, 1884).
(2) Gracchus Babeuf et le Conspiration des Egaux, by Philippe Buonarroti (Paris, 1830), a first-hand narrative by one of the principal actors in the drama he describes.
(3) Babeuf et le Socialisme en 1796, par Edouard Fleury (Paris, 1851), a book preserving some interesting details, but prejudiced and not altogether reliable.
(4) Among the contemporary sources for the history of the movement, the Copie des Pieces saisies dons le local que Babeuf occupait lors de son arrestation (Paris, Nivose, Ann. V.) occupies an important place. It consists in a volume officially published by the High Court immediately after the trial, containing a complete collection of the pieces de conviction which formed the basis of the prosecution.
(5) The collection of the numbers of Babeuf’s journals, the Journal de la Liberty de la Presse and the Tribun du Peuple, together with the few numbers of the Éclaireur, a journal published for a short time by Babeuf’s friend Sylvain Maréchal, to be found in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
Other, minor, references are given in the text.
Allusions to, and accounts of, the movement are, of course, to be found in all the journals of the time, but they are for the most part utterly prejudiced, and contain no facts of importance not given by Buonarroti or contained in the officially published documents.
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Preface
OF all the leading actors in the great drama of the French Revolution, there is probably none less known to the average reader of history than the subject of the present volume. All that has appeared in English in book form up to the present time consists, I believe, in Bronterre O’Brien’s translation of Buonaroti’s account of the Movement of the “Equals”, now long since out of print. The reason for this neglect, and for the lack of interest generally shown in Babeuf, is probably in part to be looked for in the fact that Babeuf’s public activity consisted of a kind of aftermath of the great historical events of the Revolution. The Revolution, properly speaking, had run its course before Babeuf appeared on the scene. The principal leaders were fallen or dispersed, the ragged levies of the people’s quarters of St Antoine and St Marceau had risen en masse for the last time, and had been beaten and disarmed by the forces of the new governing class that had installed itself in the seats of the old royal and feudal authorities. François Noel Babeuf, the subsequent Gracchus, played no political role of any importance while the Revolution was at its zenith. His name became first prominent in the year IV. (1795), when the Society, which later on met near the Pantheon, was formed. The usual fate of secret movements, of conspiracies, overtook Babeuf’s. It was killed by treachery – killed, as its promoters fondly believed, on the eve of success. In a word, the movement was a failure, and its memory with the great world soon tended to pass into oblivion. Nevertheless, for students of the earlier democratic movements, and of the precursors of modern Socialism, the agitation of Babeuf in the last decade of the eighteenth century must be of keen interest.
I may mention that the following monograph represents the carrying out of a wish, expressed some years before he died, of my old friend, William Morris, who thought that a clear and concise account of the Babeuf incident in English was wanted, and who urged me to undertake the task. Whether this little volume answers the requirements of the case must be left for the reader to judge.
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Introduction
To understand the history and the real significance of even the most prominent ideas of an epoch, it is necessary to realise what constitutes the mental background, as we may term it, of the period in question, for it is this that gives to the expressed ideas of a time their real significance. It has often been remarked that the same actual words or phrases may have a different meaning at different times. To take a familiar illustration – that of Dr Johnson’s well-known aphorism that “patriotism is the last resort of scoundrels.” The uneducated or half-educated man in the street of to-day would regard this mot as an attack by some “little Englander” on the Jingo or Imperialist with whom he is familiar, – the background of his mind, in the light of which he interprets it, consisting of the conditions of English politics that have grown up during the last generation. Needless to say, the expression to the mind of Dr Johnson, who first used it, had an entirely different, and in some respects even an opposite, meaning. He knew nothing of modern Imperialism, of the glorious British Empire upon which the sun never sets: what was in his mind was the antithesis, not between the advocate of an aggressive British Empire and a respecter of the rights of weaker peoples, but an advocate of the rights of the people of a given country against its ruling classes. This was the sense in which the eighteenth century, for the most part, understood the words “patriot” and “patriotism”, the great political antithesis of the eighteenth century being that between rulers and people. This is an obvious instance. But the capacity of the same form of words to express totally different meanings according to the age in which they appear, and the great danger of their entire falsification by reading into them the mind of a later period, can never be sufficiently present to the sense of the historian. Every form of ideas that belongs to a past period of history, no matter how modern it may look, we may be quite sure is not what it appears to us of the twentieth century at first sight. The intellectual background of the men who enunciated the ideas in question is so different, that the meaning present to them in the expressions used and the meaning they evoke in us cannot possibly be the same.
The above remarks apply to our estimation of eighteenth century thought generally, and, not least, to the thought of the French Revolution. To understand this thought properly, we have to investigate the conditions that reflected themselves in the mental background of the leading actors. One thing we have to do is to eliminate all conceptions having their origin in the doctrine of evolution from their mental framework. This it is somewhat difficult for the present generation effectually to accomplish. Our whole thought is so bound up with the notion of development, that it is difficult for us to realise the intellectual attitude of the man of intelligence to whom this idea has never presented itself. Yet, needless to say, to the eighteenth century thinker in general it was entirely absent. Very noticeable is this in the theories of society prevalent during the eighteenth century, and that formed the groundwork of the thought of the Revolution. The main principle upon which it all turned was that of conscious and arbitrary construction. Society, as it existed, was conceived as the outcome of a contract made in remote ages, and which might be unmade or altered at the will of its individual members at any time. The classics still bulked largely in the cultured man’s outlook on history, politics, and the world in general. In seventeenth-century England this was modified by the place the English Bible held in the imagination of all classes. Hence in the British political struggles of the seventeenth century we find the Old Testament the great storehouse of instances on which the popular imagination falls back. In France of the eighteenth century, on the contrary, the classical tradition held undisturbed sway, alike with the cultivated and the popular intelligence. The very names indicate this. In the place of Biblical names we have Anacharsis Clootz, Anaxagoras Chaumette, Gracchus Babeuf, and the like. Everyone with the smallest smattering of education talked Roman History, just as in the English political movements of the preceding century everyone talked Old Testament. As for the literary movement in France, this was derived mainly from English sources. Hobbes, Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Mandeville, Bolingbroke, and other less known English writers contributed to build up the theories of Condillac, Helvetius, D’Holbach, Voltaire, Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists.
Political and social ideas of the time were naturally dominated by the leading political forms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These were absolutism, working through a bureaucracy, on the one side, and an all but rightless people, composed more or less of a downtrodden peasantry in the country, and a middle – class, still largely composed of small masters, in the towns. A proletariat in the modern sense, which implies the existence of the great machine-industry, did not exist. But a population, not as yet relatively very numerous except in a few large towns, of journey-men and labourers, which was destined to become the groundwork of the modern proletariat, did undoubtedly obtain, but obtained only as an economic appendix of the small middle-class [in modern Marxist terms: petty bourgeoisie] to which reference has been made. The old feudal landowning class, which had come down from medieval times, had now in the main become an absentee landowning class, dancing attendance at courts and growing financially poorer. While still retaining many of its feudal privileges, it functioned for the most part through its members holding positions in the bureaucratic hierarchy which centred in the Crown. As a consequence of the foregoing conditions, the leading political category of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was that of Ruler and Subject. Similarly, the leading economic category was that of Rich and Poor. It may be said, of course, that these categories obtain also to-day. But they are no longer dominant as categories in their bare abstractness, as they were in the eighteenth century. In the Western Europe of modern times absolutism has uniformly broken down in favour of some form of popular representation. Hence there is, in theory at least, no longer a pure and unadulterated Ruler in the old sense, any more than there is a pure and unadulterated Subject in the old sense. In a word, with the dominance in the political sphere of some form of Constitutionalism, the edge of the old antithesis has become blunted. It has no longer, in its old and bare form, the incisive force that it once had.
Again, the corresponding leading antithesis of the eighteenth century in economics, that of Rich and Poor, has likewise in a measure lost its pregnancy in the modern world. The rich are no longer an approximately homogeneous class over against the poor, as also a relatively homogeneous section of society. There is no one class of rich men more or less completely dominating the economic situation of to-day, as did the French noble and higher ecclesiastic of the ancien régime. In the most recent developments of modern Capitalism, it is true that the financial Capitalist takes the lead. But he does not, as yet, completely dominate the economic situation. The Industrial Capitalist or Syndicate plays a scarcely less important part in the economic system of the modern world, while the old Landowner, who has come down from the ages of feudalism, still continues to exist, even if he no longer flourishes as of yore. The interests, moreover, of the Landowner as such, and of the Industrial Capitalist as such, are often in strong conflict. The same may be said of the small Capitalist and of the large Capitalist. In fact, the Capitalist class itself is not homogeneous. If there is no homogeneous rich class to-day, there is certainly no homogeneous poor class: the small middle-class is more or less decadent. The “Poor”, like the “People”, is, in short, an expression covering various distinct social groups to-day, with aims and interests by no means always harmonious, not to say identical. to-day the economic antithesis receives its most adequate expression, not in the vague and more or less amorphous concepts of “Rich” and “Poor”, but in the extreme poles of the antithesis, that of Capitalist on the one hand and Workman on the other.
The Capitalist System, which forms the economic basis of present society, points more and more to the possessor or effective controller of the means of production, on the one hand, and the workman who has nought but his labour power, on the other, as representing the salient economic antithesis of the world in which we live. It is, if one will, of course only a mode of the old time-honoured antithesis of Rich and Poor, but its importance consists in the fact that it is a mode which defines the relation with regard to contemporary conditions which the old, vague antithesis of Rich and Poor does not do. The latter sufficed for a time when the class conflicts of the modern world were in embryo, when the modern Proletariat, with its economic complement, the great Industrial Bourgeoisie, was in its infancy.
At that time the working classes of the towns, taking them in the bulk, were not yet readily distinguishable, as regards their interests, from the poorer sections of the middle-class. The whole question seemed only one of degree, from the well-to-do (for that time) large employer of labour like Reveillon or Santerre, a rara avis, of whom only a few specimens existed in Paris and in other large towns, through the small master working himself and employing a few journeymen to assist him, to the small independent craftsman who could not afford to employ labour, down to the journeyman labourer himself. There seemed no essential economic halting-place. At the top of the scale you had a man relatively rich, but still not rich as the noble was rich, and at the lower end of the scale you had various gradations of poverty. Outside this small industrial middle-class of the towns was to be found the man of the land, the peasant, who formed the bulk of the population of France. Here, in the peasant in his hut, as against the noble in his chateau, the lord of the countryside, was to be found the antithesis of rich and poor in its most direct and its sharpest form. Bad seasons and abject local conditions had driven numbers of the peasantry into the towns, both before and during the early years of the Revolution. These detached elements of the rural class formed a vagabond population, living from hand to mouth, and not fitting into any distinct section of society as then organised. In the France of the eighteenth century, the intellectual and bureaucratic middle-class, including the middle ranks of the clergy, attached by social and economic bonds to the smaller noblesse, and which formed the intellectual backbone of the moderate side of the Revolution, are not to be confounded, it should be observed, with the industrial middle-class. Though also men of the Third Estate, they must not be identified with the former. From them the ranks of the Constitutionalists and Girondists were mainly recruited.
From what has been said, it will be evident how the appeals of Babeuf and those who thought like him were necessarily to the poor in general, unlike the appeal of the modern Socialist agitation, which is pre-eminently to the working-classes of the great industry – to the modern proletariat. Similarly, from the political side, the appeal of the French Revolutionist was to man in general. He called upon him to claim his rights as citizen. The appeal of the modern Socialist is not so much to man in general, to man in the abstract, as to man as the producer of wealth; in other words, to the workman. He, the Socialist, calls upon the workman, as the producer of wealth, to claim his right as a class, to be at once possessor, controller, and organiser of production and the enjoyer of the wealth produced. The idea of citizenship is not sufficiently definite for modern use. All these considerations are necessary to be taken into account in judging the outlook of the men of the Revolution. Their sociological and political prospective was abstract. They regarded all things as dominated by abstractions – right, virtue, citizenship, man.
Even the great Revolutionary trinity, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, was conceived of in the abstract way of looking at things peculiar to the eighteenth century. In the absence of the idea of evolution it was inevitable that society should be regarded as governed by such abstract notions. Modern Socialist thought, on the other hand, seeks a realisation of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” in the concrete development of a new society from germs present in existing society. It takes its stand upon a social growth – economical, political, and ethical – which has in the past proceeded, in the main, independently of the conscious will of man. To the eighteenth century, liberty eras a formal pattern, to be applied as a label is applied in the most superficial manner. The modern mind sees that oftentimes a formal liberty, such as that, for example, comprised in so-called “liberty of contract” as between the possessor of the means of production and the propertyless workman, is a mere form and nothing more – a form concealing a content which is its very opposite. It is seen clearly by the modern revolutionary thinker that the superficial form of any idea may easily be only a blind, and that what we have to look to is its concrete embodiment in a given society. To this more than a mere label is necessary. The Paris of the French Revolution was enamoured of the bare word “liberty,” and felt it a revolutionary duty to apply it on every occasion and in every detail of life in its barest form, so that the Parisians of 1793 opened all the cages of their song-birds and let the inmates fly away, with the result that the streets of Paris were strewn with the dead bodies of canaries and other hapless victims. This is a trivial illustration of devotion to a term applied in its hard, formal abstraction, or as a label.
We are not free even in the present day from the worship of an abstract phrase connoting an idea regardless of its real content. This is very noticeable in the modern Feminist movement. We find the notion of chivalry, as implying consideration and deference for weakness, exploited to its fullest extent by the Feminist advocate, by using the notion of weakness as a superficial label applied to every member of the female sex, regardless of the facts or circumstances of any given case, or of the general social conditions obtaining to-day. As a matter of fact, the physical strength or weakness of the individual counts for very little in the present age, when disputes are decided, not by personal prowess, but by the power of the State, through its accredited organs. A woman in the power of the law or opposed by superior force could under no circumstances be in worse case than a man similarly situated. But the fact is, by virtue of this very sex weakness she is in a much stronger position than the man, and hence deserves much less pity than a man would do under like circumstances. A maudlin sentiment is sought to be aroused in the public mind by the employment of the notions of weakness and chivalry as the label, the justification for which is purely formal and abstract, and which is contradicted by the content of every given case, as determined by existing law and public opinion. Formal sex weakness and disability has thus been converted into real sex strength and domination. But by dint of ignoring this conversion, and taking his stand on physiological facts which under modern conditions have become purely irrelevant, the feminist can succeed in hoodwinking public opinion as to the reality embodied in the facts, and hence as to the true distribution of effective strength and weakness between the sexes in modern society.
Though the course of the French Revolution upo to the time of Gracchus Babeuf’s entry into the political arena, is one of those matters with which every modern representative of Macaulay’s schoolboy is supposed to be familiar, it may not be out of place for those readers whose Revolution lore is not altogether as fresh as it might be to devote a few pages to a short sketch of the course of events from the assembly of the States-General on May the 5th, 1789, to the Revolution of the 9th of Thermidor, July the 27th, 1794, consequent on which the political activity proper of Babeuf began.
The day after the opening of the States-General was signalised by the insistence of the Third Estate on its being joined by the other Estates in the large hall of Versailles. Wrangling as to the form the deliberations should take – the First and Second Estates, i.e. the nobility and higher clergy, with few exceptions, refusing to unite in the same council chamber with the Third Estate – continued till June the 15th, when, on the proposal of the Abbe Siéyès, the Third Estate proclaimed itself the representative assembly of the French nation. The title of National Assembly was adopted the next day. This action was followed on the 20th of the month by the closing of the great hall by the king and the adjournment of the Constituent National Assembly to the Tennis Court, where the famous oath was taken not to separate till a constitution had been given to France. The king in vain attempted to annul the action of the Third Estate, and finally, after some days, agreed to the union of the Estates as a National Assembly.
On the 11th of July the king refused to accede to the Assembly’s request to remove the troops then at Versailles, and at the same time dismissed the popular minister, Necker. The latter event aroused the whole of Paris, and was followed by meetings and tumults throughout the city. The next day a citizen guard was formed in Paris sixty thousand strong, pikes were forged and guns sought for. On the 14th, in the belief that a royal attack on the city from Versailles was imminent, the search for arms was redoubled, the Bastille was stormed and taken.
Emigration of nobles now began on a large scale, and at the same time the burning of chateaux went on throughout the countryside. On the celebrated night of the 4th of August the Assembly abolished all feudal rights, and established equality before the law and personal liberty, by decree. Within the next few days the lands and buildings of the Church were in principle declared national property. Necker, who had been recalled by the king after the taking of the Bastille, towards the end of September made vigorous but abortive attempts to raise by loan sufficient money to meet the situation.
Meanwhile starvation and want made fearful havoc in Paris, till on October the 5th several thousand women, followed by immense crowds, marched to Versailles, Lafayette following later on with his National Guards. The Assembly and the royal palace were invaded by the populace, the majority of whom remained in Versailles through out the night, renewing the attack on the palace the following day. The upshot of the whole affair was that on the afternoon of October 6th the royal family were forced to follow the crowd to Paris, taking up their residence in the Tuileries. The Assembly soon transferred itself also to Paris, where it continued its work of building up the constitution.
The map of France was now altered, the old provinces abolished, and their place taken by eighty-three departments, with corresponding administrative bodies. The old parliaments were abolished and new law courts established. The civil constitution of the clergy was now completed and promulgated. On November the 3rd the Assembly formally confiscated the effects of the clergy, abolishing them as a separate order.
About this time the Jacobin Club, so called from its meeting in the old Jacobin convent in the Rue St Honoré, began to exercise an important influence in public affairs. The work of federating the newly organised French nation in its new districts and departments now went on apace, but all the time plots were being hatched to get the king away to Metz, there to place himself at the head of an army that had been formed by the emigrant aristocrats. Some of the principal of these nobles were maintained at Trier, Turin, and other places in the neighbourhood of the French frontiers by the Court. The ecclesiastical estates were now sold, and served as the security for the new issue of paper money (assignats) inaugurated by Necker. On the 14th of July of this year, 1790, the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille, a great festival of the Federation of all France was held in Paris, on the Champs de Mars. Soon after this, fresh clubs sprang up in all directions, which became affiliated to the Jacobin Society of Paris. In Paris itself, the Club of the Cordeliers, which embraced Danton, Marat, and Hébert, was founded as a more democratic rival of the Jacobins.
In August occurred the famous affair of Nancy, which began by an outrage offered to two envoys of a Swiss regiment by French officers. This Swiss regiment became popular with French revolutionists everywhere. Bouille, the commander of the troops on the eastern frontier, ordered the Swiss to evacuate Nancy, where they were quartered. They refused, with the result that Bouillé, with the aid of some German regiments and seven hundred royalist guards, ordered a massacre, in which half of the Swiss regiment fell, after which twenty-one were hanged and fifty sent to the galleys. This affair of the “Nancy massacre”, as it was called, was an epoch-making event, fraught with important consequences to the Revolution. Henceforward the Assembly, which had played an equivocal role in the whole business, together with the king condoning Bouillé’s crime, became more and more distrusted by the popular party. The clubs developed an extraordinary activity, and rose to be of paramount importance in the political life of Paris and of France.
Early in September, soon after the news of the Nancy massacre arrived in Paris, Necker escaped from Paris and France, having become unpopular, and impossible any longer as Finance Minister. In January the clergy in the Assembly were challenged to take the oath to the Constitution. Many of them refused, thereby exacerbating the situation. On April the 2nd, Mirabeau, the most powerful mediating force between the old and the new regimes, died. This left an opening for the influence of Robespierre and other leaders of the Jacobin and Cordelier Clubs.
On the night of the 20th of June the famous attempted flight of the king took place, the idea being that Louis, together with his family, was to be received by Bouillé on the eastern frontier, prior to the latter marching on Paris with his army to suppress the Revolution. The king, as is well known, was recognised by the ex – dragoon and postmaster Drouet, who apprised the authorities at Varennes, the next town at which the royal party would have to change horses, with the result that Louis and his belongings were brought back to Paris. Henceforward the popular party was becoming more and more republican. The moderate party in the Assembly succeeded in getting the king reinstated after his virtual abdication, under conditions, which did not, however, satisfy the popular party, the latter demanding his summary dethronement, if not the establishment of a Republic. A gigantic petition to this effect, and claiming that the matter should be brought before the nation, was carried to the Champs de Mars by an immense crowd on July the 17th of this year (1791). Lafayette, accompanied by the mayor of Paris, Bailly, arrived on the ground at the head of a force of the National Guard: result, the notorious massacre of the Champs de Mars. This event produced consternation in the ranks of the popular party, and a temporary check to the Revolutionary movement.
At the end of September the Constituent Assembly, which, as we have seen, consisted of the members of the States – General elected in 1789, was dissolved. The newly elected Chamber, called the Legislative Assembly, met on the 1st of October. In this second parliament the party called at the time Brissotins, from their leader Brissot, but known subsequently by the name of Girondins, from the department of the Gironde, from which many of their chief orators came, was in the ascendancy. Pétion became mayor of Paris. Meanwhile the king vetoed various decrees passed by the Assembly. At the same time he was compelled formally to remonstrate to the central European Powers for harbouring and encouraging the émigrés who held a kind of court at Coblentz, and whose agents were active throughout Europe in their avowed intention of invading France at the first opportunity to restore the absolute monarchy. France remained in a state of seething discontent throughout the ensuing winter, and the relations with foreign powers were to the last degree strained.
Finally, in March 1792, Louis was forced to appoint a Girondin ministry, which promptly demanded explanations from the Austrian Court. The upshot was a kind of ultimatum on the part of the emperor, demanding a return to the ancien régime, including the restoration of Church property, and the cession of Alsace to the German princes.
War was at last declared on the 20th of April, on the proposition of the king, who hoped for a successful invasion of the country, resulting in the restoration of his own power, and also by this means to drain off into the army to a large extent the revolutionary elements of the home population. The declaration of war was greeted with enthusiasm in Paris, as affording a relief from the tension of the previous months. The French forces consisted of three armies – the army of the north under Richambeau, the army of the centre under Lafayette, and the army of the Rhine under Luckner. The war began by an unsuccessful invasion of Brabant. The Jacobins accused the counter – revolutionaries generally of plotting for the defeat of the French armies, and the officers of treachery. On June the 28th the Assembly decreed the formation of a military camp before Paris. This decree, together with another concerning the priests who refused to take the oath of loyalty to the constitution, Louis peremptorily vetoed.
On the 20th of June an insurrectionary movement took place in Paris, the populace breaking into the Tuileries. From this time the movement for the deposition of Louis and the abolition of the monarchy gained by leaps and bounds every day. On June the 28th, Lafayette, having left his army, appeared in Paris to demand the suppression and punishment of the Jacobin party for the riot of the 20th. He obtained no favourable hearing from anyone, and returned discomfited to his army, which he not long afterwards deserted, fleeing across the frontier.
Throughout France now the enrolling of volunteers went on; numbers of these came to Paris, ostensibly for the festival of the 14th of July. On the 22nd of July the country was declared in danger; the enrolment of volunteers received a double impetus. Recruits from the provinces arrived daily in Paris. The Paris wardships or sections declared themselves in permanent session. On the 25th, Brunswick launched his famous manifesto from Coblentz, and started on the march to Paris. Some members of the newly enrolled Federal guards formed a permanent committee at the Jacobins, while the forty – eight sections of the city appointed a central committee from their number to sit in the Hotel de Ville. On the 29th a newly created battalion of guards from Marseilles arrived in Paris, singing its war hymn, subsequently known as the Marseillaise. The demands for the dethronement of the king, by the Jacobin and popular party generally, became more clamorous and insistent than ever. Finally, on the 9th of August, a general assembly of the sections took place at the Hotel de Ville, at which it was agreed to demand the immediate abdication of the king, failing which, it was resolved to storm the palace of the Tuileries at midnight. The old municipal council, with its mayor, was then declared dissolved, and its place taken by a Revolutionary Commune.
The attack on the Tuileries took place actually in the early morning of the 10th of August, with the result that is well known. Louis was subsequently imprisoned with his family in the Temple, under the orders of the Revolutionary Commune. By the end of August news of the clerical and royalist outbreak in La Vendée reached Paris. The arrest of supposed royalist plotters within the capital took place wholesale. From the 3rd to the 6th of September the so – called September massacres were enacted by a body of persons between two and three hundred strong, who went from prison to prison killing supposed traitors. At about the same time Dumouriez, at the head of the raw levies of volunteers recently formed, drove back from the wooded ridges of the Argonne the armies of Brunswick. A week or two later a decisive victory of the French at Valmy relieved the situation.
The old Legislative Assembly having been dissolved, and a National Convention convoked on a basis of universal but indirect suffrage, the new legislative body opened its sittings on September the 21st. The dethronement of the king and the establishment of a Republic was immediately decreed. A committee to draw up the basis of a new constitution, founded on the sovereignty of the people, was nominated. Within the Convention, two distinct parties formed themselves, the old Girondist party reinforced, and the popular party, representing mainly the Paris deputies, called the Mountain, from the fact of its members sitting on the highest benches of the place of assembly. Outside these two parties were the mass of members called the Plain, or, in derision, the Marsh. The latter usually voted with the party which was for the time being in power. The famine in Paris, especially the scarcity of bread, now assumed serious proportions; bread riots were of daily occurrence. Within the Convention, exacerbation of parties grew daily more acute. The special bête noire of the Girondists was Marat, but they also dreaded Robespierre, as aiming at the Dictatorship. After weeks of wrangling, Louis was finally judged by the Convention and condemned to death without delay. On the 21st of January 1793 his execution took place on the Place de la Revolution, formerly Place Royale.
After the king’s death the feud between the Mountain and the Gironde grew more bitter. The Girondists, claiming to represent the provinces as against Paris, the stronghold of the Mountain, favoured a federal republic; the Mountain, on the other hand, insisted on an united and centralised republic, dominated by Paris. The large towns of the departments favoured the federal idea, and hence its exponents, the Girondists, while Paris remained faithful to the Mountain. Up to this time the executive power had, in the main, continued uninterruptedly in the hands of the Girondins. But the disasters now overtaking Dumouriez, the favourite general of the party, in his attempt to invade Holland, cast a suspicion of treachery, not only upon Dumouriez himself, but more or less affected the whole Girondist faction in the popular mind. Demands were made on various sides for the arrest and expulsion of twenty-two of the leading Girondists. In March, forty-four thousand communes throughout France now each appointed its permanent revolutionary committee to watch affairs, and especially to arrest and imprison suspected traitors and reactionaries.
The Girondists now succeeded in getting a commission appointed to inquire into alleged plots of the Jacobins and the popular party generally. They also obtained the indictment of Marat on a charge of inciting to disorder and breaches of the peace. Marat was tried, but triumphantly acquitted. These measures did not serve their authors, the Girondins, in any way, but merely helped to irritate their opponents. The rage of Paris, the Mountain, and the Jacobins against the party hitherto dominant in the Convention reached its climax in the last days of May, when the Commune took the lead in a popular insurrection against the Convention and the authorities. This ended on the 2nd of June in the arrest of twenty-two of the Girondist deputies, two ministers, and of the hated Commission of Twelve. The only hope for the Girondist faction lay now in the raising of the departments against what was represented as the dictatorship of Paris.
On the 14th of July, Charlotte Corday, egged on by Girondist misrepresentation, murdered Marat. The effect of this event throughout the country was immense. It roused the indignation of the whole of revolutionary France, vastly strengthening the position of the Mountain and the Jacobins. Up to this time the situation of the Girondists was not unfavourable. The chances of the Girondists’ insurrection seemed by no means hopeless. They had the bulk of the provinces with them, including the large cities of the south. But before the end of July the Girondist army melted away without having struck a blow. The cities Lyons, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Caen, etc., that still adhered to the Girondist cause, were taken by the National Forces of the Republic, and for the most part paid heavily for their partisanship. Meanwhile the committee for drawing up the new constitution had finished its labours. The draft was submitted to the forty-four thousand communes of France, and accepted by an enormous majority. On the 10th of August, the anniversary of the taking of the Tuileries, the constitution was promulgated in Paris with great rejoicings. This was the famous Constitution of 1793, which became the political sheet-anchor of the French democracy. Soon after the revolution which had placed the Mountain in power, the recently formed and now strengthened executive body, the Committee of Public Safety, had decided that a democratic constitution in accordance with the views of the Jacobins should be drawn up. The task of doing this was entrusted to a prominent member of the Convention, the ex-noble and friend of Danton, Hérault de Sechelles. He was assisted by four other Montagnards – St Just, Couthon, Ramel, and Mathieu. His draft was adopted by the Convention on June the 10th. It may be remarked that the question of the constitution had been prominently before the Convention, and more than one draft had been made by the Girondists, which had been received coldly by the Convention and public opinion, and actively opposed by the Mountain. The constitution of H6rault de Sechelles and his colleagues, called the Constitution of 1793, was the first and only constitution emanating officially from the Mountain and the Jacobins. This constitution, though adopted, as stated, by an enormous majority of the French people through their primary assemblies, was suspended immediately after it was promulgated, and never became operative.
Invasion now threatened France from all sides. It was in August 1793 that the two committees, that of Public Safety, sometimes called the Committee of Government, and that of General Security, concerned mainly with the executive functions of police, respectively, were given largely increased powers, amounting practically to those of a dictatorship. Superhuman efforts were now made to raise and equip more troops; everywhere were enlistments and requisitions. The Republic has been adequately described as presenting, in this autumn of 1793, the appearance of an armed camp. It was now that the “Reign of Terror” began in earnest. The Committee of Public Safety declared that the Republic was revolutionary, and must remain so until all danger from the enemy was past. The incriminated Girondists were tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal and guillotined. The rest of the party were either imprisoned or outlawed. Marie Antoinette, generals, ex-deputies of the constituent and legislative assemblies, nobles, and officials of the ancien régime fell beneath the national knife, now in daily operation.
In October 1793 the revolutionary government was proclaimed, the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety came into full force, and with it the power of its now strongest member, Robespierre. The Committee of Public Safety being installed as, de jure, the supreme authority in France, it found that it had to make up its account with the de facto authority of the day, to wit, the Paris Commune. At first it was the Commune that effectively dominated the situation. Chaumette and Hébert had just instituted the worship of Reason on the ruins of Catholicism. The Commune, by means of its revolutionary army, consisting of six or seven thousand men under the command of Rousin, the dramatic author, undertook the purification of the provinces from reactionary elements, although its immediate action was mainly confined to the departments around Paris. But throughout France at this time guillotining was going on. Carrier was sent to Nantes; Lebon to Arras; Maignet, Fouché, Barras, Fréron were despatched to the cities of the south; and everywhere the revolutionary committees were active in hunting down traitors or supposed traitors.
By the end of 1793 fourteen armies were in the field. The year closed amid the success of the French arms everywhere. Friction, however, between the two rival central powers, the Committee of Public Safety and the Paris Commune, had already begun. The attack on the Paris Commune, or the Hébertist faction, as it was now called, from Hébert, one of its chief members and editor of the Pere Duchesne journal, by the followers of Robespierre, was started by Robespierre himself on September the 5th. But the Commune was still strong. In October it inaugurated the new worship of Reason. Robespierre’s determination to crush the rival power was now formed. At the same time, within the Convention, the Mountain was, however, showing signs of getting out of hand. Two members, who expressed the view that the committees were terrorising over the Convention, were arrested and imprisoned in consequence. In the provinces the representatives “on mission” dominated the situation, acting in many cases as local dictators.
The friction between the Committee of Public Safety, whose soul was Robespierre, and the Commune of Paris, led by Chaumette and Hébert, continued throughout the early part of 1794. Of the two chief clubs, the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, the stronghold of Robespierre and his Committee was the Jacobins; that of the Commune, i.e. of Hébert and his followers, was the Cordeliers. But there was a third party already in the field. Danton and his friends had been for some time past “lying low”. Danton himself had been away at his home at Arcis, whence he was recalled by his political associates. The latter, with the approval of their leader, started a journal vehemently hostile to the Hébertists and the Terror, which was edited and mostly written by Camille Desmoulins. It was called Le vieux Cordelier, in allusion to the Cordeliers Club in the old days when Danton was its moving spirit. In their campaign against the Terror, the Dantonists hoped to find support in the Convention, but, as events proved, they were relying on a broken reed. Robespierre and his party had now two enemies to contend with. On the one hand he had the L’Énrages, as they were termed, namely, the Hébertists, and on the other the Pacivists, that is, Danton and his friends. It was not part of Robespierre’s purpose, or that of his committee, to relax the Terror at this moment. On the other hand, Robespierre was much concerned that the handling of the system of the Terror should not get into the control of his Extremist enemies on the opposite side.
Early in March matters reached a climax. One or other of the two rival powers had to succumb. The only course for the Hébertists and the Cordeliers lay in a successful insurrection, which would break the power of the committee and of Robespierre. The beginnings of an attempt were made, but miscarried. A panic seemed to seize the Cordeliers, and no more active measures were taken. Robespierre had now the upper hand, and lost no time in having the leaders of the “Hébertist faction” arrested and dragged before the Revolutionary Tribunal, there to be charged with conspiring to destroy the Revolution by discrediting it through the excesses of their doctrines and policy.
Accordingly, on March the 24th, the leaders of the Extremist party, Hébert, Ronsin, and Momoro, with others, went to the guillotine, Chaumette following a few days later. The revolutionary army was disbanded, and the Commune reorganised and filled with the creatures of Robespierre. Having crushed his Extremist rivals, it only remained for Robespierre to destroy his Moderate foes. This followed with little delay. On March the 30th, Desmoulins, Philippeaux, and Westermann, with other friends of Danton, were arrested. Danton himself in vain attempted to get a hearing in the Convention, Robespierre effectually succeeding in closing his mouth. On April the 3rd he, together with the members of his party, was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal, where he defended himself with such vigour that Robespierre had to extort a decree from the Convention depriving the accused of the right of speech. Two days later Danton and the remaining Dantonists were sent to the guillotine.
The power of Robespierre was now supreme. His next thought was the foundation of a deistic cult, of which he himself was to be the sovereign pontiff, as a counterblast to the atheistic worship of Reason inaugurated by the Hébertists. The Convention obediently voted his instructions in this respect, end the Festival of the Supreme Being was held on June the 8th, 1794, in the Tuileries gardens, the principal features of the ceremony being an oration from the high-priest Robespierre, following which he set fire to certain stage-property figures constructed to represent atheism and other doctrines of the Hebertists that he disliked. The Convention, which at Robespierre’s behest had shortly before decreed the existence of a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul, was, two days after the festival in honour of these dogmas, called upon by the same dictator to pass the celebrated law of Prairial, which enacted that no prisoner haled before the Revolutionary Tribunal should have the right of any defence whatever.
The next weeks saw a frightful increase in the activity of the guillotine, which every day received its holocausts. But at the same time an undercurrent of fear and detestation and indeterminate revolt was rising higher and higher every day. Meanwhile, on the 26th June, the battle of Fleurus was won by General Jourdan, and the enemy driven from the Austrian Netherlands. Thus was France freed from danger, and the last point of her threatened frontiers relieved. The imminent danger of a foreign invasion was now definitely conjured, and therewith the main excuse for the institution of the “Terror” crumbled to pieces. But nevertheless the Terror continued.
At last the reckoning came. It was on the 9th of Thermidor (27th of July) 1794. Robespierre, feeling himself with his little group of satellites daily becoming more and more isolated amid the hatred and imperfectly suppressed revolt of Convention and committee men, on the 8th of Thermidor (July the 26th) appeared in the Convention after a long absence, with a violent and threatening speech, demanding powers to purge the Convention and the committees alike. This, after a moment’s hesitation on the part of the Convention, started the open revolt against the Robespierrian dictatorship. At the sitting of the following day, Robespierre and his partisans, including his brother, Couthon, St Just, and Lebas, were decreed accused. In the early morning of the 28th, Robespierre and his partisans were surrounded in the Hotel de Ville. At four o’clock in the afternoon Robespierre himself and the other chiefs of the Robespierrian faction fell beneath the guillotine. Thus ended the celebrated revolution of the 9th of Thermidor (27th of July), year II (1794). The immediate upshot was the end of the system of the Terror, soon followed by serious modifications in the public authorities. Various economic measures passed by the Convention to relieve distress, among them the Law of Maximum, were repealed during the ensuing months. The Jacobin Club was closed in November, and the Convention began steadily and unmistakably to enter the pathway of reaction.
It was now, during this autumn of 1794, that the great political activity of Gracchus Babeuf in Paris began, and began in the sense of the Thermidoreans, as the makers of the recent revolution were termed. The earlier period of his Paris journalism was signalised, as the reader will see, by vehement attacks on the fallen régime of the Terror and all connected with it. His subsequent change of opinions in this connection must be directly attributed to the reactionary character assumed by the new government, which was manned by Thermidoreans, and by the Convention itself, dominated, as it was, by the members of the same party and other reactionary elements, such as the remnants of the Girondin faction which were allowed to regain possession of their seats in the national legislature. With his growing bitterness towards the new authorities and the daily increasing reaction generally, moreover, grew Babeuf’s clearness of vision as to the ends he ultimately had in view. The Constitution of 1793, and the other political objects for which he strove, he now regarded merely as a means towards a communistic state of society, which was necessarily conceived by him under the only guise possible for a man of the eighteenth century to envisage it.
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