February Is Black History Month-From The Black Liberation Archives- The Russian Revolution and the Black Freedom Struggle

"As at Washington, D.C., so at Tulsa, Okla. …The entire power of the State, all of the forces of capitalist 'law and order,' were turned upon the Negro in the process of 'putting down' race riots that were started and most actively prosecuted by white mobs.... That is the kind of justice the Negro gets in capitalist

America! That is the kind of justice the Jew used to get in capitalist-Czarist Russia, until the workers of all races arose in their wrath and overthrew the capitalist-Czarist combination and set up Soviets. Now the workers of all races get equal justice—in Russia. How long will the Negro in America continue to fall for capitalist bunk? How many more Tulsas will it take to line up the Negro where by all race interests he belongs—with the radical forces of the world that are working for the overthrow of capitalism and the dawn of a new day, a new heaven and a new earth?"
These questions are posed with no less urgency 80 years later. The last great struggle for black equality in the U.S., the civil rights movement, resulted in the formal elimination of entrenched Jim Crow segregation in the South. But it did nothing to ameliorate the de facto segregation of the black masses at the bot-tom of American society—massive and chronic unemployment, segregated and substandard housing and schools, rampant cop terror in the ghettos—rooted in the very foundations of this capitalist system. Thousands upon thousands of civil rights activists faced down shotgun-wielding cops and Klan lynchers in white robes. But the movement was steered away from a revolutionary challenge to racist American capitalism by Martin Luther King Jr. and other liberal civil rights leaders, aided by the long-since reformist Communist Party, and into the dead end of Democratic Party liberalism.
The Spartacist League was born in good part in a fight for a revolutionary proletarian intervention into the civil rights movement. The SL originated as the Revolutionary Tendency within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which had been founded and led for many years by Cannon, in struggle against the party's descent from Trotskyism into centrism in 1961-63. Weakened by years of isolation during the McCarthyite witchhunt, the SWP criminally abstained from the struggle to win the thousands of left-wing militants who rebelled against King's liberal pacifism, instead adapting to the liberals and later the black nationalists.
Today, the material conditions of the mass of the black population are by every measure worse than they were in the 1960s, while even the minimal gains achieved then have either been rolled back or are under incessant attack. Meanwhile, King's political heirs—Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, etc.—seek to bind a new generation of black youth to the Democratic Party as a capitalist "lesser evil" and to convince them that "communism is dead." The destruction of the Soviet Union, the final undoing of the October Revolution, was an enormous defeat. But the lessons of the Russian Revolution remain no less vital. It will take nothing short of a new October Revolution that sweeps away the U.S. bourgeoisie to bring about freedom and equality for black people and all working people.
The First COINTELPRO
If the class-struggle road to black freedom was first charted in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, it was in this period as well that the American capitalist state constructed the deadly apparatus of political repression— with its vast army of spies and informers, local police "red squads," wiretaps and mail interceptions—that was later deployed by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI in the '60s. COINTELPRO singled out the Black Panther Party, the best of a layer of radical black militants who spurned the accommodationism of King & Co., for defiantly asserting the right of armed self-defense. The FBI's war of terror left 38

Panthers dead and hundreds more framed up and imprisoned in America's dungeons, ultimately including onetime Philadelphia Panther spokesman Mumia Abu-Jamal, who now fights for his life from a prison cell on Pennsylvania's death row. Theodore Kornweibel's "Seeing Red": Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy 1919-1925 (1998) presents a history of the first edition of COINTELPRO. Kornweibel opens: "Modern America's political intelligence system—surveillance, investigation, and spying on individuals because of fear or dislike of their beliefs, resulting in harassment, intimidation, or persecution—came of age during World War I and the Red Scare of 1919 to 1921." America's entry into World War I, the first interimperialist world war, in 1917 gave impetus to the creation of a far-flung domestic espionage apparatus— including the Bureau of Investigation, the Military Intelligence Division (MID) and the Office of Naval Intelligence—which grew from a handful of agents to a staff of thousands by war's end in November 1918. At its center was the newly formed Bureau of Investigation—to be recast in 1935 as the FBI amid a new wave of working-class radicalization—and its General Intelligence Division (GID), headed by the same J. Edgar Hoover. Within months of its formation in 1919 the GID had compiled a list of 55,000 names. Initially aimed at antiwar dissidents, left-wing Socialists and IWW members, Hoover's political police went on to pursue the fledgling American Communist movement. As always, black militants were a particular target. The federal agencies were assisted by local red squads and private anti-Communist outfits like the American Defense Initiative. The Palmer Raids in the first week of January 1920 resulted in the arrest of over 6,000 Communists and the deportation of thousands of foreign-born anarchists and other radicals. All of this was carried out under "progressive" Democratic president Woodrow Wilson.
Foreshadowing the "human rights" rhetoric which was later used to justify a host of imperialist military interventions by the Clinton White House, Wilson proclaimed that the imperialist war for re-division of colonies and spheres of exploitation was fought to make the world "safe for democracy"—even as he presided over the brutal subjugation of American colonies like the Philippines and Puerto Rico and Jim Crow terror against black people in the U.S. Wilson's "14 Points," including the right of national self-determination, were cynically crafted to counter Bolshevik influence among working people and colonial slaves around the world. As a staunch supporter of segregation, Wilson was representative of ascending U.S. imperialism, whose racist wars of conquest abroad, beginning with the Spanish-American War of 1898, were accompanied by the intensification of racist repression at home.
Based on previously unavailable government documents, Kornweibel presents a powerful exposition of how the federal government mobilized its resources— from the armed forces to the postal service, from the State Department to the Justice Department—to defend the racist capitalist status quo and to crush the new movements for black emancipation and red revolution. A liberal anti-Communist, Kornweibel argues that the Feds had "reasonable grounds for monitoring" black Communists because they supposedly advocated the' violent overthrow of the American government and acted as spies for Soviet Russia. He condemns the capitalist government only for spying on large numbers of liberals and non-Communist radicals. Kornweibel sneers that "the Bolsheviks failed to convert more than a handful of blacks to communism in the 1920s."
It is true that as late as 1928, the CP had only some 50 black members. The Palmer Raids and the anti-red witchhunt had served their purpose. The decade of the '20s was marked by an ebb tide in labor struggle, as union membership shrank to barely 10 percent of the workforce. Emboldened by the right-wing climate, the Ku Klux Klan reached a peak of power and popularity, with several million members, including in the urban North. In 1925, the Klan staged a march of 40,000 in Washington, D.C.
But in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the bourgeoisie's fears that the black masses might "see red" were not misplaced. The black GIs who had been sent to die in the "great war for democracy" in Europe and were now determined to fight .for some democracy at home were, in Wilson's eyes, the "greatest medium in conveying bolshevism to America." As Kornweibel himself recounts, the Bolshevik Revolution was popular among wide layers of urban blacks and even among moderate black newspapers and organizations. The accomodationism of Booker T. Washington, who preached acceptance of Jim Crow segregation and lectured impoverished blacks to pull themselves up "by the bootstraps," had held sway in the years following the elimination of the last remaining gains of Reconstruction in the 1890s, when the downtrodden masses of black sharecroppers in the South entertained little hope of social struggle. But the end of World War I ushered in a new spirit of militancy, the "New Crowd Negro," in the words of black social democrat A. Philip Randolph.

Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
The experience of the Bolshevik Party in leading the first victorious proletarian revolution provoked a polarization and regroupment within the workers movement internationally. In the U.S., many left-wing Socialists and members of the revolutionary-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) joined together to forge an American section of the Communist International (CI). Of particular importance was the profound change inspired by the Russian Bolsheviks in the way American radicals viewed the black question.
Samuel Gompers' American Federation of Labor was largely composed of lily-white craft unions. Even the IWW, which fought heroically to organize black and immigrant workers, had no program to address the special oppression of black people. The Socialist Party ranged from open racists like Victor Berger, who considered black people "a lower race," to "colorblind" socialists like Eugene V. Debs. Debs staunchly opposed racist discrimination and the exclusion of black workers from the unions but denied that black people suffered from any form of oppression other than as workers, going so far as to challenge: "What social distinction is there between a white and a black deckhand on a Mississippi steam-boat?" (Jean Y. Tussey, ed., Debs Speaks [1970]). This Debsian outlook was manifested in the 1919 founding program of the Communist Party, while the program of the rival Communist Labor Party (the two groups merged in 1920) simply ignored the black question.
As Cannon, a former Wobbly who became an early leader of the CP and then founder of the American Trotskyist movement, noted in his 1959 article: "The earlier socialist movement, out of which the Communist Party was, formed, never recognized any need for a special program on the Negro question. It was considered purely and simply as an economic problem, part of the struggle between the workers and the capitalists; nothing could be done about the special problems of discrimination and inequality this side of socialism.... "The difference—and it was a profound difference—between the Communist Party of the Twenties and its socialist and radical ancestors, was signified by its break with this tradition. The American communists in the early days, under the influence and pressure of the Russians in the Comintern, were slowly and painfully learning to change their attitude; to assimilate the new theory of the Negro question as a special question of doubly-exploited second-class citizens, requiring a program of special demands as part of the over-all program—and to start doing something about it."
Though the early Comintern tended to conflate the black struggle in the U.S. with the colonial struggle in Africa, the manifesto adopted by the First Congress of the CI in 1919, drafted by Trotsky, was a clarion call to the dark-skinned masses throughout the world, proclaiming: "Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia! The hour of proletarian dictatorship in Europe will strike for you as the hour of your own emancipation!" The first full discussion of the black question from a Communist viewpoint took place not in the U.S. but in Moscow, at the Second Comintern Congress in 1920. At Lenin's personal request, American Communist John Reed—author of Ten Days That Shook the World, the first popular account of the Russian Revolution—was designated to report on the "Negro Question." Describing the horrors of lynch law and Jim Crow segregation as well as the effects of proletarianization and imperialist war, Reed said:
"If we consider the Negroes as an en-slaved and oppressed people, then they pose us with two tasks: on the one hand a strong racial movement and on the other a strong proletarian workers' movement, whose class consciousness is quickly growing. The Negroes do not pose the demand of national independence.... "The Communists must not stand aloof from the Negro movement which demands their social and political equality and at the moment, at a time of the rapid growth of racial consciousness, is spreading rapidly among the Negroes. The Communists must use this movement to expose the lie of bourgeois equality and emphasize the necessity of the social revolution which will not only liberate all workers from servitude but is also the only way to free the enslaved Negro people."
In the years before and during World War I, more than a million blacks fled the rural Jim Crow South to enter Northern industry. In his 1915 pamphlet, New Data on the Laws Governing the Development of Capitalism in Agriculture, Lenin wrote: "To show what the South is like, it is essential to add that its population is fleeing to other capitalist areas and to the towns.... For the 'emancipated' Negroes, the American South is a kind of prison where they are hemmed in, isolated and deprived of fresh air." The black question in the U.S. Was thus transformed from primarily a Southern agrarian question left unresolved in the aftermath of the Civil War and the radical-democratic Reconstruction era to a key question of the proletarian revolution.
Particularly with the formation of the integrated CIO industrial unions in the latter half of the 1930s, black workers became a strategic component of the multiracial proletariat. The special oppression of black people as a race/color caste—segregated at the bottom of this society while integrated into the economy—is the cornerstone of American capitalism. Black workers serve as an industrial reserve army, the last hired and first fired as economic need demands. As well, America's rulers foster racial divisions in order to obscure the fundamental and irreconcilable class division between labor and capital and to head off united working-class struggle.
The Spartacist League's proletarian, revolutionary strategy for black liberation derives from the seminal understanding laid out by Reed in Moscow in 1920 and powerfully developed by the later writings of veteran Trotskyist Richard Fraser. In the late 1940s and early '50s, Fraser pioneered the perspective of revolutionary interactionism upheld today by the SL. We fight to mobilize the multiracial proletariat in struggle against every manifestation of racist oppression, a struggle which can only be victorious through the full social, political and economic integration of black people in an egalitarian socialist society.
Won to a revolutionary program, doubly oppressed black workers will play a leading role in the fight to emancipate the black masses and all working people by sweeping away the entire system of capitalist exploitation. There can be no socialist revolution in this country without united struggle of black and white workers led by a multiracial vanguard party, and there is nothing other than a workers revolution, smashing the capitalist state and expropriating the capitalist class, which can at last realize the historic struggle for black equality and freedom.
Racist Terror and Black Self-Defense
The Red Scare hit full stride in 1919. That year saw the crest of the wave of labor radicalism which swept Europe in response to the great carnage of the war and under the impact of the Russian Revolution. In the U.S., the ranks of the Socialist Party swelled to more than 100,000, mostly foreign-born workers, with two-thirds supporting the pro-Bolshevik left wing. The U.S. was hit by the biggest strike wave up to that time, as four million workers walked off their jobs in response to the mounting cost of living induced by war inflation. Drives to organize unions in meatpacking and steel culminated in a huge steel strike that year which was smashed by federal troops. Shunned by the Jim Crow craft unions of the AFL, many black workers had first worked in non-union "open shops." Many more had been brought in to replace white workers drafted into the military.
In the South, the sight of armed and uniformed black soldiers drove the racists into a frenzy. In Houston, 13 black soldiers were hanged in September 1917 and 41 imprisoned for life for defending themselves against a racist mob, and the number of lynchings escalated over the next couple of years. Conflicts over housing and jobs set the stage for a series of bloody pogroms and racist massacres, beginning in East St. Louis in July 1917, where over 40 blacks were killed. These conflicts intensified with the end of the war, as white workers demobilized from the army demanded jobs at the expense of black workers and a postwar economic downturn set in.
The Red Summer of 1919, so called for the blood of black victims that flowed through city streets, saw a series of racist rampages that left hundreds dead across the country. In Washington, D.C., the entry of black workers into lower-level civil service jobs during the war provoked a riot by returning soldiers in which six blacks were killed. A five-day riot in Chicago, which broke the back of the meat-packers organizing drive, left 23 blacks and 15 whites dead and over 500 people seriously injured. In Elaine, Arkansas, the formation of the black Progressive Farmers and Householders Union was met with a racist onslaught. Following a mob attack on a union meeting in October, in which some 200 black men, women and children died, federal troops were called in and 12 sharecroppers were sentenced to death and another 80 to prison for "inciting to insurrection." They were finally freed after prolonged efforts by the NAACP.
The worst of these racist atrocities came in Tulsa, Oklahoma in May 1921. As false rumors spread that a young black man had attacked a white female elevator operator, lynch mobs looted and burned black homes and businesses. Black residents, many of them army vets, organized to defend themselves. The police, commandeering private planes, dropped dynamite on the heart of black Tulsa. By the time it was over, the once-thriving black business district, known as "the Negro Wall Street," had been razed. Over 200 black men, women and children (as well as some 50 white attackers) were killed, and over 4,000 more were thrown into concentration camps.
What alarmed the bourgeoisie was not the murderous ferocity of the racist attacks but that they were met by blacks with growing resolve for armed self-defense. The Chicago Whip, one of a number of small black newspapers which typified the "New Crowd Negro," drew the ire of the Feds when it headlined a report on a 1920 racist riot in Jersey City in which three whites were badly beaten in self-defense by besieged blacks: "Started by White Hoodlums, Finished by Tough Negroes." Following the Tulsa pogrom, the paper carried a scathing indictment of racist American "democracy": "Americanism! Is that the thing which lynches, burns and murders the weak? If so, then give us Lords and Kings with guillotines and dungeons" (quoted in the Crusader, July 1921).
Claude McKay gave voice to the new spirit of militancy in his famous poem "If We Must Die" (1919):
"If we must die, let it not be like hogs....
Like men we'll face the murderous cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!"
Though never a member of the CP, McKay was outspoken and eloquent in his support for the Russian Revolution and was invited to attend the CI's 1922 Fourth Congress as a special delegate. When McKay met Trotsky, the Bolshevik leader and Red Army commander talked of his hopes of training a group of American blacks as officers in the Red Army and invited McKay for a three-week tour of Russian military facilities. But, stressed Trotsky, "The training of black propagandists is the most imperative and extremely important revolutionary task of the present time."
Even the cravenly legalistic NAACP ran an editorial in its Crisis in May 1919 in which editor W. E. B. DuBois called for black vets to "battle against the forces of hell in our own land" and declared, "We return from fighting. We return fighting." This was deemed so inflammatory that the New York Postmaster / ordered 100,000 copies of the issue withheld, despite the NAACP's record of loyalty to the racist rulers. During the war, DuBois had urged blacks to "close ranks" behind U.S. imperialism, while NAACP chair-man Joel Spingarn served as an officer in military intelligence, briefly heading up subsection M14E, which specialized in "investigations of blacks' loyalties," as Kornweibel reports.
After the war, DuBois appealed to the victors of the imperialist bloodbath to apply the "principles" of their robbers' peace—Wilson's "14 Points" and the Versailles treaty—to Africa and played a leading role in the Second Pan-African Congress in 1921, which demanded nothing more lofty than the "right" of the colonial slaves "to participate in the [colonial] government as fast as their development permits." Writing about this period in 1972, even a scholar sympathetic to Pan-Africanism, Harvard political science professor Azina Nwafor, observed:
"These were, after all, the historical moments when the Bolsheviks had just triumphed in Russia and were exhorting all subject and colonial peoples to rise and overthrow their oppressors, their respective feudal and imperialist regimes, and to 'expropriate all the expropriators.' Such revolutionary principles and appeals were the real radical demands of the epoch—and not a wind of these blew through the civilized halls of the Pan-African Congresses."
—"Critical Introduction" to George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism (1972)
When McKay criticized the Crisis in 1921 for "sneering] at the Russian Revolution, the greatest event in the history of humanity," DuBois replied that "the immediate work for the American Negro lies in America and not in Russia" and pronounced it "foolish for us to give up this practical program...by seeking to join a revolution which we do not at present understand" (Crisis, July 1921; reprinted in Philip S. Foner and James S. Alien, eds., American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1919-1929 [1987]). This the liberal DuBois would never understand, even after joining the by-then thoroughly reformist CP in 1961, shortly before his death.
Hoover's Witchhunt Against Black Militants
As racist mobs rampaged against blacks in 1919, Hoover directed his agents to pay "special attention" to "the Negro agitation which seems to be prevalent throughout the industrial centers of the country and every effort should be made to ascertain whether or not this agitation is due to the influence of the radical elements such as the IWW and Bolsheviks." In a report to Congress that year, Hoover railed that "a certain class of Negro leaders" had shown "an outspoken advocacy of the Bolsheviki or Soviet doctrines," had been "openly, defiantly assertive" of their "own equality or even superiority" and had demanded "social equality" (quoted in Robert Gold-stein, Political Repression in Modern America: 1870 to the Present [1978]).
In its venomous crusade against anything smacking of black self-assertion, the government even targeted Marcus Garvey's Negro World as "probable Bolshevik propaganda." In fact, Garvey was an early exponent of the reactionary separatism and black capitalism today espoused by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. In 1922, Garvey even staged a meeting with the head of the KKK. Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association tried to get blacks to move to Africa and establish themselves as a new colonial elite with himself as their emperor. The only 'black nationalist movement in the U.S. ever to attain a mass base, the Garveyites fed off the disillusionment and demoralization which followed the defeat of the postwar strike wave and the 1919 riots. After a years-long vendetta, the Feds imprisoned Gravy in 1925 on fraud charges, deporting him to Jamaica three years later.
The main targets of government repression, intimidation, infiltration and frame-up were black leftists, especially those like McKay who had traveled to Moscow and were suspected of bringing back instructions from Trotsky to set up a "colored Soviet." The small number of black agents and informants recruited by the Feds were kept busy infiltrating numerous organizations, in some cases simultaneously, and reporting on public meetings and discussion circles. A particular focus of government spying was Martin Luther Campbell's tailor shop in Harlem, where regular discussions were attended by a wide range of black radicals and Communists, including McKay and leading CPer Rose Pastor Stokes.
Among those targeted by the Feds were left social democrats A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, who published the Messenger. The second issue of the Messenger (May/June 1919) featured headlines like "The March of Soviet Government" and "We Want More Bolshevik Patriotism." It was from the Messenger group and the Harlem branch of the Socialist Party that the Communist Party recruited its first black members, including founding CPer Otto Huiswoud, a union printer from Dutch Guiana (now Surinam). The post office withheld permanent second-class mailing status from the Messenger for two years for the following piece puncturing the racist hypocrisy of American bourgeois society:
"As for social equality, there are about five million mulattoes in the United States. This is the product of semi-social equality. It shows that social equality galore exists after dark, and we warn you that we expect to have social equality in the day as well as after dark."
Though initially an admirer of the Bolshevik Revolution, Randolph sided with the reformist wing of the SP in the 1919 split that led to the formation of the CP. In 1923, he and Owen ran an editorial titled "The Menace of Negro Communists." By the 1950s, Randolph was a Cold War liberal and Democratic Party stalwart.
The African Blood Brotherhood
The CP's real breakthrough in black recruitment came from the African Blood Brotherhood, founded in 1919 by West Indian militant Cyril Briggs, publisher of the Crusader. Announcing the formation of the ABB, the Crusader wrote: "Those only need apply who are willing to go the limit!" Briggs was led by his uncompromising hostility to imperialist capitalism to embrace a revolutionary outlook, and he and other ABB leaders joined the CP. When the CP,- before then underground, set up the Workers Party as a legal party, the ABB sent a fraternal delegation to its founding convention in December 1921 and many ABB members joined the new legal party.
Briggs himself came under surveillance in 1919 when the MID was alerted by a British intelligence report on "Negro Agitation" which described the Crusader as a "very extreme magazine" for its opposition to imperialism, its admiration of Bolshevism and its "abuse of the white man." Garvey's pro-capitalist separatist movement was a chief target of the Crusader's polemical fire. This political struggle soon became muddied as Hoover's provocateurs tried to push it toward a violent confrontation, just as 50 years later FBI provocateurs seized on the antagonism between the Panthers and Ron Karenga's "cultural nationalists" in Los Angeles to foment murderous feuding. DuBois and Randolph were trying to get the Feds to prosecute Garvey. Indefensibly, in 1922 Briggs joined with them in this, according to Kornweibel, alerting the "New York authorities that the Negro World had violated the law by printing advertisements for a cure for venereal disease."
In the wake of the 1921 Tulsa massacre, the ABB was subjected to even closer government scrutiny and a hysterical press witchhunt for supposedly organizing black self-defense efforts there. But the ABB's membership soared as it defiantly affirmed the right of armed self-defense. The CP distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of its own leaflet, "The Tulsa Massacre," which called for blacks "to resist the armed assaults upon their homes, their women and children." Three CPers were convicted and sentenced to five months under Connecticut's sedition law for distributing this leaflet.
While the ABB retained a separate existence and identity through 1924, it was closely associated with and served as a recruiting ground for the Workers Party. In 1925, the CP attempted to launch a black transitional organization, the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC), in line with the CI's recognition of the need for special organizational forms to draw into the revolutionary movement specially oppressed layers. Today's Labor Black Leagues initiated by the Spartacist League are an example of such transitional organizations, which are linked to the proletarian vanguard party both programmatically and through their most conscious cadres. The ANLC opposed the color bar in the AFL, calling for unionization of black workers, demanded full social and political equality for black people and nailed "the workers' and farmers' government of Soviet Russia." Its founding conference declared, "The white workers cannot free themselves without the aid of us dark-skinned people, and we cannot liberate ourselves unless they join with us in an assault of the world bastions of imperialism" (Daily Worker, 14 November 1925; reprinted in American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1919 to 1929).
The CP did not have enough black cadre to get the ANLC off the ground, making little headway overall in this period marked by a sharp decline in union membership and massive growth of the KKK. Moreover, by this time the Bolshevik leadership of Lenin and Trotsky which had sought to guide and educate the American Communists had been replaced by the bureaucratic regime headed by Stalin. Hostile imperialist encirclement and the failure of revolution to spread beyond backward Russia to the advanced capitalist world led to the consolidation of a parasitic, nationalist bureaucracy which usurped power through a political counterrevolution consummated by the smashing of the Trotskyist Left Opposition in January 1924. The Stalinist bureaucracy pro-claimed the nationalist dogma of "socialism in one country," transforming the Communist parties in the capitalist world from instruments for socialist revolution into appendages of the Kremlin's diplomatic maneuvers.
The Stalinists' conservative policies found an echo among American CP cadre weighed down by the reactionary pressures of an expanding and self-confident imperialism. The Soviet bureaucracy manipulated the ongoing and politically unclear factional warfare within the American party for its own ends. In 1928, the CI decreed the so-called "black belt theory," insisting against all reality and the opposition of the majority of the CP's black cadre that the black population in the South constituted a nation and that the key task was to fight for black "self-determination." But as Cannon noted in his 1959 essay, "The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement," it was the CP's "aggressive agitation for Negro equality and Negro rights on every front...that brought the results, without the help, and probably despite, the unpopular 'self-determination' slogan."
Cannon explained that the profound changes in the attitude of the American Communists to the black question introduced in the early 1920s, "brought about by the Russian intervention, were to manifest themselves explosively in the next decade." As the Great Depression led to a new period of struggle in the early '30s, the CP took the lead in fights against evictions, in struggles of the unemployed and in the Scottsboro and Angelo Herndon defense campaigns. When the tumultuous battles that gave rise to powerful new industrial unions erupted, "the policy and agitation of the Communist Party at that time did more, ten times over, than any other to help the Negro workers to rise to a new status of at least semi-citizenship in the new labor movement."
But, as Cannon put it, "the American Stalinists eventually fouled up the Negro question, as they fouled up every other question." By the mid-1930s, the CI had adopted the overtly class-collaborationist "people's front" line, manifested in the U.S. in a policy of subordination to Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" Democratic Party, whose Southern wing was the Klan-infested Dixiecrat segregationists. The CP played a key role in subordinating the CIO unions and the fight for black rights to the Democratic Party, opposing labor and black struggles during World War II in order to promote the war effort of racist U.S. imperialism.
Break with the Democrats— Forge a Workers Party!
In their introductory note to American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1919 to 1929, Stalinist academics Philip Foner and James Allen seek to justify this history of sellouts by spitting on the heroic and pioneering work of the early CP. They deep-six the central role of the Russian Bolsheviks in reorienting the American Communists on the black question and criticize them for "requiring adherence to their full program" in the ANLC. They attack the early CP's "negative attitude toward the Black middle class"—i.e., its revolutionary proletarian perspective— and counterpose the need for a class-collaborationist "united freedom front." Because they uphold the Stalinist class collaborationism of the later CP, Foner and Allen are necessarily hostile to the perspective of black liberation through proletarian revolution which animated the American Communist movement under the guidance of Lenin and Trotsky.
The Stalinists' sellout of the fight for black rights in the service of FDR's Democrats cast a heavy shadow over the American workers movement. That goes a long way to explaining why, in the sub-sequent years, many blacks—and white workers as well—turned their backs on the Communist Party and the left in general, leaving the field open to Democratic Party liberals like Martin Luther King Jr. and, today, Jesse Jackson. In concluding "The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement," Cannon wrote:
"In the next stage of its development, the American Negro movement will be compelled to turn to a more militant policy than gradualism, and to look for more reliable allies than capitalist politicians in the North who are themselves allied with the Dixiecrats of the South. The Negroes, more than any others in this country, have reason and right to be revolutionary.
"An honest workers' party of the new generation will recognize this revolutionary potential of the Negro struggle, and call for a fighting alliance of the Negro people and the labor movement in a common revolutionary struggle against the present social system. "Reforms and concessions, far more important and significant than any yet attained, will be by-products of this revolutionary alliance. They will be fought for and attained at every stage of the struggle. But the new movement will not stop with reforms, nor be satisfied with concessions. The movement of the Negro people and the movement of militant labor, united and coordinated by a revolutionary party, will solve the Negro problem in the only way it can be solved—by a social revolution." The forging of an authentically communist vanguard party to lead the multiracial proletariat to power requires breaking working people and the black masses from the grip of the racist capitalist Dem-critic Party. This is the task of the Spartacist League.
As we state in the SL/U.S. programmatic statement "For Socialist Revolution in the Bastion of World Imperialism!": "The shell game through which the Democratic Party—the historic party of the Confederate slavocracy—is portrayed as the 'friend' of blacks and labor has been essential to preserving the rule of racist American capitalism. Our principal task in the U.S. is to break the power of the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy over the labor movement. It is this bureaucracy—itself a component part of the Democratic Party—which politically chains the proletariat to the bourgeoisie and is the major obstacle to revolutionary class consciousness, to the forging of a revolutionary workers party." For black liberation through socialist revolution!

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-The Russian Revolution Of 1917- Politcal Lessons For Those In The Occupy Movement Looking For The Way Forward

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Workers Vanguard No. 874
4 August 2006

The Russian Revolution of 1917

From the February Revolution to the July Days

Part One

We print below, edited for publication, the first part of a class given by comrade T. Marlow, which was one in a series of educationals on Leon Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution (1932) held in January of this year as a Spartacist League young cadre school.

It was in the course of the year 1917 that Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the October Revolution, came over to the Bolshevik Party. Trotsky had declared his political solidarity with the Bolsheviks to the party’s leaders upon his return to Russia in May 1917. Having facilitated the fusion of the Inter-Borough Group of United Social Democrats (known as the “Mezhrayontsi”) with the Bolshevik Party, Trotsky formally joined the Bolsheviks as part of this fusion in July.

Trotsky titled the first chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution “Peculiarities of Russia’s Development”; his summary of the 1917 February Revolution is “The Paradox of the February Revolution.” These two themes continue throughout the events that occurred in Russia in 1917, which culminated in the October Revolution. The first goes back to Trotsky’s brilliant prognosis, Results and Prospects (1906), which forecast not only the possibility, but the necessity for the Russian proletariat to seize power, leading behind it the mass of the peasants. This work, begun in 1904, was completed shortly after the 1905 Revolution, which shook the rotting edifice of the tsarist monarchy to its core. But it did not overthrow the monarchy. That task would have to wait until 12 years later, which is the second of Trotsky’s themes. Its completion in the conquest of state power by the Bolsheviks occurred a mere eight months after the February Revolution deposed Tsar Nicholas Romanov and his dynasty.

A key outgrowth of 1905 was the creation of the soviets (workers councils). These were formed spontaneously by the insurgent workers and had not been called for by any of the left parties, the Bolsheviks included. Their significance as the most democratic and flexible form of mass organization of the working class quickly became apparent. Soviets reappeared in 1917 during the February Revolution with an added important difference—not only the workers but also the soldiers were represented in the soviets. As Trotsky notes in his History:

“As a matter of fact, thanks to the tradition of 1905, the soviets sprang up as though from under the earth, and immediately became incomparably more powerful than all the other organisations which later tried to compete with them (the municipalities, the co-operatives, and in part the trade unions). As for the peasantry, a class by its very nature scattered, thanks to the war and revolution it was exactly at that moment organised as never before. The war had assembled the peasants into an army, and the revolution had given the army a political character! No fewer than eight million peasants were united in companies and squadrons, which had immediately created their revolutionary representation and could through it at any moment be brought to their feet by a telephone call.”

The politicization of the peasants—driven at bottom by their desire for a sweeping agrarian revolution—was critical. Without the support, overt or tacit, of the peasants, the proletarian revolution could not hope to succeed and survive in backward Russia, with its overwhelmingly agrarian population.

War and Revolution

The strains of World War I really laid the basis for the downfall of the monarchy. Trotsky’s chapter on the tsar and the tsarina is one of my favorites: to put it mildly, Nicholas was a dim bulb on the family tree, totally isolated and deliberately ignorant of what was going on in his country (except for his generous support to Black Hundred pogromists, reports of whose activities he eagerly consumed). But with or without the will of the dynasty, Russia could not have avoided participation in the interimperialist conflict. Trotsky placed Russia’s participation in WWI somewhere between that of France (a full-blown imperialist power) and China (with its comprador bourgeoisie subservient to the big powers). In his History, he adds:

“Russia paid in this way for her right to be an ally of advanced countries, to import capital and pay interest on it—that is, essentially, for her right to be a privileged colony of her allies—but at the same time for her right to oppress and rob Turkey, Persia, Galicia, and in general the countries weaker and more backward than herself.”

Russia did not do well in the war. There were some successes against the Austrians, but as Trotsky notes, this was less due to the skill of the Russians than to: “The disintegrating Hapsburg monarchy had long ago hung out a sign for an undertaker, not demanding any high qualifications of him.”

When it came to the Germans, things went rather badly for Russia. In August 1915, that is, one year after the war began, General Ruszky reported to the Council of Ministers: “The contemporary demands of military technique are beyond our powers; in any case we cannot keep up with the Germans” (quoted in Trotsky’s History). Two years later, in the aftermath of the revolutionary upheaval and repression of the July Days, and the failure of then-Minister of War Kerensky’s June offensive, this same general would rail: “People followed the old banners as sacred things and went to their deaths…. But to what have the red banners brought us? To the surrender of armies in whole corps.” The decrepit generals and the bourgeoisie would blame Russia’s collapse on the Bolsheviks, whom they slanderously claimed were acting as paid agents of Germany.

By Trotsky’s reckoning, some 15 million men, mostly peasants, were mobilized for the war, out of which 5.5 million were counted as killed, wounded or captured; some 2.5 million were killed. Trotsky encapsulated the situation as follows: “‘Everything for the war!’ said the ministers, deputies, generals, journalists. ‘Yes,’ the soldier began to think in the trenches, ‘they are all ready to fight to the last drop...of my blood’.”

The extraordinary casualty rates were due both to incompetent military command and a pervasive lack of supplies, including weapons and ammunition, and even boots. Meanwhile, the capitalists were making huge profits selling (often inferior) goods to the government, paid for by exactions on the working class and also by more and more loans from the City of London and the French Bourse (stock market). Rodzianko, Lord Chamberlain under Tsar Nicholas II, later President of the State Duma (Russian Parliament), and one of the leaders of the Russian big bourgeoisie, got rich by providing low quality, essentially useless wood to be used for rifle stocks. As an aside, one might note that Halliburton has a long line of predecessors! Trotsky speaks of the “shower of gold” coming from the top that funded the lavish parties of the rich, while the lower classes were desperate to find even bread.

What broke the back of the dynasty was that the army no longer wanted to fight, and units were increasingly either abandoning the front in mass desertions or refusing to carry out orders. A powerful indication was when the Cossack regiments in Petrograd refused to suppress a workers demonstration in the Vyborg district—the proletarian core of Petrograd. As Trotsky relates in the History:

“…the officers first charged through the crowd. Behind them, filling the whole width of the Prospect, galloped the Cossacks. Decisive moment! But the horsemen, cautiously, in a long ribbon, rode through the corridor just made by the officers. ‘Some of them smiled,’ Kayurov recalls, ‘and one of them gave the workers a good wink.’”

If the Cossacks were winking at the workers, the tsar was in trouble.

The February Revolution

Trotsky’s chronology in Volume One of the History of the Russian Revolution gives a vivid idea of the tempo of events: on February 23, a demonstration for International Women’s Day demanding bread sparks the revolution. By February 25, there is a general strike in Petrograd. The next day, the tsar dissolves the Duma—but neither this, nor the shooting of demonstrators, are to any avail. On the next day, there is a mutiny in the Guard regiments and the formation of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. By February 28, the tsar’s ministers are arrested. Attempts to arrange an orderly succession failed—none of the grand dukes wanted to feel the rope, so richly deserved by Tsar Nicholas Romanov, around their own necks.

The revolution came as a surprise not only to the abysmally clueless monarch but also to the assorted political parties. Its spontaneity carried dangers. As Trotsky noted:

“A revolutionary uprising that spreads over a number of days can develop victoriously only in case it ascends step by step, and scores one success after another. A pause in its growth is dangerous; a prolonged marking of time, fatal. But even successes by themselves are not enough; the masses must know about them in time, and have time to understand their value. It is possible to let slip a victory at the very moment when it is within arm’s reach. This has happened in history.”

It was only on February 25 that the Bolsheviks decided to issue a leaflet calling for an all-Russian general strike—when Petrograd was facing an armed uprising. What was clearly lacking was political leadership: “The leaders were watching the movement from above; they hesitated, they lagged—in other words, they did not lead. They dragged after the movement” (Trotsky’s History).

Hence the paradox of the February Revolution: the tsar was overthrown by a massive upsurge of the Petrograd workers, with the support or indulgence of the garrison troops, and the soviets emerged with the real power. Yet the Provisional Government which was formed was dominated by monarchists—its leader was Prince Lvov—and even the Kadets (a bourgeois and landlord party favoring a constitutional monarchy) were considered to be on the left wing! The workers had toppled the monarchy, but the political power which they rightly possessed was handed off to the bourgeoisie like a hand grenade whose pin was already pulled.

How to explain this? On the face of it, the overthrow of the monarchy had been accomplished without the leadership of a revolutionary party. But as Trotsky points out, this is a misleading view. First, there had been the experience of 1905. Subsequent to that, despite the period of deep reaction, the Bolshevik Party was steeling its cadres in all arenas of work, both legal and underground. By 1912, the working class had recovered some fighting spirit, and a series of strikes occurred. The influence of the Bolsheviks within the proletariat was steadily growing. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that the proletariat could have conquered power in the urban centers of Petrograd and Moscow (as was later threatened in the July Days in 1917). The question was how long they could have held it—without a shift in the attitude of the peasantry, one would likely have had a repeat of the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1871.

The world war changed that. Despite the initial burst of patriotism in August 1914, in which the Bolsheviks were shunned by the masses and repressed by the government, the seeds planted by the Bolsheviks through their intervention into the workers’ upsurges from 1912 to 1914 eventually found fertile ground. After August 1914, the defeats on the military front, and the corresponding economic suffering in the rear that was brought about during two and a half years of imperialist carnage, had weakened support for the monarchy to zero. As Trotsky points out, even though the Bolsheviks as a party were repressed to the point of organizational collapse, the individual cadres were still alive and able to engage fellow workers on the shop floor. That is, if the Bolsheviks as a party were not in the leadership per se of the February Revolution, their ideas and agitators certainly played a critical role.

Dual Power

This brings us to the period of dual power. The downfall of the monarchy was brought about through the forces of the Petrograd proletariat and the active support (or neutrality) of the military garrison. The cringing liberals had no role, and the big bourgeoisie sought to cover their power with some regurgitated monarchical order. The Provisional Government was headed by Prince Lvov, with a sprinkling of Kadets representing the bourgeoisie and with the deputy chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Kerensky, assuming the post of Minister of Justice in contravention of a Soviet Executive Committee decision that its members not enter the government. In reality, the power belonged to the Soviet, but its leadership was dominated by the Mensheviks and, especially, the Social Revolutionaries (SRs, a leftist party based on the peasantry); the Bolsheviks were a minority, even among the workers. The soviets of February reflected the consciousness of February, which accounts for the position of the SRs, who were the predominant party of the peasants and hence the soldiers.

As Trotsky noted, the Soviet leadership was ceding power:

“The bourgeoisie received the power behind the backs of the people. It had no support in the toiling classes. But along with the power it received a simulacrum of support second-hand. The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, lifted aloft by the masses, delivered as if from themselves a testimonial of confidence to the bourgeoisie.”

When the Compromiser leadership crawled before the bourgeoisie, begging it to take the power, they were politically consistent—the Mensheviks thought that the Russian Revolution never could go beyond the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. Even the sharp Miliukov (head of the Kadets) was astonished and proclaimed his praise to the Mensheviks’ betrayal: “Yes, I was listening and I was thinking how far forward our workers’ movement has progressed since the days of 1905” (quoted in Trotsky’s History).

So here you have an official government, representing the bourgeoisie and committed to the imperialist war aims of the Romanovs and the Entente (the alliance of Britain, France and Russia in WWI), and side by side with it the Soviet, created by the insurgent workers and soldiers. Does this mean that there existed two actual governments or a state power of multiple classes? If that were true it would certainly violate the Marxist conception of the state. But it isn’t true. If anything, the history of Russia between February and October was continual conflict between the Provisional Government and the Soviet—despite and also because of the backsliding of the latter’s Menshevik and SR leaders. Lenin, as usual, got to the core of the issue in his article on the dual power in April 1917:

“The basic question of every revolution is that of state power. Unless this question is understood, there can be no intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the revolution.

“The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has brought about a dual power. This fact must be grasped first and foremost: unless it is understood, we cannot advance. We must know how to supplement and amend old ‘formulas,’ for example, those of Bolshevism, for while they have been found to be correct on the whole, their concrete realisation has turned out to be different. Nobody previously thought, or could have thought, of a dual power.

“What is this dual power? Alongside the Provisional Government, the government of the bourgeoisie, another government has arisen, so far weak and incipient, but undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing—the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.”

—V.I. Lenin, “The Dual Power”

Referring to the Menshevik/SR leaders of the soviets and their capitulations, Lenin adds:

“They refuse to recognise the obvious truth that inasmuch as these Soviets exist, inasmuch as they are a power, we have in Russia a state of the type of the Paris Commune.

“I have emphasised the words ‘inasmuch as,’ for it is only an incipient power. By direct agreement with the bourgeois Provisional Government and by a series of actual concessions, it has itself surrendered and is surrendering its positions to the bourgeoisie.”

In several instances, the soviets intervened and took actions which are normally the prerogative of the (bourgeois) state power. The first Minister of War in the Provisional Government, Guchkov, complained: “The government, alas, has no real power; the troops, the railroads, the post and telegraph are in the hands of the Soviet. The simple fact is that the Provisional Government exists only so long as the Soviet permits it” (quoted in Trotsky’s History). However, this did not alter the fact that the Provisional Government was bourgeois, that it was pursuing the imperialist war aims of the bourgeoisie, and that the economy of Russia was still operating on a capitalist basis. The Provisional Government sought to strangle the Soviet in order to exercise its state power unfettered. Please recall Lenin’s description of the Soviets as an incipient power. Dual power was inherently an unstable situation, during which the contending classes marshaled their forces for the confrontation which would decide which class would rule. In other words, it would take another revolution to put state power in the hands of the Soviets. And that is what would happen in October.
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Workers Vanguard No. 875
1 September 2006

The Russian Revolution of 1917

From the February Revolution to the July Days

Part Two

(Young Spartacus pages)

We print below, edited for publication, the second and concluding part of a class given by comrade T. Marlow as part of a series of educationals on Leon Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution (1932), which was held in January of this year as a Spartacist League young cadre school. The first part appears in WV No. 874, 4 August.

During the February Revolution and the subsequent month, Lenin was still in exile in Switzerland, desperately trying to find a way to get to Russia. During March, the attitude of the Bolshevik leaders in Russia came very close to the position of the Mensheviks. On March 15, Pravda, then edited by Stalin, Kamenev and Muranov, carried an article which declared:

“Our slogan is not the empty cry ‘Down with war!’ which means the disorganization of the revolutionary army and of the army that is becoming ever more revolutionary. Our slogan is bring pressure [!] to bear on the Provisional Government so as to compel it to make, without fail, openly and before the eyes of world democracy [!], an attempt [!] to induce [!] all the warring countries to initiate immediate negotiations to end the world war. Till then let everyone [!] remain at his post [!].” [Trotsky’s emphases]

—Leon Trotsky, Lessons of October (1924)

This article was wholly in the spirit of the “revolutionary” defensism of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries (SRs)—i.e., the Russian Revolution had achieved the main task of overthrowing the monarchy, and the “revolution” and its “free people” had to defend themselves against the German Kaiser. What this really meant was that the war aims of the Russian bourgeoisie would continue, now under the cover of “democracy” rather than the Romanov eagle. This defensism stood in stark contrast to the position of revolutionary defeatism advocated by Lenin and the Bolsheviks during WWI. In opposition to the Mensheviks and the social-democratic leaders throughout Europe who either outright supported their own imperialist ruling class, or begged the imperialists for a just peace, Lenin maintained that the working class had no side in the interimperialist war and that the only road to peace was for the working class of each of the belligerent nations to turn the imperialist war into a civil war to overthrow the capitalist rulers.

A measure of how far the Bolsheviks had gone toward conciliating the Mensheviks following the February Revolution was that, as Trotsky notes in his History, in some of the provinces the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had entered into united organizations. In fact, party leaders such as Stalin were advocating fusion with the Mensheviks at the beginning of the April party conference. As you should recognize, Lenin had his work cut out for him.

Lenin had made many key positions clear in his “Letters from Afar” of March. He was explicit that any conciliation of defensism vis-à-vis the imperialist war was a split question. In his History, Trotsky cites a March letter from Lenin: “Our party would disgrace itself forever, kill itself politically, if it took part in such deceit…. I would choose an immediate split with no matter whom in our party, rather than surrender to social patriotism….” In any case, the speech Lenin gave upon his arrival in Petrograd on April 3 on the socialist character of the Russian Revolution should have been less of a surprise to the Bolsheviks than it apparently was.

Lenin’s Fight to Rearm the Party

On April 4, Lenin presented the brilliant theses now known as the “April Theses.” In the space of only a few pages, Lenin reasserted the strategic aims of the Bolsheviks, from which they had been sliding, and promulgated a whole new tactical orientation for the party. This included the abandonment of old slogans, such as the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry,” in favor of a direct struggle for proletarian power in Russia. In doing so, Lenin repudiated in practice the faulty formula of a two-class dictatorship, arriving at essentially the same conception of the Russian Revolution as Trotsky had outlined as early as 1905 and which became known as the theory of permanent revolution. Trotsky understood that the completion of the democratic revolution in backward Russia was conceivable only as the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasantry, and that the seizure of power by the working class in Russia would place on the order of the day not only the democratic, but also the socialist tasks. This would give a powerful impetus to international socialist revolution, which was necessary for the development of socialism in Russia. [For further background on the Mensheviks’, the Bolsheviks’ and Trotsky’s conceptions of the Russian Revolution, see: “The Russian Revolution of 1905,” WV No. 872, 9 June.]

Lenin’s April Theses also called for the construction of a new, revolutionary Third International. The need for a new international and a break with the social-chauvinists, including the wavering centrist elements that followed German social-democratic leader Karl Kautsky, had been a demand by Lenin since the beginning of the imperialist war.

There was no small opposition to Lenin—he had to wage a fight to win over the party, at times even threatening to go outside the Central Committee and appeal directly to the ranks. In short, that posed a faction fight and a split. It is notable that when the April Theses were published in Pravda on April 7, not a single member of the Central Committee would cosign Lenin’s article. In fact, the editors of Pravda wrote: “As for the general scheme of Comrade Lenin, it seems to us unacceptable in that it starts from the assumption that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is ended, and counts upon an immediate transformation of this revolution into a socialist revolution” (quoted in Trotsky’s History). The seriousness of the situation within the party was well summarized by Trotsky:

“The central organ of the party thus openly announced before the working class and its enemies a split with the generally recognised leader of the party upon the central question of the revolution for which the Bolshevik ranks had been getting ready during a long period of years. That alone is sufficient to show the depth of the April crisis in the party, due to the clash of two irreconcilable lines of thought and action. Until it surmounted this crisis the revolution could not go forward.”

Bourgeois-Democratic or Socialist Revolution?

The “Old Bolsheviks,” including Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, seemed to believe that the old slogan of the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” had been realized in some amalgam of the Provisional Government and the soviets—later, in October of 1917, Zinoviev and Kamenev, in opposition to the Central Committee vote for armed insurrection, would explicitly proclaim that: “The Constituent Assembly plus the soviets—that is that combined type of state institution towards which we are going” (quoted in Lessons of October). That would have been the death of the Russian Revolution.

Before the convocation of the all-Russian conference of the Bolshevik Party on April 24, events in Petrograd strongly underlined that Lenin’s reorientation of the party was correct and overdue. Perhaps as a slap in the face to the soviets, on April 18, Miliukov, leader of the Kadets and at that point the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government, made public a letter reaffirming Russia’s commitment to the imperialist war. On the Western calendar this occurred on May 1—the international workers holiday. On that day in Petrograd there were peaceful and celebratory demonstrations. Miliukov’s letter provoked deep outrage among the masses of Petrograd, and on April 20, as Trotsky describes in his History: “The masses came out with arms in their hands. Among the bayonets of the soldiers glimmered the letters on a streamer: ‘Down with Miliukov!’” Trotsky goes on to note: “The slogan carried into the streets by the armed soldiers and sailors: ‘Down with the Provisional Government!’ inevitably introduced into the demonstration a strain of armed insurrection.”

This was a far cry from the almost festive demonstration of only a month before when 800,000 came out for the funeral of the martyrs of the February Revolution. The April 20 demonstration was not to be the last time that the Petrograd masses came out, arms in hand, with the evident intent to seize state power but without the leadership to carry the struggle to victory. That leadership would only be in place in October.

So the Bolshevik conference convened alongside a serious revolutionary manifestation of the Petrograd workers—and this was keenly felt by the Bolshevik workers inside the plants and in the lower-level soviets. Lenin was above all an astute politician! As Trotsky relates in Lessons of October:

“This manner of formulating the question is most highly significant. Lenin, after the experience of the reconnoiter, withdrew the slogan of the immediate overthrow of the Provisional Government. But he did not withdraw it for any set period of time—for so many weeks or months —but strictly in dependence upon how quickly the revolt of the masses against the conciliationists would grow…. He based himself exclusively on the idea that the masses were not at the moment capable of overthrowing the Provisional Government and that, therefore, everything possible had to be done to enable the working class to overthrow the Provisional Government on the morrow.

“The whole of the April Party Conference was devoted to the following fundamental question: Are we heading toward the conquest of power in the name of the socialist revolution or are we helping (anybody and everybody) to complete the democratic revolution? Unfortunately, the report of the April Conference remains unpublished to this very day, though there is scarcely another congress in the history of our party that had such an exceptional and immediate bearing on the destiny of our revolution as the conference of April 1917.

“Lenin’s position was this: an irreconcilable struggle against defensism and its supporters; the capture of the soviet majority; the overthrow of the Provisional Government; the seizure of power through the soviets; a revolutionary peace policy and a program of socialist revolution at home and of international revolution abroad.”

The First Coalition Government and the June Congress of Soviets

Prior to April, and with the exception of Kerensky, who had joined the Provisional Government as Minister of Justice in March, the Compromiser (SR and Menshevik) leadership of the Soviets had tried to give up the power of the soviets without openly joining the bourgeois government. In early May, the first coalition government was formed. Kerensky (who had joined the SRs after the February Revolution) became the Minister of War. Mensheviks and SRs also took on ministerial posts in the Provisional Government. This was a political betrayal of the mass base of the soviets, but it flowed harmoniously with the basic politics of the Compromisers. As Trotsky relates in Lessons of October:

“As a matter of fact, the Mensheviks had for many years tapped away like so many woodpeckers at the idea that the coming revolution must be bourgeois; that the government of a bourgeois revolution could only perform bourgeois tasks; that the social democracy could not take upon itself the tasks of bourgeois democracy and must remain an opposition while ‘pushing the bourgeoisie to the left.’ This theme was developed with a particularly boring profundity by Martynov. With the inception of the bourgeois revolution in 1917, the Mensheviks soon found themselves on the staff of the government. Out of their entire ‘principled’ position there remained only one political conclusion, namely, that the proletariat dare not seize power.”

On May 1, the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet voted to enter the coalition government. As a gesture to the masses, Miliukov was forced to resign as foreign minister the next day. (In his History, Trotsky notes one proposal by an SR leader to defuse the crisis precipitated by Miliukov’s note: “Chernov found a brilliant solution, proposing that Miliukov go over to the Ministry of Public Education. Constantinople as a topic in geography would at any rate be less dangerous than as a topic in diplomacy.”) Miliukov’s resignation was just a sop to the masses, since the government continued to carry out the policies of the bourgeoisie, especially with regard to the war.

On June 3, the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets opened. To give an idea of the masses represented by the soviets, Trotsky writes in his History that “The right to a vote was accorded to soviets containing not less than 25,000 men. Soviets containing from 10,000 to 25,000 had a voice.” But it was not the factories and barracks who were in control, but rather the Compromisers who entered the first coalition government in May. One of the “achievements” of this Congress was to give formal approval to a new offensive against the German forces. This ill-fated plan, issued by Kerensky, was in fact the Russian bourgeoisie’s partial payment to the Entente for the massive loans from Britain and France. It is doubtful that any member of the Russian bourgeoisie thought this military attack could succeed. As Trotsky relates in his History:

“The American journalist, John Reed, who knew how to see and hear, and who has left an immortal book of chronicler’s notes of the days of the October Revolution, testifies without hesitation that a considerable part of the possessing classes of Russia preferred a German victory to the triumph of the revolution, and did not hesitate to say so openly. ‘One evening I spent at the house of a Moscow merchant,’ says Reed, among other examples. ‘During tea we asked eleven people at the table whether they preferred “Wilhelm or the Bolsheviks.” The vote was ten to one for Wilhelm’.”

This would not be the first time in history that the bourgeoisie became defeatist—just look at the Paris Commune. In the aftermath of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the workers took power in Paris to defend the city. Thiers and all the great French patriots then began to beg for Bismarck, their enemy of yesterday, to intervene. With the assistance of the Prussians, the bourgeois French army was allowed to first bombard, and then enter, Paris. In the repression that followed, tens of thousands of Communards and workers were either executed on the spot or imprisoned. And note that the crushing of the Commune of 1871 was not so far distant in time in 1917—it’s less than the span of time separating us today from the end of World War II.

A Shift in the Balance of Forces

The Bolsheviks issued a call for a demonstration in June while the Congress of Soviets was in session. This was not intended to be a call for an insurrection, although the impetus came from the Bolshevik military organization. No matter, that’s how the Mensheviks and SRs took it, because they knew that the Petrograd masses were shifting to the Bolsheviks. They used their position at the head of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet to pass a resolution prohibiting any demonstrations for three days. Delegates were sent from the Congress of Soviets to the working-class districts—as Trotsky put it, “If the mountain was not allowed to come to the prophet, the prophet at least went to the mountain.”

Not wishing a direct assault against the Soviet, the Bolsheviks stood down. But as Trotsky notes, the emissaries of the Mensheviks and SRs were met with disdain and hostility. One example from the History: “The workers of the Putilov factory agreed to paste up the declaration of the congress against the demonstration only after they learned from Pravda that it did not contradict the resolution of the Bolsheviks.” This reaction was comparatively mild. Elsewhere, the Bolsheviks’ decision was not so easily accepted:

“The masses submitted to the decision of the Bolsheviks, but not without protest and indignation. In certain factories they adopted resolutions of censure of the Central Committee. The more fiery members of the party in the sections tore up their membership cards. That was a serious warning.”

The Mensheviks and SRs were out for blood—shades of things to come in just a few weeks. On June 10, the Menshevik paper declared: “It is time to brand the Leninists as traitors and betrayers of the revolution” (quoted in Trotsky’s History). The next day, the Menshevik leader Tseretelli demanded that the Bolsheviks be disarmed. What he really meant was disarming the workers. As Trotsky summarized: “In other words, that classic moment of the revolution had arrived when the bourgeois democracy, upon the demand of the reaction, undertakes to disarm the workers who had guaranteed the revolutionary victory.” Trotsky later notes: “To carry the Compromise policy through to a successful end—that is, to the establishment of a parliamentary rule of the bourgeoisie—demanded the disarming of the workers and soldiers.”

The Mensheviks decided on a public show of force in a demonstration on June 18. The march was to replicate the peaceful parade in March to honor the martyrs of February. At that time, some 800,000 had turned out. This time, half that number marched, but the vast majority were from the factories and barracks. In his History, Trotsky describes the procession:

“The first Bolshevik slogans were met half-laughingly—Tseretelli had so confidently thrown down his challenge the day before. But these same slogans were repeated again and again. ‘Down with the Ten Minister-Capitalists!’ ‘Down with the Offensive’ ‘All Power to the Soviets!’ The ironical smiles froze, and then gradually disappeared. Bolshevik banners floated everywhere. The delegates stopped counting the uncomfortable totals. The triumph of the Bolsheviks was too obvious.... One of the factories carried a placard: ‘The right to Life is Higher than the rights of Private Property.’ This slogan had not been suggested by the party.”

Trotsky went on to note: “The demonstration of June 18 made an enormous impression on its own participants. The masses saw that the Bolsheviks had become a power, and the vacillating were drawn to them.” The contradiction between the growing strength of the Bolsheviks and the decline of the authority of the Menshevik/SR leadership of the Soviet would condition the entire period leading up to the October Revolution.

The July Days

It is interesting to note that in the period from February through June, the Bolsheviks had undergone a virtually uninterrupted growth of influence in the working class and also among the Petrograd garrison. Revolutions rarely occur with such a seamless transition, and Russia in 1917 was no exception. The forces of counterrevolution were far from dead, and the ruling class wanted revenge for the humiliation of the June demonstration.

The June 18 demonstration showed clearly that at the base in the factories and some of the garrisons of Petrograd, the Bolsheviks had become the majority, or close to it. It was far from clear that the same situation applied in the provinces or on the front. The full impact of the offensive ordered by Kerensky on June 16—a fully predictable debacle—had yet to become known. But in Petrograd, the masses had reached the boiling point. Everything was in collapse, including transport, food and fuel. The February Revolution was sparked by a mass desire both to be rid of the Romanov dynasty and to put an end to the war—but several months later the murderous war was still raging.

The July 3-5 events were a semi-insurrection. Rejecting attempts by Bolshevik orators to contain the July 3 demonstration, soldiers marching in their regiments shouted “Down! Down!” As Trotsky relates in the History: “Such cries the Bolshevik balcony had never yet heard from the soldiers; it was an alarming sign. Behind the regiments the factories began to march up: ‘All power to the Soviets!’ ‘Down with the ten minister capitalists!’ Those had been the banners of June 18th, but now they were hedged with bayonets.” The Bolsheviks had tried to restrain the masses, but were unable to do so. Trotsky noted: “The Central Committee was oftener and oftener compelled to send agitators to the troops and the factories to restrain them from untimely action. With an embarrassed shake of the head, the Vyborg Bolsheviks would complain to their friends: ‘We have to play the part of the fire hose’.”

The insurrectionary sentiment of the workers and soldiers was captured by Trotsky in his descriptions of their military preparations: “On the morning of July 3, several thousand machine-gunners, after breaking up a meeting of the company and regimental committees of their regiment, elected a chairman of their own and demanded immediate consideration of the question of an armed manifestation.” Trotsky continues:

“In the yard of the barracks a no less feverish work was going on. They were giving out rifles to the soldiers who did not possess them, giving bombs to some, installing three machine-guns with operators on each motor truck supplied by the factories. The regiment was to go into the street in full military array….

“The longest struggle took place at the Putilov Factory. At about two in the afternoon a rumour went round that a delegation had come from the machine-gun unit, and was calling a meeting. About ten thousand men assembled. To shouts of encouragement, the machine-gunners told how they had received an order to go to the front on the 4th of July, but they had decided ‘to go not to the German front, against the German proletariat, but against their own capitalist ministers’.”

Raskolnikov, a naval officer and a Bolshevik, desperately phoned the party headquarters for advice, since the Kronstadt sailors were determined to go out arms in hand. After initially opposing the demonstration, the Bolshevik leadership acquiesced. Rather than leaving the masses leaderless, the Bolsheviks went into battle with the demonstrators to provide leadership for an orderly retreat.

The July Days represent the last gasp of the February Revolution, and a foretaste of October. All the contending classes were put on notice, and the counterrevolution did not shrink from battle. While the demonstrations of July 3 and 4 showed the power of the armed workers and soldiers, they did not attempt a seizure of state power. The Compromiser leadership of the Soviets railed against the masses who had come out for “All Power to the Soviets!” Trotsky writes:

“The Compromisers were waiting for reliable regiments. ‘A revolutionary people is in the streets,’ cried [the Menshevik] Dan, ‘but that people is engaged in a counter-revolutionary work.’ Dan was supported by Abramovich, one of the leaders of the Jewish Bund, a conservative pedant whose every instinct had been outraged by the revolution.”

Among the “reliable” troops the government and the Soviet leaders counted on were the Cossacks; in August, Kerensky would appeal to the Cossack general Kornilov to send a cavalry corps to Petrograd.

The wave of the semi-insurrection broke, in some cases with clashes with government troops. The revolutionary wave was quickly replaced by a counterrevolutionary campaign to drive the Bolsheviks underground. Trotsky was jailed; Lenin went into hiding. Lenin understood the importance of preserving the Bolshevik central cadre. Since 1914, Lenin had understood that the Social Democrats who supported “their” bourgeoisies in the war were agents of the class enemy rather than comrades gone astray. This prescient understanding was reinforced in the positive in October 1917 in Russia and tragically in the negative with the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg during the counterrevolutionary terror unleashed by the German Social Democrats following the Spartacus uprising in Berlin in January 1919.

The July Days illustrate with the clarity of a lightning strike the instability of the dual power which issued from the February Revolution. Either the bourgeoisie with its servile Menshevik and SR agents would liquidate the soviets in favor of some bourgeois parliament—in fact a rubber stamp for a military dictatorship—or the workers would seize the state power. The latter could occur via the soviets, or perhaps through the factory committees of the organized workers—Lenin remained flexible about the organizational form, particularly when the soviets under the leadership of the Mensheviks and SRs were more obstacles than assistants to the proletarian revolution.

The repression of the Bolsheviks following the July Days was short-lived. The party rebounded, as the workers and soldiers returned to its banners and leadership. This would be starkly shown when the bourgeoisie placed all their hopes in the Cossack general Kornilov in August. That gamble they lost. Kornilov’s coup failed, and it took a party with the determination to realize its revolutionary program in life to both repulse Kornilov and provide proletarian leadership to the agrarian revolt in the summer. That also involved internal party struggle. The great events of late 1917 are known to us not as the October Evolution but the October Revolution. The difference is qualitative, and indicates the divide between reformism of all stripes and Bolshevism, i.e., revolutionary Marxism.

Out Of the Be-Bop 1940s Film Noir Night-Publish Or Perish- “The Big Clock”- A Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film noir The Big Clock

DVD Review

The Big Clock, starring Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, Elsa Lancaster, Paramount Pictures, 1948

Yes, after over a score of film reviews of noir efforts I can truthfully say they come in all sizes, some that stretch the limits of “proper” noir dimensions like the noir under review, The Big Clock. After all plenty of glib lines, some faded femme fatale, a few screwball scenes and an off-hand maniacal press baron as the bad guy could have fit as well as in the 1930s social comedy beat. The thing that saves this actually nice ninety minute film is the flashback aspect of the plot line as it unfolds and the comeuppance of one Rupert Murdoch, oops, Earl Janoth (played a little too woodenly, and perhaps archly, by great actor Charles Laughton).

As to the plot line here is the skinny. Press baron Janoth will stop at nothing, nothing at all (sound familiar?), to keep up the circulation of his various world-wide journalistic enterprises, in the days before social media clicked our cares away, when such items were massively bought and read by the large reading public, Needless to say in order to keep producing plenty of grist for the mill, and keep people employed, it is necessary to have a staff that is little short of workaholic (to say nothing of alcoholic). And here is where hard working journal editor George Stroud (playing in dapper, and perhaps a little too arch as well, manner by Ray Milland) trying to balance work and home life comes in. Because if anybody is going to get to the bottom of anything, anything, at all, it will be George Shroud. Just ask his hard-pressed wife.

And George has plenty to get to the bottom of. It seems that among his oddball, off-hand interests (besides big clocks, keeping a very tight ship, and firing people at a patrician whim) Mr. Janoth doesn’t like the idea of being the “fall guy” for murder. Oh, yes and he also is jealous of other men “courting” his wayward, conniving mistress. Which leads to said murder (maybe murder two, but murder nevertheless) when he confronts his dear after seemingly seeing some shadowy guy coming out of their little love nest. That is why he needs a fall guy.

What he doesn’t know is that George, innocently (at least from what we are shown on camera and what figures given the unfolding plot line), is the spotted guy. Naturally Mr. Janoth, given his aversion, wants to cover his tracks and find that fall guy. As is also inevitable he puts someone on the case that will leave no stone unturned. Yes, George. So you know, know even before the final confrontation of good and bad that drives noir that Mr. Murdoch, oops again, Janoth is going to take “the fall.” And that, my friends, is what passed for high drama, high journalistic-themed drama, in the days before social networking eliminated the guesswork.

The Latest From The Private Bradley Manning Support Network-Free Bradley Manning Now! Bradley Manning to be arraigned at Fort Meade Today Feb. 23rd

Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the latest information in his case.

Bradley Manning to be arraigned at Fort Meade Feb. 23rd

Court Martial expected in early May.

February 13, 2012. Bradley Manning Support Network.

The US Army last week scheduled a formal arraignment hearing for PFC Bradley Manning, the accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower. The arraignment is scheduled for 1:00 PM EST, February 23, 2012 at Fort Meade, Maryland, just northeast of Washington DC. While the hearing itself is expected to be brief, PFC Manning is expected to be present, and the proceedings are open to the media and public. Washington DC area supporters of the Support Network are encouraged to attend the arraignment.

Bradley’s show trial will begin in earnest with this arraignment. This proceeding will set the dates for a series of hearings on pre-trial motions likely to occur in March and April. Finally, the arraignment will set the date for the full court-martial—which we currently expect to begin in early May.

If the Obama administration is the least bit concerned with providing even the appearance of a fair trial, they will allow Bradley’s legal defense team to explore the critical issues at the heart of this case, including: President Obama’s recorded unlawful command influence over the proceedings, the illegal and torturous conditions that Bradley was subjected to for nine months at the Quantico Marine Brig, the over-classification of all of the documents in question, and the lack of any harm to national security from the release of the documents.

So far military officials have blocked nearly every request by Bradley’s defense team, led by Iraq War veteran David Coombs, for access to evidence and witnesses that could explore these core issues. During the Article 32 pre-trial hearing held in December, the defense was denied access to over three dozen critical witnesses (while the prosecution was allowed access to every one of two dozen witnesses requested). This allowed military officials to limit the hearing to little more than a discussion of mitigating factors related to Bradley’s emotional health.

If Bradley had been a member of the US Marine squad that admitted to systematically murdering two dozen innocent Iraqi men, women, and children in Haditha, Iraq, he’d be walking free today. Instead, he faces the real prospect of life in prison for telling the truth.

Next week’s arraignment comes just after Bradley was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by members of the Icelandic Parliament. A blog post by MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir explained their rationale for the nomination:


“According to journalists, his alleged actions helped motivate the democratic Arab Spring movements, shed light on secret corporate influence on our foreign policies, and most recently contributed to the Obama Administration agreeing to withdraw all U.S. troops from the occupation in Iraq.”

Join us at a mass rally for Bradley at Fort Meade to coincide with the beginning of his court martial! The date(s) of the rally will be announced after the trial date is set—we’re currently anticipating early May. If you can’t make the trip to the Washington DC area, organize or take part in one of over a hundred solidarity events worldwide.

Individuals who can help organize events in your town/city: Sign our Trial Action Pledge to help organize support for Bradley!

Organizations that wish to endorse these events and potentially help publicize and organize them: Check out our new Organizational Endorsement Pledge!

We have about 100 days to save Bradley from over 100 years in prison—learn more at bradleymanning.org

Donate at bradleymanning.org/donate
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From the American Left History blog, dated March 17, 2011

Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner

Markin comment:

Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of card. American imperialism’s house of cards, but cards nevertheless.

Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th because I am outraged by the treatment of Private Manning meted to a presumably innocent man by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. The military has gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago. Allegedly Private Manning might become so distraught over his alleged actions that he requires extraordinary protections. He is assumed, in the Catch-22 logic of the military, to be something of a suicide risk on the basis of bringing some fresh air to the nefarious doings of the international imperialist order. Be serious. I, however, noticed no "spike” in suicide rates among the world’s diplomatic community once they were exposed, a place where such activities might have been expected once it was observed in public that most of these persons could barely tie their own shoes.

Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient reasons for my standing at the front gate to the Quantico Marine Base on March 20th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an addition reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came.”

Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me through the tough days inside. So on March 20th I am just, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, brother, are a true winter soldier.

Private Manning I hope that you will hear us, or hear about our rally in your defense. Better yet, everybody who reads this piece join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to those high heavens mentioned above-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
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February 23, 2012-And, of course, I will be standing in support of Private Manning as long as he is not freed from the clutches of his jailers.

You Don’t Need A Band To Perform The Last Waltz-Do You?

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Mark Dinning performing his teen tear-jerker, Teen Angel to set an "appropriate" mood for this post.

The Last Waltz, Indeed

Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964, comment:

Note: The term “last waltz” of the title of this piece is used as a simple expression of the truth. The life, or better, half-life of this sketch came about originally through reviewing, a few years ago, a long-running series of “Oldies But Goodies” CDs from the 1950s and early 1960s, the time of my coming of age time. After reviewing ten of these things I found out that the series was even longer, fifteen in all. Rather than turning myself into some local hospital for a cure and the good effects of some oldies twelve-step program to restore my soul health I plugged on. Plugged on, plugged on intrepidly, with the full knowledge that such things had their saturation point.

After all how much could one rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those of us who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in those treasured compilations. How many times, moreover, can one read about wallflowers (their invisibleness and, dread of dreads, not winding up like them even if it meant casting off friendships with every known nerdish future, doctor, engineer and lawyer in town), sighs (ahs, and otherwise), certain shes (or hes for shes) the real point of reviewing any such compilations, the crepe paper-etched moonlight glow on high school dance night (if there was any, moon that is) and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. Bastante! Enough!

Or so I thought until my old friend, my old mad monk, merry prankster, stone freak, summer of love (1967 version) compadre from Olde Saco up in Maine, Josh Breslin. Yes, that Josh Breslin, or rather Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those who have read his by-line over the years in half the unread radical chic or alterative vision publications in this country, called me up in a frenzy just after I had finally completed the last damn review. And as usual when he calls up in the dead of night it was “girl” trouble, if that is the appropriate way to describe such an illness for sixty-somethings.

His frenzied three in the morning problem? Josh’s Old Saco High School Class of 1967 was going to have its fortieth reunion, and through the now weathered Mainiac grapevine he found out that some middle school (then junior high) sweetheart, Lucy Dubois (Olde Saco was, and is a central gathering spot for French-Canadians and French Canadian Americans, including Josh’s old mother, Delores, nee LeBlanc), was going to show and he needed a refresher on the old time tunes. More importantly, he continued on to explain why he, madcap love ‘em and leave Josh in that summer of love 1967, and beyond, including a not forgotten “theft” of my girlfriend at the time, Butterfly Swirl (ya it was that kind of time), still had a “crush” on Ms. Dubois and what was he going to do about it come reunion night. So the following is just a little mood music from Josh’s backward trek in the old reprobate own words, or close to them as that degenerate will ever get.
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No question that those of us who came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s were truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents please. Or look it up on Wikipedia if you are too embarrassed to not know such ancient history things. Join the bus.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that one’s parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least they left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.

Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable forty or fifty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation like the ones Peter Paul has been satanically reviewing but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me (and Peter Paul when we talked about such august matters one Big Sur 1968 night, one stoned night but that is just redundant after I already said Big Sur 1968), or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. Just don’t remind Lucy of that, okay. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip, to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. I had to drop more guys from the old neighborhood over on Albemarle, the Olde Saco projects, who later made good just because I didn’t want the guilt by association wallflower nerd label hanging around my neck. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, maybe now too, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.

But what about the now seeming mandatory question that Peter Paul made a point of asking in those dimwitted reviews he is so proud of, the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song that I really want to talk about. Or rather about Lucy Dubois’ (I won’t use her married name because she still lives up around Olde Saco and has, many, many family connections around, including a couple of giant economy-sized brothers). The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumble-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, asked a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar).

Here the 1960 Mark Dinning tune Teen Angel fills the bill, or filled Lucy’s bill. Hey, I did really like this one too, especially the soulful, sorrowful timing and voice intonation. Yes, I know, I know the lyrics are, well, not life-enhancing and apparently the Laura or Lorraine who, ill-advisedly, ran back to that car stuck on the railroad track was none too bright. Not if she went overt he edge for some cheapjack high school ring that would not survive more than few hand-washings before turning green and that, moreover, Lance or Larry had already previously given (and taken back) from half the girls in the school. Jesus, did we really think we were that immortal. Yes, before you even start, I also know, this is one of the 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, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason than to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your preferences). I did, didn’t you?

Well Lucy showed up that class reunion night as expected since my intelligence source on the matter was very reliable. Moreover the “as expected” aspect had an additional factor also relayed by that same source. Lucy was coming back only because she had heard that I was coming back for the reunion. Damn, she still held me in thrall when I saw here coming in the entrance of the hotel ballroom where the reunion was being held on the outskirts of Portland, as I flashed back to the old days, the days when Lucy and I shared many a laugh, many an awkward boy and girl junior high school laugh, and later many a stolen kiss down at Squaw Rock, the “parking” end of Olde Saco Beach.

See, there was some kind of cosmic karma bond between us from early on even though we had more than our share of battles, break-ups, alternative romances, and the like. And from early on she was always the sensible one the one that teethered my flights of fancy and kept me from going off more than one deep-end. Or almost. Lucy, as was the serious tradition in Podunk Olde Saco French-Canadian culture, the working class part which when you got right down to it was on the only real part back then, was “slated” to be married (and out of the house) right after high school. And I was the guy, the glad guy for most of high school to join her in that act. Much to the joy of her parents and my own French-Canadian mother (nee LeBlanc).

But then the 1960s hit backwater Olde Saco in late 1966 and early 1967 and I got the wanderlust a little, although I was “slated” to go to State U in the fall of ’67. Peter Paul already mentioned my summer of love exploits, or if he didn’t he will although take any such talk strictly with the grain of salt. So instead of marrying Lucy that summer I told her to wait until I got back. Well, I got a little delayed, made seventeen detours here and there, and by the time I was ready to settle down a little Lucy had already found somebody else to marry and that was that. Except that never-ending slight gnawing in my stomach every time I heard the name Lucy, Olde Saco, Maine, the ocean, somebody parking a car, or took more than more than one stolen kiss.

Upon seeing her once again across the ballroom I almost could smell that faint-edged scent, some lilac and dreams, bed sheet dream, scent, that always travelled around with her and drove me (and other guys too, no question) to distraction. That slender girl with the do good in the world dreams and cozy cottage ambitions. But mainly it was that sensibleness, that what you see is what you get, and that ingrained gentliness no book or essay could convey that would see her, and you, through many stormy nights. And what song did we, Josh Breslin and Lucy Dubois, trot out on that scary dance floor to on that wintry November reunion night? Come on now, guess.
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....and a trip down memory lane.

MARK DINNING lyrics - Teen Angel

(Jean Surrey & Red Surrey)

Teen angel, teen angel, teen angel, ooh, ooh

That fateful night the car was stalled
upon the railroad track
I pulled you out and we were safe
but you went running back

Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love

What was it you were looking for
that took your life that night
They said they found my high school ring
clutched in your fingers tight

Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love

Just sweet sixteen, and now you're gone
They've taken you away.
I'll never kiss your lips again
They buried you today

Teen angel, can you hear me
Teen angel, can you see me
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
Teen angel, teen angel, answer me, please