Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on that date this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as well get a better grip of the important of the labor movement to winning victories in our struggles.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Why You, Your Union , Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 General Strike In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the 1% were called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the 1%.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “to big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream.”
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the 1% that seem to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the 1% of that day) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property. The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
*End the endless wars!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
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* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing
a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where
there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing where a strike is not possible to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out.”
*We will be organizing students to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
Friday, February 24, 2012
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-The Embryo Of An Alternate Government-Learn The Lessons Of History- From The Pages Of The French Revolution- Ernest Belfort Bax-The Last Episode of the French RevolutionBeing a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals(1911)-VIII. The Trial of Babeuf and his Colleagues
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the “new world” we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked lately were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those of the "one percent" having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one. In that sense previous historical models come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lessons Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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Ernest Belfort Bax-Gracchus Babeuf
VIII. The Trial of Babeuf and his Colleagues
ON the opening of the proceedings on the 2nd Ventose (anno V), forty-seven prisoners were brought up, eighteen of the accused being en contumace. Among the latter were Drouet, Lindet, Reys, Le Pelletier, and Rossignol. A large force of troops surrounded the building where the trial was held, while each of the accused was guarded by two gendarmes. The place reserved in the large audience hall for the public was always filled admirers of the incriminated movement, who vigorously applauded every utterance of the prisoners. Many of the accused, it should be remarked, though belonging to the revolutionary movement, had had nothing whatever to do with the actual conspiracy but were arrested out of spite. Amongst the prisoners present might have been seen the old Jacobin and landlord of Robespierre, Duplay and his son
Those whose voices were chiefly heard in defence of the movement were those of Babeuf, Germain, Antonelle, and Buonarroti.
Darthé remained silent, refusing to recognise the jurisdiction of the court. He made one speech only at the beginning of the proceedings, which is given by Buonarroti. “As for me,” it is related that he said, “if providence has fixed for this epoch the end of my career, I shall end it with glory, without fear and without regret. What have I indeed to regret? When liberty succumbs; when the edifice of the Republic is crumbling piece by piece; when its name has become odious; when its friends, worshippers of Equality, are pursued, are hunted, scattered, given over to the rage of assassins or to the Prey of hunger; when the people are the prey of famine and of want, deprived of all their rights, abused, despised, crushed beneath a yoke of iron; when this sublime Revolution, the hope and consolation of oppressed nations, has ceased to be more than a phantom; when the defenders of the country are everywhere covered with outrages, deprived of all, maltreated, bent beneath the most odious despotism; when, as the price of their sacrifices, of their blood poured out in the common defence, they are treated as criminals, assassins, and brigands, their laurels changed to cypress; when royalism is everywhere bold, protected, honoured, recompensed even with the blood and tears of the unfortunate; when fanaticism grasps again its poignards, and with a new fury; when proscription and death are suspended over the heads of all virtuous men, of all the friends of reason, of all those who have taken part in the grand and generous efforts in favour of our generation ; when, to fill up the tale of horror, it is in the name of all that is most sacred, most revered on earth, in the name of holy friendship, of respected virtue, of honourable probity, and of beneficent justice, of sweet humanity, of the Divinity itself, that the brigands drag desolation, despair, and death at their heels; when profound immorality, horrible treason, execrable denunciation, infamous perjury, brigandage, and assassination are officially honoured, distinguished, recognised, and qualified with the sacred name of virtue; when all social ties are broken; when France is covered with a funereal crape; when she will soon offer nothing more to the horrified eye of the traveller than heaps of corpses and smoking deserts; when the country is no more – then is death indeed a blessing! As for myself, I leave to my family and my friends neither opprobrium nor infamy. They will be able to cite with pride my name among those of the defenders n! and martyrs in the divine cause of humanity. I claim with confidence to have passed through the whole revolutionary period without taint; never has the thought of a crime or of a meanness sullied my soul. Thrown when young into the Revolution, I have supported all its fatigues, have borne all its dangers, without ever falling back. I have had no other pleasure than the hope of seeing the day that should found the durable reign of equality and of liberty. Solely occupied with the sublimity of this philanthropic enterprise, I have entirely abnegated myself. Personal interests, the affairs of my family, everything has been forgotten and neglected. My heart has never beat save for my fellow-men and for the triumph of justice.”
The above harangue, with its characteristic eighteenth-century ring, were the only words spoken before the tribunal by Darthé. The prosecution from the very first gave evidence of the bitterness of its animus against the accused, as well as against everything savouring of democracy. The government prosecutor in his speech conjured up visions of a faction of monstrous beings hitherto unknown in the history of mankind, children of anarchy and crime, to which the prisoners belonged. To this hideous and diabolical faction he traced all the democratic episodes of the Revolution; its whole course, from the taking of the Bastille to the fall of Robespierre, was involved in one common anathema. The government prosecutors even went so far on the side of reaction as to condone the royalist insurrection of the 13th Vendémiaire of the preceding year. Great efforts were made by the judges as well as by the public prosecutors to prevent the accused from defending or even expounding the doctrines contained in the piéces d’accusation. The outrageous conduct of the court in this matter led to frequent “scenes” throughout the trial.
The vile attempts of these government agents to blacken and vilify the characters of the accused – imputing dishonesty to men who had notoriously risked their lives for the country, and who, unlike their enemies and accusers, the members of the then governing classes, had left the public offices occupied by them, before the triumph of the reaction, in a state of poverty, amounting in some cases to positive indigence – led to many an out burst of indignation from prisoners and public alike. For these men the fundamental principles of the Revolution, as enshrined in the “Rights of Man” and the Constitution of 1793, were a religion, the sacred trust for which they were proud to suffer all things, and if need were to sacrifice their lives. The spirit animating them was shown by the enthusiasm with which they chanted their republican hymns in court each day at the close of the trial.
The chief witness against the accused was the traitor Grisel. Together with him were other, police spies, who, however, we are informed by Buonarroti, in spite of their métier, were animated by so strong a moral repulsion to the archtraitor that they refused to sit beside him. The defence attempted to get rid of Grisel by invoking the law which made the evidence of a denunciator legally inadmissible in cases where he could personally profit by his denunciation, whether by direct payment or otherwise. The public prosecutors, in order to get over this difficulty, had to maintain that Grisel was not a denunciator “within the meaning of the Act”, because, forsooth, his first declaration was made, not to the police, but to one of the Directors (Carnot), a fact which constituted his statements a simple revelation, and not a denunciation in the true sense of the word, thereby excluding him from the category of the law as invoked by the prisoners. Naturally this quibble excited universal derision, but the court, as might have been expected, admitted it all the same Grisel must be received as a witness at all costs.
There were in all five hundred piéces de conviction, consisting of documents seized in the house where Babeuf was lodging at the time of his arrest. The most of them were at once recognised by their authors, though, in a few cases, experts were called in to fix the identity of those responsible for them. Among them were the reports of the agents working in the interests of the Secret Directory in the several arrondissements. The latter documents which for the most part bear the superscription Égalité, Liberté, Bonheur Commun, relate to the question of the state of feeling in the different districts and the persons who might be relied on at the moment of insurrection, to the places where arms were stored, etc.
But here and there flashes afford us an interesting glimpse of the life of Paris at the time: thus (liasse xix, 17) in one of these documents, dated in the hand of Babeuf, 8 Floreal, we read: – “Yesterday morning the placard, Soldier, halt again! produced the greatest effect in the seventh arrondissement. Among other places, at the corner of the Rue Cloche-Perche, Rue Antoine, more than two thousand readers formed a queue. A patrol of cavalry passing by wanted to see what was attracting so great a concourse. The commandant, dismounting, read it through, and was desirous of tearing it down, in order, as he said, to give it his comrades to read. On its being represented to him that he could not remove it without destroying it, he replied, ‘In that case it had better be left for the people to read.’ He remounted his horse and went off towards the boulevard. Some sought, nevertheless, to pull it down; but a group of readers opposed themselves to this, saying that it contained truth.” That a crowd of two thousand persons should so readily collect to read a placard is symptomatic of the excited state of feeling still dominating the Paris populace.
A great fuss was made as to a document containing some words which Babeuf had covered with a great blot of ink. The discussion on this subject bid fair to become a free fight between the prisoners, their counsel, and the court. The séance had to be abruptly terminated, the prisoners, as was their custom, intoning a couplet of the Marseillaise : Tremblez, tyrans, et vous perfides!
On one occasion, when the public prosecutors complained to the judges of the prolongation of the trial, alleging that a number of voices were being raised against the dilatoriness of the proceedings in the high court, Babeuf sprang to his feet, exclaiming, “Whose are those voices?” and, turning to the public, “You will divine, friends of the people!” He proceeded to denounce the privileged classes, many of whom could not wait the ordinary course of law in their bloodthirsty impatience to immolate their victims. In this cry one would hearken in vain for the voices of the four-and-twenty millions of oppressed people of whose cause they, the prisoners, were the defenders. “Virtue does not die,” he concluded. “Tyrants may wallow in atrocious persecution; they do but destroy the body; the soul of good men does but change its covering; on the dissolution of one, it animates at once other beings, with whom it continues to inspire generous movements which never more allow the crime of tyranny to rest in peace. After these last thoughts, and after all the innovations that I see introduced every day to hasten my holocaust, I leave to my oppressors all the facilities they desire; I neglect useless details in my defence; let them strike without reaching anything; I shall sleep in peace in the bosom of virtue.”
Grisel related his experiences during two hearings of the court. Buonarroti says that what he stated was in the main true. What revolted everybody was his cynical avowal of treachery and breach of confidence. Turning towards the bench where the accused were sitting, he said, “I only see agents here; not one of them was the real chief of the conspiracy; behind the curtain were men who caused these to work and act.” This remark was doubtless aimed by Grisel, who was in the service of Carnot, against the latter’s fellow-director and enemy, Barras. The statement, however, called forth from Germain the retort, “If we are too insignificant, go to the banks of the Aube to dig out the sand which covers the corpse of my wife! go dispute it with the worms, less worthy than yourself to devour it! fling yourself like a famished tiger on my mother! add my sisters and their children to your abominable feast! tear my son from the feeble arms of his nurse and crush his tender limbs under your carnivorous fang!” Grisel having referred to the insurrection of Prairial, ann. III, in contemptuous terms, was countered by Babeuf, who, in a harangue redolent of eighteenth-century eloquence, glorified the insurrection and its victims, till the court compelled the speaker to resume his seat. Two soldiers named Meunier and Barbier respectively, who had been condemned already to two years’ hard labour for disaffection in the legion o£ police, were brought up from Vendôme to confirm certain statements made by them in moments of weakness. Far from doing what was demanded of them, they now denied everything. Bowing to the accused, they saluted them by republican songs. They greeted them as friends of the people, demanding to partake in their glory. Their conduct resulted subsequently in a fresh condemnation. Of the five hundred incriminating documents seized at Babeuf’s lodging, many were obviously written by his own hand, though some of these were doubtless only copied out by him.
The whole weight of the prosecution bore upon Babeuf. His interrogation lasted during nine long sittings. The attempts to explain away these documents on the part of the accused were naturally successful only in a very limited degree. As Buonarroti observes, their defence amounted to no more than a not very coherent tissue of sophism, which, he adds, they only permitted themselves out of consideration for their companions in misfortune. “The true defence of the accused,” he says; “rests entirely in the avowal that they made of their democratic doctrines; in the solemn homage which they rendered to the Constitution of 1793, and in their perseverance in justifying hypothetically the object of the conspiracy.” The conspiracy, of course, centred in the formation of a Secret Directory, the object of which was insurrection. It was this “usurpation of they sovereignty”, as it was termed, that formed the central indictment of the prosecution. “We have not here,” said Babeuf, “a trial of individuals; have a trial of the Republic itself. It must, in spite of all, be treated with the dignity, the majesty, and the devotion that so powerful an interest commands. All republicans,” said Babeuf, “are implicated in this affair; consequently it belongs to the Republic, to the Revolution, to history.” He proceeded to thank the genius of liberty for having furnished him with a tribune, even though it were the bench of the accused, from which to declare the truth.
A vehement assertion of admiration for the Constitution of ’93, and the denunciation of the illegal violence with which those in power had: deprived the people of the rights belonging to them by virtue of it, brought down upon him the intervention of the judges, who condemned him to silence. Buonarroti, when his turn came justified the existence of the Secret Director and its manifestoes as in no way contrary to law or to revolutionary precedent. Babeuf subsequently returned to the charge, proclaiming at the top of his voice “the awakening of the true people, the reign of happiness, the reign of equality and liberty, abundance for all, equality and liberty for all, the happiness of all-such are the aims of these pretended conspirators, who have been painted in such horrifying colours before the eyes of all France!” He justified the revolutionary principle of the sacred right of insurrection, repudiating with energy the whittling away of this principle by the prosecution with specious sophism that insurrection is only legitimate when it is made by the universality of the citizens, such being obviously equivalent to the assertion that it was never justified. On some of his colleagues, notably Ricord, seeking to throw the responsibility for certain of the most aggressive manifestoes on the agents provocateurs of the government, Grisel’s name being mentioned in connection with the “Insurrectionary Act”, Babeuf indignantly spurned this cowardly method of defence by shamefaced denial and falsehood. Turning to Ricord, “No!” he exclaimed, “Grisel did not do it. It is not a piece which need make its author blush, and Grisel is too great a scoundrel to have drawn up any such document.” Buonarroti, when his turn came to speak, detailed career since the dawn of the Revolution defended the Constitution of 1793, and denounced the usurping government based on that of the: year III.
As the trial went on, day by day, the interest of the public in the proceedings and the sympathy shown with the prisoners grew rather than abated. It had its echo outside the walls of the court-house in an abortive attempt to induce a mutiny in their favour on the part of the soldiers: placed on guard at the tribunal. A plot was formed for the escape at least of those most seriously compromised. Suitable tools were smuggled into the prison, by the aid of which a large breach in one of the walls was made. The moment for escape had actually arrived when, through the careless conduct of one of the accused, suspicion was aroused with the authorities, the plan discovered, and all hope of flight was at an end.
Meanwhile, the public prosecutors demanded the guillotine for sundry of the prisoners, while their task in demonstrating at once the reality and gravity of the conspiracy was an easy one, given the mass of incriminatory material. The accused, on their side, for the most part took the line of defence that, even if there had been a conspiracy it was justified by the fact that the Constitution against which it was admittedly directed, was itself illegal, being contrary to the will of the people, by which it had never been ratified, and subversive of that will, inasmuch as it abrogated the Constitution of 1793, which, on its side, had been solemnly accepted by the popular voice. In word, they argued that the existing government, and the constitution on which it was based, was null and void, having no claim on the allegiance of French citizens. The attempt to overthrow it, therefore, so far from being a crime, was rather the assertion of legality against usurpation.
The public prosecutors refused to enter into this question of right and justification, confining their speeches to a demonstration of the facts which could not effectively be denied. They could show without difficulty that there had been a conspiracy, which aimed at subverting the government and at overthrowing the existing economic bases of society. Beyond this, it only remained for them to paint in vivid terms the horrors of anarchy, bloodshed, and general destruction which would have ensued on the success of the conspirators, whose characters and intentions were, of course, blackened by suitable calumnies. The conclusion drawn was, that the equality and popular sovereignty aimed at by the prisoners must inevitably lead, through anarchy, to the return of a king.
The prosecution demanded that the jurors should be limited to examining the question of fact, whether there had really been an attempt to destroy the Constitution of the year III, and that all questions as to its justification should be ruled out. This; view was, of course, adopted by the court, but; its adoption did not prevent the prisoners from developing their own principles and their full consequences to the jury, including a drastic indictment of the authors of the Constitution of the year III, which placed full power in the hands of an oligarchy, with the dictatorship of a co-opted committee at its head. These expressions of opinion the judges found it impossible to suppress. In championing the cause of the popular Constitution of 1793, the accused were careful to expose the trick by which the governing classes, the authors of the Constitution of the year III, which supplanted it, had endeavoured to get public opinion on their side in attempting to tar it and all revolutionary principles with the responsibility for the excesses of the government of the Terror.
“You are always recalling,” said they (through the mouth of Babeuf), “the measures of 1793, but you pass over in silence all that preceded the unhappy necessity that originated them. You forget to remind France of the innumerable treacheries which caused thousands of citizens to perish; you forget to speak of the alarming progress of the war in La Vendée, of the liberation of our frontiers, of the defection of Dumouriez, and the revolting protection found for him in the very heart of the Convention itself; you forget to recall the unheard-of cruelties by which the barbarous Vendéans tore to pieces and put to death with the most refined torments the defenders of the country and all of those who retained some attachment to the Republic. If you invoke the shades of the victims of a deplorable severity brought about by the ever-growing dangers of the country, we shall exhume the corpses of the Frenchmen strangled by the counter-revolutionaries at Montauban, at Nancy, at the Champs de Mars, in La Vendée, at Lyons, at Marseilles, at Toulon. We shall awaken the shades of the millions of republicans mowed down at our frontiers by the partisans of that tyranny for :the return of which they ceaselessly conspired, even in the bosom of France itself; we shall pour into the balance the bloodshed by your friends in cold calculation with that which the patriots have caused to flow, with regret, in the urgency of defence and the exaltation of the love of liberty. Is it us or is it liberty that the national accusers have charged themselves to prosecute? Their infatuation will not be useless to us, and the jurors will discover, doubtless, in the partiality of the pictures they draw, in the affectation with which they distort history, and in the zeal with which they heap on heads of the accused acts to which the latter are total strangers, that secret hatred which the enemies the Republic, cleverer than ourselves, have vowed to its intrepid and too confident defenders.”
One and all of the prisoners gloried in their affection for the Constitution of the year 1793, as guaranteeing to the people the inalienable right of making its own laws, and for its having been accepted with all but unanimity by the French people. So conclusive was the logic of the defence that it did not fail at certain times to stagger the public prosecutors themselves, who were often at a loss for a reply. Were they being indicted, demanded the accused, for having called the attention of the people to the violation of their rights that had been practised upon them? In that they were only making use of that freedom of speech and of the press that even the Constitution of the year III. itself guaranteed to all Frenchmen While contending that their accusers had altogether failed to prove the existence of the “dangerous and criminal conspiracy” alleged by them, they nevertheless maintained, that had they really conspired to re-establish the Constitution of 1793, they would only have been doing their duty as citizens in fulfilling the oath to be faithful to liberty, to the sovereignty of the people, and to the Republic. Speaking of the communism with which he and companions were charged, Babeuf boldly reaffirmed the proposition he had often enough preached in the Pantheon Club, as well as in the Tribun du Peuple, that private property is the cause of all the evils on the face of the earth.
By the preaching of this doctrine – said he – long ago proclaimed by the wise, I have sought to rally to the Republic the people of Paris, tired of revolutions, discouraged by misfortunes, and almost converted to royalism by the intrigues of the enemies of liberty.
Babeuf’s defence occupied four days. It was very diffuse in character, constituting an elaborate vindication of his whole theory and policy. It is scarcely necessary to say that the scope and intention of the present work precludes its being given in extenso, or indeed in anything fuller than a comparatively summary analysis. The complete text, as revised by Babeuf, and left by him for publication, extends over more than three hundred closely-printed pages. These, however, comprise most of the material – proclamations, decrees, manifestoes, etc. – already given or described.
The many incidents referred to generally in the foregoing, respecting the conduct of the proceedings, reached their climax during the twenty-first sitting, when the President, losing his temper, stopped Babeuf abruptly with the words: – “Up till now it is you who have been conducting these discussions. I declare to you that from this day it will be me.” He expressed his indignation at hearing Babeuf deny the conspiracy, recalling the letter to the Directory of the 21st of Floréal (see above previous chapter), after his arrest, in which he offered to treat with them on of equality, claiming that he was the centre of the last conspiracy of Democrats. To this Babeuf replied, he only wanted to scare the Government in order to save the Democrats, and convey the impression of a great conspiracy. Babeuf was continuing the discussion when the President again interrupted, and, with menacing gestures, called out, “We have had enough of your speeches, considering that you now say you only took a secondary part in the movement. Who were, then, the real instigators of the conspiracy?” The answer of Babeuf to this question was, that the moment had not yet arrived for him to give that explanation. This question of the President was not warranted by the facts, because throughout the proceedings Babeuf never shrank from the responsibility of the part that he had taken, and in no way endeavoured to foist the blame upon his colleagues; on the contrary, he did everything to emphasise his personal responsibility for all that had taken place.
These are examples only of the various episodes that arose in the course of the proceedings, and were prior to the actual opening by Babeuf of his defence-in-chief. The indignation of the audience was apparent, and someone shouted, “You have no right to put obstacles in the way of an accused in conducting his case; and in particular,” indicating Babeuf, “in any case his head is here to pay!” Considerable disturbance was created by the noise and angry exclamations from the accused, who shouted invectives against the judges, and demanded how it was possible for them fairly to defend themselves?
Although indisposed in health, owing to his long confinement, at the twenty-fourth sitting of the Court Babeuf demanded to be allowed to make an application to the Court. The President demurred, with harshness, saying: – “Are you going to read us all these volumes? How long do you mean to take?” Babeuf replied, “The time necessary to state my defence!” Then he asked for an adjournment for eight days to enable him to prepare his statement, urging that it was impossible to defend himself without preparation. After considerable discussion, the Court settled down; and order being restored, it was decided to grant a delay of four days. On the reassembling of the Court after a lapse of six days, Babeuf began his speech. He read from a written statement of two hundred folio sheets, and went through the documents forming the grounds of the charge against himself and his colleagues, which were, as already stated, very voluminous, making three or four large bundles. He reminded the Court of the extraordinary length of the Act of Accusation, and said that its length and the nature of the speeches for the prosecution had given to those proceedings such prominence and grave importance, and those documents and the speeches gave so many varied reports of the movement, that it was necessary for him to combat them in detail. He lost no opportunity of making propaganda for the principles underlying the acts brought against the accused warmly denouncing the corruption and treachery; towards the people of those in power. At the same time he did not spare the weak places in the armour of the prosecution. For example, the strong point made by the latter was the attempt of the “Equals”, as represented by their Secret Directory, to corrupt the Legion of Police. He showed that: the latter was already disaffected, quite apart from the agitation of his own party. As a matter of fact, the body called the “Legion of Police” was largely composed of members of the old “revolutionary army” of the First Paris Commune in the Hébertist days, and was rife with Hébertist views: Babeuf claimed indulgence for his prolixity and apparent disorder, and said that an accused before his judges must not be assumed guilty before he had been fully heard, that there was a danger of an apparent show of confusion, which might be mistaken for consciousness of guilt. He quoted the, words of Mably, who, writing upon criminal legislation, said, “The first sentiment of an honest man; when he is accused of crime is a certain feeling of shame which embarrasses him, and he is momentarily at a loss to defend himself. He dreads the uncertainty of human judgement. It would be monstrous to take this embarassment for a confession of guilt. He said it would be fairer if an innocent man, when accused, were enabled to calmly justify himself, and present the truth to his tribunal without the embarrassing presence and interruption of his accusers.
I have dared to conceive and preach the following doctrine:–
The natural right of men and their destiny to is to be happy and free. Society is instituted to guarantee the more certainly to each member the natural right of his destiny. When these natural rights are not the lot of all, the social pact is broken. In order to prevent the social pact being broken, it is necessary to have a guarantee. This guarantee can only reside in the right of each citizen to watch over its infractions, to denounce them to all its members, to be the first to resist oppression, and to exhort other members to resist. Hence the inviolable, indefinite, and individual right to think, to reflect, and to communicate one’s thoughts and reflections; to observe continually the conditions of the social pact are maintained in their integrity, in their entire conformity to natural rights; to rise up against their invasion by oppression and against tyranny so soon as recognised; to propose means for repressing these attempts at usurpation by those who govern, and to reconquer all rights lost. Such is the doctrine solely on account of which I am persecuted. All the rest of what they impute to me is a mere pretext.
Once more we see in the foregoing how inevitable social compact theory incarnated is Rousseau dominated the revolutionary mind. In this respect Babeuf was no more than the echo of contemporary thought. He continues: “Ah, indeed, we are not the first men who have been persecuted by the powers on earth for holding the like principles. Socrates there was, whose end was the poisoned cup; Jesus, the Galilean, who preached equality of men, the hatred of riches, the love of justice and truth; Lycurgus, who exiled himself to avoid being sacrificed by those whom he had benefited; Agis, the only just one among the kings, who was killed because he was an exception to the rule; the Gracchi at Rome, who were massacred; Manlius, who was thrown from the capitol; Cato, who stabbed himself; Barneveldt and Sydney, who went to the scaffold; Margarot, who vegetated in the deserts; Kosciusko, who languished in the dungeons of St Petersburg; James Welldon, who had his heart torn out; and, nearer home, in our revolution, the martyr Michel Le Pelletier, who perished by the steel of the assassin.” Babeuf says, further, that it cannot be too often repeated that the proceedings of the accusers against himself and his colleagues were political movements in the French Revolution, and that upon the ultimate issue would depend the standing or falling of the Republic. The royalists, always on the alert, were vigilantly waiting at all the doors for the results of the trial. “My name,” says he, in effect,” has acquired a fatal celebrity, as it has been given to the sect which saw through them all, and had already devoted them to the poignards. The epithets, etc., of Robespierrists, Terrorists, Jacobins, and Anarchists have disappeared; their place is taken by that of Babouvists. In the democracy of Rome I should have been convoked before an assembly of the people in a public place, and the people themselves would have been my judges as to whether I had betrayed them; but in a great State like France such a trial is impossible, and the people cannot constitute themselves a tribunal to judge those who are accused of conspiring against them or their accepted Government.” Babeuf contended that he and his colleagues could not be brought within the definition of conspirators as given by the prosecution in its opening speech, according to which “conspiracy” meant to overthrow the legitimately established Government, for they had been unable to show by any of the numerous writings and documents quoted and produced against him any elements of such a conspiracy. He claimed that his writings, manifestoes, decrees, and proclamations contained nothing more than the precepts put forward by such eminent writers as Mably, Rousseau, Diderot, Morelly, and others, who were all tolerated, and were the great masters of whom he and his colleagues were only the disciples; that he claimed the liberty of the press to dilate on and review the doctrines and teachings. of such great authorities. Men like Tallien and Armand de la Meuse had advocated the same principles in their writings and speeches, and still remained in the legislative assembly. Why were they not also brought before the High Court? And he quoted passages from Tallien’s paper, Les des Sans-culottes, No.71, and a long speech of the deputy Armand de la Meuse before the Convention in which views were expressed such as were common at the time, as to reducing the income of the rich for alleviating the needs of the poor, the result being a tendency to the equalisation of income, at least to the rendering impossible of anything approaching the extremes of luxurious wealth on the one hand and penurious indigence in the other such as was the usual form assumed by aspirations towards economic equality during the French Revolution. Exclaimed Babeuf in conclusion “These, then, Gentlemen of the Jury, are the doctrines preached to the conventional assembly by a man who is still actually a member of Corps Legislatif, and whom nobody ever dream of calling a conspirator!” The inevitable allusion to Christian teaching followed, with the remind that these same doctrines brought the founder Christianity to a similar position to that in which he himself was now placed, and ultimately led to his condemnation and execution as a conspirator. Babeuf refers with dramatic eloquence and sensational warmth to the fact of the arrest of his wife, already told of, which he characterises as an act of “gross immorality” on the part of the authorities, and complains of the conduct of the magistrate or police official who was responsible for that act, and to the petition of the people of Arras to the Executive Directory asking for the punishment of that magistrate. It will be remembered that Arras was the town where, with Charles Germain and others, he was retained in prison for a long period without trial. He further goes on to relate to the jury the facts relative to the Bodson correspondence, applying for a fair consideration by them of the above-mentioned document. This correspondence with Bodson, Babeuf maintains, was absolutely confidential, and most unfairly brought forward against him by the prosecution. He says: – “Is it not permitted to me to write? Is it not permitted to me, the same as to others, to communicate by letter with whom I wish? Since when have confidential communications in friendship been liable to be delivered to a tribunal, and to be made the foundation of a prosecution?” He emphasises these incidents, and claims that they show the undue severity and harshness meted out him and his, and to those friends who participated in his ideas, and urges that nothing contained in these documents could be evidence of conspiracy against him; and if at times he had been violent in his expressions in the articles published in his paper Le Tribun, especially referring to No. 40, it was occasioned by the unjust acts of the authorities, which were an outrage on humanity, justice, and: the constitution. He points out an important passage in the Act of Accusation which was to the following effect:–
If these individuals associate together in meetings, communicating their ideas, their wishes, and their hopes; if they arrange a plan of execution in which all promise to concur ; if each of them charges himself with and fulfils a certain rôle; if the combined efforts of all are directed toward on common end; if amongst them they establish an organisation, chiefs who give orders and instructions; if they appoint their agents to carry out those orders conformably to those instructions, there then exists a conspiracy; it is concerted action which gives it that character; and this conspiracy is the most criminal of undertakings when its aim is the overthrow of the established government and the handing over of the nation to the most horrible anarchy.
Such is precisely the result of the documents that we shall produce. You will see that the was a complete organisation, a constituted directorate, with appointed and empowered agents who had accepted their positions; instructions given by the chiefs, only too faithfully performed by these same agents; an active correspondence between them; a perfectly concerted plan established, all working in accord, that they might more surely arrive at the common end. And what was that end? The overthrow of the constitution, the extinguishment of all legitimate authority, innumerable massacres, universal plunder, the absolute subversion of all social order.
Babeuf reviews this charge, saying:– “I hope, Gentlemen of the Jury, to be able to prove to you that such was not the result of the documents produced. That there was not such an organisation, directory, body of empowered agents, institution, execution, intention, and aim, as pretended by the prosecution.” He declares that he had shown during his examination that the organisation of which he was a member was not such an association, but a Club or Reunion of Democrats, who met together for the purpose of discussing the public misfortune and affairs of interest to the country, with the desire and intention of ameliorating the condition of the people, and that with this view they propounded plans and philanthropic schemes of all kinds; that this club was the outcome of the Society of the Pantheon which had been so violently dissolved by the Government, quite contrary even to its own law of the constitution of the year III. Amongst other things, he went onto say that such meetings of democrats were composed of malcontents, who had every kind of right on their side, and such malcontents were warm in their love of the people. They were not merely republican but were partisans of principles superior to the system of simple republicanism; in a word, democrats, or citizens who were not satisfied with a condition of semi-welfare for the people, but who wished for them perfect rights and independence; and would tolerate no restrictions of their liberty; that these same malcontents, seeing that people were far from enjoying the maximum of welfare, the plenitude of independence and liberty which they believed to have been the aim of the revolution, fostered a serious desire and hope to change the Government, which they deemed anti-popular and contrary to the general well-being; that these citizens from the first had put together and preserved for the public benefit papers containing their views and ideas, their projects and aims on behalf of the country; that these papers been wrongfully and illegally seized at the time his arrest; that they did not belong to him personally but to all republicans, members of that political club.
He continued to read extracts from several numbers of Le Tribun, his correspondence with Germain, Debon, and others, that the prosecutor endeavoured to twist into evidence of an existing conspiracy, and to claim that the jury could not, on fair consideration, find that they contained anything of the sort.
On the fourth day he concluded the reading of his long statement with the following peroration:
If, notwithstanding, our death is resolved upon ; if the fatal chime has sounded for me; if my last hour is fixed at this moment in the book of destiny, I have for long been prepared this hour. An almost perpetual victim from the first year of the Revolution of my love for the people; identified with dungeons; familiarised with the idea of torture and of violent death, which are almost always the lot of revolutionaries, what could there be to astonish me in this event? For a year past have I not had the Tarpeian rock ever present to me? It has nothing affright me! It is beautiful to have one’s name inscribed on the column of victims for the love of people. I am sure that mine will be there! Too happy art thou, Gracchus Babeuf, to perish for the sake of virtue! What, indeed, all things considered, is lacking to my consolation? Can I ever expect to finish my career in a nobler moment of glory? I shall have experienced before my death such sensations as have rarely accompanied those have also sacrificed themselves for humanity. The power which persecuted them has almost always succeeded in stifling for them the voice of truth. Their contemporaries, deceived or terrified by tyranny, have only poured upon their wounds the burning caustics of atrocious calumny and bloody outrage! The thirst of their agony; has, for the most part, been assuaged by foul poisons; who knows if, even at the sight of the injustices of the misguided crowd and its perverse seducers, they have not been far from the consoling foresight, that time, the avenger, would rehabilitate: their revered names, would ensure for them the: worship of every age and guarantee their rights to immortality? At least they had to await posterity. As for us, we have been happier! The power, strong enough to oppress so long, has not been strong enough to defame us. We have seen truth spring forth from every pen during our lifetime, to register those deeds which honour us, and which will redound to the eternal shame of our persecutors. Even our enemies, at least those who are most opposed to us in opinion, even their passionate annalists, all have rendered justice to our virtues. How much the more ought we not to be secure in the thought that impartial history will engrave our memory in honourable traits. I leave to it written monuments, of which each line will witness that I have lived only for justice and the welfare of the people. Who, indeed, are the men among whom I am treated as guilty? A Drouet! a Le Pelletier! names dear to the Republic! They are then my accomplices. Friends! you who surround me on these benches, who are you? I know you; you are well-nigh all the founders, the firm sustainers, of this Republic. If they condemn you, if they condemn me, then indeed are we the last of Frenchmen, the last of the energetic Republicans. The fearful royalist Terror which has already so long crushed your brethren, triumphing in your fall, goes about everywhere with its poignards, and horrible proscription mows down all the friends of liberty.[Babeuf here refers to the so-called “white Terror”, the massacres of “Jacobins” in the south of France by the bands known as “Companies of Jesus”, “Companies of the Sun”, etc.] But is it not better not to be witnesses of these last disasters? Is it not better not to have survived slavery, to have died for having sought to have preserved our fellow-citizens? What an abundant source of consolation! Is it not also a source of consolation to have been followed here by our children and by our wives? O! vulgar Prejudices, you are nothing for us! Our dear ones have not blushed to follow us to the feet of our judges, since the acts which have conducted us there cannot humiliate either their brows or ours. They will follow us to the feet of Calvary, there to receive our benedictions and our last adieux. But oh! my children, these benches are the only place from whence I can make you hear my voice, since they have taken away from me, contrary to the laws, the satisfaction of seeing you. I have only one bitter regret to express to you. It is that having desired to the utmost to contribute to leave you liberty, the source of all good things, I see after me slavery, and I leave you the prey of al evils. I have indeed nothing to bequeath to you; I would not bequeath to you my civic virtues, my deep hatred of tyranny, my ardent devotion to equality and liberty, my intense love for the people I should be making you a too cruel present. What would you do with it, under the royal oppression that must infallibly establish itself? I leave you slaves, and this thought is the only one that will rend my soul in its last moments. I ought, things are, to give you advice on the means supporting your fetters more patiently, but I feel that I am utterly incapable of doing so.”
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the “new world” we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked lately were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those of the "one percent" having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one. In that sense previous historical models come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lessons Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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Ernest Belfort Bax-Gracchus Babeuf
VIII. The Trial of Babeuf and his Colleagues
ON the opening of the proceedings on the 2nd Ventose (anno V), forty-seven prisoners were brought up, eighteen of the accused being en contumace. Among the latter were Drouet, Lindet, Reys, Le Pelletier, and Rossignol. A large force of troops surrounded the building where the trial was held, while each of the accused was guarded by two gendarmes. The place reserved in the large audience hall for the public was always filled admirers of the incriminated movement, who vigorously applauded every utterance of the prisoners. Many of the accused, it should be remarked, though belonging to the revolutionary movement, had had nothing whatever to do with the actual conspiracy but were arrested out of spite. Amongst the prisoners present might have been seen the old Jacobin and landlord of Robespierre, Duplay and his son
Those whose voices were chiefly heard in defence of the movement were those of Babeuf, Germain, Antonelle, and Buonarroti.
Darthé remained silent, refusing to recognise the jurisdiction of the court. He made one speech only at the beginning of the proceedings, which is given by Buonarroti. “As for me,” it is related that he said, “if providence has fixed for this epoch the end of my career, I shall end it with glory, without fear and without regret. What have I indeed to regret? When liberty succumbs; when the edifice of the Republic is crumbling piece by piece; when its name has become odious; when its friends, worshippers of Equality, are pursued, are hunted, scattered, given over to the rage of assassins or to the Prey of hunger; when the people are the prey of famine and of want, deprived of all their rights, abused, despised, crushed beneath a yoke of iron; when this sublime Revolution, the hope and consolation of oppressed nations, has ceased to be more than a phantom; when the defenders of the country are everywhere covered with outrages, deprived of all, maltreated, bent beneath the most odious despotism; when, as the price of their sacrifices, of their blood poured out in the common defence, they are treated as criminals, assassins, and brigands, their laurels changed to cypress; when royalism is everywhere bold, protected, honoured, recompensed even with the blood and tears of the unfortunate; when fanaticism grasps again its poignards, and with a new fury; when proscription and death are suspended over the heads of all virtuous men, of all the friends of reason, of all those who have taken part in the grand and generous efforts in favour of our generation ; when, to fill up the tale of horror, it is in the name of all that is most sacred, most revered on earth, in the name of holy friendship, of respected virtue, of honourable probity, and of beneficent justice, of sweet humanity, of the Divinity itself, that the brigands drag desolation, despair, and death at their heels; when profound immorality, horrible treason, execrable denunciation, infamous perjury, brigandage, and assassination are officially honoured, distinguished, recognised, and qualified with the sacred name of virtue; when all social ties are broken; when France is covered with a funereal crape; when she will soon offer nothing more to the horrified eye of the traveller than heaps of corpses and smoking deserts; when the country is no more – then is death indeed a blessing! As for myself, I leave to my family and my friends neither opprobrium nor infamy. They will be able to cite with pride my name among those of the defenders n! and martyrs in the divine cause of humanity. I claim with confidence to have passed through the whole revolutionary period without taint; never has the thought of a crime or of a meanness sullied my soul. Thrown when young into the Revolution, I have supported all its fatigues, have borne all its dangers, without ever falling back. I have had no other pleasure than the hope of seeing the day that should found the durable reign of equality and of liberty. Solely occupied with the sublimity of this philanthropic enterprise, I have entirely abnegated myself. Personal interests, the affairs of my family, everything has been forgotten and neglected. My heart has never beat save for my fellow-men and for the triumph of justice.”
The above harangue, with its characteristic eighteenth-century ring, were the only words spoken before the tribunal by Darthé. The prosecution from the very first gave evidence of the bitterness of its animus against the accused, as well as against everything savouring of democracy. The government prosecutor in his speech conjured up visions of a faction of monstrous beings hitherto unknown in the history of mankind, children of anarchy and crime, to which the prisoners belonged. To this hideous and diabolical faction he traced all the democratic episodes of the Revolution; its whole course, from the taking of the Bastille to the fall of Robespierre, was involved in one common anathema. The government prosecutors even went so far on the side of reaction as to condone the royalist insurrection of the 13th Vendémiaire of the preceding year. Great efforts were made by the judges as well as by the public prosecutors to prevent the accused from defending or even expounding the doctrines contained in the piéces d’accusation. The outrageous conduct of the court in this matter led to frequent “scenes” throughout the trial.
The vile attempts of these government agents to blacken and vilify the characters of the accused – imputing dishonesty to men who had notoriously risked their lives for the country, and who, unlike their enemies and accusers, the members of the then governing classes, had left the public offices occupied by them, before the triumph of the reaction, in a state of poverty, amounting in some cases to positive indigence – led to many an out burst of indignation from prisoners and public alike. For these men the fundamental principles of the Revolution, as enshrined in the “Rights of Man” and the Constitution of 1793, were a religion, the sacred trust for which they were proud to suffer all things, and if need were to sacrifice their lives. The spirit animating them was shown by the enthusiasm with which they chanted their republican hymns in court each day at the close of the trial.
The chief witness against the accused was the traitor Grisel. Together with him were other, police spies, who, however, we are informed by Buonarroti, in spite of their métier, were animated by so strong a moral repulsion to the archtraitor that they refused to sit beside him. The defence attempted to get rid of Grisel by invoking the law which made the evidence of a denunciator legally inadmissible in cases where he could personally profit by his denunciation, whether by direct payment or otherwise. The public prosecutors, in order to get over this difficulty, had to maintain that Grisel was not a denunciator “within the meaning of the Act”, because, forsooth, his first declaration was made, not to the police, but to one of the Directors (Carnot), a fact which constituted his statements a simple revelation, and not a denunciation in the true sense of the word, thereby excluding him from the category of the law as invoked by the prisoners. Naturally this quibble excited universal derision, but the court, as might have been expected, admitted it all the same Grisel must be received as a witness at all costs.
There were in all five hundred piéces de conviction, consisting of documents seized in the house where Babeuf was lodging at the time of his arrest. The most of them were at once recognised by their authors, though, in a few cases, experts were called in to fix the identity of those responsible for them. Among them were the reports of the agents working in the interests of the Secret Directory in the several arrondissements. The latter documents which for the most part bear the superscription Égalité, Liberté, Bonheur Commun, relate to the question of the state of feeling in the different districts and the persons who might be relied on at the moment of insurrection, to the places where arms were stored, etc.
But here and there flashes afford us an interesting glimpse of the life of Paris at the time: thus (liasse xix, 17) in one of these documents, dated in the hand of Babeuf, 8 Floreal, we read: – “Yesterday morning the placard, Soldier, halt again! produced the greatest effect in the seventh arrondissement. Among other places, at the corner of the Rue Cloche-Perche, Rue Antoine, more than two thousand readers formed a queue. A patrol of cavalry passing by wanted to see what was attracting so great a concourse. The commandant, dismounting, read it through, and was desirous of tearing it down, in order, as he said, to give it his comrades to read. On its being represented to him that he could not remove it without destroying it, he replied, ‘In that case it had better be left for the people to read.’ He remounted his horse and went off towards the boulevard. Some sought, nevertheless, to pull it down; but a group of readers opposed themselves to this, saying that it contained truth.” That a crowd of two thousand persons should so readily collect to read a placard is symptomatic of the excited state of feeling still dominating the Paris populace.
A great fuss was made as to a document containing some words which Babeuf had covered with a great blot of ink. The discussion on this subject bid fair to become a free fight between the prisoners, their counsel, and the court. The séance had to be abruptly terminated, the prisoners, as was their custom, intoning a couplet of the Marseillaise : Tremblez, tyrans, et vous perfides!
On one occasion, when the public prosecutors complained to the judges of the prolongation of the trial, alleging that a number of voices were being raised against the dilatoriness of the proceedings in the high court, Babeuf sprang to his feet, exclaiming, “Whose are those voices?” and, turning to the public, “You will divine, friends of the people!” He proceeded to denounce the privileged classes, many of whom could not wait the ordinary course of law in their bloodthirsty impatience to immolate their victims. In this cry one would hearken in vain for the voices of the four-and-twenty millions of oppressed people of whose cause they, the prisoners, were the defenders. “Virtue does not die,” he concluded. “Tyrants may wallow in atrocious persecution; they do but destroy the body; the soul of good men does but change its covering; on the dissolution of one, it animates at once other beings, with whom it continues to inspire generous movements which never more allow the crime of tyranny to rest in peace. After these last thoughts, and after all the innovations that I see introduced every day to hasten my holocaust, I leave to my oppressors all the facilities they desire; I neglect useless details in my defence; let them strike without reaching anything; I shall sleep in peace in the bosom of virtue.”
Grisel related his experiences during two hearings of the court. Buonarroti says that what he stated was in the main true. What revolted everybody was his cynical avowal of treachery and breach of confidence. Turning towards the bench where the accused were sitting, he said, “I only see agents here; not one of them was the real chief of the conspiracy; behind the curtain were men who caused these to work and act.” This remark was doubtless aimed by Grisel, who was in the service of Carnot, against the latter’s fellow-director and enemy, Barras. The statement, however, called forth from Germain the retort, “If we are too insignificant, go to the banks of the Aube to dig out the sand which covers the corpse of my wife! go dispute it with the worms, less worthy than yourself to devour it! fling yourself like a famished tiger on my mother! add my sisters and their children to your abominable feast! tear my son from the feeble arms of his nurse and crush his tender limbs under your carnivorous fang!” Grisel having referred to the insurrection of Prairial, ann. III, in contemptuous terms, was countered by Babeuf, who, in a harangue redolent of eighteenth-century eloquence, glorified the insurrection and its victims, till the court compelled the speaker to resume his seat. Two soldiers named Meunier and Barbier respectively, who had been condemned already to two years’ hard labour for disaffection in the legion o£ police, were brought up from Vendôme to confirm certain statements made by them in moments of weakness. Far from doing what was demanded of them, they now denied everything. Bowing to the accused, they saluted them by republican songs. They greeted them as friends of the people, demanding to partake in their glory. Their conduct resulted subsequently in a fresh condemnation. Of the five hundred incriminating documents seized at Babeuf’s lodging, many were obviously written by his own hand, though some of these were doubtless only copied out by him.
The whole weight of the prosecution bore upon Babeuf. His interrogation lasted during nine long sittings. The attempts to explain away these documents on the part of the accused were naturally successful only in a very limited degree. As Buonarroti observes, their defence amounted to no more than a not very coherent tissue of sophism, which, he adds, they only permitted themselves out of consideration for their companions in misfortune. “The true defence of the accused,” he says; “rests entirely in the avowal that they made of their democratic doctrines; in the solemn homage which they rendered to the Constitution of 1793, and in their perseverance in justifying hypothetically the object of the conspiracy.” The conspiracy, of course, centred in the formation of a Secret Directory, the object of which was insurrection. It was this “usurpation of they sovereignty”, as it was termed, that formed the central indictment of the prosecution. “We have not here,” said Babeuf, “a trial of individuals; have a trial of the Republic itself. It must, in spite of all, be treated with the dignity, the majesty, and the devotion that so powerful an interest commands. All republicans,” said Babeuf, “are implicated in this affair; consequently it belongs to the Republic, to the Revolution, to history.” He proceeded to thank the genius of liberty for having furnished him with a tribune, even though it were the bench of the accused, from which to declare the truth.
A vehement assertion of admiration for the Constitution of ’93, and the denunciation of the illegal violence with which those in power had: deprived the people of the rights belonging to them by virtue of it, brought down upon him the intervention of the judges, who condemned him to silence. Buonarroti, when his turn came justified the existence of the Secret Director and its manifestoes as in no way contrary to law or to revolutionary precedent. Babeuf subsequently returned to the charge, proclaiming at the top of his voice “the awakening of the true people, the reign of happiness, the reign of equality and liberty, abundance for all, equality and liberty for all, the happiness of all-such are the aims of these pretended conspirators, who have been painted in such horrifying colours before the eyes of all France!” He justified the revolutionary principle of the sacred right of insurrection, repudiating with energy the whittling away of this principle by the prosecution with specious sophism that insurrection is only legitimate when it is made by the universality of the citizens, such being obviously equivalent to the assertion that it was never justified. On some of his colleagues, notably Ricord, seeking to throw the responsibility for certain of the most aggressive manifestoes on the agents provocateurs of the government, Grisel’s name being mentioned in connection with the “Insurrectionary Act”, Babeuf indignantly spurned this cowardly method of defence by shamefaced denial and falsehood. Turning to Ricord, “No!” he exclaimed, “Grisel did not do it. It is not a piece which need make its author blush, and Grisel is too great a scoundrel to have drawn up any such document.” Buonarroti, when his turn came to speak, detailed career since the dawn of the Revolution defended the Constitution of 1793, and denounced the usurping government based on that of the: year III.
As the trial went on, day by day, the interest of the public in the proceedings and the sympathy shown with the prisoners grew rather than abated. It had its echo outside the walls of the court-house in an abortive attempt to induce a mutiny in their favour on the part of the soldiers: placed on guard at the tribunal. A plot was formed for the escape at least of those most seriously compromised. Suitable tools were smuggled into the prison, by the aid of which a large breach in one of the walls was made. The moment for escape had actually arrived when, through the careless conduct of one of the accused, suspicion was aroused with the authorities, the plan discovered, and all hope of flight was at an end.
Meanwhile, the public prosecutors demanded the guillotine for sundry of the prisoners, while their task in demonstrating at once the reality and gravity of the conspiracy was an easy one, given the mass of incriminatory material. The accused, on their side, for the most part took the line of defence that, even if there had been a conspiracy it was justified by the fact that the Constitution against which it was admittedly directed, was itself illegal, being contrary to the will of the people, by which it had never been ratified, and subversive of that will, inasmuch as it abrogated the Constitution of 1793, which, on its side, had been solemnly accepted by the popular voice. In word, they argued that the existing government, and the constitution on which it was based, was null and void, having no claim on the allegiance of French citizens. The attempt to overthrow it, therefore, so far from being a crime, was rather the assertion of legality against usurpation.
The public prosecutors refused to enter into this question of right and justification, confining their speeches to a demonstration of the facts which could not effectively be denied. They could show without difficulty that there had been a conspiracy, which aimed at subverting the government and at overthrowing the existing economic bases of society. Beyond this, it only remained for them to paint in vivid terms the horrors of anarchy, bloodshed, and general destruction which would have ensued on the success of the conspirators, whose characters and intentions were, of course, blackened by suitable calumnies. The conclusion drawn was, that the equality and popular sovereignty aimed at by the prisoners must inevitably lead, through anarchy, to the return of a king.
The prosecution demanded that the jurors should be limited to examining the question of fact, whether there had really been an attempt to destroy the Constitution of the year III, and that all questions as to its justification should be ruled out. This; view was, of course, adopted by the court, but; its adoption did not prevent the prisoners from developing their own principles and their full consequences to the jury, including a drastic indictment of the authors of the Constitution of the year III, which placed full power in the hands of an oligarchy, with the dictatorship of a co-opted committee at its head. These expressions of opinion the judges found it impossible to suppress. In championing the cause of the popular Constitution of 1793, the accused were careful to expose the trick by which the governing classes, the authors of the Constitution of the year III, which supplanted it, had endeavoured to get public opinion on their side in attempting to tar it and all revolutionary principles with the responsibility for the excesses of the government of the Terror.
“You are always recalling,” said they (through the mouth of Babeuf), “the measures of 1793, but you pass over in silence all that preceded the unhappy necessity that originated them. You forget to remind France of the innumerable treacheries which caused thousands of citizens to perish; you forget to speak of the alarming progress of the war in La Vendée, of the liberation of our frontiers, of the defection of Dumouriez, and the revolting protection found for him in the very heart of the Convention itself; you forget to recall the unheard-of cruelties by which the barbarous Vendéans tore to pieces and put to death with the most refined torments the defenders of the country and all of those who retained some attachment to the Republic. If you invoke the shades of the victims of a deplorable severity brought about by the ever-growing dangers of the country, we shall exhume the corpses of the Frenchmen strangled by the counter-revolutionaries at Montauban, at Nancy, at the Champs de Mars, in La Vendée, at Lyons, at Marseilles, at Toulon. We shall awaken the shades of the millions of republicans mowed down at our frontiers by the partisans of that tyranny for :the return of which they ceaselessly conspired, even in the bosom of France itself; we shall pour into the balance the bloodshed by your friends in cold calculation with that which the patriots have caused to flow, with regret, in the urgency of defence and the exaltation of the love of liberty. Is it us or is it liberty that the national accusers have charged themselves to prosecute? Their infatuation will not be useless to us, and the jurors will discover, doubtless, in the partiality of the pictures they draw, in the affectation with which they distort history, and in the zeal with which they heap on heads of the accused acts to which the latter are total strangers, that secret hatred which the enemies the Republic, cleverer than ourselves, have vowed to its intrepid and too confident defenders.”
One and all of the prisoners gloried in their affection for the Constitution of the year 1793, as guaranteeing to the people the inalienable right of making its own laws, and for its having been accepted with all but unanimity by the French people. So conclusive was the logic of the defence that it did not fail at certain times to stagger the public prosecutors themselves, who were often at a loss for a reply. Were they being indicted, demanded the accused, for having called the attention of the people to the violation of their rights that had been practised upon them? In that they were only making use of that freedom of speech and of the press that even the Constitution of the year III. itself guaranteed to all Frenchmen While contending that their accusers had altogether failed to prove the existence of the “dangerous and criminal conspiracy” alleged by them, they nevertheless maintained, that had they really conspired to re-establish the Constitution of 1793, they would only have been doing their duty as citizens in fulfilling the oath to be faithful to liberty, to the sovereignty of the people, and to the Republic. Speaking of the communism with which he and companions were charged, Babeuf boldly reaffirmed the proposition he had often enough preached in the Pantheon Club, as well as in the Tribun du Peuple, that private property is the cause of all the evils on the face of the earth.
By the preaching of this doctrine – said he – long ago proclaimed by the wise, I have sought to rally to the Republic the people of Paris, tired of revolutions, discouraged by misfortunes, and almost converted to royalism by the intrigues of the enemies of liberty.
Babeuf’s defence occupied four days. It was very diffuse in character, constituting an elaborate vindication of his whole theory and policy. It is scarcely necessary to say that the scope and intention of the present work precludes its being given in extenso, or indeed in anything fuller than a comparatively summary analysis. The complete text, as revised by Babeuf, and left by him for publication, extends over more than three hundred closely-printed pages. These, however, comprise most of the material – proclamations, decrees, manifestoes, etc. – already given or described.
The many incidents referred to generally in the foregoing, respecting the conduct of the proceedings, reached their climax during the twenty-first sitting, when the President, losing his temper, stopped Babeuf abruptly with the words: – “Up till now it is you who have been conducting these discussions. I declare to you that from this day it will be me.” He expressed his indignation at hearing Babeuf deny the conspiracy, recalling the letter to the Directory of the 21st of Floréal (see above previous chapter), after his arrest, in which he offered to treat with them on of equality, claiming that he was the centre of the last conspiracy of Democrats. To this Babeuf replied, he only wanted to scare the Government in order to save the Democrats, and convey the impression of a great conspiracy. Babeuf was continuing the discussion when the President again interrupted, and, with menacing gestures, called out, “We have had enough of your speeches, considering that you now say you only took a secondary part in the movement. Who were, then, the real instigators of the conspiracy?” The answer of Babeuf to this question was, that the moment had not yet arrived for him to give that explanation. This question of the President was not warranted by the facts, because throughout the proceedings Babeuf never shrank from the responsibility of the part that he had taken, and in no way endeavoured to foist the blame upon his colleagues; on the contrary, he did everything to emphasise his personal responsibility for all that had taken place.
These are examples only of the various episodes that arose in the course of the proceedings, and were prior to the actual opening by Babeuf of his defence-in-chief. The indignation of the audience was apparent, and someone shouted, “You have no right to put obstacles in the way of an accused in conducting his case; and in particular,” indicating Babeuf, “in any case his head is here to pay!” Considerable disturbance was created by the noise and angry exclamations from the accused, who shouted invectives against the judges, and demanded how it was possible for them fairly to defend themselves?
Although indisposed in health, owing to his long confinement, at the twenty-fourth sitting of the Court Babeuf demanded to be allowed to make an application to the Court. The President demurred, with harshness, saying: – “Are you going to read us all these volumes? How long do you mean to take?” Babeuf replied, “The time necessary to state my defence!” Then he asked for an adjournment for eight days to enable him to prepare his statement, urging that it was impossible to defend himself without preparation. After considerable discussion, the Court settled down; and order being restored, it was decided to grant a delay of four days. On the reassembling of the Court after a lapse of six days, Babeuf began his speech. He read from a written statement of two hundred folio sheets, and went through the documents forming the grounds of the charge against himself and his colleagues, which were, as already stated, very voluminous, making three or four large bundles. He reminded the Court of the extraordinary length of the Act of Accusation, and said that its length and the nature of the speeches for the prosecution had given to those proceedings such prominence and grave importance, and those documents and the speeches gave so many varied reports of the movement, that it was necessary for him to combat them in detail. He lost no opportunity of making propaganda for the principles underlying the acts brought against the accused warmly denouncing the corruption and treachery; towards the people of those in power. At the same time he did not spare the weak places in the armour of the prosecution. For example, the strong point made by the latter was the attempt of the “Equals”, as represented by their Secret Directory, to corrupt the Legion of Police. He showed that: the latter was already disaffected, quite apart from the agitation of his own party. As a matter of fact, the body called the “Legion of Police” was largely composed of members of the old “revolutionary army” of the First Paris Commune in the Hébertist days, and was rife with Hébertist views: Babeuf claimed indulgence for his prolixity and apparent disorder, and said that an accused before his judges must not be assumed guilty before he had been fully heard, that there was a danger of an apparent show of confusion, which might be mistaken for consciousness of guilt. He quoted the, words of Mably, who, writing upon criminal legislation, said, “The first sentiment of an honest man; when he is accused of crime is a certain feeling of shame which embarrasses him, and he is momentarily at a loss to defend himself. He dreads the uncertainty of human judgement. It would be monstrous to take this embarassment for a confession of guilt. He said it would be fairer if an innocent man, when accused, were enabled to calmly justify himself, and present the truth to his tribunal without the embarrassing presence and interruption of his accusers.
I have dared to conceive and preach the following doctrine:–
The natural right of men and their destiny to is to be happy and free. Society is instituted to guarantee the more certainly to each member the natural right of his destiny. When these natural rights are not the lot of all, the social pact is broken. In order to prevent the social pact being broken, it is necessary to have a guarantee. This guarantee can only reside in the right of each citizen to watch over its infractions, to denounce them to all its members, to be the first to resist oppression, and to exhort other members to resist. Hence the inviolable, indefinite, and individual right to think, to reflect, and to communicate one’s thoughts and reflections; to observe continually the conditions of the social pact are maintained in their integrity, in their entire conformity to natural rights; to rise up against their invasion by oppression and against tyranny so soon as recognised; to propose means for repressing these attempts at usurpation by those who govern, and to reconquer all rights lost. Such is the doctrine solely on account of which I am persecuted. All the rest of what they impute to me is a mere pretext.
Once more we see in the foregoing how inevitable social compact theory incarnated is Rousseau dominated the revolutionary mind. In this respect Babeuf was no more than the echo of contemporary thought. He continues: “Ah, indeed, we are not the first men who have been persecuted by the powers on earth for holding the like principles. Socrates there was, whose end was the poisoned cup; Jesus, the Galilean, who preached equality of men, the hatred of riches, the love of justice and truth; Lycurgus, who exiled himself to avoid being sacrificed by those whom he had benefited; Agis, the only just one among the kings, who was killed because he was an exception to the rule; the Gracchi at Rome, who were massacred; Manlius, who was thrown from the capitol; Cato, who stabbed himself; Barneveldt and Sydney, who went to the scaffold; Margarot, who vegetated in the deserts; Kosciusko, who languished in the dungeons of St Petersburg; James Welldon, who had his heart torn out; and, nearer home, in our revolution, the martyr Michel Le Pelletier, who perished by the steel of the assassin.” Babeuf says, further, that it cannot be too often repeated that the proceedings of the accusers against himself and his colleagues were political movements in the French Revolution, and that upon the ultimate issue would depend the standing or falling of the Republic. The royalists, always on the alert, were vigilantly waiting at all the doors for the results of the trial. “My name,” says he, in effect,” has acquired a fatal celebrity, as it has been given to the sect which saw through them all, and had already devoted them to the poignards. The epithets, etc., of Robespierrists, Terrorists, Jacobins, and Anarchists have disappeared; their place is taken by that of Babouvists. In the democracy of Rome I should have been convoked before an assembly of the people in a public place, and the people themselves would have been my judges as to whether I had betrayed them; but in a great State like France such a trial is impossible, and the people cannot constitute themselves a tribunal to judge those who are accused of conspiring against them or their accepted Government.” Babeuf contended that he and his colleagues could not be brought within the definition of conspirators as given by the prosecution in its opening speech, according to which “conspiracy” meant to overthrow the legitimately established Government, for they had been unable to show by any of the numerous writings and documents quoted and produced against him any elements of such a conspiracy. He claimed that his writings, manifestoes, decrees, and proclamations contained nothing more than the precepts put forward by such eminent writers as Mably, Rousseau, Diderot, Morelly, and others, who were all tolerated, and were the great masters of whom he and his colleagues were only the disciples; that he claimed the liberty of the press to dilate on and review the doctrines and teachings. of such great authorities. Men like Tallien and Armand de la Meuse had advocated the same principles in their writings and speeches, and still remained in the legislative assembly. Why were they not also brought before the High Court? And he quoted passages from Tallien’s paper, Les des Sans-culottes, No.71, and a long speech of the deputy Armand de la Meuse before the Convention in which views were expressed such as were common at the time, as to reducing the income of the rich for alleviating the needs of the poor, the result being a tendency to the equalisation of income, at least to the rendering impossible of anything approaching the extremes of luxurious wealth on the one hand and penurious indigence in the other such as was the usual form assumed by aspirations towards economic equality during the French Revolution. Exclaimed Babeuf in conclusion “These, then, Gentlemen of the Jury, are the doctrines preached to the conventional assembly by a man who is still actually a member of Corps Legislatif, and whom nobody ever dream of calling a conspirator!” The inevitable allusion to Christian teaching followed, with the remind that these same doctrines brought the founder Christianity to a similar position to that in which he himself was now placed, and ultimately led to his condemnation and execution as a conspirator. Babeuf refers with dramatic eloquence and sensational warmth to the fact of the arrest of his wife, already told of, which he characterises as an act of “gross immorality” on the part of the authorities, and complains of the conduct of the magistrate or police official who was responsible for that act, and to the petition of the people of Arras to the Executive Directory asking for the punishment of that magistrate. It will be remembered that Arras was the town where, with Charles Germain and others, he was retained in prison for a long period without trial. He further goes on to relate to the jury the facts relative to the Bodson correspondence, applying for a fair consideration by them of the above-mentioned document. This correspondence with Bodson, Babeuf maintains, was absolutely confidential, and most unfairly brought forward against him by the prosecution. He says: – “Is it not permitted to me to write? Is it not permitted to me, the same as to others, to communicate by letter with whom I wish? Since when have confidential communications in friendship been liable to be delivered to a tribunal, and to be made the foundation of a prosecution?” He emphasises these incidents, and claims that they show the undue severity and harshness meted out him and his, and to those friends who participated in his ideas, and urges that nothing contained in these documents could be evidence of conspiracy against him; and if at times he had been violent in his expressions in the articles published in his paper Le Tribun, especially referring to No. 40, it was occasioned by the unjust acts of the authorities, which were an outrage on humanity, justice, and: the constitution. He points out an important passage in the Act of Accusation which was to the following effect:–
If these individuals associate together in meetings, communicating their ideas, their wishes, and their hopes; if they arrange a plan of execution in which all promise to concur ; if each of them charges himself with and fulfils a certain rôle; if the combined efforts of all are directed toward on common end; if amongst them they establish an organisation, chiefs who give orders and instructions; if they appoint their agents to carry out those orders conformably to those instructions, there then exists a conspiracy; it is concerted action which gives it that character; and this conspiracy is the most criminal of undertakings when its aim is the overthrow of the established government and the handing over of the nation to the most horrible anarchy.
Such is precisely the result of the documents that we shall produce. You will see that the was a complete organisation, a constituted directorate, with appointed and empowered agents who had accepted their positions; instructions given by the chiefs, only too faithfully performed by these same agents; an active correspondence between them; a perfectly concerted plan established, all working in accord, that they might more surely arrive at the common end. And what was that end? The overthrow of the constitution, the extinguishment of all legitimate authority, innumerable massacres, universal plunder, the absolute subversion of all social order.
Babeuf reviews this charge, saying:– “I hope, Gentlemen of the Jury, to be able to prove to you that such was not the result of the documents produced. That there was not such an organisation, directory, body of empowered agents, institution, execution, intention, and aim, as pretended by the prosecution.” He declares that he had shown during his examination that the organisation of which he was a member was not such an association, but a Club or Reunion of Democrats, who met together for the purpose of discussing the public misfortune and affairs of interest to the country, with the desire and intention of ameliorating the condition of the people, and that with this view they propounded plans and philanthropic schemes of all kinds; that this club was the outcome of the Society of the Pantheon which had been so violently dissolved by the Government, quite contrary even to its own law of the constitution of the year III. Amongst other things, he went onto say that such meetings of democrats were composed of malcontents, who had every kind of right on their side, and such malcontents were warm in their love of the people. They were not merely republican but were partisans of principles superior to the system of simple republicanism; in a word, democrats, or citizens who were not satisfied with a condition of semi-welfare for the people, but who wished for them perfect rights and independence; and would tolerate no restrictions of their liberty; that these same malcontents, seeing that people were far from enjoying the maximum of welfare, the plenitude of independence and liberty which they believed to have been the aim of the revolution, fostered a serious desire and hope to change the Government, which they deemed anti-popular and contrary to the general well-being; that these citizens from the first had put together and preserved for the public benefit papers containing their views and ideas, their projects and aims on behalf of the country; that these papers been wrongfully and illegally seized at the time his arrest; that they did not belong to him personally but to all republicans, members of that political club.
He continued to read extracts from several numbers of Le Tribun, his correspondence with Germain, Debon, and others, that the prosecutor endeavoured to twist into evidence of an existing conspiracy, and to claim that the jury could not, on fair consideration, find that they contained anything of the sort.
On the fourth day he concluded the reading of his long statement with the following peroration:
If, notwithstanding, our death is resolved upon ; if the fatal chime has sounded for me; if my last hour is fixed at this moment in the book of destiny, I have for long been prepared this hour. An almost perpetual victim from the first year of the Revolution of my love for the people; identified with dungeons; familiarised with the idea of torture and of violent death, which are almost always the lot of revolutionaries, what could there be to astonish me in this event? For a year past have I not had the Tarpeian rock ever present to me? It has nothing affright me! It is beautiful to have one’s name inscribed on the column of victims for the love of people. I am sure that mine will be there! Too happy art thou, Gracchus Babeuf, to perish for the sake of virtue! What, indeed, all things considered, is lacking to my consolation? Can I ever expect to finish my career in a nobler moment of glory? I shall have experienced before my death such sensations as have rarely accompanied those have also sacrificed themselves for humanity. The power which persecuted them has almost always succeeded in stifling for them the voice of truth. Their contemporaries, deceived or terrified by tyranny, have only poured upon their wounds the burning caustics of atrocious calumny and bloody outrage! The thirst of their agony; has, for the most part, been assuaged by foul poisons; who knows if, even at the sight of the injustices of the misguided crowd and its perverse seducers, they have not been far from the consoling foresight, that time, the avenger, would rehabilitate: their revered names, would ensure for them the: worship of every age and guarantee their rights to immortality? At least they had to await posterity. As for us, we have been happier! The power, strong enough to oppress so long, has not been strong enough to defame us. We have seen truth spring forth from every pen during our lifetime, to register those deeds which honour us, and which will redound to the eternal shame of our persecutors. Even our enemies, at least those who are most opposed to us in opinion, even their passionate annalists, all have rendered justice to our virtues. How much the more ought we not to be secure in the thought that impartial history will engrave our memory in honourable traits. I leave to it written monuments, of which each line will witness that I have lived only for justice and the welfare of the people. Who, indeed, are the men among whom I am treated as guilty? A Drouet! a Le Pelletier! names dear to the Republic! They are then my accomplices. Friends! you who surround me on these benches, who are you? I know you; you are well-nigh all the founders, the firm sustainers, of this Republic. If they condemn you, if they condemn me, then indeed are we the last of Frenchmen, the last of the energetic Republicans. The fearful royalist Terror which has already so long crushed your brethren, triumphing in your fall, goes about everywhere with its poignards, and horrible proscription mows down all the friends of liberty.[Babeuf here refers to the so-called “white Terror”, the massacres of “Jacobins” in the south of France by the bands known as “Companies of Jesus”, “Companies of the Sun”, etc.] But is it not better not to be witnesses of these last disasters? Is it not better not to have survived slavery, to have died for having sought to have preserved our fellow-citizens? What an abundant source of consolation! Is it not also a source of consolation to have been followed here by our children and by our wives? O! vulgar Prejudices, you are nothing for us! Our dear ones have not blushed to follow us to the feet of our judges, since the acts which have conducted us there cannot humiliate either their brows or ours. They will follow us to the feet of Calvary, there to receive our benedictions and our last adieux. But oh! my children, these benches are the only place from whence I can make you hear my voice, since they have taken away from me, contrary to the laws, the satisfaction of seeing you. I have only one bitter regret to express to you. It is that having desired to the utmost to contribute to leave you liberty, the source of all good things, I see after me slavery, and I leave you the prey of al evils. I have indeed nothing to bequeath to you; I would not bequeath to you my civic virtues, my deep hatred of tyranny, my ardent devotion to equality and liberty, my intense love for the people I should be making you a too cruel present. What would you do with it, under the royal oppression that must infallibly establish itself? I leave you slaves, and this thought is the only one that will rend my soul in its last moments. I ought, things are, to give you advice on the means supporting your fetters more patiently, but I feel that I am utterly incapable of doing so.”
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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!
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!
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