Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.
Markin comment:
I will post any updates from that site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History “ series started in the Fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All 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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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 instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. 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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Claude-Henri Saint-Simon (1803)
Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva to His Contemporaries
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Source: Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva to His Contemporaries, (1803). The Political Thought of Saint-Simon, Oxford University Press, 1976. 'Letters', omiting hypothetical 'Reply'.
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I am no longer young, I have observed and reflected actively all my life and your happiness has been the end to which all my work has been directed; I have thought of a project which I think might be useful to you and I now propose to tell you about it.
Open a subscription in honour of Newton's memory: allow everyone, no matter who he may be, to subscribe as much as he wishes.
Let each subscriber nominate three mathematicians, three physicists, three chemists, three physiologists, three authors, three painters and three musicians.
The subscriptions and nominations should be renewed annually, although everyone should be completely free to renominate the same people indefinitely.
Divide the amount of the subscriptions between the three mathematicians, the three physicists, etc., who have obtained the most votes.
Invite the President of the Royal Society in London to receive the subscriptions for the first year. In subsequent years, entrust this honourable duty to whomsoever has given the highest subscription.
Make it a proviso that those who have been nominated should accept no posts, honours or money from any special group, but leave each man absolutely free to use his gifts as he wills.
Men of genius will in this Way enjoy a reward which is worthy of themselves and of you; this reward is the only one which will supply them with the means to give you all the service of which they are capable; it will become the object of the ambition of the most active minds and will deflect them from anything which might disturb your peace of mind.
Finally, by doing this you will be providing leaders for those who are working for the progress of your enlightenment; you will b endowing these leaders with great prestige and you will be placing considerable financial resources at their disposal.
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I have addressed this project directly to mankind, because it is in its collective interest; but I am not foolish enough to hope that mankind will immediately put it into execution. I have always thought that its success would depend on how much support the most influential would decide to give it. The best way to win their votes is to explain the matter as fully as possible. This is what I intend to do by addressing myself to different sections of mankind, which I have divided into three classes. The first, to which you and I have the honour to belong, marches under the banner of the progress of the human mind. It is composed of scientists, artists and all those who hold liberal ideas. On the banner of the second is written 'No innovation!' All proprietors who do not belong in the first category are part of the second.
The third class, which rallies round the slogan of 'Equality' is made up of the rest of the people.
I would say to the first class: everyone to whom I have spoken of the project I am presenting to mankind, has, after a short discussion, finally approved it. All have wished it well, but they have also all let me see that they feared it would not succeed.
This general conformity of opinion makes me think that I am likely to find everyone, or at least most people, of the same way of thinking. If this presentiment comes true, the force of inertia will be the only obstacle to the adoption of my views.
You, scientists and artists and those of you who devote some of your energy and your means to the furtherance of enlightenment, you are the section of mankind with the greatest intellectual force; you have the greatest talent for grasping new ideas. You are the most directly interested in the success of the subscription; it is up to you to overcome the force of inertia. Let the mathematicians, since they head the list, make a start!
Scientists, artists, look with the eye of genius at the present state of the human mind; you will see that the sceptre of public opinion has fallen into your hand; grasp it with vigour! You can create happiness for yourselves and for your contemporaries; you can preserve posterity from the evils from which we have suffered and from those which we still endure; all of you, subscribe!
To the members of the second class, I would then address the following words:
Gentlemen,
Compared with those who own no property, you are not very many in number: how, then, does it come about that they consent to obey you? It is because the superiority of your intellect enables you to combine your forces (as they cannot), thus for the most part giving you an advantage over them in the struggle which, in the nature of things, must always exist between you and them.
Once this principle has been accepted, it is clearly in your interest to include those without property in your party; those who have proved the superiority of their intelligence with important discoveries; and it is equally clear that the interest being general for your class, each of the member who compose it should contribute.
Gentlemen, I have spent much of my time among scientists and artists; I have observed them closely and I can assure you that they will exert pressure on you until you decide to sacrifice your pride and the money needed to place their leaders in the most respected positions and to provide them with the necessary financial means to exploit their ideas fully. I would be guilty of exaggeration, gentlemen, if I allowed you to believe that I have found this intention fully formulated in the minds of scientists and artists: No! Gentlemen, no! I can only say that such an intention exists in a vague form; but I am convinced, by a long series of observations, of the existence of such an intention and of the influence which it can exert on the ideas of scientists and artists.
Until you have adopted the measure which I propose to you, you will be exposed, each in your own country, to the sort of evils which some of your class have suffered in France. In order to convince yourselves of the truth of what I have said, you have only to think about the events that have occurred in that country since 1789. The first popular movement there was secretly fomented by scientists and artists. Once the success of the insurrection had lent it the appearance of legitimacy, they declared themselves its leaders. The resistance they encountered to the direction they gave to that insurrections direction aimed at the destruction of all the institutions which had wounded their self-esteem - provoked them to inflame the passions of the ignorant and to burst all the bonds of subordination which, until then, had contained the rash passions of those without property. They succeeded in doing what they wanted. All the institutions which from the outset they had intended to overthrow were destroyed inevitably; in short, they won the battle and you lost it. This victory was to cost the victors dear; but you who were defeated have suffered even more. A few scientists and artists, victims of the insubordination of their army, were massacred by their own troops. From a moral point of view, they have all had to bear your apparently justified reproaches, for they were responsible for the atrocities committed against you and for the disorders of every kind which their troops were led to commit under the barbarous impulse of ignorance.
Once the evil had reached its height, the cure appeared; you no longer resisted. The scientists and artists, having learnt from experience, and recognising that you were more enlightened than the propertyless,, desired to see sufficient power returned to you to restore the regular functioning of the social organisation. The propertyless bore almost the whole brunt of the famine brought about by their own improvident measures. They were brought to heel.
Although force of circumstances had led the people of France ardently to desire the restoration of order, they could only be reorganised as a society by a man of genius: Bonaparte undertook this task, and succeeded in it.
Among the ideas I have put before you is the suggestion that you have lost the battle. If you remain in any doubt on this subject, compare the amount of prestige and comfort which scientists and artists now enjoy in France with their position before 1789.
Gentlemen, do not take issue with them, for you will be beaten in every battle in which you allow them to embroil you. You will suffer more than they during hostilities and the peace will not be to your advantage. Give yourselves the credit of doing something with good grace which, sooner or later, the scientists, artists and men of liberal ideas, joined with the propertyless, will make you do by force: subscribe to a man - it is the only way open to you to avert the evils which threaten you.
Since this question has been raised, let us be brave enough not to leave it without glancing at the political situation in the most enlightened part of the world.
At this moment in Europe, the actions of governments are not troubled by any open opposition from the governed; but given the climate of opinion in England, Germany and Italy, it is easy to predict that this calm will not last long, unless the necessary precautions are taken in time; for, gentlemen, you cannot conceal from yourselves that the crisis which faces the human mind is common to all the enlightened peoples, and that the symptoms which appeared in France, during the terrible explosion which occurred there, can be detected at the present moment by an intelligent observer in England, and even in Germany.
Gentlemen, by adopting the project which I am proposing, you will limit the crises which these peoples are fated to suffer, and which n power on earth can prevent, to simple changes in their governments and finances, and you will spare them the general upheaval undergone by the French people-an upheaval in which all existing relations between the members of a nation become precarious; and anarchy, the greatest of all scourges, rages unchecked until it plunges the entire nation it afflicts into a depth of misery which finally gives birth, even among the most ignorant of its members, to the desire for the restoration of order.
I would appear to be underestimating your intelligence, gentlemen, if I were to add further proofs to those which I have just submitted, to prove to you that it is in your own interest to adopt the measure which I propose, in the light of the evils from which it can save you.
It is with pleasure that I now present the project to you in a light flattering to your self-esteem. Think of yourselves as the regulators of the progress of the human mind; you can play this part; for if, through the subscription, you give prestige and comfort to men of genius, one of the conditions in the subscription is that those who are elected are debarred from holding any position in the government, you will thus safeguard yourselves and the rest of humanity from the drawbacks of placing effective power in their hands.
Experience has shown that at the moment of their conception an admixture of harmful elements is generally found in new, powerful, just ideas, on which discoveries are based. Despite this, if their inventor had the power he would often demand that they should be put into practice. This is an example of one particular disadvantage. But I would draw your attention to another of a general nature. Always, if a discovery is to be put into practice which requires a change in existing customs and habits, the generation which has witnessed its birth can only enjoy it through its feeling for future generations who are destined to profit from it.
I conclude this little discourse which I have ventured to address to you by saying:
Gentlemen, if you remain in the second class, it is because you want to do so, for it lies in your power to climb into the first class. Now let us turn to the third class:
My friends,
There are many scientists in England. Educated Englishmen have more respect for scientists than they have for kings. Everyone can read, write and count in England. Well, my friends, in that country the workers in the cities) and even those in the countryside eat meat every day.
In Russia, if a scientist displeases the emperor his nose and cars are cut off and he is sent to Siberia. In Russia the peasants are as ignorant as their horses. Well, my friends, the Russian peasants are badly fed, badly clothed and are frequently beaten.
Until now, the only occupation of the rich has been to order you about; force them to enlighten themselves and to teach you; they make you work for them with your hands-make their hands work for you; do them the good turn of relieving them of the burden of boredom; they pa . y you with money; pay them with respect: it is a far more precious currency; happily, even the poorest owns some of it; spend what you have wisely and your lot will soon improve.
To enable you to judge the advice which I am giving you, and to appreciate the advantages which can follow from the execution of my project for mankind, I must go into some detail, but I will confine myself to what is essential.
A scientist, my friends, is a man who foresees; it is because science provides the means to predict that it is useful, and that scientists are superior to all other men.
All the phenomena we know of have been divided into different categories: astronomical, physical, chemical and physiological. Every scientist devotes himself more especially to one of these categories above the rest.
You know some of the predictions made by the astronomers: you know they foretell eclipses; but they also make a host of other predictions to which you pay no heed and with which I shall not trouble you. I shall confine myself to saying a few words about the use to which they are put, the value of which is well known to you.
It is by means of the predictions of astronomers that it has been possible to determine exactly the relative position of different points of the earth; their predictions also make it possible to navigate the farthest oceans. You are familiar with some of the predictions of the chemists. A chemist tells you that with this stone you can make lime and with this one you cannot; he tells you that with such a quantity of ashes from a particular tree you can bleach your linen just as well as with a far larger quantity from another kind of tree; he tells you that one substance mixed with another will yield a product with such and such an appearance, displaying certain properties.
The physiologist devotes himself to the phenomena of organic bodies; for instance, if you are ill, he tells you "You feel this symptom today; well, tomorrow you will be in such a condition."
Do not run away with the idea that I want you to believe that scientists can predict everything; of course they cannot. And I am even sure that they can predict accurately only a very small number of things. But you have convinced yourselves, just as I have, that scientists are men who can predict the most in their own field; and this is, of course, because they only acquire the reputation of being scientists by the verifications which are made of their predictions; at least this is so today, although it has not always been so. This means that we must look at the progress made by the human mind; despite my efforts to express myself clearly, I am not absolutely sure that you will understand me at first reading, but if you think about it a little, you will do so in the end.
The first phenomena which man observed systematically were astronomical. There were good reasons for this, since they were the simplest. In the beginning of astronomical research, men confused the facts which they observed with those which they Imagines, and in this primitive hotch-potch they made the best combinations they could in order to satisfy all the demands of prediction. They gradually disentangled themselves from the facts created by their imagination and, after much work, they finally adopted a sure method of perfecting this science. The astronomers accepted only those facts which were verified by observation; they chose the system which linked them best, and since that time, they have never led science astray. If a new system is produced, they check before they accept it whether it links the facts better than the one which they had adopted. If a new fact is produced, they check by observation, that it exists.
The period of which I am speaking, the most memorable in the history of human progress, is that in which the astronomers drove out the astrologers. Another observation which I must make is that since then, the astronomers have become modest harmless people, who do not pretend to know things about which they are ignorant. You, for your part, have stopped asking them presumptuously to read your future in the stars.
Chemical phenomena are far more complicated than astronomical ones, so men only came to study them much later. In the study of chemistry, the same errors were made as in the study of astronomy, but eventually the chemists rid themselves of the alchemists.
Physiology, too, is still in the bad state through which the astrological and chemical sciences have already passed; the physiologists must expel the philosophers, moralists and metaphysicians from their midst, just as the astronomers expelled the astrologers and the chemists the alchemists.
My friends, we are organic bodies; by viewing our social relations as physiological phenomena I conceived the plan which I am putting forward, and it is with arguments drawn from the system which I used to co-ordinate physiological facts that I shall demonstrate to you the value of this plan.
It is a fact, confirmed by a long series of observations, that every man feels, to some degree, the desire to dominate others. What is clear, according to reasoned argument, is that every man who is not isolated is both actively and passiveo dominant in his relations with others, and I urge you to use that little portion of domination which you exercise upon the rich.... But before going further, I must discuss with you something which angers you deeply. You say: we are ten, twenty, a hundred times more numerous than the proprietors and yet they exercise a power over us veg much greater than that which we wield over them. I can understand, my friends, that you are aggrieved. But notice that the proprietors, although fewer in number are more enlightened than you are and for the general good power should be distributed according to the degree of enlightenment. Consider what took place in France during the period when your comrades were in power. They brought about famine.
Let us now return to my plan. By adopting and putting it into practice, you will permanently entrust to mankind's twenty-one most enlightened men, the two great instruments of power: prestige and wealth. The result will be that, for many reasons, the sciences will make rapid strides. It is well known that the study of the sciences becomes easier with every advance made, so that those who, like yourselves, can only devote a short time to their education can learn more, and as they learn more, they lessen the extent of the power exercised over them by the rich. It will not be long, my friends, before you see the resultant benefits. But I do not want to waste time in speaking to you of the remote consequences of a course of action which you have still not decided to take. Let us rather speak about what you can see before your eyes at this very moment.
You give your respect, that is to say you voluntarily give a measure of power to men who, in your view do things you consider to be of use to you. Your mistake, which you share with all mankind, is that you do not make a clear enough distinction between temporary and lasting benefits; between benefits of local interest and those of universal interest; between things which benefit a part of mankind at the expense of the rest, and those which increase the happiness of the whole of mankind. In short, you have not yet noticed that there is only one interest common to all mankind: that of the progress of the sciences.
If the mayor of your village obtains a concession for you over the neighbouring villages, you are pleased with him, you respect him; city-dwellers exhibit the same desire to exercise superiority over other towns in the vicinity. The provinces compete with each other, and there are struggles of personal interest between nations which are called wars., Among the efforts made by all these factions of mankind, can we see any which aims directly at the common good? It is a very small effort indeed-which is not surprising, considering that mankind has not yet taken any steps to agree collectively on the subject of rewards for those who succeed in doing something for the common good. I do not think that a better method can be found than the one which I propose, for uniting as far as possible all those forces acting in so many, often contrary, directions; for leading them as far as possible in the only direction which points to the betterment of mankind. Now, for the time being, enough about the scientists. Let us speak of the artists.
On Sundays, you find delight in eloquence, you take pleasure in reading a well-written book, in looking at beautiful pictures or statues or in listening to music which holds you entranced. Hard work is necessary before a man can speak or write in a way which will amuse you, or can paint a picture or carve a statue which pleases you or can compose music which affects you. Is it not fair, my friends, that you should reward the artists who fill the pauses in your work with pleasures which enlarge your minds by playing on the most delicate nuances of your feelings?
Subscribe my friends! No matter how little money you subscribe, there are so many of you that the total sum will be considerable; besides, the prestige bestowed on those whom you nominate will give them untold strength. You will see how the rich will hasten to distinguish themselves in the sciences and the arts, once they realise that this road leads to the highest honours. Even if you only succeed in diverting them from the quarrels born of their idleness, over how many of you should be under their command, quarrels in which you are always embroiled and of which you are always the dupes, you will have gained much.
If you accept my plan, you will encounter one difficulty that of choice. I will tell you how I should set about making my own. I should ask all the mathematicians I know, who are, in their opinion, the three best mathematicians, and I should nominate the three who have gathered the most votes from those whom I had consulted. I should do the same for the physicists, etc.
Having divided mankind into three parts, and having presented each with what I thought were the reasons why they should adopt the plan, I shall now address my contemporaries collectively and lay before them my reflections on the French Revolution.
The abolition of the privilege of birth required an effort which burst the bonds of the old social system and did not present an obstacle to the reorganisation of society. But the appeal which was made to all the members of society to carry out their duties of deliberation regularly had no success. Apart from the terrible atrocities which resulted from the application of this principle of equality, as the natural result of putting power into the hands of the ignorant, it also ended in the creation of an utterly impractical form of government, because the rulers, who were all paid so that the propertyless could be included, were so numerous that the labours of the governed were barely sufficient to support them. This led to a situation absolutely the contrary of what the propertyless had always wanted, which was to pay less taxes.
Here is an idea which seems to me to be fair. The basic needs of life are the most pressing. The propertyless can only partly satisfy them. A physiologist can see clearly that their most constant desire must be the reduction of taxes, or an increase in wages, which comes to the same thing.
I think that all classes of society would be happy in the following situation: spiritual power in the hands of the scientists; temporal power in those of the proprietors; power to nominate those called upon to carry out the functions of the great leaders of mankind in the hands of everyone; the reward for those who govern to be — esteem.
Sunday, July 01, 2012
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-Uncle Lionel’s Loss- With Bob Dylan’s “Boots Of Spanish Leather” In Mind
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bob Dylan performing his classic early lament, Boots of Spanish Leather.
Boots Of Spanish Leather by Bob Dylan
Lyrics
Oh, I’m sailin’ away my own true love
I’m sailin’ away in the morning
Is there something I can send you from across the sea
From the place that I’ll be landing?
No, there’s nothin’ you can send me, my own true love
There’s nothin’ I wish to be ownin’
Just carry yourself back to me unspoiled
From across that lonesome ocean
Oh, but I just thought you might want something fine
Made of silver or of golden
Either from the mountains of Madrid
Or from the coast of Barcelona
Oh, but if I had the stars from the darkest night
And the diamonds from the deepest ocean
I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss
For that’s all I’m wishin’ to be ownin’
That I might be gone a long time
And it’s only that I’m askin’
Is there something I can send you to remember me by
To make your time more easy passin’
Oh, how can, how can you ask me again
It only brings me sorrow
The same thing I want from you today
I would want again tomorrow
I got a letter on a lonesome day
It was from her ship a-sailin’
Saying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again
It depends on how I’m a-feelin’
Well, if you, my love, must think that-a-way
I’m sure your mind is roamin’
I’m sure your heart is not with me
But with the country to where you’re goin’
So take heed, take heed of the western wind
Take heed of the stormy weather
And yes, there’s something you can send back to me
Spanish boots of Spanish leather
Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1992 by Special Rider Music
Love is a tough racket any way you cut it. Not just the sometimes flame-outs that get extinguished in a youthful minute and are soon forgotten, and not just the ones that turn out to be uneven in the emotional turmoil of the affair before it goes south on one side. Sometimes it gets so lop-sided that nothing can fix the thing. That “nothing can fix the thing” is what I want to speak of just now. And give it a name. The late Lionel LeBlanc, my mother’s brother and my favorite uncle while growing up in Olde Saco up in Maine during the 1950s. Uncle Lionel always seemed like a good guy, always gave us gifts on all important occasions, always supported the various athletic endeavors we pursued, always volunteered to help out in the Fourth Of July and Fourteenth of July (French Revolution celebrations, for the heathens) festivities in the summer, always was respected for the forty years that he put in as a skilled mechanic at the old MacAdams Textile Mills, long, long gone, that kept the town and its mainly working class population afloat. And he was always unmarried. Not that he didn’t have lady friends (as my mother Delores, nee hard French-Canadian LeBlanc would say). He just never married.
And that fact, or the facts behind that fact, as I grew to manhood, left for the West Coast to do this and that, including marrying three times, receded into foggy memory until several years ago when my mother passed away. As part of my legacy I was to sell the family house over on Atlantic Avenue in Olde Saco and divide up the proceeds according to her wishes. As part of preparing for the sale I needed to clean out the overburdened attic. I have mentioned before in an earlier sketch that my mother was a “central committee of one” for keeping alive the greater family memories by keeping almost every known memento, letters, prom tickets, whatever for the past couple of generations. She did her work well, although if I wasn’t as curious as I am, I would certainly have cursed her for eternity for keeping some of the stuff.
Naturally she saved all of Lionel’s letters that he left behind in his apartment when he passed away in 1997. Most of the letters were ho-hum notes to family members about this and that, nothing out of the ordinary. Then I came upon one batch of letters, or rather they came upon me, for I could “smell,” I swear, a faint odor of perfume even after all this time coming from the neatly wrapped and ribboned expensive writing paper and envelopes. So I started reading from the bottom (he, or my mother, had put them in order). The first one was dated April 22, 1927, and was filled with all kinds of impressions about the first few days on the S.S. France that was taking Mlle. LaCroix (a family name known even now in the old town) to Paris and a job as a nanny to one of the MacAdams family’s many children (the textile people whose mills ran the town and provided luxury for many branches of that family). Mlle LaCroix also expressed her fervent desire in that first letter that her time would go quickly so that she could get back to Olde Saco and marry Uncle Lionel. The next couple of letters, including her first from gay Paree, were along the same lines.
Then things got a little terser. Uncle Lionel kept asking when she (Laura) expected to return to America, and she kept saying that she planned to take up painting in Paris as someone (gender unknown) had noticed some of her sketches when she was minding one of the MacAdams children. For the next several months the letters from her got more distant, and Lionel’s more forlorn, although each letter from both always contained some reference to their impending marriage.
After about a year, Lionel decided to put his foot down and ask for a definitive answer on her return date. He never received an answer to that plea. But a tip-off, when I thought about it later, should have been when she stopped asking him, as he had in the beginning, if he wanted her to send him some nice silk shirts for their wedding day. He should have grabbed those luxury items with both hands when he had the chance. Right? And that broken, faithless love affair is why good old Uncle Lionel never married. Ya, love is a tough racket anyway you cut it.
Boots Of Spanish Leather by Bob Dylan
Lyrics
Oh, I’m sailin’ away my own true love
I’m sailin’ away in the morning
Is there something I can send you from across the sea
From the place that I’ll be landing?
No, there’s nothin’ you can send me, my own true love
There’s nothin’ I wish to be ownin’
Just carry yourself back to me unspoiled
From across that lonesome ocean
Oh, but I just thought you might want something fine
Made of silver or of golden
Either from the mountains of Madrid
Or from the coast of Barcelona
Oh, but if I had the stars from the darkest night
And the diamonds from the deepest ocean
I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss
For that’s all I’m wishin’ to be ownin’
That I might be gone a long time
And it’s only that I’m askin’
Is there something I can send you to remember me by
To make your time more easy passin’
Oh, how can, how can you ask me again
It only brings me sorrow
The same thing I want from you today
I would want again tomorrow
I got a letter on a lonesome day
It was from her ship a-sailin’
Saying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again
It depends on how I’m a-feelin’
Well, if you, my love, must think that-a-way
I’m sure your mind is roamin’
I’m sure your heart is not with me
But with the country to where you’re goin’
So take heed, take heed of the western wind
Take heed of the stormy weather
And yes, there’s something you can send back to me
Spanish boots of Spanish leather
Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1992 by Special Rider Music
Love is a tough racket any way you cut it. Not just the sometimes flame-outs that get extinguished in a youthful minute and are soon forgotten, and not just the ones that turn out to be uneven in the emotional turmoil of the affair before it goes south on one side. Sometimes it gets so lop-sided that nothing can fix the thing. That “nothing can fix the thing” is what I want to speak of just now. And give it a name. The late Lionel LeBlanc, my mother’s brother and my favorite uncle while growing up in Olde Saco up in Maine during the 1950s. Uncle Lionel always seemed like a good guy, always gave us gifts on all important occasions, always supported the various athletic endeavors we pursued, always volunteered to help out in the Fourth Of July and Fourteenth of July (French Revolution celebrations, for the heathens) festivities in the summer, always was respected for the forty years that he put in as a skilled mechanic at the old MacAdams Textile Mills, long, long gone, that kept the town and its mainly working class population afloat. And he was always unmarried. Not that he didn’t have lady friends (as my mother Delores, nee hard French-Canadian LeBlanc would say). He just never married.
And that fact, or the facts behind that fact, as I grew to manhood, left for the West Coast to do this and that, including marrying three times, receded into foggy memory until several years ago when my mother passed away. As part of my legacy I was to sell the family house over on Atlantic Avenue in Olde Saco and divide up the proceeds according to her wishes. As part of preparing for the sale I needed to clean out the overburdened attic. I have mentioned before in an earlier sketch that my mother was a “central committee of one” for keeping alive the greater family memories by keeping almost every known memento, letters, prom tickets, whatever for the past couple of generations. She did her work well, although if I wasn’t as curious as I am, I would certainly have cursed her for eternity for keeping some of the stuff.
Naturally she saved all of Lionel’s letters that he left behind in his apartment when he passed away in 1997. Most of the letters were ho-hum notes to family members about this and that, nothing out of the ordinary. Then I came upon one batch of letters, or rather they came upon me, for I could “smell,” I swear, a faint odor of perfume even after all this time coming from the neatly wrapped and ribboned expensive writing paper and envelopes. So I started reading from the bottom (he, or my mother, had put them in order). The first one was dated April 22, 1927, and was filled with all kinds of impressions about the first few days on the S.S. France that was taking Mlle. LaCroix (a family name known even now in the old town) to Paris and a job as a nanny to one of the MacAdams family’s many children (the textile people whose mills ran the town and provided luxury for many branches of that family). Mlle LaCroix also expressed her fervent desire in that first letter that her time would go quickly so that she could get back to Olde Saco and marry Uncle Lionel. The next couple of letters, including her first from gay Paree, were along the same lines.
Then things got a little terser. Uncle Lionel kept asking when she (Laura) expected to return to America, and she kept saying that she planned to take up painting in Paris as someone (gender unknown) had noticed some of her sketches when she was minding one of the MacAdams children. For the next several months the letters from her got more distant, and Lionel’s more forlorn, although each letter from both always contained some reference to their impending marriage.
After about a year, Lionel decided to put his foot down and ask for a definitive answer on her return date. He never received an answer to that plea. But a tip-off, when I thought about it later, should have been when she stopped asking him, as he had in the beginning, if he wanted her to send him some nice silk shirts for their wedding day. He should have grabbed those luxury items with both hands when he had the chance. Right? And that broken, faithless love affair is why good old Uncle Lionel never married. Ya, love is a tough racket anyway you cut it.
Songs To While The Time By-Laura's Song- With Patsy Cline In Mind
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Patsy Cline performing I Fall To Pieces.
“Frank, I am going to put my voice exercises CD in the so be quiet, alright,” Laura explained, a little crack in her voice as usual when she was getting ready to perform, as I started up the car in our driveway on that cold clear February Saturday night a couple of years ago. I could almost feel my teeth grinding at the thought of being held captive while Laura went up, down, around, double-back, and did a reverse twist through the scales and other little riffs with some hysterical instructor in order to loosen up her “instrument,” her voice. I can listen almost endlessly to that voice when she is up in her study, her “music and meditation room” she calls it, but this CD thing is from hell. Yikes! Well at least it was to be a short ride over to the church in Lakeville that night unlike when she decides to go full bore on one of our now very occasional rides back to her growing up home in Centerville. That’s in upstate New York. Jesus.
That night though I was actually in a forgiving and tolerant mood because it was to be Laura’s singing debut, in public anyway. The event, a members’ concert, was to held in the ever-generous and forgiving Lakeville Universalist-Unitarian church assembly hall (the U-U circuit we laughingly call it) and sponsored by the Lost Art Folk Society to which she belonged. As the name of the group indicates these were old folkies from back in the 1960s who never gave up that folk minute, or perhaps didn’t know that it had passed by. We had been to others such concerts in the past and while that nostalgic time moment might have passed these aficionados, for the most part, knew their stuff.
And that was why Laura was going full bore, do, re mi, all the way to the hall to make sure her voice would hold. Naturally she was nervous, despite that great voice and intense preparation, in be in front of peers who knew the good from the bad, and the off note from the true one. She was also just afraid of crowds for a whole bunch of reasons that need no explanation here and now. Moreover Laura was not performing solo but as part of a three women group, dubbed Three Is A Crowd. So she was fretting in between la, la, las about whether Ellie, the “max mamma” (if there is such a thing in the universe) harmonica player, had remembered to set her alarm so she would arrive on time (or, maybe arrive at all) and Dotty, the main guitar player, had not danced off into space somewhere. All that fretting was for naught because as we approached the church we could see the pair of folk refugees emerging from Ellie’s 1973 Volkswagen bus. Ya, it was that kind of crowd.
No sooner had the three “sisters” greeted each other than they immediately ran off to “practice” before their turn. Leaving me to wander in, pay my admission, and “save” seats. I was a regular “roadie” that night. I should explain the set-up. The way this Lost Art Folk members’ concert works, maybe the only way it could works, is that each act gets one song, or poem, bag-pipe playing (for real), juggling act, or whatever. Done. See everybody is looking for their fifteen minutes of glory but since the concert is only presented once a year the whole tribe shows up, at least those who survived the sixties. So there are maybe twenty-five or thirty acts listed. Since everybody has to be out by eleven so god, or his kindred, can rest for Sunday morning mass, or is it service, one to a customer is the only way to go. Except, naturally, human nature, ego, or just love of the music, can play tricks on the agenda. Like Jim Beam can juggle by himself in one act , play the accordion as Aztec Two-Step in a second, play the kazoo with Maria’s band in a third, sing bass with the Midnight Singers (they get two songs, by the way) and still only be counted as one act. Nice, huh, if you have the energy, or the chutzpah.
Three Is A Crowd in deference to Laura and her jitters was strictly working the one act theme for real that night. Except they would also all sing with the Midnight Singers at the end of the night but then half the audience would be too, and the other half would chime in from their seats as I knew from past experience. Ya, like I said it was that kind of crowd. The other thing is that the order of battle is random. As it turned out that night Three Is A Crowd was number fourteen in the first set (out of eighteen, then a little intermission, and the second set to conclude the evening). No good, not good for Laura’s jitters but that was the deal. The only thing to do was enjoy the acts and keep counting down. (Oh ya, and hold her hand.)
Like I say these people may have stepped out a time warp but most of them could perform, perform like crazy. Things like old time hills and hollows Appalachian mountain ballads, old country (Britain, Scotland Child ballad old country) , some American Carter Family country stuff, a few self-written poems, sea chanties, a couple of churchy things, a vaudeville number or two. The mix of the world songbook that you don’t hear about too much anymore except on a night like that. Some more modern stuff too for those not totally stuck in the sixteenth century. Then number fourteen was called by the MC. That folks is Three Is A Crowd in case you forgot.
As Ellie, Dotty, and Laura made their way up to the makeshift stage (used on Sunday for the pulpit service area, I think) I started to get nervous. Nervous because Laura was nervous, nervous that her throat would hold up, nervous, well just nervous. And nervous to hear which song they had selected to play. That was the point of that pre-performance practice. To see which one was working that night. Once they were set up I immediately put my head down so I could “really” listen to Laura’s voice. And hide any blushing. As it turned out they decided to perform the old Hank Ballard tune from the 1950s made famous by the late Patsy Kline, I Fall To Pieces. Good choice. After a little harmonica intro (that Ellie is a space-shot but she can wail that thing when she gets going) they started singing. Good, good harmony, and then… Somewhere around the lines “you want me to find someone else to love,” ya right around there Laura’s voice just meshed the three together so well that it almost brought a tear to my eye.
It was the kind of moment like when Patsy had a good night getting it just right, not too slick not too sentimental. A moment like probably happened way back when somebody first decided that human voices could collectively be greater than the sum of their parts if you could just get that one meshing voice. Hey, I am just a music fan not a scholar, okay. But don’t take my word for it. After the show some guy , some guy who heard the same ethereal thing I heard and who I know knows his stuff, came up to Laura and said,” You did Patsy proud.” And she did.
“Frank, I am going to put my voice exercises CD in the so be quiet, alright,” Laura explained, a little crack in her voice as usual when she was getting ready to perform, as I started up the car in our driveway on that cold clear February Saturday night a couple of years ago. I could almost feel my teeth grinding at the thought of being held captive while Laura went up, down, around, double-back, and did a reverse twist through the scales and other little riffs with some hysterical instructor in order to loosen up her “instrument,” her voice. I can listen almost endlessly to that voice when she is up in her study, her “music and meditation room” she calls it, but this CD thing is from hell. Yikes! Well at least it was to be a short ride over to the church in Lakeville that night unlike when she decides to go full bore on one of our now very occasional rides back to her growing up home in Centerville. That’s in upstate New York. Jesus.
That night though I was actually in a forgiving and tolerant mood because it was to be Laura’s singing debut, in public anyway. The event, a members’ concert, was to held in the ever-generous and forgiving Lakeville Universalist-Unitarian church assembly hall (the U-U circuit we laughingly call it) and sponsored by the Lost Art Folk Society to which she belonged. As the name of the group indicates these were old folkies from back in the 1960s who never gave up that folk minute, or perhaps didn’t know that it had passed by. We had been to others such concerts in the past and while that nostalgic time moment might have passed these aficionados, for the most part, knew their stuff.
And that was why Laura was going full bore, do, re mi, all the way to the hall to make sure her voice would hold. Naturally she was nervous, despite that great voice and intense preparation, in be in front of peers who knew the good from the bad, and the off note from the true one. She was also just afraid of crowds for a whole bunch of reasons that need no explanation here and now. Moreover Laura was not performing solo but as part of a three women group, dubbed Three Is A Crowd. So she was fretting in between la, la, las about whether Ellie, the “max mamma” (if there is such a thing in the universe) harmonica player, had remembered to set her alarm so she would arrive on time (or, maybe arrive at all) and Dotty, the main guitar player, had not danced off into space somewhere. All that fretting was for naught because as we approached the church we could see the pair of folk refugees emerging from Ellie’s 1973 Volkswagen bus. Ya, it was that kind of crowd.
No sooner had the three “sisters” greeted each other than they immediately ran off to “practice” before their turn. Leaving me to wander in, pay my admission, and “save” seats. I was a regular “roadie” that night. I should explain the set-up. The way this Lost Art Folk members’ concert works, maybe the only way it could works, is that each act gets one song, or poem, bag-pipe playing (for real), juggling act, or whatever. Done. See everybody is looking for their fifteen minutes of glory but since the concert is only presented once a year the whole tribe shows up, at least those who survived the sixties. So there are maybe twenty-five or thirty acts listed. Since everybody has to be out by eleven so god, or his kindred, can rest for Sunday morning mass, or is it service, one to a customer is the only way to go. Except, naturally, human nature, ego, or just love of the music, can play tricks on the agenda. Like Jim Beam can juggle by himself in one act , play the accordion as Aztec Two-Step in a second, play the kazoo with Maria’s band in a third, sing bass with the Midnight Singers (they get two songs, by the way) and still only be counted as one act. Nice, huh, if you have the energy, or the chutzpah.
Three Is A Crowd in deference to Laura and her jitters was strictly working the one act theme for real that night. Except they would also all sing with the Midnight Singers at the end of the night but then half the audience would be too, and the other half would chime in from their seats as I knew from past experience. Ya, like I said it was that kind of crowd. The other thing is that the order of battle is random. As it turned out that night Three Is A Crowd was number fourteen in the first set (out of eighteen, then a little intermission, and the second set to conclude the evening). No good, not good for Laura’s jitters but that was the deal. The only thing to do was enjoy the acts and keep counting down. (Oh ya, and hold her hand.)
Like I say these people may have stepped out a time warp but most of them could perform, perform like crazy. Things like old time hills and hollows Appalachian mountain ballads, old country (Britain, Scotland Child ballad old country) , some American Carter Family country stuff, a few self-written poems, sea chanties, a couple of churchy things, a vaudeville number or two. The mix of the world songbook that you don’t hear about too much anymore except on a night like that. Some more modern stuff too for those not totally stuck in the sixteenth century. Then number fourteen was called by the MC. That folks is Three Is A Crowd in case you forgot.
As Ellie, Dotty, and Laura made their way up to the makeshift stage (used on Sunday for the pulpit service area, I think) I started to get nervous. Nervous because Laura was nervous, nervous that her throat would hold up, nervous, well just nervous. And nervous to hear which song they had selected to play. That was the point of that pre-performance practice. To see which one was working that night. Once they were set up I immediately put my head down so I could “really” listen to Laura’s voice. And hide any blushing. As it turned out they decided to perform the old Hank Ballard tune from the 1950s made famous by the late Patsy Kline, I Fall To Pieces. Good choice. After a little harmonica intro (that Ellie is a space-shot but she can wail that thing when she gets going) they started singing. Good, good harmony, and then… Somewhere around the lines “you want me to find someone else to love,” ya right around there Laura’s voice just meshed the three together so well that it almost brought a tear to my eye.
It was the kind of moment like when Patsy had a good night getting it just right, not too slick not too sentimental. A moment like probably happened way back when somebody first decided that human voices could collectively be greater than the sum of their parts if you could just get that one meshing voice. Hey, I am just a music fan not a scholar, okay. But don’t take my word for it. After the show some guy , some guy who heard the same ethereal thing I heard and who I know knows his stuff, came up to Laura and said,” You did Patsy proud.” And she did.
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- "In the Time Of His Time"
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bob Dylan performing his classic call to, well, something, I am not sure whether he knew what the call was to, Blowin’ In The Wind.
Blowin' In The Wind by Bob Dylan
Lyrics
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
Yes, ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
How many years can a mountain exist
Before it’s washed to the sea?
Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
Copyright © 1962 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1990 by Special Rider Music
Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:
He was not sure, exactly, when he, as he called them, caught the "dissatisfied blues." He tried, tried like hell, to remember when he didn’t have them so he could kind of work his way back to give the damn things a date, or at least a time frame. But he couldn’t. The best that he could come up with was when he was in third grade, maybe fourth, because he had had female teachers both years (and pre-teen boy chaste crushes on both of them, and don’t try to make anything out of that, that is strictly a false lead if you do) at the old now long torn down and since rebuilt Olde Saco Elementary School up in Olde Saco, Maine in ancient post-World II times.
It could not have been later because in fifth and sixth grade he had had hard-ass male teachers who would have boxed his ears, or some such thing, if he had expressed out loud his dissatisfactions. Or, if not them doing the boxing of ears (or some such), then salt of the earth Papa who trucked no dissatisfactions, not compared to his hard-scrabble childhood down in some forsaken Appalachian mines (somewhere near Hazard, Kentucky, of some fame in song and story he learned later, much later). Or, in her mother mood days, Meme (she, nee LeBlanc), if she heard that he was dissatisfied with anything greater than the weather after our lord (and, no question in Olde Saco, post –World War II, French –Canadian hard scrabble textile mill Olde Saco, that “our lord” was a vengeful Gallic Roman Catholic our lord) had provided the family with, well, for openers, a roof over their heads, food, good solid food on the table, and… well, whatever “and” she had decided on mother mood days.
Still he was dissatisfied. If he did not express it publicly in the wilds of the complacent Olde Saco school system, or the comforts of the Papa and Meme household, or confess it as some sin, venial or mortal (he never did confess not being sure which type it was), at Sainte Anne Dupree’s Church (not need for the Gallic Roman Catholic part, that is etched in stone) he was still dissatisfied very early on.
Later he could give it a name, although his capacity to do anything about it, or that he could do anything about it did not rise measurably for a very long time. It was little things, kid’s inarticulate things, at first. Why did he have to wear older brother Andre’s hand-med-downs to school when everybody else was wearing new things from the new Penny’s just build up the road in Portland? Why did five people (two adults, already introduced, Andre ditto, and younger brother Prescott) have to live in a tiny house on the wrong side of the tracks (literally, the tracks divided the low-rent Atlantic Avenue section of town from the more upscale Ocean Edge section.)? Although it would be a long time, a very long time, until he got to the bottom of all of that.
Later, high school fresh kid later, first faux-beatnik in Olde Saco later (mostly, very mostly, to impress the girls, especially a certain Lola LaCroix whose perfume, or bath soap, he couldn’t always tell the difference, drifted carelessly all the way across the room to inflame his desire) his first public break-out (mainly at night, mainly if someone had a car, he didn’t, and
wanted to head to Harvard Square and sights of real, faux real, beatniks) and tag as “different.” To some “cool” different but mostly not.
Later still, blown winds across the land later, southern winds of change later. First stirrings, but just first stirrings of wind changes in North Carolina journey later. Winds of war, the smell of war, and stiff resistance later and he the sacrificial lamb to those wars later. He at war with, well, with his government, his parents, his brothers, his Lola, his textile mill town, his beatnik friends, his, mother the ocean in front of him, and his box-like way of life later. And he still sang those dissatisfied blues to high heaven, and beyond. And he never, as far as anybody knew, stopped doing so. Even, if like that third or fourth grade boy, he was never quite sure when it started. Or when it would end
Blowin' In The Wind by Bob Dylan
Lyrics
How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
Yes, ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
How many years can a mountain exist
Before it’s washed to the sea?
Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
Copyright © 1962 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1990 by Special Rider Music
Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:
He was not sure, exactly, when he, as he called them, caught the "dissatisfied blues." He tried, tried like hell, to remember when he didn’t have them so he could kind of work his way back to give the damn things a date, or at least a time frame. But he couldn’t. The best that he could come up with was when he was in third grade, maybe fourth, because he had had female teachers both years (and pre-teen boy chaste crushes on both of them, and don’t try to make anything out of that, that is strictly a false lead if you do) at the old now long torn down and since rebuilt Olde Saco Elementary School up in Olde Saco, Maine in ancient post-World II times.
It could not have been later because in fifth and sixth grade he had had hard-ass male teachers who would have boxed his ears, or some such thing, if he had expressed out loud his dissatisfactions. Or, if not them doing the boxing of ears (or some such), then salt of the earth Papa who trucked no dissatisfactions, not compared to his hard-scrabble childhood down in some forsaken Appalachian mines (somewhere near Hazard, Kentucky, of some fame in song and story he learned later, much later). Or, in her mother mood days, Meme (she, nee LeBlanc), if she heard that he was dissatisfied with anything greater than the weather after our lord (and, no question in Olde Saco, post –World War II, French –Canadian hard scrabble textile mill Olde Saco, that “our lord” was a vengeful Gallic Roman Catholic our lord) had provided the family with, well, for openers, a roof over their heads, food, good solid food on the table, and… well, whatever “and” she had decided on mother mood days.
Still he was dissatisfied. If he did not express it publicly in the wilds of the complacent Olde Saco school system, or the comforts of the Papa and Meme household, or confess it as some sin, venial or mortal (he never did confess not being sure which type it was), at Sainte Anne Dupree’s Church (not need for the Gallic Roman Catholic part, that is etched in stone) he was still dissatisfied very early on.
Later he could give it a name, although his capacity to do anything about it, or that he could do anything about it did not rise measurably for a very long time. It was little things, kid’s inarticulate things, at first. Why did he have to wear older brother Andre’s hand-med-downs to school when everybody else was wearing new things from the new Penny’s just build up the road in Portland? Why did five people (two adults, already introduced, Andre ditto, and younger brother Prescott) have to live in a tiny house on the wrong side of the tracks (literally, the tracks divided the low-rent Atlantic Avenue section of town from the more upscale Ocean Edge section.)? Although it would be a long time, a very long time, until he got to the bottom of all of that.
Later, high school fresh kid later, first faux-beatnik in Olde Saco later (mostly, very mostly, to impress the girls, especially a certain Lola LaCroix whose perfume, or bath soap, he couldn’t always tell the difference, drifted carelessly all the way across the room to inflame his desire) his first public break-out (mainly at night, mainly if someone had a car, he didn’t, and
wanted to head to Harvard Square and sights of real, faux real, beatniks) and tag as “different.” To some “cool” different but mostly not.
Later still, blown winds across the land later, southern winds of change later. First stirrings, but just first stirrings of wind changes in North Carolina journey later. Winds of war, the smell of war, and stiff resistance later and he the sacrificial lamb to those wars later. He at war with, well, with his government, his parents, his brothers, his Lola, his textile mill town, his beatnik friends, his, mother the ocean in front of him, and his box-like way of life later. And he still sang those dissatisfied blues to high heaven, and beyond. And he never, as far as anybody knew, stopped doing so. Even, if like that third or fourth grade boy, he was never quite sure when it started. Or when it would end
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- “Down And Out In America-Part I”
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bob Dylan performing one of his later classics, Dignity.
Dignity by Bob Dylan
Lyrics
Fat man lookin’ in a blade of steel
Thin man lookin’ at his last meal
Hollow man lookin’ in a cottonfield
For dignity
Wise man lookin’ in a blade of grass
Young man lookin’ in the shadows that pass
Poor man lookin’ through painted glass
For dignity
Somebody got murdered on New Year’s Eve
Somebody said dignity was the first to leave
I went into the city, went into the town
Went into the land of the midnight sun
Searchin’ high, searchin’ low
Searchin’ everywhere I know
Askin’ the cops wherever I go
Have you seen dignity?
Blind man breakin’ out of a trance
Puts both his hands in the pockets of chance
Hopin’ to find one circumstance
Of dignity
I went to the wedding of Mary Lou
She said, “I don’t want nobody see me talkin’ to you”
Said she could get killed if she told me what she knew
About dignity
I went down where the vultures feed
I would’ve gone deeper, but there wasn’t any need
Heard the tongues of angels and the tongues of men
Wasn’t any difference to me
Chilly wind sharp as a razor blade
House on fire, debts unpaid
Gonna stand at the window, gonna ask the maid
Have you seen dignity?
Drinkin’ man listens to the voice he hears
In a crowded room full of covered-up mirrors
Lookin’ into the lost forgotten years
For dignity
Met Prince Phillip at the home of the blues
Said he’d give me information if his name wasn’t used
He wanted money up front, said he was abused
By dignity
Footprints runnin’ ’cross the silver sand
Steps goin’ down into tattoo land
I met the sons of darkness and the sons of light
In the bordertowns of despair
Got no place to fade, got no coat
I’m on the rollin’ river in a jerkin’ boat
Tryin’ to read a note somebody wrote
About dignity
Sick man lookin’ for the doctor’s cure
Lookin’ at his hands for the lines that were
And into every masterpiece of literature
For dignity
Englishman stranded in the blackheart wind
Combin’ his hair back, his future looks thin
Bites the bullet and he looks within
For dignity
Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed
Dignity never been photographed
I went into the red, went into the black
Into the valley of dry bone dreams
So many roads, so much at stake
So many dead ends, I’m at the edge of the lake
Sometimes I wonder what it’s gonna take
To find dignity
Copyright © 1991 by Special Rider Music
Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:
Walking down Route 5 west out of Moline, quarter in his pocket, holes in his shoes, patched up, make due patched until sunnier days, by some cardboard graham cracker package cut-out a while back when he had time, endless time to cut-out the moon if he needed to, just outside of Gary, Indiana. Damn that was weeks ago, and heading west to those sunnier days and getting out of north and Midwest winter were not get closer, damn not any closer. Hell, he had only himself to blame, no, get that negative thought of his head because if the dwelt (dwelled ?) on it he could not push forward and get himself straight, get himself clean in some California wash baptism ocean foam-flecked sea.
Stopping for a moment adjusting that damn two-bit cardboard once again he began to reflect on just how he had gotten here, jesus, he had the time for figuring that out on this lonesome Moline road. A road filled with families, farm families from the look of them, prosperous, farm prosperous just now with farm prices rising (fact known through courtesy of a ride a couple of rides back from some Farmer Brown, at one time up against it to the banks but now flush with that prices rising gloat look), heading to some Jimmy Jack’s Diner for the daily special (meat loaf, pot roast, steak, prime rib, for the really prosperous) and decidedly not interested in picking up any obviously non-Moline, non- Midwestern, hell, maybe for all they know some illegal wetback bracero.
He had that look with his leather-beaten skin now tanned beyond golden day tans and more like some tex-mex broiled sun picking farm product (cucumbers, tomatoes, broccoli, who knows) and in fact he had spent a few back-breaking bracero-like days stooped over some sting bean field to earn enough dough to move west from stalled Ohio a while back. And then had been bracero short-changed by the farm straw boss for half his pay for
room and board. A laugh, room, a dormitory for twenty snoring, stinking winos or their brethren, food, some slops not fit for the sty, but he hard-up needed the money, needed to get sanity west, and needed not to be billy-clubbed by no straw boss. And so he took the dough, took his ass out of the broiled fields and headed west from Cincinnati. No, he would get no Moline escape that day from the corn-fed sedan and van traffic that he saw pass him by, pass him by with that sullen, permanent look of scorn, the scorn of those just up the ladder from cardboard-packed make due shoes.
Nor would he get, unless he was very lucky get, a worthwhile ride, from the usually friendly cross state (or country) professional truckers, who more times than not, used to like having the company to spill their guts into the wind to. Or explain their latest theory about how the government, the wife, the kids, anybody, was screwing them over, royally, always royally. And, despite his own hard luck just then, self-imposed or not, he always half-nodded in agreement that the room for righteous guys in this wicked old world was getting small, and getting smaller fast.
But see the company lawyers, probably, or maybe the insurance agents, were putting a serious crimp into old blue-eyed good old boy hankering to tell their untold stories to wayward young guys, looking kind of hippie-like or not, ever since the roads got more dangerous for everybody. So unless some local trucker had not heard the news, or was in a fuck-you mood toward his boss, or was so lonesome that he needed some rider to take his mind off the road as he headed across state to some forlorn grain silo he was stuck in Moline for a while. Maybe for a while in the pokey too if he stayed here, solo quarter in his pocket, too long. It had happened more than once, although not in Moline. A couple of times in Connecticut and Arizona but he had been forewarned, and, damn, when he thought about it, up in his home state of Maine, not twenty-five miles from home Olde Saco. Jesus.
Again stopping to readjust that cardboard square holding the dust and debris of the road from boring a bigger hole in his white (kind of white anyway) socks he ready did want to try to think about how he got on this road, this exact Moline road he had not been on since he had hitchhiked in search of the great blue-pink American West night with fair Angelica, back in, what was it 1969, and they had been forced to shack up in some non-descript motel he thought was further up the road because it had rained for something like five days straight. And fair Angelica, thrilled by the road and jail-break from Muncie, Indiana (via a Steubenville, Ohio truck-stop diner) still was enough t of a bedazzled young woman not to see the romance in five day rains.
Maybe that was the start of it, the long road down the slippery-slope of this praying for some relief hunger madness. Not the Angelica part (although that ended with her going back to Muncie after some California time, and a few years later, a return to Hollywood, well, to not stardom but some celebrity. He wondered where she is now out in the American night. And he wonder if she would smile, or cry, if she saw her ex-beau, looking bracero-hungry, out on the road. Cry, cry a million tears, probably, that was the way she was, plain-spoken Mid-west girl what you see is what you get, and what you got was worth getting, although mist-bedazzled non-bracero hungry ex-beau could quite see through the “high purpose” search for the American dream night then.
If that was not the start of it, then, no question, the break with Joyell, and with civilized society (as she, Joyell, put it) definitely had been. When he, looking for some quick change, fast dough, with no heavy lifting, and plenty of time to think about the next search dream, started dealing a little dope (nothing heavy at first, a little weed, grass, mary jane, whatever you call it in your neck of the woods, some peyote buttons, in season,(in search west season, a little speed for the frantic work ahead) to friends, and their friends, and then their friends, and then somebody’s friends, and then to strangers, and their friends.
And of course when he got caught up in laying around waiting for search for the next dream, then you short weight, just a little, because well because they are strangers, and their friends. At first. The some deal goes south and you owe the patron some dough and he won’t take manana for an answer. And so you “borrow” a C-note until next week when the ship comes in, and when it doesn’t borrow a couple of C-notes to cover that original C-note, and expenses. And so on, and so on.
Just then he got tired of thinking about those busted deals, those busted dreams, and the hard fact that in the end he had to hit the road west one dark night, one dark night midnight creep after taking about eighty dollars from Joyell’s pocketbook, and putting some distance between him and her. Some no return distance from the look of it. He started to tear up as he thought about that and did not hear the brakes of a fully-loaded Andersen Grain Company hiss as the truck came to a stop and the big burly driver called out, “Hey, I’m Memphis Slim and I’m heading to Denver and if you don’t’ mind me talking your ear off I could use the company.” He put his rucksack over this shoulder and climbed on board. Yes, he could listen, listen to eternity, to some poor snook talk his ear off heading west.
Dignity by Bob Dylan
Lyrics
Fat man lookin’ in a blade of steel
Thin man lookin’ at his last meal
Hollow man lookin’ in a cottonfield
For dignity
Wise man lookin’ in a blade of grass
Young man lookin’ in the shadows that pass
Poor man lookin’ through painted glass
For dignity
Somebody got murdered on New Year’s Eve
Somebody said dignity was the first to leave
I went into the city, went into the town
Went into the land of the midnight sun
Searchin’ high, searchin’ low
Searchin’ everywhere I know
Askin’ the cops wherever I go
Have you seen dignity?
Blind man breakin’ out of a trance
Puts both his hands in the pockets of chance
Hopin’ to find one circumstance
Of dignity
I went to the wedding of Mary Lou
She said, “I don’t want nobody see me talkin’ to you”
Said she could get killed if she told me what she knew
About dignity
I went down where the vultures feed
I would’ve gone deeper, but there wasn’t any need
Heard the tongues of angels and the tongues of men
Wasn’t any difference to me
Chilly wind sharp as a razor blade
House on fire, debts unpaid
Gonna stand at the window, gonna ask the maid
Have you seen dignity?
Drinkin’ man listens to the voice he hears
In a crowded room full of covered-up mirrors
Lookin’ into the lost forgotten years
For dignity
Met Prince Phillip at the home of the blues
Said he’d give me information if his name wasn’t used
He wanted money up front, said he was abused
By dignity
Footprints runnin’ ’cross the silver sand
Steps goin’ down into tattoo land
I met the sons of darkness and the sons of light
In the bordertowns of despair
Got no place to fade, got no coat
I’m on the rollin’ river in a jerkin’ boat
Tryin’ to read a note somebody wrote
About dignity
Sick man lookin’ for the doctor’s cure
Lookin’ at his hands for the lines that were
And into every masterpiece of literature
For dignity
Englishman stranded in the blackheart wind
Combin’ his hair back, his future looks thin
Bites the bullet and he looks within
For dignity
Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed
Dignity never been photographed
I went into the red, went into the black
Into the valley of dry bone dreams
So many roads, so much at stake
So many dead ends, I’m at the edge of the lake
Sometimes I wonder what it’s gonna take
To find dignity
Copyright © 1991 by Special Rider Music
Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:
Walking down Route 5 west out of Moline, quarter in his pocket, holes in his shoes, patched up, make due patched until sunnier days, by some cardboard graham cracker package cut-out a while back when he had time, endless time to cut-out the moon if he needed to, just outside of Gary, Indiana. Damn that was weeks ago, and heading west to those sunnier days and getting out of north and Midwest winter were not get closer, damn not any closer. Hell, he had only himself to blame, no, get that negative thought of his head because if the dwelt (dwelled ?) on it he could not push forward and get himself straight, get himself clean in some California wash baptism ocean foam-flecked sea.
Stopping for a moment adjusting that damn two-bit cardboard once again he began to reflect on just how he had gotten here, jesus, he had the time for figuring that out on this lonesome Moline road. A road filled with families, farm families from the look of them, prosperous, farm prosperous just now with farm prices rising (fact known through courtesy of a ride a couple of rides back from some Farmer Brown, at one time up against it to the banks but now flush with that prices rising gloat look), heading to some Jimmy Jack’s Diner for the daily special (meat loaf, pot roast, steak, prime rib, for the really prosperous) and decidedly not interested in picking up any obviously non-Moline, non- Midwestern, hell, maybe for all they know some illegal wetback bracero.
He had that look with his leather-beaten skin now tanned beyond golden day tans and more like some tex-mex broiled sun picking farm product (cucumbers, tomatoes, broccoli, who knows) and in fact he had spent a few back-breaking bracero-like days stooped over some sting bean field to earn enough dough to move west from stalled Ohio a while back. And then had been bracero short-changed by the farm straw boss for half his pay for
room and board. A laugh, room, a dormitory for twenty snoring, stinking winos or their brethren, food, some slops not fit for the sty, but he hard-up needed the money, needed to get sanity west, and needed not to be billy-clubbed by no straw boss. And so he took the dough, took his ass out of the broiled fields and headed west from Cincinnati. No, he would get no Moline escape that day from the corn-fed sedan and van traffic that he saw pass him by, pass him by with that sullen, permanent look of scorn, the scorn of those just up the ladder from cardboard-packed make due shoes.
Nor would he get, unless he was very lucky get, a worthwhile ride, from the usually friendly cross state (or country) professional truckers, who more times than not, used to like having the company to spill their guts into the wind to. Or explain their latest theory about how the government, the wife, the kids, anybody, was screwing them over, royally, always royally. And, despite his own hard luck just then, self-imposed or not, he always half-nodded in agreement that the room for righteous guys in this wicked old world was getting small, and getting smaller fast.
But see the company lawyers, probably, or maybe the insurance agents, were putting a serious crimp into old blue-eyed good old boy hankering to tell their untold stories to wayward young guys, looking kind of hippie-like or not, ever since the roads got more dangerous for everybody. So unless some local trucker had not heard the news, or was in a fuck-you mood toward his boss, or was so lonesome that he needed some rider to take his mind off the road as he headed across state to some forlorn grain silo he was stuck in Moline for a while. Maybe for a while in the pokey too if he stayed here, solo quarter in his pocket, too long. It had happened more than once, although not in Moline. A couple of times in Connecticut and Arizona but he had been forewarned, and, damn, when he thought about it, up in his home state of Maine, not twenty-five miles from home Olde Saco. Jesus.
Again stopping to readjust that cardboard square holding the dust and debris of the road from boring a bigger hole in his white (kind of white anyway) socks he ready did want to try to think about how he got on this road, this exact Moline road he had not been on since he had hitchhiked in search of the great blue-pink American West night with fair Angelica, back in, what was it 1969, and they had been forced to shack up in some non-descript motel he thought was further up the road because it had rained for something like five days straight. And fair Angelica, thrilled by the road and jail-break from Muncie, Indiana (via a Steubenville, Ohio truck-stop diner) still was enough t of a bedazzled young woman not to see the romance in five day rains.
Maybe that was the start of it, the long road down the slippery-slope of this praying for some relief hunger madness. Not the Angelica part (although that ended with her going back to Muncie after some California time, and a few years later, a return to Hollywood, well, to not stardom but some celebrity. He wondered where she is now out in the American night. And he wonder if she would smile, or cry, if she saw her ex-beau, looking bracero-hungry, out on the road. Cry, cry a million tears, probably, that was the way she was, plain-spoken Mid-west girl what you see is what you get, and what you got was worth getting, although mist-bedazzled non-bracero hungry ex-beau could quite see through the “high purpose” search for the American dream night then.
If that was not the start of it, then, no question, the break with Joyell, and with civilized society (as she, Joyell, put it) definitely had been. When he, looking for some quick change, fast dough, with no heavy lifting, and plenty of time to think about the next search dream, started dealing a little dope (nothing heavy at first, a little weed, grass, mary jane, whatever you call it in your neck of the woods, some peyote buttons, in season,(in search west season, a little speed for the frantic work ahead) to friends, and their friends, and then their friends, and then somebody’s friends, and then to strangers, and their friends.
And of course when he got caught up in laying around waiting for search for the next dream, then you short weight, just a little, because well because they are strangers, and their friends. At first. The some deal goes south and you owe the patron some dough and he won’t take manana for an answer. And so you “borrow” a C-note until next week when the ship comes in, and when it doesn’t borrow a couple of C-notes to cover that original C-note, and expenses. And so on, and so on.
Just then he got tired of thinking about those busted deals, those busted dreams, and the hard fact that in the end he had to hit the road west one dark night, one dark night midnight creep after taking about eighty dollars from Joyell’s pocketbook, and putting some distance between him and her. Some no return distance from the look of it. He started to tear up as he thought about that and did not hear the brakes of a fully-loaded Andersen Grain Company hiss as the truck came to a stop and the big burly driver called out, “Hey, I’m Memphis Slim and I’m heading to Denver and if you don’t’ mind me talking your ear off I could use the company.” He put his rucksack over this shoulder and climbed on board. Yes, he could listen, listen to eternity, to some poor snook talk his ear off heading west.
Saturday, June 30, 2012
From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Open Letter to the KKE (1927)
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
**********
Open Letter to the KKE
The Greek Communist Party (KKE) was founded on 4 November 1918, with the original name of the Greek Socialist Workers Party. An outline of its early years can be found in Loukas Karliaftis, The History of Bolshevism/Trotskyism in Greece and La naissance du bolshevisme en Grece, part ii, as well as in A. Stinas, Memoires, pp.37-108. The following document was circulated after the end of the party’s third congress in March 1927 along with the appeal of Trotsky and Vuyovic against expulsion from the Comintern.
Pantelis Pouliopoulos (1900-43) joined the KKE in 1922, and first became prominent in the thousands-strong movement of the war veterans in 1923-25, for which he was arrested and tried in Athens on charges of promoting the autonomy of Macedonia and Thrace, and exiled to Folegandos island. He translated Capital into Greek, and was the KKE’s first Secretary, and had been delegated to the fifth congress of the Comintern in 1924. After being made the scapegoat for the party’s failure, and being abused and slandered, he resigned in September 1926, but was reinstated by the Comintern delegation and took part in the party’s congress in March 1927, where he and Giatsopoulos were removed from the Central Committee. After publishing and circulating the pamphlet known as New Beginning they were formally expelled from the party later that year, and formed an oppositional group which solidarised itself with the struggle of the International Left Opposition They began to publish a journal called Spartocus from December 1928 onwards, containing the main documents of the Left Opposition. They refused to join the split of the Archeiomarxists that had already taken place from the Communist Party, as they regarded it as having a sectarian attitude to the KKE. When the Archeiomarxists were accepted as the representatives of the International Left Opposition in Greece, Trotsky condemned the Spartacus group (L.D. Trotsky, Who Shall Attend the International Conference?, 22 May 1932, in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1932, New York 1973, p.102), describing them as “fruitless and hopeless” (On the State of the Left Opposition, 16 December 1932, in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1932-33, New York 1972, p.291), and they were excluded from the Trotskyist movement along with the ‘Fractionalists’ who had just split from the Archeiomarxists led by Michel Pablo (The International Left Opposition. Its Tasks and Methods, in Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years, New York 1973, p.40). The two groups joined together to set up the OKDE in 1934, and for a while Pouliopoulos maintained links with other oppositional groups around Landau and Molinier, opposing the movement to create a new International from 1933 onwards, but took the initiative in the move to unite the Greek Trotskyists in 1938. Later that year he was arrested, and his ultimate fate is described below.
***********************
Every thinking Communist inside the Communist Party of Greece feels quite sure that the party is in an unhealthy state, and in all its activities sees the spasms of an incurable illness. Most members of the party do not see any of this. They continue to view the situation as natural, and are completely unable to think things through. This is the most frightening symptom of the party’s illness. After its congress the party’s crisis has not only worsened, but has today reached such a tragic state, whereby every logical man who is to be found inside this organisation with the honest intention of working for Communism, feels the irresistible urge finally to react in some way to this situation. It is a general phenomenon inside the party. However, many honest comrades who are not crushed by the recurrent disillusionments, are today experiencing an unprecedented unease and even guilt, having left things to themselves to take the downhill road to degeneration.
We happen to be among the oldest militants inside the party and have otherwise served the party in the most responsible positions. The experience which we have gathered from the struggle, and a deep awareness of our responsibilities to the movement, have led us to a few concrete conclusions on how we should confront the situation. Our first Communist task is indubitably to make known our thoughts to as many comrades as have shown in practice until now the sincerity of their commitment and their common sense.
We recognise the elementary logical idea that inside a sick organism, which has proved itself incapable of standing on its own, comradeship and cooperation among those members who feel the same urge to react to the malaise, is both unavoidable and urgent.
The views expressed below are for us a precondition for the revolutionary movement of our country, based on study and experience, ideas which we will carry through to their logical conclusion with confidence and resoluteness, indifferent to whatever obstacles or sycophancy we meet or the number of comrades who will accept them today. As Lenin said: “Every serious revolutionary is obliged to defend his views, which he believes are important for the cause of the proletarian revolution, even in the case of being in a minority. And he is obliged to go against the stream which may dominate for a certain period. If he does not do this he is not a revolutionary, but a pitiless careerist”.
1. The Crisis in the Party
The development of the party since the Third Emergency Congress has confirmed the conclusions which a small group had formed during the turbulent pre-congress discussion in Rizospastis (Radical) and during the discussions inside the congress. The KKE has experienced a permanent internal crisis from birth. The symptoms are:
1.The lack of a leading nucleus of comrades with a sound Marxist political education and the ability to adapt their Communist principles to the concrete situation of the country, with a minimal homogenous ideology and inspire trust within the members of the party as well as among the mass of its followers;
2.The party has had a bad class composition from the start, which as time progresses becomes even worse. A large part of the members of the party have originated from the worst elements of the proletariat, from the lumpen-proletariat, and from the petty bourgeoisie with an anti-proletarian psychology. In many places, Communism appearing with such elements repels away many of the best elements from the working class as well as quite a few intellectuals who could become good militants. Such a social composition of the party allows even opportunist elements, which exist inside the party to become demagogues with pseudo-revolutionary phraseology, and many honest comrades are disillusioned, forcing them to leave the party. That is the reason why the party does not attract serious intellectuals but frequently strange and suspect individuals;
3.There is a disproportion between the spontaneous movement of the masses who turn towards the left due to the objective situation, and the defectiveness and insufficiencies of the party. This creates a complex arena for action where the pressing needs of the workers are confronted by the party in a fashion which is spasmodic, unorganised and anarchic, thus ending only in hopeless confusion, without any positive results and no steady organisational conquests for Communism inside the country.
2. Reasons for the Crisis
The most immediate reasons for these critical phenomena are to be found in the particular conditions of the historical development of our movement, in correlation with the upturn and downturn of the international revolutionary movement. Basically the reasons for the crisis, in the final analysis, are to be found in the special conditions of the development of capitalism in our country: its socio-economic position and the psychology of the Greek proletariat and of the petty bourgeoisie, and in particular, the comprador character of our country and its capitalist backwardness, the lack of a Socialist tradition and of a Marxist culture, the influx of opportunist elements inside the movement, etc.
The task of the Greek Communists is to come to grips with confronting those conditions of the movement which they can influence with their conscious actions.
3. The Question of ‘Tendencies’ Inside the KKE
Only he who ignores the situation in the party can assert today that the crisis of the KKE is to be attributed to a conflict of ‘tendencies’ concerning tactics. The above mentioned reasons for the crisis show that the overall tendency inside the KKE concerning tactics is generally confused. Periodically sharp antagonisms between ideologically formed tendencies, antagonisms which are common in all the Communist parties and provoke periodical inter-party crises, inside the KKE consist of either personal conflicts or at the most automatic conflicts between groups which spasmodically seek a concrete ideological form. Such crises inside the KKE form only a small part of its permanent crisis. The confusion of these two phenomena prevents a correct diagnosis of the situation inside the party.
Convincing proof of utter confusion is the so-called ‘left’ and ‘Leninist’ group (Khaitas, and the leadership of the OKNE – CP Youth). Yesterday it was for Pangalos, as well as for ‘left wing democracy’ – craven opportunism – and then stupid extremism of a Byzantine type, and while at first it deceived the party with its “clear reformism”, considering as mistakes the slogans on the national question, in their opportunist activity they simply spoke about a “defence of the minorities” in the last elections, whilst in line with revolutionary policy they should have spread the slogans of the Emergency Congress as did their opponents who believed them to be truly revolutionary. The assumption that a clear ‘right’ and ‘left’ exist today inside the KKE is clearly, demagogy. Our inherent basic deficiencies and, first of all, the lack of a clear revolutionary theory based on a Marxist-Leninist analysis of conditions in the country, cannot avoid exposing the party to extreme right wing views and to a permanent vacillation between extremism and clear cut opportunism. No logical comrade can accept as ‘left wing’ the fabricators of the so-called ‘Leninism’ and ‘left wing democracy’, which they did not repudiate until a condemnation arrived from the International, when they started shouting comically on the eve of the elections about the ‘party’s mistake’, thus making a joke of one of the basic principles of Leninism in Greece, that of self-criticism. And it is clearly demagogy to use the handy sycophantic label of “right wingers” against the undersigned, who were the only ones, and the first ones, to characterise that slogan at the ‘Congress of Factors’ (September 1926 as “stupid opportunism” and a ludicrous mechanical transferring of Russian slogans of 1905, and this at a time when all of today’s defenders of ‘leftism’ were overawed by the ‘Leninist’ slogan of ‘left wing democracy’ brought here directly by those merely trained in Mosco’s Educational School.
Another issue is the object of our inner-party struggle, and not the acquisition of ‘leftist’ credentials. The division, which the representatives of the Communist International made into a ‘Marxist group’, a ‘Leninist group’ and a ‘workers’ group’, is obviously arbitrary and it is very dangerous for our movement to characterise as ‘Left’ the Khaitas group as occurred in a previous Balkan Congress. These things show once more how much damage is done to our movement by the lack of knowledge of Greek individuals and situations shown all the time by the representatives of the Communist International.
4. The Third Emergency Congress
The congress never provided, nor could it have provided, any ‘solution’ to the crises of the party. The pre-congress discussion not only was not enlightening for the party and those workers who follow it, but it immensely ridiculed and lowered the prestige of the party. During the congress, while nearly all were in possession of the facts about the social composition and about the ‘opportunists’ inside the party, no one apart from a few comrades drew the necessary conclusions to remedy the situation, in the face of the spectre of ‘liquidation’ which had been craftily raised inside the party by the opportunist majority of the old leadership. The decisions of the congress were an official ratification for the continuation of disorder. Not only were there no thoughts about the selection and recruitment of members, but on the contrary, entry was provided into the party to all kinds of useless elements. While the splitting opportunist view concerning professionalism was condemned, the congress chose precisely to enforce the opposite tactic by those who didn't believe in it, as it was proved later in practice that they were only capable of provoking pseudo-revolutionary disorders inside the trade unions, so aiding reformism and provocateurs, and not carrying out productive and positive revolutionary work in uniting and educating the workers in a revolutionary fashion.
5. After the Congress
As was expected, instability characterised all the appearances and movements of the party after that famous congress. Internally it was the same but worse – spasmodic methods, empiricism, a bit of everything, no distribution of work, anarchy and journalistic production due to the inability of the party to produce a theoretical organ at a time when Marxist works in our country were enriching a few publishers. On May Day and at the meeting of the Press Union in Athens, the party tail-ended various loud-mouthed irresponsible elements and various members of the ‘Communist League’, and thus these meetings, instead of being the first steps in exposing reformism and provocateurs, a true exposure and not fake promises, became weapons and arguments in the hands of the sputters. Later, in the face of the danger of a split in the trade unions, instead of all our forces being intensified in recruiting the unorganised, which is a better means against the sputters (as in any case the broad masses of workers outside the trade unions do not take much notice of the ‘uncovering’ of known provocateurs) we reached the pathetic point of not knowing what is happening inside the trade union movement, awaiting the automatic development of events, the leadership of which had been left to the reactionary leaders of the General Confederation (Greek TUC). If it is correct what is being heard inside the party, that the leaders of the ‘workers’ group’ are thinking seriously of founding a new General Confederation, then we have before us the culmination of a crazy tendency on the trade union question, as it is clear that our role is precisely to expose those reactionary people who declare openly for a split, and to unify the workers, educating them, and moving them on the day-to-day issues with which they can identify, and thus show them in practice, and not with indefinite phrases about the necessity of unified trade unionism. The craziness which makes us waver today in an ungovernable fashion is a consequence of the logic dominating among us of utter adventurism.
A complete catastrophe has been brought to the movement by the adventurism which in general governs the majority of the party during the last tobacco workers’ struggle. The comrades of the Tobacco Workers Union had done nothing to discover the general relationship of forces inside the country, in order to be able to judge if they needed to enter into a struggle right now. Preparation work around the Insurance Funds of the Tobacco Workers Union was terra incognita for the party. There was absolutely no concept of what precisely the Insurance Funds of the Tobacco Workers Union were and what general importance they had for the working class as a whole and for Communism in Greece. It has been proved that the Insurance Funds of the Tobacco Workers Union were a weapon with which the reactionary government wanted to be able to attack the union, in other words, the only basis of Communism inside Greece, the proletariat of the heroic tobacco workers. The splitting tendency of the General Confederation and the general downturn of the labour movement were clear, and thus its lack of support for the struggle of the Tobacco Workers Union. And the leaders of the party should have known that a general strike of the tobacco workers in a period of open attacks of the Coalition Government against the KKE would mobilise against them all the forces of state terror. And finally when it appeared as if the almost completely spontaneous outbreak by the tobacco workers would end in disaster, the party continued fatalistically to tail-end the unavoidable, producing in the last days in Rizospastis declarations such as the “traitors of the General Confederation”, without even proving such allegations in the many tangible events which had taken place. And people began leaving. The hitherto bare provocateur reformism started to create an even more stable basis inside the tobacco-working masses. The endeavours which the comrades up there now must undertake in rebuilding the old Tobacco Workers Union are gigantic. Now in the face of the debris which adventurism has accumulated under the flag of fake ‘Leninism’, they are attempting to put the blame on the KKE fraction, as if it was a narrow trade union struggle over which the KKE leaders have no control! Finally the meeting of the “only Bolshevik” organisation in Greece in Athens on 5 June 1927 constituted a complete disgrace for the party. What Communist has not lost his sense of shame, and there was much to be ashamed of as a Communist to see such a downgrading of the tobacco workers’ struggle and of Communism in Greece? The ridiculous appearance of the party in the capital of the country with a feeble excuse, which allowed troublesome elements to dominate the meeting with their resulting interjections to the obscene expressions of the official speaker of the party, and likewise the stupidity of trying to organise an ‘illegal’ meeting, along with the absence from it of the ‘Leninists’ (!) of the Athens organisation who convened it – all of these made the party appear in the capital as a gathering of people who are simply joking and being irresponsible about the revolution, at the time when the Greek proletariat is everywhere carrying out in practice its fierce revolutionary struggle!
6. The International and the Party
We believe completely in the correctness of the principles and tactics of the Communist International as founded and guided by Lenin. But we declare quite clearly that we do not agree at all with the methods and views of the representatives of the Communist International at the Third Congress of the KKE. The representatives of the Communist International with their stance at the congress, and their declarations in the Balkan Communist Federation, proved that they don't know anything apart from the speeches of a group inside the party, and who happen to carry with them a so-called ‘Leninist’ baggage of knowledge, but are completely unable to discern with Leninist dialectics the particular conditions under which we work here in Greece, and up until now they have only shown political adventurism, having paralysed the movement. We disagree with the non-Leninist way international centralism has been applied by the representatives of the Communist International at our congress, both in the discussion of our views, as well as in the elections of a new Central Committee. We disagree fundamentally with the views which have been stated by the representatives concerning the nature of the Communist Party (it “reflects the level of the working class”), and we consider it to be the opposite of the basic organisational principle of Leninism and the experience of the Bolsheviks, which show us that the Communist Party is the elite of the proletariat and gathers around it the most advanced and “honest” (as Lenin put it) elements of the working class. Lenin, when asked on many occasions about the question of the first organisation of Russian Social Democrats, had with bitterness and sarcasm frowned upon those who had suggested that we must take as our starting point not the ‘best’ of the workers but the ‘middle workers’ from the class (Lenin, What Is To Be Done). We fundamentally disagree with the mechanical way in which the comrades of the International have transferred the experience of the internal struggles of the German Communist Party to Greece, and their ideas concerning the position of revolutionary intellectuals inside the party of the proletariat. We have the conviction that the narrow workerist spirit which the representatives have brought to the congress is damaging for our party as a party which organises the revolutionary forces in an underdeveloped petty bourgeois country with a bitter experience of narrow workerism. Those who today cultivate inside the party a workerist spirit and defame the revolutionary intelligentsia are not workers, but only the few ruling adventurist, pseudo-revolutionary ‘intellectuals’ who want to monopolise the revolutionary intelligentsia. We believe that in Greece a serious Communist movement cannot exist if serious thinkers from bourgeois, even, and petty bourgeois layers are not won over, and who will come to give the uneducated Greek proletariat the knowledge of scientific Socialism, and to accept from it proletarian psychology. `Social Democratic (Communist) theory appeared independently from the spontaneous rise of the working class movements, being a natural and inevitable result of the thought of intellectual followers of scientific Socialism. “The history of all countries proves that left to its own forces the working class can only reach a trade unionist outlook” (Lenin, What Is To Be Done).
In any case, the experience of the Bulgarian party teaches us that the attraction of intellectuals to the proletarian camp in underdeveloped countries like ours has a special significance. Obviously our party in its composition must be basically proletarian, and its proletarian composition is obviously a guarantee for its correct revolutionary line. But the other equally important guarantee for the development and greater raising of the party's level and the proletarian masses towards Communism, is the existence inside the fighting vanguard of a group of intellectuals who have a high practical idealism and are cultivated daily in proletarian life, who will give to the party its scientific weapon of Marxist theory. We finally disagree with the utter offhand way with which the delegation of the Communist International spoke about the national question in Greece, and tried to characterise our views as “Luxemburgist”. It has been proved finally in practice that the party had abandoned the slogans of the Emergency Congress, even as ‘propaganda’ slogans. Finally, we emphasise that as revolutionaries not only disciplined but of independent thought who want and are obliged to develop our own ideas, we have the right to ask for more information about the views of the Opposition inside the CPSU and inside the International, and we do not agree at all with the view that for our party the great historical problems concerning this discussion that today divide the leaders of the Russian Revolution and old co-workers of Lenin (Socialist industrialisation in one country, international tactics, the Chinese question, etc) are secondary. If the party is to be a true component of the international revolutionary front, we must consider of primary importance the issues concerning the development of the international revolution.
A Bolshevik is one who is not only disciplined, he is a man who deeply studies and every time forms his own views and defends them courageously and independently not only against the enemy, but also courageously and independently inside his own organisation. Today he might be in a minority but that does not mean that he is always wrong. (Trotsky)
7. The Danger of Degeneration Inside the Party
However, many comrades who hoped that the Third Congress would open up a new period of creative enthusiasm and revitalisation inside the party saw their hopes being disproved by events. The deeper causes of the crisis of the party remained untouched and without any examination at the congress, and made fruitless any attempt of the healthy elements inside the party to make amends. A small number of honest, able and thinking comrades, who truly want to work every day, see that their work for the party remains without result, and others lose interest while others fatalistically conclude that the situation is unchangeable as this is “the material which the position of the Greek proletariat gives us”. They work inside the party without interest or enthusiasm, and they also become part of the general downturn, and are plagued by serious doubts. Any uncomfortable search for a resolution of the crisis has now become alien. The great mass of politically uneducated members passively accepts the speeches made by those who happen to be the present leadership, and thus it is easy for an active demagogue who will use great words and pseudo-revolutionary phrases, whose content is meaningless, to influence party members. Nearly all the public appearances of the party take on the exclusive character of automatic displays and undue uproar, thus losing all seriousness. That is why many comrades whom we attract to the party are simply noisy, empty or adventurist elements who simply ask for adventures of the moment, and do not enter the movement to contribute to the revolutionary education, organisation and mobilisation of the proletariat. While the party appears to be represented by such elements, we will not be able to stabilise a force inside the country to raise the consciousness of the masses and to make them feel the authority and imposition of a political organisation which directs them in their daily struggles and prepares their future liberation from capitalism. Public appearances and meetings are not occasions for screeching, but for organised displays and mobilisations of the masses, which manifest their revolutionary enthusiasm and are also educated politically by their party, which explains its slogans and its political ideas. This is how Communism is implanted among the exploited masses. Today’s events show that the party is not an organisation which can discipline the masses, but is a gathering of people dragged along by the spontaneous movement.
In such a situation it is not at all strange that an atmosphere of corruption is created inside the party, inside of which chatter, careerism and pseudo-revolutionary phrases are endlessly cultivated, and hence we see the hatching of new ‘leaders’ every once in a while, who then fall so that others can take over. This situation, which we call adventurist pseudo-revolutionism, will dominate the party for a long time in the future. The groundwork for its domination was unfortunately cultivated unconsciously by all of us, at a time when there was a lack of any experience, and pure revolutionary enthusiasm was the only guide of every healthy element inside the party. It was aided by the mistaken appreciation of the representatives of the International. It is aided by a network of ‘trustworthy’ people who are forever around the organs of the International and the Balkan Communist Organisation, and who create a suitable sycophantic atmosphere concerning the various ‘unwanted’ comrades. Finally, it is based upon a layer of comrades in the party who are politically uneducated and completely uncontrollable.
This ‘tendency’ is the first and constant element against which every attempt to raise the party from its current level stumbles. Its representatives' way of thinking, mechanical and in general closed to all surrounding reality, and incorrigibly narrow-minded, renders them totally incapable of observing what is going on around them or of finding a new solution to the fresh problems which develop, by applying a Marxist dialectical method. Marxism and Leninism for them are always a given sophistry, a sealed bible, which gives ready-made solutions and labels for every problem. It is not a living method of theory distilled from the experience of past struggles, which here in Greece we are called upon to enrich, producing by the same method new lessons and new experiences and thus creating the revolutionary theory of the Greek proletarian movement as part of its international experience.
Practice has proved here in Greece, as elsewhere, that inability to use the Marxist method when dealing with concrete reality leads to political adventurism and destroys the movement. (For example: the ‘Leninist’ left wing democracy, because Lenin in 1905 had said: “the democratic dictatorship of the proletarian and peasantry”; “the organised left wing faction” because they heard that the same occurred in England; the “Bonapartism” of Pangalos, because some Marxist book happened to refer to Bonapartism; the “rationalisation” of power and our “negative” stance, because a few days ago we read Pravda, and Bukharin spoke about something like that in German industry; and all of these endless and great absurdities in the name of poor ‘eninism’).
But from another point of view this ‘tendency’ is adventurist. Its representatives do not by any means intend to undertake responsibly and publicly the task of explaining their political line every time to the masses. Their ideal is to remain closed inside the party circle of members, who are awed by their ‘Leninism’, to give orders, to direct (as did ... Lenin from Finland or Switzerland!) and then implacably ... to criticise in ‘Bolshevik’ style. Full of conceit and petty craftiness, old fashioned in their political methods, they want to have puppet MPs and public speakers generally under control, so as to be able tomorrow to condemn them as careerists and right wingers, nor at all revolutionaries, incapable of understanding the sterile line of Leninism of which only they know the secret and can safeguard it(!), while they can also appear as specialists on ‘illegal’ activity. They are afraid of legality precisely in the same fashion that others are afraid of illegality. And the illegal activities of the party are directed without them taking part (for example, the absence of the ‘Leninist’ secretary of the Athens organisation at the ‘illegal’ meeting which he himself had ordered for 5 June). In other words for them illegality means “hide so no one knows you”. What fake ‘Archeiomarxist’ Leninism!
If this situation continues it is without doubt that every healthy element will feel asphyxiated inside the party and will distance himself, while the party will transform itself even more into a gathering of certain types, who bear no relation to Communism, under the leadership of this original ‘eninist’ adventurism. And naturally in the new period of illegality which now opens up, these people will disperse themselves and once more destroy the party, as occurred precisely with the first period of illegality, when the representative of the International, amazed at the many provocateur elements, proposed the dissolution of the party and the retainment of only the 100 ‘true’ Communists. Thus a serious Communist party, which will impose itself with authority in the working class against its enemies and will educate the masses in a revolutionary fashion, will not be acquired before the proletarian revolution!
8. The Task of the Healthy Elements
While there is still time and whilst the party has not yet been completely poisoned by this dreadful situation, all the healthy elements must start reacting sympathetically to this evil. Avoiding any fatalism and the simplistic idea that “through activity alone” the situation will remedy itself, they are obliged to undertake a decisive struggle against the root causes of the crisis. There are two basic and indispensable preconditions for such an attempt; a determined, strict commonoutlook not only as to the concrete aims which need to be pursued to overcome the crisis, but a whole series of bases to be created for the rebirth of the movement, and decisiveness in achieving these aims without hesitation and fear in the face of any slander, which will surely be used by those who have identified their position inside the movement with the vulgar role of those who ridicule Communism in Greece. All who understand these developments but hesitate in fighting the unhealthy aspects of our movement, and passively accept the current situation with its tragic perspective, aid it and thus become jointly responsible for it. We strongly believe that every thinking comrade inside Greece will be convinced sooner or later that apart from the course we are outlining here, serious and fruitful work for Communism will not exist in the future. Let us consider the aims which, in our opinion, need to be pursued.
9. What Needs to be Done
(1) A general cleansing of the party and a new selection, using as a basis individual capability for development, activity and proletarian morality. The creation of a seriously based Communist party in Greece must be approached correctly, in other words, on Communist organisational principles applied not blindly, but dialectically, according to the concrete circumstances and historical experience of the Greek labour movement. We must start correctly. We will never build a serious Communist Party in Greece if we do not at first concentrate a certain layer of chosen proletarian and intellectual elements. Such was the starting point of all of today’s Communist Parties and the Bolshevik Party first of all. For many more particular reasons this must be the starting point for us in Greece. These elements must clear out from our party as quickly as possible every adventurist, passive, politically uncontrollable and easily gullible element that is to be found in our ranks. Greek Communists must first of all take care to concentrate in their ranks those whose intellectual, moral and practical qualities can inspire the Greek proletariat to gather around them, and not to allow Communism in our country to appear from elements which are bankrupt, ludicrous, weird or simply of a low intellectual capability when relating to their working class surroundings, elements which defame in practice the ideas of Communism. Before such a serious sorting out of the true ‘vanguard’ is made, capable of assimilating the best elements and getting rid of the worst, the doors of the party cannot simply be opened up to the proletariat.
(2) Communism has nothing to lose in political influence by such an organisational recomposition of its forces, as has been proved by events in the past. We have to win as our goals stability, strengthening and a broadening of our perspective. Today's chaos will be replaced by a class discipline, and stale chatter by comradely cooperation and enthusiasm alongside creative work. Everyone will start to understand what work he must do inside the party, and everyone will look at the positive developments of their attempts, and that will inspire trust in the strength of their organisation. The accusation levelled against such a cleansing approach towards the party, of ‘aristocratic Communism’ is baseless. We cannot consider ourselves today as a ‘vanguard’. We must become a true vanguard. With today’s wretched composition not only will we never become a vanguard but we will continuously turn into a vulgar caricature of Communism, a parody of a Communist movement. We will progressively deteriorate if we do not pull ourselves together. Such a view has nothing in common with the automatisation (Spontaneity theory) as declared by Pannekoek and Rosa Luxemburg. On the contrary, it is based on a correct estimation of the great role (for a backward country with such a generally low political level of the masses and such general corruption) to be played by the consciously organised direction of the struggle by a good general staff.
(3) A decisive condition for the raising of the party from its current level is the political development of its members with a suitable combination of the propagandistic-educating work inside the party, and the method of division and control of practical activity, which have both been lacking in the party, the normalisation of the internal life of the party, the fearless attack upon spontaneity and adventurism on the organisational level, and more generally the eradication from our ranks of vulgar parasitism and adventurist pseudo-revolutionism and of a narrow workerist spirit wherever it reveals itself.
(4) It is a task of all leaders to educate themselves continuously in all theoretical questions ... Socialism from when it became a science must be treated as a science, in other words we must study it. (Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, p175)
The party is obliged constantly and with a studied system to aid in the minimum theoretical specialisation of its best elements. The necessity for theoretical work for the KKE is much greater than of any other party inside the Communist International which has a similar influence on the masses. Thus and only thus can the question of theoretical and practical work for our Communist movement be posed. Blind ‘activity’ in darkness and useless uproar – that is what our ‘activity’ has hitherto consisted of. Whoever talks of theoretical work inside the party is characterised as an ‘Archeiomarxist’. The question is how to bring these two fields of activity into a correct relationship, in other words in a relationship which is in agreement with the current conditions and needs of the movement. The party must pursue the scientific cultivation of Marxism-Leninism, to distribute it among the proletariat and to give the possibility for the best comrades to study in a Marxist-Leninist fashion the concrete social-economic condition of the country, something which until now hasn’t even been started. For so long as such work does not produce results, the KKE cannot constitute a serious party inside the International. Only the development of a correct revolutionary theory by the KKE can prevent vacillations in our tactical work, which many times until now have distorted the independent class character of the party. It is deceitful and a vulgar sycophancy to characterise such an appreciation of the living needs of the party as ‘Archeiomarxist’. No work can be done separate from the practice of the workers’ movement. Marxist-Leninist theory cannot appear in Greece if it is not concentrated and generalised in the practical experience of the struggle of the Greek proletariat, in combination with international experience, and if it is not tested through these.
(5) The squandering of the meagre resources of the party in adventurist confrontations in diverse fields of action must stop. The party is obliged above all to concentrate its attention and to use most of its forces in trade union work, and in the proletarian centres of the country, concentrating upon workers in the unions, in their revolutionary education, and to apply revolutionary tactics not with abstract phraseology but in confronting the concrete problems of the daily struggle of the workers, in accordance with the desired aim along with the systematic work for the raising of the level of proletarian education of the workers, which in our country is very low. The trade union fractions must become living organs, which will observe closely the problems of their field of work, and become centres of union meetings and of the political education and mobilisation of the workers in their daily struggles. The task of systematically aiding certain comrades, who can cultivate their abilities and acquire a serious theoretical education so as to become serious revolutionary cadres, is one of the first tasks in front of us.
(6) We must democratise centralism inside the party, stop the appointment of functionaries or the use of untested comrades in responsible positions or the mechanical creation of ‘professional revolutionaries’, and cleanse the technical organisational functioning of the party by pursuing the economic independence of the local branches, and call a halt to measures that limit the aims of purging it.
(7) The party must confront the Archeiomarxists as a particular Greek organisation which exploits the organisational disorder of the party and the nascent cultural level of its members, seeking the dissolution of the party in the name of Communism, dividing in anti-Marxist fashion theory from practice, distorting the teachings of Marxism with countless slanders against the party, distorting the psychology and spirit of the workers who, disillusioned by the party, are pushed towards the Archeiomarxists. It must educate the workers and intellectuals with care, and explain that the Areheiomarxists’ corrosive propaganda is an obstacle to the creation of a strong Communist Party in Greece.
The so-called ‘third position’ is made up of elements who are proletarian and intellectual with a good propagandistic Communist education in the past, who declare that they are asking to enter the party. The tactics of the leadership of the party in confronting them are basically mistaken. It asks them to repudiate certain opinions concerning the cleansing of the party, but to declare that they recognise completely the correctness of the decisions of the Third Congress, whereas the only thing which the leadership could ask from revolutionary proletarians who are followers of the International is to accept the discipline of the party, but have the right of independent thought and opinion concerning the deepest sickness which the party is experiencing, To insist on the former is equal to the complete transformation of the members of a political party into an amorphous mass of passive people, and can only lead to a continuation of today’s disgraceful situation.
(8) The party, without ceasing to support the self-determination of the Macedonian people up until their secession and to fight the concrete forms of national oppression over them by the Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian bourgeoisie, must abandon the tactical slogans of “a united and independent Macedonia” and “a united and independent Thrace”, as they have proved mistaken, and have created confusion among the workers, refugees and peasants, thwarting their internationalist education, which is one of the tasks of the party. The Communists from the Balkans must be able to demonstrate before the Macedonian masses their autonomist slogans independent of the Bulgarian bourgeoisie and its Fascist organs inside the Macedonian organisations, and to defend the national liberation movement of the Macedonians wherever and whenever it manifests itself among the masses themselves, declaring at the same time that the only way for the Macedonian peoples to acquire their national freedoms and the basis of an independent state, if they want it themselves, is a joint struggle with the workers and peasants of the, Balkans against the common enemy, the Balkan bourgeoisie and the dynastic cliques, for a Balkan federation of workers’ and peasants’ democracies. The argument that such a position when dealing with the Macedonians is wrong, saying it starts from an anti-Leninist theoretical basis and it agrees more with the views of Rosa Luxemburg on the national question which cannot be seriously supported today, that the national independence of the Macedonians cannot occur within the framework of bourgeois regimes such as in the Norwegian example, which was discussed by such Russian Marxists as Lenin during the discussion with Rosa Luxemburg, is untenable. Such a position on the national question, despite the fact that it was condemned by the congress, in practice is the position of the party today, as the slogans of the Emergency Congress of 1924 were not even propagandistically used after the Third Emergency Congress. The collapse of Communism can be seen when the party is criticised by the bourgeois papers of Macedonia for its national policy, and the leadership of the party remains silent without clearly giving its opinion! Political cowardice shelters under the cloak of Leninism – that is the present political line of the KKE on the national question.
(9) A brief collection of facts, the formulation of a programme for the KKE, using as a basis the programme of the Communist International which was accepted at its Fifth Congress and the programme of the Communist Party of Bulgaria, arid the publication of a theoretical organ of the party where all the views can be expressed freely concerning the problems facing the movement, are essential.
(10) Finally, we must discuss methods of work inside the party. It is utopian to believe that every attempt to cleanse the party can be achieved in cooperation with every honest element inside the party when they haven’t acquired a clear conception of the situation, as described above, and have not the decisiveness to work accordingly in attacking the bad traditions which have immobilised us until today. Even more utopian is it to wait for a solution of the crisis by an ‘enlightenment’ of the adventurers or the uncontrolled elements, who have been proved totally incapable of realising into what state the movement is being driven. The problem lies in the hands of the best comrades inside the party who correctly understand the situation.
Our immediate aim must be to disseminate broadly and continually the above ideas among the best comrades, and to dispel this atmosphere of conservatism which is stifling the internal life of the party.
When all the best and healthy elements inside the party have been convinced about the necessity for such a cleansing and recomposition of the party, then the problem is near its solution.
The position of all comrades who accept the above views inside the present organisation of the party are clearly defined: (1) No one has the right to doubt our true position inside the party for which we have given and are giving whatever services and sacrifices we can. (2) The party is threatened by a real danger of degeneration – a consequence of the current situation and the adventurism which predominates. Here is to be found the true ‘liquidationism’ of the party. It is this danger which we are fighting. We are fighting for the cleansing and rebirth of the party, which is the only way to avoid the degeneration towards which we are heading. (3) Whoever talks about our ‘liquidationism’ is characterising himself and his position.
We have the conviction that enough able elements who can systematise their endeavours on clearly predetermined common aims, will one day achieve the rebirth of the movement, and breathe new life into the party organisation, which is continuously dying.
It is upon the activity of the comrades who today have become convinced about the reasons for the crises of the movement and the means by which it can be overcome that the fate of Communism in Greece depends. One day it will start emerging from its pre-history, so that it will one day enter its true history, seriously preparing all the revolutionary forces in the country for the overthrow of capitalism.
Athens, 15 July 1927
P. Pouliopoulos
P. Giatsopoulos
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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Open Letter to the KKE
The Greek Communist Party (KKE) was founded on 4 November 1918, with the original name of the Greek Socialist Workers Party. An outline of its early years can be found in Loukas Karliaftis, The History of Bolshevism/Trotskyism in Greece and La naissance du bolshevisme en Grece, part ii, as well as in A. Stinas, Memoires, pp.37-108. The following document was circulated after the end of the party’s third congress in March 1927 along with the appeal of Trotsky and Vuyovic against expulsion from the Comintern.
Pantelis Pouliopoulos (1900-43) joined the KKE in 1922, and first became prominent in the thousands-strong movement of the war veterans in 1923-25, for which he was arrested and tried in Athens on charges of promoting the autonomy of Macedonia and Thrace, and exiled to Folegandos island. He translated Capital into Greek, and was the KKE’s first Secretary, and had been delegated to the fifth congress of the Comintern in 1924. After being made the scapegoat for the party’s failure, and being abused and slandered, he resigned in September 1926, but was reinstated by the Comintern delegation and took part in the party’s congress in March 1927, where he and Giatsopoulos were removed from the Central Committee. After publishing and circulating the pamphlet known as New Beginning they were formally expelled from the party later that year, and formed an oppositional group which solidarised itself with the struggle of the International Left Opposition They began to publish a journal called Spartocus from December 1928 onwards, containing the main documents of the Left Opposition. They refused to join the split of the Archeiomarxists that had already taken place from the Communist Party, as they regarded it as having a sectarian attitude to the KKE. When the Archeiomarxists were accepted as the representatives of the International Left Opposition in Greece, Trotsky condemned the Spartacus group (L.D. Trotsky, Who Shall Attend the International Conference?, 22 May 1932, in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1932, New York 1973, p.102), describing them as “fruitless and hopeless” (On the State of the Left Opposition, 16 December 1932, in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1932-33, New York 1972, p.291), and they were excluded from the Trotskyist movement along with the ‘Fractionalists’ who had just split from the Archeiomarxists led by Michel Pablo (The International Left Opposition. Its Tasks and Methods, in Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years, New York 1973, p.40). The two groups joined together to set up the OKDE in 1934, and for a while Pouliopoulos maintained links with other oppositional groups around Landau and Molinier, opposing the movement to create a new International from 1933 onwards, but took the initiative in the move to unite the Greek Trotskyists in 1938. Later that year he was arrested, and his ultimate fate is described below.
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Every thinking Communist inside the Communist Party of Greece feels quite sure that the party is in an unhealthy state, and in all its activities sees the spasms of an incurable illness. Most members of the party do not see any of this. They continue to view the situation as natural, and are completely unable to think things through. This is the most frightening symptom of the party’s illness. After its congress the party’s crisis has not only worsened, but has today reached such a tragic state, whereby every logical man who is to be found inside this organisation with the honest intention of working for Communism, feels the irresistible urge finally to react in some way to this situation. It is a general phenomenon inside the party. However, many honest comrades who are not crushed by the recurrent disillusionments, are today experiencing an unprecedented unease and even guilt, having left things to themselves to take the downhill road to degeneration.
We happen to be among the oldest militants inside the party and have otherwise served the party in the most responsible positions. The experience which we have gathered from the struggle, and a deep awareness of our responsibilities to the movement, have led us to a few concrete conclusions on how we should confront the situation. Our first Communist task is indubitably to make known our thoughts to as many comrades as have shown in practice until now the sincerity of their commitment and their common sense.
We recognise the elementary logical idea that inside a sick organism, which has proved itself incapable of standing on its own, comradeship and cooperation among those members who feel the same urge to react to the malaise, is both unavoidable and urgent.
The views expressed below are for us a precondition for the revolutionary movement of our country, based on study and experience, ideas which we will carry through to their logical conclusion with confidence and resoluteness, indifferent to whatever obstacles or sycophancy we meet or the number of comrades who will accept them today. As Lenin said: “Every serious revolutionary is obliged to defend his views, which he believes are important for the cause of the proletarian revolution, even in the case of being in a minority. And he is obliged to go against the stream which may dominate for a certain period. If he does not do this he is not a revolutionary, but a pitiless careerist”.
1. The Crisis in the Party
The development of the party since the Third Emergency Congress has confirmed the conclusions which a small group had formed during the turbulent pre-congress discussion in Rizospastis (Radical) and during the discussions inside the congress. The KKE has experienced a permanent internal crisis from birth. The symptoms are:
1.The lack of a leading nucleus of comrades with a sound Marxist political education and the ability to adapt their Communist principles to the concrete situation of the country, with a minimal homogenous ideology and inspire trust within the members of the party as well as among the mass of its followers;
2.The party has had a bad class composition from the start, which as time progresses becomes even worse. A large part of the members of the party have originated from the worst elements of the proletariat, from the lumpen-proletariat, and from the petty bourgeoisie with an anti-proletarian psychology. In many places, Communism appearing with such elements repels away many of the best elements from the working class as well as quite a few intellectuals who could become good militants. Such a social composition of the party allows even opportunist elements, which exist inside the party to become demagogues with pseudo-revolutionary phraseology, and many honest comrades are disillusioned, forcing them to leave the party. That is the reason why the party does not attract serious intellectuals but frequently strange and suspect individuals;
3.There is a disproportion between the spontaneous movement of the masses who turn towards the left due to the objective situation, and the defectiveness and insufficiencies of the party. This creates a complex arena for action where the pressing needs of the workers are confronted by the party in a fashion which is spasmodic, unorganised and anarchic, thus ending only in hopeless confusion, without any positive results and no steady organisational conquests for Communism inside the country.
2. Reasons for the Crisis
The most immediate reasons for these critical phenomena are to be found in the particular conditions of the historical development of our movement, in correlation with the upturn and downturn of the international revolutionary movement. Basically the reasons for the crisis, in the final analysis, are to be found in the special conditions of the development of capitalism in our country: its socio-economic position and the psychology of the Greek proletariat and of the petty bourgeoisie, and in particular, the comprador character of our country and its capitalist backwardness, the lack of a Socialist tradition and of a Marxist culture, the influx of opportunist elements inside the movement, etc.
The task of the Greek Communists is to come to grips with confronting those conditions of the movement which they can influence with their conscious actions.
3. The Question of ‘Tendencies’ Inside the KKE
Only he who ignores the situation in the party can assert today that the crisis of the KKE is to be attributed to a conflict of ‘tendencies’ concerning tactics. The above mentioned reasons for the crisis show that the overall tendency inside the KKE concerning tactics is generally confused. Periodically sharp antagonisms between ideologically formed tendencies, antagonisms which are common in all the Communist parties and provoke periodical inter-party crises, inside the KKE consist of either personal conflicts or at the most automatic conflicts between groups which spasmodically seek a concrete ideological form. Such crises inside the KKE form only a small part of its permanent crisis. The confusion of these two phenomena prevents a correct diagnosis of the situation inside the party.
Convincing proof of utter confusion is the so-called ‘left’ and ‘Leninist’ group (Khaitas, and the leadership of the OKNE – CP Youth). Yesterday it was for Pangalos, as well as for ‘left wing democracy’ – craven opportunism – and then stupid extremism of a Byzantine type, and while at first it deceived the party with its “clear reformism”, considering as mistakes the slogans on the national question, in their opportunist activity they simply spoke about a “defence of the minorities” in the last elections, whilst in line with revolutionary policy they should have spread the slogans of the Emergency Congress as did their opponents who believed them to be truly revolutionary. The assumption that a clear ‘right’ and ‘left’ exist today inside the KKE is clearly, demagogy. Our inherent basic deficiencies and, first of all, the lack of a clear revolutionary theory based on a Marxist-Leninist analysis of conditions in the country, cannot avoid exposing the party to extreme right wing views and to a permanent vacillation between extremism and clear cut opportunism. No logical comrade can accept as ‘left wing’ the fabricators of the so-called ‘Leninism’ and ‘left wing democracy’, which they did not repudiate until a condemnation arrived from the International, when they started shouting comically on the eve of the elections about the ‘party’s mistake’, thus making a joke of one of the basic principles of Leninism in Greece, that of self-criticism. And it is clearly demagogy to use the handy sycophantic label of “right wingers” against the undersigned, who were the only ones, and the first ones, to characterise that slogan at the ‘Congress of Factors’ (September 1926 as “stupid opportunism” and a ludicrous mechanical transferring of Russian slogans of 1905, and this at a time when all of today’s defenders of ‘leftism’ were overawed by the ‘Leninist’ slogan of ‘left wing democracy’ brought here directly by those merely trained in Mosco’s Educational School.
Another issue is the object of our inner-party struggle, and not the acquisition of ‘leftist’ credentials. The division, which the representatives of the Communist International made into a ‘Marxist group’, a ‘Leninist group’ and a ‘workers’ group’, is obviously arbitrary and it is very dangerous for our movement to characterise as ‘Left’ the Khaitas group as occurred in a previous Balkan Congress. These things show once more how much damage is done to our movement by the lack of knowledge of Greek individuals and situations shown all the time by the representatives of the Communist International.
4. The Third Emergency Congress
The congress never provided, nor could it have provided, any ‘solution’ to the crises of the party. The pre-congress discussion not only was not enlightening for the party and those workers who follow it, but it immensely ridiculed and lowered the prestige of the party. During the congress, while nearly all were in possession of the facts about the social composition and about the ‘opportunists’ inside the party, no one apart from a few comrades drew the necessary conclusions to remedy the situation, in the face of the spectre of ‘liquidation’ which had been craftily raised inside the party by the opportunist majority of the old leadership. The decisions of the congress were an official ratification for the continuation of disorder. Not only were there no thoughts about the selection and recruitment of members, but on the contrary, entry was provided into the party to all kinds of useless elements. While the splitting opportunist view concerning professionalism was condemned, the congress chose precisely to enforce the opposite tactic by those who didn't believe in it, as it was proved later in practice that they were only capable of provoking pseudo-revolutionary disorders inside the trade unions, so aiding reformism and provocateurs, and not carrying out productive and positive revolutionary work in uniting and educating the workers in a revolutionary fashion.
5. After the Congress
As was expected, instability characterised all the appearances and movements of the party after that famous congress. Internally it was the same but worse – spasmodic methods, empiricism, a bit of everything, no distribution of work, anarchy and journalistic production due to the inability of the party to produce a theoretical organ at a time when Marxist works in our country were enriching a few publishers. On May Day and at the meeting of the Press Union in Athens, the party tail-ended various loud-mouthed irresponsible elements and various members of the ‘Communist League’, and thus these meetings, instead of being the first steps in exposing reformism and provocateurs, a true exposure and not fake promises, became weapons and arguments in the hands of the sputters. Later, in the face of the danger of a split in the trade unions, instead of all our forces being intensified in recruiting the unorganised, which is a better means against the sputters (as in any case the broad masses of workers outside the trade unions do not take much notice of the ‘uncovering’ of known provocateurs) we reached the pathetic point of not knowing what is happening inside the trade union movement, awaiting the automatic development of events, the leadership of which had been left to the reactionary leaders of the General Confederation (Greek TUC). If it is correct what is being heard inside the party, that the leaders of the ‘workers’ group’ are thinking seriously of founding a new General Confederation, then we have before us the culmination of a crazy tendency on the trade union question, as it is clear that our role is precisely to expose those reactionary people who declare openly for a split, and to unify the workers, educating them, and moving them on the day-to-day issues with which they can identify, and thus show them in practice, and not with indefinite phrases about the necessity of unified trade unionism. The craziness which makes us waver today in an ungovernable fashion is a consequence of the logic dominating among us of utter adventurism.
A complete catastrophe has been brought to the movement by the adventurism which in general governs the majority of the party during the last tobacco workers’ struggle. The comrades of the Tobacco Workers Union had done nothing to discover the general relationship of forces inside the country, in order to be able to judge if they needed to enter into a struggle right now. Preparation work around the Insurance Funds of the Tobacco Workers Union was terra incognita for the party. There was absolutely no concept of what precisely the Insurance Funds of the Tobacco Workers Union were and what general importance they had for the working class as a whole and for Communism in Greece. It has been proved that the Insurance Funds of the Tobacco Workers Union were a weapon with which the reactionary government wanted to be able to attack the union, in other words, the only basis of Communism inside Greece, the proletariat of the heroic tobacco workers. The splitting tendency of the General Confederation and the general downturn of the labour movement were clear, and thus its lack of support for the struggle of the Tobacco Workers Union. And the leaders of the party should have known that a general strike of the tobacco workers in a period of open attacks of the Coalition Government against the KKE would mobilise against them all the forces of state terror. And finally when it appeared as if the almost completely spontaneous outbreak by the tobacco workers would end in disaster, the party continued fatalistically to tail-end the unavoidable, producing in the last days in Rizospastis declarations such as the “traitors of the General Confederation”, without even proving such allegations in the many tangible events which had taken place. And people began leaving. The hitherto bare provocateur reformism started to create an even more stable basis inside the tobacco-working masses. The endeavours which the comrades up there now must undertake in rebuilding the old Tobacco Workers Union are gigantic. Now in the face of the debris which adventurism has accumulated under the flag of fake ‘Leninism’, they are attempting to put the blame on the KKE fraction, as if it was a narrow trade union struggle over which the KKE leaders have no control! Finally the meeting of the “only Bolshevik” organisation in Greece in Athens on 5 June 1927 constituted a complete disgrace for the party. What Communist has not lost his sense of shame, and there was much to be ashamed of as a Communist to see such a downgrading of the tobacco workers’ struggle and of Communism in Greece? The ridiculous appearance of the party in the capital of the country with a feeble excuse, which allowed troublesome elements to dominate the meeting with their resulting interjections to the obscene expressions of the official speaker of the party, and likewise the stupidity of trying to organise an ‘illegal’ meeting, along with the absence from it of the ‘Leninists’ (!) of the Athens organisation who convened it – all of these made the party appear in the capital as a gathering of people who are simply joking and being irresponsible about the revolution, at the time when the Greek proletariat is everywhere carrying out in practice its fierce revolutionary struggle!
6. The International and the Party
We believe completely in the correctness of the principles and tactics of the Communist International as founded and guided by Lenin. But we declare quite clearly that we do not agree at all with the methods and views of the representatives of the Communist International at the Third Congress of the KKE. The representatives of the Communist International with their stance at the congress, and their declarations in the Balkan Communist Federation, proved that they don't know anything apart from the speeches of a group inside the party, and who happen to carry with them a so-called ‘Leninist’ baggage of knowledge, but are completely unable to discern with Leninist dialectics the particular conditions under which we work here in Greece, and up until now they have only shown political adventurism, having paralysed the movement. We disagree with the non-Leninist way international centralism has been applied by the representatives of the Communist International at our congress, both in the discussion of our views, as well as in the elections of a new Central Committee. We disagree fundamentally with the views which have been stated by the representatives concerning the nature of the Communist Party (it “reflects the level of the working class”), and we consider it to be the opposite of the basic organisational principle of Leninism and the experience of the Bolsheviks, which show us that the Communist Party is the elite of the proletariat and gathers around it the most advanced and “honest” (as Lenin put it) elements of the working class. Lenin, when asked on many occasions about the question of the first organisation of Russian Social Democrats, had with bitterness and sarcasm frowned upon those who had suggested that we must take as our starting point not the ‘best’ of the workers but the ‘middle workers’ from the class (Lenin, What Is To Be Done). We fundamentally disagree with the mechanical way in which the comrades of the International have transferred the experience of the internal struggles of the German Communist Party to Greece, and their ideas concerning the position of revolutionary intellectuals inside the party of the proletariat. We have the conviction that the narrow workerist spirit which the representatives have brought to the congress is damaging for our party as a party which organises the revolutionary forces in an underdeveloped petty bourgeois country with a bitter experience of narrow workerism. Those who today cultivate inside the party a workerist spirit and defame the revolutionary intelligentsia are not workers, but only the few ruling adventurist, pseudo-revolutionary ‘intellectuals’ who want to monopolise the revolutionary intelligentsia. We believe that in Greece a serious Communist movement cannot exist if serious thinkers from bourgeois, even, and petty bourgeois layers are not won over, and who will come to give the uneducated Greek proletariat the knowledge of scientific Socialism, and to accept from it proletarian psychology. `Social Democratic (Communist) theory appeared independently from the spontaneous rise of the working class movements, being a natural and inevitable result of the thought of intellectual followers of scientific Socialism. “The history of all countries proves that left to its own forces the working class can only reach a trade unionist outlook” (Lenin, What Is To Be Done).
In any case, the experience of the Bulgarian party teaches us that the attraction of intellectuals to the proletarian camp in underdeveloped countries like ours has a special significance. Obviously our party in its composition must be basically proletarian, and its proletarian composition is obviously a guarantee for its correct revolutionary line. But the other equally important guarantee for the development and greater raising of the party's level and the proletarian masses towards Communism, is the existence inside the fighting vanguard of a group of intellectuals who have a high practical idealism and are cultivated daily in proletarian life, who will give to the party its scientific weapon of Marxist theory. We finally disagree with the utter offhand way with which the delegation of the Communist International spoke about the national question in Greece, and tried to characterise our views as “Luxemburgist”. It has been proved finally in practice that the party had abandoned the slogans of the Emergency Congress, even as ‘propaganda’ slogans. Finally, we emphasise that as revolutionaries not only disciplined but of independent thought who want and are obliged to develop our own ideas, we have the right to ask for more information about the views of the Opposition inside the CPSU and inside the International, and we do not agree at all with the view that for our party the great historical problems concerning this discussion that today divide the leaders of the Russian Revolution and old co-workers of Lenin (Socialist industrialisation in one country, international tactics, the Chinese question, etc) are secondary. If the party is to be a true component of the international revolutionary front, we must consider of primary importance the issues concerning the development of the international revolution.
A Bolshevik is one who is not only disciplined, he is a man who deeply studies and every time forms his own views and defends them courageously and independently not only against the enemy, but also courageously and independently inside his own organisation. Today he might be in a minority but that does not mean that he is always wrong. (Trotsky)
7. The Danger of Degeneration Inside the Party
However, many comrades who hoped that the Third Congress would open up a new period of creative enthusiasm and revitalisation inside the party saw their hopes being disproved by events. The deeper causes of the crisis of the party remained untouched and without any examination at the congress, and made fruitless any attempt of the healthy elements inside the party to make amends. A small number of honest, able and thinking comrades, who truly want to work every day, see that their work for the party remains without result, and others lose interest while others fatalistically conclude that the situation is unchangeable as this is “the material which the position of the Greek proletariat gives us”. They work inside the party without interest or enthusiasm, and they also become part of the general downturn, and are plagued by serious doubts. Any uncomfortable search for a resolution of the crisis has now become alien. The great mass of politically uneducated members passively accepts the speeches made by those who happen to be the present leadership, and thus it is easy for an active demagogue who will use great words and pseudo-revolutionary phrases, whose content is meaningless, to influence party members. Nearly all the public appearances of the party take on the exclusive character of automatic displays and undue uproar, thus losing all seriousness. That is why many comrades whom we attract to the party are simply noisy, empty or adventurist elements who simply ask for adventures of the moment, and do not enter the movement to contribute to the revolutionary education, organisation and mobilisation of the proletariat. While the party appears to be represented by such elements, we will not be able to stabilise a force inside the country to raise the consciousness of the masses and to make them feel the authority and imposition of a political organisation which directs them in their daily struggles and prepares their future liberation from capitalism. Public appearances and meetings are not occasions for screeching, but for organised displays and mobilisations of the masses, which manifest their revolutionary enthusiasm and are also educated politically by their party, which explains its slogans and its political ideas. This is how Communism is implanted among the exploited masses. Today’s events show that the party is not an organisation which can discipline the masses, but is a gathering of people dragged along by the spontaneous movement.
In such a situation it is not at all strange that an atmosphere of corruption is created inside the party, inside of which chatter, careerism and pseudo-revolutionary phrases are endlessly cultivated, and hence we see the hatching of new ‘leaders’ every once in a while, who then fall so that others can take over. This situation, which we call adventurist pseudo-revolutionism, will dominate the party for a long time in the future. The groundwork for its domination was unfortunately cultivated unconsciously by all of us, at a time when there was a lack of any experience, and pure revolutionary enthusiasm was the only guide of every healthy element inside the party. It was aided by the mistaken appreciation of the representatives of the International. It is aided by a network of ‘trustworthy’ people who are forever around the organs of the International and the Balkan Communist Organisation, and who create a suitable sycophantic atmosphere concerning the various ‘unwanted’ comrades. Finally, it is based upon a layer of comrades in the party who are politically uneducated and completely uncontrollable.
This ‘tendency’ is the first and constant element against which every attempt to raise the party from its current level stumbles. Its representatives' way of thinking, mechanical and in general closed to all surrounding reality, and incorrigibly narrow-minded, renders them totally incapable of observing what is going on around them or of finding a new solution to the fresh problems which develop, by applying a Marxist dialectical method. Marxism and Leninism for them are always a given sophistry, a sealed bible, which gives ready-made solutions and labels for every problem. It is not a living method of theory distilled from the experience of past struggles, which here in Greece we are called upon to enrich, producing by the same method new lessons and new experiences and thus creating the revolutionary theory of the Greek proletarian movement as part of its international experience.
Practice has proved here in Greece, as elsewhere, that inability to use the Marxist method when dealing with concrete reality leads to political adventurism and destroys the movement. (For example: the ‘Leninist’ left wing democracy, because Lenin in 1905 had said: “the democratic dictatorship of the proletarian and peasantry”; “the organised left wing faction” because they heard that the same occurred in England; the “Bonapartism” of Pangalos, because some Marxist book happened to refer to Bonapartism; the “rationalisation” of power and our “negative” stance, because a few days ago we read Pravda, and Bukharin spoke about something like that in German industry; and all of these endless and great absurdities in the name of poor ‘eninism’).
But from another point of view this ‘tendency’ is adventurist. Its representatives do not by any means intend to undertake responsibly and publicly the task of explaining their political line every time to the masses. Their ideal is to remain closed inside the party circle of members, who are awed by their ‘Leninism’, to give orders, to direct (as did ... Lenin from Finland or Switzerland!) and then implacably ... to criticise in ‘Bolshevik’ style. Full of conceit and petty craftiness, old fashioned in their political methods, they want to have puppet MPs and public speakers generally under control, so as to be able tomorrow to condemn them as careerists and right wingers, nor at all revolutionaries, incapable of understanding the sterile line of Leninism of which only they know the secret and can safeguard it(!), while they can also appear as specialists on ‘illegal’ activity. They are afraid of legality precisely in the same fashion that others are afraid of illegality. And the illegal activities of the party are directed without them taking part (for example, the absence of the ‘Leninist’ secretary of the Athens organisation at the ‘illegal’ meeting which he himself had ordered for 5 June). In other words for them illegality means “hide so no one knows you”. What fake ‘Archeiomarxist’ Leninism!
If this situation continues it is without doubt that every healthy element will feel asphyxiated inside the party and will distance himself, while the party will transform itself even more into a gathering of certain types, who bear no relation to Communism, under the leadership of this original ‘eninist’ adventurism. And naturally in the new period of illegality which now opens up, these people will disperse themselves and once more destroy the party, as occurred precisely with the first period of illegality, when the representative of the International, amazed at the many provocateur elements, proposed the dissolution of the party and the retainment of only the 100 ‘true’ Communists. Thus a serious Communist party, which will impose itself with authority in the working class against its enemies and will educate the masses in a revolutionary fashion, will not be acquired before the proletarian revolution!
8. The Task of the Healthy Elements
While there is still time and whilst the party has not yet been completely poisoned by this dreadful situation, all the healthy elements must start reacting sympathetically to this evil. Avoiding any fatalism and the simplistic idea that “through activity alone” the situation will remedy itself, they are obliged to undertake a decisive struggle against the root causes of the crisis. There are two basic and indispensable preconditions for such an attempt; a determined, strict commonoutlook not only as to the concrete aims which need to be pursued to overcome the crisis, but a whole series of bases to be created for the rebirth of the movement, and decisiveness in achieving these aims without hesitation and fear in the face of any slander, which will surely be used by those who have identified their position inside the movement with the vulgar role of those who ridicule Communism in Greece. All who understand these developments but hesitate in fighting the unhealthy aspects of our movement, and passively accept the current situation with its tragic perspective, aid it and thus become jointly responsible for it. We strongly believe that every thinking comrade inside Greece will be convinced sooner or later that apart from the course we are outlining here, serious and fruitful work for Communism will not exist in the future. Let us consider the aims which, in our opinion, need to be pursued.
9. What Needs to be Done
(1) A general cleansing of the party and a new selection, using as a basis individual capability for development, activity and proletarian morality. The creation of a seriously based Communist party in Greece must be approached correctly, in other words, on Communist organisational principles applied not blindly, but dialectically, according to the concrete circumstances and historical experience of the Greek labour movement. We must start correctly. We will never build a serious Communist Party in Greece if we do not at first concentrate a certain layer of chosen proletarian and intellectual elements. Such was the starting point of all of today’s Communist Parties and the Bolshevik Party first of all. For many more particular reasons this must be the starting point for us in Greece. These elements must clear out from our party as quickly as possible every adventurist, passive, politically uncontrollable and easily gullible element that is to be found in our ranks. Greek Communists must first of all take care to concentrate in their ranks those whose intellectual, moral and practical qualities can inspire the Greek proletariat to gather around them, and not to allow Communism in our country to appear from elements which are bankrupt, ludicrous, weird or simply of a low intellectual capability when relating to their working class surroundings, elements which defame in practice the ideas of Communism. Before such a serious sorting out of the true ‘vanguard’ is made, capable of assimilating the best elements and getting rid of the worst, the doors of the party cannot simply be opened up to the proletariat.
(2) Communism has nothing to lose in political influence by such an organisational recomposition of its forces, as has been proved by events in the past. We have to win as our goals stability, strengthening and a broadening of our perspective. Today's chaos will be replaced by a class discipline, and stale chatter by comradely cooperation and enthusiasm alongside creative work. Everyone will start to understand what work he must do inside the party, and everyone will look at the positive developments of their attempts, and that will inspire trust in the strength of their organisation. The accusation levelled against such a cleansing approach towards the party, of ‘aristocratic Communism’ is baseless. We cannot consider ourselves today as a ‘vanguard’. We must become a true vanguard. With today’s wretched composition not only will we never become a vanguard but we will continuously turn into a vulgar caricature of Communism, a parody of a Communist movement. We will progressively deteriorate if we do not pull ourselves together. Such a view has nothing in common with the automatisation (Spontaneity theory) as declared by Pannekoek and Rosa Luxemburg. On the contrary, it is based on a correct estimation of the great role (for a backward country with such a generally low political level of the masses and such general corruption) to be played by the consciously organised direction of the struggle by a good general staff.
(3) A decisive condition for the raising of the party from its current level is the political development of its members with a suitable combination of the propagandistic-educating work inside the party, and the method of division and control of practical activity, which have both been lacking in the party, the normalisation of the internal life of the party, the fearless attack upon spontaneity and adventurism on the organisational level, and more generally the eradication from our ranks of vulgar parasitism and adventurist pseudo-revolutionism and of a narrow workerist spirit wherever it reveals itself.
(4) It is a task of all leaders to educate themselves continuously in all theoretical questions ... Socialism from when it became a science must be treated as a science, in other words we must study it. (Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, p175)
The party is obliged constantly and with a studied system to aid in the minimum theoretical specialisation of its best elements. The necessity for theoretical work for the KKE is much greater than of any other party inside the Communist International which has a similar influence on the masses. Thus and only thus can the question of theoretical and practical work for our Communist movement be posed. Blind ‘activity’ in darkness and useless uproar – that is what our ‘activity’ has hitherto consisted of. Whoever talks of theoretical work inside the party is characterised as an ‘Archeiomarxist’. The question is how to bring these two fields of activity into a correct relationship, in other words in a relationship which is in agreement with the current conditions and needs of the movement. The party must pursue the scientific cultivation of Marxism-Leninism, to distribute it among the proletariat and to give the possibility for the best comrades to study in a Marxist-Leninist fashion the concrete social-economic condition of the country, something which until now hasn’t even been started. For so long as such work does not produce results, the KKE cannot constitute a serious party inside the International. Only the development of a correct revolutionary theory by the KKE can prevent vacillations in our tactical work, which many times until now have distorted the independent class character of the party. It is deceitful and a vulgar sycophancy to characterise such an appreciation of the living needs of the party as ‘Archeiomarxist’. No work can be done separate from the practice of the workers’ movement. Marxist-Leninist theory cannot appear in Greece if it is not concentrated and generalised in the practical experience of the struggle of the Greek proletariat, in combination with international experience, and if it is not tested through these.
(5) The squandering of the meagre resources of the party in adventurist confrontations in diverse fields of action must stop. The party is obliged above all to concentrate its attention and to use most of its forces in trade union work, and in the proletarian centres of the country, concentrating upon workers in the unions, in their revolutionary education, and to apply revolutionary tactics not with abstract phraseology but in confronting the concrete problems of the daily struggle of the workers, in accordance with the desired aim along with the systematic work for the raising of the level of proletarian education of the workers, which in our country is very low. The trade union fractions must become living organs, which will observe closely the problems of their field of work, and become centres of union meetings and of the political education and mobilisation of the workers in their daily struggles. The task of systematically aiding certain comrades, who can cultivate their abilities and acquire a serious theoretical education so as to become serious revolutionary cadres, is one of the first tasks in front of us.
(6) We must democratise centralism inside the party, stop the appointment of functionaries or the use of untested comrades in responsible positions or the mechanical creation of ‘professional revolutionaries’, and cleanse the technical organisational functioning of the party by pursuing the economic independence of the local branches, and call a halt to measures that limit the aims of purging it.
(7) The party must confront the Archeiomarxists as a particular Greek organisation which exploits the organisational disorder of the party and the nascent cultural level of its members, seeking the dissolution of the party in the name of Communism, dividing in anti-Marxist fashion theory from practice, distorting the teachings of Marxism with countless slanders against the party, distorting the psychology and spirit of the workers who, disillusioned by the party, are pushed towards the Archeiomarxists. It must educate the workers and intellectuals with care, and explain that the Areheiomarxists’ corrosive propaganda is an obstacle to the creation of a strong Communist Party in Greece.
The so-called ‘third position’ is made up of elements who are proletarian and intellectual with a good propagandistic Communist education in the past, who declare that they are asking to enter the party. The tactics of the leadership of the party in confronting them are basically mistaken. It asks them to repudiate certain opinions concerning the cleansing of the party, but to declare that they recognise completely the correctness of the decisions of the Third Congress, whereas the only thing which the leadership could ask from revolutionary proletarians who are followers of the International is to accept the discipline of the party, but have the right of independent thought and opinion concerning the deepest sickness which the party is experiencing, To insist on the former is equal to the complete transformation of the members of a political party into an amorphous mass of passive people, and can only lead to a continuation of today’s disgraceful situation.
(8) The party, without ceasing to support the self-determination of the Macedonian people up until their secession and to fight the concrete forms of national oppression over them by the Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian bourgeoisie, must abandon the tactical slogans of “a united and independent Macedonia” and “a united and independent Thrace”, as they have proved mistaken, and have created confusion among the workers, refugees and peasants, thwarting their internationalist education, which is one of the tasks of the party. The Communists from the Balkans must be able to demonstrate before the Macedonian masses their autonomist slogans independent of the Bulgarian bourgeoisie and its Fascist organs inside the Macedonian organisations, and to defend the national liberation movement of the Macedonians wherever and whenever it manifests itself among the masses themselves, declaring at the same time that the only way for the Macedonian peoples to acquire their national freedoms and the basis of an independent state, if they want it themselves, is a joint struggle with the workers and peasants of the, Balkans against the common enemy, the Balkan bourgeoisie and the dynastic cliques, for a Balkan federation of workers’ and peasants’ democracies. The argument that such a position when dealing with the Macedonians is wrong, saying it starts from an anti-Leninist theoretical basis and it agrees more with the views of Rosa Luxemburg on the national question which cannot be seriously supported today, that the national independence of the Macedonians cannot occur within the framework of bourgeois regimes such as in the Norwegian example, which was discussed by such Russian Marxists as Lenin during the discussion with Rosa Luxemburg, is untenable. Such a position on the national question, despite the fact that it was condemned by the congress, in practice is the position of the party today, as the slogans of the Emergency Congress of 1924 were not even propagandistically used after the Third Emergency Congress. The collapse of Communism can be seen when the party is criticised by the bourgeois papers of Macedonia for its national policy, and the leadership of the party remains silent without clearly giving its opinion! Political cowardice shelters under the cloak of Leninism – that is the present political line of the KKE on the national question.
(9) A brief collection of facts, the formulation of a programme for the KKE, using as a basis the programme of the Communist International which was accepted at its Fifth Congress and the programme of the Communist Party of Bulgaria, arid the publication of a theoretical organ of the party where all the views can be expressed freely concerning the problems facing the movement, are essential.
(10) Finally, we must discuss methods of work inside the party. It is utopian to believe that every attempt to cleanse the party can be achieved in cooperation with every honest element inside the party when they haven’t acquired a clear conception of the situation, as described above, and have not the decisiveness to work accordingly in attacking the bad traditions which have immobilised us until today. Even more utopian is it to wait for a solution of the crisis by an ‘enlightenment’ of the adventurers or the uncontrolled elements, who have been proved totally incapable of realising into what state the movement is being driven. The problem lies in the hands of the best comrades inside the party who correctly understand the situation.
Our immediate aim must be to disseminate broadly and continually the above ideas among the best comrades, and to dispel this atmosphere of conservatism which is stifling the internal life of the party.
When all the best and healthy elements inside the party have been convinced about the necessity for such a cleansing and recomposition of the party, then the problem is near its solution.
The position of all comrades who accept the above views inside the present organisation of the party are clearly defined: (1) No one has the right to doubt our true position inside the party for which we have given and are giving whatever services and sacrifices we can. (2) The party is threatened by a real danger of degeneration – a consequence of the current situation and the adventurism which predominates. Here is to be found the true ‘liquidationism’ of the party. It is this danger which we are fighting. We are fighting for the cleansing and rebirth of the party, which is the only way to avoid the degeneration towards which we are heading. (3) Whoever talks about our ‘liquidationism’ is characterising himself and his position.
We have the conviction that enough able elements who can systematise their endeavours on clearly predetermined common aims, will one day achieve the rebirth of the movement, and breathe new life into the party organisation, which is continuously dying.
It is upon the activity of the comrades who today have become convinced about the reasons for the crises of the movement and the means by which it can be overcome that the fate of Communism in Greece depends. One day it will start emerging from its pre-history, so that it will one day enter its true history, seriously preparing all the revolutionary forces in the country for the overthrow of capitalism.
Athens, 15 July 1927
P. Pouliopoulos
P. Giatsopoulos
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