From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future- Lenin On "Lockouts and the Class Struggle"

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-

Markin comment on this series:

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

There is no question that back in my early 1960s youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American for Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view.

As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but just not in my area.

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

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

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

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
Workers Vanguard No. 1006
3 August 2012

Lockouts and the Class Struggle

(Quote of the Week)

With the U.S. economy continuing to falter and the labor movement in an extended retreat, lockouts have increasingly been used by the capitalists in their drive to wrest ever-greater concessions from the unions, or destroy them altogether. V. I. Lenin, writing in a period of intense strikes in Russia on the eve of World War I, discussed workers’ resistance to lockouts. Despite the different contexts, the role of Marxists in advancing the class consciousness of the proletariat remains unchanged.

Lockouts, i.e., the mass discharge of workers by common agreement among employers, is as necessary and inevitable a phenomenon in capitalist society as strikes are. Capital, which throws the whole of its crushing weight upon the ruined small producers and the proletariat, constantly threatens to force the conditions of the workers down to starvation level and condemn them to death from starvation. And in all countries there have been cases, even whole periods in the life of nations, when the failure of the workers to fight back has led to their being reduced to incredible poverty and all the horrors of starvation.

The workers’ resistance springs from their very conditions of life—the sale of labour-power. Only as a result of this resistance, despite the tremendous sacrifices the workers have to make in the struggle, are they able to maintain anything like a tolerable standard of living. But capital is becoming more and more concentrated, manufacturers’ associations are growing, the number of destitute and unemployed people is increasing, and so also is want among the proletariat; consequently, it is becoming harder than ever to fight for a decent standard of living. The cost of living, which has been rising rapidly in recent years, often nullifies all the workers’ efforts.

By drawing larger and larger masses of the proletariat into the organised struggle, the workers’ organisations, and first and foremost the trade unions, make the workers’ resistance more planned and systematic. With the existence of mass trade unions of different types, strikes become more stubborn: they occur less often, but each conflict is of bigger dimensions.

Lockouts are caused by a sharpening of the struggle, and in their turn, sharpen that struggle. Rallying in the struggle and developing its class-consciousness, its organisation and experience in that struggle, the proletariat becomes more and more firmly convinced that the complete economic reconstruction of capitalist society is essential.

Marxist tactics consist in combining the different forms of struggle, in the skilful transition from one form to another, in steadily enhancing the consciousness of the masses and extending the area of their collective actions, each of which, taken separately, may be aggressive or defensive, and all of which, taken together, lead to a more intense and decisive conflict.

—V. I. Lenin, “Forms of the Working-Class Movement (The Lockout and Marxist Tactics)” (April 1914)

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future- Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

Markin comment on this series:

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

There is no question that back in my early 1960s youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American for Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view.

As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but just not in my area.

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

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

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

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******

Workers Vanguard No. 1006
3 August 2012

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

July 2 marked 30 years since a nearly all-white jury declared class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal guilty in the killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner on 9 December 1981. One day later, on the eve of the 4th of July, the jurors sentenced Mumia to death, based explicitly on his political views and activities as a champion of black freedom and an eloquent voice for the oppressed. Beginning in the late 1960s, Mumia was targeted by the police as a Black Panther leader and later as a MOVE supporter and journalist renowned for his searing exposés of cop brutality and racist oppression.

For three decades, police, prosecutors and government officials of both the Democratic and Republican parties screamed for the head of this innocent man. That effort finally ran aground on 7 December 2011 when Philadelphia district attorney Seth Williams announced that he would not pursue the death sentence for Mumia. This announcement came in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision last October rejecting the D.A.’s petition to reinstate the death sentence, which was overturned in 2001 (see “Drive to Execute Mumia Halted,” WV No. 993, 6 January). Mumia is now left to languish in prison without possibility of parole. Finally removed from death row, Mumia was transferred to Mahanoy prison in Frackville, Pennsylvania, where he was vindictively thrown into solitary for seven weeks before finally being released into the general prison population at the end of January.

Mumia’s conviction and death sentence were the result of a political and racist frame-up. Cops, prosecutors and “hanging judge” Albert Sabo ripped to shreds every single one of Mumia’s trial rights—from the right to an attorney of his choice to the right to even be present in the courtroom where his life and freedom hung in the balance. Black people were summarily excluded from the jury. Witnesses were terrorized by the cops. Exculpatory evidence was concealed from the defense. Court after court refused to even consider the mountains of evidence proving Mumia’s innocence, including the confession of the actual killer. In this, the courts are joined not only by the right-wing tabloids but also by anti-death penalty liberals like those at the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer who are hopeful that Mumia will now be a forgotten man left to rot in prison for the rest of his life.

During the decades of his unjust imprisonment, Mumia has remained unbowed, speaking out for the oppressed and the impoverished through his death row commentaries (which can be heard on prisonradio.org). Mumia has published a number of books, including collections of his commentaries and essays in Live From Death Row, Death Blossoms and All Things Censored, the autobiographical We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party and Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners vs. the U.S.A.

On July 9, PDC representatives visited Mumia. Dating back to 1987, our comrades have visited him on many occasions, first at Huntingdon prison and later at SCI Greene in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. In those previous visits, Mumia was separated by a thick wall of Plexiglas, and until a couple of years ago his hands were manacled. Mumia’s life on death row also meant that he was confined in an eight-by-twelve-foot cell almost 24 hours a day, with severe restrictions, including on phone calls.

With the restraints of death row finally lifted, Mumia is allowed six hours a day outdoors and is getting all the exercise and soaking up all the sun that he can. Mumia told how a number of fellow inmates had read his books and expressed their solidarity. He has been able to reacquaint himself with MOVE comrade Eddie Africa, also imprisoned at Mahanoy. For the first time, Mumia and our comrades could embrace, sit side by side and even break bread together (or at least the stale fare from the overpriced vending machines). At one point, a woman visiting another inmate came over to hug Mumia and tell how she has followed his case for 30 years. Noticing one particularly playful little girl, Mumia—who for decades could not touch his wife or bounce his children or grandchildren on his knee—expressed how much he appreciated being able to actually see children.

Compared to the death row conditions under which Mumia lived for 30 years, the more ordinary hell of America’s prisons is an improvement. But it is a crime that this innocent man has spent even a day behind bars. We remain dedicated to searing the cause of Mumia’s fight for freedom into the consciousness of the working class, radical youth and opponents of black oppression. Free Mumia now! 

From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 90th Anniversary Of The Fourth Congress (1922)-The Black Freedom Struggle and the Comintern (1922)-Presentation at Toronto Conference

Click on the headline to link to the Communist International Internet Archives.

Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in other posts in this space.
***********
Workers Vanguard No. 1006
3 August 2012

The Black Freedom Struggle and the Comintern (1922)-Presentation at Toronto Conference

We print below with his permission the presentation of Jacob Zumoff, an associate of the Prometheus Research Library, at the Historical Materialism conference in Toronto earlier this year. It has been slightly edited for publication by the author.

In 1959, James P. Cannon—a founder of the American Communist Party (CP) and historic leader of American Trotskyism—wrote an article called “The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement.” He argued “that CP policy on the Negro question got its initial impulse from Moscow, and also that all further elaborations of this policy, up to and including the adoption of the ‘self-determination’ slogan in 1928, came from Moscow.”

This is what I want to talk about today. By necessity, I must leave out rich historic detail in such a short presentation (much of which will be dealt with in the book I am writing on the early American CP). I want to focus on how the Communist International (CI), acting upon its understanding of the need for a revolutionary vanguard party derived from the Bolsheviks’ experience, forcefully intervened in the American Communist movement in the 1920s. The CI called for a sharp break with the traditional “color-blind” approach of the early Socialist movement in the U.S. and for the Communists to place the fight for black liberation at the center of their work.

The tradition of the American Socialist Party (SP) was one of indifference to black oppression, which has been the bedrock of American capitalism since its origins. By the time of the foundation of the CP in 1919, the “Great Migration” of black people from the rural South to the urban North was well underway. Blacks were becoming an important component of the working class, making the fight against black oppression more strategic. Increasingly, black people were integrated into industrial capitalism while being forcibly segregated at the bottom as a race-color caste. World War I sped up this process. Amid a wave of racist pogroms throughout the U.S.—most spectacularly in Chicago—a layer of black radicals, the so-called “New Negro Movement,” refused to accept the murderous violence, as expressed in Claude McKay’s famous poem “If We Must Die” (1919).

In this period, the SP did nothing to battle black oppression. Some right-wing Socialists, like Victor Berger, were open racists. Some black Socialists—most importantly Hubert Harrison—urged the SP to address racial oppression. But its general position was articulated by Eugene Debs: “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races” (International Socialist Review, November 1903). Most Socialists were not racists, and Debs was an anti-racist. His hero was John Brown, and the article that I quoted is an eloquent attack on racial segregation. However, this “color-blind” position dissolved black oppression into class oppression and signaled a refusal to make fighting against black oppression central to the fight for socialist revolution. Essentially, the position was that racism would be solved through socialist revolution, and there was no need to address it specifically.

After the left-wing splits from the SP in the summer of 1919—plural because the result was actually two Communist parties—the Communist movement continued this color-blind approach. Communists at times denounced racism and called for working-class unity, but there still was no sense that fighting for black freedom should be central to the fight for proletarian revolution. (There was only one black person in the ranks of the early Communist Party: Otto Huiswoud, who was from Dutch Guiana.)

In contrast, the Bolsheviks emphasized “special oppression”—that is, oppression not just reducible to class exploitation. In What Is To Be Done?, Lenin argued that the revolutionary party must be a “tribune of the people,” fighting against all forms of oppression and linking such to the struggle for proletarian power. In Russia, which Lenin called a “prison house of peoples,” this meant fighting the oppression of the myriad national and ethnic groups by Great Russian chauvinism. In the context of the betrayal of international Social Democracy—by those whom Lenin called the social-chauvinists—during the interimperialist slaughter of WWI, this meant opposing all forms of support to colonialism and imperialism.

From this revolutionary internationalist perspective, the Comintern forced American Communists to take up what was then called the “Negro question.” At the Second Comintern Congress (1920), Lenin made John Reed give a report on the issue. I went through Reed’s papers at Harvard University, where there is a note stating that Reed would have preferred to speak on the trade-union question, but Lenin insisted that the report on black oppression was “absolutely necessary.”

Early Black Communists

Early Soviet Russia was a beacon for the oppressed. The anti-imperialist, anti-chauvinist positions of the Comintern attracted black militants. Independent of the Communist parties in the U.S., a movement of black radicals was formed from the “New Negro Movement,” many of whom were black Caribbean immigrants with few illusions in racist European imperialism or American capitalism. The most notable of these radicals were in a group, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), to which most of the early black Communists belonged.

The ABB did not originate as a socialist group but rather embraced a contradictory mixture of race-centered, pro-labor positions. Some of its members, such as Richard B. Moore, Wilfred A. Domingo and Grace P. Campbell, had been active in the SP in Harlem and remained active in the SP after the Left-Wing split in 1919. The leader of the ABB, Cyril V. Briggs, was a journalist who was not a socialist. But he had become politicized by the hypocrisy of U.S. imperialism pontificating about “self-determination” in WWI as blacks were lynched in America.

By itself, the early CP would not and could not have recruited the ABB. However, the anti-imperialism of the Comintern attracted such black radicals, and by 1921 most of the Harlem leadership of the ABB had joined the Communist Party. It is important to underline that they joined the American CP because it was the representative of the Communist International in the U.S.

I am going to have to gloss over the details of Communist activity over the next decade. However, it can be summed up by noting that the leadership of the CP dragged its feet in making the fight against black oppression central to its work, the black Communists complained to the Comintern and the Comintern fought to make the party address the issue. The CI had to wage an implacable struggle against the social-democratic approach inherited by the Communists.

The Fourth Congress of the Comintern (1922) is a key signpost. The American CP had two black representatives: Huiswoud, who was the official delegate, and McKay, who despite CP opposition managed to be seated as a fraternal delegate. John Riddell’s valuable new book on the Congress—which I recommend that people read—contains the session on the U.S. black question, the first time it had been discussed at length at a CI meeting. After the Congress, McKay stayed in Russia. Trotsky commissioned him to write a short study of black oppression in the U.S., Negroes in America. McKay was harshly critical of the American CP for neglecting the fight for black liberation. He criticized it for dropping its demand for full “social equality” for blacks. Significantly, the CP never published this book, and it was not published in English until the 1970s when it was discovered in the Russian-language division of the New York Public Library.

The next period includes several attempts by the American party to address the black question, including the founding of the American Negro Labor Congress in 1925. It was to be turned into a black transitional organization, in line with the Comintern’s recognition of the need for special organizational forms to draw specially oppressed segments of the population into the revolutionary movement. But these attempts were not particularly successful. To some degree, this outcome was a reflection of the internecine factionalism that wracked the party in this period. It also showed that the party leadership still did not get the importance of the fight for black liberation.

The Sixth Congress and “Self-Determination”

By the mid 1920s, the CI was not the revolutionary organization it had been under Lenin and Trotsky. The pressure of imperialist encirclement, the devastation of the Russian working class in the Civil War, the defeat of post-1917 revolutionary uprisings and the lengthy isolation of the workers state issuing out of the Russian Revolution enabled a bureaucratic layer headed by Stalin to usurp power in a political counterrevolution in 1923-24. Instead of the Bolshevik program of world revolution, the Comintern adopted Stalin’s anti-Marxist theory of “socialism in one country” at its Sixth Congress.

In 1928, the Comintern decreed the so-called “black belt” theory, which claimed that the black population in the American South was a nation and that the key task was to fight for “black self-determination.” This so-called “theory” flew in the face of reality and was initially opposed by most black Communists. I do not have time to go into the origin of this theory, except to say that it was part of the Stalinist degeneration of the Comintern.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Communist Party carried out valuable and dangerous work in the fight for black liberation. Its activities included organizing sharecroppers in the South, fighting for the freedom of the Scottsboro Boys, organizing integrated unions and organizing tenants in Harlem. This work was done despite the Stalinist degeneration of the CP and despite the black belt theory. However, as Cannon stressed in the essay I quoted at the beginning of my presentation, the CP became known for its stand in fighting for black rights because of the repeated intervention of the Comintern into the American party. 

From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 90th Anniversary Of The Fourth Congress (1922)- Toronto Historical Materialism Conference-Revisionists Still Trying to Bury Leninism

Click on the headline to link to the Communist International Internet Archives.

Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in other posts in this space.
*************

Workers Vanguard No. 1006
3 August 2012

Toronto Historical Materialism Conference-Revisionists Still Trying to Bury Leninism

In May, comrades from the Canadian and U.S. sections of the International Communist League intervened in a Historical Materialism (HM) conference held in Toronto, where some 400 people attended dozens of sessions over three days. One theme of debate was the 1922 Fourth Congress of the Communist International (CI), following the release by the Historical Materialism Book Series of a useful new English-language volume of the Congress proceedings, edited by leftist historian John Riddell. The Historical Materialism Book Series describes itself as a “publishing initiative of the radical left” and is influenced by the Cliffite Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain among others. Haymarket Books, associated with the American International Socialist Organization (ISO), is publishing paperback editions of the HM series.

HM and Haymarket render a useful service in publishing English-language works of interest to the workers movement. However, HM conferences are driven by the stock-in-trade reformist politics of the SWP and the ISO as well as the SWP-affiliated Canadian International Socialists, whose historic leaders—Paul Kellogg and Abigail Bakan—had a high profile at the Toronto event. These groups from their origins sided with their respective bloody “democratic” imperialist ruling classes against the Soviet degenerated workers state (see “The Bankruptcy of ‘New Class’ Theories,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 55, Autumn 1999). Since the fall of the USSR, they echo the bourgeoisie’s “death of communism” triumphalism and continue to bury the lessons of the Russian Revolution. Illustrating this were comments at one session by Bakan, who assisted Riddell with the Fourth Congress volume and yet asserted that the CI Congresses are not a textbook for leftists today.

On the contrary! The early Communist International provides a vital guide. Although we cast a critical eye on the Fourth Congress in particular, the ICL stands programmatically on the first four CI Congresses (i.e., those that occurred prior to the 1923-24 Stalinist political counterrevolution that resulted in the degeneration of the Soviet workers state). Emerging out of the Russian workers revolution of October 1917, these Congresses represent the highest theoretical and programmatic generalization of revolutionary lessons that the proletariat has ever achieved. The Russian Revolution, carried out under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, was a shaping event of the 20th century: capitalism was swept away and in its place a workers state based on workers and peasants councils (soviets) was established. It was viewed by Lenin and Trotsky as the opening shot in a revolution that could only be completed on the world stage.

The CI’s 1919 founding manifesto stated that as “representatives of the revolutionary proletariat of the different countries of Europe, America, and Asia,” its members were the heirs and executors of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. It proclaimed that its task was “to generalize the revolutionary experience of the working class, to cleanse the movement of the corroding influence of opportunism and social patriotism, and rally the forces of all truly revolutionary parties of the world proletariat.”

Communist parties were only beginning to form in 1919. Advanced workers in most countries were still organized under the banner of the social-democratic Second International, whose leaders helped bring workers to the slaughter of World War I by peddling poisonous nationalism and embracing the war aims and colonial ambitions of their “own” imperialist rulers. The Bolshevik Party under Lenin had by 1912 achieved a thorough political and organizational split from the opportunists in Russia, the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks also had acquired an unequaled wealth of practical experience under a rapid and varied succession of conditions and methods of struggle.

The Bolsheviks politically defeated the pro-capitalist opportunists in leading the Russian proletariat to power. Revolutionary workers uprisings that broke out in Central Europe right after WWI were smashed in large part due to the immaturity of the new Communist parties leading them. The CI sought to accomplish a final split of young Communist parties from the Social Democracy and to forge a more politically homogeneous international.

The Fourth Congress and the “Workers Government”

The ICL has a critical appraisal of the Fourth Congress’s treatment of the call for a “workers government.” We agree with Trotsky who in the 1938 Transitional Program made clear that the call for a workers government “represented nothing more than the popular designation for the already established dictatorship of the proletariat,” which also accords with Lenin’s views. Prior to the October Revolution, Lenin wrote The State and Revolution to prepare the working class for the seizure of power. In it, he described how a state—that is, the whole repressive apparatus of the ruling class, centrally the army, police and courts—emerges out of the “irreconcilability of class antagonisms.” Citing the conclusion drawn by Marx and Engels after the Paris Commune of 1871, Lenin emphasized that workers can’t simply “lay hold of the ready-made state machinery” but must crush it and replace it with a workers state.

But various reformist leftists take weak or ambiguous aspects of the decisions at the Fourth Congress to justify their own opportunist and class-collaborationist practices today. A case in point is the confused CI resolution that endorsed multiple interpretations of what constitutes a “workers government.” It detailed how this slogan could mean the dictatorship of the proletariat on the model of the October Revolution but also argued that “not every workers’ government is truly proletarian, that is, a revolutionary instrument of proletarian power.” The resolution allowed that the “workers government” designation could apply to Communists participating in a capitalist government run by Social Democrats, i.e., a bourgeois government dressed up in workers clothing. This latter interpretation was defended at the Historical Materialism conference.

For revolutionaries, it is an absolute betrayal of the working class to politically support or participate in a bourgeois government or to hold an executive post at the national, state or local level. However, this view—the illusory and ultimately deadly idea that workers parties could run a bourgeois state in workers’ interests—had been championed by an increasingly dominant section of the Second International. In the early years of the CI, the young Communist parties struggled to fully break with this reformist programmatic heritage. “Ultraleft” currents wrongly rejected parliamentary tactics altogether, while right-wing currents continued to cling to illusions in bourgeois parliamentarism, not assimilating the lessons imparted by Marx and Lenin on the state. The “workers government” debate at the Fourth Congress reflected these different political tendencies.

As an ICL comrade remarked at the Toronto conference:

“The proceedings of the Fourth Congress, usefully put together in John Riddell’s book, show that the debate on the ‘workers government’ slogan was extremely ill-prepared and extremely confused. Many delegates, not just ultralefts who opposed the united front on principle, spoke against the idea of coalition governments with social democrats and against the idea of so-called ‘workers governments’ based on parliamentary forms.”

He continued, “In contrast, the German leadership, the KPD, who were the central pushers of the final version of the ‘workers government’ resolution as adopted, were trying to do something on the ground in Germany—which was to form coalition governments with Social Democrats in various German regional states. At different points, that was opposed and pushed back by elements in the CI leadership, but in the end it went through.”

The consequences were enormous. In 1923, the German workers—plagued by hunger and massive inflation—were in a state of revolutionary turmoil. Unrest was fueled by the French occupation of the heavily industrial western part of Germany, a result of reparations that had been imposed on Germany after its defeat in WWI. In October, the German Communist Party (KPD) entered Social Democratic governments in the states of Saxony and Thuringia. Ignominiously, an insurrection was called off and a golden opportunity for revolution was lost, undermined by elements in the KPD and in the Soviet leadership (as Lenin was on his deathbed). As our comrade noted, looking for a halfway house between bourgeois and proletarian power “only leads to disaster.” (For more on the “workers government” slogan, see “A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 56, Spring 2001.)

In the main presentation on the “workers government” in Toronto, John Riddell accurately captured the Fourth Congress debate, noting that the CI resolution left room for a “workers government” to take office “while the capitalist state, or most of it, was still around,” a position that he embraced. Riddell began by addressing Greece today, where an economic crisis fueled by the austerity diktats of the German-dominated European Union (EU) has engulfed the country. Riddell was critical that the leftist Antarsya and Syriza coalitions had not joined forces, arguing that “if united, the left-wing, anti-austerity parties in Greece could have won the election.” Defending the idea that working-class organizations should consider managing the bourgeois state, he said: “The value of the workers government position rather lies in alerting us to a possibility and expanding our framework of thought and imagination,” adding that “even before the onset of workers revolution, workers can find a way to pose the issue of governmental power and to struggle for it.”

This perspective is precisely that of the Greek Internationalist Workers Left (DEA), a cofounder of Syriza that is associated with the American ISO. In a May 23 interview on the ISO’s Web site, a DEA leader explained: “We have declared before the people that the only government we will take part in or form is a government of the left, a government that will change the Memorandum [EU austerity terms] and all the laws that [sic] of the last three years, during the period of the crisis.” But such a “government of the left” would simply run the bourgeois state to help save the Greek and European capitalists. Syriza gives a “left” cover to the continued brutal exploitation of the Greek working class, while seeking to tinker with the EU-imposed terms of surrender.

As for Antarsya, which includes the Greek Socialist Workers Party (affiliated with the British SWP), it ran candidates in the June 17 election in its own name. However, Antarsya’s purpose was simply to pressure Syriza to the left from the outside, as was made clear in numerous declarations. Following the elections, its efforts have focused on building a pressure group around the Syriza opposition in parliament.

The ICL’s Greek section gave critical support to the Stalinist Greek Communist Party (KKE) in these elections. Despite its reformism and nationalism, the KKE campaigned in opposition to the EU and NATO and refused to participate in any class-collaborationist coalition with bourgeois parties (see “Vote KKE! No Vote to Syriza!” WV No. 1005, 6 July).

The “Anti-Imperialist United Front”

Another HM conference session further addressed the Fourth Congress, concentrating on questions of “Race, Gender, Nation and Class.” An associate of the Prometheus Research Library, our working Marxist archive, spoke on the crucial intervention of the Communist International in driving home the centrality of the fight for black freedom to proletarian revolution in the U.S. (see page 9). Among the other presentations in that session was one on women in the pre-1947 Indian Communist Party and another on “Islamism and Marxism.” The latter painted Islam and Marxism as complementary and compatible, drawing on weaknesses of the Fourth Congress in doing so. In fact, the ICL is also critical of the treatment by the Fourth Congress of the “anti-imperialist united front” as well as of pan-Islamism.

The Fourth Congress passed a resolution endorsing the “anti-imperialist united front,” tacitly posing an ongoing political bloc with bourgeois nationalism. Such a perspective could only tie the colonial workers and peasants to their own venal exploiters, who in turn are tied to the imperialists by a thousand threads. The ICL’s Declaration of Principles notes: “The ‘anti-imperialist united front’ is the particular form that class collaboration most often assumes in the colonial and ex-colonial countries, from the liquidation of the Chinese Communist Party into Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang in the 1920s to decades of prostration of the South African ‘left’ before the African National Congress (ANC).”

Similarly, the Fourth Congress opened the door to support of pan-Islamism, which had a hearing among workers in Muslim countries, such as Indonesia, by endowing Islamic political currents with “anti-imperialist” credentials. The Congress declared that “to the degree that the national-liberation movements extend in scope, the religious-political slogans of pan-Islamism will be more and more replaced by specific political demands.” That resolution stands in sharp contrast to one from the Second CI Congress in 1920 that took a hard position against pan-Islamism. The Second Congress’s “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” drafted by Lenin, argued that the CI “must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in colonial and backward countries” but insisted that it should “under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement.”

The disruptions in the imperialist centers brought on by WWI had by 1920 spurred the development of industry in the colonial world and correspondingly the emergence of a small but concentrated proletariat. The Second Congress was breaking new terrain in addressing the emergence of Communism in the colonies, where even bourgeois-nationalist movements were relatively new, reflecting the weak and late development of a native capitalist class. This situation together with the extremely limited implantation of Marxist ideas in these countries had the Second Congress looking primarily toward Western Europe, where revolutions appeared imminent. The sweeping away of capitalist property forms by a workers revolution in an imperialist center would immediately impact its colonies by ending imperialist subjugation. The CI fought to put the struggle against colonial and national oppression front and center as against the pro-imperialist politics of the Social Democracy.

At the conference session on “Race, Gender, Nation and Class,” an ICL comrade noted that “the Comintern leadership had to fight against indifference to the fight against colonial oppression, that’s a given.” But he added, “I want to speak to the other side, which is the strategy within the colonies, and I want to defend the Second Congress against the Fourth,” observing that “Lenin at the Second Congress put forward the idea of unconditional independence of the proletarian movement against all forms of bourgeois nationalism, in which he explicitly included pan-Islamism, however embryonic.” Our comrade also noted that Lenin stressed the importance of fighting against illusions in bourgeois nationalism, even as the Communists defended national liberation movements against colonialism.

The Fourth Congress discussion on proletarian independence in the colonies occurred immediately after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been instructed by the CI to enter the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang (GMD). This ultimately led to catastrophe for the young CCP. In May 1925, a Chinese workers revolution was sparked by a general strike in Shanghai that quickly spread throughout the country. The growing strike movement eventually pitted workers against the GMD. Even with the nationalists taking the lead in suppressing the uprising in 1926, the CCP remained inside the GMD. By this time, Stalin and his then-ally Nikolai Bukharin called the shots in the CI, which opposed requests from the CCP leadership to leave the GMD, even though the GMD had insisted that the CCP hand over a list of its members working within the GMD. The decisive crushing of the Chinese Revolution occurred in Shanghai in April 1927 when GMD leader Chiang Kai-shek carried out a coup, slaughtering tens of thousands of Communists and trade unionists (see “The Origins of Chinese Trotskyism,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 53, Summer 1997).

The bloody defeat of the Chinese Revolution shows where the “anti-imperialist united front” leads: not to “national liberation” from the imperialist yoke but rather to the subordination of the neocolonial masses to their own tinpot rulers and ultimately to bloody defeat. It was in the aftermath of the defeat of the Chinese Revolution that Trotsky generalized his theory of permanent revolution, which deepened and transcended the earlier debates in the CI, as pointed out by one of our comrades at the HM conference. Trotsky extended the model of the Russian Revolution, wherein the Bolsheviks stood in complete independence from, and fought against, the bourgeois liberals and vied for (and won) the allegiance of the poorest peasants and the oppressed peoples by championing their interests in the course of fighting for socialist revolution.

The crass pandering by the reformists before all manner of nationalist movements and even religious reaction was on display at the HM session on Egypt, where the ISO’s Ahmed Shawki was one of the speakers. A sharp debate took place between the ICL and the ISO over the pandering to the Muslim Brotherhood by the Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists, which has ties to both the ISO and the SWP. Some attendees sympathized with the ISO/SWP view, arguing that the Muslim Brotherhood was the only organization “big enough and tough enough” to challenge the Mubarak dictatorship and that it had contradictions that leftists could exploit. Shawki demagogically railed against us for holding up Trotsky and Lenin to “lecture” people and hailed the youth of the Muslim Brotherhood who “physically put themselves out there” defending Tahrir Square and “made the revolution.”

But there was no social revolution in Egypt, nor was there any independent political expression of the working class as against the military, religious reactionaries and bourgeoisie. In opposition to the ISO, an ICL spokesman defended permanent revolution and argued that the “fundamentalists are precisely those forces that represent and are ideologically linked to the ruling class in every way, but also they are the mortal enemies of the Copts, of women, of peasants and of the organized working class itself.” She continued: “The clearest example of that is Iran in 1979, where all the [leftist] supporters of Khomeini ended up killed by Khomeini.” The ISO’s program is merely a recipe to keep workers and the oppressed under the neocolonial yoke.

As the philosopher George Santayana put it, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Socialist revolution remains the only fundamental solution to the ills of our time. This is still the epoch of imperialism—where finance capital holds sway and a handful of the most powerful capitalist countries dominate the globe—the same epoch that gave rise to WWI and the Russian Revolution. The inability of capitalism to fulfill even the minimal needs of the masses can be seen in the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, in the ravages of the recession on workers and the downtrodden, from the U.S. to Greece and beyond. The struggle between anti-Communist revisionism and revolutionary Marxism is the difference between disappearing the lessons of the past in order to repeat the same betrayals and studying the past to point the road to a victorious outcome. 

It Ain’t About The Pool, Fast Eddie- Paul Newman’s “The Hustler”- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Paul Newman’s The Hustler.

DVD Review

The Hustler, starring Paul Newman, Piper Laurie, George C. Scott, Jackie Gleason, 20th Century-Fox, 1961

Shoot pool, Fast Eddie, shoot pool. Yes, Fast Eddie shoot pool like your life depended on it. Fast Eddie coming like hellfire out of the west, out of the wild boy, okie, arkie dust shaking be-bop west night looking, looking for something in the go-go post- World War II night. Some cureless thing to take the curse off of not having made that okie trek with everything you owned in the Great Depression or not having gotten your fill of blood, action and danger in the “big one.” Something to take the pain, the angst, the alienation or whatever the sociologists and psychologists wanted to call it, away.

But like the headline says it ain’t about the pool as this 1961 Paul Newman (as Fast Eddie) film under review, The Hustler, makes very clear. For Fast Eddie it was, or it started out as, just creeping out from under that old East Oakland, Haywood, Richmond, you name the town they were all the same, all filled with restless boys wishing to break out from that corner boy existence. Hanging out in white tee shirt, cigarette pack rolled up one sleeve, wide bucket belt, whipsaw ready, holding up blue denims, black engineer boots hitched up against some drugstore , mom and pop variety store , some bowling alley, hell, some glass-fronted pool hall wall to break- out, jail-break out but just then waiting , yeh, waiting.

But hunger, gnawed hunger, festering hunger is a tyrant, a hard and cruel tyrant, when you have Fast Eddie appetites. Yes, Fast Eddie, just join the drifters, grifters, and midnight sifters and make a name, a small name for yourself, in the fifteen minutes of fame world and then fade. Small dreams fade. Not our boy Fast Eddie though he wanted more, he wanted way more, he was hungry, really too hungry. He wanted to be the king hell king of the pool hall night, small dream in a big dream world but it was his dream and he was sticking to it, come hell or high water. Jesus was he going to stick to it.

To watch Fast Eddie shoot pool when he was fast and loose was a sight to behold, shifting those hips just this way and that, a wayward shoulder here or there, eyeing, careful eyeing the best angle for the shot like he and the balls were one, and maybe they were, beating up angels to get at the chalk to fatten up his cue stick, and then go on those runs. Hell some nights he would run the table just to show some punk that he should get back to hanging off that wall at the mom and pop variety store corner that he crawled out from under. Jesus. Still he wanted pharaoh. He wanted the king hell king, Minnesota Fats (played by Jackie Gleason with serious style).

And he got Fats, got Fats in spades. Got more of Fats that most men, even hard corner boys, would ever want. Got Fats with his blood up, with his king hell king no prisoners blood up. Jesus Fast Eddie looked good for about ten rounds though all loose and Fast Eddie-like, making juke moves like some fancy dan pro football player, cocky, hell, cocky, calling strange shot combinations and drinking high-bench bourbon to steady his nerves. Beautiful.

Fats about that time, about round ten, took his measure though, writing him off as a fly-by-night seven- day wonder boy, making some fast and Fast Eddie –like moves of his own and some ballet-like combinations that had Fast Eddie reeling. Pharaoh- by a knock-out. The boys who watched most of the play, and they had watched Pharaoh up against some pretty good corner boys, all agreed that Fast Eddie was good, but that his talent could only get him so far and that his dreams maybe should be played out in Hoboken, or Jersey City not in the bigs. One guy, who didn’t want to be quoted just in case, called Fast Eddie just another okie sodbuster loser.

But that guy, that no quote nine to five guy, had never nursed a dream, never was haunted by being there at the end hearing the other guy, the pharaoh, cry to the high heavens “uncle.” Yeh, he had never heard that sweet music, and never would. And so Fast Eddie nursed his wounds, nursed his dream along too. He still had that too much hunger that comes from a rationed world, his world, his okie world, to carry. Fast Eddie was dumped back on cheap street, on the street of broken dreams.

And then she, Sarah (played by Piper Laurie), showed up, showed up to pick up the pieces, the Fast Eddie too much hunger pieces. To curb his hunger a little, maybe, and also to disturb his sleep. Some called her a tramp, an easy lay, a place to hang your hat while you were nursing your fresh wounds but Fast Eddie never, even from minute one, at the bus station diner saw her that way. And even wild corner boy sullen guys like Eddie who couldn’t say the right words knew she was no whore, no dish rag to dirty and move on.

Funny how it all started, all started like with most Fast Eddie girls, with a few drinks, a few words, and some animal, not wild but not gentle either, connection that drove them to her bed. Polite society had called her a tramp, hanging on to a succession of beat down corner boys for dear life, maybe for her life. What could they know about a girl who wrote be-bop beat stuff, read a million books, and drank an ocean of whiskey before noon to chase away her own demons. She was Fast Eddie’s girl from the minute he sat down next to her, he knew it, she knew it, and that thought got her through some stuff.

Sarah, Fast Eddie’s lifeline Sarah out of some biblical prophecy, out of those million books read, out of her own dark street past, knew the ten percent men, men like gambler Bert (played by George C. Scott), knew their clawing and scratching away at a man’s soul, at a woman’s soul too when they got their blood up. She knew, back streets knowledge knew at a heavy price, and a couple of off-hand bought drinks, that their price was too much to pay for fifteen minute fame dreams. Knew from her own much abused bed they had no pure Fast Eddie dreams, no Fast Eddie soul, just clawing away at more than their ten-percent cut. But would Fast Eddie listen, hell, not our boy, and so the dice were cast.

But see too some women (maybe some men too but I am thinking about a woman just now), no, forget some formless woman, let’s call her Sarah Packard, can’t live in the real world. Can’t live in the world of dirt and dust, and blood and still take breathe. So Sarah could not save Fast Eddie from his too much hunger, or in the end save herself from her own hungers. Fast Eddie not knowing what he had lost, or only half-knowing, had to nevertheless even the score, even the score the only way he knew how. Take on the Fat Man or die.

As it turned out Fast Eddie danced that night of the re-match, all loose and fast like old Fast Eddie when he first worked his magic against some scrub surfer guy down in some southern California pool hall way out of his element in the 1950s be-bop night. The pockets were like manholes that night and everyone thought Fast Eddie was going to run the table on old tired Fats. He didn’t but old pharaoh, wise enough to know his play, cried “uncle” to the high heavens. That “victory,” that Sarah Packard –paid for victory however only tasted like ashes in Fast Eddie’s mouth. Shoot pool, Fast Eddie, shoot pool like your life depended on it.

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin -When Miss Cora Swayed

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the 1946 film adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.

This is the way Peter Paul Markin told me the story one night many years ago when we were, well, let's leave it at feeling no pain. Who he first heard it from I don't remember but here it is as best as I could take it down in my notebook at the time:

Yah, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie a guy up so bad he will go to the chair without a murmur, the electric chair for those not in the know or those not wound up in the love game with a big old knot very tightly squeezing him. That is he will not murmur if there is such a merciful chair in his locale, otherwise whatever way they cut the life out of a guy who has been so twisted up he couldn’t think straight enough to tie his own shoes, or hers.

Here’s the funny part and you know as well as I do that I do not mean funny, laughing funny, the guy will go to his great big reward smiling, okay half-smiling, just to have been around that frail, frill, twist. dame, oh hell, you know what I mean. Around her slightly shy, sly, come hither scents, around her, well, just around her. Or maybe just to be done with it, done with the speculation, the knots and all, six-two-and even he would go back for more, plenty more, and still have that smile, ah, half-smile as they lead him away. Yah, guys just like Frank.

Frank Jackman had it bad. [But you might as well fill in future signatures, the Peter Paul Markins, the Joshua Lawrence Breslins, and every corner boy who ever kicked his heels against some drugstore store front wall, name your name, just kids, mere boys, when they started getting twisted up in knots, girl knots, and a million, more or less, other guys too, just as easily as Frank, real easy]. Yah, Frank had it bad as a man could have from the minute Miss Cora walked through that café door from the back of the house, the door that separated the living quarters from the café, a cup of joe in her hand. Just an off-hand plain plank door, cheaply made and amateurishly hinged, that spoke of no returns.

She breezed, Frank thought later when he tried to explain it, explain everything that had happened and how to anyone who would listen, trade winds breezed in although this was the wrong coast for that, in her white summer frilly V-neck buttoned cotton blouse, white short shorts, tennis or beach ready, maybe just ready for whatever came along, with convenience pockets for a woman’s this-and-that, and showing plenty of well-turned, lightly-tanned bare leg, long legs at first glance, and the then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair, also white, the bandana that is. Yah, she came out of that crooked cheapjack door like some ill-favored Pacific wind now that he had the coast right, some Japan Current ready, ready for the next guy out. Jesus.

I might as well tell you, just like he told it to me, incessantly told it to me like I was some father-confessor, and maybe I was, before he moved on, it didn’t have to finish up like the way it did. Or start that way either, for that matter. The way it did play out. Not at all. No way. He could have just turned around anytime he said but I just took that as so much wind talking, or maybe some too late regret. Sure there are always choices, for some people. Unless you had some Catholic/Calvinist/Shiva whirl pre-destination Mandela wheel working your fates, working your fates into damn overdrive like our boy Frank.

Listen up a little and see if Frank was just blowing smoke, or something. He was just a half-hobo, maybe less, bumming around and stumbling up and down the West Coast, too itchy to settle down after four years of hard World War II Pacific battle fights on bloody atolls, on bloody coral reefs, and knee-deep bloody islands with names even he couldn’t remember, or want to remember after Cora came on the horizon. He was just stumbling, like he said, from one half-ass mechanic’s job (a skill he had picked in the Marines) in some flop garage here, another city day laborer’s job shoveling something there, and picking fruits, hot sun fruits, maybe vegetables depending on the crop rotation, like some bracero whenever things got really tough, or the hobo jungle welcome ran out, ran out with the running out of wines and stubbed cigarette butts. He mentioned something about freight yard tramp knives, and cuts and wounds. Tough, no holds barred stuff, once tramp, bum, hobo solidarities broke down, and that easy and often. Frank just kind of flashed that part of the story because he was in a hurry for me to get it straight about him and Cora and the hobo jungle stuff was just stuff, and so much train smoke and maybe a bad dream.

Hell, the way he was going, after some bracero fruit days with some bad hombre bosses standing over his sweat, the “skids” in Los Angeles, down by the tar pits and just off the old Southern Pacific line, were looking good, a good rest up. Real good after fourteen days running in some Imperial Valley fruit fields so he started heading south, south by the sea somewhere near Paseo Robles to catch some ocean sniff, and have himself washed clean by loud ocean sounds so he didn’t have to listen to the sounds coming from his head about getting off the road.

Here is where luck is kind of funny though, and maybe this is a place where it is laughing funny, because, for once, he had a few bucks, a few bracero fruit bucks, stuck in his socks. He was hungry, maybe not really food hungry, but that would do at the time for a reason, and once he hit the coast highway this Bayview Diner was staring him right in the face after the last truck ride had let him off a few hundred yards up the road. Some fugitive barbecued beef smell, or maybe strong onions getting a workout over some griddled stove top, reached him and turned him away from the gas station fill-up counter where he had planned, carefully planning to husband his dough to make the city of angels, to just fill up with a Coke and moon pie. But that smell got the better of him. So he walked into that Bayview Diner, walked in with his eyes wide open. And then she walked through the damn door.

She may have been just another blonde, a very blonde frail, just serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint as he found out later, but from second one when his eyes eyed her she was nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. Frank femme fatale, fatal. Of course between eyeing, pillow-talk dreaming, and scheming up some “come on” line once she had her hooks into him, which was about thirty seconds after he laid eyes on her, he forgot, foolishly forgot, rule number one of the road, or even of being a man in go-go post-war America.

What he should have asked, and had in the past when he wasn’t this dame-addled, was a dish like this doing serving them off the arm in some rundown roadside café out in pacific coast Podunk when she could be sunning herself in some be-bop daddy paid-up hillside bungalow or scratching some other dame’s eyes out to get a plum role in a B Hollywood film courtesy of some lonely rich producer. Never for a minute, not even during those thirty seconds that he wasn’t hooked did he figure, like some cagey guy would figure, that she had a story hanging behind that bandana hair.

And she did. Story number one was the “serve them off the platter” hubby short-ordering behind the grill in that tramp cafe. The guy who, to save dough, bought some wood down at the lumber yard and put up that crooked door that she had come through on first sight and who spent half his waking hours trying to figure how to short-change somebody, including his Cora. Story number two, and go figure, said hubby didn’t care one way or the other about what she did, or didn’t do, as long as he had her around as a trophy to show the boys on card-playing in the back of the diner living rooms and Kiwanis drunk as a skunk nights. Story number three was that she had many round-heeled down-at- the-heels stories too long to tell Frank before hubby came along to pick her out of some Los Angles arroyo gutter. Story number four, the one that would in the end sent our boy Frankie smiling, sorry half-smiling, to his fate was she hated hubby, hell-broth murder hated her husband, and would be “grateful” in the right way to some guy who had the chutzpah to take her out of this misery. But those stories all came later, later when she didn’t need to use those hooks she had in him, didn’t need to use them at all.

Peter Paul Markin Interlude One: “I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled, yelled from some womblike place, at the screen once I saw her coming through that door for him, for Frank, to get the hell out of there at that moment. This dame was poison, no question. Frank stop looking at those long paid for legs and languid rented eyes for a minute and get the hell out of there to some safe hobo jungle. Hell, just walk out the diner, café or whatever it is door, run if you have too, get your hitchhike great blue-pink American West thumb out and head for it. There’s a hobo jungle just down the road near Santa Monica, get going, and tonight grab some stolid, fetid stews, and peace.”

But here is where fate works against some guys, hell, most guys. She turned around to do some dish rack thing or other with her lipstick-smeared coffee cup and then, slowly, turned back to look at Frank with those languid eyes, what color who knows, it was the look not the color that doomed Frank and asked in a soft, kittenish voice “Got a cigarette for a fresh out girl?” And wouldn’t you know, wouldn’t you just know, that Frank, “flush” with bracero dough had bought a fresh deck of Luckies at the cigarette machine out at that filling station just adjacent to the diner and they were sitting right in his left shirt pocket for the entire world to see. For her to see. And wouldn’t you know too that Frank could see plain as day, plain as a man could see if he wanted to see, that bulging out of one of the convenience pockets of those long-legged white short shorts was the sharply-etched outline of a package of cigarettes. Yah, still he plucked a cigarette into her waiting lips, kind of gently, gently for rough-edged Frank, lit her up, and dated her up with his eyes. Gone, long-gone daddy gone, except for dreams, and that final half-smile.

Peter Paul Markin Interlude Two: “I screamed again, some vapid man-child scream, some kicking at the womb thump too, but do you think Frank would listen, no not our boy. You don’t need to know all the details if you are over twenty-one, hell over twelve and can keep a secret. She used her sex every way she could, and a few ways that Frank, not unfamiliar with the world’s whorehouses in lonely ports-of-call, was kind of shocked at, but only shocked. He was hooked, hook, line and sinker. Frank knew, knew what she was, knew what she wanted, and knew what he wanted so there was no crying there.”

Here is what is strange, and while I am writing this even I think it is strange. She told Frank her whole life’s story, the too familiar father crawling up into her barely teenage bed, the run-aways, returns, girls’ JD homes, some more streets, a few whorehouse tricks, some street tricks, a little luck with a Hollywood producer until his wife, who controlled the dough, put a stop to it, some drugs, some L.A. gutters, and then a couple of years back some refuge from those mean streets via husband Manny’s Bayview Diner.

Even with all of that Frank still believed, believed somewhere from deep in his recessed mind, somewhere in his Oklahoma kid mud shack mind, that Cora was virginal. Some Madonna of the streets. Toward the end it was her scent, some slightly lilac scent, some lilac scent that combined with steamed vegetable sweat combined with sexual animal sweat combined with ancient Lydia MacAdams' bath soap fresh junior high school crush sweat drove him over the edge. Drove him to that smiling chair.

He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end. Christ, just like his whole young stupid gummed up life he had to play with fire. And from that minute, the lit cigarette minute, although really from the minute that Frank saw those long legs protruding from those white shorts Manny was done for.
And once Frank had sealed his fate (and hers too) on that midnight roaring rock sandy beach night when the ocean depths smashing against the shore drowned out the sound of their passion everybody from Monterrey to Santa Monica knew he was done for, or said they knew the score after the fact. Everybody who came within a mile of the Bayview Diner anyway. Everybody except Manny and maybe somewhere in his cheap jack little heart he too knew he was done for when Cora, in her own sensible Cora way, persuaded him that he needed an A-One grease monkey to run the filling station.

The way Frank told it even I knew, knew that everybody had to have figured things out. Any itinerant trucker who went out of his way to take the Coast highway with his goods on board in order to get a full glance at Cora and try his “line” on her (Manny encouraged it, he said it was good for business and harmless, and maybe it was with them) knew it. Knew it the minute he sat at his favorite corner stool and saw a monkey wrench-toting Frank come in for something and watch the Frank-Cora- and cigar-chomping Manny in his whites behind the grille dance play out. He kept his eyes and his line to himself on that run.

Damn, any dated –up teen-age joy-riding kids up from Malibu looking for the perfect wave at Roaring Rock (and maybe some midnight passion drowned out by the ocean roar too) knew the minute they came in and smelled that lilac something coming like something out of the eden garden from Cora. The girls knowing instinctively that Cora lilac scent was meant for more than some half-drunk old short order cook. One girl, with a friendly look Frank’s way, and maybe with her own Frank Roaring Rock thoughts, asked Cora, while ordering a Coke and hamburger, whether she was married to him. And her date, blushing, not for what his date had just said but because he, fully under the lilac scent karma, wished that he was alone just then so she could take a shot at Cora himself.

Hell even the California Highway Patrol motorcycle cop who cruised the coast near the diner (and had his own not so secret eyes and desires for Cora) knew once Frank was installed in one of the rooms over the garage that things didn’t add up, add up to Manny’s benefit. And, more importantly, that if anything happened, anything at all, anything requiring more than a Band-Aid, to one Manny DeVito for the next fifty years the cops knew the first door to knock at.

Look I am strictly a money guy, going after loot wherever I could and so I never got messed up with some screwy dame on a caper. That was later, spending time later. And maybe if I had gotten a whiff of that perfume things might have been different in my mind too but I told Frank right out why didn’t he and Cora take out a big old .44 in the middle of the diner and just shoot Manny straight out, and maybe while the cop was present too. Then he /they could have at least put up an insanity or crime of passion defense. Not our boy though, no he had to play the angles, play Cora’s evil game.

These two amateurs gummed up the job every which way, gummed it so that even a detective novel writer would turn blush red with shame. Murder is, from guys that I know who specialize in such things, make a business out of taking guys out for dough, an art form and nothing for amateurs to mess around with. They tried one thing, something with poison taken over a long time that couldn’t be traced but Manny was such a lush it didn’t take. Then they tried to get him drunk and drown him off of Roaring Rock but that night around two in the morning about sixty kids from down around Malibu decided to have a cook-out after their prom night. In the end they just did the old gag that the cops have been wish to since about 1906 and conked him, threw him in the car, drove to the Roaring Rock and pushed him and the car over the cliff. Jesus, double jesus.

Peter Paul Interlude Three: “Frank, one last time, get out, get on the road, this ain’t gonna work. That poison thing was crazy. That drunk at the ocean thing was worst. The cops wouldn’t even have had to bother to knock at your door. Frank on this latest caper she’s setting you up. Who drove the car, who got the whiskey, who knew how to trip the brake lines, and who was big enough to carry Manny? Why don’t you just paint a big target on your chest and be done with it. She just wants the diner for her own small dreams. You don’t count. Hell, I ain’t no squealer but she is probably talking to that skirt –crazy (her skirt) cop right now. Get out I say, get out.”

If you want the details, want to see how she framed him but good and walked away with half the California legal system holding the door open for her, just look them up in the 1946 fall editions of the Los Angeles Gazette. They covered the story big time, and the trial too. That’s just the details though. I can give you the finish now and save your eyes, maybe. Frank, yah, Frank was just kind of smiling that smile, what did I call it, half-smile, all the way to the end. Do you need to know more?

*From The Pen Of Vladimir Lenin- From “Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder (1920)-Should we Participate in Bourgeois Parliaments?

Click on the headline to link to the Lenin Internet Archives.

Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in other posts.
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With this now-classic work, Lenin aimed to encapsulate the lessons the Bolshevik Party had learned from its involvement in three revolutions in 12 years—in a manner that European Communists could relate to, for it was to them he was speaking. He also further develops the theory of what the "dictatorship of the proletariat" means and stresses that the primary danger for the working-class movement in general is opportunism on the one hand, and anti-Marxist ultra-leftism on the other.

"Left-Wing" Communism: an Infantile Disorder was written in April, and the appendix was written on May 12, 1920. It came out on June 8-10 in Russian and in July was published in German, English and French. Lenin gave personal attention to the book’s type-setting and printing schedule so that it would be published before the opening of the Second Congress of the Communist International, each delegate receiving a copy. Between July and November 1920, the book was re-published in Leipzig, Paris and London, in the German, French and English languages respectively.

"Left-Wing" Communism: an Infantile Disorder is published according to the first edition print, the proofs of which were read by Lenin himself.
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Should we Participate in Bourgeois Parliaments?

It is with the utmost contempt—and the utmost levity—that the German "Left" Communists reply to this question in the negative. Their arguments? In the passage quoted above we read:

"... All reversion to parliamentary forms of struggle, which have become historically and politically obsolete, must be emphatically rejected" [[__ Rjc: Could be incomplete here; check __]]

This is said with ridiculous pretentiousness, and is patently wrong. "Reversion" to parliamentarianism, forsooth! Perhaps there is already a Soviet republic in Germany? It does not look like it! How, then, can one speak of "reversion"? Is this not an empty phrase?

Parliamentarianism has become "historically obsolete". That is true in the propaganda sense. However, everybody knows that this is still a far cry from overcoming it in practice. Capitalism could have been declared—and with full justice—to be "historically obsolete" many decades ago, but that does not at all remove the need for a very long and very persistent struggle on the basis of capitalism. Parliamentarianism is "historically obsolete" from the standpoint of world history, i.e., the era of bourgeois parliamentarianism is over, and the era of the proletarian dictatorship has begun. That is incontestable. But world history is counted in decades. Ten or twenty years earlier or later makes no difference when measured with the yardstick of world history; from the standpoint of world history it is a trifle that cannot be considered even approximately. But for that very reason, it is a glaring theoretical error to apply the yardstick of world history to practical politics.

Is parliamentarianism "politically obsolete"? That is quite a different matter. If that were true, the position of the "Lefts" would be a strong one. But it has to be proved by a most searching analysis, and the "Lefts" do not even know how to approach the matter. In the "Theses on Parliamentarianism", published in the Bulletin of the Provisional Bureau in Amsterdam of the Communist International No. 1, February 1920, and obviously expressing the Dutch-Left or Left-Dutch strivings, the analysis, as we shall see, is also hopelessly poor.

In the first place, contrary to the opinion of such outstanding political leaders as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the German "Lefts", as we know, considered parliamentarianism "politically obsolete" even in January 1919. We know that the "Lefts" were mistaken. This fact alone utterly destroys, at a single stroke, the proposition that parliamentarianism is "politically obsolete". It is for the "Lefts" to prove why their error, indisputable at that time, is no longer an error. They do not and cannot produce even a shred of proof. A political party’s attitude towards its own mistakes is one of the most important and surest ways of judging how earnest the party is and how it fulfils in practice its obligations towards its class and the working people. Frankly acknowledging a mistake, ascertaining the reasons for it, analysing the conditions that have led up to it, and thrashing out the means of its rectification -- that is the hallmark of a serious party; that is how it should perform its duties, and how it should educate and train its class, and then the masses. By failing to fulfil this duty and give the utmost attention and consideration to the study of their patent error, the "Lefts" in Germany (and in Holland) have proved that they are not a party of a class, but a circle, not a party of the masses, but a group of intellectualists and of a few workers who ape the worst features of intellectualism.

Second, in the same pamphlet of the Frankfurt group of "Lefts", which we have already cited in detail, we read:

"... The millions of workers who still follow the policy of the Centre [the Catholic "Centre" Party] are counter-revolutionary. The rural proletarians provide the legions of counter-revolutionary troops." (Page 3 of the pamphlet.)

Everything goes to show that this statement is far too sweeping and exaggerated. But the basic fact set forth here is incontrovertible, and its acknowledgment by the "Lefts" is particularly clear evidence of their mistake. How can one say that "parliamentarianism is politically obsolete", when "millions" and "legions" of proletarians are not only still in favour of parliamentarianism in general, but are downright "counter-revolutionary"!? It is obvious that parliamentarianism in Germany is not yet politically obsolete. It is obvious that the "Lefts" in Germany have mistaken their desire, their politico-ideological attitude, for objective reality. That is a most dangerous mistake for revolutionaries to make. In Russia—where, over a particularly long period and in particularly varied forms, the most brutal and savage yoke of tsarism produced revolutionaries of diverse shades, revolutionaries who displayed amazing devotion, enthusiasm, heroism and will power—in Russia we have observed this mistake of the revolutionaries at very close quarters; we have studied it very attentively and have a first-hand knowledge of it; that is why we can also see it especially clearly in others. Parliamentarianism is of course "politically obsolete" to the Communists in Germany; but—and that is the whole point—we must not regard what is obsolete to us as something obsolete to a class, to the masses. Here again we find that the "Lefts" do not know how to reason, do not know how to act as the party of a class, as the party of the masses. You must not sink to the level of the masses, to the level of the backward strata of the class. That is incontestable. You must tell them the bitter truth. You are in duty bound to call their bourgeois-democratic and parliamentary prejudices what they are—prejudices. But at the same time you must soberly follow the actual state of the class-consciousness and preparedness of the entire class (not only of its communist vanguard), and of all the working people (not only of their advanced elements).

Even if only a fairly large minority of the industrial workers, and not "millions" and "legions", follow the lead of the Catholic clergy—and a similar minority of rural workers follow the landowners and kulaks (Grossbauern)—it undoubtedly signifies that parliamentarianism in Germany has not yet politically outlived itself, that participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class, and for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden and ignorant rural masses. Whilst you lack the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work within them because it is there that you will still find workers who are duped by the priests and stultified by the conditions of rural life; otherwise you risk turning into nothing but windbags.

Third, the "Left" Communists have a great deal to say in praise of us Bolsheviks. One sometimes feels like telling them to praise us less and to try to get a better knowledge of the Bolsheviks’ tactics. We took part in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, the Russian bourgeois parliament in September-November 1917. Were our tactics correct or not? If not, then this should be clearly stated and proved, for it is necessary in evolving the correct tactics for international communism. If they were correct, then certain conclusions must be drawn. Of course, there can be no question of placing conditions in Russia on a par with conditions in Western Europe. But as regards the particular question of the meaning of the concept that "parliamentarianism has become politically obsolete", due account should be taken of our experience, for unless concrete experience is taken into account such concepts very easily turn into empty phrases. In September-November 1917, did we, the Russian Bolsheviks, not have more right than any Western Communists to consider that parliamentarianism was politically obsolete in Russia? Of course we did, for the point is not whether bourgeois parliaments have existed for a long time or a short time, but how far the masses of the working people are prepared (ideologically, politically and practically) to accept the Soviet system and to dissolve the bourgeois-democratic parliament (or allow it to be dissolved). It is an absolutely incontestable and fully established historical fact that, in September-November 1917, the urban working class and the soldiers and peasants of Russia were, because of a number of special conditions, exceptionally well prepared to accept the Soviet system and to disband the most democratic of bourgeois parliaments. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks did not boycott the Constituent Assembly, but took part in the elections both before and after the proletariat conquered political power. That these elections yielded exceedingly valuable (and to the proletariat, highly useful) political results has, I make bold to hope, been proved by me in the above-mentioned article, which analyses in detail the returns of the elections to the Constituent Assembly in Russia.

The conclusion which follows from this is absolutely incontrovertible: it has been proved that, far from causing harm to the revolutionary proletariat, participation in a bourgeois-democratic parliament, even a few weeks before - the victory of a Soviet republic and even after such a victory, actually helps that proletariat to prove to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve to be done away with; it facilitates their successful dissolution, and helps to make bourgeois parliamentarianism "politically obsolete". To ignore this experience, while at the same time claiming affiliation to the Communist International, which must work out its tactics internationally (not as narrow or exclusively national tactics, but as international tactics), means committing a gross error and actually abandoning internationalism in deed, while recognising it in word.

Now let us examine the "Dutch-Left" arguments in favour of non-participation in parliaments. The following is the text of Thesis No. 4, the most important of the above-mentioned "Dutch" theses:

When the capitalist system of production has broken down, and society is in a state of revolution, parliamentary action gradually loses importance as compared with the action of the masses themselves. When, in these conditions, parliament becomes the centre and organ of the counter-revolution, whilst, on the other hand, the labouring class builds up the instruments of its power in the Soviets, it may even prove necessary to abstain from all and any participation in parliamentary action."

The first sentence is obviously wrong, since action by the masses, a big strike, for instance, is more important than parliamentary activity at all times, and not only during a revolution or in a revolutionary situation. This obviously untenable and historically and politically incorrect argument merely shows very clearly that the authors completely ignore both the general European experience (the French experience before the revolutions of 1848 and 1870; the German experience of 1878-90, etc.) and the Russian experience (see above) of the importance of combining legal and illegal struggle. This question is of immense importance both in general and in particular, because in all civilised and advanced countries the time is rapidly approaching when such a combination will more and more become—and has already partly become—mandatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat, inasmuch as civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is maturing and is imminent, and because of savage persecution of the Communists by republican governments and bourgeois governments generally, which resort to any violation of legality (the example of America is edifying enough), etc. The Dutch, and the Lefts in general, have utterly failed to understand this highly important question.

The second sentence is, in the first place, historically wrong. We Bolsheviks participated in the most counterrevolutionary parliaments, and experience has shown that this participation was not only useful but indispensable to the party of the revolutionary proletariat, after the first bourgeois revolution in Russia (1905), so as to pave the way for the second bourgeois revolution (February 1917), and then for the socialist revolution (October 1917). In the second place, this sentence is amazingly illogical. If a parliament becomes an organ and a "centre" (in reality it never has been and never can be a "centre", but that is by the way) of counter-revolution, while the workers are building up the instruments of their power in the form of the Soviets, then it follows that the workers must prepare—ideologically, politically and technically—for the struggle of the Soviets against parliament, for the dispersal of parliament by the Soviets. But it does not at all follow that this dispersal is hindered, or is not facilitated, by the presence of a Soviet opposition within the counter-revolutionary parliament. In the course of our victorious struggle against Denikin and Kolchak, we never found that the existence of a Soviet and proletarian opposition in their camp was immaterial to our victories. We know perfectly well that the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly on January 5, 1918 was not hampered but was actually facilitated by the fact that, within the counter-revolutionary Constituent Assembly which was about to be dispersed, there was a consistent Bolshevik, as well as an inconsistent, Left Socialist-Revolutionary Soviet opposition. The authors of the theses are engaged in muddled thinking; they have forgotten the experience of many, if not all, revolutions, which shows the great usefulness, during a revolution, of a combination of mass action outside a reactionary parliament with an opposition sympathetic to (or, better still, directly supporting) the revolution within it. The Dutch, and the "Lefts" in general, argue in this respect like doctrinaires of the revolution, who have never taken part in a real revolution, have never given thought to the history of revolutions, or have naively mistaken subjective "rejection" of a reactionary institution for its actual destruction by the combined operation of a number of objective factors. The surest way of discrediting and damaging a new political (and not only political) idea is to reduce it to absurdity on the plea of defending it. For any truth, if "overdone" (as Dietzgen Senior put it), if exaggerated, or if carried beyond the limits of its actual applicability, can be reduced to an absurdity, and is even bound to become an absurdity under these conditions. That is just the kind of disservice the Dutch and German Lefts are rendering to the new truth of the Soviet form of government being superior to bourgeois-democratic parliaments. Of course, anyone would be in error who voiced the outmoded viewpoint or in general considered it impermissible, in all and any circumstances, to reject participation in bourgeois parliaments. I cannot attempt here to formulate the conditions under which a boycott is useful, since the object of this pamphlet is far more modest, namely, to study Russian experience in connection with certain topical questions of international communist tactics. Russian experience has provided us with one successful and correct instance (1905), and another that was incorrect (1906), of the use of a boycott by the Bolsheviks. Analysing the first case, we, see that we succeeded in preventing a reactionary government from convening a reactionary parliament in a situation in which extra-parliamentary revolutionary mass action (strikes in particular) was developing at great speed, when not a single section of the proletariat and the peasantry could support the reactionary government in any way, and when the revolutionary proletariat was gaining influence over the backward masses through the strike struggle and through the agrarian movement. It is quite obvious that this experience is not applicable to present-day European conditions. It is likewise quite obvious—and the foregoing arguments bear this out -- that the advocacy, even if with reservations, by the Dutch and the other "Lefts" of refusal to participate in parliaments is fundamentally wrong and detrimental to the cause of the revolutionary proletariat.

In Western Europe and America, parliament has become most odious to the revolutionary vanguard of the working class. That cannot be denied. It can readily be understood, for it is difficult to imagine anything more infamous, vile or treacherous than the behaviour of the vast majority of socialist and Social-Democratic parliamentary deputies during and after the war. It would, however, be not only unreasonable but actually criminal to yield to this mood when deciding how this generally recognised evil should be fought. In many countries of Western Europe, the revolutionary mood, we might say, is at present a "novelty", or a "rarity", which has all too long been vainly and impatiently awaited; perhaps that is why people so easily yield to that mood. Certainly, without a revolutionary mood among the masses, and without conditions facilitating the growth of this mood, revolutionary tactics will never develop into action. In Russia, however, lengthy, painful and sanguinary experience has taught us the truth that revolutionary tactics cannot be built on a revolutionary mood alone. Tactics must be based on a sober and strictly objective appraisal of all the class forces in a particular state (and of the states that surround it, and of all states the world over) as well as of the experience of revolutionary movements. It is very easy to show one’s "revolutionary" temper merely by hurling abuse at parliamentary opportunism, or merely by repudiating participation in parliaments; its very ease, however, cannot turn this into a solution of a difficult, a very difficult, problem. It is far more difficult to create a really revolutionary parliamentary group in a European parliament than it was in Russia. That stands to reason. But it is only a particular expression of the general truth that it was easy for Russia, in the specific and historically unique situation of 1917, to start the socialist revolution, but it will be more difficult for Russia than for the European countries to continue the revolution and bring it to its consummation. I had occasion to point this out already at the beginning of 1918, and our experience of the past two years has entirely confirmed the correctness of this view. Certain specific conditions, viz., (1) the possibility of linking up the Soviet revolution with the ending, as a consequence of this revolution, of the imperialist war, which had exhausted the workers and peasants to an incredible degree; (2) the possibility of taking temporary advantage of the mortal conflict between the world’s two most powerful groups of imperialist robbers, who were unable to unite against their Soviet enemy; (3) the possibility of enduring a comparatively lengthy civil war, partly owing to the enormous size of the country and to the poor means of communication; (4) the existence of such a profound bourgeois-democratic revolutionary movement among the peasantry that the party of the proletariat was able to adopt the revolutionary demands of the peasant party (the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, the majority of whose members were definitely hostile to Bolshevism) and realise them at once, thanks to the conquest of political power by the proletariat—all these specific conditions do not at present exist in Western Europe, and a repetition of such or similar conditions will not occur so easily. Incidentally, apart from a number of other causes, that is why it is more difficult for Western Europe to start a socialist revolution than it was for us. To attempt to "circumvent" this difficulty by "skipping" the arduous job of utilising reactionary parliaments for revolutionary purposes is absolutely childish. You want to create a new society, yet you fear the difficulties involved in forming a good parliamentary group made up of convinced, devoted and heroic Communists, in a reactionary parliament! Is that not childish? If Karl Liebknecht in Germany and Z. H?glund in Sweden were able, even without mass support from below, to set examples of the truly revolutionary utilisation of reactionary parliaments, why should a rapidly growing revolutionary mass party, in the midst of the post-war disillusionment and embitterment of the masses, be unable to forge a communist group in the worst of parliaments? It is because, in Western Europe, the backward masses of the workers and—to an even greater degree—of the small peasants are much more imbued with bourgeois-democratic and parliamentary prejudices than they were in Russia because of that, it is only from within such institutions as bourgeois parliaments that Communists can (and must) wage a long and persistent struggle, undaunted by any difficulties, to expose, dispel and overcome these prejudices.

The German "Lefts" complain of bad "leaders" in their party, give way to despair, and even arrive at a ridiculous "negation" of "leaders". But in conditions in which it is often necessary to hide "leaders" underground, the evolution of good "leaders", reliable, tested and authoritative, is a very difficult matter; these difficulties cannot be successfully overcome without combining legal and illegal work, and without testing the "leaders", among other ways, in parliaments. Criticism -- the most keen, ruthless and uncompromising criticism—should be directed, not against parliamentarianism or parliamentary activities, but against those leaders who are unable—and still more against those who are unwilling -- to utilise parliamentary elections and the parliamentary rostrum in a revolutionary and communist manner. Only such criticism—combined, of course, with the dismissal of incapable leaders and their replacement by capable ones—will constitute useful and fruitful revolutionary work that will simultaneously train the "leaders" to be worthy of the working class and of all working people, and train the masses to be able properly to understand the political situation and the often very complicated and intricate tasks that spring from that situation. *5

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Footnotes

[*5] I have had too little opportunity to acquaint myself with ’Leftwing’, communism in Italy. Comrade Bordiga and his faction of Abstentionist Communists (Comunista astensionista) are certainly wrong in advocating non-participation in parliament. But on one point, it seems to me, Comrade Bordiga is right—as far as can be judged from two issues of his paper, Il Soviet (Nos. 3 and 4, January 18 and February 1, 1920), from four issues of Comrade Serrati’s excellent periodical, Comunismo (Nos. 1-4, October l-November 30, 1919), and from separate issues of Italian bourgeois papers which I have seen. Comrade Bordiga and his group are right in attacking Turati and his partisans, who remain in a party which has recognised Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and yet continue their former pernicious and opportunist policy as members of parliament. Of course, in tolerating this, Comrade Serrati and the entire Italian Socialist Party [28] are making a mistake which threatens to do as much harm and give rise to the same dangers as it did in Hungary, where the Hungarian Turatis sabotaged both the party and the Soviet government [29] from within. Such a mistaken, inconsistent, or spineless attitude towards the opportunist parliamentarians gives rise to "Leftwing" communism, on the one hand, and to a certain extent justifies its existence, on the other. Comrade Serrati is obviously wrong when he accuses Deputy Turati of being "inconsistent" (Comunismo No. 3), for it is the Italian Socialist Party itself that is inconsistent in tolerating such opportunist parliamentarians as Turati and Co.

[28] From its foundation in 1892, the Italian Socialist Party saw a bitter ideological struggle between the opportunist and the revolutionary trends within it. At the Reggio Emilia Congress of 1912, the most outspoken reformists who supported the war and collaboration with the government and the bourgeoisie (Ivanoe Bonomi, Leonida Bissolati and others) were expelled from the party under pressure from the Left wing. After the outbreak of the First World War and prior to Italy’s entry into it, the I.S.P. came out against the war and advanced the slogan: "Against war, for neutrality!" In December 1914, a group of renegades including Benito Mussolini, who advocated the bourgeoisie’s imperialist policy and supported the war, were expelled from the party. When Italy entered the war on the Entente’s side (May 1915), three distinct trends emerged in the Italian Socialist Party: 1) the Right wing, which aided the bourgeoisie in the conduct of the war; 2) the Centre, which united most of party members and came out under the slogan: "No part in the war, and no sabotage of the war" and 3) the Left wing, which took a firmer anti-war stand, but could not organise a consistent struggle against the war. The Left wing did not realise the necessity of converting the imperialist war into a civil war, and of a decisive break with the reformists.

After the October Socialist Revolution in Russia, the Left wing of the I.S.P. grew stronger, and the 16th Party Congress held on October 5-8, 1919, in Bologna, adopted a resolution on affiliation to the Third International. I.S.P. representatives took part in the work of the Second Congress of the Comintern. After the Congress Centrist Serrati, head of the delegation, declared against a break with the reformists. At the 17th Party Congress in Leghorn in January 1921, the Centrists, who were in the majority, refused to break with the reformists and to accept all the terms of admission into the Comintern. On January 21, 1921, the Left-wing delegates walked out of the Congress and founded the Communist Party of Italy.

[29] Soviet rule was established in Hungary on March 21, 1919. The socialist revolution in Hungary was a peaceful one, the Hungarian bourgeoisie being unable to resist the people. Incapable of overcoming its internal and external difficulties, it decided to hand over power for a while to the Right-wing Social-Democrats so as to prevent the development of the revolution. However, the Hungarian Communist Party’s prestige had grown so great, and the demands of rank-and-file Social-Democrats for unity with the Communists had become so insistent that the leaders of the Social-Democratic Party proposed to the arrested Communist leaders the formation of a joint government. The Social-Democratic leaders were obliged to accept the terms advanced by the Communists during the negotiations, i.e., the formation of a Soviet government, disarmament of the bourgeoisie, the creation of a Red Army and people’s militia, confiscation of the landed estates, the nationalisation of industry, an alliance with Soviet Russia, etc.

An agreement was simultaneously signed on the merging of the two parties to form the Hungarian Socialist Party. While the two parties were being merged, errors were made which later became clear. The merger was carried out mechanically, without isolation of the reformist elements.

At its first meeting, the Revolutionary Governmental Council adopted a resolution on the formation of the Red Army. On March 26, the Soviet Government of Hungary issued decrees on the nationalisation of industrial enterprises, transport, and the banks; on April 2, a decree was published on the monopoly of foreign trade. Workers’ wages were increased by an average of 25 per cent, and an 8-hour working day was introduced. On April 3, land-reform law was issued, by which all estates exceeding 57 hectares in area were confiscated. The confiscated land, however, was not distributed among the land-starved and landless peasants, but was turned over to agricultural producers’ cooperatives and state farms organised after the reform. The poor peasants, who had hoped to get land, were disappointed. This prevented the establishment of a firm alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry, and weakened Soviet power in Hungary.

The Entente imperialists instituted an economic blockade of the Soviet Republic. Armed intervention against the Hungarian Soviet Republic was organised, the advance of interventionist troops stirring up the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries. The treachery of the Right-wing Social-Democrats, who entered into an alliance with international imperialism, was one of the causes of the Hungarian Soviet Republic’s downfall.

The unfavourable international situation in the summer of 1919, when Soviet Russia was encircled by enemies and therefore could not help the Hungarian Soviet Republic, also played a definite role. On August 1, 1919, as a result of joint actions by the foreign imperialist interventionists and the domestic counterrevolutionaries, Soviet power in Hungary was overthrown.

From Occupy Homes MA-Boston-Attention people facing foreclosure or in foreclosure: Don't let the Bank push you out!

From Occupy Homes MA-Boston-Attention people facing foreclosure or in foreclosure: Don't let the Bank push you out!

Important information

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Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Tufts Library - Canoe Room
46 Broad Street, Weymouth
6:00 PM

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