AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Thursday, September 13, 2012

From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-Their Struggles To Build Communist Organizations-The Early Days- Demands of the Communist Party in Germany (1848)

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-Auguste Blanqui 1872-Eternity Through the Stars-Excerpt

Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.

Markin comment:

I will post any updates from that Occupy Boston site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History ’’series started in the fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.

* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

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Auguste Blanqui 1872-Eternity Through the Stars-Excerpt

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Source: Louis Auguste Blanqui, L'éternité par les astres. Librairie Germer Bailliére, 1872, Paris;
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.

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The entire universe is composed of stellar systems. In order to create them nature has only one hundred simple bodies at its disposal. Despite the prodigious profit it knows how to make from its resources, and the incalculable number of combinations these allow its fecundity, the result is necessarily a finite number, like that of the elements themselves. And in order to fill the entire expanse nature must infinitely repeat each of its original or generic combinations.

Every star, whatever it might be, thus exists in infinite number in time and space, not only in one of its aspects, but as it is found in every second of its duration, from birth until death. All the beings spread across its surface, big or little, animate or inanimate, share in this privilege of perennity.

The earth is one of these stars. Every human being is thus eternal in every second of its existence. What I write now in a cell in the fort of Taureau I wrote and will write under the same circumstances for all of eternity, on a table, with a pen, wearing clothing. And so for all.

One after another all these earths are submerged in renovatory flames, to be re-born there and to fall into them again, the monotonous flowing of an hourglass that eternally turns and empties itself. It is something new that is always old; something old that is always new.

Those curious about extra-terrestrial life will nevertheless smile at a mathematical conclusion that grants them not only immortality but eternity. The number of our doubles is infinite in time and space. In all conscience, we can hardly ask for more. These doubles are of flesh and blood, or in pants and coats, in crinoline and chignon. These aren’t phantoms: they are the now eternalized.

There is nevertheless a great defect: there is, alas, no progress! No, these are vulgar re-editions, repetitions. As it is with editions of past worlds, so it is with those of future worlds. Only the chapter of bifurcations remains open to hope. Never forget that all we could have been here, we are somewhere else.

Progress here is only for our nephews. They are luckier than us. All the beautiful things that our globe will see our future descendants have already seen, see now, and will always see in the form of doubles who preceded them and who follow them. Children of a better humanity, they have already scoffed at us and mocked us on dead earths, passing there after us. From living earths from which we have disappeared they continue to condemn us; and on earths to be born, they will forever pursue us with their contempt.

Them and us, as well as all the guests of our planet, are born over again as prisoners of the moment and place that destiny assigns us in its series of avatars. Our perennity is an appendix of its perennity. We are but partial phenomena of its resurrections. Men of the 19th Century, the hour of our apparition is forever fixed, and we are returned always the same, at best with the possibility of happy variants. There is nothing much there to satisfy the thirst for what is better. What then is to be done? I haven’t sought my happiness; I have sought after truth. You will find here neither a revelation nor a prophet, but a simple deduction from the spectral analysis and cosmogony of Laplace. These two discoveries make us eternal. Is this a godsend? We should profit from it. Is it a mystification? We should resign ourselves to it.

But isn’t it a consolation to know ourselves to constantly be, on millions of planets, in the company of our beloved, who is today naught but a memory? Is it another, on the other hand, to think that we have tasted and will eternally taste this happiness in the shape of a double, of millions of doubles! Yet this is what we are. For many of the small minded this happiness through substitutes is somewhat lacking in rapture. They would prefer three or four supplementary years of the current edition to all the duplicates of the infinite. In our century of disillusionment and skepticism we are keen at clinging to things.

But deep down this eternity of man through the stars is melancholy, and sadder still this sequestration of brother-worlds through the barrier of space. So many identical populations that pass each other without suspecting their mutual existence! But yes! It has finally been discovered at the end of the 19th Century. But who will believe it?

And in any event, up till now the past represented barbarism to us, and the future signified progress, science, happiness, illusion! This past has seen brilliant civilizations disappear without leaving a trace on all our double-worlds; and they will disappear without leaving anymore of them. On millions of earths the future will see the ignorance, stupidity, and cruelty of our former ages.

At the present time the entire life of our planet, from birth until death, is being detailed day by day with all its crimes and misfortunes on a myriad of brother-stars. What we call progress is imprisoned on every earth, and fades away with it. Always and everywhere in the terrestrial field the same drama, the same décor; on the same limited stage a boisterous humanity, infatuated with its greatness, believing itself to be the universe, and living in its prison as if it were immense spaces, only to soon fall along with the globe that carried — with the greatest disdain — the burden of its pride. The same monotony, the same immobility on foreign stars. The universe repeats itself endlessly and fidgets in place. Eternity infinitely and imperturbably acts out the same performance.

“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International -Felix Morrow-The National Question in Europe-Our Differences with the Three Theses

Markin comment:

Below this general introduction is another addition to the work of creating a new international working class organization-a revolutionary one fit of the the slogan in the headline.

Markin comment (repost from September 2010):

Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward

The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.

With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
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Felix Morrow-The National Question in Europe-Our Differences with the Three Theses

(December 1942)

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From Fourth International, Vol.3 No.10 (Whole No.28), December 1942, pp. 372-374.
Transcription: by Ted Crawford & Einde O’Callaghan.
XHTML Mark-up: David Walters & Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive
Copyleft: Felix Morrow Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2004. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Continuing the discussion on the national question in Europe, we publish in this issue the theses submitted by a group of European comrades and an answer by Felix Morrow. The official position of the Socialist Workers Party on this question appeared in our October issue.

There is no difference between us and the comrades of the Three Theses as to the reality of the existence of national oppression in the occupied countries. There is no difference between us as to the fact that national oppression now exists in Europe on an unprecedented scale, requiring of us an attentive and sensitive understanding of what is new in the European situation as well as what is similar to the First World War.

Our differences center around the relation between the slogan of national liberation and the slogan of the Socialist United States of Europe. We insist that these two slogans must go together, for otherwise the slogan of national liberation degenerates into mere bourgeois nationalism in the service of one of the imperialist camps. On the other hand the “Three Theses,” it is all too clear, raise the slogan of national liberation independently of the slogan of the Socialist United States

of Europe. In discussions the authors of the Three Theses have indicated that they consider national liberation as an immediate agitation slogan and the Socialist United States of Europe as a propaganda slogan, i.e., not at present suitable for immediate agitation. (Despite repeated requests they have not as yet written anything on this question except the Three Theses.) Their separation of the two slogans must be characterized as a nationalist deviation.

This difference between us on slogans expresses a difference in perspectives. We say that, whichever imperialist camp were to win the war, national oppression in Europe would continue; Anglo-American occupation of Europe would likewise constitute national oppression. An Anglo-American victory would not only bring national oppression to Germany and its allies but we believe would continue national oppression of France and other occupied countries in order to crush the socialist revolution. The bourgeois groups in the occupied countries would undoubtedly be agents of the “democracies” in this task. The authors of the theses, on the other hand, speak of taking part “in the restoration of democracy” and of a “democratic revolution” (Thesis III) which, if words mean anything, can only mean a “revolution” other than a proletarian and the participation of the bourgeoisie and their labor agents in the “restoration of democracy.” The Three Theses, then, have a perspective of a new democratic epoch in Europe. “Of course” they think it will be merely a stage on the road to international socialism. But they base themselves on working for that stage of (in essence) a revival of the Third Republic in France, the Weimar Republic in Germany, etc. For them it is a necessary stage preceding the direct struggle for socialism.

Who Resists the Nazis?

Pursuing this false theory of stages the authors of the theses are driven by their logic to a completely false description of the actual composition of the fighters for national liberation in the occupied countries. Who resists the Nazis? Comrade Loris and the French comrades have provided irrefutable proofs that the movement of resistance is predominantly proletarian. The big bourgeoisie collaborates with the Nazis; the rest of the bourgeoisie in part also collaborates or plays no. role; even the Gaullist, Andre Philip, apologetically says that the anti-Nazi bourgeois elements “do what they can” but that the proletariat is the core of the resistance. The Three Theses, however, more; consistent than Philip in their search for the elements of a “democratic revolution,” states: In the resistance movement “participate all classes and strata from workers, farm laborers, farmers, urban petty bourgeoisie ... to officials, priests, intellectuals and generals ... Everywhere there are involved in protest movements workers, peasants, besides students, journalists, professors, officers, priests, merchants, etc.” (Thesis II). Thus they place on an equal plane the resisting masses, of workers and the handfuls of resisting bourgeois elements! Their false theory leads them to a false description of the actually existing situation.

While they thus evoke a mythical scene of a great movement of the bourgeois elements – they do not even mention the bourgeois collaborators of the Nazis! – the Three Theses insist that the workers’ movement is practically non-existent. There “is no longer an organized and active workers’ movement” and “there can also be no talk of the existence of real revolutionary organizations” (Thesis III). Hence, “Under such circumstances protest against growing suffering must find another outlet” (Thesis II). That is, while the workers’ movement does not and cannot exist at this stage, “another outlet,” namely an all-national movement, can and does exist. Thus the Three Theses counterpose the national movement to the workers’ movement. It can now be seen clearly why they will not link together the slogans of national liberation and the Socialist United States of Europe. They consider national liberation as “another outlet” than the workers’ movement.

This theory is false in fact, since the liberation struggle has actually unfolded under the leadership of workers’ organizations and workers’ groups. Suppose, however, there did exist in France a powerful nationalist organization led by the bourgeoisie, which had drawn into it large sections of the workers. What would be our task then? Obviously, to draw the class line between the bourgeois nationalists and the workers aspiring for national freedom, to teach the workers that there is not “another outlet” for the workers, but that, whatever the tasks facing the workers – including national liberation – they must fight only under the leadership of their own workers’ organizations.

The workers under the Nazi boot want national freedom. Good. The task is to explain to them that national freedom in this epoch is the task of the working class under the leadership of the Fourth International. The task is to expose and condemn bourgeois nationalist organizations as agents of the imperialists who can lead only to further national oppression and repression of the workers. The workers must be shown, as proved by the spectacle of bourgeois collaboration with the Nazis,, that only the working class can free the country by proletarian revolution.

These are the ABC’s of Marxism. It is embarrassing to have to repeat them, but the Three Theses make it necessary.

There are new problems, opportunities and tasks, but not in the direction where the Three Theses seek them. It is astonishing to me that its authors can write that the struggle “levels all and everything and takes a direction which can be described as nothing but a ‘desire for national freedom’.” As if, while the Second World War is still going on, the Nazis had succeeded in obliterating the difference between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the occupied countries! What is really new in the occupied countries is that the national sentiment of the workers and peasants is sharpening their class bitterness against the collaborating bourgeoisie. National oppression has given a new edge to the class struggle. National sentiment, hitherto serving only the bourgeoisie, today can be used against the bourgeoisie of the occupied countries. That is what is new.

While national sentiment can now help the revolutionary movement, it is also still susceptible of perversion to the uses of imperialism. That is why we reject most of the methods of combat advocated by the bourgeois nationalists and their labor agents. What is the main content of the Gaullist-Stalinist tactics, for example? Espionage for the British, individual terrorism, individual sabotage. We condemn all these as serving one of the imperialist camps and as incompatible with the proletarian methods. Individual terrorism against German officers and soldiers creates a situation in which it is impossible to fraternize with the German soldiers – the absolutely indispensable prerequisite for unity of the German and French workers and soldiers against all the imperialists. Terrorism and individual sabotage, aiding the Soviet Union very little if at all, place terrible obstacles in the way of the fraternization and revolution which alone can really aid the Soviet Union. The Gaullists and their Stalinist allies are by these methods uselessly sacrificing heroic fighters who could be invaluable to the revolutionary struggle. It should be plain, then, how important it is to combat the false ideology and methods of the bourgeois nationalists and their labor agents. Ideological victory over them is the prerequisite for the efficacious struggle by the working class for national liberation. But there is not a word about this in the theses. In their search, for a national movement as distinct from the workers’ movement, they falsely subordinate the workers’ methods of struggle to the “unity” of national struggle.

We welcome a reply from the authors of the Three Theses. We shall be only too happy to find that any of our criticisms are but the result of misunderstanding of their vague, confused and contradictory theses. But I must confess that I also recall the false importance which the same comrades gave to the resistance of the German churches to Nazi .coordination; these comrades then thought that the workers could make significant advances through support of the churches’ resistance. I cannot help feeling that the authors of the Three Theses have throughout exhibited a tendency to dissolve the workers’ movement into “broader” bourgeois movements. In all comradeliness, we must ask them to think – and write – their position out to its ultimate implications.

Chicago teachers' strike grinds into third day-Victory To The Chicago Teachers!

Chicago teachers' strike grinds into third day
By DON BABWIN, AP
1 hour ago

CHICAGO — The public teachers' strike that has halted classwork and upset family routines across Chicago ground into a third day Wednesday with some movement reported by union and school board negotiators but no sign of an imminent deal.

Union leaders said they will meet Wednesday morning to review a new, comprehensive proposal from school board negotiators that addresses all the issues still on the table. The board has requested either a written response or a comprehensive counterproposal from the union.

But the teachers Tuesday were lowering expectations for an agreement, buoyed by energetic rallies in which even parents inconvenienced by the strike waved placards in support. Other unions were joining in, with school custodian representatives saying their members will walk off the job this week as well.

Board President David Vitale, the lead schools negotiator, said early in the day that a deal could be reached, but union President Karen Lewis and her colleagues emerged from the talks accusing the board of having dug in its heels with its new proposal. Among the biggest remaining issues are a new teacher evaluation system and a process for deciding which laid-off teachers can be rehired.

"There's been — let's put it this way — centimeters (of progress) and we're still kilometers apart," said Lewis, who earlier stated it was "lunacy" to think the issues could be wrapped up quickly.

School officials also took steps to prepare for a long haul, despite persistent assertions by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and others that the strike was "unnecessary" and could be resolved quickly. The school district in the country's third largest city announced that, beginning Thursday, the 147 drop-off centers where students can get free breakfast and a morning of supervision will be open six hours a day rather than four.

Vitale said late Tuesday that the two sides had held extensive discussions on the teacher evaluation system. But he questioned the seriousness of the union negotiators, noting that they had encouraged the protesting teachers to enjoy themselves at a rally during the day.

As the teachers walk the picket lines, they have been joined by parents who are scrambling to find a place for children to pass the time or for baby sitters. Mothers and fathers — some with their kids in tow — are marching with the teachers. Other parents are honking their encouragement from cars or planting yard signs that announce their support in English and Spanish.

Unions are still hallowed organizations in much of Chicago, and the teachers union holds a special place of honor in many households where children often grow up to join the same police, firefighter or trade unions as their parents and grandparents.

"I'm going to stay strong, behind the teachers," said the Rev. Michael Grant, who joined educators on the picket line Tuesday. "My son says he's proud; `You are supporting my teacher.'"

But one question looming over the contract talks is whether parents will continue to stand behind teachers if students are left idle for days or weeks. That ticking clock could instill a sense of urgency in the ongoing negotiations.

Mary Bryan, the grandmother of two students at Shoop Academy on the city's far South Side, supports the teachers because she see "the frustration, the overwork they have." A protracted labor battle, she acknowledged, would "test the support" of many families.

Parents "should stick with them, but they might demand teachers go back to work," Bryan added.

To win friends, the union has engaged in something of a publicity campaign, telling parents repeatedly about problems with schools and the barriers that have made it more difficult to serve their kids. They cite classrooms that are stifling hot without air conditioning, important books that are unavailable and insufficient supplies of the basics, such as toilet paper.

"They've been keeping me informed about that for months and months," Grant said.

It was a shrewd tactic, said Robert Bruno, professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"This union figured out they couldn't assume the public would be on their side, so they went out and actively engaged in getting parent support," Bruno said. "They worked like the devil to get it."

But, said some reform advocates, public opinion could swing against the union relatively soon if the dispute seems to carry on with no resolution in sight.

Juan Jose Gonzalez is the Chicago director for the education advocacy group Stand for Children, which has hundreds of parent volunteers and was instrumental in pushing legislative reforms in Illinois. He says parents "are all over the map" in terms of their support for teachers or the school district.

"Within a day or two, all parents are going to turn their ire toward the strike," Gonzalez said. "As parents see what the district offers and see the teachers not counterpropose, they will become increasingly frustrated with the grandstanding."

Already, there are some parents who don't understand why teachers would not readily accept a contract offering a 16 percent raise over four years — far more than most American employers are giving in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Rodney Espiritu, a stay-at-home dad whose 4-year-old son just started preschool, said the low test scores he's read about suggest teachers don't have "much of a foot to stand on."

In a telephone poll conducted Monday by the Chicago Sun-Times, nearly half of people surveyed said they supported the teachers union, compared with 39 percent who oppose the strike. Almost three-quarters of those polled regarded Emanuel's efforts to resolve the dispute as average, below average or poor. The poll of 500 registered voters had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

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Associated Press writers Sophia Tareen, Michael Tarm and Jason Keyser contributed to this report.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-Their Struggles To Build Communist Organizations-The Early Days- Various Preface s To The Communist Manifesto By Marx Or Engels

Click on the headline to link to the Marx-Engels Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.

Markin comment:

The foundation article by Marx or Engels listed in the headline goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in other posts in this space. Just below is a thumbnail sketch of the first tentative proceedings to form a communist organization that would become a way-station on the road to building a Bolshevik-type organization in order fight for the socialist revolution we so desperately need and have since Marx and Engels first put pen to ink.
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Marx/Engels Internet Archive-The Communist League

A congress of the League of the Just opened in London on June 2, 1847. Engels was in attendance as delegate for the League's Paris communities. (Marx couldn't attend for financial reasons.)

Engels had a significant impact throughout the congress -- which, as it turned out, was really the "inaugural Congress" of what became known as the Communist League. This organization stands as the first international proletarian organization. With the influence of Marx and Engels anti-utopian socialism, the League's motto changed from "All Men are Brothers" to "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!"

Engels: "In the summer of 1847, the first league congress took place in London, at which W. Wolff represented the Brussels and I the Paris communities. At this congress the reorganization of the League was carried through first of all. ...the League now consisted of communities, circles, leading circles, a central committee and a congress, and henceforth called itself the 'Communist League'."

The Rules were drawn up with the participation of Marx and Engels, examined at the First Congress of the Communist League, and approved at the League's Second Congress in December 1847.

Article 1 of the Rules of the Communist League: "The aim of the league is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property."

The first draft of the Communist League Programme was styled as a catechism -- in the form of questions and answers. Essentially, the draft was authored by Engels. The original manuscript is in Engels's hand.

The League's official paper was to be the Kommunistische Zeitschrift, but the only issue produced was in September 1847 by a resolution of the League's First Congress. It was First Congress prepared by the Central Authority of the Communist League based in London. Karl Schapper was its editor.

The Second Congress of the Communist League was held at the end of November 1847 at London's Red Lion Hotel. Marx attended as delegate of the Brussels Circle. He went to London in the company of Victor Tedesco, member of the Communist League and also a delegate to the Second Congress. Engels again represented the Paris communities. Schapper was elected chairman of the congress, and Engels its secretary.

Friedrich Lessner: "I was working in London then and was a member of the communist Workers' Educational Society at 191 Drury Lane. There, at the end of November and the beginning of December 1847, members of the Central Committee of the Communist League held a congress. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels came there from Brussels to present their views on modern communism and to speak about the Communists' attitude to the political and workers' movement. The meetings, which, naturally, were held in the evenings, were attended by delegates only... Soon we learned that after long debates, the congress had unanimously backed the principles of Marx and Engels..."

The Rules were officially adopted December 8, 1847.

Engels: "All contradiction and doubt were finally set at rest, the new basic principles were unanimously adopted, and Marx and I were commissioned to draw up the Manifesto." This would, of course, become the Communist Manifesto.
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Markin comment on this series:

No question that today at least the figures of 19th century communist revolutionaries, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, are honored more for their “academic” work than their efforts to build political organizations to fight for democratic and socialist revolutions, respectively, as part of their new worldview. Titles like Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, The Peasants Wars In Germany, and the like are more likely to be linked to their names than Cologne Communist League or Workingmen’s International (First International). While the theoretical and historical materialist works have their honored place in the pantheon of revolutionary literature it would be wrong to neglect that hard fact that both Marx and Engels for most of their lives were not “arm chair" revolutionaries or, in Engels case, smitten by fox hunts. These men were revolutionary politicians who worked at revolution in high times and low. Those of us who follow their traditions can, or should, understand that sometimes, a frustratingly long sometimes, the objective circumstances do not allow for fruitful revolutionary work. We push on as we can. Part of that pushing on is to become immersed in the work of our predecessors and in this series the work of Marx and Engels to create a new form of revolutionary organization to fight the fights of their time, the time from about the Revolutions of 1848 to the founding of various socialist parties in Europe in the latter part of the 19th century.
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Preface to The 1872 German Edition

The Communist League, an international association of workers, which could of course be only a secret one, under conditions obtaining at the time, commissioned us, the undersigned, at the Congress held in London in November 1847, to write for publication a detailed theoretical and practical programme for the Party. Such was the origin of the following Manifesto, the manuscript of which travelled to London to be printed a few weeks before the February [French] Revolution [in 1848]. First published in German, it has been republished in that language in at least twelve different editions in Germany, England, and America. It was published in English for the first time in 1850 in the Red Republican, London, translated by Miss Helen Macfarlane, and in 1871 in at least three different translations in America. The French version first appeared in Paris shortly before the June insurrection of 1848, and recently in Le Socialiste of New York. A new translation is in the course of preparation. A Polish version appeared in London shortly after it was first published in Germany. A Russian translation was published in Geneva in the sixties . Into Danish, too, it was translated shortly after its appearance.
However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (See The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association, 1871, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated.
But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter. A subsequent edition may perhaps appear with an introduction bridging the gap from 1847 to the present day; but this reprint was too unexpected to leave us time for that.
Karl Marx & Frederick Engels
June 24, 1872, London

Preface to The 1882 Russian Edition

The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, translated by Bakunin, was published early in the ‘sixties by the printing office of the Kolokol [a reference to the Free Russian Printing House]. Then the West could see in it (the Russian edition of the Manifesto) only a literary curiosity. Such a view would be impossible today.
What a limited field the proletarian movement occupied at that time (December 1847) is most clearly shown by the last section: the position of the Communists in relation to the various opposition parties in various countries. Precisely Russia and the United States are missing here. It was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of all European reaction, when the United States absorbed the surplus proletarian forces of Europe through immigration. Both countries provided Europe with raw materials and were at the same time markets for the sale of its industrial products. Both were, therefore, in one way of another, pillars of the existing European system.
How very different today. Precisely European immigration fitted North American for a gigantic agricultural production, whose competition is shaking the very foundations of European landed property – large and small. At the same time, it enabled the United States to exploit its tremendous industrial resources with an energy and on a scale that must shortly break the industrial monopoly of Western Europe, and especially of England, existing up to now. Both circumstances react in a revolutionary manner upon America itself. Step by step, the small and middle land ownership of the farmers, the basis of the whole political constitution, is succumbing to the competition of giant farms; at the same time, a mass industrial proletariat and a fabulous concentration of capital funds are developing for the first time in the industrial regions.
And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European princes, but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat just beginning to awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today, he is a prisoner of war of the revolution in Gatchina , and Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.
The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.
Karl Marx & Frederick Engels
January 21, 1882, London

Preface to The 1883 German Edition

The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the whole working class of Europe and America owes more than to any one else – rests at Highgate Cemetery and over his grave the first grass is already growing. Since his death [March 14, 1883], there can be even less thought of revising or supplementing the Manifesto. But I consider it all the more necessary again to state the following expressly:
The basic thought running through the Manifesto – that economic production, and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom, constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primaeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social evolution; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression, class struggles – this basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx.*
I have already stated this many times; but precisely now is it necessary that it also stand in front of the Manifesto itself.
Frederick Engels
June 28, 1883, London

Preface to The 1888 English Edition

The Manifesto was published as the platform of the Communist League, a working men’ s association, first exclusively German, later on international, and under the political conditions of the Continent before 1848, unavoidably a secret society. At a Congress of the League, held in November 1847, Marx and Engels were commissioned to prepare a complete theoretical and practical party programme. Drawn up in German, in January 1848, the manuscript was sent to the printer in London a few weeks before the French Revolution of February 24. A French translation was brought out in Paris shortly before the insurrection of June 1848. The first English translation, by Miss Helen Macfarlane, appeared in George Julian Harney’ s Red Republican, London, 1850. A Danish and a Polish edition had also been published.
The defeat of the Parisian insurrection of June 1848 – the first great battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie – drove again into the background, for a time, the social and political aspirations of the European working class. Thenceforth, the struggle for supremacy was, again, as it had been before the Revolution of February, solely between different sections of the propertied class; the working class was reduced to a fight for political elbow-room, and to the position of extreme wing of the middle-class Radicals. Wherever independent proletarian movements continued to show signs of life, they were ruthlessly hunted down. Thus the Prussian police hunted out the Central Board of the Communist League, then located in Cologne. The members were arrested and, after eighteen months’ imprisonment, they were tried in October 1852. This celebrated “Cologne Communist Trial” lasted from October 4 till November 12; seven of the prisoners were sentenced to terms of imprisonment in a fortress, varying from three to six years. Immediately after the sentence, the League was formally dissolved by the remaining members. As to the Manifesto, it seemed henceforth doomed to oblivion.
When the European workers had recovered sufficient strength for another attack on the ruling classes, the International Working Men’ s Association sprang up. But this association, formed with the express aim of welding into one body the whole militant proletariat of Europe and America, could not at once proclaim the principles laid down in the Manifesto. The International was bound to have a programme broad enough to be acceptable to the English trade unions, to the followers of Proudhon in France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, and to the Lassalleans in Germany.*
Marx, who drew up this programme to the satisfaction of all parties, entirely trusted to the intellectual development of the working class, which was sure to result from combined action and mutual discussion. The very events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the victories, could not help bringing home to men’ s minds the insufficiency of their various favorite nostrums, and preparing the way for a more complete insight into the true conditions for working-class emancipation. And Marx was right. The International, on its breaking in 1874, left the workers quite different men from what it found them in 1864. Proudhonism in France, Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out, and even the conservative English trade unions, though most of them had long since severed their connection with the International, were gradually advancing towards that point at which, last year at Swansea, their president [W. Bevan] could say in their name: “Continental socialism has lost its terror for us.” In fact, the principles of the Manifesto had made considerable headway among the working men of all countries.
The Manifesto itself came thus to the front again. Since 1850, the German text had been reprinted several times in Switzerland, England, and America. In 1872, it was translated into English in New York, where the translation was published in Woorhull and Claflin’s Weekly. From this English version, a French one was made in Le Socialiste of New York. Since then, at least two more English translations, more or less mutilated, have been brought out in America, and one of them has been reprinted in England. The first Russian translation, made by Bakunin, was published at Herzen’ s Kolokol office in Geneva, about 1863; a second one, by the heroic Vera Zasulich, also in Geneva, in 1882. A new Danish edition is to be found in Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek, Copenhagen, 1885; a fresh French translation in Le Socialiste, Paris, 1886. From this latter, a Spanish version was prepared and published in Madrid, 1886. The German reprints are not to be counted; there have been twelve altogether at the least. An Armenian translation, which was to be published in Constantinople some months ago, did not see the light, I am told, because the publisher was afraid of bringing out a book with the name of Marx on it, while the translator declined to call it his own production. Of further translations into other languages I have heard but had not seen. Thus the history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern working-class movement; at present, it is doubtless the most wide spread, the most international production of all socialist literature, the common platform acknowledged by millions of working men from Siberia to California.
Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the “educated” classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of total social change, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce the Utopian communism of Cabet in France, and of Weitling in Germany. Thus, in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, “respectable”; communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that “the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself,” there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take. Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating it.
The Manifesto being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms the nucleus belongs to Marx. That proposition is: That in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which it is built up, and from that which alone can be explained the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; That the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class – the proletariat – cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class – the bourgeoisie – without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinction, and class struggles.
This proposition, which, in my opinion, is destined to do for history what Darwin’ s theory has done for biology, we both of us, had been gradually approaching for some years before 1845. How far I had independently progressed towards it is best shown by my “Conditions of the Working Class in England.” But when I again met Marx at Brussels, in spring 1845, he had it already worked out and put it before me in terms almost as clear as those in which I have stated it here.
From our joint preface to the German edition of 1872, I quote the following:
“However much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (See The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’ s Association 1871, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the Earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated.
“But then, the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter.”
The present translation is by Mr Samuel Moore, the translator of the greater portion of Marx’ s “Capital.” We have revised it in common, and I have added a few notes explanatory of historical allusions.
Frederick Engels
January 30, 1888, London

Preface to The 1890 German Edition

Since [the first German preface of 1883] was written, a new German edition of the Manifesto has again become necessary, and much has also happened to the Manifesto which should be recorded here.
A second Russian translation – by Vera Zasulich – appeared in Geneva in 1882; the preface to that edition was written by Marx and myself. Unfortunately, the original German manuscript has gone astray; I must therefore retranslate from the Russian which will in no way improve the text. It reads:
[Reprint of the 1882 Russian Edition ]
At about the same date, a new Polish version appeared in Geneva: Manifest Kommunistyczny.
Furthermore, a new Danish translation has appeared in the Socialdemokratisk Bibliothek, Copenhagen, 1885. Unfortunately, it is not quite complete; certain essential passages, which seem to have presented difficulties to the translator, have been omitted, and, in addition, there are signs of carelessness here and there, which are all the more unpleasantly conspicuous since the translation indicates that had the translator taken a little more pains, he would have done an excellent piece of work.
A new French version appeared in 1886, in Le Socialiste of Paris; it is the best published to date.
From this latter, a Spanish version was published the same year in El Socialista of Madrid, and then reissued in pamphlet form: Manifesto del Partido Communista por Carlos Marx y F. Engels, Madrid, Administracion de El Socialista, Hernan Cortes 8.
As a matter of curiosity, I may mention that in 1887 the manuscript of an Armenian translation was offered to a publisher in Constantinople. But the good man did not have the courage to publish something bearing the name of Marx and suggested that the translator set down his own name as author, which the latter however declined.
After one, and then another, of the more or less inaccurate American translations had been repeatedly reprinted in England, an authentic version at last appeared in 1888. This was my friend Samuel Moore, and we went through it together once more before it went to press. It is entitled: Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Authorized English translation, edited and annotated by Frederick Engels, 1888, London, William Reeves, 185 Fleet Street, E.C. I have added some of the notes of that edition to the present one.
The Manifesto has had a history of its own. Greeted with enthusiasm, at the time of its appearance, by the not at all numerous vanguard of scientific socialism (as is proved by the translations mentioned in the first place), it was soon forced into the background by the reaction that began with the defeat of the Paris workers in June 1848, and was finally excommunicated “by law” in the conviction of the Cologne Communists in November 1852. With the disappearance from the public scene of the workers’ movement that had begun with the February Revolution, the Manifesto too passed into the background.
When the European workers had again gathered sufficient strength for a new onslaught upon the power of the ruling classes, the International Working Men’ s Association came into being. Its aim was to weld together into one huge army the whole militant working class of Europe and America. Therefore it could not set out from the principles laid down in the Manifesto. It was bound to have a programme which would not shut the door on the English trade unions, the French, Belgian, Italian, and Spanish Proudhonists, and the German Lassalleans. This programme – the considerations underlying the Statutes of the International – was drawn up by Marx with a master hand acknowledged even by the Bakunin and the anarchists. For the ultimate final triumph of the ideas set forth in the Manifesto, Marx relied solely upon the intellectual development of the working class, as it necessarily has to ensue from united action and discussion. The events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the successes, could not but demonstrate to the fighters the inadequacy of their former universal panaceas, and make their minds more receptive to a thorough understanding of the true conditions for working-class emancipation. And Marx was right. The working class of 1874, at the dissolution of the International, was altogether different from that of 1864, at its foundation. Proudhonism in the Latin countries, and the specific Lassalleanism in Germany, were dying out; and even the ten arch-conservative English trade unions were gradually approaching the point where, in 1887, the chairman of their Swansea Congress could say in their name: “Continental socialism has lost its terror for us.” Yet by 1887 continental socialism was almost exclusively the theory heralded in the Manifesto. Thus, to a certain extent, the history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern working-class movement since 1848. At present, it is doubtless the most widely circulated, the most international product of all socialist literature, the common programme of many millions of workers of all countries from Siberia to California.
Nevertheless, when it appeared, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. In 1847, two kinds of people were considered socialists. On the one hand were the adherents of the various utopian systems, notably the Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France, both of whom, at that date, had already dwindled to mere sects gradually dying out. On the other, the manifold types of social quacks who wanted to eliminate social abuses through their various universal panaceas and all kinds of patch-work, without hurting capital and profit in the least. In both cases, people who stood outside the labor movement and who looked for support rather to the “educated” classes. The section of the working class, however, which demanded a radical reconstruction of society, convinced that mere political revolutions were not enough, then called itself Communist. It was still a rough-hewn, only instinctive and frequently somewhat crude communism. Yet, it was powerful enough to bring into being two systems of utopian communism – in France, the “Icarian” communists of Cabet, and in Germany that of Weitling. Socialism in 1847 signified a bourgeois movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, quite respectable, whereas communism was the very opposite. And since we were very decidedly of the opinion as early as then that “the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the working class itself,” [from the General Rules of the International] we could have no hesitation as to which of the two names we should choose. Nor has it ever occurred to us to repudiate it.
“Working men of all countries, unite!” But few voices responded when we proclaimed these words to the world 42 years ago, on the eve of the first Paris Revolution in which the proletariat came out with the demands of its own. On September 28, 1864, however, the proletarians of most of the Western European countries joined hands in the International Working Men’ s Association of glorious memory. True, the International itself lived only nine years. But that the eternal union of the proletarians of all countries created by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is no better witness than this day. Because today , as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as one army, under one flag, for one immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers’ Congress of 1889. And today’ s spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the proletarians of all countries are united indeed.
If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!
Frederick Engels
May 1, 1890, London

Preface to The 1892 Polish Edition

The fact that a new Polish edition of the Communist Manifesto has become necessary gives rise to various thoughts.
First of all, it is noteworthy that of late the Manifesto has become an index, as it were, of the development of large-scale industry on the European continent. In proportion as large-scale industry expands in a given country, the demand grows among the workers of that country for enlightenment regarding their position as the working class in relation to the possessing classes, the socialist movement spreads among them and the demand for the Manifesto increases. Thus, not only the state of the labour movement but also the degree of development of large-scale industry can be measured with fair accuracy in every country by the number of copies of the Manifesto circulated in the language of that country.
Accordingly, the new Polish edition indicates a decided progress of Polish industry. And there can be no doubt whatever that this progress since the previous edition published ten years ago has actually taken place. Russian Poland, Congress Poland, has become the big industrial region of the Russian Empire. Whereas Russian large-scale industry is scattered sporadically – a part round the Gulf of Finland, another in the centre (Moscow and Vladimir), a third along the coasts of the Black and Azov seas, and still others elsewhere – Polish industry has been packed into a relatively small area and enjoys both the advantages and disadvantages arising from such concentration. The competing Russian manufacturers acknowledged the advantages when they demanded protective tariffs against Poland, in spit of their ardent desire to transform the Poles into Russians. The disadvantages – for the Polish manufacturers and the Russian government – are manifest in the rapid spread of socialist ideas among the Polish workers and in the growing demand for the Manifesto.
But the rapid development of Polish industry, outstripping that of Russia, is in its turn a new proof of the inexhaustible vitality of the Polish people and a new guarantee of its impending national restoration. And the restoration of an independent and strong Poland is a matter which concerns not only the Poles but all of us. A sincere international collaboration of the European nations is possible only if each of these nations is fully autonomous in its own house. The Revolution of 1848, which under the banner of the proletariat, after all, merely let the proletarian fighters do the work of the bourgeoisie, also secured the independence of Italy, Germany and Hungary through its testamentary executors, Louis Bonaparte and Bismarck; but Poland, which since 1792 had done more for the Revolution than all these three together, was left to its own resources when it succumbed in 1863 to a tenfold greater Russian force. The nobility could neither maintain nor regain Polish independence; today, to the bourgeoisie, this independence is, to say the last, immaterial. Nevertheless, it is a necessity for the harmonious collaboration of the European nations. It can be gained only by the young Polish proletariat, and in its hands it is secure. For the workers of all the rest of Europe need the independence of Poland just as much as the Polish workers themselves.
F. Engels
London, February 10, 1892

Preface to The 1893 Italian Edition

Publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party coincided, one may say, with March 18, 1848, the day of the revolution in Milan and Berlin, which were armed uprisings of the two nations situated in the centre, the one, of the continent of Europe, the other, of the Mediterranean; two nations until then enfeebled by division and internal strife, and thus fallen under foreign domination. While Italy was subject to the Emperor of Austria, Germany underwent the yoke, not less effective though more indirect, of the Tsar of all the Russias. The consequences of March 18, 1848, freed both Italy and Germany from this disgrace; if from 1848 to 1871 these two great nations were reconstituted and somehow again put on their own, it was as Karl Marx used to say, because the men who suppressed the Revolution of 1848 were, nevertheless, its testamentary executors in spite of themselves.
Everywhere that revolution was the work of the working class; it was the latter that built the barricades and paid with its lifeblood. Only the Paris workers, in overthrowing the government, had the very definite intention of overthrowing the bourgeois regime. But conscious though they were of the fatal antagonism existing between their own class and the bourgeoisie, still, neither the economic progress of the country nor the intellectual development of the mass of French workers had as yet reached the stage which would have made a social reconstruction possible. In the final analysis, therefore, the fruits of the revolution were reaped by the capitalist class. In the other countries, in Italy, in Germany, in Austria, the workers, from the very outset, did nothing but raise the bourgeoisie to power. But in any country the rule of the bourgeoisie is impossible without national independence Therefore, the Revolution of 1848 had to bring in its train the unity and autonomy of the nations that had lacked them up to then: Italy, Germany, Hungary. Poland will follow in turn.
Thus, if the Revolution of 1848 was not a socialist revolution, it paved the way, prepared the ground for the latter. Through the impetus given to large-scaled industry in all countries, the bourgeois regime during the last forty-five years has everywhere created a numerous, concentrated and powerful proletariat. It has thus raised, to use the language of the Manifesto, its own grave-diggers. Without restoring autonomy and unity to each nation, it will be impossible to achieve the international union of the proletariat, or the peaceful and intelligent co-operation of these nations toward common aims. Just imagine joint international action by the Italian, Hungarian, German, Polish and Russian workers under the political conditions preceding 1848!
The battles fought in 1848 were thus not fought in vain. Nor have the forty-five years separating us from that revolutionary epoch passed to no purpose. The fruits are ripening, and all I wish is that the publication of this Italian translation may augur as well for the victory of the Italian proletariat as the publication of the original did for the international revolution.
The Manifesto does full justice to the revolutionary part played by capitalism in the past. The first capitalist nation was Italy. The close of the feudal Middle Ages, and the opening of the modern capitalist era are marked by a colossal figured: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of modern times. Today, as in 1300, a new historical era is approaching. Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of birth of this new, proletarian era?

Frederick Engels
London, February 1, 1893

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Veterans For Peace Demand Peace And Justice- October 7, 2012- New York City

Click on the headline to link to the Veterans For Peace website.

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At 10 p.m. on May 1,2012, the New York Police Department closed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, driving out members of the Occupy movement who were holding a nonviolent General Assembly. Eight members of the Veterans Peace Team and two members of Occupy Faith were arrested for standing their ground. A small metal sign has been posted at the park stating that it closes at 10 p.m. This was Vietnam vet Paul Appell's reaction:

"Plato wrote 'only the dead have seen the end of war.' War veterans, loved ones of the fallen, and certainly those living in war ^ones do not have the option of closing down their memories at 10p.m. There is a good reason why suicide is an attractive option for many. It is truly the only sure way of ending the memories. For a memorial to shut down at some convenient time for the city is an insult to all those who do not have the luxury of shutting down their war memories at a specific time. I know that many want us war vets to go out of sight and nof bother them, except when we are needed for some parade. Some of us are not going away at 10 p.m. or any other time. If they do not like it, maybe they should have thought of that before they sent us to war."

International Day Of Peace In Boston-Friday, September 21, 2012

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin-No Country For Old Men- Bob Dylan’s “Tempest”- A CD Review

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bob Dylan performing Mississippi from his Love and Theft album.

CD Review

Tempest, Bob Dylan, Columbia Records, 2012

It is hard to believe that I have been listening to Brother Dylan now for fifty years, some good, some bad, some fat some lean, the years that is, just like the lyrics in this 35th studio album. As usual, especially of late, he either soars with the lyrical angels or is down in wordsmith skid row with the rest of us. Also as usual of late, at least since World Gone Wrong, some of the material as befits the times is dark, dark as the night with no apparent light at the end of that night. More on this below.

Getting back to the difference in listening to Dylan then and now though. In the old days I had to sneak up into my room and listen to his stuff on a local folk music program on my transistor radio (for the younger set that was a small battery- operated radio we could use to listen to rock and roll and other parent- disapproved music without them knowing it. Sorry, no up or down loading, you just took what you could get and on some nights, usually Sunday, you could get Moon Odom’s Blues Hour out of Chicago and be in seventh heaven). Why was I forced into exile? My parents blew their collective tops when I played Dylan’s raspy-voiced Blowin’ In The Wind for the 217th straight time on the family record player. See they objected not so much to the lyrics (although they, thankfully, probably didn’t understand them) as to that damn voice, especially compared to their generation’s Frank Sinatra or the Inkspots let’s say.

Well, Brother Dylan’s voice if it was raspy then is more like cracked glass now. But did (does) anybody listen to his stuff for the voice (or the melody). Hell, no, or at least I hope it is hell no, it has always been about the lyrics, about some theme that interested him at any particular point and that is the case here with Tempest. Bob Dylan could have been the president of the generation of’’68, my generation, but after the first fanfare as the voice of that generation he chose to move on and re-invent himself as what has now become an ageless (and endlessly touring) troubadour, something out of the old medieval tradition.

And so we have had, and have here, ballad offerings (Tempest, a.k.a. Captain Ahab meets the Titanic), musings, prose poems, muttering of an old sometimes wise man (Long and Wasted Years), perfectly meshed lyrics (Soon After Midnight), songs of love, thwarted love, love gone bad, love with regret and no regrets, murmuring of dark times here and now and to come , a nod to fallen comrades (Roll On John), and just plain old fashioned Dylan whimsy.

Does that sound familiar? Well, it should it because it is the “formula” Dylan has been using at least since Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited (is there any darker song here than Desolation Row by the way). And in the end that is why you should listen to this album. While we all know, and have had it pounded into our heads almost daily, this is no country for old men (or old women either) note this, and note it well, you need to listen to this old man in order to know what it was like in the times when men and women wrote meaningful and worthy lyrics for keeps even when sung with cracked glass voices. Enough said

“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International -"Fourth International," December 1942-The National Question in Europe-Three Theses on the European Situation and the Political Tasks

Markin comment:

Below this general introduction is another addition to the work of creating a new international working class organization-a revolutionary one fit of the the slogan in the headline.

Markin comment (repost from September 2010):

Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward

The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.

With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
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Fourth International, December 1942-The National Question in Europe-Three Theses on the European Situation and the Political Tasks

(19 October 1941)

From Fourth International, Vol.3 No.10 (Whole No.28), December 1942, pp.370-372.
Transcription: by Ted Crawford & Einde O’Callaghan.
HTML Mark-up: David Walters & Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Copyleft: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL) 2004. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Continuing the discussion on the national question in Europe, we publish in this issue the theses submitted by a group of European comrades and an answer by Felix Morrow. The official position of the Socialist Workers Party on this question appeared in our October issue.

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It is as clear in the third year of the new World War as it was at it’s beginning that this is a war of long duration, a war that has no prospect of being decided by means of military power and thus reach its “natural” end. In ever increasing tempo it has changed the economic, political and social face of the earth; it has destroyed dynasties and nations, enslaved peoples and half-exterminated them. Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece and a large part of Russia have one after another been conquered and occupied by the German armies. Austria, formerly incorporated, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and Rumania are under German domination and control, while the rest of Europe (Sweden, Switzerland, Finland and Turkey) is to a great extent under German influence. In all these countries the regimentation of human life is making gigantic progress and changes them to German prisons. The prisons, the new ghettos, the forced labor, the concentration and even war-prisoners camps are not only transitional political-military establishments, they are just as much forms of new economic exploitation which accompanies the development toward a modern slave state and is intended as the permanent fate of a considerable percentage of mankind. As always, the first victims of a system that has become impossible are the “politically untrustworthy,” Jews, foreigners, refugees, of whom the “published” number in France alone was admitted to be over 120,000 on August 20, 1941. This economic ruin is accompanied by a callous destruction of human lives and values and a migration of peoples of colossal extent. “Resettlements,” transfer of workers, etc., which amount to hundreds of thousands, follow the movement of armies of millions. The German radio made known in the middle of August 1941 that a country, such as Belgium, had already supplied 200,000 workers to Germany.

All this is the result of a process which began a long time ago and only increases in intensity in the present war. Far from being “planned organization,” this process follows laws of compulsion and seeks to break through by force, where it cannot shake off, the competition on the international scale. Before as after, the accumulation of capital and unheard of riches on the one side entails the accumulation of misery, suffering, ruin, destruction and barbarism on the other side. The world-wide economic crisis of 1929 cost already as much as the First World War, but the technical rationalization which followed it flowed into the greater crisis of the new war ten years later. Confronted with the choice of lagging behind and seeing cannons, tanks and airships of the dominant powers turned against them, German capitalism organized its own war machine and beat down the world competition with its cannons, airships and tanks. So mechanization with progressing capitalist application leads itself ad absurdum. The means of destruction which are supposed to solve the crisis and lead to a solution, force production of further means of destruction and cause unprecedented economic disproportions which subject the whole world. England and America answer German expansion with a rearming which is to surpass any previously known and again set back the production of consumer goods.

The English dominions, Latin America and the resources of India are drawn in increasing measure into the conduct of the war and thus, together with the deep-going changes in Asia and Africa, strengthen the tendency which leads to the universal reduction in the standard of living of the masses, to destruction, to the preparation of greater disproportions and greater crises. Not only have the productive powers of mankind ceased growing, not only have technical discoveries and improvements brought about no further increase in material wealth, but economy is retrogressing. In contrast to the use of complicated machinery, and in contrast to the concentration and over-development of an industry fit only for war purposes, there is compulsory labor, that is, the mass use of manual labor which is cheaper than machine labor, the founding and extension of small and middle-sized firms because of the shortage oft consumer goods, the restoration of handwork, the dissipation and ruin of the monetary system. Uneven development is recapitulated in the whole world and along with it, agricultural production decreases constantly. Wherever one looks, there are destruction, gangrene and anarchy in alarming degree which seal the catastrophe of culture.

II

As a result of the brutal suffering and terrific pressure which the war imposes upon the nations, hate, rage and despair are accumulated and unleashed at first in the countries conquered by Germany. The political situation in these systematically exploited countries is characterized above all by the destruction of workers’ and non-fascist bourgeois parties. Step by step unions, political and cultural societies of all kinds, religious organizations, etc. are wiped out according to the German pattern, changed or in some way put under direct fascist control. With certain exceptions, where this process has not yet been fully completed, there is no longer an independent traditional bourgeois or proletarian political or workers’ movement, and in these countries (especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia) even the “national” bourgeoisie is being more and more crushed by such means as “aryanization,” compulsory sales and direct expulsion. All that is left of the old organized movements are today nothing but illegal circles, which have little connection with each other and can in no way act as an entity. Under such circumstances protest against growing suffering must find another outlet. In the face of unbearable conditions, it directs itself against the one visible and consistently present enemy in the form of the German Conqueror. As it is pushed to that limit which is daily drawn closer and closer by this enemy, it levels all and everything and takes a direction which can be described as nothing but a “drive for national freedom.” In a few countries (Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, in part Poland, etc.) this drive has crossed the limit and has turned into a real people’s movement, which also passes the limit of the old movements. In it participate all classes and strata, from workers, farm laborers, farmers, urban petty bourgeoisie (tradesmen and artisans, that is, together with the farmers, those classes, which in spite of their large numbers are remnants of pre-capitalistic modes of production) to officials, priests, intellectuals and generals. In other countries, where it has not reached the point of mass resistance, the movement goes underground and finds respective expression in individual acts of sabotage, arson, train wrecks, accidents, assassinations, etc. But everywhere involved in protest movements, at the side of workers and peasants, etc., there are students, journalists, professors, officers, priests, merchants. And they range without distinction amongst the victims of the German repression. The longer the war lasts, the more will German fascism appear as the main enemy to the enslaved and exploited peoples. Everything will be leveled to a desire for the overthrow of this enemy and, in fact, it must be recognized that without it there can be no question of change in existing conditions.

III

If in the Europe dominated by Germany there is no longer an organized and active workers’ movement and even the bourgeois organizations are out of the picture, there can also be no talk of the existence of real revolutionary organizations, insofar as they are understood as united structures, which, even if illegal, would be willing and capable of influencing the development by means at least of correct agitation and propaganda. What is left of the revolutionary tendency are individuals and weak and uneven groups, which are more or less correctly oriented on the general evaluation of the situation and the abstract principles, but living at the brink of events and failing to understand how to formulate their concrete tasks. The mood and initiative of the masses, for which every revolutionist, as every revolutionary party, should have a fine sensitivity, met these organizations completely unprepared and passed over them to the order of the day which can be called “struggle for national liberation.” It is no exaggeration to state that revolutionary socialism may once again miss a chance and compromise itself, if it continues to face this struggle any longer without taking part. The responsibility lies with international socialism, to take up the demands of all oppressed – in no matter what form they appear – to raise its voice loudly and clearly, mobilize its forces, to enlighten the world on the meaning of events, to assist the national sections in word and deed, and to lead them to the right path. There is no more burning problem in Europe than the national liberation of nations enslaved by Germany, and its solution with the help and through international socialism is important and indispensable for three reasons.

First, these are democratic demands, which must always and everywhere be supported and without the realization of which socialism cannot win.

Second, socialism cannot find the necessary allies in city and country for the accomplishment of the revolution, cannot mobilize the masses for the final battle and cannot win their sympathy if it hasn’t stepped forward as the determined defender of their demands during an entire period and thus won the leadership in battle.

Third, only revolutionary socialism is in the position to realize the democratic program and to give a goal and direction to the movement at hand, without which it must sooner or later relapse and bury socialism under itself.

Along with these general reasons which are applicable under all conditions, there are specific ones which arise from the present situation.

In Europe in order to be able to restore the tie between socialism, isolated because of retrograde development, and the workers’ and mass movement, it is necessary to build revolutionary parties and restore the labor movement. But to change the existing cadres and cadre elements into revolutionary parties, it is necessary to have a more sympathetic milieu which allows them under illegality to test their forces, to school themselves, to educate new forces, to gather the most progressive elements around it, to overcome the leveling, to introduce the absolutely essential differentiation and to step forward as the vanguard of freedom. The gulf, which up to the moment of revolution exists between on the one hand the program of socialist revolution and the ripeness of the objective conditions, and on the other hand the consciousness of the masses and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard, is today especially wide. This gulf, the most important element of which is at present the inexperience of the younger generation, can be bridged only by a system of transitional demands, but the world situation and the peculiar conditions in Europe make such a system a matter of life and death in the near future.

However one views it, the transition from fascism to socialism remains a Utopia without an intermediate stage, which is basically equivalent to a democratic revolution. The advantage of the European situation consists in the fact that the masses are being forced on the path of national freedom and that the struggle for this because of the general situation offers a complete transitional program which encompasses all democratic demands from freedom of assembly, press, organization and religion and the right to strike to the right of self-determination of nations. It would be absolutely false to conceive it possible to take part in politics and ignore the democratic demands; it would be very dangerous to take the attitude that national freedom could not further socialistic interests. The danger of standing with “tied hands” does not confront the one that takes part in the restoration of democracy and becomes its daring standard-bearer but the one who stands passively by, does not participate and allows the movement to pass him by and thereby permits the imperialists, “democrats” and reformists to give it a bourgeois instead of a socialist character. The passive bearer of the socialist revolution is comparable to those Italian Maximalists who upon receiving word of an uprising in Turin decided, after the collapse of the uprising on the fifth day, to deny their aid because it was not a question of a “true communist” uprising. The result was the victory of fascism, the discrediting of socialism, the crisis of proletarian leadership, the Second World War. With the continuation of the World War the “European” problem becomes acute even for American socialism and makes a clear, active connection with it essential. It is enough for every revolutionary to render an account of the forces led into battle in this war in order to come to the same conclusion which was our starting point: It is a war of long duration, which must completely destroy all human culture, if the rebellion of the masses does not end it. Nothing can free World Socialism from the duty of stirring up this rebellion, preparing for it and acknowledging all means of struggle, which correspond to the forces at hand and which permit the formation of a revolutionary party and that has prospects of assuring results most favorable in a given situation. An abstract attitude toward revolution, however, which fails in the secondary as well as the most important tactical questions, can lead to nothing but another defeat.