THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND THE BLACK LIBERATION STRUGGLE

COMMENTARY

BLACK LIBERATION THROUGH THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM

 

This article is a reprint, with slight editing for the blog, from the journal BLACK HISTORY AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE first published in 2001 in Workers Vanguard. The thrust of the historic points in the article speak for themselves. Markin.

 

"Everything new on the Negro question came from Moscow—after the Russian Revolution began to thunder its demand throughout the world for freedom and equality for all national minorities, all subject peoples and all races—for all the despised and rejected of the earth." —James P. Cannon, "The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement" (International Socialist Review, Summer 1959; reprinted in The First Ten Years of American Communism [1962])

 

These words, describing the revolu­tionary ideas which inspired a generation of radicals in the early 1920s, were writ­ten by American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon as the historic struggle for black freedom and equality in the U.S. entered a new chapter with the civil rights movement. The October Revolution of 1917 was a beacon to the exploited and oppressed throughout the world, the greatest victory ever achieved by the working people. As the multinational working class, led by the Bolshevik Party of V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, smashed the bloody rule of the capitalist masters and erected its own state power, it opened the portals of liberation to all the many oppressed peoples of Russia.

In the U.S., the reverberations of the Russian Revolution coincided with the great migration of Southern black share­croppers to the cities of the North and the return of some 400,000 black World War I vets. This combination of events gave birth to the rise of a new black mil­itancy. It also gave birth to the far-flung web of repression that a half century later took the form of the FBI's COINTEL-PRO (Counter-intelligence Program) ter­ror operation. From the time of the slave revolts before the Civil War, the sight of black people armed not only with guns but with "radical" notions of freedom and equality has struck fear into Amer­ica's racist rulers. In a 1919 Senate report, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, author of the infamous 1920 Palmer Raids, warned that "the Negro is 'seeing red'."

 

Many black radicals in the early '20s did indeed look to the Russian Revolu­tion, and a few joined the early American Communist Party (CP). Among them were leaders of the African Blood Broth­erhood (ABB), mainly composed of West Indian immigrants, which advocated race pride and armed self-defense against racist terror. As black people took up arms in self-defense against a series of racist pogroms and lynchings that swept American cities from Washington to Tulsa, Oklahoma at the end of World War I, the ABB defiantly proclaimed in an article headlined "The Tulsa Outrage" (Crusader, July 1921):

 

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

America! That is the kind of justice the Jew used to get in capitalist-Czarist Rus­sia, until the workers of all races arose in their wrath and overthrew the capitalist-Czarist combination and set up Soviets. Now the workers of all races get equal justice—in Russia. How long will the Negro in America continue to fall for capitalist bunk? How many more Tulsas will it take to line up the Negro where by all race interests he belongs—with the radical forces of the world that are work­ing for the overthrow of capitalism and the dawn of a new day, a new heaven and a new earth?"

 

These questions are posed with no less urgency 80 years later. The last great struggle for black equality in the U.S., the civil rights movement, resulted in the formal elimination of entrenched Jim Crow segregation in the South. But it did nothing to ameliorate the de facto seg­regation of the black masses at the bot­tom of American society—massive and chronic unemployment, segregated and substandard housing and schools, rampant

cop terror in the ghettos—rooted in the very foundations of this capitalist system. Thousands upon thousands of civil rights activists faced down shotgun-wielding cops and Klan lynchers in white robes. But the movement was steered away from a revolutionary challenge to racist Amer­ican capitalism by Martin Luther King Jr. and other liberal civil rights leaders, aided by the long-since reformist Communist Party, and into the dead end of Demo­cratic Party liberalism.

 

The Spartacist League was born in good part in a fight for a revolutionary proletarian intervention into the civil rights movement. The SL originated as the Revolutionary Tendency within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which had been founded and led for many years by Cannon, in struggle against the party's descent from Trotskyism into centrism in 1961-63. Weakened by years of isolation during the McCarthyite witchhunt, the SWP criminally abstained from the strug­gle to win the thousands of left-wing mil­itants who rebelled against King's liberal pacifism, instead adapting to the liberals and later the black nationalists.

 

Today, the material conditions of the mass of the black population are by every measure worse than they were in the 1960s, while even the minimal gains achieved then have either been rolled back or are under incessant attack. Meanwhile, King's political heirs—Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, etc.—seek to bind a new gen­eration of black youth to the Democratic Party as a capitalist "lesser evil" and to convince them that "communism is dead." The destruction of the Soviet Union, the final undoing of the October Revolution, was an enormous defeat. But the lessons of the Russian Revolution remain no less vital. It will take nothing short of a new October Revolution that sweeps away the U.S. bourgeoisie to bring about freedom and equality for black people and all working people.

 

The First COINTELPRO

 

If the class-struggle road to black free­dom was first charted in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, it was in this period as well that the Amer­ican capitalist state constructed the deadly apparatus of political repression— with its vast army of spies and inform­ers, local police "red squads," wiretaps and mail interceptions—that was later deployed by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI in the '60s. COINTELPRO singled out the Black Panther Party, the best of a layer of radical black militants who spurned the accommodationism of King & Co., for defiantly asserting the right of armed self-defense. The FBI's war of terror left 38 Panthers dead and hundreds more framed up and imprisoned in America's dun­geons, ultimately including onetime Phil­adelphia Panther spokesman Mumia Abu-Jamal, who now fights for his life from a prison cell on Pennsylvania's death row.

 

Theodore Kornweibel's "Seeing Red": Federal Campaigns Against Black Mili­tancy 1919-1925 (1998) presents a his­tory of the first edition of COINTELPRO. Kornweibel opens: "Modern America's political intelligence system—surveil­lance, investigation, and spying on indi­viduals because of fear or dislike of their beliefs, resulting in harassment, intimida­tion, or persecution—came of age during World War I and the Red Scare of 1919 to 1921." America's entry into World War I, the first interimperialist world war, in 1917 gave impetus to the creation of a far-flung domestic espionage apparatus— including the Bureau of Investigation, the Military Intelligence Division (MID) and the Office of Naval Intelligence—which grew from a handful of agents to a staff of thousands by war's end in November

1918. At its center was the newly formed Bureau of Investigation—to be recast in 1935 as the FBI amid a new wave of working-class radicalization—and its General Intelligence Division (GID), headed by the same J. Edgar Hoover.

 

Within months of its formation in 1919. the GID had compiled a list of 55,000 names. Initially aimed at antiwar dissidents, left-wing Socialists and IWW members, Hoover's political police went on to pursue the fledgling American Communist movement. As always, black militants were a particular target. The federal agencies were assisted by local red squads and private anti-Communist outfits like the American Defense Initia­tive. The Palmer Raids in the first week of January 1920 resulted in the arrest of over 6,000 Communists and the deportation of thousands of foreign-born anarchists and other radicals. All of this was carried out under "progressive" Democratic pres­ident Woodrow Wilson.

 

Foreshadowing the "human rights" rhetoric which was later used to justify a host of imperialist military interventions by the Clinton White House, Wilson pro­claimed that the imperialist war for re-division of colonies and spheres of ex­ploitation was fought to make the world "safe for democracy"—even as he pre­sided over the brutal subjugation of Amer­ican colonies like the Philippines and Puerto Rico and Jim Crow terror against black people in the U.S. Wilson's "14 Points," including the right of national self-determination, were cynically crafted to counter Bolshevik influence among working people and colonial slaves around the world. As a staunch supporter of segregation, Wilson was representative of ascending U.S. imperialism, whose racist wars of conquest abroad, beginning with the Spanish-American War of 1898, were accompanied by the intensification of racist repression at home.

 

Based on previously unavailable gov­ernment documents, Kornweibel presents a powerful exposition of how the federal government mobilized its resources— from the armed forces to the postal ser­vice, from the State Department to the Justice Department—to defend the racist capitalist status quo and to crush the new movements for black emancipation and red revolution. A liberal anti-Communist, Kornweibel argues that the Feds had "reasonable grounds for monitoring" black Communists because they suppos­edly advocated the' violent overthrow of the American government and acted as spies for Soviet Russia. He condemns the capitalist government only for spying on large numbers of liberals and non-Communist radicals. Kornweibel sneers that "the Bolsheviks failed to convert more than a handful of blacks to commu­nism in the 1920s."

 

It is true that as late as 1928, the CP had only some 50 black members. The Palmer Raids and the anti-red witchhunt had served their purpose. The decade of the '20s was marked by an ebb tide in labor struggle, as union membership shrank to barely 10 percent of the work­force. Emboldened by the right-wing cli­mate, the Ku Klux Klan reached a peak of power and popularity, with several million members, including in the urban North. In 1925, the Klan staged a march of 40,000 in Washington, D.C.

 

But in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the bourgeoisie's fears that the black masses might "see red" were not misplaced. The black GIs who had been sent to die in the "great war for democracy" in Europe and were now determined to fight .for some democ­racy at home were, in Wilson's eyes, the "greatest medium in conveying bol-shevism to America." As Kornweibel himself recounts, the Bolshevik Revolu­tion was popular among wide layers of urban blacks and even among moderate black newspapers and organizations. The accomodationism of Booker T. Wash­ington, who preached acceptance of Jim Crow segregation and lectured impover­ished blacks to pull themselves up "by the bootstraps," had held sway in the years following the elimination of the last remaining gains of Reconstruction in the 1890s, when the downtrodden masses of black sharecroppers in the South enter­tained little hope of social struggle. But the end of World War I ushered in a new spirit of militancy, the "New Crowd Negro," in the words of black social dem­ocrat A. Philip Randolph.

 

Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

 

The experience of the Bolshevik Party in leading the first victorious proletarian revolution provoked a polarization and regroupment within the workers move­ment internationally. In the U.S., many left-wing Socialists and members of the revolutionary-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) joined together to forge an American section of the Communist International (CI). Of particular importance was the profound change inspired by the Russian Bolshe­viks in the way American radicals viewed the black question.

 

Samuel Gompers' American Federa­tion of Labor was largely composed of lily-white craft unions. Even the IWW, which fought heroically to organize black and immigrant workers, had no program to address the special oppression of black people. The Socialist Party ranged from open racists like Victor Berger, who con­sidered black people "a lower race," to "colorblind" socialists like Eugene V. Debs. Debs staunchly opposed racist dis­crimination and the exclusion of black workers from the unions but denied that black people suffered from any form of oppression other than as workers, going so far as to challenge: "What social dis­tinction is there between a white and a black deckhand on a Mississippi steam­boat?" (Jean Y. Tussey, ed., Debs Speaks [1970]). This Debsian outlook was mani­fested in the 1919 founding program of the Communist Party, while the program of the rival Communist Labor Party (the two groups merged in 1920) simply ignored the black question.

 

As Cannon, a former Wobbly who became an early leader of the CP and then founder of the American Trotskyist movement, noted in his 1959 article:

 

"The earlier socialist movement, out of which the Communist Party was, formed, never recognized any need for a special program on the Negro question. It was considered purely and simply as an eco­nomic problem, part of the struggle be­tween the workers and the capitalists; nothing could be done about the special problems of discrimination and inequal­ity this side of socialism.... "The difference—and it was a profound difference—between the Communist Party of the Twenties and its socialist and radical ancestors, was signified by its break with this tradition. The Ameri­can communists in the early days, under the influence and pressure of the Rus­sians in the Comintern, were slowly and painfully learning to change their atti tude; to assimilate the new theory of the Negro question as a special question of doubly-exploited second-class citizens, requiring a program of special demands as part of the over-all program—and to start doing something about it."

 

Though the early Comintern tended to conflate the black struggle in the U.S. with the colonial struggle in Africa, the manifesto adopted by the First Congress of the CI in 1919, drafted by Trotsky, was a clarion call to the dark-skinned masses throughout the world, proclaiming: "Co­lonial slaves of Africa and Asia! The hour of proletarian dictatorship in Europe will strike for you as the hour of your own emancipation!" The first full discussion of the black question from a Communist viewpoint took place not in the U.S. but in Moscow, at the Second Comintern Con­gress in 1920. At Lenin's personal request, American Communist John Reed—author of Ten Days That Shook the World, the first popular account of the Russian Rev­olution—was designated to report on the "Negro Question." Describing the horrors of lynch law and Jim Crow segregation as well as the effects of proletarianization and imperialist war, Reed said:

 

"If we consider the Negroes as an en­slaved and oppressed people, then they pose us with two tasks: on the one hand a strong racial movement and on the other a strong proletarian workers' movement, whose class consciousness is quickly growing. The Negroes do not pose the demand of national independence.... "The Communists must not stand aloof from the Negro movement which demands their social and political equality and at the moment, at a time of the rapid growth of racial consciousness, is spreading rap­idly among the Negroes. The Communists must use this movement to expose the lie of bourgeois equality and emphasize the necessity of the social revolution which will not only liberate all workers from ser­vitude but is also the only way to free the enslaved Negro people."

 

In the years before and during World War I, more than a million blacks fled the rural Jim Crow South to enter Northern industry. In his 1915 pamphlet, New Data on the Laws Governing the Development of Capitalism in Agriculture, Lenin wrote: "To show what the South is like, it is essential to add that its population is flee­ing to other capitalist areas and to the towns.... For the 'emancipated' Negroes, the American South is a kind of prison where they are hemmed in, isolated and deprived of fresh air." The black question in the U.S. Was thus transformed from primarily a Southern agrarian question left unresolved in the aftermath of the Civil War and the radical-democratic Reconstruction era to a key question of the proletarian revolution.

 

Particularly with the formation of the integrated CIO industrial unions in the latter half of the 1930s, black workers became a strategic component of the mul­tiracial proletariat. The special oppres­sion of black people as a race/color caste—segregated at the bottom of this society while integrated into the econ­omy—is the cornerstone of American capitalism. Black workers serve as an industrial reserve army, the last hired and first fired as economic need demands. As well, America's rulers foster racial divi­sions in order to obscure the fundamental and irreconcilable class division between labor and capital and to head off united working-class struggle.

 

The Spartacist League's proletarian, revolutionary strategy for black liberation derives from the seminal understanding laid out by Reed in Moscow in 1920 and powerfully developed by the later writings of veteran Trotskyist Richard Fraser. In the late 1940s and early '50s, Fraser pioneered the perspective of revolutionary integra-tionism upheld today by the SL. We fight to mobilize the multiracial proletariat in struggle against every manifestation of racist oppression, a struggle which can only be victorious through the full social, political and economic integration of black people in an egalitarian socialist society.

 

Won to a revolutionary program, doubly oppressed black workers will play a leading role in the fight to emancipate the black masses and all working people by sweeping away the entire system of capitalist exploitation. There can be no socialist revolution in this country without united struggle of black and white work­ers led by a multiracial vanguard party, and there is nothing other than a workers revolution, smashing the capitalist state and expropriating the capitalist class, which can at last realize the historic struggle for black equality and freedom.

 

Racist Terror and Black Self-Defense

 

The Red Scare hit full stride in 1919. That year saw the crest of the wave of labor radicalism which swept Europe in response to the great carnage of the war and under the impact of the Rus­sian Revolution. In the U.S., the ranks of the Socialist Party swelled to more than 100,000, mostly foreign-born work­ers, with two-thirds supporting the pro-Bolshevik left wing. The U.S. was hit by the biggest strike wave up to that time, as four million workers walked off their jobs in response to the mounting cost of living induced by war inflation. Drives to organize unions in meatpacking and steel culminated in a huge steel strike that year which was smashed by federal troops. Shunned by the Jim Crow craft unions of the AFL, many black workers had first been hired by the bosses as scabs and worked in non-union "open shops." Many more had been brought in to replace white workers drafted into the military.

 

In the South, the sight of armed and uniformed black soldiers drove the racists into a frenzy. In Houston, 13 black sol­diers were hanged in September 1917 and 41 imprisoned for life for defending themselves against a racist mob, and the number of lynchings escalated over the next couple of years. Conflicts over hous­ing and jobs set the stage for a series of bloody pogroms and racist massacres, beginning in East St. Louis in July 1917, where over 40 blacks were killed. These conflicts intensified with the end of the war, as white workers demobilized from the army demanded jobs at the expense of black workers and a postwar economic downturn set in.

 

The Red Summer of 1919, so called for the blood of black victims that flowed through city streets, saw a series of racist rampages that left hundreds dead across the country. In Washington, D.C., the entry of black workers into lower-level civil service jobs during the war provoked a riot by returning soldiers in which six blacks were killed. A five-day riot in Chi­cago, which broke the back of the meat-packers organizing drive, left 23 blacks and 15 whites dead and over 500 people seriously injured. In Elaine, Arkansas, the formation of the black Progressive Farm­ers and Householders Union was met with a racist onslaught. Following a mob attack on a union meeting in October, in which some 200 black men, women and children died, federal troops were called in and 12 sharecroppers were sentenced to death and another 80 to prison for "inciting to insurrection." They were finally freed after prolonged efforts by the NAACP.

 

The worst of these racist atrocities came in Tulsa, Oklahoma in May 1921. As false rumors spread that a young black man had attacked a white female ele­vator operator, lynch mobs looted and burned black homes and businesses. Black residents, many of them army vets, organized to defend themselves. The police, commandeering private planes, dropped dynamite on the heart of black Tulsa. By the time it was over, the once-thriving black business district, known as "the Negro Wall Street," had been razed. Over 200 black men, women and children (as well as some 50 white attackers) were killed, and over 4,000 more were thrown into concentration camps.

What alarmed the bourgeoisie was not the murderous ferocity of the racist attacks but that they were met by blacks with growing resolve for armed self-defense. The Chicago Whip, one of a number of small black newspapers which typified the "New Crowd Negro," drew the ire of the Feds when it headlined a report on a 1920 racist riot in Jersey City in which three whites were badly beaten in self-defense by besieged blacks: "Started by White Hoodlums, Finished by Tough Negroes." Following the Tulsa pogrom, the paper carried a scathing indictment of racist American "democ­racy": "Americanism! Is that the thing which lynches, burns and murders the weak? If so, then give us Lords and Kings with guillotines and dungeons" (quoted in the Crusader, July 1921).

 

Claude McKay gave voice to the new spirit of militancy in his famous poem "If We Must Die" (1919):

 

"If we must die, let it not be like hogs....

 

Like men we'll face the murderous cowardly pack,

 

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fight­ing back!"

 

Though never a member of the CP, McKay was outspoken and eloquent in his support for the Russian Revolution and was invited to attend the CI's 1922 Fourth Congress as a special delegate. When McKay met Trotsky, the Bol­shevik leader and Red Army commander talked of his hopes of training a group of American blacks as officers in the Red Army and invited McKay for a three-week tour of Russian military facilities. But, stressed Trotsky, "The training of black propagandists is the most impera­tive and extremely important revolution­ary task of the present time."

 

Even the cravenly legalistic NAACP ran an editorial in its Crisis in May 1919 in which editor W. E. B. DuBois called for black vets to "battle against the forces of hell in our own land" and declared, "We return from fighting. We return fight­ing." This was deemed so inflammatory that the New York Postmaster / ordered 100,000 copies of the issue withheld, despite the NAACP's record of loyalty to the racist rulers. During the war, DuBois had urged blacks to "close ranks" behind U.S. imperialism, while NAACP chair­man Joel Spingarn served as an officer in military intelligence, briefly heading up subsection M14E, which specialized in "investigations of blacks' loyalties," as Kornweibel reports.

 

After the war, DuBois appealed to the victors of the imperialist bloodbath to apply the "principles" of their robbers' peace—Wilson's "14 Points" and the Ver­sailles treaty—to Africa and played a leading role in the Second Pan-African Congress in 1921, which demanded noth­ing more lofty than the "right" of the colo­nial slaves "to participate in the [colonial] government as fast as their develop­ment permits." Writing about this period in 1972, even a scholar sympathetic to Pan-Africanism, Harvard political science professor Azina Nwafor, observed:

 

"These were, after all, the historical moments when the Bolsheviks had just triumphed in Russia and were exhorting all subject and colonial peo-•ples to rise and overthrow their oppres­sors, their respective feudal and imperi­alist regimes, and to 'expropriate all the expropriators.' Such revolutionary princi­ples and appeals were the real radical demands of the epoch—and not a wind of these blew through the civilized halls of the Pan-African Congresses."

—"Critical Introduction" to George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism (1972)

 

When McKay criticized the Crisis in 1921 for "sneerjmg] at the Russian Revo­lution, the greatest event in the history of humanity," DuBois replied that "the immediate work for the American Negro lies in America and not in Russia" and pronounced it "foolish for us to give up this practical program...by seeking to join a revolution which we do not at present understand" (Crisis, July 1921; reprinted in Philip S. Foner and James S. Alien, eds., American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary His­tory, 1919-1929 [1987]). This the liberal DuBois would never understand, even after joining the by-then thoroughly refor­mist CP in 1961, shortly before his death.

Hoover's Witchhunt Against Black Militants

 

As racist mobs rampaged against blacks in 1919, Hoover directed his agents to pay "special attention" to "the Negro agitation which seems to be prevalent throughout the industrial centers of the country and every effort should be made to ascertain whether or not this agitation is due to the influence of the radical elements such as the IWW and Bolsheviks." In a report to Congress that year, Hoover railed that "a certain class of Negro leaders" had shown "an outspoken advocacy of the Bolsheviki or Soviet doctrines," had been "openly, defiantly assertive" of their "own equality or even superiority" and had demanded "social equality" (quoted in Robert Gold-stein, Political Repression in Modern America: 1870 to the Present [1978]).

 

In its venomous crusade against any­thing smacking of black self-assertion, the government even targeted Marcus Garvey's Negro World as "probable Bol­shevik propaganda." In fact, Garvey was an early exponent of the reactionary sep­aratism and black capitalism today espoused by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. In 1922, Garvey even staged a meeting with the head of the KKK. Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association tried to get blacks to move to Africa and establish themselves as a new colonial elite with himself as their emperor. The only 'black nationalist movement in the U.S. ever to attain a mass base, the Garveyites fed off the dis­illusionment and demoralization which followed the defeat of the postwar strike wave and the 1919 riots. After a years-long vendetta, the Feds imprisoned Gar­vey in 1925 on fraud charges, deporting him to Jamaica three years later.

 

The main targets of government repression, intimidation, infiltration and frame-up were black leftists, especially those like McKay who had traveled to Moscow and were suspected of bringing back instructions from Trotsky to set up a "colored Soviet." The small number of black agents and informants recruited by the Feds were kept busy infiltrating numerous organizations, in some cases simultaneously, and reporting on public meetings and discussion circles. A par­ticular focus of government spying was Martin Luther Campbell's tailor shop in Harlem, where regular discussions were attended by a wide range of black radi­cals and Communists, including McKay and leading CPer Rose Pastor Stokes.

 

Among those targeted by the Feds were left social democrats A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, who published the Messenger. The second issue of the Mes­senger (May/June 1919) featured head­lines like "The March of Soviet Govern­ment" and "We Want More Bolshevik Patriotism." It was from the Messenger group and the Harlem branch of the Socialist Party that the Communist Party recruited its first black members, includ­ing founding CPer Otto Huiswoud, a union printer from Dutch Guiana (now Surinam). The post office withheld per­manent second-class mailing status from the Messenger for two years for the fol­lowing piece puncturing the racist hypoc­risy of American bourgeois society:

 

"As for social equality, there are about five million mulattoes in the United States. This is the product of semi-social equality. It shows that social equality galore exists after dark, and we warn you that we expect to have social equality in the day as well as after dark."

 

Though initially an admirer of the Bol­shevik Revolution, Randolph sided with the reformist wing of the SP in the 1919 split that led to the formation of the CP. In 1923, he and Owen ran an editorial titled "The Menace of Negro Commu­nists." By the 1950s, Randolph was a Cold War liberal and Democratic Party stalwart.

 

The African Blood Brotherhood

 

The CP's real breakthrough in black recruitment came from the African Blood Brotherhood, founded in 1919 by West Indian militant Cyril Briggs, publisher of the Crusader. Announcing the formation of the ABB, the Crusader wrote: "Those only need apply who are willing to go the limit!" Briggs was led by his uncompro­mising hostility to imperialist capitalism to embrace a revolutionary outlook, and he and other ABB leaders joined the CP. When the CP,- before then underground, set up the Workers Party as a legal party, the ABB sent a fraternal delegation to its founding convention in December 1921 and many ABB members joined the new legal party.

 

Briggs himself came under surveil­lance in 1919 when the MID was alerted by a British intelligence report on "Negro Agitation" which described the Cru­sader as a "very extreme magazine" for its opposition to imperialism, its admira­tion of Bolshevism and its "abuse of the white man." Garvey's pro-capitalist sepa­ratist movement was a chief target of the Crusader's polemical fire. This polit­ical struggle soon became muddied as Hoover's provocateurs tried to push it toward a violent confrontation, just as 50 years later FBI provocateurs seized on the antagonism between the Panthers and Ron Karenga's "cultural nationalists" in Los Angeles to foment murderous feud­ing. DuBois and Randolph were trying to get the Feds to prosecute Garvey. Inde­fensibly, in 1922 Briggs joined with them in this, according to Kornweibel, alerting the "New York authorities that the Negro World had violated the law by printing advertisements for a cure for venereal disease."

 

In the wake of the 1921 Tulsa massa­cre, the ABB was subjected to even closer government scrutiny and a hys­terical press witchhunt for supposedly organizing black self-defense efforts there. But the ABB's membership soared as it defiantly affirmed the right of armed self-defense. The CP distributed hun­dreds of thousands of copies of its own leaflet, "The Tulsa Massacre," which called for blacks "to resist the armed assaults upon their homes, their women and children." Three CPers were con­victed and sentenced to five months under Connecticut's sedition law for dis­tributing this leaflet.

 

While the ABB retained a separate existence and identity through 1924, it was closely associated with and served as a recruiting ground for the Workers Party. In 1925, the CP attempted to launch a black transitional organization, the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC), in line with the CI's recogni­tion of the need for special organi­zational forms to draw into the revolu­tionary movement specially oppressed layers. Today's Labor Black Leagues initiated by the Spartacist League are an example of such transitional organiza­tions, which are linked to the proletarian vanguard party both programmatically and through their most conscious cadres. The ANLC opposed the color bar in the AFL, calling for unionization of black workers, demanded full social and politi­cal equality for black people and nailed "the workers' and farmers' government of Soviet Russia." Its founding confer­ence declared, "The white workers can­not free themselves without the aid of us dark-skinned people, and we cannot lib­erate ourselves unless they join with us in an assault of the world bastions of imperialism" (Daily Worker, 14 Novem­ber 1925; reprinted in American Commu­nism and Black Americans: A Documen­tary History, 1919 to 1929).

 

The CP did not have enough black cadre to get the ANLC off the ground, making little headway overall in this period marked by a sharp decline in union membership and massive growth of the KKK. Moreover, by this time the Bolshevik leadership of Lenin and Trotsky which had sought to guide and educate the American Communists had been replaced by the bureaucratic regime headed by Stalin. Hostile imperialist encirclement and the failure of revolu­tion to spread beyond backward Rus­sia to the advanced capitalist world led to the consolidation of a parasitic, nationalist bureaucracy which usurped power through a political counterrevolu­tion consummated by the smashing of the Trotskyist Left Opposition in January 1924. The Stalinist bureaucracy pro­claimed the nationalist dogma of "social­ism in one country," transforming the Communist parties in the capitalist world from instruments for socialist revolution into appendages of the Kremlin's diplo­matic maneuvers.

 

The Stalinists' conservative policies found an echo among American CP cadre weighed down by the reactionary pres­sures of an expanding and self-confident imperialism. The Soviet bureaucracy manipulated the ongoing and politically unclear factional warfare within the American party for its own ends. In 1928, the CI decreed the so-called "black belt theory," insisting against all reality and the opposition of the major­ity of the CP's black cadre that the black population in the South consti­tuted a nation and that the key task was to fight for black "self-determination." But as Cannon noted in his 1959 essay, "The Russian Revolution and the Ameri­can Negro Movement," it was the CP's "aggressive agitation for Negro equality and Negro rights on every front...that brought the results, without the help, and probably despite, the unpopular 'self-determination' slogan."

 

Cannon explained that the profound changes in the attitude of the American Communists to the black question intro­duced in the early 1920s, "brought about by the Russian intervention, were to manifest themselves explosively in the next decade." As the Great Depression led to a new period of struggle in the early '30s, the CP took the lead in fights against evictions, in struggles of the unemployed and in the Scottsboro and Angelo Herndon defense campaigns. When the tumultuous battles that gave rise to powerful new industrial unions erupted, "the policy and agitation of the Communist Party at that time did iriore, ten times over, than any other to help the Negro workers to rise to a new status of at least semi-citizenship in the new labor movement."

 

But, as Cannon put it, "the American Stalinists eventually fouled up the Negro question, as they fouled up every other question." By the mid-1930s, the CI had adopted the overtly class-collaborationist "people's front" line, manifested in the U.S. in a policy of subordination to Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" Democratic Party, whose Southern wing was the Klan-infested Dixiecrat segrega­tionists. The CP played a key role in sub­ordinating the CIO unions and the fight for black rights to the Democratic Party, opposing labor and black struggles dur­ing World War II in order to promote the war effort of racist U.S. imperialism.

 

Break with the Democrats— Forge a Workers Party!

 

In their introductory note to American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1919 to 1929, Sta­linist academics Philip Foner and James Allen seek to justify this history of sell­outs by spitting on the heroic and pio­neering work of the early CP. They deep-six the central role of the Russian Bolsheviks in reorienting the American Communists on the black question and criticize them for "requiring adherence to their full program" in the ANLC. They attack the early CP's "negative attitude toward the Black middle class"—i.e., its revolutionary proletarian perspective— and counterpose the need for a class-collaborationist "united freedom front." Because they uphold the Stalinist class collaborationism of the later CP, Foner and Alien are necessarily hostile to the perspective of black liberation through proletarian revolution which animated the American Communist movement under he guidance of Lenin and Trotsky.

 

The Stalinists' sellout of the fight for black rights in the service of FDR's Democrats cast a heavy shadow over the American workers movement. That goes a long way to explaining why, in the sub­sequent years, many blacks—and white workers as well—turned their backs on the Communist Party and the left in gen­eral, leaving the field open to Demo­cratic Party liberals like Martin Luther King Jr. and, today, Jesse Jackson. In concluding "The Russian Revolution and the American Negro Movement," Can­non wrote:

 

"In the next stage of its development, the American Negro movement will be compelled to turn to a more militant policy than gradualism, and to look for more reliable allies than capitalist politi­cians in the North who are themselves allied with the Dixiecrats of the South. The Negroes, more than any others in this country, have reason and right to be revolutionary.

 

"An honest workers' party of the new generation will recognize this revolution­ary potential of the Negro struggle, and call for a fighting alliance of the Negro people and the labor movement in a common revolutionary struggle against the present social system.

"Reforms  and  concessions,  far more important and significant than any yet attained, will be by-products of this revo­lutionary alliance. They will be fought for and attained at every stage of the struggle. But the new movement will not stop with reforms, nor be satisfied with concessions. The movement of the Negro people and the movement of militant labor, united and coordinated by a revo­lutionary party, will solve the Negro problem in the only way it can be solved—by a social revolution."

 

The forging of an authentically com­munist vanguard party to iead the multi­racial proletariat to power requires break­ing working people and the black masses from the grip of the racist capitalist Dem­ocratic Party. This is the task of the Spar­tacist League. As we state in the SL/U.S. programmatic statement "For Socialist Revolution in the Bastion of World Impe­rialism!": "The shell game through which the Democratic Party—the historic party of the Confederate slavocracy—is por­trayed as the 'friend' of blacks and labor has been essential to preserving the rule of racist American capitalism. Our princi­pal task in the U.S. is to break the power of the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy over the labor movement. It is this bureaucracy—itself a component part of the Democratic  Party—which politically chains the proletariat to the bourgeoisie and is the major obstacle to revolutionary class consciousness, to the forging of a revolutionary workers party."  For black  liberation  through socialist revolution! •

 

HONOR THE MEMORY OF THE PARIS COMMUNE

Markin Comment:

 

March 18^th is the anniversary of the Paris Commune. All honor to the men and women who fought to the death to defend this first beacon of working class revolution.

Remarks of a speaker at an event commemorating the heroic Paris Commune in March 2007: 

I would like make a few comments in honor of the heroic Communards.

       When one studies the history of the Paris Commune of 1871 one learns something new from it even though from the perspective of revolutionary strategy the Communards made virtually every mistake in the book. However, one can learn its lessons and measure it against the experience acquired by later revolutionary struggles and above all by later revolutions, not only the successful Russian Revolution of October 1917 but the failed German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese and Spanish revolutions in the immediate aftermath of World War I. More contemporaneously we have the experiences of the partial victories of the later Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions. 

     Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of these later experiences, as if to show that history is not always totally a history of horrors against the fate of the masses we honor the Paris Commune as a beacon of the coming world proletarian revolution. It is just for that reason that Karl Marx fought tooth and nail in the First International to defend it against the rage of capitalist Europe. It is one of our peaks. The Commune also presented in embryo the first post-1848 Revolution instance of what was later characterized by Lenin at the beginning of World War I as the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the international labor movement. So this question that after Lenin’s death preoccupied Trotsky for much of the later part of his life really has a much longer lineage that I had previously recognized. Unfortunately, as we are too painfully aware that question is still to be resolved. Therefore, even at this great remove, it is necessary to learn the lessons of that experience in facing today’s crisis of leadership in the international labor movement.
 

Below is a tribute to the Paris Commune written by the Bolshevik Revolutionary Leon Trotsky in 1921 in Russian and later translated into English in the New International in March 1935,  Volume 2, No. 2

 

LESSONS OF THE PARIS COMMUNE

EACH TIME that we study the history of the Commune we see it from a new aspect, thanks to the experience acquired by the later revolutionary struggles and above all by the latest revolutions, not only the Russian but the German and Hungarian revolutions. The Franco-German war was a bloody explosion, harbinger of an immense world slaughter, the Commune of Paris a lightning harbinger of a world proletarian revolution.

The Commune shows us the heroism of the working masses, their capacity to unite into a single bloc, their talent to sacrifice themselves in the name of the future, but at the same time it shows us the incapacity of the masses to choose their path, their indecision in the leadership of the movement, their fatal penchant to come to a halt after the first successes, thus permitting the enemy to regain its breath, to reestablish its position.

The Commune came too late. It had all the possibilities of taking the power on September 4 and that would have permitted the proletariat of Paris to place itself at a single stroke at the head of the workers of the country in their struggle against all the forces of the past, against Bismarck as well as against Thiers. But the power fell into the hands of the democratic praters, the deputies of Paris. The Parisian proletariat had neither a party, nor leaders to whom it would have been closely bound by previous struggles. The petty bourgeois patriots who thought themselves socialists and sought the support of the workers did not really have any confidence in themselves. They shook the proletariat's faith in itself, they were continually in quest of celebrated lawyers, of journalists, of deputies, whose baggage consisted only of a dozen vaguely revolutionary phrases, in order to entrust them with the leadership of the movement.

The reason why Jules Favre, Picard, Gamier-Pages and Co. took power in Paris on September 4 is the same as that which permitted Pall-Boncour, A. Varenne, Renaudel and numerous others to be for a time the masters of the party of the proletariat. The Renaudels and the Boncours and even the Longuets and the Pressemanes are much closer, by virtue of their sympathies, their intellectual habits and their conduct, to the Jules Favres and the Jules Ferrys than to the revolutionary proletariat. Their socialist phraseology is nothing but an historic mask which permits them to impose themselves upon the masses. And it is just because Favre, Simon, Picard and the others used and abused a democratico-liberal phraseology that their sons and their grandsons are obliged to resort to a socialist phraseology. But the sons and the grandsons have remained worthy of their fathers and continue their work. And when it will be necessary to decide not the question of the composition of a ministerial clique but the much more important question of knowing what class in France must take power, Renaudel, Varenne, Longuet and their similars will be in the camp of Millerand-collaborator of Galliffet, the butcher of the Commune .... When the revolutionary babblers of the salons and of parliament find themselves face to face, in real life, with the revolution, they never recognize it.

The workers' party-the real one-is not a machine for parliamentary manoeuvres, it is the accumulated and organized experience of the proletariat. It is only with the aid of the party, which rests upon the whole history of its past, which foresees theoretically the paths of development, all its stages, and which extracts from it the necessary formula of action, that the proletariat frees itself from the need of always recommencing its history: its hesitations, its lack of decision, its mistakes.

The proletariat of Paris did not have such a party. The bourgeois socialists with whom the Commune swarmed, raised their eyes to heaven, waited for a miracle or else a prophetic word, hesitated, and during that time the masses groped about and lost their heads because of the indecision of some and the fantasy of others. The result was that the revolution broke out in their very midst, too late, and Paris was encircled. Six months elapsed before the proletariat had reestablished in its memory the lessons of past revolutions, of battles of yore, of the reiterated betrayals of democracy-and it seized power.

These six months proved to be an irreparable loss. If the centralized party of revolutionary action had been found at the head of the proletariat of France in September 1870, the whole history of France and with it the whole history of humanity would have taken another direction.

If the power was found in the hands of the proletariat of Paris on March 18, it was not because it had been deliberately seized, but because its enemies had quitted Paris.

These latter were losing ground continuously, the workers despised and detested them, the petty bourgeoisie no longer had confidence in them and the big bourgeoisie feared that they were no longer capable of defending it. The soldiers were hostile to the officers. The government fled Paris in order to concentrate its forces elsewhere. And it was then that the proletariat became master of the situation.

But it understood this fact only on the morrow. The revolution fell upon it unexpectedly.

This first success was a new source of passivity. The enemy had fled to Versailles. Wasn't that a victory? At that moment the governmental band could have been crushed almost without the spilling of blood. In Paris, all the ministers, with Thiers at their head, could have been taken prisoner. Nobody would have raised a hand to defend them. It was not done. There was no organization of a centralized party, having a rounded view of things and special organs for realizing its decisions.

The debris of the infantry did not want to fall back to Versailles. The thread which tied the officers and the soldiers was pretty tenuous. And had there been a directing party center at Paris, it would have incorporated into the retreating armies-since there was the possibility of retreating-a few hundred or even a few dozen devoted workers, and given them the following instructions: enhance the discontent of the soldiers against the officers, profit by the first favorable psychological moment to free the soldiers from their officers and bring them back to Paris to unite with the people. This could easily have been realized, according to the admissions of Thiers' supporters themselves. Nobody even thought of it. Nor was there anybody to think of it. In the midst of great events, moreover, such decisions can be adopted only by a revolutionary party which looks forward to a revolution, prepares for it, does not lose its head, by a party which is accustomed to having a rounded view and is not afraid to act.

And a party of action is just what the French proletariat did not have.

The Central Committee of the National Guard is in effect a Council of Deputies of the armed workers and the petty bourgeoisie. Such a Council, elected directly by the masses who have taken the revolutionary road, represents an excellent apparatus of action. But at the same time, and just because of its immediate and elementary connection with the masses who are in the state in which the revolutionary has found them, it reflects not only all the strong sides but also the weak sides of the masses, and it reflects at first the weak sides still more than it does the strong: it manifests the spirit of indecision, of waiting, the tendency to be inactive after the first successes.

The Central Committee of the National Guard needed to be led. It was indispensable to have an organization incarnating the political experience of the proletariat and always present-not only in the Central Committee, but in the legions, in the battalion, in the deepest sectors of the French proletariat. By means of the Councils of Deputies-in the given case they were organs of the National Guard-the party could have been in continual contact with the masses, known their state of mind; its leading center con! I each day put forward a slogan which, through the medium of the party's militants, would have penetrated into the masses, uniting their thought and their will.

Hardly had the government fallen back to Versailles than the National Guard hastened to unload its responsibility, at the very moment when this responsibility was enormous. The Central Committee imagined "legal" elections to the Commune. It entered into negotiations with the mayors of Paris in order to cover itself, from the Right, with "legality".

Had a violent attack been prepared against Versailles at the same time, the negotiations with the mayors would have been a ruse fully justified from the military standpoint and in conformity with the goal. But in reality, these negotiations were being conducted only in order to avert the struggle by some miracle or other. The petty bourgeois radicals and the socialistic idealists, respecting "legality" and the men who embodied a portion of the "legal" state-the deputies, the mayors, etc.-hoped at the bottom of their souls that Thiers would halt respectfully before revolutionary Paris the minute the latter covered itself with the "legal" Commune.

Passivity and indecision were supported in this case by the sacred principle of federation and autonomy. Paris, you see, is only one commune among many other communes. Paris wants to impose nothing upon anyone; it does not struggle for the dictatorship, unless it be for the 'dictatorship of example".

In sum, it was nothing but an attempt to replace the proletarian revolution, which was developing, by a petty bourgeois reform: communal autonomy. The real revolutionary task consisted of assuring the proletariat the power all over the country. Paris had to serve as its base, its support, its stronghold. And to attain this goal, it was necessary to vanquish Versailles without the loss of time and to send agitators, organizers, and armed forces throughout France. It was necessary to enter into contact with sympathizers, to strengthen the hesitators and to shatter the opposition of the adversary. Instead of this policy of offensive and aggression which was the only thing that could save the situation, the leaders of Paris attempted to seclude themselves in their communal autonomy: they will not attack the others if the others do not attack them; each town has its sacred right of self-government. This idealistic chatter-of the same gender as mundane anarchism covered up in reality a cowardice in face of revolutionary action which should have been conducted incessantly up to the very end, for otherwise it should not have been begun.

The hostility to capitalist organization-a heritage of petty bourgeois localism and autonomism-is without a doubt the weak side of a certain section of the French proletariat. Autonomy for the districts, for the wards, for the battalions, for the towns, is the supreme guarantee of real activity and individual independence for certain revolutionists. But that is a great mistake which cost the French proletariat dearly.

Under the form of the "struggle against despotic centralism" and against "stifling" discipline, a fight takes place for the self preservation of various groups and sub-groupings of the working class, for their petty interests, with their petty ward leaders and their local oracles. The entire working class, while preserving its cultural originality and its political nuances, can act methodically and firmly, without remaining in the tow of events, and directing each time its mortal blows against the weak sectors of its enemies, on the condition that at its head, above the wards, the districts, the groups, there is an apparatus which is centralized and bound together by an iron discipline. The tendency towards particularism, whatever the form it may assume, is a heritage of the dead past. The sooner French communist-socialist communism and syndicalist communism-emancipates itself from it, the better it will be for the proletarian revolution.

The party does not create the revolution at will, it does not choose the moment for seizing power as it likes, but it intervenes actively in the events, penetrates at every moment the state of mind of the revolutionary masses and evaluates the power of resistance of the enemy, and thus determines the most favorable moment for decisive action. This is the most difficult side of its task. The party has no decision that is valid for every case. Needed are a correct theory, an intimate contact with the masses, the comprehension of the situation, a revolutionary perception, a great resoluteness. The more profoundly a revolutionary party penetrates into all the domains of the proletarian struggle, the more unified it is by the unity of goal and discipline, the speedier and better will it arrive at resolving its task.

The difficulty consists in having this organization of a centralized party, internally welded by an iron discipline, linked intimately with the movement of the masses, with its ebbs and flows. The conquest of power cannot be achieved save on the condition of a powerful revolutionary pressure of the toiling masses. But in this act the element of preparation is entirely inevitable. The better the party will understand the conjuncture and the moment, the better the bases of resistance will be prepared, the better the force and the roles will be distributed, the surer will be the success and the less victims will it cost. The correlation of a carefully prepared action and a mass movement is the politico-strategical task of the taking of power.

The comparison of March 18, 1871 with November 7, 1917 is very instructive from this point of view. In Paris, there is an absolute lack of initiative for action on the part of the leading revolutionary circles. The proletariat, armed by the bourgeois government, is in reality master of the town, has all the material means of power-cannon and rifles-at its disposal, but it is not aware of it. The bourgeoisie makes an attempt to retake the weapon of the giant: it wants to steal the cannon of the proletariat. The attempt fails. The government flees in panic from Paris to Versailles. The field is clear. But it is only on the morrow that the proletariat understands that it is the master of Paris. The "leaders" are in the wake of events, they record them when the latter are already accomplished, and they do everything in their power to blunt the revolutionary edge.

In Petrograd, the events developed differently. The party moved firmly, resolutely, to the seizure of power, having its men everywhere, consolidating each position, extending every fissure between the workers and the garrison on the one side and the government on the other.

The armed demonstration of the July days is a vast reconnoitering conducted by the party to sound the degree of close contact between the masses and the power of resistance of the enemy. The reconnoitering is transformed into a struggle of outposts. We are thrown back, but at the same time the action establishes a connection between the party and the depths of the masses. The months of August, September and October see a powerful revolutionary flux. The party profits by it and augments considerably its points of support in the working class and the garrison. Later, the harmony between the conspirative preparations and the mass action takes place almost automatically. The Second Congress of the Soviets is fixed for November '. All our preceding agitation was to lead to the seizure of power by the Congress. Thus, the overturn was adapted in advance to November 7. This fact was well known and understood by the enemy. Kerensky and his councillors could not fail to make efforts to consolidate themselves, to however small an extent, in Petrograd for the decisive moment. Also, they stood in need of shipping out of the capital the most revolutionary sections of the garrison. We on our part profited by this attempt by Kerensky in order to make it the source of a new conflict which had a decisive importance. We openly accused the Kerensky government-our accusation subsequently found a written confirmation in an official document-of having planned the removal of a third of the Petrograd garrison not out of military considerations but for the purpose of counter-revolutionary combinations. This conflict bound us still more closely to the garrison and put before the latter a well-defined task, to support the Soviet Congress fixed for November 7. And since the government insisted-even if in a feeble enough manner-that the garrison be sent off, we created in the Petrograd Soviet, already in our hands, a Revolutionary War Committee, on the pretext of verifying the military reasons for the governmental plan.

Thus we had a purely military organ, standing at the head of the Petrograd garrison, which was in reality a legal organ of armed insurrection. At the same time we designated (communist) commissars in all the military units, in the military stores, etc. The clandestine military organization accomplished specific technical tasks and furnished the Revolutionary War Committee with fully trustworthy militants for important military tasks. The essential work concerning the preparation, the realization and the armed insurrection took place openly, and so methodically and naturally that the bourgeoisie, led by Kerensky, did not clearly understand what was taking place under their very eyes. (In Paris, the proletariat understood only on the following day that it had been really victorious-a victory which it had not, moreover, deliberately sought-that it was master of the situation. In Petrograd, it was the contrary. Our party, basing itself on the workers and the garrison, had already seized the power, the bourgeoisie passed a fairly tranquil night and learned only on the following morning that the helm of the country was in the hands of its gravedigger.)

As to strategy, there were many differences of opinion in our party.

A part of the Central Committee declared itself, as is known, against the taking of power, believing that the moment had not yet arrived, that Petrograd was detached from the rest of the country, the proletariat from the peasantry, etc.

Other comrades believed that we were not attributing sufficient importance to the elements of military complot. One of the members of the Central Committee demanded in October the surrounding of the Alexandrine Theater where the Democratic Conference was in session, and the proclamation of the dictatorship of the Central Committee of the party. He said: in concentrating our agitation as well as our preparatory military work for the moment of the Second Congress, we are showing our plan to the adversary, we are giving him the possibility of preparing himself and even of dealing us a preventive blow. But there is no doubt that the attempt at a military complot and the surrounding of the Alexandrine Theater would have been a fact too alien to the development of the events, that it would have been an event disconcerting to the masses. Even in the Petrograd Soviet, where our faction dominated, such an enterprise, anticipating the logical development of the struggle, would have provoked great disorder at that moment, above all among the garrison where there were hesitant and not very trustful regiments, primarily the cavalry regiments. It would have been much easier for Kerensky to crush a complot unexpected by the masses than to attack the garrison consolidating itself more and more on its positions: the defense of its inviolability in the name of the future Congress of the Soviets. Therefore the majority of the Central Committee rejected the plan to surround the Democratic Conference and it was right. The conjuncture was very well judged: the armed insurrection, almost without bloodshed, triumphed exactly on the date, fixed in advance and openly, for the convening of the Second Soviet Congress.

This strategy cannot, however, become a general rule, it requires specific conditions. Nobody believed any longer in the war with the Germans, and the less revolutionary soldiers did not want to quit Petrograd for the front. And even if the garrison as a whole was on the side of the workers for this single reason, it became stronger in its point of view to the extent that Kerensky's machinations were revealed. But this mood of the Petrograd garrison had a still deeper cause in the situation of the peasant class and in the development of the imperialist war. Had there been a split in the garrison and had Kerensky obtained the possibility of support from a few regiments, our plan would have failed. The elements of purely military complot (conspiracy and great speed of action) would have prevailed. It would have been necessary, of course, to choose another moment for the insurrection.

The Commune also had the complete possibility of winning even the peasant regiments, for the latter had lost all confidence and all respect for the power and the command. Yet it undertook nothing towards this end. The fault here is not in the relationships of the peasant and the working classes, but in the revolutionary strategy.

What will be the situation in this regard in the European countries in the present epoch? It is not easy to foretell anything on this score. Yet, with the events developing slowly and the bourgeois governments exerting all their efforts to utilize past experiences, it may be foreseen that the proletariat, in order to attract the sympathies of the soldiers, will have to overcome a great and well organized resistance at a given moment. A skillful and well~ timed attack on the part of the revolution will then be necessary. The duty of the party is to prepare itself for it. That is just why it must maintain and develop its character of a centralized organization, which openly guides the revolutionary movement of the masses and is at the same time a clandestine apparatus of the armed insurrection.

The question of the electibility of the command was one of the reasons of the conflict between the National Guard and Thiers. Paris refused to accept the command designated by Thiers. Varlin subsequently formulated the demand that the command of the National Guard, from top to bottom, ought to be elected by the National Guardsmen themselves. That is where the Central Committee of the National Guard found its support.

This question must he envisaged from two sides: from the political and the military sides, which are interlinked but which should be distinguished. The political task consisted in purging the National Guard of the counter­revolutionary command. Complete electibility was the only means for it, the majority of the National Guard being composed of workers and revolutionary petty bourgeois. And in addition, the motto "electibility of the command", being extended also to the infantry, Thiers would have been deprived at a single stroke of his essential weapon, the counterrevolutionary officers. In order to realize this plan, a party organization, having its men in all the military units, was required. In a word, electibility in this ease had as its immediate task not to give good commanders to the batallions, but to liberate them from commanders devoted to the bourgeoisie. Electibility served as a wedge for splitting the army into two parts, along class lines. Thus did matters occur with its in the period of Kerensky, above all on the eve of October.

But the liberation of the army from the old commanding apparatus inevitably involves the weakening of organizational cohesion and the diminution of combative power. As a rule, the elected command is pretty weak from the technico-military standpoint and with regard to the maintenance of order and of discipline. Thus, at the moment when the army frees itself from the old counterrevolutionary command which oppressed it, the question arises of giving it a revolutionary command capable of fulfilling its mission. And this question can by no means be resolved by simple elections. Before wide masses of soldiers acquire the experience of well choosing and selecting commanders, the revolution will be beaten by the enemy which is guided in the choice of its command by the experience of centuries. The methods of shapeless democracy (simple electibility) must be supplemented and to a certain extent replaced by measures of selection from above. The revolution must create an organ composed of experienced, reliable organizers, in which one can have absolute confidence, give it full powers to choose, designate and educate the command. If particularism and democratic autonomism are extremely dangerous to the proletarian revolution in general, they are ten times more dangerous ¥to the army. We saw that in the tragic example of the Commune.

The Central Committee of the National Guard drew its authority from democratic electibility. At the moment when the Central Committee needed to develop to the maximum its initiative in the offensive, deprived of the leadership of a proletarian party, it lost its head, hastened to transmit its powers to the representatives of the Commune which required a broader democratic basis. And it was a great mistake in that period to play with elections. But once the elections had been held and the Commune brought together, ft was necessary to concentrate everything in the Commune at a single blow and to have it create an organ possessing real power to reorganize the National Guard. This was not the case. By the side of the elected Commune there remained the Central Committee; the elected character of the latter gave it a political authority thanks to which it was able to compete with the Commune. But at the same time that deprived it of the energy and the firmness necessary in the purely military questions which, after the organization of the Commune, justified its existence. Electibility, democratic methods, are but one of the instruments in the hands of the proletariat and its party. Electibility can in no wise be a fetish, a remedy for all evils. The methods of electibility must be combined with those of appointments. The power of the Commune came from the elected National Guard. But once created, the Commune should have reorganized with a strong hand the National Guard, from top to bottom, given it reliable leaders and established a regime of very strict discipline. The Commune did not do this, being itself deprived of a powerful revolutionary directing center. It too was crushed.

We can thus thumb the whole history of the Commune, page by page, and we will find in it one single lesson: a strong party leadership is needed. More than any other proletariat has the French made sacrifices for the revolution. But also more than any other has it been duped. Many times has the bourgeoisie dazzled it with all the colors of republicanism, of radicalism, of socialism, so as always to fasten upon it the fetters of capitalism. By means of its agents, its lawyers and its journalists, the bourgeoisie has put forward a whole mass of democratic, parliamentary, autonomist formulae which are nothing but impediments on the feet of the proletariat, hampering its forward movement.

The temperament of the French proletariat is a revolutionary lava. But this lava is now covered with the ashes of skepticism result of numerous deceptions and disenchantments. Also, the revolutionary proletarians of France must be severer towards their party and unmask more pitilessly any non-conformity between word and action. The French workers have need of an organization, strong as steel, with leaders controlled by the masses at every new stage of the revolutionary movement.

How much time will history afford us to prepare ourselves? We do not know. For fifty years the French bourgeoisie has retained the power in its hands after having elected the Third Republic on the bones of the Communards. Those fighters of '71 were not lacking in heroism. What they lacked was clarity in method and a centralized leading organization. That is why they were vanquished. Half a century elapsed before the proletariat of France could pose the question of avenging the death of the Communards. But this time, the action will be firmer, more concentrated. The heirs of Thiers will have to pay the historic debt in full.

 

From The American Left History Archives As We Approach Election Day - THE ABC' OF THE WAR BUDGET (March 2007)

Markin comment:

NOT ONE PENNY, NOT ONE PERSON FOR THE WAR!

ATTACHING UNENFORCEABLE RIDERS ONTO THE WAR APPROPRIATIONS BILL IS NOT A NO VOTE ON THE WAR BUDGET. HONOR THE MEMORY OF THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRAT KARL LIEBKNECHT-HE KNEW HOW TO VOTE NO ON THE WAR BUDGET.

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT!

WRITTEN ON MARCH 17^TH 2007 THE DAY OF THE 40^TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ORIGINAL MARCH ON THE PENTAGON

Okay, one more time on the war budget. As I have repeatedly mentioned over the last year or so the only meaningful parliamentary maneuver on the Iraq War is a no vote on the war budget, under the principle of not one penny, not one person for the war. I have nevertheless been castigated lately for a seeming softness on the Democrats when I mentioned that the beginning of wisdom was a straight up and down no vote on the budget. (See ONCE AGAIN ON THE DEMOCRATS AND THEIR IRAQ WAR in my blog archives for March 2007). Some very politically savvy acquaintances of mine have assumed that this meant political support for the efforts in Congress, particularly in the House, for the various pieces of legislation now before those bodies. Apparently they have missed my very clear statement that we cannot support such legislation. Why no such support? All the riders on the legislation, and I mean all, are attached in order to pass the war budget. The only control is over the timetable for withdrawal. That, dear readers, is very, very far from not one penny, not one person anti-war politics.  Where, in God's name is that a capitulation to Democrats? No one, I repeat, not one of the Democrats from fellow traveler Vermont Senator Bernie Saunders to Democratic presidential candidate Congressman Dennis Kucinich has advocated a straight up and down no vote on the war budget. That said; let us take a look at history to see what a real parliamentary anti-war war budget vote looks like.

I have mentioned elsewhere the name of the revolutionary German Social Democrat Karl Liebknecht in association with my model for what a parliamentary anti-war leader should look like, and even he had to do some somersaults to come out to the right decision. (See March 2006 blog archives.) As is well known, or should be well known, the Western European social democracy as institutionalized in the Second International before World War I was formally committed to the fight against war and especially imperialist war. That included a pro forma commitment to opposition to the capitalist war budgets. As we know, to our regret, those sentiments were fine in peace time but by the time that the war drums for World War I started most European socialist parties were committed to vote in favor of their own nation's war budget. Most notorious in this regard was the stance of the German Social Democratic Party, the largest and most organized party in the International, that voted unanimously (including Liebknecht) to support the Kaiser's war budget on August 4, 1914.

An explanation is in order about Liebknecht's initial vote. The German Social Democratic Party's parliamentary delegation in 1914 (composed at the time of 110 members) was bound by bloc voting. Since the majority in caucus voted for the budget Liebknecht felt obliged to go along at the time, but not for long. By December of 1914 he had broken that fictitious solidarity and cast the lone against the war appropriations. For those familiar with the Liebknecht story, and those who are not, he went on to cast more no votes and got a few more Social Democrats to vote with him (not always for the same principled reason or with his intensity). Ultimately his agitation led to the lifting of his parliamentary immunity and eventual imprisonment for what amounted to treason against the German state. Liebknecht was later release as a result of the events of the November 1918 German Revolution and shortly thereafter assassinated, along with Rosa Luxemburg, after attempting to establish a Socialist Republic during the failed Spartacist uprising of January 1919.

To even tell the Liebknecht story in the content of what today passes for anti-war bourgeois politicians seems slightly ridiculous. With the Iraqi War seemingly never ending and subject to increased 'phantom' escalation with the latest news that the American military command in Iraq want several thousand MORE troops to support the already committed five ‘surge’ brigades anything short of a no vote seems less courageous than usual.