Felix Morrow

Labor’s Answer to Conscription

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Source: Original pamphlet published by Pioneer Pubishing, 1941
Transcribed/HTML Markup: Martin Falgren & D. Walters in 2009.
Copyleft: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.

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The trade union leaders have said “NO!” to the BurkeWadsworth conscription bill. For the CIO, John L. Lewis informed the House and Senate military affairs committees that “I have carefully canvassed our organizations and find that the concensus of opinion is in fundamental opposition to this measure.” William Green had to report likewise on behalf of the AFL; the big five Railroad Brotherhoods took the same stand. Seldom have all three sections of the trade union movement been unanimous as they are on this question. That fact undoubtedly reflects the firm sentiment of the overwhelming majority of their membership.

“No” was not, however, the only answer that the official leadership of the trade unions gave to the conscription bill. A mere “No” could not be the sole element in any answer to conscription. One must also answer the question: “If not the conscription bill, then what?”
The pacifists have no answer to this question. They try to deny that the problem of military training exists-and they do this in a world whose chief characteristics have become militarism and war! Instead they read us sermons about the evils of force and violence and publish a dreary literature to prove that war is not really necessary, that the United States can turn its back on the rest of the world, etc. In the end of course, as happened during the World War in all countries, the pacifist myth is blown apart by the realities of this capitalist world that we live in; and the pacifists turn into rabid recruiting sergeants, who say: “You know me. I was always against war. Therefore if I tell you now that you should support the government in this war, you should believe me.”
Like the pacifists, the Communist Party also has no answer to the question: “If not the Burke-Wadsworth bill, then what?” Its propaganda is, indeed, impossible to distinguish from the clap-trap of the pacifists. It consists of belittling the real possibilities of German imperialist penetration of the Western Hemisphere, and of similar arguments borrowed from the “isolationists”. Far from helping to win workers to a firm stand against the conscription bill, the propaganda of the Communist Party makes many workers believe that the Stalinist propaganda is merely designed to serve Stalin’s friend, Hitler. These workers, despite the Stalinist attacks upon them as “red-baiters”, are in reality far in advance of the Communist Party to this extent: they understand that the working class must give an answer to the question: “If not the conscription bill, then what?”
In contrast to the pacifists and Stalinists, the official leaders of the trade unions have given an answer to this question. The main purpose of this pamphlet is to demonstrate that their answer is the wrong one; that their “alternative” is no better than the conscription measure and, indeed, paves the way for the enactment of the Burke-Wadsworth bill in the end. After this is demonstrated, we propose what we believe is the right answer to this fundamental question.

The Lewis-Green Answer

John L. Lewis and William Green both make a number of economic demands upon Congress in their statements opposing conscription. These demands include higher pay for soldiers, guarantees that men would get their jobs back after serving in the armed forces, etc. These demands, though too modest, deserve support. The Burke-Wadsworth bill is damned by the yardstick of these demands; we need mention only the coolie wages provided conscripts by the bill, and its phoney “promise” of getting men their jobs back.
(The very first day of formal debate on the bill in the Senate, Senator Norris drew an admission from Senator Barkley, administration leader, that the provision directing employers to rehire men after their service “probably” has no legal force!)
But it is not enough for the workers to make these types of economic demands. There still remains the question of fighting against the provisions for conscription by the capitalist state into the state’s armed forces, and of offering an alternative method of military training for the manpower of this country.
It is on this key question that Lewis and Green are fundamentally wrong. All they say, at bottom, against the conscription bill is that conscription is not necessary now. Lewis’ argument is against “compulsory conscription in time of peace”; and even in time of peace, he makes plain, he is ready to support conscription by the capitalist state, if it is first established that mass enlistments will not provide sufficient men. Therefore, he proposes:
But it is not enough for the workers to make these types of economic demands. There still remains the question of fighting against the provisions for conscription by the capitalist state into the state’s armed forces, and of offering an alternative method of military training for the manpower of this country.
It is on this key question that Lewis and Green are fundamentally wrong. All they say, at bottom, against the conscription bill is that conscription is not necessary now. Lewis’ argument is against “compulsory conscription in time of peace”; and even in time of peace, he makes plain, he is ready to support conscription by the capitalist state, if it is first established that mass enlistments will not provide sufficient men. Therefore, he proposes:
“The Congress of Industrial Organizations suggests that if there is a need for larger personnel in our armed forces, the method of voluntary enlistments be continued and relied upon to meet the needs of the present emergency. WE BELIEVE THAT A SUFFICIENT NUMBER OF VOLUNTARY ENLISTMENTS COULD BE SECURED if the pay for enlisted men were increased and, the minimum period of enlistment reduced Such an enlisted army, highly trained in the use of mechanized arms, would, we submit, meet our military defense problems.” (ClO NEWS, August 5)
Similarly, William Green’s August 5 press statement says:
“The AFL will give support to compulsory military training service legislation when such action becomes necessary in order to defend, protect and preserve America.
“However, in providing an adequate army for defensive purposes the American way should be followed first. A voluntary enlistment program should be launched by the Government designed to create an army of one million and a half men, This would be putting voluntary action before compulsion. American labor would respond to such a program wholeheartedly and enthusiastically.”
The stand against conscription taken by the official trade union leaders amounts, therefore, to:
1. The same kind of conscription that they now oppose, they are ready to support either (a) in war-time or (b) if mass enlistments do not provide enough men.
2. They enthusiastically support mass enlistments into the regular army and navy as better than conscription today in that it is (a) voluntary and (b) more democratic.
This position is identical with that taken by the “anticonscription” senators, Wheeler, Vandenberg and their associates, who support a “compromise” offered by Senator Maloney of Connecticut. The Maloney amendment provides for mass enlistments until January; if by that time enlistmerits prove inadequate, the conscription provisions of the Burke-Wadsworth bill go into effect automatically.
It should be obvious that John L. Lewis is misusing words when he announces himself “in fundamental opposition to this Burke-Wadsworth measure”. There’s nothing fundamental about his opposition, for as we have seen he is for the key provisions of that measure either in war-time or if enlistments won’t provide enough men.
But that’s only half the picture. The truth is that Lewis’ alternative to conscription, “voluntary enlistments”, turns out upon careful examination to be neither voluntary, nor more democratic than conscription. After we examine the real nature of this enlistment proposal, every worker who is firm in his loyalty to the working class, must say: “Enlistment is just as reactionary as the conscription proposal. We must find another way, a way which will provide the workers with military training, but which will not put them at the mercy of the capitalist state and its reactionary army officer caste.”

Would Enlistments Be Voluntary?

The statement on conscription issued by the five Railroad Brotherhood presidents lets the cat out of the bag. After proposing one-year enlistments and more attractive pay, it says that under these conditions, “Thousands of UNEMPLOYED would enlist voluntarily if given an opportunity” (N, Y. Times, August 7).
Just let that idea sink in a moment. These gentlemen don’t want their membership subject to the draft. But it’s all right with them if UNEMPLOYED workers, including the hundreds of thousands of railroad workers driven out of the industry, are inducted into the army! They take it for granted that a shorter enlistment term and a few dollars higher pay would drive the unemployed into the army.
So far as their cold-blooded calculation goes, these very comfortable gentlemen are being accurate. Today and throughout the last ten years, the statistics of enlistment show, the majority of “volunteers” have come from the unemployed; they join up to eat and to learn a new trade which the recruiting posters promise them. Maybe, they hope, there’ll be a job for them in their new trade when they get out.
A shorter term of enlistment and higher pay would be certain, therefore, to attract more of the unemployed. Those who today are hungry and in enforced idleness would be more tempted by the pay if they didn’t have to sign away three years of their lives. Vain illusion! Anybody joining the army now would be certain to find himself unable to get out-just like the men who joined the National Guard for a little training and exercise, contracting for nothing more than this except in case of war, and who now find themselves, in violation of that contract, ordered by Congress into active service.
This is what John L. Lewis, William Green, and the rest of the AFL, CIO and Railroad Brotherhoods leadership are aiding and abetting. Voluntary? To be driven by hunger which one cannot otherwise feed is not voluntary. Democratic? There’s nothing democratic about an army service system which will inevitably draw most of its men from among the ten million unemployed.
John L. Lewis doesn’t put it as crudely as do the Railroad Brotherhoods, but that he knows what he is proposing will mainly hit the unemployed is shown by this revealing, sentence: “Compulsory conscription would necessarily result in tremenuous dislocations among the lives of millions of individuals in industry and in communities throughout our country.” Why won’t mass enlistments do the same thing, those mass enlistments which Lewis advocates? Because—this is plainly the thought in Lewis’ mind—the recruits will then come mainly from the unemployed, whose induction into the army won’t “dislocate industry”.

Sets Unemployed Against Employed Workers

Bitter rage must fill the hearts of the unemployed workers, if they contemplate this spectacle of “labor leaders”, living on a scale beyond the dreams of the highest-paid employed workers, proposing to penalize the unemployed by making them the chief victims of mass recruitment. It wasn’t bad enough that the unemployed have peen penalized by the present economic system; they must now pay for their joblessness by becoming soldiers.
Thus, instead of being the champions of the unemployed, Messrs. Lewis, Green and their associates treat the unemployed as second-class citizens, as people not deserving the same consideration and protection as dues-paying members of the unions.
Members of the trade unions! Awake in time to realize what a dangerous game your official leaders are playing! If they treat the unemployed as second-class citizens in this way, eventually the unemployed will answer in kind. A deep gap will be created between the unions and the unemployed. The unemployed will become enemies of the trade unions.
That’s what happened in Germany. The pot-bellied bureaucrats who ran the unions were only interested in raking in the dues. They treated the unemployed like secondclass citizens. A deep gap developed between the unions and the unemployed. Hitler used that to the full. He posed as the champion of the unemployed. He put tens of thousands of them in barracks where he fed them-and indoctrinated them with Nazism and clothed them-with Nazi uniforms.
In the name of fighting against fascism, the CIO and AFL leadership are making a “patriotic” proposal which can only serve the interests of fascism in this country.
Already some of the most reactionary groups in this country are cleverly using this situation to pose as champions of the unemployed. The multi-millionaire Owen D. Young’s so-called “American Youth Commission” is insisting on passage of the Burke-Wadsworth conscription bill because otherwise, it says hypocritically, the unemployed will be made to bear an entirely disproportionate share of the burden of military service.
What do you think would be the effect on the average unemployed man, of seeing the trade unions propose a system of military service which hits the unemployed most, and then seeing reactionary demagogues defending the interests of the unemployed against the proposal of the trade unions?
Woe to the trade unions if this situation is permitted to continue! But it must not continue. The labor movement must fight against creation of a regular army of millions of hunger-driven “volunteers”, just as much as it should fight against creation of a regular army by the Burke-Wadsworth conscription bill. Because the labor movement, for its own salvation, must defend the interests of all-skilled and unskilled, employed and unemployed.

Why The Government Wants Conscription

The light-minded way in which the AFL and CIO officialdom have agreed to support the conscription measure as soon as enlistments don’t work shows that the trade union movement has failed to understand the fundamental meaning of the Burke-Wadsworth conscription bill. If the workers did understand, they would never permit their leaders under any circumstances to support conscription.
Why is the conscription bill introduced at this time, and with the backing of the government, the dominant sections of the two capitalist parties, and of the capitalist class generally? Neither Lewis nor Green attempt to answer this fundamental question.
About three years ago, the present chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, then ambitiously aspiring to teach the post he now occupies, got a brilliant idea. Thought Senator Sheppard: why not enact into law some of the provisions of the M-Day plans? Forthwith, together with his friend Congressman May, he drew up and introduced the notorious Sheppard-May Bill.
Senator Sheppard “represents” Texas, thanks to the help of a poll tax law and a Jim Crow system whereby the black -and many white workers and farmers have no vote. He is therefore not very sensitive to the problem of not offending the masses. But other Senators have that problem. Finally an informal committee took Sheppard aside and told him the facts of life. He and May were arousing opposition to the M-Day plans by their crude insistence on enacting them into law at that time. Why do that when laws like that are not yet needed? Sheppard and May saw the light. They retired their bill into the background.
The moral of this story is that the hard-headed and coldblooded leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties who have now united in advocating immediate execution of the main M-Day plan, conscription, know just what they are doing. They have thought this thing through with about as much emotion as an adding machine. They need conscription now and they therefore demand a law far more frightful than that which they correctly called Sheppard and May fools for trying to get in 1937. Because then they didn’t need it and now they do.
When a demagogue like Senator Wheeler calls the conscription proposal a - product of “war hysteria”, he is lying, and he knows he is lying. He knows the gentlemen who have commanded the passage of conscription, and he knows they are not hysterical; they are too calculating a crew for that. When a hypocrite like Senator Vandenberg says that conscription is “unnecessary”, he is only throwing sand in the eyes of the masses. Unnecessary for the workers and farmers who would be the victims of conscription? Of course! But a desperate necessity for American capitalism and its political agents.

Why We Oppose The Bill

Conscription, like the gigantic arms program already voted, is called for at this time by the capitalist class because it is preparing for military aggression in the near future on a world scale.
The question whether German imperialism, having conquered Europe, can or cannot “attack” the United States has nothing to do with the real issue. The very existence of one great imperialist power in the modern world is an “attack” on the others. The United States, as an imperialist power having its foundations throughout the world, is “attacked” anywhere a rival power attempts to seize a market, a piece of territory, or a sphere of influence. The very existence of two imperialist powers in this capitalist world means that they “attack” each other and hence must settle the issue from time to time by war. That is why war is inevitable under the capitalist system.
The conscription measure is, therefore, a result of the very nature of American imperialism. John L. Lewis puts the cart before the horse when he says (in his speech at the Auto Union convention) that “by that act (conscription) our Congress is planting the seeds of destruction of democracy and is paving the way for the rise of a new imperialistic nation within the confines of the U. S. A.” No, Brother Lewis, the seeds of destruction are already planted, they were planted before the last World War, when the United States was already an imperialistic nation. Because they are imperialists by their very being, the American imperialists want conscription.
Precisely for that reason the workers must fight against conscription by the capitalists not only when it is “unnecessary” but also when it is “necessary.” Because it is never necessary for the workers. Any war undertaken by the capitalist government of the United States will be an imperialist war, undeserving of the support of the working class.
Because they fail to answer as we do the question why the capitalist class now seeks conscription, the ClO and AFL fail to put up a consistent, fundamental fight against the conscription bill.
To our analysis, Lewis might retort: “You are a Marxist, a revolutionary socialist, interested in overthrowing capitalism. I am not. Therefore we cannot agree on one approach to conscription.”
Very well, then, let us examine the conscription measure from a “Simon pure” trade union point of view. Even from that limited outlook Lewis and Green fail to criticise the Burke-Wadsworth bill deeply enough.

Why Unionists Should Oppose The Bill

Perhaps the most glaring example of the superficiality of AFL and CLO criticism of the bill is their complete failure to explain to their members the meaning of that provision in the bill which empowers the president to exempt from immediate service those men whose work in industry “is found” to justify exemption. These exemptions are to be determined “under such regulations as he may prescribe.”
Green and Lewis know exactly what that means. For the regulations in question are not a matter for future elaboration by Roosevelt; they have been in writing since 1926 when they were drawn up by the joint Army and Navy Selective Service Committee to await just such a moment as this.
Why weren’t they put in the conscription bill, in place of the blanket power given to the president to prescribe the regulations? Because if those regulations were part of the bill, millions of workers who are now not thinking too much about the bill one way or the other,, would be aroused to an under standing of what a reactionary anti-labor weapon it is.
The Joint Army and Navy Selective Service Committee drew up regulations laying down the one method of exemptions of this type which the army and navy and those they speak for-the capitalist class as a whole-will use for any bill they vote for. Under these regulations, to enter a claim for exemption (deferment), a worker will have to submit two affidavits, one by his immediate superior, one by the executive head of the company by which he is employed.
These affidavits will be the sole method of determining whether that worker is or is not entitled to exemption because of his indispensability in the work he is doing. Militant trade unionists will be gotten rid of by the simple device of their employers refusing to sign their affidavits, while finks will be rewarded with affidavits. It’s the chance of a lifetime for union-busting bosses!
These regulations are known to every student, even a casual one, of the conscription system. Yet not a word about them has been said by either the AFL or ClO officials. Is i* because they are afraid to scratch too deep in making their criticism of the conscription bill, since they know that these regulations are designed to be used in connection with any conscription bill, no matter how “liberal” it sounds? Yet deep they must scratch, if they are to be considered loyal to the interests of the many millions of union men and women for whom they speak.
We have now seen what will happen in industry, where the conscription regulations will help employers to weed out militant unionists and hold that threat as a club over the organized workers. That will be the regime in the factories.
And now let us ask a question, (still from a “Simon pure” union standpoint) which Lewis and Green do not even hint at. What will happen to the workers who are drafted into the army? What kind of regime will they live under?.

The Army’s Open Shop Regime

Lewis and Green are able to escape raising this question because most workers, unfortunately, are not thinking about this problem. These workers do not give thought to the nature of the regime in the army because they take the present nature of the army for granted. As if to say: “That’s what armies have been, are, and will be”. But they are profoundly wrong; and they must change their mind on this key question, if the working class is not to become the slave of military dictatorship and fascism.
There was a time when there were no trade unions. The open shop was all that workers knew. The boss had virtually the power of life and death over the workers. And since they had no experience of any other kind of regime in the factory, many workers did not think of the possibility of any other kind. They were in the same state of mind as most union men today are about the possibility of a different kind of regime in the armed forces. It took a vanguard of class-conscious workers to arouse the mass of workers to realize that the open shop was not an immutable law of nature. The same kind of vanguard is needed today to arouse the mass of workers to realize that the open shop in the armed forces is neither a law of nature nor the only way to train millions in the military arts.
There is, of course, an explanation why the open shop in industry has given way to the unionization of many millions of workers, while the open shop has remained in the army. Unionization of industry is not a direct and immediate threat to the power and property of the bosses- so long as they retain the open shop in the, army. Whenever union demands become too intolerable to the bosses, they use the open shop army (which in this sense includes the police and the National Guard) to drive back the union
But the army could not be used for these anti-labor purposes if the officers did not have the power of life and death over the ranks of the soldiers. Only under that power can the officers drive young workers and farmers in uniforms to smah picket lines.
[If simple democratic rights existed in the army-the right ofthe rank and file to gather and discuss without the supervision of officers, the right of the rank and file to publish a newspaper of their own, their right to elect committees to present their grievances to the officers, etc-it would become impossible for the army to be used as an anti-labor force. Just for that reason the army remains an open shop, i.e., a place where the workers have no rights at
If Lewis and Green were really representing the interests of the labor movement, their criticism of the conscription bill would include a denunciation of the open shop regime in the army. And this denunciation would, of course, prevent them from advocating mass enlistments into the open shop army.

If Not Conscription, Then What?

If Lewis and Green were really leading the workers, instead of leaning on the most backward layer they can find among the workers, they would not be letting capitalist demagogues like Wheeler and Vandenberg “speak for Labor” in Congress on the conscription question. Instead they would say:
“The quarrel in Congress is a difference of opinion between two sections of the bosses over which is the best method of getting an open shop army which will be used for the benefit of the capitalists and against the interests of the workers. We don’t take either the side of the pro-conscriptionists or the side of the ’volunteers’. Those two alternatives are not the only way’s to train the workers in the military arts.
“There is another way, one which is in the interests of Labor. And that way is through our trade unions! Just as our unions make possible our very existence, giving us the ability to lift our heads like men in the factories and to live like human beings at home, so our unions can enable us to undergo military training in the atmosphere of the union hail and not in that of the barracks. Compulsory military training? Yes! But only under the direct control of the trade unions.”
That, in short, would be a working class answer to the question of how the workers of this country should receive training in military arts.

Labor’s Military Program

Along this line, Labor has a clear and unambiguous answer to make to the government’s demand that the masses undergo military training:
“Yes, we are for military training. We don’t want to see worker-soldiers go into battle without proper training and equipment. Nor do we want worker-soldiers in the hands of capitalist officers who have no regard for the treatment, the protection and the lives of the men under them.
“Therefore we demand federal funds for the military training of workers and worker-officers under the control of the trade unions. Does that mean we want military appropriations? Yes-but only for the establishment and equipment of workers’ training camps!
“Does this mean compulsory military training of workers? Yes-but only under the control of the trade unions!”

Learn The Lessons of This War!

This workers’ program for military training is the only kind of program which the trade union movement can honorably support. Support of “voluntary” enlistment or conscription by the capitalist state constitutes a betrayal of the interests of the working class.
In this epoch of militarism great questions can be decided only with the aid of military means-this has been demonstrated by the developments of the present war.
Let us therefore brush aside pacifists fools. But also let us thrust aside those equally traitors to the working class, the agents and apologists of “democratic” imperialism.
For the victories of the fascist war machine of Hitler have destroyed every plausible basis for the illusion that a serious military struggle against fascism can be conducted under the leadership of a bourgeois democratic regime. The war in Europe, as previously in the Spanish rehearsal, has shown up the hollowness, the rottenness and the contemptible cowardice and greed of the whole ruling stratum of the bourgeois democrats. They are unwilling to sacrifice anything but the lives of the duped masses. To save their own hides and their property the capitalists were ready in one country’ after another to capitulate to fascism and seek its protection against the wrath of their own people. The American bosses will be no better.
The fight against fascism, at home and abroad, can be won only by the independent action of the working class. That is the supreme lesson of the present war.
The first step in that fight is for the working class to adopt the military program which we have just outlined.
That should be Labor’s answer to conscription!

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Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor 1930s American Socialist Workers Party Leader Felix Morrow

 

 

 

 

Markin comment (2008):

 

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to1930s American Socialist Workers Party leader Felix Morrow.

 

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

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Biography

Felix Morrow was for many years a leading figure figure in American Trotskyism, best known for his classic Revolution and Counter-Revolution In Spain. He joined the Communist League of America in 1933 and after Max Shachtman’s minority split in 1940, served as editor of the Socialist Workers Party’s paper, the Militant, and its theoretical journal, Fourth International. He was one of 18 SWP leaders imprisoned under the Smith Act during the Second World War. In 1943 he formed a faction with Albert Goldman which challenged the SWP’s ‘orthodox’ catastrophic perspective. In one of the most instructive factional struggles in the history of the Trotskyist movement, Morrow and Goldman projected the likelihood of a prolonged period of bourgeois democracy in western Europe and emphasised the need for democratic and transitional demands against the maximalism advocated by the majority. Although he was expelled from the SWP in 1946 for ‘unauthorised collaboration’ with Shachtman’s Workers Party, he did not join Shachtman, and drifted out of politics.

Felix Morrow

Anarchism in Spain

(January 1938)

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Source: New International, Vol.4 No.1, January 1938, pp.6-7.
Transcription/XHTML Markup: Ted Crawford and David Walters.
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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The appearance of Rudolf Rocker’s The Tragedy of Spain warrants a proposal to the anarchists of the English-speaking world for a basic discussion of the role of anarchism in the Spanish revolution. As events dictate, Rocker’s pamphlet is in large part a damning indictment of the bourgeois-Stalinist counter-revolution. We subscribe to every jot and tittle of that indictment. Our comrades throughout the world have undertaken as their elementary duty the defense of the CNT workers. We stand in unconditional solidarity with them against their oppressors. Our own press has largely subordinated our critical analysis of the strategy of Spanish anarchism to the immediately pressing task of rallying aid for the persecuted anarchist movement. If Rocker’s new work were but such a defense alone, we should be only too happy to solidarize ourselves with it completely.

The Tragedy of Spain is, however, more than a defense pamphlet. It is also an attempt to justify the fundamental strategy pursued by the CNT leadership. More, it “deduces” the bourgeois-Stalinist repressions from Lenin and Trotsky’s theories which “were merely pathbreakers” for Stalin, whose policies are “only the logical result of the work of his predecessors”.
No one can have failed to observe the sudden recrudescence of anarchist and syndicalist attacks on the foundations of Leninism. The struggle for Kronstadt in 1921 is revived as a burning question! Strenuous are the attempts to pronounce Stalinism the natural heir of Bolshevism. Trotsky and other comrades have analyzed such arguments and coped with them at great length. Here, I wish merely to underline one reason for the revival of this stuff: the disastrous course of the leadership of Spanish anarchism has developed a strong semi-Bolshevik current in the anarchist movement. The Friends of Durruti, supported by sections of the Libertarian Youth and the FAI, represent this tendency in Spain itself. Their recognition of the necessity for democratic organs of power (soviets) and organs of repression against the bourgeoisie and its direct allies (dictatorship of the proletariat)—lessons learned not from books but from the hard blows of the Spanish events—have spelled the end of anarchist prejudices against proletarian state power. But this is Trotskyism! The anarchist leadership outside Spain therefore seeks to immunize its followers against this tendency by identifying it with... its merciless persecutor! (Inside Spain, however, this method is employed but little, for the simple reason that the CNT leadership courts Stalin.) This stratagem will not save anarchism from discussing with us the question: the movement led by their Spanish comrades was the greatest single force in the Iberian proletariat; anarchism has thus received its first test on a large scale; what has that test shown?
We contend that the Spanish events have demonstrated the complete bankruptcy of anarchism as a guide to the proletariat on the road to a socialist society. I shall briefly outline some necessary points of discussion:

I. Anarchism becomes class collaborationism in the period of social revolution.

During the period of stable bourgeois rule, anarchist hatred of oppression spurs it to struggle against capitalism. But in the crucible of the revolution, when the bourgeoisie can only weather the flames by offering to collaborate in building the “new society”, anarchist opposition to the dictatorship of the proletariat is revealed as a “non-class” ideology, in other words, class collaborationist. Why didn’t the CNT take power on July 19, 1936, or propose the assumption of power by democratic organs with franchise limited to worker and peasant? Note the answer of Rudolf Rocker—who is concededly the most important figure in world anarchism. Arguing against the Stalinist myth that the CNT was trying to take power in May 1937, Rocker says:

“If the CNT-FAI had really entertained any such plans, they had for a long time after the 19th of July the best opportunity to put their wishes into effect, for their tremendous moral and physical superiority over every other faction was such that simply no one could have resisted them. They did not do so, not because they lacked the strength, but because they were opposed to any dictatorship from whichever side it proceeded. “

Note that the anarchist criterion is not conditioned by the specific Spanish situation; it is a blueprint for all revolutions: class collaboration with any section of capitalists who do not take arms in hand against the masses (they do not because they have not yet the strength!) is at the very heart of the anarchist conception of the road to socialism. Thus the Spanish anarchists—and all who follow them in the future—rehabilitate the bourgeoisie before the masses, nurture them, give them time to restore their strength—and to turn and crush the masses.

II. A coalition government is inevitably anti-working class.

Rocker is less than entirely honest—to put it no more strongly—in writing a pamphlet which does not once comment on the significant fact of CNT participation in the Valencian and Catalonian governments! These coalitions with the bourgeoisie, instruments of class collaboration during a revolutionary period, were the most important means whereby the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc recouped the power from the masses. They did so by the simple device of arrogating more and more power to the government, i.e., to the old bourgeois state for which the CNT served as a “red front”; and they did so with the direct approbation of the CNT leadership.

Rocker is guilty of a vulgar anti-Stalinism which does not take into account the role of the bourgeois state, for which Stalinism merely served as the most efficient bloodhound.

“If one can bring any reproach against the leading persons in the CNT-FAI,” says Rocker, “it is that they accorded these false ‘brothers’ [the Stalinists] a greater confidence than they deserved, and that under the pressure of desperate circumstances they let themselves be drawn into making concessions which could only prove disastrous to them later.”

This, and other equally vague statements of the same kind, remind one of those academic admissions of error which Stalinism gives as lip-service to critical Marxism, but the exact contents of which are discreetly left for future turns and twists. The fact is that the basic crimes of the CNT leadership were committed during the first weeks of the Generalidad government (September 26 on), when the Stalinists were still hopelessly weak in Spain and when no Russian arms had yet arrived. What were those basic crimes? Joining with the bourgeois-Stalinist bloc in issuing a series of decrees wiping out the revolution: the decrees dissolving the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias and turning its powers over to the Ministries of Defense and Public Order; the decree dissolving all the revolutionary committees throughout Catalonia; the decree establishing municipal governments based on fixed ratios of representation from the various parties; the decree disarming the workers; the decree providing for compensation to the landlords and factory owners; the decrees militarizing the militias under the bourgeois military code. I mention only those decrees which the bourgeoisie proposed and the C.N.T. approved. I shall not even mention those necessary measures for the social revolution which the CNT failed even to propose (nationalization of banks, land, etc., etc.).

Can one speak of this systematic legislation, approved by the CNT, as an “error”? No, CNT approval flowed from a basic tenet of anarchism: the refusal to distinguish between workers’ states and bourgeois states, hence CNT collaboration in a bourgeois state, CNT approval of legislation to strengthen the bourgeois state against the workers. The crimes of the CNT leaders cannot be laid to their trustfulness in the Stalinists. As a matter of fact, I can adduce page and chapter to demonstrate that they understood who their Stalinist confrères were. Much deeper were the roots of this collaboration with reformists and bourgeois counter-revolutionaries: it flows from anarchist theory.

III. There is today in Spain a corrupt, degenerate anarchist bureaucracy.

Doctrinairism can explain much: leaders pursuing false theories will not admit the falsity of their theories, despite the impact of events. But this is not the only explanation for the present course of the CNT leadership. Fifteen months of class collaboration, of occupying bourgeois governmental posts, etc., has crystallized a bureaucratic layer in the CNT which feels its affinity with the communist and socialist bureaucracies rather than with the masses of the CNT. Despite all the experiences of the first coalition governments, this CNT bureaucracy seeks only to return to the government, under the face-saving formula of the “anti-fascist” front, which is nothing but a re-baptized People’s Front. This bureaucracy concealed from the workers on the barricades in the May days the government’s sending of troops from Valencia, the Generalidad’s violation of its agreements, the massacre at Tarragona, etc., etc.—intent only on getting the workers to capitulate. This bureaucracy calls upon the masses to put its faith in Caballero—the same Caballero who headed a government which boycotted Catalonian economy, prevented systematic development of a war industry in Catalonia, starved the Aragon front of arms, established political censorship of the workers’ press, organized praetorian forces in the Assault, Civil guards and carabineros, etc., etc. This bureaucracy praised Stalin, suppressed all criticism of the Moscow trials, and thus facilitated the bloody work of Stalin’s hangmen. This bureaucracy did not lift a finger to save the Friends of Durruti, its contenders for leadership of the CNT, from being outlawed by the government. One can no longer speak of this CNT bureaucracy as just making mistakes.

Yet anarchist comrades, particularly in the English-speaking world, in the name of unity of action, of defense of the Spanish workers, remain silent about these crimes and thus join in bearing the responsibility for them. While the late Camillo Berneri and Joaquin Ascaso, among others, have not hesitated in Spain publicly to denounce the policies of the CNT bureaucrats, while more and more local papers of the CNT movement speak out, we find the American anarchists especially silent about the tragic course of the CNT. Who is served by such silence? Certainly not the masses of any country. Certainly not the theoretical foundations of the revolution in any country. We have opened the discussion. What do the anarchists have to say?

Felix MORROW

As indicated in the article of Felix Morrow, the Editors of The New International are ready to open its pages to a discussion article on the subject by a responsible advocate of the policy of the Spanish anarchists.

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor 1930s American Socialist Workers Party Leader Felix Morrow

Markin comment (2008):

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to1930s American Socialist Workers Party leader Felix Morrow.

 

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

********

 

Biography

Felix Morrow was for many years a leading figure figure in American Trotskyism, best known for his classic Revolution and Counter-Revolution In Spain. He joined the Communist League of America in 1933 and after Max Shachtman’s minority split in 1940, served as editor of the Socialist Workers Party’s paper, the Militant, and its theoretical journal, Fourth International. He was one of 18 SWP leaders imprisoned under the Smith Act during the Second World War. In 1943 he formed a faction with Albert Goldman which challenged the SWP’s ‘orthodox’ catastrophic perspective. In one of the most instructive factional struggles in the history of the Trotskyist movement, Morrow and Goldman projected the likelihood of a prolonged period of bourgeois democracy in western Europe and emphasised the need for democratic and transitional demands against the maximalism advocated by the majority. Although he was expelled from the SWP in 1946 for ‘unauthorised collaboration’ with Shachtman’s Workers Party, he did not join Shachtman, and drifted out of politics.

Felix Morrow

Gods and Society

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Source: New International, New York, Vol.2 No.1, January 1935, pp.29-30.
Transcription/XHTML Markup: Ted Crawford and David Walters
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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THE PASSING OF THE GODS
by V.P. Calvedrton
320 pp. New York. Charles Scribner’s Sons. $2.50.

In three hundred pages V.F. Calverton attempts to say a great many things about religion from primitive times to the present. Here, however, I should like to limit myself to one central point: the contrast between the conception of the nature of religion suggested by Marx and that of Calverton.

Calverton’s main thesis is that the savage’s fear of his natural environment, plus institutional and ideological inertia, accounts for the existence of religion. Religion arose because of primitive man’s inability to control his environment, and seemed to give man power to fulfil his economic needs. Then, in the last few centuries, “the agricultural world which had perpetuated the religious mentality began to give way to an industrial world in which that type of mentality was no longer needed. As the discovery of natural laws prepared the way for the mechanical inventions that made possible the Industrial Revolution, man became less dependent upon the gods and more dependent upon science for the power he needed over his environment” (p.87).
Calverton has obscured this general thesis by also accepting Frazer’s. Frazer makes a fundamental distinction between magic and religion; magic is for him primitive science, religion is primitive metaphysics. This distinction—which has been abandoned not only by most anthropologists but also by serious liberal religionists like A. Eustace Haydon, Shirley Jackson Case, etc.—has an apologetic function; it serves to obscure the instrumental character of religion; and is, in fact, logically contradictory to Calverton’s general thesis.
As for Calverton’s main thesis, it leads him to insist that religion today is disappearing; in line with this notion, he says:

“The best proof of that fact [that religion is disappearing] is to be seen in what has happened to Russia... Today the religious, metaphysical mind has evaporated. Why? Because Soviet Russia has become an industrialized state... The result has been that the religious mentality has been driven into irrecoverable retreat within the span of little more than a decade.” (p.89.)

In capitalist countries, too, religion is fast disappearing.

“Notwithstanding all that may be said to the contrary, notwithstanding all the statistics of membership that the churches may cite, the fact remains that the religious mentality is in a state of disintegration and decay, with no hope left for its recovery. Its social purpose has been superseded by that of science.” (p.89.)

In further proof of the death of religion, Calverton produces figures (p.263) which he has apparently misunderstood: for they show church membership to be growing proportionally with the population, though stationary in percentage: whereas for Calverton’s thesis there would have to be a precipitous fall. Then, Calverton (perhaps attempting to overcome this contradiction) says:

“But the decline and decay of religion in America is more of a qualitative than a quantitative phenomenon. It is in spirit far more than in numbers that American religion has deteriorated.” (p.267)

Here, of course, Calverton confuses two different meanings of decay: it is one thing to say that religion is decaying, meaning that by present intellectual and moral criteria it is no longer progressive: it is entirely different, and inadmissable, to say that religion is decaying in the sense that the churches are about to disappear.

A Marxist can have little in common with Calverton’s position. Throughout, when Calverton speaks of the “environment”, it is always clear from the context that he means the physical environment. This is particularly obvious in all references to science as giving us control over “the environment”. This is the position of bourgeois atheism, which holds that religion is generated as an escape from frustrations imposed on primitive man by uncontrolled nature, but which will not recognize the frustrations imposed on modern man by uncontrolled (bourgeois) forces of production.
What bourgeois atheism fails to recognize is that frustrations imposed by uncontrolled nature were social frustrations. The fetishism of nature which generated the primitive and ancient religions was the result of the fact that the social process of labor, that is the interaction of society with nature, was not fortified by adequate techniques; this social condition has long been supplanted as the main condition for the existence of religion. Calverton and bourgeois atheists fail to understand this too. But the fetishism which today sustains religion is what Marx called the fetishism of commodities. This means that the process of producing commodities is not mastered by society but is today the master of society.
Society’s labor appears to it in the form of elemental forces beyond its control. Forces so independent of control appear in the realm of experience, inevitably, as non-social forces indistinguishable from natural catastrophes. Business failures and crimes, war and poverty appear as though by the inexorable hand of fate. And to the individual, neither will, nor foresight, nor effort are in any way commensurate with results: the worker toils and yet starves, and is thrown out of work to suffer still more, by forces which cannot but seem mysterious and evil to him; the bourgeois is equally in the hands of fate, for there is no relation between his efforts and rewards; he is superstitious when he plays a In on the stockmarket and wins, and equally superstitious when business prospers or fails. Commodities, the products of society’s own efforts, rear up like monsters to overwhelm their maker. Men are frustrated at every. turn by their own social relations. There is a basic dualism between social ethics and practical activity. Attempts to satisfy our needs or potentialities by the secular techniques fail or are frustrates. It is inevitable under these circumstances that many should turn for satisfaction to the religious techniques.
The bourgeois atheist cannot understand this process because he cannot admit that the bourgeoisie is not the master of society’s productive forces. For him historical contradictions ended with feudalism, and thereafter there are only problems for science to solve in the course of its development. Even the liberal bourgeois aware of what he calls the “social problem” proposes its solution by new scientific processes or by the application of “knowledge”, i.e., by agreed upon technical methods, and not by social methods—which upon analysis mean class struggle. For the bourgeois atheist, therefore, it is impossible to understand that the roots of religion today are social, that no amount of enlightenment can break up the religious complex until the fetichisms which generate it are done away with by the building of a form of society which will be master of the productive forces. The Yaroslayskvs of the Soviet Union may make their vulgar boasts that they are doing away with religion, and many may believe them, but this is merely another perverted derivative of the theory of socialism in one country. Russia is in the grip of world economy, and to the Russian masses, too, in spite of the gigantic industrial developments, the forces of production cannot but still appear as forces with a demonic life of their own: the Protestant sects which have been springing up in the Soviet Union throughout the last ten years are proof of this fact.
Speaking of the fetishism of commodities, Marx says,

“Such reflections of the real world will not disappear until the relations between human beings in their practical everyday life have assumed the aspect of perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations as between man and man, and as between man and nature. The life process of society, this meaning the material process of production, will not lose its veil of mystery until it becomes a process carried on by a free association of producers, under their conscious and purposive control.”

Calverton’s analysis of religion contains not an inkling of the main condition for the existence of religion today! Not a word about the process whereby man’s own labors confront him as independent forces. Calverton is, in this book as in much other work, ridden by the genetic fallacy. He thinks the primary origin of religion must still be its basis; and is ready to go so far, in fact, as to make religion a cultural hang-over, as it were, from the days when agriculture was the dominant form of production. This is hopelessly undialectical. Religion may have many origins, as may anything else which has a history. No Marxist would thinkingly put himself in the intellectual position that his criticism of religion today depended on its historical origins. What he is interested in is, primarily, the conditions for the existence of religion today.

Of these conditions there is no analysis at all in this book. In other words, this is a book designed to attack religion as a capitalist institution but which really cannot do so because it does not reveal the reasons for the existence of religion tinder capitalism.

Felix MORROW

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-Honor 1930s American Socialist Workers Party Leader Felix Morrow

 

 

 

 

 

Markin comment (2008):

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to1930s American Socialist Workers Party leader Felix Morrow.

 

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

********

 

Biography

Felix Morrow was for many years a leading figure figure in American Trotskyism, best known for his classic Revolution and Counter-Revolution In Spain. He joined the Communist League of America in 1933 and after Max Shachtman’s minority split in 1940, served as editor of the Socialist Workers Party’s paper, the Militant, and its theoretical journal, Fourth International. He was one of 18 SWP leaders imprisoned under the Smith Act during the Second World War. In 1943 he formed a faction with Albert Goldman which challenged the SWP’s ‘orthodox’ catastrophic perspective. In one of the most instructive factional struggles in the history of the Trotskyist movement, Morrow and Goldman projected the likelihood of a prolonged period of bourgeois democracy in western Europe and emphasised the need for democratic and transitional demands against the maximalism advocated by the majority. Although he was expelled from the SWP in 1946 for ‘unauthorised collaboration’ with Shachtman’s Workers Party, he did not join Shachtman, and drifted out of politics.

Felix Morrow

Declining America

(November 1934)

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Source: New International, New York, Vol.1 No.4, November 1934, pp.128-129.
Transcription/XHTML Markup: Ted Crawford and David Walters.
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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THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM
by Lewis Corey
622 pp. IX Graphs. New York. Covici, Friede, $4.00.

Lewis Corey has been unfortunate in his reviewers; the handful of radical and liberal papers which should have introduced his work to an audience which badly needs it have, indeed, but served to screen the book from the labor movement. Scarcely one of them gave even a hint of its quality and content. To what extent the reviewers alone were to blame for this, to what extent Corey himself is responsible, requires some discussion. It will help clear the ground for an adequate appreciation of Corey’s work if we begin by a consideration of the principal reviews.

The nasty review in The Nation, by the New Dealer, A. A. Berle, revealed more about how “impartial” an economist Berle is than it did about the quality of Corey’s thought. Nor is there anything in Corey’s book to justify the ill humor and economic illiteracy of the editor of Common Sense. Of the liberals, only George Soule in The New Republic gave some notion of the proportions of the book, though without seriously coming to grips with it. The only review so far in the socialist press was that of James Oneal in The New Leader, which lightly passed over the whole book in a gingerly fashion solely to denounce its revolutionary conclusions. On the whole, the reviews in the capitalist and reformist press merely revealed the ignorance and prejudice of these people, and it is only unfortunate that their readers were thus barred from learning how valuable a book the reviewers were tampering with.
The truly fantastic review of thirty-odd pages in The Communist was, if one needed such confirmation, a thorough revelation of the abysmal theoretical level of the Stalinists. It was a mosaic of quotations from Marx, Lenin, Stalin, etc., most of them quite irrelevant, and tied together by sentences at least half of which were wholly unintelligible. It was the work of men long bereft of any loyalty to ideas, and completely incompetent to discover whether the leading ideas of Corey on economics were or were not in conformity with Stalinism. Perhaps the very sanity of Corey made him sound like a heretic; and so, ever and anon, the Stalinists quoted at random and asked: Is this Trotskyism? Though the specific passages thus isolated were not at all significant, the Stalinists were right, however, in being suspicious; for Corey’s conception of the process of capitalist decline provides, like Lenin’s, for a continuation of capitalist production, though on continuously lower levels, until it is politically overthrown. In this Corey differs fundamentally from the apocalyptic theory of “the last crisis”, by which Stalinism revises Lenin and reverts to the Kautsky-Luxemburg theory of an internal collapse of capitalism.
Why did not the Stalinists merely vent their bile on the book in their usual fashion of dealing with non-Stalinists? They were instinctively uneasy and distrustful of the book; but they were not sure that a deal could not be made with Corey, as indicated by the closing chapter of his book. That chapter, hastily sketching the history of the radical movement and the necessary strategy and tactics, is ambiguous and hazy on those points—as Corey himself well knows—around which most controversy revolves (Negro trade unions, united front), ends the story of the radical movement with the communist party, and says that in the period 1923-29, “except for the communist party all labor organizations became more and more conservative”—thus ignoring that these were the years of the political degeneration of the party, and the rise of the oppositions (mention of which is apparently taboo). Undoubtedly this chapter raised hopes in the Stalinists for bringing Corey, into open captivity. This is made quite obvious by the ending of the Stalinist review, which abruptly closes with a promise to return next month to a consideration of the last short chapter, i.e., after waiting to see whether Corey will crawl to Canossa.
This last chapter is also, perhaps, a clue to some of the defects of the whole book. The avoidance of questions of economics controversial among Marxists, the lack of even a single reference to the writings of the local Stalinist or Comintern “experts” on America and, above all, the heavy, often even clumsy and repetitious style lacking all personality (Corey has evidenced elsewhere that he can write well), reveal, it may be, the marks of a man who is writing under a sense of restraint. Except for this sense of one not permitting himself complete intellectual freedom, however, the main body of the book is, in its scholarly integrity, in sharp contrast to the Jesuitical last chapter.
Another review which could only serve to prevent readers from coming to Corey was Paul Mattick’s in the Modern Monthly. Mattick continues the most repulsive aspects of the interpretation of Marxian economics, as a mechanistic conception of an automatic collapse of capitalism. His review disgraced the name of Marxism in its scholastic pettiness and, gave Corey no credit for even those sections of his book which Mattick must agree with. His accusation that Corey holds to the theory of underconsumption is preposterous, for on the fundamental issue which distinguishes the underconsumption theory front the Marxian overproduction theory—whether or no a balanced economy is theoretically possible within the social relations of capitalist production—Corey is most unambiguously a Marxist.
That Mattick could even raise this question does, however, reveal one weakness in Corey’s exposition; and this is substantiated by the readiness with which George Soule—who does follow the underconsumption theory—thinks himself in agreement with Corey as against other Marxists.
This weakness appears in Part Four. To the usual reader (and the not so usual, as Mattick and Soule testify), it may seem that the exposition appears to lead up to a consideration of the Antagonism Between Production and Consumption, as if that were the basic antagonism. Corey falls into some absurd errors, such as:

“The economic contradictions in the movement of production and consumption are necessarily expressed in class antagonisms:

“Struggle between the workers and employers over wages,” etc. (p.156.)

This is unforgivably slipshod. As Corey himself would no doubt be the first to admit, the correct statement of the capitalist contradictions is precisely the opposite of what he has stated. It is the class antagonisms which are expressed in, among other ways, the “antagonism between production and consumption”, which is a mere secondary effect of the class antagonisms. And the struggle between workers and employers, arising from the contradiction between wages and profits, is a struggle at the point of production, and can be described and understood without any reference to consumption.

What happened is that Corey has unthinkingly accommodated himself to the prevailing formulations of the liberal bourgeois economists. These, unconsciously but determinedly, limit their analysis of capitalism to the problems which trouble capitalists themselves. That capital itself, that is, the conditions of capitalist production,—production for the sake of capitalist accumulation—is the barrier which prevents an unrestricted extension of production, is an answer which is unthinkable for the capitalist and its economists. Hence they limit their analysis to that one of the results of this barrier which troubles capitalists most—not mass unemployment, mass starvation, imperialist war, cultural degeneration, etc., but the empirical observation that production does not continue because consumers goods are not sold. The only form in which they see the contradictions of capitalism is in the lack of balance between production and consumption. It is only when we go behind this mere appearance that we reach the fundamental nature of capitalism. For Corey to adapt himself to the superficial terminology of bourgeois economists aids him in no way, but rather involves him, sound though his general position is, in a number of absurd errors of which the above quotation is typical.
Marx himself was particularly careful at all times to demonstrate that the basic contradictions of capitalism are at the point of production itself. One of the effects of these contradictions is the phenomenon of a conflict between the tendency to unconditional development of the forces of production as contrasted with the limited consumption of consumers goods. This conflict, however, Marx always emphasizes, is merely the reflection, in the subsidiary realm of exchange, of the contradiction at the point of production, the “tendency to an absolute development of productive forces, a development which comes continually in conflict with the specific conditions of production in which capital moves and alone can move.” (Vol.III, p.302.)
Corey’s unthinking accommodation to the empiricistic formula of the liberal bourgeois economists is a serious mistake. Precisely because it is so prevalent, Corey should have sharply dissociated himself from it and used the Marxian formulations. There is no more reason for a Marxist to use the bourgeois formulation on this point, than the bourgeois definition of capital, value, etc.
Worse, still, Corey’s treatment of this subject makes it seem as though the fact that the forces of production are developed more highly than the forces of consumption is of itself a sufficient cause of economic crises. He thus obscures the fact that only under capitalist production is production over any given period dependent upon consumption. A socialist society, if it so willed, could go on producing for years tenfold what it consumed, without a dislocation of harmonious productive relations, for under socialist production there can be an absolute increase of the forces of production without any relation to consumption. This most significant aspect of a socialist economy is obscured, if one emphasizes the capitalist antagonism as one between production and consumption, as if one were a blind bourgeois economist instead of a Marxist.
Despite the lack of clarity evidenced by Corey on this question, his errors are mainly limited to Part IV, and even there, only to a series of passages; for his weakness, it is worth repeating, is due merely to taking over at this point the bourgeois formula of production versus consumption.
In considering Corey’s reviewers and the questions raised by them, we have also stated our main disagreements with him. Having thus cleared the decks, there remains to give a general estimation of The Decline of American Capitalism.
Its most obvious contribution is the astonishing wealth of statistical material marshalled together for the purposes of demonstrating that the facts of American capitalism offer “the fullest confirmation of the analysis Karl Marx made of the laws of capitalist production”. The wealth of statistics is not only organized for the reading text, but is constructed into tables and graphs which have their counterpart nowhere else and which, once seen, become indispensable for a Marxian exposition of the processes of American capitalism.
A work of such proportions in the Marxian literature is a rarity indeed, for many reasons. Few leading Marxists since the time of Marx himself have had the opportunity to assimilate the sheer volume of economic materials required for a large-scale statistical demonstration of the Marxian laws of capitalist production. Where the opportunity existed, there were other difficulties. Even the Germans had no such materials available as Corey used, for the American statistical material is more abundant, and far superior in scope and continuity, than any in the world. Moreover, with the general tendency riveted on the Marxian tradition by Kautsky, to treat Marxian economics as a closed deductive system, it was natural that Marxists should give more attention to deductive analysis than to statistical demonstration. It is a fact, therefore, that Corey’s work is the most comprehensive attempt yet made in the Marxian tradition to give a statistical-analytical demonstration of the working of the Marxian laws of capitalist production within a specific country.
Where does this book belong in the the Marxian tradition? It belongs, it is clear, with those who have understood that Marxian economics is a sociological economics; that the economic process is not analogical to that of a machine, of which political, cultural events, etc. are mere by-products; that the economic development of capitalism provides the objective conditions for the proletarian revolution and socialism, but that any talk of the automatic collapse of capitalism is either meaningless babble or derives from a thoroughgoing mechanism which is really a form of mysticism. Corey speaks of tendencies and processes. He never forgets that economic barriers to capitalism as a going concern may be broken down for a period by a non-economic category of action—imperialist war (politics, in its most aggressive form)—precarious and dangerous though such a method of blood-letting may be for capitalism itself. He might well have taken for the motto of his book Lenin’s famous thought, that there is always a way out for capitalism so long as the proletarian revolution does not overthrow it. The reactionary nature of declining capitalism, its consequences in moral suffering and degradation, slaughter and brutalization, does not provide the end of capitalism, it provides the opportunity for its overthrow.
Sharing none of its mechanistic conceptions, Corey belongs in another line of development than that of the German Social Democracy. He belongs with Lenin, whose sharp break with mechanistic Marxian economics is the foundation of most of his important contributions, most obviously in his theory of the role of the peasantry in imperialist and colonial countries. Less obvious, but equally susceptible of proof, is the fact that the Leninist theory of the role of the party and the nature of the proletarian dictatorship, also have their foundation in his sociological, anti-mechanistic Marxian economics.
The valuable direction that Corey’s work will give to the study of Marxian economics in this country is, I believe, peculiarly timely. Many now coming to the revolutionary movement come from non-Leninist traditions; they bring with them a baggage of dangerous theories of spontaneity: lack of understanding of the leading role of theory, confusion of trade union and political levels of activity, failure to comprehend the importance of the autonomy of the party, failure to understand that revolutionary confiscation of private property will not instantaneously wipe out class hostilities and attitudes, which can only disappear during a considerable period of proletarian dictatorship.
One of the most important correctives for such theories of spontaneity is a correct approach to economic phenomena. Most theories involving spontaneity can be traced, logically, back to a mechanistic economics, which makes social and political actions a mere reflex of economic change. Thus many of Rosa Luxemburg’s differences with Lenin flow from her mechanistic economics: her failure to understand the possibilities of the peasantry as proletarian allies; her failure to understand the progressive character of colonial revolutions; her unclarity on the autonomous role of the party. Luxemburg, despite her revolutionary instincts, is closer in her economic methodology to Kautsky than to Lenin.
Corey’s work, then, should serve as a sharp corrective to the mechanistic economics which is always implicit or explicit in theories of spontaneity. In his approach to economics, Corey understands Marx as Lenin understood him.
The Marxian exposition of the significance of changes in the composition of capital takes on added significance as Corey utilizes the statistics collected by conservatives and government agencies. The theory of the falling rate of profit has never to my knowledge before received such statistical demonstration and yet been handled with such a frank, recognition of the difficulties involved.

Felix MORROW

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman-Joseph Cotten’s “A Blueprint For Murder”

DVD Review

A Blueprint For Murder, starring Joseph Cotton, Jean Peters, 20^thCentury Fox, 1953

Personally, I like my femme fatales, my cinematic femme fatales anyway, pretty straightforward. Someone like fetching sultry Jane Greer in Out Of The Past who when she got cross with her main squeeze, her main connected man, shot him point blank and took a bunch of his cash as she sauntered out the door to sunny Mexico. Nice. And then when he, Kirk Douglas he, had her tailed by a couple of private gumshoes to get the dough back, and maybe her too you know how connected guys are, she thought nothing of shooting one of them dead, very dead when the heat was on, and led the other one a merry chase (although he, Robert Mitchum he, knew the score, and took the ride anyway), and when Robert got“religion” on her put the rooty-toot-toot on him too. At least a guy knew where he stood with dear Jane and if he was silly enough to turn his back on her under any circumstances then shame on him. So if his neck was tired from turning around, or if he forgot, and he neglected his defense and a cold piece of steel came his way he was forewarned. Yah, I can appreciate dear Jane because in this wicked old world when a girl is from hunger, well, a girl has got to do what she has to do.

This femme in the film under review, Blueprint For Murder, though throws me off, is somebody who I can’t figure. Yah, this Lynne Cameron (played by Jean Peters) is something else, smart, beautiful (although not to these eyes drop- dead beautiful and sultry like Ms. Greer), would be good company on a cold night, seemingly on top of the world yet was a stone-cold killer, a murderess, a child murderess. And the child in question was one of her stepchildren. See she married rich Bill Cameron after his wife died. (It came out later, at least it was rumored and so take it for what it is worth, that she, working under the name Lola Landry, was a high- class call girl when she met Bill, he was bowled over, and married her after a few weeks. Another story making the rounds later, and one that is more believable to these ears, was that she was a torch singer, working under the name, LaVerne LaRue (nice),in one of Chi town gangster Johnny Rico’s night spots, and his girlfriend. Once he was sent up to Joliet and the dough stopped she, having to watch out for herself in this wicked old world , grabbed for the next best thing, one sad sack but rich widower Bill Cameron whom she met at the club one night and his two young kids, Polly and Doug)

Things were okay, okay as long as Bill breathed and was shelling out the dough to keep her in comfort and was happy with her care of his kids but then he up and died of some rare and exotic disease (no she didn’t have anything to do with his demise after all he was the meal ticket, as far as the coppers were able to determine). Under the terms of Bill’s will though our Lynne was to get coffee and cakes from his million dollar plus estate (yes, it sounds like chump change, just walking around money now, but was real dough, real felony-worthy dough in the 1950s) unless the kids died before her. Some foolish lawyer arrangement as it turned out to protect the kids and kind of freeze her out. Something must have snapped in her with this news because she started spending all her waking hours studying toxicology, studying about human reactions to various types of poisons and, more importantly, how traceable, how criminally traceable they were.

Lynne did her work well as Polly was the first to go from a strychnine dose, not once, but twice, the second time in the hospital after she “volunteered,” as an angel of mercy to run out and get an antidote prescription filled. Yes, Lynne was nothing but a stone-cold killer when she got her wanting habits on. Enter Uncle Cam (played by Joseph Cotten), Bill’s brother, who couldn’t understand how Polly, who appeared to be recovering, could go under. And he was aided (egged on too) in his suspicions by Bill’s lawyer and his over-read amateur sleuth wife who built the case for Polly poisoning inch by inch. More importantly, pointing the finger directly at Lynne once the terms of the will entered center stage as a motive, and once little innocent Doug found himself as the only thing between Lynne and a big payday.

The beauty of poisoning, as the baffled authorities discovered from the amateur sleuths to the cops to the D.A. to judge, is that unless you see the person actually administer the damn stuff it is hard to get a conviction. Cam and his associates tried, got Lynne charged, and got laughed out of court. And in the aftermath laughed at in the face by Lynne who planned to take Doug away from prying eyes with a long European trip by boat. Good-bye Doug. Well, not quite. Cam decided he needed to get some fresh air so he took that same boat trip, pretend courted Lynne, and administered a dose of strychnine that he found in her vanity into her drink. (All parties admitted later that he was both heroic and foolish in that rash act.)Then they played chicken, as the poison worked its way through her system and time was running out. She stood up for her “innocence” like a real pro but in the end she had to cry “uncle” and wound up in some women’s prison doing life for her efforts. Yah, give me a Jane femme and a cranked neck every time, so I don’t have to hire somebody to test my food and drink like the kings of old did. Jesus.

From The Pen OfJoshua Lawrence Breslin – From "The Lonesome Hobo" Series- Down Sonora Way- The Ghost Of Bill Higgins

Frankie Riley was shocked, well maybe not shocked but stunned when he heard the news of Bill Higgins’ murder. Jesus, he had had just seen Bill in Los Angeles a couple of months before when Bill was passing through on his way south and he and Maria, his live-in mex girlfriend (immigration status fuzzy so Maria, okay), her of the sparkling laughing eyes and dark brown skin, had let Bill stay in their apartment for a couple of weeks while he worked on some plan that he had hatched, some vague plan connected with making a pile down in Mexico, down Sonora way that would put he and Clara on easy street.

Bill Higgins and Frankie Riley had known each other from the hunger days in the old 1960s Olde Saco (Maine, okay) neighborhood, the old just barely working- class neighborhood where the chronically unemployed, under-employed and just plain ne’er-do-wells, mainly Irish and hence locally known as Irishtown (although more generically to outsiders, combined with the French-Canadian streets, as the Acre), mainly third or fourth generation Irish and thus firmly planted by the prior toil of forbears lived, where they had met, beyond Olde Saco Junior High corridor nod (the junior high, and come to think of it, high school nod too, a subject worthy of its own sketch but not here, not now when dope, guns, and girls, ah, women, are central to what is what) met, while hugging the walls (literally according to both sources at the time) at the old Sacred Heart (Roman Catholic) Church at the weekly (except Lent, of course, and other odd-ball feast days like the Feast of the Immaculate Conception which even as ignorant, sex ignorant, flat- out sex ignorant, as these boyos were drew a guffaw) “sock hop” held by the senior parish priest, Monsignor Lally.

Held to, well, “keep an eye, maybe more than one, on the younger portion of his flock,” as the good father expressed it each Sunday when making the announcement for the next hop in the line-up. The real reason, of course, whispered among the young, including wall-huggers Higgins and Riley, was to keep said young angel sheep, away from too much heathen devil’s music (read: ersatz Protestant music probably a Baptist or Unitarian conspiracy, the good priest spouted both theories); that rock and roll music that was just then epitomized by that hip-swaying, butt-flaying, making the girls “wet” (wet in the wrong places) praying false god praying Elvis Presley. And by all means to keep them, that unprotected angel flock to a person, but especially those with access to automobiles, from dark seawalls down at Olde Saco Beach listening to fogged-up car radios in the back seat and digging the beat while, well, just while and leave it at that or for those without golden automobile access or who were too young, away from the Strand Theater, the exclusive upstairs balcony section of course, for the young set, the car-less healthy young interested in lightless dark night s-x (you know just in case the old bastard is still around).

Frankie still remembered the first song that they had heard upon meeting at that fateful junior high school time sock hop, Danny and the Juniors’ At The Hop. And the reason he remembered that song so vividly was one sparking blue-eyed, flaming red-haired Clara Murphy, just mentioned Clara, a girl who had given both of them her come hither twelve-year old look that night (and previously at school too) and they had been hooked, hooked as bad as men (okay, boys) could be hooked by a woman (okay, girl). So it was not surprising that they both had rushed over to ask her to dance when that number was being played at that fateful dance. And Clara in her Solomonic wisdom turned them both down. Or maybe not so Solomonic. Clara Murphy couldn’t, just that moment, decide whether she liked Bill or Frankie better, or whether she liked either of them, according to Frankie’s intelligence source, his younger sister Amy who was friends with Clara’s sister Bonnie and so gave in to her budding feminine wiles and had turned them both down.

Naturally that denial after those come hither looks inflamed the boyos. So for the next several weeks Bill and Frankie made every mad school boy mad attempt to win her favors. Both had recklessly, although determinedly, courted legal danger by “clipping” (five finger discount, oh, you know, petty larceny) onyx rings (Frankie’s had a diamond in the center) for her at Sam’s Jewelry Store in downtown Olde Saco (again intelligence, reliable intelligence, Clara sister Bonnie via Amy, had informed them separately that she liked those kinds of rings). She accepted both as tokens of friendship she called it. Ditto 45 RPM Elvis and Jerry Lee records from Chuck’s Record Shop over on Main Street (an easy “clip” for these adventurers, just place under your undershirt and walk out, or better slide into your underpants, no salesperson, no girl salesperson on duty at the time was going there, no way). Accepted, dispassionately accepted. Not ditto though, not ditto“clipped” flowers and candy (especially when Clara heard how the previous goods were “purchased” although she did not go so far as to give them back). They had each worked, really dragged their butts carrying doubles, as caddies as the local golf course to gather the dough necessary for those expenses. And on it went like that for several weeks.

To no avail for Frankie though because, also exhibiting another aspect of her budding wiles, Clara took up with Bill (and had really, according to other reliable intelligence sources, had her eye on him all along. Girls, ah, women, go figure). Reason: stated Clara reason. Bill had a head on his shoulders and, quote, was not so hung up on silly rock and roll that was just a passing thing like Frankie, unquote.

Frankie laughed at the recollection, a bittersweet recollection, since later Clara married Bill right out of high school, right out of the Class of 1964, maybe not the wisest thing to do for either of them in a lifetime sense but with war cries, real war cries on every horizon, out in the killing field of Asia (and who knows where else in that red scare cold war good night) it had a certain logic, a way to keep Bill out of harm’s way with any luck. Although at the time it had much more to do with Bill being crazy for Clara, head on his shoulders or not, and since he had no plans to go to college he figured it was just as well to start family life early. Yes, he was that kind of guy then, and was not alone in that sentiment, not by any means. Clara, for her part, had schemed and plotted to get out of her shanty Irish-drunk father-cold mother house from about age fourteen. Whatever she thought about Bill, and Frankie was a little hesitant to take her undying love sentiments at face value (and miffed about his own Clara plight for a long time, every time he caddied up at that damn golf course), she had always had Clara and lace curtain Irish front and center even then.

Frankie remembered just then too that he had been part of their wedding party, that June wedding over at the Starlight Ballroom where the trio had spent many a Saturday night listening as the music changed from silly Danny and the Juniors to serious Beatles and Stones stuff. The wedding the last big event of his youth before he kicked the dust of Olde Saco off his shoes and headed out on the hitchhike highway and his own dreams. Headed out for what became for many years the wandering road turned into the hobo road, and then back, back a little, but this is Bill and Clara’s story, or Bill’s anyway, so let bygones be bygones. But too he remembered that wedding party night when Clara, out of the blue, while they were dancing the obligatory friend dance, dancing very close, very close her leaning into him, she whispered in his ear that just in case Bill didn’t work out she still had some hot flash thoughts of him. That helped, if he needed any help, getting him out of that one-horse town just as fast as he could. Not for Bill’s sake, or Clara’s, but just because he might have taken her up on the offer.

Here is the funny part though, Bill and Clara, just like Frankie at the beginning of the wave got caught up with their generation’s new breeze coming through the land, the music, the drugs, the experimenting with everything under the sun, and maybe more, and had after a couple of years of married life drifted west to the coast, formed and unformed a couple of rock and roll bands in the strobe light dreams 1960s with Clara as a Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick –like lead singer and Bill on lead guitar. Yes, playing that no account rock and roll. Frankie, on the coast at the time too, trying to avoid the draft (Bill had turned out to be 4-F, unfit for military duty, due to nearsightedness), had run into to them several times, had stayed at their pad on Fillmore, when they had operated out of Frisco town, for months at a time, had helped console (among others) Clara when Bill ran off for a while with some surfer girl from LaJolla looking for groupie acid rock kicks and she was at wits end. Yes, he had slept with Clara as part of that consolation but by then Frankie’s road addiction had turned him away from any thoughts of Clara lace curtain Irish dreams. As far as he knew Clara never told Bill about the affair, or if she had he never let it interfere with his relationship with Frankie. When Bill got back from his fling with that surfer girl they became closer than at any time since that long ago sock hop night. Then in the late 1960s, he back on the road, out in New Mexico back, they had lost touch. And now in 1973 Bill had been killed, face-down killed, down in some dusty back alley, Sonora, back alley, when that plan, that major drug deal went south on him.

According to the reports, the police reports when he went to check, Mexican police reports, so maybe a little off on the details, but on point on the face-down dead part, Bill and Clara had“muled” many times for one of the budding drug cartels. (Frankie had known this, hell, had taken delivery of some goods himself, and had, once, accompanied Bill and Clara, down there, down there the time he had met Maria, met her down in that Mexicali whorehouse and brought her Norte but that was another story). Bill, while he was working on his plan in L. A. the details of which were unknown to Frankie, had decided to go “independent” trying to take-off with one of his cartel deliveries to be used as seed money for his own operation to Panama (the ideas being to try to get to the Canal Zone and some Estados Unidos protection if things went awry, he obviously never made it) and wound up in a back alley with six slugs in the back for his efforts. End of story, just another number in the broken dreams world, the fast stuff of dreams world.

End of blasé Mexican police report story, as usual, but not quite the end of Bill’s story, some of which Frankie knew a little about other stuff he got when he went full bore to find out what happened (including a low-profile trip, hair cut short, beard shaved, only a mustache left, wearing a light-weight suit down and around, to Sonora, alone). After the 1960s died (when, the date, a million people have written about, with about two millions dates and about three million reasons for their particular date, Frankie had May Day, 1971 as his date when they, he included, tried to shut down D. C. over the Vietnam war and got nothing but eight million busts and a ton of bad hubris for their efforts) Bill and Clara, having ridden the crest, were broke, not just broke but in hock broke to about twenty different guys for various musical, life-style and drug stuff, including a busted flat-out last ill-fated concert in 1972. When the times were good Bill and Clara “walked with the king” but the music scene was changing and so acid rock, the thing that made them a thing, could not sustain a bunch of Airplane-look-a-likes. Familiar story ever since music started. That was when they started “muling.” (Frankie knew the details of the connections but was keeping mum about that).

What Frankie didn’t know, although if he had thought about it for ten seconds he should have known, was that Clara, Clara with her lace curtain turned chandelier Irish dreams, was the driving force behind their new careers, and kept prodding Bill on that plan to step up to the “bigs” and build his own operation. Jesus, girls, ah, women, go figure. See here is what is finally strange though. Clara who had accompanied Bill on that fateful trip (and had been holding that delivery, ten kilos of coke just then becoming the drug of choice for the hipsters, and never cartel recovered) was never heard from again. Just that moment, that reflected moment , Frankie raised his finger to his head and nodded that old schoolboy nod to Bill’ s memory and raised his drink to Clara Murphy, Clara of the sparkling eyes and flaming red hair, and of his youth.

Pardon Bradley Manning