Felix Morrow

Lenin’s Teachings on National Wars

An Answer to the Latest Stalinist Forgeries

(April 1942)

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Source: A review from Fourth International, New York, Vol.3 No.4, April 1942, pp.102-107.
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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On March 15, 1942, a grotesque ceremony took place in London. At the Holford Square tenement in which Lenin forty years ago lived for a time in exile, a plaque was unveiled in his honor, draped in the Red Flag and... the Union Jack. High officials of the Churchill government surrounded Soviet Ambassador Maisky and his wife as she unveiled the plaque. “Here some of his best works were written,” Ambassador Maisky said, according to the press. “Here he developed many of the ideas that led to the creation of the USSR.” Nobody disrupted the affair by telling what those ideas were.

This obscene ceremony is aptly characterized by Lenin’s own words in State and Revolution:

“ During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes have visited relentless persecution on them and received their teaching with the most savage hostility, the most furious hatred, the most ruthless campaign of lies and slanders. After their death attempts are made to turn the revolutionaries into harmless icons, canonize them, and surround their names with a certain halo for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating and vulgarizing the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge.”

During 1917-1920 Churchill tried to bury Lenin beneath the ruins of the young Soviet republic; today Churchill collaborates with Stalin in trying to turn Lenin into a harmless icon. Maisky is the appropriate ambassador for this work: he was Minister of Labor in the anti-Soviet Samara Government in the years when Churchill led world capitalist intervention against Lenin.

The Stalinist Line on War Until 1935

Lenin died in January, 1924. During the next four years the Stalinist bureaucracy seized control of the USSR and of the Communist International. At the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, in 1928, a permanent Program was adopted; it was a Stalinist document, which Trotsky submitted to exhaustive criticism in The Third International after Lenin. But Stalinist degeneration had not yet reached the point of openly calling upon the workers in imperialist countries to support “their” governments if allied to the Kremlin; on the contrary the Program still had to repeat some Leninist formulations on the question of war; it states:

”The Communist International must devote itself especially to systematic preparation for the struggle against the danger of imperialist wars. Ruthless exposure of social chauvinism, of social imperialism and of pacifist phrase-mongering intended to camouflage the imperialist plans of the bourgeoisie; propaganda in favor of the principal slogans of the Communist International; everyday organizational work in connection with this in the course of which constitutional methods must unfailingly be combined with unconstitutional methods; organized work in the army and navy—such must be the activity of the Communist Parties in this connection. The fundamental slogans of the Communist International in this connection must be the following: ‘Convert imperialist war into civil war’; defeat the ‘home’ imperialist government; defend the USSR and the colonies by every possible means in the event of imperialist war against them. It is the bounden duty of all Sections of the Communist International, and of every one of its members, to carry on propaganda for these slogans, to expose the ‘socialistic’ sophisms and the ‘socialistic’ camouflage of the League of Nations, and constantly to keep to the front the experiences of the war of 1914-1918.” (Handbook of Marxism, International Publishers, 1935, p.1040.)

Incidentally this is still officially the Program of the Communist International.

But perhaps the rise of fascism to power in Germany changed the character of our epoch so it was no longer, as Lenin termed it, “the epoch of imperialist wars, proletarian revolutions and colonial uprisings”? Now it was an epoch of war between fascism and democracy? Stalin dared not say anything of the sort in 1934 in his lengthy Report to the 17th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was clear that a second world war was coming; how did Stalin characterize it:

“In this connection the victory of fascism in Germany must be regarded... as a symptom of the fact that the bourgeoisie is no longer able to find a way out of the present situation on the basis of a peaceful foreign policy, as a consequence of which it is compelled to resort to a policy of war.

“Thus, you see that things are moving towards a new imperialist war as a way out of the present situation.

“Of course there are no grounds for assuming that the war can provide a real way out. On the contrary, it must confuse the situation still more. More than that, it will certainly unleash revolution and put in question the very existence of capitalism in a number of countries, as was the case in the course of the first imperialist war. And if, notwithstanding the experience of the first imperialist war, the bourgeois politicians clutch at war as a drowning man clutches at straw, it shows that they have become utterly confused, have reached an impasse, and are ready to rush headlong over the precipice.” (Handbook of Marxism, pp.920-921.)

But perhaps all this was said on the assumption that the “democracies” would be siding with Germany in the coming war and there was an alternative policy if the “democracies” were fighting Germany? This question was dealt with specifically by the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1934, in a pamphlet by R.F. Andrews, and it said:

#8220;Supposing Fascist Germany attacks the USSR, are you in favor of the workers supporting the British or French Government in an attack on Fascist Germany?

“UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES! ...

“Such action would help the German capitalists to represent the war as one of self-defense. It would strengthen British capitalists and weaken British workers, it would put British imperialism in the event of victory in a favorable position for attacking the USSR, it would mean suppressing the inevitable revolt in India and the Empire.

“On the contrary, by supporting the workers in their struggle against exploitation, profiteering and oppression in wartime—a struggle which is unavoidable in any case—and developing it into a struggle against the war itself, the British workers would undermine Hitler’s own front, which would be the most effective assistance British revolutionaries could give to the USSR in such circumstances.” (The Labour Party and the Menace of War)

A year later this anti-war principle was formulated even more definitively in the leading editorial of The Labour Monthly edited by R. Palme Dutt, the most authoritative Stalinist publication in the English language. Condemning “the attempts to preach the obligation of the working class to subordinate itself to the leadership of the League of Nations,” the editorial proclaimed:

“What is our answer to these ‘left,’ ‘pacifist,’ ‘democratic,’ ‘anti-fascist’ arguments in support of future imperialist war? Our answer remains the Leninist line, the line or international socialism from Marx and Engels, from Stuttgart and Basle up to today. We need more than ever to warn the workers never to become entangled in the lines of imperialist policies, but to judge every question of war and peace solely from the standpoint of the working class revolution. The workers under capitalism have no fatherland; their only fatherland is so much of the territory of the globe as they have conquered and made their own, today the territory of the Soviet Union. The participation of the Soviet Union in the League of Nations no more transforms the character of the League of Nations than the participation of a Communist in Parliament transforms the character of Parliament... The false comparison of the position of a working class which has not yet conquered power, which has not yet overthrown its capitalist class, with the position of a working class which has conquered power and has now to maneuver in a capitalist world (and has to maneuver only because the workers in the other countries have not yet overthrown their capitalists) is the favorite fallacy of reformism to confuse the issues and conceal its own capitalist policies...

“Must we then let the Nazis ‘walk over us,’ demand the trade union leaders with great heat. Must we not ‘defend our country’ against Fascism’? Is not pacifism in such conditions equivalent to surrender to Fascism? The revolutionary answer is clear. We hold nothing in common with the pacifist position. We do not for a moment exclude military defense against Fascism—on one condition and one condition only, namely, that we have a country to defend. We shall defend Workers’ Britain, as an integral part of the World Workers Republic, of the future World Soviet Union, against Fascism with every means in our (power. Let the exploiting class in Prance make way and surrender power to the workers’ united front, and the French workers will defend Workers’ France against every attack, as they defended the Commune, against the combined French-German ruling class. But until then we shall fight our own exploiting class; we shall not let ourselves be dragged into warring for one set of masters against another; we shall raise the slogan of fraternisation with the German workers and soldiers. Is this ‘unpractical’? On the contrary, it is the only practical line. For such fraternisation, such fight of the British workers against British Imperialism, will more rapidly undermine the shaking Nazi regime in Germany, will hasten the German revolution, than any ‘union sacrŽe’ of the trade union leaders with British Imperialism, which will only strengthen the Nazi hold, confirm the Nazi propaganda of the vanity of working-class internationalism, and prolong the war. This is the Leninist line, which remains the only line for the working class in any imperialist war.” (The Labour Monthly, January, 1935)

One could ask for nothing clearer than these quotations: they indicate the extent to which, as late as 1935, the Stalinist parties paid lip-service to Lenin’s line on war in the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolution.

In and Out of the New Line

Then, May 15, 1935, came the Stalin-Laval communique and in it this pregnant sentence: “M. Stalin understands and fully approves the policy of national defense undertaken by France by maintaining her armed forces at the level necessary for security.” “Monsieur Stalin” was not then a government official, but General Secretary of the Communist Party. His endorsement of France’s war plans subsequently became the open line of all the Communist parties toward the “democracies.” How appropriate that this began with a joint statement of Stalin and the “democrat” Laval! Lenin’s “epoch of imperialist war, proletarian revolutions and colonial uprisings” was proclaimed to have been transformed into an epoch of “democratic wars against fascism.”

However nearly five years of this new epoch ended not in a democratic war against fascism but in the Stalin-Hitler pact which, freeing Hitler from a second front in the East, enabled him to mobilize all his forces for war against the West, a war which (after a few days of insistence that the pact made no change in their policies) was characterized by the Communist parties of Britain, France, etc., as an imperialist war which they would not support. It was in the name of Leninism that this new policy operated, but it was a policy which has been aptly characterized by our French comrades as “defeatism without revolution.”
The invasion of Greece (begun by the Italians October 28, 1940, completed by the Germans April 27, 1941) and of Yugoslavia (begun at the end of March 1941 and completed in six weeks) produced in the Comintern press condemnation of... Britain for dragging the small countries into the imperialist war.
From September 1939 until June 22, 1941 the Communist parties proclaimed again that this was the “epoch of imperialist war, proletarian revolutions and colonial uprisings.” The colonial peoples of the British and French empires were exhorted to win their independence arms in hand. These tag-ends from Leninism were to hide the nakedness of the period of collaboration under the Stalin-Hitler Pact.

The War “Changes” Once Again

The epoch of imperialist war and proletarian revolutions abruptly ended, by Stalinist computation, on June 22, 1941. As James W. Ford put it in The Communist, October, 1941:

“When the war broke out in 1939 it was clearly imperialistic. It was unmistakably a struggle to determine which group of powers was to dominate the world... The strength of the Soviet Union gave stimulus to the peoples of Western Europe in their struggle for national independence against fascism [i.e., after Hitler subjugated them with the aid of the Stalin-Hitler pact—F.M.]. In desperation the Nazis treacherously violated the non-aggression pact and ruthlessly attacked the Soviet people on June 22. Thus a new phase of the war entered, changing all the relation of forces and the character of the war.”

It is interesting to note that it took the Communist Party of Britain, busily engaged in rabidly condemning the imperialist war aims of the Churchill government, two weeks to make the switch. As late as the July 5, 1941 issue of World News and Views (formerly organ of the Communist International, now published in England without reference to organizational connections), R. Palme Dutt wrote:

“But the British imperialists by no means wish to see a victory for the Soviet Union, with its liberating consequences for Europe. They count, instead, on the basis of the weakening of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, on establishing their own domination in Europe, and eventually to return to their ultimate aim of crushing the Soviet Union. There is no room for illusions on these ulterior aims of the imperialists.”

However, Dutt quickly transferred this correct characterization of British (and American) imperialism into an individual accusation against Moore-Brabazon, Minister of Aircraft Production, who had been indiscreet enough to say just that about the Soviet Union in a speech, and the very concept of British imperialism disappeared from the Stalinist press.

What makes a war imperialist? Stalin and R. Palme Dutt told us not so long ago, repeating Lenin’s thought. Warring for one set of capitalist masters against another is imperialist. The workers under capitalism have no fatherland. Imperialism is the latest—and last—stage in the unfolding of capitalism. Any war conducted by an imperialist power—i.e., the great capitalist powers, ruled by finance capital and holding the colonial peoples in subjection either by direct rule or by dollar diplomacy—is an imperialist war. The participation of the Soviet Union in the war no more transforms the character of the war of the imperialist nations than the participation of the Soviet Union transformed the character of the League of Nations. The British-Soviet pact no more changes the politics of Britain’s war than the Hitler-Stalin pact changed the politics of Germany’s war. War—Lenin never tired of repeating Clausewitz’s formula—is the continuation of politics by other means. And the politics of an imperialist power is always imperialist. Lenin’s sharpest condemnations of Kautsky were directed at his attempts to characterize imperialism as but one of several policies which the capitalist powers might pursue. Imperialism, Lenin answered, is not merely a policy; it is a social, economic and political stage of capitalism, the latest and last; an epoch which determined the character of all pecific policies of capitalist states. Lenin branded Kautsky as a traitor for implying that capitalist powers could pursue an alternative to imperialism. The Stalinist assertion that defense of the Soviet Union requires that the American and British workers support “their” imperialist governments in the war is refuted by the fact that for 18 years after the establishment of the Soviet Union no one dreamed of proposing such a policy.
These truths penetrate into the ranks of the Communist Party in spite of the totalitarian regime. Its Acting National Secretary, Robert Minor, complains of “adulteration of the point of view of the revolutionary working class by admixtures of pacifism and opposition to war ‘in general’ and blames it with utter brass on “ignorance of the history and the theoretical basis of our movement among even honest sympathizers or members of our Party itself.”

The Latest Stalinist Forgeries

To calm these doubters, Minor tells them that Lenin himself predicted just such a “war for national liberation” as the “democracies” are now waging! Such is the thesis solemnly offered by Minor to the “honest sympathizers or members of our Party” who are now “stumbling,” in an article entitled “Lenin on the Junius Pamphlet, in the October, 1941 Communist, the gist of which Minor has since repeated in numerous articles and speeches.

Minor’s thesis is stated as follows:

“By the Hitler war, Europe and the whole world are ‘thrown back for several decades,’ and against this hideous reaction, ‘wars of national liberation’ have become inevitable on the part of all nations of the world and all states capable of defending their national independence.”

If “all nations of the world” are now capable of waging wars of national liberation, this is obviously no longer the epoch of imperialist war and proletarian revolution. Proof? Minor adduces the fact that in August, 1916, Lenin wrote that “to picture world history as advancing smoothly and steadily without sometimes taking gigantic strides backward is undialectical, unscientific and theoretically wrong.” Minor then pours vituperation on Trotsky and others who allegedly claim that history always moves forward. [1] This paves the way to falsifying a quotation from Lenin in order that Lenin’s thought that strides backward are possible within the epoch of imperialism is identified with the Stalinist claim that this is no longer the epoch of imperialism!

Here is Minor’s deliberate forgery:

“It should be noted that Lenin states this carefully as a question of scientific principle: that ‘gigantic strides backward’ do occur in history and are in accord with the laws of motion of society. At an earlier time, during the World War, he referred to the matter, saying: ‘We are dealing here with large historic epochs; there are and there will be, in every age, individual, partial, backward and forward movement ...’ (The Imperialist War)... The ‘temporary step backward’ has eventuated.”

Minor does it very neatly—a quotation from Lenin and a reference to the book from which it comes. The reader is not provided by Minor with the page number from the 402 page The Imperialist War and no wonder! For Minor’s “quotation” is deliberately faked to give exactly the opposite idea from that which Lenin wrote!

Minor’s “quotation” comes from page 125 of The Imperialist War and the extent of his deliberate falisification of Lenin’s thought will be clear only to those who read that article; entitled ;Under A Stolen Flag, it is an attack by Lenin on the Menshevik, A. Potresov, for using the “stolen flag” of Marxism to cover support of the imperialist war.
Lenin condemns Potresov for dragging the proletarian movement backward; “he drags it back to the slogans and ideology of the old bourgeois democracy, to the dependence of the masses upon the bourgeoisie,” Then, to show the falsity of thus going backwards in policy, Lenin shows that we live in an entirely different epoch from that in which Marx lived. The second sentence of the following passage is the one which Minor “quoted”—but notice that Lenin is referring to the possibility of developments backward which, however, he insists, would not determine our policy; our policy is determined by the fundamental character of our epoch! Lenin writes:

“ We are undoubtedly living on the borderline of two epochs, and historic events of the greatest importance that are taking place before our eyes can be understood only if, in the first place, we analyze the objective conditions of the transition from one epoch to the other. We are dealing here with large historic epochs; there are, and there will be in every age, individual, partial, backward and forward movements; there are and there will be various deviations from the average type and average tempo of the movement. We cannot know how rapidly and how successfully the various historic movements of a given epoch will develop, but we can and do know which class occupies the centre of one or the other epoch, determining its main contents, the main direction of its development, the main characteristics of the historic circumstances of that epoch, etc. Only on this basis, i.e., by taking into account, in the first!place, the fundamental distinguishing features of the various ‘epochs’ (and not individual episodes in the history of individual countries) can we correctly determine our tactics; and only the knowledge of the fundamental features of a given epoch can serve as a basis for understanding in greater detail the peculiarities of one or the other country...

“The usual division of historical epochs, many times quoted in Marxian literature, is this: (1) 1789-1871; (2) 1871-1914; (3)1914... The First Epoch, from the great French Revolution to the Franco-Prussian War, is the epoch” of the rise of the bourgeoisie, of its full victory... The Second Epoch is the epoch of the full domination and decline of the bourgeoisie, an epoch of transition from the progressive character of the bourgeoisie to reactionary, even rabidly reactionary, finance capital. This is the epoch when there are being prepared and there slowly gather the forces of a new class of modern democracy [the proletariat—F.M.]. The Third Epoch, which is just beginning, places the bourgeoisie in the same position as that in which the feudal lords found themselves during the First Epoch. This is the epoch of imperialism and imperialist convulsions resulting from the nature of imperialism...

“In place of the struggle of rising capital striving towards national liberation from the remnants of feudalism, there has come the struggle of the most reactionary finance capital against the new forces, the struggle of a power that has exhausted and outlived itself, that is headed downward towards decay. The bourgeois-national framework of states, which in the First Epoch was a support to the development of the productive forces of humanity then in the process of liberating itself from feudalism has now, in the Third Epoch, become a hindrance to the free development of the productive forces. From a rising, progressive class the bourgeoisie has become a sinking, decaying, internally dead, reactionary class. The rising class—on a wide international scale—-has become an entirely different one.” (The Imperialist War, pp.125-129.)

After reading this passage, a reader, unfamiliar with the Stalin school of falsification, will rub his eyes as he realizes Minor’s conscious misuse of a sentence out of a passage—and an entire book—which teaches exactly the opposite of Minor’s doctrine.

Why is it treason to the working class to support an imperialist state in war? Lenin answers: because the bourgeois-national state has become a hindrance to the free development of the productive forces. Lenin’s answer applies to 1942 even more than to 1914—after the permanent world crisis of 1918-1939. Imperialism is not a spigot, turned on and off by Stalin’s twists and turns; it is the economic, social and political character of our epoch, and determines the character of any war conducted by the imperialist powers.
Minor’s forged quotation about “backward movements” is merely the atmospheric setting for something much more grandiose—“proof” that Lenin and other Marxists were able “to describe accurately 25 years ago the main conditions under which we are fighting now in a war which they then said would justifiedly be supported by the workers and peoples of the world and by the revolutionary party of the working class.” His “proof” is a section from an article written by Lenin in August, 1916, entitled, On the Junius Pamphlet.
This monstrous falsification of Lenin, really breath-taking in its scope, demonstrates anew the extent to which Stalinism shares Hitler’s precept: “the grosser the lie the more readily people believe it.” But we must try to cleanse these Augean stables.

Lenin’s Teachings on National Wars

During 1916 Lenin found himself in conflict with an important section of the Bolshevik leadership—Bukharin, Pyatakov and others—and with some of his closest international allies in the Zimmerwald Left—the Dutch and Polish revolutionists—on the national question. The main question immediately at issue was the connection of the slogan of national liberation for oppressed nationalities with the coming revolutions in the “prison-houses of peoples,” Russia and Austro-Hungary; in reaction against the national-chauvinism of the Pilsudski socialists, the revolutionary socialists of Poland, led by Rosa Luxemburg, mistakenly rejected the slogan of national liberation, and out of similar circumstances came the similar mistake of the others. Lenin, firmly keeping to the forefront the importance of colonial uprisings against imperialism and of revolts of small nations against imperialist domination, sharply defended the Bolshevik position on the national question—the issue, indeed, nearly led to a split in the Bolsheviks abroad.

Preoccupied with the struggle within the Bolsheviks and the Zimmerwald Left on the national question, Lenin devoted two pages to it in the course of his article, warmly hailing the famous Junius pamphlet, The Crisis of Social-Democracy, the first illegal revolutionary pamphlet to appear in Germany during the war. Junius (Rosa Luxemburg) had written at one point; “In the epoch of imperialism there can be no more national wars.” Her mistake, said Lenin, is “to lose sight of the national movements against imperialism,” and to show the possibility of national wars against imperialism he gave three examples, which are worth describing because they exemplify Lenin’s method on the national question and they will show how deliberately false is Minor’s “quotation.”

I

Very significant for today is Lenin’s insistence that a war waged by a colonial or semi-colonial country against an imperialist power can remain a progressive war—such as China’s war against Japan—in spite of China having imperialist “allies.” Lenin writes:

“Every war is a continuation of politics by other means. The continuation of the national-liberation politics of the colonies must necessarily be national wars on their part against imperialism. Such wars may lead to an imperialist war of the present ‘great’ imperialist powers, but they may also not lead to this-it depends on a number of circumstances.

“To take an example: in the Seven Years War, Britain and France were fighting for colonies; that is, they were waging an imperialist war (which is possible on the basis of slave rule or of primitive capitalism just as much as on the contemporary basis of highly developed capitalism). France was vanquished and lost a part of her colonies. Several years later there began a national-liberation war of the North American States against Britain alone. France and Spain, who still owned a apart of the present United States, were led by their hostility to Britain—that is, by their imperialist interest -to enter into a friendly agreement with the States that were rebelling against Britain. French troops fought along with the Americans against the English. We thus see a national-liberation war, in which the imperialist co-operation [with the colony—F.M.] appears merely as a secondary element without serious significance...” (Lenin, On the Junius Pamphlet, first printed in English in The Labour Monthly, Jan. 1935.)

It is clear here that Lenin gives no credit for progressiveness to the imperialist powers which for “their own imperialist interests” would be supporting such a war as China’s war against Japan. Here is the essence of Lenin’s method on such wars. That method, applied to the present war, characterizes the war of China and the Soviet Union, non-imperialist countries, as progressive, while the war of the imperialist powers on both sides remains reactionary. Contrast this Leninist method with the Stalinist claptrap whereby—presumably by osmosis or contagion—imperialist allies of non-imperialist countries are whitewashed into progressives!

II

In the above example Lenin was considering the great colonial and semi-colonial countries like India, China and Persia, fighting their main imperialist oppressors where it was possible for the imperialist co-operation with the colonial country to be “merely a secondary element.” In Europe, however, as the example of Serbia showed, the small capitalist countries are swallowed up in a general imperialist war so that the national element then “has no serious significance compared to the basic imperialist rivalries.”

But, added Lenin, thinking particularly of the coming break-up of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, opening the way to national independence for the Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Letts, Finns, Poles, etc., there may be occasions when the national struggles for liberation by these small peoples may not be submerged in a general imperialist war:

“The imperialist era has made the present war into an imperialist war; it will necessarily (until the advent of socialism) produce new imperialist wars; it has made the politics of the present great powers essentially imperialist—but this ‘epoch’ in no way excludes a national war, e.g. on the part of the small (even though annexed or nationally subjected) states against the imperialist powers, in the same way as it does not exclude large scale national movements in Eastern Europe... In the event of the ‘great’ powers being thoroughly exhausted in the present war, or in the event of a victory of the revolution in Russia, national wars are quite possible and may even be successful. On the one hand, the interference of the imperialist powers would not necessarily take place in every case. If, on the other hand, it is decided ‘off one’s bat’ that a war of a small state against a giant is hopeless, then we must answer that a hopeless war is also a war. Besides that, the appearance of certain phenomena inside the ‘giants’—for instance the outbreak of a revolution—may change a hopeless war into a very hopeful one.” (idem)

Lenin’s thought here is too unambiguous to permit of Stalinist “interpretation”: the exhaustion of the imperialists or the Russian revolution can provide conditions for an isolated war of national liberation of a small nation against an imperialist power, but if a general imperialist war breaks out “the national element... has no serious significance compared to the basic imperialist rivalries.” By this criterion it is clear how anti-Leninist is the claim of the Stalinists that Britain’s allies, Greece and Yugoslavia (the latter an imperialist state oppressing the Croats), were fighting “national-liberation” wars against Germany.

III

Lenin was writing this article in the dark days of August, 1916, when the European proletariat was dormant; it was conceivable that the war might end without a revolutionary upheaval. In March, 1916, Lenin wrote: “It is possible, however, that five, ten and even more years will pass before the beginning of the socialist revolution.” In January, 1917, he said: “We, the older men, will perhaps not live long enough to see the decisive battles of the impending revolution.” Under certain conditions, if no revolutions come, said Lenin, there might even be a national war in Europe:

“... if the European proletariat proved to be powerless for twenty years; if the present war should end with Napoleonic victories and the subjection of a whole series of national states that are capable of life; if non-European imperialism (mainly Japanese and American) should also hold out for twenty years, without going over to socialism, for instance, as a result of a Japanese-American war,—then a large-scale national war in Europe would be possible. This would mean for Europe a retrograde development of several decades, and is improbable. But it is not impossible, since it is non-dialectical, non-scientific, and theoretically incorrect to imagine world history as progressing smoothly and accurately forward, without occasional enormous retrogressive steps.” (idem)

Fortunately for humanity, the “improbable” did not occur. The European proletariat did not prove to be powerless for twenty years; on the contrary the October revolution destroyed capitalism in one of the key countries of world imperialism, the Soviet Union survived and its weight in Europe and the post-war wave of revolution made impossible any attempt by France to establish a Napoleonic domination of the continent. Otherwise it is conceivable that, over a period of twenty years (note Lenin’s emphasis on how long such a development would take) victorious France, with an absolutely free hand in Europe, permanently occupying the Ruhr and stripping Germany of its industries and economic resources (as well as its colonies) could have reduced Germany to the status of a non-imperialist nation (its finance-capital structure would have been wiped out). And after twenty years, with the old German capitalist class gone from the scene, a new generation in Germany whose bourgeoisie would have been equivalent to the bourgeoisie of a semi-colonial country might have, in alliance with other subjugated nations on the continent, conducted a war of national-liberation in Europe. This is an example of the “improbable” but “not impossible” perspective had no revolutions come during or after the first imperialist war.

But revolution did come, and henceforth Lenin never gave any place in his thoughts to the possibility of such a national war in Europe. Lenin lived for six years after the October revolution, perhaps the most fruitful years of his life. It is no accident that Minor and the Stalinists have to dig back to 1916, before even the February revolution, for something in which Lenin concedes even the possibility of such a national war in Europe! No amount of combing will find anything of the sort in Lenin’s writings between February 1917 and his death in January 1924.
Now, having described what Lenin had to say on national wars against imperialism in his August, 1916 articles, we are in a position to measure the monstrosity of the Stalinist falsification of that article.

Five Stalinist Forgeries

Minor writes:

“In this article Lenin, with startling accuracy, sketched the possibilities and even foretold as probable a great national war in Europe in connection with the rise of a dictator-conqueror of the Napoleon type—provided that certain conditions were to come about. The reader will see what the conditions were, as forecast by Lenin. Among them are: if the war of 1914-1918 were to be concluded in such a way that ‘the proletariat of Europe proved to be powerless for some twenty years’; and if that were to result in ‘victories of the type of Napoleon’s and the enslavement of a number of vital national states’; if ‘extra-European imperialism’ held out for twenty years; and if there should come a victorious revolution in Russia. If these conditions were to come about, said Lenin, a ‘great national war’—i.e., a just war in defense of national independence, would be possible.

“The occurrence of the first three of these conditions ‘would be a development of Europe backward by some decades,’ said Lenin...

“The ‘temporary step backward’ has eventuated. By the Hitler war, Europe and the whole world are ‘thrown back for several decades,’ and against this hideous reaction, ‘wars of national liberation’ have become inevitable on the part of all nations of the world.” (The Communist, Oct. 1941, p.881, my italics—F.M.)

Let us list the main Stalinist forgeries in this fabrication of Minor which follows the Hitler-Stalin precept that “the grosser the lie the more readily people believe it.”

Forgery No.1: Of Lenin’s examples of different types of national wars cited above, Nos.II and III are mutually exclusive: the existence of one excludes the other. III was based on what might happen if there were no Russian revolution and II is based on the perspective of a Russian revolution—II and III could not both happen. But in order to connect together the “great national war” of a revolution-less Europe with the not-to-be-denied Russian revolution, Minor, deliberately committing a forgery,’ puts together as a single set of conditions Lenin’s mutually exclusive conditions for II (revolution) and III (no revolution)!

Forgery No.2: Example III—a great national war in Europe—could happen only if, in addition to the absence of any successful revolutions, there would be a Napoleonic domination of Europe for “some twenty years,” says Lenin, i.e., long enough to wipe out the imperialist structure of a country like France and reduce it to semi-colonial character. This, of course, did not happen after the first imperialist war. This has not happened and could not have happened in the two and a half years since the second imperialist war began—if nothing else, the time that has elapsed is too short for such a process: both Vichy and De Gaullist France are imperialist powers retaining colonial empires, the governments-in-exile are fighting both to recover their own imperialist interests (Holland’s great colonial empire, Yugoslav oppression of the Croats, Czech oppression of the Slovaks and the Sudetens, etc.) and as satellites of Anglo-American imperialism. And the war is still unfolding—to be ended, we are certain, by proletarian and colonial revolutions far greater in scope than the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. The task of the masses in the occupied countries is not “national war”—wars can only be fought by states and armies —but revolution against Nazi domination. To apply to this situation in Europe Lenin’s hypothesis of what could happen after “some twenty years” of Napoleonic domination of Europe can only be done by a Stalinist falsifier.

Forgery No.3: To Lenin the possibility of a great national war in Europe was “improbable” even in the dark days of 1916, and he never referred to it again after the February revolution. Minor falsifies this to mean that “Lenin, with startling accuracy, sketched the possibilities and even foretold as probable a great national war in Europe.” Lenin wrote “improbable”; Minor simply changes it to “probable”

Forgery No.4: Even if this improbable situation became reality, Lenin never said that imperialists if allied to a non-imperialist country thereby become capable of fighting progressive wars. As we saw by his example I, China’s war against Japan does not make Anglo-American imperialism’s war against Japan progressive, any more than Spain and France’s war against England became progressive because they were allied to the American colonies. Lenin makes this absolutely clear. It would be a “national war” only for the semi-colonial countries. Minor deliberately falsifies Lenin to mean that “wars of national liberation have become inevitable on the part of all nations of the world.”

Marx and Lenin on National Wars

Forgery No.5: Minor pretends that the Marxist-Leninist tradition is that, in a national war, it is the duty of the proletariat to collaborate with the bourgeois government, vote for its war budgets, etc. This is precisely the same falsification of Marx’s teachings concocted by the social-chauvinists during the first imperialist war.

Here is what Lenin had to say on the real Marxist tradition toward national wars and its falsification by the social-chauvinists:

“The policy of the social-chauvinists, their justification of the war from the bourgeois standpoint of national liberty, their acceptance of the ‘defense of the fatherland,’ their voting for war appropriations, their participation in the cabinet etc., etc., is a direct betrayal of Socialism...

“The Russian social-chauvinists refer to Marx’s tactics in the war of 1870...

“All these references are an abominable distortion of Marx and Engels’ views... The war of 1870-71 was historical progressive on Germany’s side up to the defeat of Napoleon III.... Even at the beginning of the war of 1870-1871 Marx and Engels approved of Bebel’s and Liebknecht’s refusal to vote for military appropriations; they advised the Social-Democrats not to merge with the bourgeoisie, but to defend the independent class-interests of the proletariat.” (The Imperialist War, p.228.)

Thus the class struggle was to go on even in a national war, for Marx and Engels, and for Lenin. According to the Stalinist falsification of Marxism-Leninism, however, Bebel and Liebknecht—who correctly considered a vote in favour would he a vote of confidence for the bourgeois government—should have been shot as “fifth columnists” for refusing to vote military appropriations in a national war.

There were many who wanted to do just that to Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht; “millions looked upon every Social-Democrat as having played the part of a murderer and a vile criminal in 1870; the Socialist had been in the eyes of the masses a traitor and an enemy,” recalled Liebknecht, “so it was no small thing at that time to swim against the current. But what is to be done, must be done. And so we gritted our teeth in the face of the inevitable. There was no time for fear ... Certainly Bebel and I never for a moment thought of the warning. We did not retreat. We had to hold our posts, come what might.”

“They stuck to their posts,” Rosa Luxemburg adds, in the Junius Pamphlet, “and for forty years the socialist movement lived upon the moral strength with which it had opposed a world of enemies.”

The millions who wanted to lynch Liebknecht had at least the excuse that they were not socialists but under bourgeois influence, and that it was a national war for the unification of German The Stalinists, joining the howling bourgeois pack, want to lynch revolutionary internationalists during an imperialist war - in the forged name of Leninism.

But the revolutionary internationalists fear neither the imperialists nor their Stalinist murder-gangs. Following Lenin, we take our motto from Liebknecht in 1870: against the current.

Footnote

1. Minor’s “quotation” from Trotsky is of course faked:

“Is it not possible that Mr. Trotsky was right in saying that what Hitler is doing is to bring about the ‘national unification’ of Germany, in saying that ‘Bismarck only half fulfilled this task, leaving almost intact the entire feudal and particularist rubbish,’ and failed to centralize Germany! If, as our latest books tell us, history moves only forward, then is it not possible that Trotsky spoke the truth in saying ‘Both these tasks fell to Hitler. The leader of fascism came forward in his own fashion as the continuator of Bismarck’.“

Minor wisely does not cite his source; his “quotation” is from Trotsky’s A Fresh Lesson: On the Character of the Coming War, in the Dec. 1938 New International. What Trotsky actually wrote was:

“The leader of Fascism came forward, in his own fashion, as the continuator of Bismarck, who in his turn had been the executor of the bourgeois bankrupts of 1848. But this is in the long run only the superficial aspect of the process. Its social content has radically changed. From the progressive factor that it was, the national state has long since been transformed in advanced countries into a brake on the development of productive forces. Ten million more Germans within the boundaries of Germany do not alter the reactionary nature of the national state. For Hitler it is not at all a question of ‘unifying Germans’ as an independent task, but of creating a broader European drill-ground for future world expansion.”

In short, Trotsky wrote the opposite of what Minor’s “quotation” attributes to him.

Such is the Stalin school of falsification.

Felix Morrow

The Minneapolis ‘Sedition’ Trial

(January 1942)

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Source: Fourth International, New York, Vol.3 No.1, January 1942, pp.4-9.
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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I. The Verdict

The Minneapolis “sedition” trial was an unprecedented development in the class struggle in the United States. Never before has the federal government ordered a trial which was so nakedly a political trial, a persecution of the workers’ political movement. The political trials of the last World War were the most significant prior to Minneapolis; but they were limited formally in their scope; they were brought under the wartime Espionage Act and ostensibly were merely aimed at persons allegedly obstructing the war. In Minneapolis, however, the government directly characterized as criminal the doctrines of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, in the indictment and the prosecution arguments. In this assault upon the Socialist Workers Party the government stood out more plainly than ever before as a government of the capitalist class, persecuting proletarian politics.

As the capitalist prosecution marked a new stage in the class struggle, so too did the conduct of the proletarian defense. Never before in a labor trial in this country have defendants so deliberately, so systematically, defended their revolutionary doctrines, using the courtroom as a forum from which to proclaim their ideas; but simultaneously demonstrating that the defense of their doctrines was the most effective way to defend themselves against the charges, not only outside the courtroom but also in the courtroom. By this method the defense won from the jury important concessions, partial victories which enormously facilitate the task of rallying working class and liberal public opinion to support the Civil Rights Defense Committee’s appeal to the higher courts.
An analysis of the jury’s verdict will show how much the Socialist Workers Party has bettered the position of labor’s rights in this battle in contrast to where we stood when the indictment drawn up by the Department of Justice was handed down by a federal grand jury on July 15, 1941, and we went on trial on October 27, 1941.
The jury found all 23 defendants not guilty on Count 1 of the indictment. (Five of the 28 defendants who originally went on trial were acquitted on both counts by directed verdict by the judge for lack of evidence, at the conclusion of the prosecution’s presentation of the case.) Three important consequences resulted from rejecting Count I.

1. The jury thwarted the government’s attempt to use against the labor movement a statute enacted by Congress in 1861, aimed against the southern slaveholders.

Count I charged violation of this statute; the section of the statute adduced against us—used, incidentally, for the first time since its adoption!—makes it a crime to conspire to overthrow the government by force and violence. In argument prior to the trial (for dismissal of the indictment) our chief counsel, Albert Goldman, showed that the statute obviously was designed against attempts to overthrow the government in the immediate present, such as the 1861 rebellion of the southern states. Government counsel, however, stated that it was the position of the government that the statute applied also to any movement whose doctrines could be charged to indicate an attempt to overthrow the government at some time in the remote future. The full meaning of this extension of the application of the statute became clear in final argument, when Assistant Attorney-General Henry A. Schweinhaut called upon the jury to convict us because, although the Socialist Workers Party is a tiny party now, its avowal of the doctrines of the Russian revolution make it possible that, like the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, it could eventually grow to become the leader of a similar revolution here!
In acquitting us on Count 1, the jury, in effect, rejected the government’s attempt to transform the 1861 statute into a ban against revolutionary doctrines. The importance of this as a precedent is that the constitutionality of the 1861 statute as a whole is firmly established by Supreme Court decisions; a conviction under it would be much more likely to remain untouched by the higher courts than one under the hitherto untested Smith Act of 1940. In his final argument, Albert Goldman carefully explained to the jury the important distinction between conspiring to overthrow the government (Count 1) and conspiring to advocate overthrow of the government (Count 2), a distinction which the government, in extending the meaning of the 1861 statute, had refused to recognize. On this important question the jury aligned itself with the defense.

2. Furthermore, by acquitting us on this count, the jury, in effect, characterized the main section of the government’s case as a frame-up. The main purpose of the parade of government witnesses had been to secure a conviction on Count 1. These witnesses were to show the existence of an actual conspiracy to forcibly overthrow the government. This was particularly so in their testimony on the Union Defense Guard of Minneapolis, which the government attempted to depict as an armed force organized with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the government. It was under Count 1 that the indictment brought in the Union Defense Guard. Likewise under this count it was charged that we did “procure certain explosives” for the same purpose.

It is one thing to charge that the doctrines of the Socialist Workers Party constitute “seditious conspiracy”; that is a political persecution. It is something very different, it is a crude police frame-up, to charge that we obtained explosives and armed the Union Defense Guard to assault the government. “If the government persists in its attempt to make of the Union Defense Guard an organization aimed at destroying the government, then this whole case is nothing but a frame-up,” Albert Goldman told the jury in his opening statement; the government did persist; and the jury’s acquittal of the defendants on that count upheld Albert Goldman’s charge of frame-up.

Now Clearly a Civil Liberties Issue

3. The third and most important result of acquittal on Count 1 is that it left the case squarely an issue of civil liberties. The introduction of the charge of violating the 1861 statute, the “evidence” about the Union Defense Guard, the blood-curdling references in Count 1 of the indictment to procuring “explosives,” to soldiers under our influence who would “turn their weapons against their officers,” etcetera—all this had as its aim to picture the defendants as desperados and criminals and not as political prisoners. The liberal Attorney-General wanted at all costs to deny that the case was a civil liberties issue. Biddle, answering a protest from the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in his letter of September 4, 1941:

“You state from your examination of the ‘character of the evidence on which the indictment rests’ that the charges attack utterances or publications and include only one overt act—the organization of the workers in a defense corps. This overt act, however—arming workers to carry out the purpose to which the utterances are addressed—is clearly sufficient to remove the case from one involving expression of opinion... You suggest that the facts show that the intent (of the Union Defense Guard) was merely to protect union property against threats of violence. But the indictment specifically alleges otherwise, and I am confident that it will be supported in the evidence.” So unconvincing was the evidence, however, that the jury aligned itself with the defense on this question and left Biddle in the extremely embarrassing position of having lost his chief prop for his claim that the case was not one “involving expression of opinion.” Let us note in passing that the liberal Attorney-General’s chief prop was an attempted frame-up. Even if we concede he was deceived by subordinates on the Union Defense Guard, Biddle avidly seized upon it—to show his liberalism!

As a clear-cut issue of civil liberties, the appeal to the higher courts will receive far broader support than we could have hoped for had we been convicted on Count 1. Unquestionably it was the jury’s absolving us of the charges of “procuring explosives” and arming guards which has encouraged The Nation and other liberal spokesmen to give their unqualified endorsement to the movement to appeal the case to the higher courts.

The Recommendation of Leniency

On Count 2 the jury found 18 of the 23 defendants guilty, but with a recommendation of leniency. That recommendation undermines the moral validity of the guilty verdict. What does leniency imply here? This was no case of crime committed by a young boy or girl under extenuating circumstances. The defendants were obviously in full possession of their faculties, and not a bit remorseful; indignant against their accusers; clearly determined to go on with their revolutionary work. Under these conditions what could a recommendation of leniency mean, except a formal registration by the jury of its disagreement with the ideas of the defendants rather than a condemnation of the defendants as criminals.

Such a guilty verdict is robbed of all moral validity. No wonder that Mr. Biddle and his associates—it is no secret—are chagrined by such a victory!
An examination of Count 2 renders the verdict still less defensible. Of what were the defendants convicted? Count 2 charged violation of the Smith Act of 1940, popularly known, during the fight against enactment of it, as the Omnibus Gag Bill; the justice of that nickname becomes apparent by describing Count 2. It lists five numbered acts which the defendants allegedly conspired to commit: 1. “Advise, counsel, urge” and “distribute written and printed matter” to cause insubordination in the armed forces. 2. “Advocate, abet, advise and teach the duty, necessity, desirability and propriety of overthrowing the government by force and violence.” 3. “Print, publish, edit, issue, circulate, sell, distribute and publicly display written and printed matter advocating” such overthrow. 4. “Organize societies, groups and assemblies of persons to teach” the same. 5. Become members of such groups.
The last three of these charges played no role. Count 2 was considered, by both prosecution and defense, as if it consisted of the first two charges—causing insubordination and advocating violence.
The jury could vote guilty or not guilty on Count 2 as a whole and could not indicate whether it held the defendants guilty on one, or the other, or both charges in the count. The recommendation of leniency tends to indicate that the jury did not consider the defendants guilty of both.
One of these two charges was so unsubstantiated that it should never have been submitted to the jury at all—that on insubordination in the armed forces. Albert Goldman pointed this out to Judge Joyce in argument for a new trial. For the only “evidence” on this point was some oral testimony by two government witnesses to the effect that one or two defendants had told them that soldiers should be induced to “kick” about food and living conditions. Judge Joyce’s answer was that, since “some” evidence had been offered in this point, he had been bound to submit the question to the jury. Federal judges may dismiss all or any part of any count in an indictment when in the judge’s opinion no substantial evidence has been introduced warranting the submission of the point in question to the jury.
Certainly it is hard to believe that a jury recommended leniency if it held the defendants guilty of such a serious charge as conspiring to cause insubordination in the army.

What Happened in the Jury Room

So far we have discussed the verdict and its logical implications. Perhaps even more devastating to the moral validity of the verdict of guilty on Count 2 is the story of what actually happened in the jury room, which has now been told by some of the jurors. There were three jurors who were ready to vote not guilty on both counts. Had they withstood the pressure, there would have been no verdict, but a hung jury, with a new trial—if the government had decided to go through with a second one.

Instead the jurors compromised. Those who believed us not guilty secured acquittal on the first count, acquittal of five on the second count, and a recommendation of leniency, and in return voted guilty on Count 2.
All in all, the jury’s verdict is scarcely one which the government can point to as a vindication of the government charges on which the trial took place. On the contrary, the defendants are in a strong moral position on the basis of which, even in wartime, great sections of the labor and liberal movement can be united in the appeal against the convictions

II. The Jury

No one connected with the defense, I believe, thought it possible to win from a jury a verdict of not guilty on both counts. With the prestige of the federal government backing the charges, with charges of such a character, with the given procedure in the federal courts, with the trial taking place on the eve of war, it was inconceivable that a jury could be found hardy enough to go against bourgeois public opinion and declare us not guilty. The defendants were not the only ones who held this view. Roger Baldwin, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, just before the case went to the jury, sent out an urgent appeal for funds for the defense in which he assumed that a conviction was coming.

A disagreement in the jury—no verdict—seemed more conceivable than a blanket verdict of not guilty. But those who believed us innocent accepted a compromise, instead of insisting upon a hung jury. Shall we criticize then for that? Perhaps. But let us also examine the real situation of the jury.
Here were jurors chosen by a procedure which made certain that no one sympathetic to labor would be on the venire. They were called upon to pass on a case which, they well understood, had been initiated by the highest circles of the United States Government; an Assistant Attorney-General, sent from Washington, was present in the courtroom to demand of them a guilty verdict. The defendants were revolutionaries committed to the overthrow of the existing order, that is to say, members of a small unpopular movement anathematized by respectable society. Over the courtroom was the shadow of the impending war—the defendants were sentenced the day Congress declared war against Japan. Under those conditions, it would have taken men and women of extraordinary calibre to stand up in the jury room on behalf of the defendants to the point of a hung jury. In truth it is more surprising that those who believed us innocent were not finally beaten down to submit to a blanket verdict of guilty against all defendants, on both counts, and with no recommendation of leniency.
The really significant fact is not that the three jurors compromised, but that the other nine were ready to agree to a compromise favorable to the defendants. A significant fact, for when the trial began these jurors were unquestionably steeped in hostility and prejudice against the revolutionary Marxists they were called upon to judge. That the jurors ended ready to show leniency toward the defendants is a tribute to the character of the defense conducted by Albert Goldman.
Consider who these jurors were and how they were chosen. The venire for a federal jury in this district is constituted as follows: The court clerk and a jury commissioner write to their friends and acquaintances in all the counties of this predominantly rural federal district, asking them to send in the names of persons likely to make good jurors. The court clerk and jury commissioner naturally write to “solid” citizens who, in turn, name the same type. Those named receive routine questionnaires which they fill in and return to the court clerk, who files them. When a court term is about to open and a venire is needed, the clerk gets out of the files the required number distributed almost equally among the counties, which means an overwhelmingly rural venire. In this case the judge called for a venire drawn from 33 counties, predominantly rural.
Nor was Albert Goldman permitted to question prospective jurors, as defense counsel are traditionally allowed to do. The procedure permitted questioning of prospective jurors only by the judge. Defense counsel could submit questions to the judge, who put some of them, rejected the rest. Thus defense counsel could not, by skillful, probing questioning, ferret out prejudiced jurors.
The defense was limited to ten peremptory challenges. After using up the first few, Albert Goldman could not but ask himself: “If I use up the rest, isn’t it almost certain, from such a venire, that I shall get worse than I already have in the jury box?”
And so this jury was chosen: a grain elevator owner; a small town newspaper publisher; a bank executive; a garage owner; a farmer; a farm laborer; a general store owner a general store clerk; a plumbing contractor; a hardware clerk; the wife of a courthouse janitor; a lumber company sales manager. Most of them from rural counties, and not a single person who is or ever has been a member of a trade union.
Visualize that jury and you will begin to understand Albert Goldman’s achievement in conducting the defense!

III. The Method of the Defense

The method of the defense will perhaps be best understood if we contrast it with the method which liberals and civil libertarians advised us to employ.

Retain eminent and respectable attorneys. Leave the strategy of the defense entirely in their hands, without “politically motivated” interference by the defendants. How would such counsel picture the defendants to the jury? As “harmless, theoretical ‘revolutionists’ innocent enough, foolish enough, to talk about overthrowing the government of the United States. To pretend that these people are a danger to this country is simply fantastic.” These words from a New Leader (December 20, 1941) editorial, protesting the prosecution, typify what such counsel would say to the jury: try to laugh it off at the expense of the defendants, plus an appeal to civil liberties.
This approach would include systematic objections by defense counsel to acceptance into evidence of any and all government exhibits from the literature of the Socialist Workers Party—objections designed to limit as far as possible the number of government exhibits, so that there would be as few as possible to explain away. Similar objections would be made to testimony of government witnesses. Each exhibit and item of oral testimony, at least the most damaging, would then be separately “interpreted” to persuade the jury that it isn’t as bad as it is painted. Government witnesses would be cross-examined on the same basis. Defendants would be called as witnesses only primarily to refute specific charges made by government witnesses.
The liberal method of trying the case would eschew any systematic exposition in the case, or in final argument, of the socialist theories of the defendants. Proposals by defendants to defend their doctrines would be frowned upon by the liberal attorneys as having no other purpose than to use the court for propaganda purposes. It might make good propaganda for socialism but would prejudice the jury against the defendants.
This, I think, is a fair presentation of the method that the liberals would use in the Minneapolis and similar cases.

Fallacies of the Liberal Method

There are two fundamental flaws in this strategy.

1. It does not cope with the fact that there are laws on the statute books making it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the government by violence. When the New Leader, impliedly conceding the main contention of the government indictment, calls us “foolish enough to talk about overthrowing the government of the United States,” it leaves us with no defense in a jury trial against the Smith Act so long as that is law. When The Nation, while outspokenly calling for support to our appeal, condemns the prosecution as similar to Japan’s prosecutions of “dangerous thoughts,” it is in reality assuming that we, as charged in the indictment, advocate overthrow of the government by violence.

These liberal organs prove to their own satisfaction that the Socialist Workers Party is no danger to the government; and that argument may conceivably be accepted by the United States Supreme Court, for reversing the conviction by adopting the Holmes-Brandeis theory of “clear and present danger.” But that argument is in point only in appellate courts and on a motion to dismiss the indictment, prior to trial. Albert Goldman made that motion on our behalf. Judge Joyce rejected that motion—finding that there was a clear and present danger of the evils which the statutes cited in the indictment sought to prevent and therefore the statutes were applicable! We were then faced with the necessity of convincing a jury that we were not guilty of violating those statutes. The liberal argument that it is unjust to convict “foolish, unpopular, tiny grouplets” for advocating overthrow of the government by violence would get nowhere with a jury which is sworn to take the law as it is handed to them by the judge.

2. The liberals’ appeal to the jury to uphold civil liberties is not likely to sway a jury which has heard such a defense as the liberals would present. The jurors, as we have seen, came into the courtroom with the habits and prejudices of a lifetime standing like a Chinese wall between them and us. Unions were strange and alien to them—a hundredfold more so were proletarian revolutionists. The liberal method of presenting the case would not have broken down those prejudices against the defendants and their socialist doctrines. The perfect civil libertarian may say, with Voltaire: “I abhor to the death what you believe in but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.” But the ordinary mortal, sitting as a juror in a doctrinal case, if he abhors to the death what you stand for, is fairly certain to vote guilty.

These reasons would have been sufficient to decide us to reject the liberal strategy. But even had the liberal method been efficacious enough to win us an acquittal, we could not have agreed to that kind of a defense.
To have defense counsel deride the potency of our doctrines, urge the jury to laugh at us as foolish doctrinaires and to let us go because we could never achieve our goal—such a defense would be little better than abandoning our principles for the sake of a possible acquittal.
Instead we employed a principled method which may justly be said to have been used for the first time in this country—certainly for the first time systematically and consciously.
We set out to get those jurors to cease abhorring socialism and to recognize and respect the sincerity, sanity and seriousness of the defendants and their ideas. It might even be said that, in a sense, we set out to make socialist sympathizers or half-sympathizers out of those jurors. The defense had as its main object to make those jurors understand what we are really like and what we really stand for. That could be done only by explaining to them, in the simplest and most persuasive terms, our beliefs and our hopes for the socialist future of humanity.

The Kind of Attorney We Needed

That method of defense necessitated a chief counsel learned in socialist theory; no other could skillfully guide defense witnesses in expounding the doctrines of the Socialist Workers Party, decide what questions to ask government witnesses, which government exhibits were satisfactory to the defense, and make an exhaustive final argument in defense of socialism. Indeed it would be impossible to carry out such a method of defense except under the leadership of an attorney thoroughly trained in Marxism.

There was one man above all in the country who had those qualifications: Albert Goldman. Friendly liberals pointed out to us that he was seriously handicapped by the fact that he was himself one of the defendants in the case; moreover he was a Jew facing a rural jury which might harbor anti-Semitic prejudices. These were facts which we had to take into account. Were Albert Goldman not a Jew and a defendant, perhaps he would have been still more effective with a jury. But for those reasons replace him with another lawyer? Yes—if the other lawyer were Goldman’s equal as a lawyer, as a speaker, as a Marxist. But in those qualities there is no lawyer alive who measures up to Albert Goldman. And by the time he had concluded his final argument all serious observers were agreed that the handicaps had paled away and disappeared as Albert Goldman established his moral authority in that courtroom.
The trial began with opening statements by both sides. After US District Attorney Anderson made his statement, Goldman incisively called the attention of the jury to the heart of the case:

“We shall show to you, by the very evidence introduced by the prosecution, that the Socialist Workers Party’s aim is to win a majority of the people for its ideas. And Mr. Anderson will have to convince you that that is criminal...

“The evidence will show that we were very, very interested in the question of trade unionism. We will not deny it. We instructed our members to be active in all organizations, particularly trade unions. Where people congregate, there should we be, to show the majority of the people that they, in order to solve their problems, must accept those ideas...

“The defense will prove Mr. Anderson’s contention that we are opposed to this war, and the evidence will prove further Mr. Anderson’s contention that the defendants consider this war on the part of England and Germany and Italy, and the United States as an imperialistic war, fought for the economic interests of the small group of financiers and capitalists who control the destinies of these countries...

“Those are ideas of ours with which the jurors may agree or not, but the evidence will show that every statement made by Mr. Anderson to the effect that we believe in sabotage is absolutely false. The evidence will show that so long as we are in a minority, so long as we cannot convince the majority of the people that our ideas are correct, we shall submit and we have nothing else to do but to submit to the government.

“Essentially the question boils itself down to this: Did we advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence? ...

“The evidence will show that we prefer a peaceful transition to socialism; but that we analyze all the conditions in society, we analyze history, and on the basis of this analysis we predict, we predict that the reactionary minority, by violence, will not permit the majority its right to establish socialism. That is the heart of the question!”

The rest of the trial consisted, so far as the defense was concerned, in proving these propositions.

Our Attitude to Prosecution Evidence

Goldman made clear to the jury that he welcomed all exhibits introduced by the government which were programmatic documents of the Socialist Workers Party, articles on policy in our press written by authoritative leaders of the party, resolutions of the party conventions or the National Committee, etc. He explained to the jury that the defense would introduce few exhibits since it would prove its case from the exhibits of the government.

The comparatively few objections he made to exhibits submitted by the government were clearly in protest against irrelevant or unfair items: a floorplan of the Minneapolis party branch offices, red flags and pictures of Lenin and Trotsky seized in an FBI raid on the Twin City branch offices; unsigned articles from our press which had no bearing on the issues, etc. Goldman also objected to the introduction of works by Marx, Lenin and Trotsky on the ground that, while we accept the fundamental doctrines of these founders of our movement, we are not idol-worshippers who accept every single word they wrote; hence their doctrines should be considered in the form in which they appear in the official literature and resolutions of the Socialist Workers Party.
Goldman followed a similar procedure toward government witnesses. He made no objections to their descriptions of the structure and history of the party, their recital of events at party meetings, their account of party activities in the trade unions, etc. As the reader of Goldman’s final argument will note, he made effective use of this hostile testimony in clinching important points, notably on the question of the party’s aims in the unions. Only where the prosecutors led their witnesses into fabulous tales of private conversations allegedly had between witnesses and defendants in barrooms, automobiles and house-parties, or government testimony was completely irrelevant to the issues, did Goldman object.
Likewise his extremely effective cross-examination carefully avoided any appearance of hammering witnesses merely for the sake of tripping them up. Much of their testimony he did not cross-examine at all, dealing only with crucial points such as their allegations about the Union Defense Guard and about statements by defendants advocating violence against the government. Goldman’s activities during the three weeks that the prosecution was presenting its side of the case clearly indicated his willingness to have everything brought in which would give the jury a complete picture of the doctrines and activities of the Socialist Workers Party.
The defense took only four day’s to presents its case. The party’s National Secretary, James P. Cannon, was on the stand for two days. Under Goldman’s questioning he gave the jury an effectively simple description of our ideas; under cross-examination he defended those ideas against prosecution attempts to pervert their meaning.
This was supplemented by the testimony of Farrell Dobbs and Vincent Dunne on the policy and activities of the party in the trade unions. Short but convincing testimony by six Union Defense Guard members on the nature of the organization, and testimony by Grace Carlson rebutting government testimony about statements allegedly made by her were other important items in the defense presentation.
The effect of the whole was not so much to deny specific government allegations as to describe to the jury the ideas of the Socialist Workers Party.
Whatever may have been the effect of the defense witnesses on the jury, in the end everything depended upon Albert Goldman’s final argument. For after the defense witnesses came the prosecution’s final argument, a day-long speech by US District Attorney Victor Anderson.

IV. The Final Arguments

On the eve of the trial, Attorney-General Biddle had issued a statement, presumably to conciliate protesting liberals, promising that the trial would be conducted in “a low key.” But Anderson’s final argument was an utterly brutal thing, devoid of any hint of concession to the rights of labor; a speech aimed at evoking the most reactionary sentiments; not appealing to the jury’s sense of justice but demanding, in the name of constituted authority, that it bring in a verdict of guilty for the sake of God and country. The jury appeared to us to be visibly affected by Anderson’s demand, either because it shared his sentiments or bowed to his authority.

One felt that all the previous handicaps against us were revived in full force by Anderson’s vicious assault. I have not yet mentioned the handicaps imposed by Judge Matthew M. Joyce; he had scarcely made easier our task of acquainting the jury with our real ideas. I cite but a few examples. The prosecution insisted on introducing as evidence against us Wintringham’s book, New Ways of War, replete with diagrams of how to make bombs, grenades and other weapons; it is a book written to train Britain’s Home Guards to resist Nazi invasion; but we had written a book review of it and the judge admitted the book in evidence. We had visions of the jurors deliberating their verdict and poring over those diagrams! Judge Joyce had also admitted into evidence Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto of 1848; what its words, written about the Europe of 93 years ago, could conjure up in the jurors’ minds, we could only conjecture.
On the other hand Judge Joyce would not permit the defense witnesses to tell the jury the whole story behind the trial—the struggle between AFL Teamsters President Daniel J. Tobin and the Trotskyist leadership of the Motor Transport Workers Union, Local 544-CIO, and the series of governmental actions siding with Tobin, culminating in the indictment of the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party and Local 544-CIO. Whenever defense witnesses approached this question, the prosecutors jumped up to object and were sustained by the judge.
Such were the onerous conditions under which Albert Goldman delivered his final argument, speaking for two days, for a total of ten hours.
His speech, as the reader can see for himself, is austerely simple in its construction. There are no tricks in it, nor flights of rhetoric. The secret of its great power is that it is an unadorned but clear and persuasive explanation of what socialism is. The task Albert Goldman set for himself was to try to make those jurors understand who we defendants are, what we believe, why we believe it, and why we have a moral and legal right to our beliefs. He set out to move those jurors, not inches, but worlds, from their capitalist-dominated world into seeing distance of the socialist world of the future.
The obstacles in the way were well-nigh insuperable. But hour after hour, with an eloquence which lent restrained passion to his words, Goldman labored upon that jury, And, finally, his labors were not in vain. He won from them a partial victory, partial but rich with fruitful consequences for the preservation and building of the revolutionary movement.
Not the least of the fruitful consequences of this trial is the text of Goldman’s speech. It provides something which the American revolutionary movement has long lacked—an elementary exposition of the socialist outlook. Now we have it, not in a dry textbook, but in the dramatic form of a defense of revolutionists against the government’s attempt to imprison them for their ideas. Let us see to it that the new generation of youth, in whose hands is the power to put an end to capitalist slaughter, is given the opportunity to read Albert Goldman’s great speech. [1]

Footnote

1. This article is the introduction to Albert Goldman’s In Defense of Socialism, the text of the first argument in the Minneapolis “sedition” trial, which will shortly appear in pamphlet form. A companion pamphlet is Socialism on Trial, by James P. Cannon, consisting of the official court record of Cannon’s testimony.

Felix Morrow

War-Mad Liberal

(May 1939)

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Source: New International, New York, Vol.5 No.5, May 1939, p.156-7
Transcribed: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: David Walters
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005. You can freely copy, distribute, display and perform 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 the transcribers & proofreaders above.

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MEN MUST ACT
By Lewis Mumford
Harcourt, Brace. $1.50.

As a spokesman of the liberal intelligentsia, Mumford has not been conspicuous for trail-blazing; he has remained close to his constituency; and this fact gives this book an importance as an index to the present mentality of that constituency which it does not possess as a work of thought.

The post-war revolutionary upsurge lightly touched this group and therefore Mumford (The Story of Utopias, 1922); European stability under American tutelage and the decline of the revolutionary movement brought a return to literary pursuits until the 1929 crisis drove the liberal intelligentsia again a step or two toward the revolutionary movement (Mumford chaired a Harlan miners defense meeting and introduced everybody as “comrade”) then the New Deal opened the doors of the ABC’s to the intelligentsia which in turn turned its back on radicalism; Muntford’s constituency is now busily engaged in providing moral justification for supporting American imperialism in the coming World War, and this book codifies the war ideology at its present roughly-fashioned stage.
The logic of politics is remorseless, indeed. In order to justify on idealistic grounds the support of one imperialist camp against another, Mumford is driven step by step to revise the former opinions of the left liberals on all basic questions: the first World War the League of Nations, the nature of capitalist democracy, the nature of fascism, etc. etc. Perhaps the best introduction to this book—and I write of it primarily for that purpose, for this is a book which every opponent of the coming war should read in order to understand how that war is being justified—is to indicate the major amputations Mumford has been compelled by his present political logic to make on the ideas formerly held by his constituency.
Few of these liberals held out against war in 1917; yet no tenet of the liberal creed since then and until very recently has been more firmly held than that the war was a conflict among imperialist bandits and should have received no honest intellectual support. In the post-war years one of the main functions of The New Republic and The Nation was to publish material demonstrating that fact, painstakingly prepared, in the main, by intellectuals remorseful of their support of the war.
On their behalf, however, Mumford now abandons this tenet:

“... the United States spent thousands lives and billions of dollars to save world for democracy between 1917 and 1919... What was wrong was not that we sought to preserve democracy : what alone was wrong was that we failed.

“... many people have come to accept the economic interpretation of our actions as one that in fact explains them. According this fable, the war was entered into by the United States to save the Morgan loans to the Allies...

“... What made millions of intelligent Americans join hands with such rascals and profiteers is that something else actually was at stake. Why, toward the end of the war, did the higher type of German—I met many—fervently wish the Allies to win? ...

“And mark this: something was actually gained by America’s entrance into the war on behalf of democracy: a breathing space. Germany’s assault on democracy was staved off for another twenty years... it was certainly better than immediate serfdom as vassals of a triumphant, militaristic, still essentially feudal Germany. That we did not gather the beneficent results of a democratc victory is not a proof of the notion that we were fooled or misguided when we sought to save democracy.” (p.155)

If Czar Nicholas (who was overthrown not by those who fought to make the world safe for democracy but precisely by those who denounced the war), Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Bernard Baruch—not to forget those other fighters for democracy whom Mumford doesn’t mention, the Emperor of Japan and the King of Italy!—were morally superior to their enemies, the peace written by the victors must also have virtues. Mumford takes this step, too. abandoning all that the liberal intelligentsia had to say about the Versailles iniquity, the League of Nations which was put on it as a fig-leaf, and the rapacious imperialisms which it served:

“... Imperialism had become, by the end of the nineteenth century, apologetic, shame-faced, abashed: in the very hypocrisy by, which their naked economic aims were cloaked, the imperial powers made their first dim acknowledgment of political morals. So they way was opened to a different state of reciprocity and free government; this took place in Cuba and the Philippines after the American conquest there; it took place in South Africa...

“For the last generation there was, in international affairs, a steady gain for moral decency. Even the Treaty of Versailles, though it lacked justice and magnanimity, was coupled with at least the lip recognition of a more rational political order, embodied in the League of Nations... Most intelligent Germans knew then, and still know, that the treaty the German government had in store for the Allies, had they been victorious was far more ferocious in its injustices.

... Indefensible as any imperialism now is, the League of Nations, with all its shortcomings, offered a means whereby the Lilliputian nations of the world were, until 1930, gradually getting the imperialist Gullivers to accept a network of restriction that would have made further military conquests impossible.” (65-66)

This idyll of American, British, French imperialism quite takes one’s breath away: Cuba has free government—forget the American government-instigated overthrow of the Grau San Martin government and the American government-supported bloody regime of Batista, not to speak of American government-supported dictatorships in most Latin-American countries—all this under Roosevelt—the British have given the white minority in South Africa the right to a local dictatorship over the black majority—that should make you forget the Britishers’ own dictatorship over four hundred million toilers in India, or the French dictatorship over the North Africans. In an offhand manner Mumford ignores a little detail of present history: that every Englishman has nine or ten slaves working for him, every Frenchman two or three slaves; never mind that, Mumford indicates, the Englishman and the Frenchman have democracy at home. Freedom for the oppressed colonial peoples? Not in Mumford’s program for “Re-fortification of Democracy.”

The real face of imperialism cannot appear in Mumford’s book for the same reason that he cannot permit us to think for a moment upon the real nature of wage slavery in the home countries: his thesis is that there is an “unbridgeable gulf” between life of the fascist countries and that of the democratic empires.
And to accentuate that “unbridgeable gulf” so that we shall be sufficiently hardened to plunge cold steel into the guts of every German, Mumford not only idealizes the democracies but also indicts the entire German people. In America “those who have a firm belief in democracy... probably includes the greater number of intelligent Americans, representing every shade of economic status and political conviction”—bosses included. The sole exceptions Mumford stakes in his “democratic front” are those “intransigent industrialists who seek to maintain the absolutism of their rule, as practiced anciently in the company town”, the “stone age industrialists”. But as “anciently” and “stone age” happily portend, this is past; now, “our more progressive industries, led by men who have claims to industrial statesmanship, have in principle accepted the need for democratic participation and security of livelihood.” (p.139). We are all one happy democratic family, bosses and workers manage industry by “democratic participation”, no significant section of employers are opposed to the Wagner Act or use strikebreakers or stool-pigeons or other union-busting methods, and the Fansteel, Apex and similar court decisions of the last few weeks really belong to the dim past.
In Germany, on the other hand, all—workers, including thirteen million who voted Communist or Socialist in 1932, etc.—are Nazis in their ideology. In an article on Spengler in the January 11, 1939 New Republic, Mumford proclaimed the “pathology of the German mind” to be the “sinister world problem” today. The German mind—not that of the rulers but of the people. Mumford in this book speaks of “the residual barbarisms in German civilization: the soil out of which Nazism grew” and seeks to “remove forever those superficial interpretations of Nazism which overlook how much of its animus and creed already existed—long before Hitler and Rosenberg—in Luther, Fichte, Hegel, Treitschke, Nietzsche, Wagner, and Houston Chamberlain.” (p.176) Fascism is “an error of politically undeveloped countries, such as Italy and Germany historically were and are” (p.24); “the majority of Germans succumbed... they relapsed into the cult of Wotan: the savage and the primeval. Momentarily halted in their creative act of construction, the Germans vengefully turned on their own handiwork and tore it down.” (pp.55-56). Not the Nazis, mind you, but “the majority of Germans” or, better still, “the Germans.” Wield your bayonets, you fighters for democracy, with the firm assurance that those you kill are really not human; they are Huns.
That by Mumford’s own criterion—”Every trade union, every co-operative society, every neighborhood association, is a training ground for the more complicated problems of collective government” the German people were far more democratic in traditions and practice than America; that “German civilization” gave us not only the forerunners of Nazism but also Marx and Engels, Bebel and Liebknecht—we live in an atmosphere of war psychosis in which a spokesman of the liberal intelligentsia can blandly assign Hegel to the Nazis! Hegel, whose direct fructifying inspiration, to mention but one instance, on John Dewey and his disciples, and through them on progressive philosophy and education, must be known even to Mumford!
Elsewhere I propose to examine in detail Mumford’s racial theory of the causes for the rise of fascism. If there is an “unbridgeable gulf” between the democratic empires and the fascist, why is the “oldest and surest form of democratic government”—Britain—ruled concededly by a “pro-fascist ruling class”?
Mumford’s book is couched in the form of a polemic—against pacifists, isolationists, and neutrality-seekers. But all these will be with Mumford in the war. Why doesn’t Mumford confront the arguments of those who will not be with him—the revolutionary Marxists? These consistent opponents of the war remain unmentioned; and that is an index to Mumford’s intellectual dishonesty.

Felix MORROW

Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line

—Socialist Workers Party [US] Education for Socialist Bulletins—

Comrade Cross Invents a Problem (excerpt)

A Reply to “The Relationship Between Free Speech and the Proletarian Revolution ”

By Felix Morrow

The following item is reprinted from SWP Internal Bulletin No. 8, May 1939. Felix Morrow was a member of the SWP Political Committee who wrote many of the key articles on fascism published in the Socialist Appeal , the SWP’s twice-weekly newspaper, in 1939.
On February 20, 1939, the SWP led a demonstration of 50,000 protesting a fascist meeting at Madison Square Garden. Other political forces had abstained from the action, for fear of undermining their ties with New York’s Mayor La Guardia.
Many liberals and Stalinist sympathizers tried to justify their refusal to participate in the antifascist demonstration by pretending that such demonstrations violated the fascists’ right to free speech. This attempt to divert attention from the real issues was answered in “Should Fascists be Allowed the Right of Free Speech?”, an unsigned article probably authored by Morrow. In the March 3, 1939, issue of the Socialist Appeal . Morrow also flayed the, liberals for their failure to defend the civil rights of the antifascist demonstrators against brutal police attacks. Stalinists claimed that the purpose of the antifascist demonstration was to prevent or break up the fascist meeting. Morrow answered this in the March 10, 1939, Socialist Appeal“Jerome’s reference to ‘forcibly’ preventing the meeting is of course a dishonest subterfuge; the issue involved was that of a counterdemonstration, of mass picketing of the meeting.”
Roger Cross, a member of the SWP, interpreted the position taken by the SWP as opposing the application of free speech rights to fascists. In “Comrade Cross Invents a Problem,’ Morrow attempted to eliminate this misunderstanding.

Comrade Cross Invents a Problem

I have carefully read and reread Comrade Cross’ article, “The Relationship Between Free Speech and the Proletarian Revolution” [see the same number of the’ Bulletin]. I regret that it is not a fruitful contribution to analyzing the new problems concretely raised by the slogan of Workers Defense Guards. That slogan does raise important new problems. Comrade Cross has, however, simply invented a nonexistent problem; he has done so, as I shall show, in order to propagate an historical interpretation of the Thermidorean reaction in Soviet Russia which is alien to the Trotskyist explanation of the degeneration of the workers state in Russia. The free’ speech problem” invented by him serves merely as a springboard for a false historical theory. Comrade Cross is within his rights in raising any and all questions during the pre-convention discussion. But the main body of his article is an argument against a straw man, for it is not true that the party “denies free speech to fascists”; while the real logical motivation of his article—the enunciation of an anti-Trotskyist explanation of the degeneration of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia—is simply asserted without a word of argument or proof.
Comrade Cross writes: “The current articles in the press of the SWP have unambiguously pledged that party to most violent action in smashing the fascists and in denying them the right to speak. A more thoughtful leadership would simply agitate to smash the fascists, and leave the question of their right to speak alone. The arguments used are: that the avowed object of the fascists is to smash all democratic rights. They would deny us the right to speak, put us in concentration camps and shoot us. Consequently, why should they be allowed free speech?
Where did comrade Cross find the Socialist Appeal saying that fascists should not be allowed to speak? He cites no issues and pages of the Appeal —and with good reason, for he could find no such citations. Yet he blandly reports the Appeal’ s arguments for this nonexistent position.
A very fruitful discussion can be had on the extremely delicate problems connected with calling upon the workers to fight against the fascists: when to speak purely in defensive terms, and when to go over to terms indicating an offensive against the fascists. For the moment, it is clear, political realities—the speedy growth of the fascists, our own weakness—dictates defensive terms. A warning must also be given to the party against a too-technical conception of the formation of Workers. Defense Guards: unless the Guards are merely the first ranks, carrying with them nonparty and nonguard elements-in their actions, we shall find ourselves defeating the real purpose for mobilizing the guards: getting the masses to move with us. We must also convince the party membership—and above all the youth—that the guard is a practical, feasible, and pressing task. These and other problems, deserve discussion. But not this invention of Comrade-Cross.
It has long been clearly thought out in the Bolshevik movement, where we stand on the question of free speech. First of all, “free speech” belongs to the category of “civil liberties.” Let those who will, engage in this activity—we certainly don’t denounce the existence of the American Civil Liberties Union —but the task of the revolutionist and of the working class and its allies is the fight for the democratic rights of the working class .
From the concept of “civil liberties,” the American Civil Liberties Union logically arrives at the point offering its services to fascists who in isolated instances run afoul of a progressive mayor or police chief. What do we say about such actions of the’ ACLU? We say: for every fascist persecuted by the state, ten thousand workers are persecuted. We are ready to tell the ACLU of more cases of workers rights being violated than’ the ACLU can possibly handle. The ACLU knows this as well as we. But the ACLU is so anxious to prove its respectability, so fawningly worried about the good opinion of .bosses and their stooges., that the AC LU takes good money and lawyers that might be used to help persecuted workers, and diverts it to the use of the fascists.
This concrete criticism of the ACLU does not involve a denial of free speech to the fascists. Moreover, is it our business ‘to tell the capitalist state what to do about the fascists, to please give them free speech? Not at all. We give advice only to the workers, and we call upon to fight fascism. The only point at which we will suppress the free speech of the fascists is only in the broad sense that, in carrying out the seizure of state power, we shall undoubtedly have to smash the fascist organizations and suppress the fascist cadres.

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Felix Morrow

The GPU orders a Novel

(March 1939)

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Source: Review, New International, New York, Vol.5 No.5, March 1939, page 34
Transcribed: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: David Walters
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2005. You can freely copy, distribute, display and perform 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 the transcribers & proofreaders above.

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MAN’S HOPE
By André MALRAUX
511 pages New York. Random House. $3.

Like his novels of the Chinese revolution, The Conquerors and Man’s Fate, Malraux’s Spanish book is less a novel than a fictionalized chronicle of the historical events. But with this great difference: in the Chinese novels the artist and observer put down what his trained eyes saw, with the result that he told far more than he knew: the strangling of the Chinese revolution by the Stalinist bureaucrats was unfolded before us. When the Stalinists told the workers to surrender their arms to their executioners; when the Stalinists turned the revolutionary terrorists over to the bourgeoisie—Malraux recorded such incidents indelibly. Despite his defense of the Stalinists against the Trotskyists in articles, therefore, his novels constituted an indictment of the Stalinist strategy in China.

The present “novel”, a chronicle of the early months of the Spanish civil war, dealing with events in which the Stalinists conducted themselves a thousand-fold more vilely than in China in 1925-1927, reveals that Malraux has thoroughly divested himself of the role of artist and observer. The events are carefully sifted, not by aesthetic criteria, but by the standards of the GPU. Nothing is permitted to appear which indicates the actual class forces in the Spanish struggle. Of the seizure of the factories by the workers’ committees in July 1936; the collectives organized by the peasants’ committees; the workers’ organization of the militias; the network of workers’ and peasants’ committees which were the real rulers of Spain during those early months; the great controversy whether the proletariat should go on to complete the socialist revolution or turn back to collaboration with the “liberal” bourgeoisie, as the Stalinists insisted, in order to get the Anglo-French aid which never came—in a word, of the real issues of the Spanish civil war, there is not a hint in this nook.
These omissions are supplemented by deliberate falsifications. The book opens in Madrid for one purpose: to give the reader the false impression that the fascists were first defeated here; the actual issue was first decided by the CNT workers in Barcelona July 19, 1936 when, refused arms by the government, the masses nevertheless by sheer numbers and heroism, conquered the revolting troops. Only then, with the workers triumphant and in power in Catalonia, did the government at Madrid agree to arm the workers. Malraux’s “poetic license” enables him in the first paragraph of his book to say that “the government had decided to arm the people”. When Malraux does turn to the Barcelona events, he has the effrontery to describe the fighting workers as “the forces of the Popular Front” (p.20); they were, of course, the CNT and POUM workers who were not dragged into the Popular Front by their leaders until months later and whose freedom from the Popular Front government enabled them to act independently and in spite of the Popular Front government in saving Catalonia on July 19.
It is a matter of historical record that the struggle in the Barcelona streets was entirely in the hands of the workers; the government leaders were nowhere to be seen; such police as remained loyal played an extremely minor role. But in Malraux’s book the historical record is perverted to justify the Stalinist subordination of the workers to the Popular Front government. Incredibly, the most famous event in the Barcelona fighting—the storming of the Atarazanas barracks by the masses under the leadership of the two most outstanding anarchist leaders, Ascaso and Durruti (Ascaso was killed in the battle)—receives one line in this book, and that in the form of a radio report, while pages are devoted to the exploits of the Barcelona police!
The completely fraudulent character of this book is revealed by this incident, among others:

Colonel Ximenes [commander of the Barcelona police] was in charge of the whole district, and for the last few hours the heads of the local organizations had been coming to get instructions from him...
Puig (anarchist leader) entered...
“Where can we be of the most use?” he asked. “I’ve a thousand men.”
“Nowhere; all’s well for the moment. But they’ll be trying to get out of the barracks—from Atarazana anyhow. You’d better stay around for half an hour; you men may come in very handy any moment.” (p.29.)

Only a corrupt, consciously dishonest agent, could have written these lines. The CNT was master of Barcelona in those hours; a CNT leader no more thought of asking Ximenes for orders than he would have asked the fascist generals.

The real relationship of forces may be indicated by the discreet statement of the bourgeois Esquerra leader, Jaime Miravittles, explaining why the CNT-controlled militia committee was established:

The Central Committee of Militias was born two or three days after the [subversive] movement, in the absence of any regular public force and when there was no army in Barcelona. For another thing, there were no longer any Civil or Assault Guards. For all of them had fought so arduously, united with the forces of the people, that now they formed part of the same mass and had remained mixed up> with it. In these circumstances, weeks went by without it being possible to reunite and regroup the dispersed forces of the Assault and Civil Guards. (Heraldo de Madrid, Sept. 4, 1936)

One could confront every page of this utterly dishonest book with the documented facts. This hook is not a novel at all, but a piece of dirty work for the GPU.

Felix MORROW

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.