Blessings of Liberty and Education

Frederick Douglass
September 3, 1894
Manassas, Virginia

Print this Page

Ladies, Gentlemen ad Friends: As I am a stranger among you and a sojourner, you will, I hope, allow me a word about myself, by way of introduction. I want to say something about the day upon which we are met. Coincidents are always more or less, interesting and here is one such of a somewhat striking character. This day has for me a special interest. It happens to be the anniversary of my escape from bondage. Fifty-six years ago to-day, it was my good fortune to cease to be a slave, a chattel personal, and to become a man. It was upon the 3rd day of September, 1838, that I started upon my little life work in the world. It was a great day for me. With slavery behind me and all the great untried world before me, my heart throbbed with many anxious thoughts as to what the future might have in store for me. I will not attempt here any description of what were my emotions in this crisis. I leave you to imagine the difference between what they were and what they are on this happy occasion. I then found myself in a strange land, unknown, friendless, and pursued as if I were a fugitive from justice. I was a stranger to every one I met in the streets of the great city of New York, for that city was the first place in which I felt at liberty to halt in my flight farther North. New York, at that day was by no means a city of refuge. On the contrary, it was a city in which slave-hunters and slave-catchers delighted to congregate. It was one of the best fields for that sport this side of Africa. The game once started was easily taken. If they had caught me, I should have been elsewhere to assist in founding an Industrial School for colored youth in Virginia. This is all I have to say on this point.My first thought germain to this occasion, and which must have some interest for us all, very naturally relates to noted place where we now happen to be assembled. Since the great and terrible battle with which its name is associated and which has now passed into history as the birth of many battles, no event has occured here so important in its character and influence and so every way significant, as the event which we have this day met to inaugurate and celebrate. To found an educational institution for any people is worthy of note; but to found a school in which to instruct, improve and develop all that is noblest and best in the souls of a deeply wronged and long neglected people, is especially note worthy. This spot, once the scene of fratricidal war, and the witness of its innumerable and indescribal horrors, is, we hope to be hereafter the scene of brotherly kindness, charity and peace. We are to witness here a display of the best elements of advanced civilization and good citizenship. It is to be the place where the children of a once enslaved people may realize the blessings of liberty and education, and learn how to make for themselves and for all others the best of both worlds.No spot on the soil of Virginia could have been more fitly chosen for planting this school, than this historic battle-field. It has not only the high advantage of forming an instructive contrast and illustrating the compensation possible to mankind, by patiently awaiting the quiet operation of time and events, but suggests the battle to be waged here against ignorance and vice. Thirty years ago, when Federal and Confederate armies met here in deadly conflict over the question of the perpetual enslavement of the negro, who would or could have dreamed, that, in a single generation, such changes would be wrought in the minds of men that a school would have founded here, for the mental, moral and industrial education of the children of this same people whose enslavement was sought even with by sword? Who would have imagined that Virginia would, after the agony of war and in a time so short, become so enlightened and so liberal as to be willing and even pleased to welcome here, upon her "sacred soil," a school of the children of her former slaves? Thirty years ago neither poet, priest nor prophet, could have foretold the vast and wonderful changes which have taken place in the opinions of the American people on this subject since the war. The North has changed, and the South has changed, and we have all changed, and all changed for the better. Otherwise, we should not be here to-day engaged in the business of establishing this institution.The liberality on the part of the people of Virginia, a typical State of the South, which has encouraged and justified the founding of this Industrial School, not only within her borders, but here on the very first great battle-field between the two great sections of our Union, is as much a cause of amazement, satisfaction and joy, as is the readiness with which the good people of the North have responded to the call for pecuniary aid and thus made this enterprize successful. Both circumstances are to-day causes of joy and congratulation. They show that the colored man need not despair; that he has friends in both sections of the Republic. In view of this school and the changes in public sentiment which it indicates, we may well exclaim with Milton, "Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war!"When first invited to speak a few words in celebration of the founding of this industrial school, I was disposed to decline the honor, in favor of some of my younger and better educated brothers. But I am glad that I did not decline the honor. The duty devolved upon me, but which I then hesitated to assume, is, in every respect, an agreeable duty. I am glad that, at my time of life, the opportunity is afforded me to connect my name with a school so meritorious and which I can reasonably hope will be of so great and permanent service to a people so greatly needing it. It is in line with my relations to the negro. I have pleaded the cause of the oppressed against all comers, during more than fifty years of conflict. Were a period put to my career to-day, I could hardly wish for a time or place, or an occasion, better suited for a desired ending, than here and now. The founding of this and similar schools on the soil of Virginia, ---a State formerly the breeder, buyer and seller of slaves; a State so averse in the past to the education of colored people, as to make it a crime to teach a negro to read,---is one of the best fruits of the agitation of a half a century, and a firm foundation of hope for the future.The idea at the bottom of this Institution is rapidly gaining ground every where. Industrial education is, with me, however, no new idea. Nearly forty years ago I was its advocate, and at that time I held it to be the chief want of the free colored people of the North. I was then editor and publisher of the North Star, a newspaper printed in Rochester, New York I saw even then, that the free negro of the North, with every thing great expected of him, but with no means at hand to meet such expectations, could not hope to rise while he was excluded from all profitable employments. He was free by law, but denied the chief advantages of freedom; he was indeed but nominally free; he was not compelled to call any man his master, and no one could call him slave, but he was still in fact a slave, a slave to society, and could only be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. It was easier at that day to get a black boy into a lawyer’s office to study law, or into a doctor’s office to study medicine, than it was to get him into a carpenter’s shop to push a plane, or into a blacksmith’s shop to hammer iron.While I have no sympathy whatever with those who affect to despise labor, even the humblest forms of it, and hold that whatever is needful to be done it is honorable to do, it is, nevertheless, plain that no people, white or black, can, in my country, continue long respected who are confined exclusively to mere menial service for which but little intelligence or skill are required, and for which but the smallest wages are paid or received; especially if the laborer does not make an effort to rise above that condition. While the employment as waiters at hotels and on steamboats and railroads, is perfectly proper and entirely honorable, in the circumstances which now surround the colored people, no one variety of the American people can afford to be known only as waiters and domestic servants. While I say this, I fully believe in the dignity of all needful labor. All honest effort to better human conditions is entitled to respect. I have met at Poland Springs, in the State of Maine, and at the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and at other places, as well as at the late World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago, many young white ladies and gentlemen, who were truly such, students and teachers in high schools and seminaries, gladly serving as waiters during their vacation, and doing so with no sense of being degraded in any degree, or embarassed by such service. This would not have been the case with them, if society, by any law or custom, had decided that this service should be, for such persons, their only calling and vocation in life. Daniel Webster used to say that New Hampshire was a good State to emigrate from. So I say of menial service--- it is a good condition to separate from, just as soon as one can find any other calling, which is more remunerative and more elevating in its tendency. It is not the labor that degrades, but the want of spirit to rise above it.Exclusive service, or exclusive mastery, is not good for the moral or mental health of any class. Pride and insolence will certainly be developed in the one class, and weakness and servility in the other. The colored people, to be respected, must furnish their due proportion to each class. They must not be all masters, or all servants. They must command, as well as be commanded. However much I may regret that it was my lot to have been a slave, I shall never regret that I was once a common laborer; a servant, if you please so to term it. But I felt myself as much a man then, as I feel myself a man now; for I had an ambition above my calling, and I was determined then, as I have been ever since, to use every honorable means in my power to rise to a higher plane of service, just as soon and as fast as that should be possible.My philosophy of work is, that a man is worked upon by that upon which he works. Some work requires more muscle than it does mind. That work which requires the most thought, skill and ingenuity, will receive the highest commendation, and will otherwise do most for the worker. Things which can be done simply with the exertion of muscle, and with little or no exertion of the intellect, will develop the muscle, but dwarf the mind.Long ago it was asked, "How can he get wisdom, who holdeth the plow and whose talk is of oxen?"The school which we are about to establish here, is, if I understand its object, intended to teach the colored youth, who shall avail themselves of its privileges, the use of both mind and body. It is to educate the hand as well as the brain; to teach men to work as well as to think, and to think as well as to work. It is to teach them to join thought to work, and thus to get the very best result of thought and work. There is in my opinion, no useful thing that a man can do, that cannot be better done by an educated man than by an uneducated one.In the old slave times, they colored people were expected to work without thinking. They were commanded to do as they were told. They were to be hands---only hands, not heads. Thought was the prerogative of the master. Obedience was the duty of the slave. I, in my ignorance, once told my old master I thought a certain way of doing some work I had in hand was the best way to do it. He promptly demanded, "Who gave you the right to think?" I might have answered in the language of Robert Burns,

"Were I designed yon lordling’s slave, By Nature’s law designed,Why was an independent thoughtE’er planted in my mind?"

But I had not then read Robert Burns. Burns had high ideas of the dignity of simple manhood. In respect of the dignity of man we may well exclaim with the great Shakspeare concerning him: "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In apprehension how like a God! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!" Yet, if man be benighted, this glowing description of his power and dignity is merely a "glittering generality," an empty tumult of words, without any support of facts.In his natural condition, however, man is only potentially great. As a mere physical being, he does not take high rank, even among the beasts of the field. He is not so fleet as a horse or a hound, or so strong as an ox or a mule. His true dignity is not to be sought in his arm, or in his legs, but in his head. Here is the seat and source of all that is of especially great or practical importance in him. There is fire in the flint and steel, but it is friction that causes it to flash, flame and burn, and give light where all else may be darkness. There is music in the violin, but the touch of the master is needed to fill the air and the soul with the concord of sweet sounds. There is power in the human mind, but education is needed for its development. As man is the highest being on earth, it follows that the vocation of teacher is among the highest known to him. To properly teach it to enduce man’s potential and latent greatness, to discover and develop the noblest, highest and best that is in him. In view of this fact, no man whose business it is to teach should ever allow himself to feel that his mission is mean, inferior, or circumscribed. In my estimation, neither politics nor religion present to us a calling higher than this primary business of unfolding and strengthening the powers of the human soul. It is a permanent vocation. Some know the value of education, by having it. I know its value by not having it. It is a want that begins with the beginning of human existence, and continues through all the journey of life. Of all the creatures that live and move and have their being on this green earth, man, at his birth, is the most helpless and the most in need of instruction. He does not know even how to seek his food. His little life is menaced on every hand. The very elements conspire against him. The cattle upon a thousand hills; the wolves and bears in the forest, all come into the world better equipped for life than does man. From first to last, his existence depends upon instruction.Yet this little helpless weakling, whose life can be put out as we put out the flame of a candle, with a breath, is the lord of creation. Though in his beginning, he is only potentially this lord, with education he is the commander of armies; the builder of cities; the tamer of wild beasts; the navigator of unknown seas; the discoverer of unknown islands, capes and continents, and the founder of great empires, and capable of limitless civilization.But if man is without education, although with all his latent possibilities attaching to him, he is, but a pitiable object; a giant in body, but a pigmy in intellect, and, at best, but half a man. Without education, he lives within the narrow, dark and grimy walls of ignorance. He is a poor prisoner without hope. The little light that he gets comes to him as through dark corridors and grated windows. The sights and sounds which reach him, so significant and full of meaning to the well-trained mind, are to him of dim and shadowy and uncertain importance. He sees, but does not perceive. He hears, but does not understand. The silent and majestic heavens, fretted with stars, so inspiring and uplifting, so sublime and glorious to the souls of other men, bear no message to him. They suggest to him no idea of the wonderful world in which he lives, or of the harmony of this great universe, and hence impart to him no happiness.Education, on the other hand, means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free. To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness, and to defeat the very end of their being. They can neither honor themselves nor their Creator. Than this, no greater wrong can be inflicted; and, on the other hand, no greater benefit can be bestowed upon a long benighted people than giving to them, as we are here this day endeavoring to do, the means of useful education. It is aimed to make them both better and more useful in life and to furnish them with increased means of livelihood; to make of them more skilled workmen, more useful mechanics, and better workers in wood, leather, tin and iron.It is sometimes said that we have done enough for the negro; that we have given him his liberty and we should now let him do for himself. This sounds well, but that is all. I do not undervalue freedom from chattel slavery. It was a great and glorious triumph of justice and humanity. It was the first of long years of labor, agitation and sacrifice. But let us look at this emancipation and see where it left the negro, and we shall see how far it falls short of the plainest demands of justice and of what we owe the negro.To find an adequate measure of compensation for any wrong, we must first ascertain the nature and extent of the wrong itself. The mere act of enslaving the negro was not the only wrong done him, nor were the labors and stripes imposed upon him, though heavy and grievous to bear, the sum of his wrongs. They were, indeed, terrible enough; but deeper down and more terrible still were the mental and moral wrongs which enter into his claim for a slight measure of compensation. For two hundred and forty years the light of letters was denied him, and the gates of knowledge were closed against him.He was driven from time to eternity in the darkest ignorance. He was herded with the beasts of the field, was without marriage, without family, without schools and without any moral training, other than that which came by the slave driver’s lash. People who live now and talk of doing too much for the negro, think nothing of these things, and those who know them, seem to desire to forget them especially when they are made the basis of a claim for a larger measure of justice to the negro. They forget that for these terrible wrongs there is no redress and no adequate compensation. The enslaved and battered millions have come, suffered, died and gone with all their moral and physical wounds into eternity. To them no recompense can be made. If the American people could put a school-house in every valley of the south a church on every hill-top; supply with a teacher and preacher each respectively, and welcome the descendents of the former slaves to all the moral and intellectual benefits of the one and the other, without money and without price, such a sacrifice would not compensate their children for the terrible wrong done to their fathers and mothers by their enslavement and enforced degradation.I have another complaint. It is said that the colored people of the South have made but little progress since their emancipation. This complaint is not only groundless, but adds insult to injury. Under the whole heavens there never was a people liberated from bondage under conditions less favorable to the beginning of a new and free mode of life, than were the freedmen of the South. Criminals, guilty of heinous crimes against the State and society, are let go free on more generous conditions than were our slaves. The despotic government of Russia was more liberal and humane to its emancipated slaves than our Republic was to ours. Each head of a family of slaves in Russia was given three acres of land and necessary farming implements with which to begin life, but our slaves were turned loose without any thing---naked to the elements.As one of the number of enslaved, I am none the less disposed to observe and note with pleasure and gratitude every effort of our white friends and brothers to remedy the evils wrought by the long years of slavery and its concomitants. And in such wise I rejoice in the effort made here to-day.I have a word now upon another subject, and what I have to say may be more useful than palatable. That subject is the talk now so generally prevailing about races and race lines. I have no hesitation in telling you that I think the colored people and their friends make a great mistake in saying so much of race and color. I know no such basis for the claims of justice. I know no such motive for efforts at self-improvement. In this race-way they put the emphasis in the wrong place. I do now and always have attached more importance to manhood than to mere kinship or identity with any variety of the human family. RACE, in the popular sense, is narrow; humanity is broad. The one is special; the other is universal. The one is transient; the other permanent. In the essential dignity of man as man, I find all necessary incentives and aspirations to a useful and noble life. Man is broad enough and high enough as a platform for you and me and all of us. The colored people of this country should advance to the high position of the Constitution of the country. The Constitution makes no distinction on account of race or color, and they should make none.We hear, since emancipation, much said by our modern colored leaders in commendation of race pride, race love, race effort, race superiority, race men, and the like. One man is praised for being a race man and another is condemned for not being a race man. In all this talk of race, the motive may be good, but the method is bad. It is an effort to cast out Satan by Beelzebub. The evils which are now crushing the negro to earth have their root and sap, their force and mainspring, in this narrow spirit of race and color, and the negro has no more right to excuse and foster it than have men of any other race. I recognize and adopt no narrow basis for my thoughts, feelings, or modes of action. I would place myself, and I would place you, my young friends, upon grounds vastly higher and broader than any founded upon race or color. Neither law, learning, nor religion, is addressed to any man’s color or race. Science, education, the Word of God, and all the virtues known among men, are recommended to us, not as races, but as men. We are not recommended to love or hate any particular variety of the human family more than any other. Not as Ethiopeans; not as Caucasians; not as Mongolians; not as Afro-Americans, or Anglo-Americans, are we addressed, but as men. God and nature speak to our manhood, and to our manhood alone. Here all ideas of duty and moral obligation are predicated. We are accountable only as men. In the language of Scripture, we are called upon to "quit ourselves like men." To those who are everlastingly prating about race men, I have to say: Gentlemen, you reflect upon your best friends. It was not the race or the color of the negro that won for him the battle of liberty. That great battle was won, not because the victim of slavery was a negro, mulatto, or an Afro-American, but because the victim of slavery was a man and a brother to all other men, a child of God, and could claim with all mankind a common Father, and therefore should be recognized as an accountable being, a subject of government, and entitled to justice, liberty and equality before the law, and every where else. Man saw that he had a right to liberty, to education, and to an equal chance with all other men in the common race of life and in the pursuit of happiness.You know that, while slavery lasted, we could seldom get ourselves recognized in any form of law or language, as men. Our old masters were remarkably shy of recognizing our manhood, even in words written or spoken. They called a man, with a head as white as mine, a boy. The old advertisements were carefully worded: "Run away, my boy Tom, Jim or Harry," never, "my man."Hence, at the risk of being deficient in the quality of love and loyalty to race and color, I confess that in my advocacy of the colored man’s cause, whether in the name of education or freedom, I have had more to say of manhood and of what is comprehended in manhood and in womanhood, than of the mere accident of race and color; and, if this is disloyalty to race and color, I am guilty. I insist upon it that the lesson which colored people, not less than white people, ought now to learn, is, that there is no moral or intellectual quality in the color of a man’s cuticle; that color, in itself, is neither good nor bad; that to be black or white is neither a proper source of pride or of shame. I go further, and declare that no man’s devotion to the cause of justice, liberty, and humanity, is to be weighed, measured and determined by his color or race. We should never forget that the ablest and most eloquent voices ever raised in behalf of the black man’s cause, were the voices of white men. Not for the race; not for color, but for man and manhood alone, they labored, fought and died. Neither Phillips, nor Sumner, nor Garrison, nor John Brown, nor Gerrit Smith was a black man. They were white men, and yet no black men were ever truer to the black man’s cause than were these and other men like them. They saw in the slave, manhood, brotherhood, and womanhood outraged, neglected and degraded, and their own noble manhood, not their racehood, revolted at the offence. They placed the emphasis where it belonged; not on the mint, anise and cummin or race and color, but upon manhood the weightier matters of the law.Thus compassed about by so great a cloud of witnesses, I can easily afford to be reproached and denounced for standing, in defense of this principle, against all comers. My position is, that it is better to regard ourselves as a part of the whole than as the whole of a part. It is better to be a member of the great human family, than a member of particular variety of the human family. In regard to men as in regard to things, the whole is more than a part. Away then with the nonsense that a man must be black to be true to the rights of black men. I put my foot upon the effort to draw lines between the white and the black, or between blacks and so-called Afro-Americans, or to draw race lines any where in the domain of liberty. Whoever is for equal rights, for equal education, for equal opportunities for all men, of whatever race or color,--- I hail him as a "countryman, clansman, kinsman and brother beloved."I must not further occupy your time, except to answer briefly the inquiry, "What of the night?" You young people have a right to ask me what the future has in store for you and the people with whom you are classed. I have been a watchman on your walls more than fifty years, so long that you think I ought to know what the future will bring to pass and to discern for you the signs of the times. You want to know whether the hour is one of hope or despair. I have no time to answer this solemn inquiry at length or as it deserves, and will content myself with giving you the assurance of my belief. I think the situation is serious, but it is not hopeless. On the contrary, there are many encouraging signs in the moral skies. I have seen many dark hours and yet have never despaired of the colored man’s future. There is no time in our history that I would prefer to the present. Go back to the annexation of Texas, the Fugitive Slave Law times, and the Border War in Kansas. The existence of this Industrial School of Manassas is a triumphant rebuke to the cry of despair now heard in some quarters. Nor does it stand alone. It is a type of such institutions in nearly all of the Southern States. Schools and colleges for colored youth are multiplying all over the land. Hampton, Tuskeegee, Cappahoosic, are brilliant examples. The light of education is shedding its beams more brightly and more effectively upon the colored people in the South, than it ever did in the cause of any other emancipated people in the world. These efforts cannot fail in the end to bear fruit. But it is said that we are now being greatly persecuted. I know it. I admit it. I deplore it. I denounce it. Attempts are being made to set aside the amendments of the Constitution; to wrest from us the elective franchise; to exclude us from respectable railroad cars; to draw against us the color line in religious organizations; to exclude us from hotels and to make us a proscribe class. I know it all, and yet I see in it all a convincing evidence of our progress and the promise of a brighter future. The resistence that we now meet is the proof of our progress. We are not the only people who have been persecuted. The resistance is not to the colored man as a slave, a servant or a menial, or as a person. It is aimed at the negro as a gentleman, as a successful man and a scholar. The negro in ignorance and in rags meets no resistance. He is rather liked than otherwise. He is thought to be in his place. It is only when he acquires education, property, popularity and influence; only when he attempts to rise above his ancient level, where he was numbered with the beasts of the field, and aspires to be a man and a man among men, that he invites repression. Even in the laws of the South excluding him from railroad cars and other places, care is taken to allow him to ride as a servant, a valet or a porter. He may make a bed, but must not sleep in it. He may handle bread, but must not eat it. It is not the negro, but the quality of the negro that disturbs popular prejudice. It is his character, not his personality, which makes him an offense or otherwise. In one quality he is smiled upon as a very serviceable animal; in the other he is scorned as an upstart entirely out of his place, and is made to take a back seat. I am not much disturbed by this, for the same resistance in kind, though not in degree, has to be met by white men and white women who rise from lowly conditions. The successful and opulent esteem them as upstarts. A lady as elegant and splendid as Mrs. Potter Palmer, of Chicago, had to submit to the test. She was compelled to hear herself talked about as a "shoddy" upstart; the "wife of a tavern-keeper," and the like, during the Columbian Exposition. But the upstart of to-day is the elite of to-morrow.A ship at anchor, with halliards broken, sails mildewed, hull empty, her bottom covered with sea-weed and barnacles, meets no resistance. She lies perfectly still; but when she spreads her canvas to the breeze, turns her prow to the open sea, and sets out on her voyage, the higher shall be her speed, the greater shall be her resistance. So it is with the colored man. He meets with resistance now, because he is now, more than ever, fitting himself for a higher life. He is shedding the old rags of slavery and putting on the apparel of freedom.In conclusion, my dear young friends, be not discouraged. Accept the inspiration of hope. Imitate the example of the brave mariner, who, amid clouds and darkness, amid hail, rain and storm bolts, battles his way against all that the sea opposes to his progress. You will then reach the goal of your noble ambition in safety.

Poet’s Corner- Claude McKay-If We Must Die-In Honor Of The 94^thAnniversary Of The Communist International- Take Three

…they had heard that a group of White Guards, a first detachment on horse, maybe from the dreaded mercenary Czech Legion that were running amok from Siberia to the Urals, paid for by who knows who, some said the English some said the French, or worst maybe the dreaded Cossacks, who needed no outside pay but only their Ataman’s word to bend contemptible peasant heads to size, and who took no prisoners, none, were heading their way, heading right for their line of defense in the city ready to take back Kazan for the asking, so those Whites thought. Kazan fallen then the road to Moscow lay wide open and perhaps the end of the Soviet experiment in that dragged on second year of hellish civil war. But Commissar Vladimir ( assigned that title because he, a little more literate, a little cooler under pressure, than the vast bulk of lumpish peasants, mostly from Monsieur Orlov’s land around Omsk, who had signed up to fight and to die for the land, their land from what they had heard, was listened to by that mass unlike the city boy reds) and his band of comrade brothers, five in all, (and one sixteen year old sister, one stray Red Emma, they called her who learned of revolution and sex, young love smitten sex even in war-torn Kazan with young Zanoff, in that exact order while in their company and proved as fierce a fighter both ways, according to that same Zanoff, as any man), the last remnant from the old Orlov estate who survived the bloody endless Czar war swore, swore a blood oath on their tattered red flag, the previous day that they would retreat no further, that here was their stand, their last stand if necessary, but no more moves away from Moscow.

[Red Emma, real name Nana Kamov, deserves a better fate that to written off as some play thing for some loutish peasant boy, Grisha Zanoff by full name, no matter how Red Army brave he was just that moment and no matter how peasant handsome he was, and he was, to Nana’s eyes. Nana had come off the land as a child, as fate would have it Orlov’s land, when after the last revolution, the one in 1905, the government encouraged capitalist exploitation of the land in order to break down the backward-looking peasant communes. Her parents had abandoned the land had travelled to live in Kazan and her father had set up shop as a locksmith, a good one. Nana had gone school and had been an outstanding student if somewhat socially backward (she had not been like the other girls boy-crazy) and desperately wanted to become an engineer although the family resources precluded such a fate.

One day in the summer of 1917 at the height of the revolutionary fervor she ran across a Bolshevik agitator in Kazan (later killed in Kiev fighting off some White Guards in that location) who told her, young impressionable her, aged fourteen, no more, that if the Soviets survived she would be able to pursue her engineering career, hell, the Bolsheviks would encourage it. From that time she had been a single-minded Red Guard soldier performing many dangerous tasks until the Whites threatened Kazan and she was trapped in the city and had joined Vladimir’s remnants as a result. And there she spied Grisha among his soldiers, loutish, foolish Grisha, although handsome she admitted. Perhaps it was the time of her time, perhaps she still had a little foolish schoolgirl notion to be with a man just in case things didn’t work out and she was killed, or worse, executed but one cold night she snuggled up to the sleeping Grisha and that was that. She was teaching him to read better and to think about things just in case they weren’t killed, or worse executed. Practical young woman, very practical. And so young Nana enters the red pantheon, and maybe she will drag Grisha along too.]

It had not always been that way with them, not even with Vladimir, not by a long shot. They had all farmed, like their fathers going back eons before them, the same fruitless task (for them) land for Orlov, the richest landowner in Omsk, and never lifted their heads when the Social Revolutionaries had come before the war and during that last revolution, the one back in 1905, with glad tidings (and before them other city radicals, narodniks or something like that, had spoken to their fathers and grandfathers). They just shoveled the dirt, kept shoveling, and kept their heads down.

Then the war came, the bloody world war as it turned out, and the Czar’s police (Orlov’s really but in the name of the Czar so the same thing) came and “drafted” them into some vast ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-armed peasant force which proved no match for the methodical Germans as they were slaughtered by the millions in and around those foul trenches. And still they kept their heads bent, Vladimir and his four Orlov surviving farm brothers the only healthy alive ones left from the twenty-two that had started out from Omsk in the summer of 1915. Kept them bent until the February revolution stirred things up although they held to the front since no one told them not to leave and in the fall of 1917 they had just followed their fellows out of the trenches and went home. Not the first ones out, nor the last but just out. Went home to farm Orlov’s land again they figured with bent heads again. Even when the Bolsheviks took power in November and decreed the land of Orlov’s theirs they kept their heads bent. It was not until Orlov, his agents, and his White Guard friends came back and took the land, their now precious land, theirs, that they roared back. And they had joined one of Trotsky’s red brigades passing through on a recruiting drive. They had moved here and there as the lines of battle shifted but mainly back, mainly retreats or break-ups since then and hence the blood oath, and no more retreats. The peasant slows in them had been busted, busted good.

Just then a messenger came to their line, a messenger from the river in front of Kazan, from the wind swept Volga. The message said that Trotsky himself , Trotsky of thephantom armored train that put fear in the hearts of whites and reds alike, had decided to fight and die before Kazan if necessary to save the revolution, to save their precious land. Vladimir and his comrades, including Red Emma, Red Emma who if the truth be told despite her tender years of sweet sixteen was the best soldier of the lot, and should have been the commissar except those lumpish peasants would not have listened to her, reaffirmed their blood oath. If they must die they would die in defense of Kazan, and maybe just maybe somebody would hear of their story, the story of five peasant boys and a pretty red-hearted city girl as brave as they, and lift their heads and roar back too….

If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Immigration “Reform”: Repression and Exploitation-Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!

Workers Vanguard No. 1018	22 February 2013

Immigration “Reform”: Repression and Exploitation-Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!

Barack Obama’s re-election last November was hailed by liberal commentators as a confirmation of the “historic” and “consequential” nature of his presidency. For many others, it seemed to signal a rejection of the reactionary brew of bigotries and threats of savage austerity that were the bedrock of Mitt Romney’s candidacy. The president had wooed Latino voters with promises of immigration “reform” while his opponent urged “self-deportation.” A key consideration for Obama is that the corporate bosses of important sectors of industry, e.g., agribusiness, manufacturing and information technology, have suffered from a drought of both low-wage manual and highly skilled immigrant labor that has adversely impacted their profits. On January 21, Obama kicked off his second term by renewing the push to overhaul immigration policy. “Our journey is not complete,” he intoned, “until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country.”

The White House blazed the trail for that “journey” out of the U.S. With 410,000 deportations in 2012, the administration set a new record for the fourth consecutive year in its escalating war against “illegal” immigration. Over 1,000 people are deported every day even as attempted border crossings have dropped by 53 percent since 2008, a sign of the greatly diminished prospects for employment in the U.S. Officials have widened the anti-immigrant dragnet by trolling state DMV records for information on foreign-born applicants and dispatching agents to traffic safety checkpoints to detain anyone without a driver’s license. These “great unwashed” are apparently of little weight in the administration’s calculations, as against the talented engineers.

In the State of the Union address on February 12, Obama touted his administration’s “putting more boots on the southern border than at any time in our history.” Washington also poured more money into policing immigration last year than all other federal law enforcement projects combined. A formidable machinery is now in place on the border: over 21,000 agents along with thousands of thermal-imaging sensors, a fleet of aerial drones and nearly 700 miles of fence. Between 2007 and 2011, the rate of reported deaths of those attempting to cross vastly increased—over 350 such deaths were acknowledged each year.

Following the 2012 elections, more savvy Republican politicians noted that their party had failed to attract the votes of certain sectors of the U.S. population—to name a few, black people, women, Latinos, Asian Americans and youth—and timidly ventured the opinion that it needed to expand its appeal. As the Republican Party has deep roots in the South and among those given to religious fanaticism, not much room is available for a wiggle to the left, rendering difficult the search for support from those who are not older white male bigots. Nevertheless, certain Republicans, notably John McCain and Marco Rubio, last month joined hands with a passel of Democrats to put forward an immigration reform proposal in the Senate.

In theory, Obama should have little problem coming to an agreement with this bipartisan effort. The day after the announcement of their proposal, a White House memo laid out its own plan for immigration reform: further securing the border and intensifying the crackdown on undocumented workers under the guise of penalizing employers on the one hand and offering a remote possibility of citizenship and streamlining legal immigration on the other. These points are almost identical to those raised by the Senators save the not insignificant detail that for them the borders must be closed, not merely “defended.” This difference opens up the possibility of unending hours of debate in Congress as it awaits the placement of the last stone in the great wall, deemed necessary by the Tea Party types, on the southern border of Fortress America.

If a compromise immigration bill is achieved, it will undoubtedly contain the main elements of the “pathway to citizenship” put forth by Obama. In this scheme, undocumented immigrants would be required to register with the government, submit biometric data, pass criminal background and national security checks and pay fees and penalties before becoming eligible for a provisional legal status. If cleared, they then would have to wait until the existing legal immigration backlogs are cleared before joining the line for lawful permanent residency (a “green card”), and ultimately U.S. citizenship. The line proposed might as well stretch to infinity. Some Mexicans who have applied for legal residency have been waiting decades for their requests to be granted. Now some Republicans are up in arms because Obama proposes to reduce the wait to a mere eight years!

When announcing his latest scheme, the president said it was time to end a situation where eleven million undocumented immigrants “live their lives in the shadows.” Indeed, he wants them out of the shadows and under the ever-watchful gaze of the capitalist state, all the better to regulate the flow of low-wage labor. Undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, toil at some of the most backbreaking and dangerous jobs in this country. It is a testament to their militancy and class consciousness that a sizable number of these workers are often involved in union organizing battles, which in California signed up 100,000 new workers last year, bucking the continued nationwide slide in union membership. The labor movement must demand that all immigrants have immediate and full citizenship rights and must fight against every instance of discrimination, calling for no deportations.

Field Hands, Scientists and Students

Not a few immigrants fled their homelands to escape grinding poverty and brutal repression resulting from U.S. imperialist plunder. At the same time, the capitalist rulers will always attempt to tap new sources of cheaper labor, particularly immigrants from less-developed countries. The Wall Street Journal (1 February) recently pumped for a guest worker program that “would allow low-skilled immigrants to legally fill temporary labor demands, and it is absolutely necessary if we are to avoid a future flood of illegal immigrants.” The central focus of the current proposals is on creating a large pool of completely vulnerable immigrants who will be policed utilizing every bit of biometric and other data available and made to pay large sums of money for the privilege of working for a pittance with no job protection, no assured immigration status and no right to any kind of welfare. This offering is bread and water rationing—in fact, a kind of indentured servitude.

As a result, some older undocumented immigrants look with fondness on the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who signed legislation that granted permanent residency to some three million undocumented immigrants, raising some real possibility of their becoming citizens. Since then, the decay of American capitalist society has advanced considerably. Such largesse will not be granted at a time when there are legions of the unemployed and an all-sided anti-labor offensive is driving down wages, even for unionized workers, to near Wal-Mart levels.

In recent weeks, leaders of high-tech industries have flooded Washington to push for comprehensive legislation, propelled by a belief that they will only obtain the substantial increase in temporary visas for skilled labor that they require if Congress passes such a bill. Their quest is primarily a comment on the deterioration of American society and its public education system. Ever fewer high school graduates possess the academic skills, let alone monetary resources, necessary for the intensive university training that produces scientists, engineers and mathematicians. Many U.S. manufacturers have concerns similar to their counterparts’ at Google and Intel. With the unions here on their knees and costs elsewhere rising, Caterpillar and other industrial giants are relocating plants from outside the country to the “low-wage” U.S., only to have their research and development staff from China and India waiting years for a green card.

American universities, which still provide some of the best education available in these fields, have been increasingly populated with foreign graduate students, especially from China. However, it has become difficult for these students to obtain a visa to stay in the country after graduation. Meanwhile, the Stalinist bureaucracy in Beijing is putting up money to make it more attractive for those with advanced degrees to return to the Chinese deformed workers state. A more farsighted section of the U.S. bourgeoisie is now expressing concern that it might some day lose its “edge on innovation.”

Last year, immigrant college students, many of them undocumented, marched, staged sit-ins and even outed themselves to the authorities to draw attention to immigration reform, in particular to the Dream Act, which stalled in Congress in 2010 despite Obama’s support for the measure. This plan, also favored by the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), would allow immigrant youth to apply for permanent residency if they attend college—an improbable option for the vast majority—or serve in the armed forces for two years. Thus, most of these youth are left with the grotesque prospect of joining the imperialist military that has slaughtered millions in its invasions of foreign lands as other branches of the same capitalist state kill, imprison and deport those who may be their relatives. We say: No to the Dream Act!

The ISO seeks to tinker with the terms of anti-immigrant repression, calling for more “bold” protests “to force a change in the pro-business priorities for immigration legislation—and to win a proposal that’s worthy of the term ‘reform’” (socialistworker.org, 31 January). These shameless reformists offer nothing other than to dress up U.S. capitalism, as if a fair immigration policy shorn of “pro-business priorities” is possible under an inherently unjust system rooted in the exploitation of the many by the few. We do not advise the bourgeoisie on its priorities. Our aim is to instill in the multiracial working class the importance of defending immigrants and fighting every manifestation of oppression as part of preparing it for the necessary revolutionary battle to end capitalist rule.

For a Class-Struggle Perspective!

Marching in lockstep with the government’s campaign against undocumented workers are the union tops. These labor traitors not only are now actively collaborating with the Chamber of Commerce in hammering out the details of a guest worker program but also have embraced e-Verify, a government database of everyone legally permitted to work in the U.S. AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka baldly states that e-Verify is “part of the system we’ve proposed.”

At hundreds of workplaces across the country, mass firings of immigrant workers have followed audits of Social Security numbers using the e-Verify database (“desktop raids”). This cornerstone of Obama’s immigration policy, dishonestly billed as “employer enforcement,” has time and again helped employers get rid of labor activists and head off unionization drives. Immigrant families are ravaged, as the breadwinners are thrown out of their jobs with few prospects for new employment, not to mention a much higher risk of deportation.

The venal union bureaucrats are thus lining up against the basic class interests of the proletariat. For these staunch supporters of the political parties of the class enemy, above all the Democrats, these latest betrayals are simply a continuation of a general policy of appeasement of the capitalist rulers that has resulted in the withering of union power. Battered by a wave of attacks on public workers, union membership fell to 11.3 percent of the workforce last year, the lowest rate since 1916.

Revitalizing the labor movement will require hard class struggle, including on behalf of all those ground down by capitalism. Immigrant workers, often from places with a rich history of social and class struggle, will have a vital role to play. It is through uniting black, white and immigrant workers in struggle against their common class enemy that the working class can surmount the racial and ethnic divisions long sown by the exploiters to divide and weaken labor. But when it comes to an appetite for struggle for the unity and integrity of the working class against chauvinism and racism, the union bureaucrats are decidedly anorexic.

The anti-immigrant campaign has served to deflect attention from the fact that the “Great Recession,” which has brought widespread job loss and misery, is the direct product of the capitalist profit system. A program for the mobilization of working-class unity against capitalist exploitation and oppression requires that the current labor misleaders be replaced by a new generation of class-struggle militants. It will take this kind of leadership to sever labor’s ties to the Democratic Party and promote the building of a revolutionary workers party committed to overturning the imperialist order through socialist revolution. This is the only road to ending the exploitation of man by man, as well as all forms of oppression. 

In Honor Of The 94^th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Four-For Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht

The cops, the hated Federals, and their allies the Freikorps, were hunting down every Red, hell every leftist or trade union militant that would not bow his head, they could find in all of stinking Bavaria after they crushed the Commune. It was awful, savage, something out of what Otto Schmidt thought it must have been like when Thiers and his hatchet men pulled the hammer down on the Paris Commune. He had read plenty, plenty as a schoolboy, as a proud member of the Socialist Youth, about those heroic events back in 1871 so he knew that if they, they the working people did not win, then the blood would flow in the streets. And it had after some bloody street fighting. Worse they had grabbed their leader, Eugene Levine, and who knows what had happened to him. Hell, Otto had just barely gotten out of Munich himself and now hiding in a small apartment of a sympathizer in the outer suburbs of Munich he had a chance to think about the events of the past several months since the damn Kaiser had abdicated, the war had come to a crashing halt, and working people like him, honest socialists trying to figure out a way to change this rotten old world, had unbowed their heads for once and taken some action.

Otto knew, although he was not theoretician, not even really a leader, not a big leader anyway, although he was respected among the youth for his militancy and his willingness to stick his neck out, that they, the revolutionaries, the real revolutionaries had made mistakes, made bad mistakes about what to do, and with whom. Sure they were young, mostly, hot-headed, mad and hell had never before, unlike the Russians they were trying to emulate, ever had a part in a revolution before. Their leaders, their Social-Democratic leaders mostly, had told them organize, organize, organize and vote, vote, vote, and when they had done enough of both then they would just ease into the socialist republic of their dreams, his dreams.

Then when the chance actually came those leaders, those august bootblack leaders, just filled the governmental seats and left everybody else standing high and dry. Worse those bastards had done the bosses’work for them; they had suppressed everything, every armed attempt to get some worker justice. Those damn leaders were just as bad as Thiers and his French companions in suppressing the Commune. Otto burned with an inner rage when he thought about what they, Ebert, that fat pig, and Noske, that goddam hangman, had done, done with glee from what he had heard, to Rosa, Rosa Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, and courageous Karl Liebknecht, bright shining Karl who had in the flames of war stood up and called down every kind of damnation on the German war aims (and the other side too but he was aimed at his own fellow Germans first). And had paid the price. Poor Levine, poor beautiful Levine with the soul of a poet probably was slated for that same fate, a martyr’s fate.

Yes, Otto could see where the big mistakes lie, trusting those parlor socialists gotten fat and lazy off of hard-earned workingmen’ dues once they took over the bourgeois government. Somebody, he forgot who it was and some of the details but a comrade who had been to Russia or had talked to a Russian Bolshevik while he was in Germany, one night in Munich when it looked like they would win, had said when the revolution was at its hottest then the struggle against the reform socialists (in Russia the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries and here the Social-Democrats) has to most merciless. They had forgotten that, forgotten that to their regret. He had heard that same night that in Moscow earlier in the spring the Bolsheviks and their international allies had formed a new International, a Communist International to fight against the Social –Democrats tooth and nail for the allegiance of the working masses. He had had not had time to investigate that more since all hell had broken out a week or so after that, to sign up or anything but he knew this, knew it deep in his young bones, that he wished the effort well. He also wished that they, and he, could find some way, some righteous way to avenge those deaths of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. And now probably Levine too.
*******

V. I. Lenin

The Third International and
Its Place in History

---

Written: 15 April, 1919
First Published: Published in May 1919; Published according to the manuscript.
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 305-313
Translated: George Hanna
Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters & Robert Cymbala
Copyleft: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002; Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

---

The imperialists of the Entente countries are blockading Russia in an effort to cut off the Soviet Republic, as a seat of infection, from the capitalist world. These people, who boast about their “democratic” institutions, are so blinded by their hatred of the Soviet Republic that they do not see how ridiculous they are making themselves. Just think of it, the advanced, most civilised and “democratic” countries, armed to the teeth and enjoying undivided military sway over the whole world, are mortally afraid of the ideological infection coming from a ruined, starving, backward, and even, they assert, semi-savage country!

This contradiction alone is opening the eyes of the working masses in all countries and helping to expose the hypocrisy of the imperialists Clemanceau, Lloyd George, Wilson and their governments.
We are being helped, however, not only by the capitalists’ blind hatred of the Soviets, but also by their bickering among themselves, which induces them to put spokes in each other’s wheels. They have entered into a veritable conspiracy of silence, for they are desperately afraid of the spread of true information about the Soviet Republic in general, and of its official documents in particular. Yet, Le Temps, the principal organ of the French bourgeoisie, has published a report on the foundation in Moscow of the Third, Communist International.

For this we express our most respectful thanks to the principal organ of the French bourgeoisie, to this leader of French chauvinism and imperialism. We are prepared to send an illuminated address to Le Temps in token of our appreciation of the effective and able assistance it is giving us.
The manner in which Le Temps compiled its report on the basis of our wireless messages clearly and fully reveals the motive that prompted this organ of the money-bags. It wanted to have a dig at Wilson, as if to say, “Look at the people with whom you negotiate!” The wiseacres who write to the order of the money-bags do not see that their attempt to frighten Wilson with the Bolshevik bogey is becoming, in the eyes of the working people, an advertisement for the Bolsheviks. Once more, our most respectful thanks to the organ of the French millionaires!

The Third International has been founded in a world situation that does not allow prohibitions, petty and miserable devices of the Entente imperialists or of capitalist lackeys like the Scheidemanns in Germany and the Renners in Austria to prevent news of this International and sympathy for it spreading among the working class of the world. This situation has been brought about by the growth of the proletarian revolution, which is manifestly developing everywhere by leaps and bounds. It has been brought about by the Soviet movement among the working people, which has already achieved such strength as to become really international.

The First International (1864-72) laid the foundation of an international organisation of the workers for the preparation of their revolutionary attack on capital. The Second International (1889-1914) was an international organisation of the proletarian movement whose growth proceeded in breadth, at the cost of a temporary drop in the revolutionary level, a temporary strengthening of opportunism, which in the end led to the disgraceful collapse of this International.

The Third International actually emerged in 1918, when the long years of struggle against opportunism and social-chauvinism, especially during the war, led to the formation of Communist Parties in a number of countries. Officially, the Third International was founded at its First Congress, in March 1919, in Moscow. And the most characteristic feature of this International, its mission of fulfilling, of implementing the precepts of Marxism, and of achieving the age-old ideals of socialism and the working-class movement—this most characteristic feature of the Third International has manifested itself immediately in the fact that the new, third, “International Working Men’s Association” has already begun to develop, to a certain extent, into a union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The First International laid the foundation of the proletarian, international struggle for socialism.
The Second International marked a period in which the soil was prepared for the broad, mass spread of the movement in a number of countries.

The Third International has gathered the fruits of the work of the Second International, discarded its opportunist, social-chauvinist, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois dross, and has begun to implement the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The international alliance of the parties which are leading the most revolutionary movement in the world, the movement of the proletariat for the overthrow of the yoke of capital, now rests on an unprecedentedly firm base, in the shape of several Soviet republics, which are implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat and are the embodiment of victory over capitalism on an international scale.

The epoch-making significance of the Third, Communist International lies in its having begun to give effect to Marx’s cardinal slogan, the slogan which sums up the centuries-old development of socialism and the working-class movement, the slogan which is expressed in the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

This prevision and this theory—the prevision and theory of a genius—are becoming a reality.
The Latin words have now been translated into the languages of all the peoples of contemporary Europe—more, into all the languages of the world.

A new era in world history has begun.

Mankind is throwing off the last form of slavery: capitalist, or wage, slavery.

By emancipating himself from slavery, man is for the first time advancing to real freedom.
How is it that one of the most backward countries of Europe was the first country to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, and to organise a Soviet republic? We shall hardly be wrong if we say that it is this contradiction between the backwardness of Russia and the “leap” she has made over bourgeois democracy to the highest form of democracy, to Soviet, or proletarian, democracy—it is this contradiction that has been one of the reasons (apart from the dead weight of opportunist habits and philistine prejudices that burdened the majority of the socialist leaders) why people in the West have had particular difficulty or have been slow in understanding the role of the Soviets.

The working people all over the world have instinctively grasped the significance of the Soviets as an instrument in the proletarian struggle and as a form of the proletarian state. But the “leaders”, corrupted by opportunism, still continue to worship bourgeois democracy, which they call “democracy” in general.

Is it surprising that the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat has brought out primarily the “contradiction” between the backwardness of Russia and her “leap” over bourgeois democracy? It would have been surprising had history granted us the establishment of a new form of democracy without a number of contradictions.

If any Marxist, or any person, indeed, who has a general knowledge of modern science, were asked whether it is likely that the transition of the different capitalist countries to the dictatorship of the proletariat will take place in an identical or harmoniously proportionate way, his answer would undoubtedly be in the negative. There never has been and never could be even, harmonious, or proportionate development in the capitalist world. Each country has developed more strongly first one, then another aspect or feature or group of features of capitalism and of the working-class movement. The process of development has been uneven.

When France was carrying out her great bourgeois revolution and rousing the whole European continent to a historically new life, Britain proved to be at the head of the counter-revolutionary coalition, although at the same time she was much more developed capitalistically than France. The British working-class movement of that period, however, brilliantly anticipated much that was contained in the future Marxism.

When Britain gave the world Chartism, the first broad, truly mass and politically organised proletarian revolutionary movement, bourgeois revolutions, most of them weak, were taking place on the European continent, and the first great civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie had broken out in France. The bourgeoisie defeated the various national contingents of the proletariat one by one, in different ways in different countries.

Britain was the model of a country in which, as Engels put it, the bourgeoisie had produced, alongside a bourgeois aristocracy, a very bourgeois upper stratum of the proletariat.^[1] For several decades this advanced capitalist country lagged behind in the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. France seemed to have exhausted the strength of the proletariat in two heroic working-class revolts of 1848 and 1871 against the bourgeoisie that made very considerable contributions to world-historical development. Leadership in the International of the working-class movement then passed to Germany; that was in the seventies of the nineteenth century, when she lagged economically behind Britain and France. But when Germany had out stripped these two countries economically, i.e., by the second decade of the twentieth century, the Marxist workers’ party of Germany, that model for the whole world, found itself headed by a handful of utter scoundrels, the most filthy blackguards—from Scheidemann and Noske to David and Legien—loathsome hangmen drawn from the workers’ ranks who had sold themselves to the capitalists, who were in the service of the monarchy and the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie.

World history is leading unswervingly towards the dictatorship of the proletariat, but is doing so by paths that are anything but smooth, simple and straight.

When Karl Kautsky was still a Marxist and not the renegade from Marxism he became when he began to champion unity with the Scheidemanns and to support bourgeois democracy against Soviet, or proletarian, democracy, he wrote an article—this was at the turn of the century—entitled “The Slavs and Revolution”. In this article he traced the historical conditions that pointed to the possibility of leadership in the world revolutionary movement passing to the Slavs.

And so it has. Leadership in the revolutionary proletarian International has passed for a time—for a short time, it goes without saying—to the Russians, just as at various periods of the nineteenth century it was in the hands of the British, then of the French, then of the Germans.
I have had occasion more than once to say that it was easier for the Russians than for the advanced countries to begin the great proletarian revolution, but that it will be more difficult for them to continue it and carry it to final victory, in the sense of the complete organisation of a socialist society.

It was easier for us to begin, firstly, because the unusual—for twentieth-century Europe—political backwardness of the tsarist monarchy gave unusual strength to the revolutionary onslaught of the masses. Secondly, Russia’s backwardness merged in a peculiar way the proletarian revolution against the bourgeoisie with the peasant revolution against the landowners. That is what we started from in October 1917, and we would not have achieved victory so easily then if we had not. As long ago as 1856, Marx spoke, in reference to Prussia; of the possibility of a peculiar combination of proletarian revolution and peasant war.^[2] From the beginning of 1905 the Bolsheviks advocated the idea of a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. Thirdly, the 1905 revolution contributed enormously to the political education of the worker and peasant masses, because it familiarised their vanguard with “the last word” of socialism in the West and also because of the revolutionary action of the masses. Without such a “dress rehearsal” as we had in 1905, the revolutions of 1917—both the bourgeois, February revolution, and the proletarian, October revolution—would have been impossible. Fourthly, Russia’s geographical conditions permitted her to hold out longer than other countries could have done against the superior military strength of the capitalist, advanced countries. Fifthly, the specific attitude of the proletariat towards the peasantry facilitated the transition from the bourgeois revolution to the socialist revolution, made it easier for the urban proletarians to influence the semi-proletarian, poorer sections of the rural working people.

Sixthly, long schooling in strike action and the experience of the European mass working-class movement facilitated the emergence—in a profound and rapidly intensifying revolutionary situation—of such a unique form of proletarian revolutionary organisation as the Soviets.
This list, of course, is incomplete; but it will suffice for the time being.

Soviet, or proletarian, democracy was born in Russia. Following the Paris Commune a second epoch-making step was taken. The proletarian and peasant Soviet Republic has proved to be the first stable socialist republic in the world. As a new type of state it cannot die. It no longer stands alone.

For the continuance and completion of the work of building socialism, much, very much is still required. Soviet republics in more developed countries, where the proletariat has greater weight and influence, have every chance of surpassing Russia once they take the path of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The bankrupt Second International is now dying and rotting alive. Actually, it is playing the role of lackey to the world bourgeoisie. It is a truly yellow International. Its foremost ideological leaders, such as Kautsky, laud bourgeois democracy and call it “democracy” in general, or—what is still more stupid and still more crude—“pure democracy”.

Bourgeois democracy has outlived its day, just as the Second International has, though the International performed historically necessary and useful work when the task of the moment was to train the working-class masses within the framework of this bourgeois democracy.
No bourgeois republic, however democratic, ever was or could have been anything but a machine for the suppression of the working people by capital, an instrument of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the political rule of capital. The democratic bourgeois republic promised and proclaimed majority rule, but it could never put this into effect as long as private ownership of the land and other means of production existed.

“Freedom” in the bourgeois-democratic republic was actually freedom for the rich. The proletarians and working peasants could and should have utilised it for the purpose of preparing their forces to overthrow capital, to overcome bourgeois democracy, but in fact the working masses were, as a general rule, unable to enjoy democracy under capitalism.

Soviet? or proletarian, democracy has for the first time in the world created democracy for the masses, for the working people, for the factory workers and small peasants.
Never yet has the world seen political power wielded by the majority of the population, power actually wielded by this majority, as it is in the case of Soviet rule.
It suppresses the “freedom” of the exploiters and their accomplices; it deprives them of “freedom” to exploit, “freedom” to batten on starvation, “freedom” to fight for the restoration of the rule of capital, “freedom” to compact with the foreign bourgeoisie against the workers and peasants of their own country.

Let the Kautskys champion such freedom. Only a renegade from Marxism, a renegade from socialism can do so.

In nothing is the bankruptcy of the ideological leaders of the Second International, people like Hilferding and Kautsky, so strikingly expressed as in their utter inability to understand the significance of Soviet, or proletarian, democracy, its relation to the Paris Commune, its place in history, its necessity as a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The newspaper Die Freiheit, organ of the “Independent” (alias middle-class, philistine, petty-bourgeois) German Social-Democratic Party, in its issue No. 74 of February 11, 1919, published a manifesto “To the Revolutionary Proletariat of Germany”.

This manifesto is signed by the Party executive and by all its members in the National Assembly, the German variety of our Constituent Assembly.

This manifesto accuses the Scheidemanns of wanting to abolish the Workers’ Councils, and proposes—don’t laugh!—that the Councils be combined with the Assembly, that the Councils be granted certain political rights, a certain place in the Constitution.

To reconcile, to unite the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat! How simple! What a brilliantly philistine idea!

The only pity is that it was tried in Russia, under Kerensky, by the united Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, those petty-bourgeois democrats who imagine themselves socialists.
Anyone who has read Marx and failed to understand that in capitalist society, at every acute moment, in every serious class conflict, the alternative is either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the dictatorship of the proletariat, has understood nothing of either the economic or the political doctrines of Marx.

But the brilliantly philistine idea of Hilferding, Kautsky and Co. of peacefully combining the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat requires special examination, if exhaustive treatment is to be given to the economic and political absurdities with which this most remarkable and comical manifesto of February 11 is packed. That will have to be put off for another article.^[3]

Moscow, April 15, 1919

---

Endnotes

[1] Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965, p. 110.

[2] Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965, p. 92.

[3] See pp. 392-401 of this volume.

(please forward widely) FRIDAY - CALL-IN DAY TO DEMAND JUSTICE FOR ARAFAT JARADAT, SAMER ISSAWI, AND ALL PALESTINIAN HUNGER STRIKERS Friday March 1 Israel has TORTURED and KILLED another Palestinian in prison! Maan News Agency reported on Sunday that political prisoner Arafat Jaradat was beaten and hanged for many hours while in Israeli custody, this according to his lawyer, Kameel Sabbagh. An autopsy conducted in Israel in the presence of Palestinian officials revealed that the 30-year-old Jaradat had six broken bones in his neck, spine, arms and legs and did not die of a stroke or cardiac arrest as claimed by the Israeli prison officials. Arafat Jaradat was being detained for throwing stones at an Israeli soldier. The Israeli government has no respect for international law and the just treatment of prisoners. Do Palestinian lives have any value to the U.S. government? Samer Issawi continues on his hunger strike now in its 218th day, until he wins an absolute agreement that guarantees his release. We need to continue to put pressure on the US government to demand his release. We also must not forget the other Palestinian prisoners still on hunger strike - Tarek Qa’adan and Jafar Azzidine, who have been without food for 91 days in protest of their detention without charge or trial; Ayman Sharawna, who has been on hunger strike since July 1, 2012, except for a brief reprieve in January 2013 when he believed that his case was moving in a positive direction; and the hundreds of other Palestinian prisoners who are striking in solidarity with these men. We again call on all activists, especially those in the U.S., to call President Obama and the State Department on Friday, March 1 from 9 AM to 5 PM EST, to take action. “My name is _____ from __________ and I demand that: - the US administration condemn and sanction Israel for the killing of Arafat Jaradat and - intervene for the immediate release of Samer Issawi, the other hunger strikers, and all the Palestinian administrative detainees and political prisoners held by Israel." 1) Call President Obama at 1-202-456-1111 2) Call US Secretary of State John Kerry at 1-202-647-4000 (pick option 4 for the operator and ask to leave a message for Kerry) and the Office of Near East Affairs at 1-202-647-7209 (you will get transferred to Marguerite Pickett to leave a message) There will also be a campaign on Twitter, as there has been for multiple days, at 1PM CST, to demand the release of Samer Issawi. Check @samerissawi1 for the hashtag to use. For updates on the worldwide campaign, follow "The Free Samer Issawi Campaign" page on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Free-Samer-Issawi-Campaign/194111744067340?ref=ts&fref=ts Issawi had been detained by Israeli authorities without any charge whatsoever. He had been released from prison in October 2011 as a part of the Shalit prisoner swap, but was detained again without charge on 7 July 2012 and has been refusing food since August 2012 to protest his detention. He is still in critical condition. He is losing his vision, vomiting blood and lapsing in and out of consciousness. ***************************** April Days of Action Against Drones. At a meeting in New York City in December, UNAC joined with others to help form the Network to Stop Drone Surveillance and Warfare. This groups called for anti-drone actions during the month of April. Please go to the web site of the network to find an action in your area. If there are none planned in your area, please plan one, post it on the web site or organize a bus to one in your region. The web site is at: http://nodronesnetwork.blogspot.com/2012/12/national-anti-drone-group-calls-for.html click here to donate to UNAC Click here for the Facebook UNAC group. To add yourself to the UNAC listserv, please send an email to: UNAC-subscribe@lists.riseup.net

Boston screening of “Brother Towns/Pueblos Hermanos” and an Immigrant Rights Panel Discussion

Immigrant Voices on Immigration: An Experiential and Theological Foundation for Immigrant Justice
A film screening and panel discussion on an Immigrant Rights Perspective on Immigration Reform.
The documentary: “Brother Towns/Pueblos Hermanos” a film about two towns linked by immigration, one in Guatemala and one in Florida, and the thousands of paths connecting them for Mayan people. The screening will be followed by Q & A with Charlie Thompson, the film's producer from Duke University. http://brothertowns.com/
After a short break, there will be a panel discussion: Immigrant Rights: An Immigrant Perspective." Refreshments provided.
Monday, March 4, 2013
4:30 Registration and Reception
5:00 Film: Brother Towns/ Pueblos Hermanos followed by Q&A with producer Charlie Thompson
6:30 – 7:15 Refreshments
7:30 – 9:00 Panel and Discussion: An Immigrant Rights Perspective on Immigration Reform
Rev. Dr. Cristian De La Rosa, BU School of Theology, Moderator
Dr. Ahida E. Pilarski, Saint Anselm College, Biblical Context
Patricia Montes, Executive Director, Centro Presente
Natalicia Tracy, Executive Director, Brazilian Immigrant Center
Conrado Santos, Student Immigrant Movement
Boston University School of Theology 745 Commonwealth Avenue (next to Marsh Chapel) Location B19
The Flyer: http://www.bostonnewsanctuary.org/temp/March4_2013Flyer.pdf
Please RSVP by February 25^th march4rsvp@bostonnewsanctuary.org or 617-686-2452
Directions: http://www.bu.edu/sth/welcome/visiting-sth/
This event is free. Donations are welcome.
Sponsors: * BUSTH Hispanic/Latino Students Association * Boston Theological Institute (BTI) * Office of Contextual Education at BU School of Theology (BUSTH) * Old Cambridge Baptist Church * Boston New Sanctuary Movement * La Fundación Dominicana Del Arte y La Cultura de Boston (FUNDOARCU) * The Hispanic/Latino Ministry of the New England Conference of the United Methodist Church * Centro Presente * Brazilian Immigrant Center * Student Immigrant Movement

Monday, March 4, 2013 - 4:30pm to 9:00pm

Add to Calendar

• iCalendar
• Outlook
• Google
• Yahoo

Boston University School of Theology 745 Commonwealth Avenue (next to Marsh Chapel)

Event Type:

Film

Country:

Guatemala

Region:

All Latin America

Event Location:

Other

• HOME
• AREA PROGRAMS
  • ANDES INITIATIVE
  • ARTS@DRCLAS
  • BRAZIL STUDIES PROGRAM
  • REGIONAL OFFICE
  • CUBAN STUDIES PROGRAM
  • MEXICO & CENTRAL AMERICA PROGRAM
  • OUTREACH
  • PLALA
• STUDENTS
  • UNDERGRADUATE
  • GRADUATE
• FACULTY
• EVENTS
• PUBLICATIONS
  • BOOK SERIES
  • REVISTA
• ABOUT
  • ABOUT DRCLAS
  • ABOUT BRAZIL OFFICE
  • ABOUT REGIONAL OFFICE