On The 60th Anniversary Of The Rosenberg Executions- Cold War Ideologues Want to Kill Them Again-Hail the Heroic Rosenbergs!-Martyrs of Anti-Soviet Witchhunt

Workers Vanguard No. 923	24 October 2008

Cold War Ideologues Want to Kill Them Again-Hail the Heroic Rosenbergs!-Martyrs of Anti-Soviet Witchhunt

Shortly after 8 p.m., on 19 June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at New York’s Sing Sing prison. Jewish Communists from New York, the Rosenbergs were framed up on charges of “conspiring” to pass the “secret of the atomic bomb” to the Soviet Union during World War II, when the USSR was allied with the U.S. Their 1951 trial was replete from beginning to end with perjured testimony, concocted evidence, a heavy dose of anti-Semitism and a judge who illegally consulted with the prosecution before meting out a sentence under provisions of a law that didn’t apply to their case—all against a backdrop of bloodcurdling calls to “fry the Reds.”

Around the world, millions raised their voices in an outcry demanding “justice for the Rosenbergs.” But from the White House on down, the American ruling class was united in its determination to make an example of these courageous leftists who never renounced their support to the Soviet Union, and refused to name names to save their lives. The great Soviet spy Kim Philby, in his book, My Silent War, rightly called them “the brave Rosenbergs.”

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed on the altar of Cold War anti-Communism, in which the U.S. rulers saw the USSR as the main obstacle to U.S. imperialist world hegemony. Thus, Julius Rosenberg was arrested three weeks after the outbreak of the Korean War and less than a year after the first Soviet A-bomb test. Setting the tone for the trial, the prosecutor ranted in his opening arguments that the Rosenbergs stole “the key to the survival of this nation and…the peace of the world.” As we explained in our article “In Defense of the Rosenbergs!” (WV No. 86, 21 November 1975), following World War II:

“As the predominant capitalist power, the U.S., planning for an ‘American century,’ tore apart the U.S.-Soviet alliance and prepared the ground for a nationwide anti-red scare. When the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear bomb in 1949 and later that same year Mao’s Red Army overthrew capitalism in China, politicians like Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy were building their political careers through a crusade to exorcise ‘Communism’ from American life.”

It was against this backdrop the Rosenbergs were put to death.

The Rosenberg Case and the Russian Question

The horrific memory of this case has been nearly impossible to bury. The capitalist rulers—often with liberals and social democrats taking the lead—have found the need to frame up and execute the Rosenbergs again and again. On the one hand they seek to defend the secret police, prosecution, judiciary and highest federal authorities who framed them. On the other, the Rosenberg case was, and still is, the question of the Russian Revolution. The 1917 seizure of power by the Bolshevik-led Russian working class was the greatest event of human history, and its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, after decades of Stalinist bureaucratic misrule, a world-historic catastrophe. America’s imperialist rulers, the most dangerous in history, would like to wipe out of the consciousness of the proletariat and the oppressed any attachment to the program or ideals of communism—and that means driving a stake through the memory of those martyred in defense of the land of the October Revolution.

Today, with the financial crash leading the international capitalist economy into a freefall, the massive unpopularity of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the floundering occupation of Afghanistan, the U.S. bourgeoisie seized on a chance to fry the Rosenbergs again. The latest exhumation and assassination was sparked by an interview (12 September) by the New York Times’ Sam Roberts with the Rosenbergs’ co-defendant Morton Sobell, who had served over 18 years in prison. Responding to whether he had been a Soviet spy, Sobell, now 91 years old and ill, said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that. I never thought of it in those terms.” Regarding Julius Rosenberg, Sobell offered, “His intentions might have been to be a spy.” Yet Sobell maintained that sketches and other atomic bomb details the government claimed were passed along to Julius Rosenberg by his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, were of little value. “What he gave them was junk.” According to Sobell, Ethel Rosenberg “knew what he [Julius] was doing, but what was she guilty of? Of being Julius’s wife.”

We don’t know if Sobell’s “confession” is true or not—whether his interview was a last grab for attention near the end of his life or merely an expression of his coming to peace with U.S. imperialism. We do know however that every previous effort to “prove” the Rosenbergs’ “guilt”—from Ronald Radosh’s 1983 book, The Rosenberg File, which featured the dubious jailhouse informer Jerome Tartakow, to the Venona papers released in 1995—have had as much credibility as Bush’s tales of “weapons of mass destruction.” The Rosenbergs were legally lynched for political purposes. As the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) wrote in the Militant (27 October 1952): “The Rosenberg decision above all else was an act of ruling class terror by a state that is preparing a war of world conquest, a war directed primarily against the Soviet Union.”

What is indisputably true is that for the U.S. capitalist masters, guilt or innocence mattered not at all. Nor is guilt or innocence in this case the key question for revolutionaries. The nuclear arms capacity developed by the Soviet Union was an important component to the defense of the gains of the October Revolution. As we wrote 25 years ago, at the height of Carter/Reagan’s Cold War II, in “They’re Trying to Kill the Rosenbergs All Over Again” (WV No. 340, 21 October 1983):

“For revolutionaries, on the contrary, those who helped the Russians achieve nuclear capacity did a great service for humanity. Had U.S. imperialism maintained a nuclear monopoly, it would have meant historic defeats for the international proletariat. It would have meant nuclear destruction from Southeast Asia to Latin America. Who can doubt that U.S. imperialism would have destroyed Vietnam totally with nuclear weapons if they did not fear a retaliatory Soviet strike? Would Cuba exist today if the U.S. had a nuclear monopoly? It is clear that the USSR’s advance to nuclear capacity and then to nuclear parity has thus far been instrumental in staying the nuclear hand of U.S. imperialism.”

The Soviet Union was destroyed by imperialist-backed counterrevolution, but the question posed by the Russian Revolution—that of the proletarian seizure of state power—is as vital as ever. The imperialists seek to rewrite history in order to ensure that the rule of capital is never again challenged. We honor the Rosenbergs’ memory today, not least in our unconditional military defense of the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states—China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea—against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution.

As always, the Rosenberg case is used to serve the political needs of the day. Sobell’s “confession” was leaped on by the bourgeois press and bloggers. “Case Closed: The Rosenbergs were Soviet Spies,” trumpeted an op-ed piece by Ronald Radosh in the Los Angeles Times (17 September). Written when he was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Radosh’s 1983 book was a rallying point for the liberals, rad-libs and social democrats as they joined U.S. imperialism’s efforts to regiment the population during Cold War II against the Soviet Union. Today, Radosh, portrayed as an expert on the Rosenbergs case, is a neocon, a loud voice in support of the “war on terrorism” and a contributing columnist to FrontPage Magazine, mouthpiece of right-wing racist demagogue David Horowitz.

Written shortly after the FBI was given new powers to spy on and terrorize the population in the name of the “war on terrorism,” Radosh’s L.A. Times article declares, “It is time the ranks of the left acknowledge that the United States had (and has) real enemies and that finding and prosecuting them is not evidence of repression.” Meanwhile, his right-wing acolytes have seized on the Sobell statements to argue that death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal—a former Black Panther Party spokesman and supporter of the MOVE organization framed up on charges of killing Police Officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981—is guilty. It is a telling indictment of American capitalist “justice” that from the liberal New York Times to Radosh’s right-wing “fringe,” Sobell’s confession is accepted without question, while the mountains of evidence of Mumia’s innocence, including the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot Faulkner, is sneered at and barred by court after court.

A Cold War Show Trial

Like many of their generation, the Rosenbergs were inspired by the authority and achievements of the Russian Revolution, which overthrew capitalism on one-sixth of the globe and created a society where those who labored ruled. Within less than two decades, the collectivized and planned economy of the USSR propelled a poor and backward country into a world power, with jobs, housing, education and medical care for all. In the 1930s, the capitalist world was mired in the Great Depression, while the rise of fascism and the buildup for a second interimperialist war further exposed the barbarity of capitalist class rule. As a teenager, Julius became determined to help free labor leader Tom Mooney, and as a college freshman protested against fascist students from Italy visiting CCNY. Ethel helped raise money for refugees fleeing fascist terror during the Spanish Civil War. Both were active trade unionists—Ethel in the clerical workers union and Julius as an organizer for the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians until he was fired from his job in 1945 for membership in the U.S. Communist Party (CP).

The Rosenbergs looked for political leadership to the Stalinized CP, a product of the degeneration of the Soviet workers state and Communist International. Ardent believers in the disastrous Stalinist popular front against fascism, the Rosenbergs were typical of “progressives” who hoped for a U.S.-Soviet alliance to continue after World War II. CP leader Earl Browder declared, “Communism is 20th Century Americanism.” But the U.S. ruling class didn’t see it that way.

On the contrary, the Rosenbergs were political scapegoats tried as “atom spies” because U.S. imperialism lost its nuclear monopoly, and with it the capacity for nuclear blackmail against the Soviets. Two months after Washington dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the Pentagon mapped out a plan to launch a nuclear attack on 20 Soviet cities. Throughout the next few years, the U.S. repeatedly threatened to nuke Russia during early confrontations in the Cold War—in 1946, in 1948 over Berlin, again in 1950 over Korea. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover seized on the Soviets’ August 1949 atomic test to unleash his army of G-men to hunt down the “atom spies” in the hopes of launching a series of show trials to frame up the CP for espionage. They went on frequent fishing expeditions hoping to force “confessions” and to get the confessors to falsely point the finger at other CPers.

Government prosecutors have since admitted that the arrest and threat of execution of Ethel Rosenberg was intended solely to force Julius to break down and “confess.” In the last minutes of their lives, a U.S. Marshal stood outside the execution chamber, waiting for a nod from either of them indicating that they would “confess” and “name names.” Two FBI agents waited by a special phone with an open line to Attorney General Brownell, ready to call off the execution if the Rosenbergs capitulated and allowed the government to use them as it had other finks and turncoats. But the Rosenbergs refused to bow.

Fully aware that there was no case against the Rosenbergs for espionage, the government got them on the classic frame-up charge—“conspiracy.” The government knew that the Rosenbergs did not “steal the secret of the atomic bomb.” In fact there was no “secret.” J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of designing the first atomic bomb, pointed out, “There are no unpublished secrets concerning atomic weapons, and no secrets of nature available to a few.” Judge Irving Kaufman, upon pronouncing the death sentence, accused the Rosenbergs of “treason.” It did not matter that according to the U.S. Constitution, “treason,” a capital crime, is defined as giving aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime. The USSR was an ally of the U.S. in 1944 when the “crime” supposedly took place!

It was hardly coincidental that the judge, the lead prosecutor, Irving Saypol, and the key witnesses were Jewish, chosen in a transparent effort to cover up the stench of anti-Semitism surrounding the trial (see “The Political Execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,” WV No. 626, 28 July 1995). Two self-confessed perjurers sent them to the chair—Ethel Rosenberg’s brother David Greenglass and Philadelphia chemist Harry Gold, supposedly a Soviet spy courier. Gold admitted at the trial to having become “so tangled up in a web of lies...it is a wonder steam didn’t come out of my ears,” and never even testified to having met or known Julius or Ethel Rosenberg.

Greenglass, who had apparently stolen a piece of uranium while working as an army technician at the Los Alamos nuclear facility in 1945, set his sister and her husband up as fall guys. Greenglass testified that, after being recruited to a spy ring by Julius, he had handed sketches of the atomic bomb to Soviet spy courier Gold, claiming to have learned the A-bomb “secret” by overhearing conversations of scientists passing through the machine shop at Los Alamos. Greenglass implicated his sister with testimony that she typed up the notes for Julius. That Greenglass’ testimony was perjured was proven yet again in recently released grand jury testimony of his wife Ruth Greenglass, who testified that she wrote up the notes. The only hard “evidence” against the Rosenbergs introduced at the trial was a contribution box found in their home for Spanish Civil War refugees and Ethel’s signature on a petition for a Communist candidate for New York City Council.

Liberals and Social Democrats Witchhunt Reds

While his name has become a synonym for eviscerating the democratic rights of individuals and organizations based on their political views and associations, Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy was at first a fringe development in the anti-Communist hysteria. The political basis of the post World War II witchhunt was set by the Cold War liberals. As early as 1947, Democratic president Harry Truman put in place a loyalty board to screen all government employees, and the purge of left-wing militants from the CIO began. That same year Congress enacted the strikebreaking Taft-Hartley law, which, in addition to outlawing such labor weapons as secondary strikes, barred Communists from union office. It was the pro-Truman anti-Communists, among them Democrat Hubert Humphrey and United Auto Workers head Walter Reuther who founded the Americans for Democratic Action in 1947 to drive the CP and radicals out of the unions.

Some 25,000 union members, many of them key leaders of the CIO organizing drives of the 1930s, were purged from the labor movement, in some cases leading to the destruction of whole unions. Thousands of others were tracked down by the FBI and driven from their jobs, only to continue to be hounded and witchhunted due to secret employer blacklists. The 1950 McCarran Act, named for the Democratic Senator from Nevada, legitimized secret FBI record keeping on “subversive” individuals and called for the registration of organizations and individuals who purportedly “advocated violent overthrow” of the government. It also provided for the deportation of non-citizens who had been Communists at any time in their lives. Hundreds of Communists were jailed. Nearly 12,000 people were listed on a “Security Index” kept by FBI national headquarters and another 17,000 on the “Communist Index,” while FBI field offices held lists of an additional 200,000 considered to constitute a danger in times of “national emergency.” Humphrey sponsored the 1954 Communist Control Act outlawing the CP, and amended the McCarran Act to set up concentration camps for “subversives” in the U.S.

The liberal Cold Warriors shared the same enemy, Communism, but thought that McCarthy overreached—he went after the “innocent” liberals along with the “guilty.” When the names of Cold War liberals were added to the Attorney General’s Subversives List, the liberals dumped McCarthy. The liberals and social democrats wanted their civil liberties and their witchhunt too.

Playing a parallel role was the Independent Socialist League (ISL) of Max Shachtman, successor to the Workers Party. The founders of the Workers Party had split toward social democracy from the SWP in 1940 over their refusal to defend the Soviet Union against imperialism. The ISL, a precursor to the International Socialist Organization (ISO), supported the expulsions of the CP-led unions from the CIO. Shachtman, clearly expressing the need to join forces with Reuther, declared that workers “should follow the general line, inside the labor movement, of supporting the reformist officialdom against the Stalinist officialdom” (New International, September 1949). Shachtman proclaimed, “Stalinism is the most virulent poison that has ever coursed through the veins of the working class and its movement. The work of eliminating it makes the first claim on the attention of every militant.” The anti-red purge installed a venal pro-imperialist union leadership that abetted the bosses in fostering racial divisions and presided over the decimation of the unions for decades.

Shachtman’s ISL refused to come out for commutation of the Rosenbergs’ sentence until just before the execution. In the Bay Area branch, where a vote to support commutation of the death sentence lost by a single vote, the right-wing “hang the spies” faction was destroyed when confronted with Shachtman’s wire to President Eisenhower asking to commute the sentence. Writing in the name of “an independent socialist organization which has been uncompromising in its struggle against Stalinism,” Shachtman assured Eisenhower that their concern arose only from the death penalty which “gives worldwide Stalinism an effective weapon” (Labor Action, 22 June 1953). Still, there was a hue and cry in the party against the decision, as letters poured in to Labor Action bitterly complaining of Shachtman’s “capitulation” and of “this belated jump into the ‘super-liberal’ bandwagon...that hangs on the Stalinist coattails.”

The Shachtmanites were visceral anti-Communists. But most of the left, including the SWP, failed to immediately rally to the Rosenbergs’ defense for other reasons. This was a time when leftist militants were being tried and sent to prison for long stretches based on nothing but their libraries; Congressmen were calling to make CP membership a capital crime and the government was looking to brand left organizations, particularly the CP, as espionage agents. Civil rights activist Carl Braden was jailed for “state sedition” after he and his wife sold a house to a black family in a white neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky. Paul Robeson, the acclaimed black actor and vocalist, was one of the many stripped of their passports and banned from leaving the country for years. The renowned filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, a British citizen, was barred from re-entering the U.S.

As for the CP, it did not even mention the case until after the trial was over and the death sentence had already been handed down. When the CP did take up the case, it neither denounced the political frame-up nor defended the Rosenbergs as victims of the capitalist state. It merely accused the government of “bad faith” similar to its refusal “to negotiate peace in Korea” (Daily Worker, 6 April 1951). The CP’s betrayal was not simply one of defense policy over the Rosenbergs’ case. The CP betrayed the working class with its program of class collaboration, its policy of tailing the “progressive” bourgeoisie. By the end of World War II, the CP found itself without allies when it was no longer useful for the bourgeoisie to continue the popular front forged during the “Great Patriotic War Against Fascism.” Years of class collaboration behind Roosevelt—the no-strike pledge, scabbing on strikes and betrayal of the fight for black rights during the Second World War—closed off the possibility of effectively mobilizing the labor movement against repression. As the Cold War McCarthy period ensued, the CP found itself totally abandoned by its “progressive” friends.

Even had the CP moved sooner and with more energy, it is not likely they could have saved the Rosenbergs from a government intent on killing them. Against the Stalinists’ vapid talk of “bad faith” on the part of the U.S. government, it was the SWP that correctly recognized the anti-Soviet centrality of the Rosenberg trial and hailed the USSR’s nuclear capacity—an important act demonstrating considerable political courage in that period. Though the SWP could have recognized the political character of the Rosenberg case sooner and sounded the alarm earlier and louder, the defense record of the SWP was generally excellent. They protested the 1949 Smith Act prosecutions of the CP, undeterred by the vicious sectarianism which led the CP to applaud the first use of the Smith Act in 1941 against the Trotskyists for their principled opposition to their “own” rulers. While unconditionally defending the USSR during the Second World War, the SWP courageously opposed all the imperialist combatants in that carnage.

Today, Sobell’s “confession” has left the Rosenbergs’ few liberal defenders uneasy and defensive. That is because they are hostile to the cause for which the Rosenbergs died. What the liberals care about is the “fairness” of the American “justice” system. For Howard Zinn, “The most important thing was they did not get a fair trial in the atmosphere of cold war hysteria” (New York Times, 21 September). Victor Navasky, former publisher of the Nation, told the Times, “I wish Morty and Ethel and Julius had been open about what they had and hadn’t done, or in Morty’s case, ‘come clean’ before this.” He added, “These guys thought they were helping our ally in wartime, and yes, they broke the law, shouldn’t have done what they did, and should have been proportionally punished for it; but the greater betrayal was by the state.”

Today, Shachtman’s heirs in the ISO have published an article “Executed to Send a Message” (Socialist Worker online, 30 September) that makes no mention of the Democrats’ role in the Cold War witchhunt or in the Rosenbergs’ prosecution. The ISO ludicrously seeks to put distance between the Rosenbergs and the CP, stating, “by 1943, they were no longer active in the party,” and giving not the slightest hint that they went to their deaths as supporters of the Soviet Union. Small wonder: this is a group that was formed in opposition to the defense of the USSR and that hailed its counterrevolutionary destruction.

Against such liberals and renegades, we Trotskyists fought to the end in defense of the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states of East Europe. We hail those, like the Rosenbergs, who gave their lives in defense of the land of October and fight to disarm the rapacious imperialist rulers through socialist revolution. We will not forget—Honor the heroic Rosenbergs! For new October Revolutions!

In Honor Of Julius And Ethel Rosenberg On The 60th Anniversary Of Their Execution-On Paying Homage To Leftist (And Other) Political Opponents- A Short Note

A repost from June 19, 2010

Markin comment:
First question: What do the murdered heroic Kansas abortion provider, Doctor George Tiller, the 17th century Puritan revolutionary poet and propagandist, John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, and the early 20th century labor and civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow, defender of “Big” Big Haywood and John Scopes, among others, have in common? Similar expertise in similar fields? No. Common political vision? Hell, no. Could it be that they, each in their own way, contributed to the store of our human progress? Well, yes. And also, by the way, they have all been honored on this American Left History site for those contributions. And nary a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them.

Second question: What do the pre-World War II American communist renegade from Marxism, Max Shachtman, the old English socialist and novelist turned British imperial informer, George Orwell, and the German “pope” of pre- World War I Marxism in the Second International , Karl Kautsky have in common? I will not prolong the agony on this one because I have to make my point before the next millennium so it is that they have made contributions to our common socialist movement before they went over to the other, pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist side (one way or the other). And also, by the way, they have all been honored on this American Left History site for those contributions. And nary a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them.

Third question: What do the old-fashioned 19th century French revolutionary and Paris Commune member, Louis–August Blanqui, the iconic American black liberation fighter, Malcolm X, and the old Industrial Workers of World (IWW-Wobblies) organizer extraordinaire, Vincent St. John, have in common? Again, I will cut to the chase; they were all, one way or the other, political opponents of Marxism. And also, by the way, they have all been honored on this American Left History site for those contributions. And nary a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them.

Okay, by my count I see zero legendary Bolshevik names listed above. Names like Leon Trotsky, V.I. Lenin, N. Krupskaya, J. Sverdlov, Jim Cannon, John Reed, “Big” Bill Haywood, and so on. Oh, they have been honored in this space, profusely. Of course. (Although I do not believe that there was a flea-bitten, hard-shell, broad-backed, barn-burning, blood-thirty, red meat, communistic, reds under every bed, Bolshevik bastard who wants to “nationalize” women and “eat babies” for breakfast among them either, that was pure bourgeosi propaganda, always). And that is exactly my point here.

Let me back track on this one, a little. Recently I did a series of reviews of the work of American detective fiction writer, Dashiell Hammett. (see blogs, dated August 15-18, 2010). Beyond a review of his outstanding literary work I noted that Hammett was a prominent supporter of the Stalinized American Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s. In that dead night of the "red scare", which many from that time and since would prefer to obliterate from American "democratic" memory, especially the memory of their own silence and complicity, just said no to the committees that wanted him to “name names.” He didn’t and paid the price for his courageous act. Others, including long time Stalinists and fellow–travelers squawked to high heaven before those committees, sometimes without the least bit of pressure. A simple acknowledgement of Hammett’s deed, noting along the way, that Hammett and our Trotskyist forbears were still political opponents at the end of the day seemed less than controversial.

Not so, at least from an e-mail that I received, claiming (for me) the mantle of Stalinophile for such a “tribute”. First, I assume that the person, for good or ill, had not read my "tributes” to arch-Stalinist American Communist Party supporters, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who I have termed “heroic” for their deeds in behalf of the Soviet Union, when those deeds counted. Or that if the person had deeds, like Hammett's, involving less than going to meet death fearlessly by Stalinists are not worthy of kudos. In any case, this person is all wrong.

Go back to the first question above where basically non-political types were noted for their contributions to human progress. That is the “missing link” to this person’s mistaken position. I could have gone on and on about various persons that have been honored in this American Left History blog. But that seemed to me to be unnecessarily hammering home the point. Here is the real point. We have had few enough occasions when our fellows get it right to narrow the parameters of what contributes to human progress. If we get too picky we are left with honoring Lenin, Trotsky, and a few other Bolsheviks. Oh yes, and, of course, those few of us who claim to be contemporary Bolsheviks- including, I presume, the heroic, non-Stalinophile, e-mail sender. Enough said.

Note: I did not mention this e-mail sender’s political affiliation although it was provided. Let us just put it this way. The organization that the person belongs to (and I am not sure the person knows all the organization’s history, it didn’t seem so) has a history of “bailing water” (my term)for the “progressive" wing of the Democratic party (whatever that is?) and wondered out loud why I did not honor the likes of California’s’ current Attorney General, Jerry Brown, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, ex-Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney,and so on. Jesus, give me a break. But, wait a minute, if the shades of old Dashiell Hammett were around today or those of some of his fellow reprobate Stalinists, those are the same kindreds that they would be kowtowing to, as well. Hey, I just tipped my hat to old Hammett I did not try to "steal" his "progressive/ popular front" political strategy. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Double, Jesus give me a break.

Honor Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht!

Workers Vanguard No. 862 20 January 2006 TROTSKY LENIN Honor Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht! (Quote of the Week) January 15 marks the anniversary of the murder of heroic revolutionary Marxists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, victims of the repression organized by the German Social Democratic government that crushed the January 1919 Spartakist uprising. The International Communist League has revived the Communist tradition of honoring the “Three L’s”—Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Russian Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin, who died in January 1924. In printing Luxemburg’s denunciation of the fraud of disarmament under capitalism, we reaffirm that the road to smashing the imperialist system of war, poverty and oppression lies in proletarian socialist revolution. The friends of peace in bourgeois circles believe that world peace and disarmament can be realized within the framework of the present social order, whereas we who base ourselves on the materialist conception of history and on scientific socialism, are convinced that militarism can be abolished only with the destruction of the capitalist state.... Thus would be clearly explained what constitutes the kernel of the social-democratic conception: that militarism in both its forms—as war and as armed peace—is a legitimate child, a logical result of capitalism, and that whoever honestly desires world peace and freedom from the tremendous burden of armaments must strive for socialism.... For the international antagonisms of the capitalist state are but complements of class antagonisms and world-political anarchy, but the reverse side of the anarchic system of capitalist production. Both grow together and must be overcome together. “A little order and peace” is, therefore, just as impossible, just as much a petty-bourgeois utopia, with regard to world politics as it is with regard to the capitalist world market, with regard to the limitation of armaments as it is with regard to the restriction of crises. —Rosa Luxemburg, “The Road to Peace” (1911), printed in Young Socialist (October 1958) *************** EVERY JANUARY WE HONOR LENIN OF RUSSIA, ROSA LUXEMBURG OF POLAND, AND KARL LIEBKNECHT OF GERMANY AS THREE LEADERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT.     Here is a thumb-nailsketch of Karl Liebknecht probably the least well known of the three- Biography The son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the SPD, Karl Liebknecht trained to be a lawyer and defended many Social Democrats in political trials. He was also a leading figure in the socialist youth movement and thus became a leading figure in the struggle against militarism. As a deputy in the Reichstag he was one of the first SPD representatives to break party discipline and vote against war credits in December 1914. He became a figurehead for the struggle against the war. His opposition was so successful that his parliamentary immunity was removed and he was improsoned. Freed by the November revolution he immediately threw himself into the struggle and became with Rosa Luxemburg one of the founders of the new Communist Party (KPD). Along with Luxemburg he was murdered by military officers with the tacit approval of the leaders of the SPD after the suppression of the so-called “Spartacist Uprising” in January 1919.

From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-

Feminism vs. Marxism: Origins of the Conflict

Markin comment:

The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and Revolution that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

*******

Workers Vanguard No. 982	10 June 2011

Feminism vs. Marxism: Origins of the Conflict

From Women and Revolution, 1974

(Young Spartacus pages)

We reprint below an article with minor corrections from the Spring 1974 issue of Women and Revolution (No. 5), which was the journal of the Spartacist League Central Committee Commission for Work Among Women from 1973 until 1996.

Contrary to an opinion still subscribed to in certain circles, modern feminism did not emerge full-grown from the fertile womb of the New Left, but is in fact an ideological offspring of the utopian egalitarianism of the early nineteenth century, which was in turn a product of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. It is noteworthy that the most original theorist of utopian socialism, Charles Fourier, was also the first advocate of women’s liberation through the replacement of the nuclear family by collective child rearing. Since utopian socialism (including its solution to the problem of the oppression of women) represented the ideals of the bourgeois-democratic revolution breaking through the barriers of private property, it was historically progressive. However, with the genesis of Marxism and the recognition that an egalitarian society can emerge only out of the rule of the working class, feminism (like other forms of utopian egalitarianism) lost its progressive aspect and became an ideology of the left wing of liberal individualism, a position which it continues to occupy to this day.

Women in the Bourgeois-Democratic Vision

Without question, the most important bourgeois-democratic work on women’s liberation was Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman written in 1792. Wollstonecraft was part of a circle of English radical democrats which included William Blake, Tom Paine and William Godwin, whose political lives came to be dominated by the French Revolution. A year before she wrote her classic on sexual equality, Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Man, a polemic against Edmund Burke’s counterrevolutionary writings. A few years after, she was to attempt a history of the French Revolution.

While informed and imbued with moral outrage as a result of her own experiences as an unmarried, middle-class woman (she worked as a school teacher and governess), Vindication is essentially an extension of the principles of the Enlightenment and French Revolution to women. The first chapter, entitled “Rights and Duties of Mankind,” sets the theoretical framework. Vindication rests heavily on analogies between the basis for the equality of women and general social equality.

For a contemporary reader, Vindication seems a highly unbalanced work. While the description of the role of women continues to be relevant, Wollstonecraft’s solutions appear pallid. Her main programmatic demand, to which she devotes the concluding chapter, is uniform education for girls and boys. Even when she wrote Vindication this was only a moderately radical proposal. In fact in the very year that Vindication was written, a similar educational program was proposed in the French Assembly. Yet generations after the establishment of coeducation and the even more radical reform of women’s suffrage, Wollstonecraft’s depiction of women’s role in society continues to ring true.

Although Wollstonecraft was one of the most radical political activists of her day (shortly after writing her classic on women’s rights, she crossed the Channel to take part in the revolutionary French government), Vindication has an unexpectedly moralizing and personalist character. Like many feminists of our day, she appeals to men to recognize the full humanity of women and to women to stop being sex objects and develop themselves. And there is the same conviction that if only men and women would really believe in these ideals and behave accordingly, then women would achieve equality.

The emphasis on individual relationships is not peculiar to Wollstonecraft, but arises from the inherent contradiction within the bourgeois-democratic approach to women’s oppression. Wollstonecraft accepted the nuclear family as the central institution of society and argued for sexual equality within that framework.

By accepting the basic role of women as mothers, Wollstonecraft accepted a division of labor in which women were necessarily economically dependent on their husbands. Therefore, women’s equality was essentially dependent on how the marriage partners treated one another. In good part, Vindication is an argument that parents and particularly fathers should raise their daughters more like their sons in order to bring out their true potential. But if fathers reject education for their daughters, there is no other recourse. Here we have the limits both of bourgeois democracy and of Wollstonecraft’s vision.

Charles Fourier and the Abolition of the Family

The status of women in the nineteenth century represented the most acute and manifest expression of the contradiction between capitalist society and its own ideals. It was this contradiction that gave birth to utopian socialism. Early in the nineteenth century it became apparent to those still committed to the ideals of the French Revolution that liberty, equality and fraternity were not compatible with private property in a competitive market economy. As the most incisive of the pioneer socialists, Charles Fourier, put it:

“Philosophy was right to vaunt liberty; it is the foremost desire of all creatures. But philosophy forgot that in civilized society liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth. When the wage-earning classes are poor, their independence is as fragile as a house without foundations. The free man who lacks wealth immediately sinks back under the yoke of the rich.”

—Beecher and Bienvenu (Eds.), The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier

And when Fourier applied the same critical concepts to the status of women, he reached equally radical, anti-bourgeois conclusions. The importance that Fourier attributed to the condition of women is well known:

“Social progress and changes of period are brought about by virtue of the progress of women toward liberty, and social retrogression occurs as a result of a diminution in the liberty of women…. In summary, the extension of the privileges of women is the fundamental cause of all social progress.”

—Ibid.

What is of decisive importance about Fourier’s concern for women’s oppression is that he put forth a program for the total reconstruction of society that would end the historic division of labor between men and women. In Fourier’s projected socialist community, children were raised collectively with no particular relation to their biological parents, men and women performed the same work and total sexual liberty was encouraged. (He regarded heterosexual monogamy as the extension of bourgeois property concepts to the sexual sphere.)

Fourier’s intense hostility to the patriarchal family in good part derived from his realization that it was inherently sexually repressive. In this he anticipated much of radical Freudianism. For example, he observed, “There are still many parents who allow their unmarried daughters to suffer and die for want of sexual satisfaction” (Ibid.).

Despite the fantastic nature of his projected socialist communities or “phalanxes,” Fourier’s program contained the rational core for the reorganization of society needed to liberate women. He was uniquely responsible for making the demand for the liberation of women through the abolition of the nuclear family an integral part of the socialist program which the young Marx and Engels inherited. Engels was more than willing (for example, in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific) to pay homage to the primary author of the socialist program for women’s liberation.

Utopian Egalitarianism and Women’s Liberation

While not giving the woman question the centrality it had in Fourierism, the two other major currents of early nineteenth-century socialism, Owenism and Saint-Simonism, were also unambiguously committed to sexual equality and opposed to legally enforced monogamy. The political life of the early nineteenth century was characterized by the complete interpenetration of the struggle for women’s liberation and the general struggle for an egalitarian society. Those women advocating women’s rights (no less than the men who did so) did not view this question as distinct from, much less counterposed to, the general movement for a rational social order. Those women who championed sexual equality were either socialists or radical democrats whose activity on behalf of women’s rights occupied only a fraction of their political lives. The most radical women advocates of sexual equality—the Americans Frances Wright and Margaret Fuller and the Frenchwoman Flora Tristan—all conform to this political profile.

Frances Wright began her political career as a liberal reformer with a tract in favor of the abolition of slavery. She was won to socialism by Robert Dale Owen, Robert Owen’s son, who immigrated to the U.S. to become its most important radical socialist in the 1820-30’s. Wright established an Owenite commune in Tennessee modeled on the famous one at New Harmony, Indiana. In 1828-29, she and Robert Dale Owen edited the Free Enquirer, a newspaper associated with the New York Workingman’s Party which championed universal suffrage, free public education, “free love” and birth control.

Margaret Fuller, whose Women in the Nineteenth Century was the most influential women’s rights work of her generation, was a product of New England Transcendentalism and had edited a journal with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller approached the woman question from the standpoint of religious radicalism (the equality of souls).

Fuller was associated with the Transcendentalist commune, Brook Farm, about the time it was transformed into a Fourierist community or “phalanx,” the year before she wrote her classic on women’s equality. Shortly after that she went to Europe and became involved in the democratic nationalist movements that were a mainspring in the revolutions of 1848. In that momentous year, she went to Italy to run a hospital for Guiseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy movement.

The most important woman socialist of the pre-1848 era was Flora Tristan. She began her revolutionary career with a tract in favor of legalized divorce, which had been outlawed in France following the reaction of 1815. (As a young woman Tristan had left her husband, an act which resulted in social ostracism and continual hardship throughout her life.) Her work on divorce led to a correspondence with the aging Fourier and a commitment to socialism. Among the most cosmopolitan of socialists, Tristan had crisscrossed the Channel playing an active role in both the Owenite and Chartist movements. Summing up her political situation in a letter to Victor Considerant, leader of the Fourierist movement after the master’s death, she wrote: “Almost the entire world is against me, men because I am demanding the emancipation of women, the propertied classes because I am demanding the emancipation of the wage earners” (Goldsmith, Seven Women Against the World).

In the 1840’s the ancient French craft unions, the compagnons, were transforming themselves into modern trade unions. This process produced an embryonic revolutionary socialist labor movement whose main leaders were Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Auguste Blanqui and Etienne Cabet. Flora Tristan was part of this nascent proletarian socialist movement. Her The Workers Union, written in 1843, was the most advanced statement of proletarian socialism up to its day. Its central theme was the need for an international workers’ organization. (Marx met Tristan while he was in Paris and was undoubtedly influenced by her work.) The concluding passage of The Workers Union affirms: “Union is power if we unite on the social and political field, on the ground of equal rights for both sexes, if we organize labor, we shall win welfare for all.”

The Workers Union devotes a section to the problems of women and its concluding passage indicates the integral role that sexual equality had in Tristan’s concept of socialism: “We have resolved to include in our Charter woman’s sacred and inalienable rights. We desire that men should give to their wives and mothers the liberty and absolute equality which they enjoy themselves.”

Flora Tristan died of typhoid in 1844 at the age of 41. Had she survived the catastrophe of 1848 and remained politically active, the history of European socialism might well have been different, for she was free of the residual Jacobinism of Blanqui and the artisan philistinism of Proudhon.

Contemporary feminists and bourgeois historians tend to label all early nineteenth-century female advocates of sexual equality feminists. This is a wholly illegitimate analysis—a projection of current categories back into a time when they are meaningless. As a delimited movement and distinctive ideology feminism did not exist in the early nineteenth century. Virtually all the advocates of full sexual equality considered this an integral part of the movement for a generally free and egalitarian society rooted in Enlightenment principles and carrying forward the American and particularly the French Revolutions. The American Owenite Frances Wright was no more a feminist than the English Owenite William Thompson, who wrote An appeal of one half the Human Race, Women, against the pretentions of the other Half, Men, to keep them in Civil and Domestic Slavery. Flora Tristan was no more a feminist than was Fourier.

In the 1840’s, a Transcendentalist radical like Margaret Fuller, a nationalist democrat like Guiseppe Mazzini and a socialist working-class organizer like Etienne Cabet could consider themselves part of a common political movement whose program was encapsulated in the slogan, “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.” In its most radical expression, this movement looked forward to a single, total revolution which would simultaneously establish democracy, eliminate classes, achieve equality for women and end national oppression.

This vision was defeated on the barricades in 1848. And with that defeat, the component elements of early nineteenth-century radicalism (liberal democracy and socialism, trade unionism, women’s equality and national liberation) separated and began to compete and conflict with one another. After 1848, it seemed that bourgeois society would continue for some time and that the interests of the oppressed, be they workers, women or nations, would have to be realized within its framework. Feminism (like trade unionism and national liberation) emerged as a delimited movement with its own constituency, ideology and organization only after the great catastrophe of 1848 had temporarily dispelled the vision of a fundamentally new social order.

Marx Against Utopian Egalitarianism

It is sometimes written that Fourier regarded socialism more as a means of overcoming women’s oppression than class oppression. This is a post-Marx way of looking at politics and not how Fourier would have viewed it. He would have said that he projected a society which would satisfy human needs and that the most striking thing about it was the radical change in the role of women. As opposed to the materialist view that different political movements represent the interests of different classes, utopian socialism shared the rational idealistic conception of political motivation characteristic of the Enlightenment—i.e., that different political movements reflect different conceptions of the best possible social organization. The idealism of early socialism was probably inevitable since it was produced by those revolutionary bourgeois democrats who maintained their principles after the actual bourgeoisie had abandoned revolutionary democracy. The social base of early socialism was those petty-bourgeois radicals who had gone beyond the interests and real historic possibilities of their class. This was most true of German “True Socialism” which, in a nation with virtually no industrial workers and a conservative, traditionalist petty bourgeoisie, was purely a literary movement. It was least true of English Owenism, which had intersected the embryonic labor movement while retaining a large element of liberal philanthropism.

By the 1840’s a working-class movement had arisen in France, Belgium and England which was attracted to socialist ideas and organization. However, the relationship of the new-fledged socialist workers’ organizations to the older socialist currents, as well as to liberal democracy and the political expressions of women’s rights and national liberation, remained confused in all existing socialist theories. It was Marx who cut the Gordian knot and provided a coherent, realistic analysis of the social basis for the socialist movement within bourgeois society.

Marx asserted that the working class was the social group which would play the primary and distinctive role in establishing socialism. This was so because the working class was that social group whose interests and condition were most in harmony with a collectivist economy or, conversely, which had the least stake in the capitalist mode of production.

Marx’s appreciation of the role of the proletariat was not deduced from German philosophy, but was the result of his experience in France in the 1840’s. Socialism had manifestly polarized French society along class lines, the main base for socialism being the industrial working class, the propertied classes being implacably hostile and the petty bourgeoisie vacillating, often seeking a utopian third road.

For Marx the predominance of intellectuals in the early socialist movement was not proof that the socialist movement could be based on universal reason. Rather it was necessarily a phenomenon partly reflecting the contradictions of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and partly anticipating the new alignment of class forces: “A portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat and in particular, a portion of bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” (Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto).

The propertied, educated classes could not be won to socialism on the basis of rational and democratic ideals even though objectively those ideals could only be realized under socialism. Along the same lines, women of the privileged class and the ruling stratum of oppressed nationalities cannot in general be won to socialism even though objectively sexual equality and national liberation can only be realized under socialism.

Closely related to the question of the class basis of the socialist movement is the question of the material conditions under which socialism can be established. Reflecting on pre-Marxist socialism in his later years, Engels quipped that the utopians believed that the reason socialism hadn’t been established before was that nobody had ever thought of it. That Engels’ witticism was only a slight exaggeration is shown by the importance of communal experiments in the early socialist movement, indicating a belief that socialism could be established under any and all conditions if a group really wanted it. The primacy of voluntarism for the early socialists again reflected the fact that their thinking was rooted in eighteenth-century, individualistic idealism which, in turn, derived from Protestantism, an earlier bourgeois ideology.

In sharp and deliberate contrast to the utopians, Marx asserted that inequality and oppression were necessary consequences of economic scarcity and attempts to eliminate them through communal escapism or political coercion were bound to fail:

“…this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historic, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced....” [emphasis in original]

—Karl Marx, The German Ideology

Marx’s assertion that inequality and oppression are historically necessary and can be overcome only through the total development of society, centering on the raising of the productive forces, represents his most fundamental break with progressive bourgeois ideology. Therefore, to this day, these concepts are the most unpalatable aspects of Marxism for those attracted to socialism from a liberal humanist outlook:

“...although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher level of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process in which individuals are sacrificed....”

—Karl Marx, Theories of
Surplus Value

“...it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means,...slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and...in general people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. ‘Liberation’ is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse....”

—Karl Marx, The German Ideology

It is evident that “women” can replace “individuals” and “classes” in these passages without doing damage to their meaning, since Marx regarded women’s oppression as a necessary aspect of that stage in human development associated with class society.

Marx’s programmatic differences with the utopians were encapsulated in the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” which he regarded as one of his few original, important contributions to socialist theory. The dictatorship of the proletariat is that period after the overthrow of the capitalist state when the working class administers society in order to create the economic and cultural conditions for socialism.

During the dictatorship of the proletariat, the restoration of capitalism remains a possibility. This is not primarily due to the machinations of die-hard reactionaries but arises rather out of the conflicts and tensions generated by the continuation of global economic scarcity.

This economic scarcity is caused not only by inadequate physical means of production. Even more importantly it derives from the inadequate and extremely uneven cultural level inherited from capitalism. Socialist superabundance presupposes an enormous raising of the cultural level of mankind. The “average” person under socialism would have the knowledge and capacity of several learned professions in contemporary society.

However, in the period immediately following the revolution, the administration of production will necessarily be largely limited to that elite trained in bourgeois society, since training their replacements will take time. Therefore, skilled specialists such as the director of an airport, chief of surgery in a hospital or head of a nuclear power station will have to be drawn from the educated, privileged classes of the old capitalist society. Although in a qualitatively diminished way, the dictatorship of the proletariat will continue to exhibit economic inequality, a hierarchic division of labor and those aspects of social oppression rooted in the cultural level inherited from bourgeois society (e.g., racist attitudes will not disappear the day after the revolution).

These general principles concerning the dictatorship of the proletariat likewise apply to the woman question. To the extent that it rests on the cultural level inherited from capitalism, certain aspects of sexual inequality and oppression will continue well into the dictatorship of the proletariat. The population cannot be totally re-educated nor can a psychological pattern instilled in men and women from infancy be fully eliminated or reversed.

The rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary transition period to socialism is the central justification for utopian egalitarianism (including radical or “socialist” feminism) in the era of Marxism.

The Battle over Protective Labor Legislation

Feminism was one of the three major extensions of utopian egalitarianism into the post-1848 era, the other two being anarchism and artisan cooperativism (Proudhonism). In fact, during the later nineteenth century radical feminism and anarchism heavily interpenetrated one another both as regards their position on the woman question and in personnel. The decisive element in common among feminism, anarchism and cooperativism was a commitment to a level of social equality and individual freedom impossible to attain not only under capitalism, but in the period following its overthrow. At a general ideological level, feminism was bourgeois individualism in conflict with the realities and limits of bourgeois society.

During their lifetimes, Marx and Engels had two notable conflicts with organized feminism—continual clashes in the context of the struggle for protective labor legislation and a short faction fight in the American section of the First International. While the question of protective labor legislation covered a great deal of ground at many levels of concreteness, the central difference between the Marxists and feminists over this issue was also the central difference between Marxism and utopian egalitarianism—i.e., the question of the primacy of the material well-being of the masses and the historical interests of the socialist movement vis-à-vis formal equality within bourgeois society.

The feminist opposition to protective labor legislation argued and continues to argue that it would mean legal inequality in the status of women and that it was partly motivated by paternalistic, male-chauvinist prejudices. Marx and Engels recognized these facts but maintained that the physical well-being of working women and the interests of the entire class in reducing the intensity of exploitation more than offset this formal and ideological inequality. Writing to Gertrud Guillaume-Schack, a German feminist who later became an anarchist, Engels stated his case:

“That the working woman needs special protection against capitalist exploitation because of her special physiological functions seems obvious to me. The English women who championed the formal right of members of their sex to permit themselves to be as thoroughly exploited by the capitalists as the men are mostly, directly or indirectly, interested in the capitalist exploitation of both sexes. I admit I am more interested in the health of the future generation than in the absolute formal equality of the sexes in the last years of the capitalist mode of production. It is my conviction that real equality of women and men can come true only when exploitation of either by capital has been abolished and private housework has been transformed into a public industry.”

—Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Letter to Guillaume-Schack of 5 July 1885

Thus Engels recognized in feminism the false consciousness of the privileged classes of women who believe that since they themselves are oppressed only as women, sexual inequality is the only significant form of oppression.

Guillaume-Schack’s conversion to anarchism was not accidental, for the anarchists also opposed protective labor legislation for women as an inconsistent, inegalitarian reform. Writing a polemic against the Italian anarchists in the early 1870’s, Marx ridiculed the “logic” that one “must not take the trouble to obtain legal prohibition of the employment of girls under 10 in factories because a stop is not thereby put to the exploitation of boys under 10”—that this was a “compromise which damages the purity of eternal principles” (quoted in Hal Draper, International Socialism, July-August 1970).

Woodhull versus Sorge in the First International

Because of the catch-all nature of the First International, the Marxist tendency had to wage major internal factional struggles against the most characteristic left currents in the various countries (e.g., trade-union reformism in Britain, Proudhon’s cooperativism in France, Lasalle’s state socialism in Germany and anarchism in Eastern and Southern Europe). It is therefore highly symptomatic that the major factional struggle within the American section centered around feminism, a variant of petty-bourgeois radicalism. In the most general sense, the importance of the Woodhull tendency reflected the greater political weight of the American liberal middle class relative to the proletariat than in European class alignments. Historically petty-bourgeois moralism has been more influential in American socialism than in virtually any other country. This was particularly pronounced in the period after the Civil War when abolitionism served as the model for native American radicalism.

The relative political backwardness of the American working class is rooted primarily in the process of its development through successive waves of immigration from different countries. This created such intense ethnic divisions that it impeded even elementary trade-union organization. In addition, many of the immigrant workers who came from peasant backgrounds were imbued with strong religious, racial and sexual prejudices and a generally low cultural level which impeded class—much less socialist—consciousness. In general the discontent of American workers was channeled by the petty bourgeoisie of the various ethnic groups into the struggle for their own place in the parliamentary-state apparatus.

The American working class’s lack of strong organization, its ethnic electoral politics and relatively backward social attitudes created a political climate in which “enlightened middle-class socialism” was bound to flourish. Not least important in this respect was the fact that the liberal middle classes were Protestant while the industrial working class was heavily Roman Catholic. Indeed, an important aspect of the Woodhull/Sorge fight was over an orientation toward Irish Catholic workers.

Victoria Woodhull was the best-known (more accurately notorious) “free love” advocate of her day, ambitious and with a gift for political showmanship. Seeing that the First International was becoming fashionable, she organized her own section of it (Section 12) along with remnants of the New Democracy, a middle-class, electoral-reformist organization, led by Samuel Foot Andrews, a former abolitionist. The Woodhullites thus entered the First International as a radical liberal faction, with an emphasis on women’s rights and an electoralist strategy.

Section 12 rapidly retranslated the principles of the First International into the language of American liberal democracy. Needless to say, it came out for total organizational federalism with each section free to pursue its own activities and line within the general principles of the International. Section 12’s political line and organizational activities (its official paper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, preached spiritualism among other things) quickly brought it into conflict within the Marxist tendency, led by the German veteran of the 1848 Revolution, Friedrich Sorge. Section 12 was able to cause much factional trouble, not only in the U.S. but abroad, because its radical liberalism fed into the growing anarchist, electoral-reformist and federalist currents in the International. The Woodhullites were part of a rotten bloc which coalesced against the Marxist leadership of the First International in 1871-72. Woodhull enjoyed a short stay in the anarchist International in 1873 on her way to becoming a wealthy eccentric.

The immediate issue of the faction fight was the priority of women’s rights, notably suffrage, over labor issues particularly the eight-hour day. That for the Woodhullites what was involved was not a matter of programmatic emphasis, but a counterposition to proletarian socialism was made explicit after the split with Sorge: “The extension of equal citizenship to women, the world over, must precede any general change in the subsisting relation of capital and labor” [emphasis in original] (Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, 18 November 1871).

After splitting with the Sorge wing, while still claiming loyalty to the First International, Section 12 organized the Equal Rights Party in order to run Woodhull for president in 1872. The program was straight left-liberalism without any proletarian thrust. It called for “...a truly republican government which shall not only recognize but guarantee equal political and social rights to men and women, and which shall secure equal opportunities of education for all children” (Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, 20 April 1872).

The general political principles of the Woodhullites were clearly expressed in their appeal to the General Council of the First International against the Sorge wing:

“It [the object of the International] involves, first, the Political Equality and Social Freedom of men and women alike.... Social Freedom means absolute immunity from the impertinent intrusion in all affairs of exclusively personal concernment, such as religious belief, sexual relations, habits of dress, etc.” [emphasis in original]

—Documents of the First International, The General Council; Minutes 1871-72

This appeal was answered by a resolution written by Marx, which suspended Section 12. After cataloguing the organizational abuses and rotten politics, Marx concluded by reasserting the central difference between democratic egalitarianism and proletarian socialism—namely, that the end to all forms of oppression must run through the victory of the working class over capitalism. Marx called attention to past International documents:

“…relating to ‘sectarian sections’ or ‘separatist bodies pretending to accomplish special missions’ distinct from the common aim of the Association [First International], viz. to emancipate the mass of labour from its ‘economical subjection to the monopolizer of the means of labour’ which lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of social misery, mental degradation and political dependence.”

—Ibid.

While the Marxist case against the Woodhullites centered on their electoralism, middle-class orientation and quackery, the role of “free love” in the socialist movement had a definite significance in the fight. While including personal sexual freedom in their program, the Marxists insisted on a cautious approach to this question when dealing with more backward sections of the working class. By flaunting a sexually “liberated” life-style, the Woodhullites would have created a nearly impenetrable barrier to winning over conventional and religious workers. One of the main charges that Sorge brought against Section 12 at the Hague Conference in 1872 was that its activities had made it much more difficult for the International to reach the strategically placed Irish Catholic workers.

The historic relevance of the Woodhull/Sorge faction fight is that it demonstrated, in a rather pure way, the basis of feminism in classic bourgeois-democratic principles, particularly individualism. It further demonstrated that feminist currents tend to be absorbed into liberal reformism or anarchistic petty-bourgeois radicalism, both of which invariably unite against revolutionary proletarian socialism.

***The Stuff Of Dreams- Harry Madden, “The Grifter,” R.I.P.

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

“Hey, Peter Paul, long time no see,”yelled Harry Madden, seemingly forever known as “The Grifter” in North Adamsville childhood lore, from across Commonwealth Avenue near Kenmore Square, or better for those who do not know Boston, near Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox, on a hot summer’s day in 1967. Peter Paul Markin, a little high, smoke high, and in funk thinking about his latest also seemingly endless problems with Joyell, took a couple flashes to recognize the Grifter, not having seen him in a couple of years. A couple of youth-changing 1960s years so that the Grifter’s eternal sharkskin suit, white shirt, thin, really almost stringy brown tie, and pattern leather black shoes, shined to a mirror look see, short 1950s style hair, short, with no facial hair showing anywhere, seemed strange in the new faded blue jeans, ratty tee-shirt, long-haired, bearded, scraggly or not, hard rock night.

What was not strange was the Grifter’s request, or rather demand, as he crossed the street and met up with Peter Paul, “Markin, lend me a hundred dollars, I’ve got a hot deal, a hot grass (marijuana, for the innocent, or unworldly) deal going down coming in straight from Mexico where I can make a score, a big score, and be on easy street, finally on easy street just like I said I would be back in those North Adamsville days when we dreamed our dreams. I‘ll pay you back double, hey, why don’t you give me two hundred and we can be partners and split down the right down the middle.”

Markin, warily and wearily in equal parts, replied quickly that he did not have two hundred dollars but that he could see his way clear to lending the hundred, for old times’ sake, and because, frankly, although not every word of their conversation is being restated here, the Grifter held a spell over the usually rational Markin, and everybody else whom he had ever encountered for more than two minutes. That was the Grifter’s charm, and his claim to North Adamsville fame. So the pair made their way a few blocks over to Markin’s tiny student ghetto apartment on Westland Avenue to get the money, share a little something for the head (that aforementioned grass, okay) from Markin’s stash, and talk over old times. That was the last time Markin saw Harry Madden, blessed childhood Harry Madden, alive.

Who knows when Harry became the Grifter. Maybe it was when they, along with a couple of other Adamsville South Elementary School classmates, decided that they would sell Kool-Aid one hot summer’s day in the early 1950s, Markin was not exactly sure of the year but it was when they were very young, in order to raise enough of a stake to go down to Carter’s Variety Store and load up on penny candy. Penny candy being the po’boy’s (and girl’s too) way of satisfying their sweet tooth by buying it by the piece. Things like tootsie rolls, necco wafers, mary janes (no, not dope), chunkies, and so on. Stuff that dear mothers would not throw by the bagful into shopping carts on shopping days.

Well, the boys set up the Kool-Aid stand without much of a problem, using an old wooden crate for a stand, placing cups, and pitchers of Orange and Grape Kool-Aid on display for thirsty customers to dare to walk by at two cents a glass. And that day was a very hot one, and the neighborhood kids had a great thirst, a great thirst for those pitchers of Kool-Aid coming off the playing fields behind the old school. Harry, and he was just Harry then, came up with the bright idea that they could increase their profits and make enough money to get ice cream cones rather than just cheapjack penny candy if they added extra water, and, well, really just diluted the product a little. And that night, as they licked their chocolate, strawberry or vanilla cones amid satisfied chuckles, Harry had a band of brother that would follow him through hell.

Maybe it was when the band of brothers was twelve, perhaps thirteen, Markin again was not sure, when Harry, now already called the Grifter, came up with the idea that they should pool their lunch money together and buy a lottery ticket. And to hear the Grifter give his spiel they would thereafter all be on easy street, and maybe have so much money that they could leave dreary old school for the has-beens (the Grifter’s term for anybody who did not get in on one his schemes, without questions). Sold, idea sold as usual, when the Grifter put on the press for one of his “hot” ideas.

And the idea was sold solidly when they “hit,” for twenty dollars a few days later. What the others, Markin included, did not know was that the Grifter had just said they had made that hit, what after all did they know of lotteries except as the road to easy street. The Grifter had used his own money as the first prize, and all the later funds collected from his boys that whole school year went into his pocket for his real scheme- working some shell game that he lost the money on when a couple of rough customers stole his dough after telling him the facts of life. The facts of life being in this case that Lefty Looney held the exclusive rights to who and who did not promote shell games in Adamsville. It was only by accident that one of the band, Bizarre Benny not Markin, found out from a cousin the details of the Grifter’s game, having lost a few bucks at it.

Or maybe it was just from the womb that the Grifter had some gene, some grifter X or Y or G gene, embedded in his life system that made him such an easy mark for the lure of easy street, for the bright lights of “being somebody,”some easy way somebody. In any case, in the end it was not pretty, as Markin heard the story a couple of years after that Kenmore Square chance meeting (or was it), while the Grifter’s friends and family were standing around the funeral home talking about his various schemes over the years, and about how he could have been somebody, somebody no question, if he had spent just a little less time worrying about easy street.

Apparently Harry, Markin says let’s call him Harry now at least to show a little respect for what he could have been and to kind of wash the grifter thing away from his memory, actually did use Markin’s hundred dollars to finance a wholesale drug purchase (marijuana, ganja, herb, weed, whatever you may have called it then, or call it now), sold the stuff on the street, making enough of a profit to make a bigger purchase, and more profit. Things looked very much like easy street just then. And in those early days selling dope to students, young working class kids, and even adults who hated their day jobs was as easy as hanging around the Boston Common, whispering a few words, and having people flock to you like lemmings to the sea. Especially if you had the good stuff, stuff like Acapulco Gold and Columbian Red, and Harry had it.

Then, as usual, Harry had to go one step beyond, although if you follow a certain logic Harry’s idea was not that crazy, starting out anyway. See the streets were okay for a while, but the legal questions, the surfeit of dealers and the decline of quality was killing the street market, or driving it indoors. Harry, sensing this, decided that he would take his tidy profits and buy into distributorship, a freelance distributorship. In short, sell to the street dealers and go indoors and count the profits. And for a while he was again successful but the two things happened. The drug cartels at the higher levels were squeezing the Harrys out and putting their own people in the distribution system, and were moreover beginning to push high profit cocaine more than weed, and the profit margins at Harry’s level for the good stuff (that Gold and Red) were declining. Harry could daily see himself sinking, sinking back into Adamsville oblivion.

Harry though was never short of ideas, especially ideas on the fly. Harry came up with an idea, actually two interrelated ideas. First, to raise more capital he would cut his dope, cut it with oregano, twigs, whatever, to his street dealers. Second, he would, cut through the system and bring his own dope out of Mexico. Now cutting dope was generally something street punks did, did for the weekend “hippies” who were glad, glad as hell, to even have the idea, the essence of the idea of dope. However for a distributor this was poison. Now a lot of people have the image that your average street dealer, dealing out of his or her pocket, is just a mellow head spreading the good news.

But see Harry was dealing with street dealers from the ghetto and barrio then and cutting product on them was well, death. And before long Harry was forced to leave town or face the unknown wrath of several important street dealers who would just as soon cut up a skinny white hustler like Harry as look at him. According to one report, one unconfirmed report but with the ring of truth about it, Harry was within a day or two of “as look at him.”

And, of course, by then Harry had, straight-out had, to flee to Mexico to get right. Of course as well in Mexico, Sonora, Mexico as it turned out, Harry found out to his regret, while one could have all the money in the drug world if one was not connected, and more importantly as the structure of the cartels was getting in order, not part of the distribution system you were out of luck. Harry, naturally, believed he was born under a lucky star, he was still alive wasn’t he, and tried to arrange a large purchase to take out of Mexico, to make things right in Boston. But see in Sonora every drug deal went through Pablo Sanchez, or it didn’t go down.

When Senor Sanchez, or one of his agents, heard about it (through a guy who worked for the guy Harry was putting the deal together with from what was gathered) Harry was a marked man. The rest of the story is plain as day to see coming and, moreover, Markin got pretty shaky telling the rest of it but they found Harry looking very much like Swiss cheese in a back-alley Sonora street, face down. Yes, Harry, R.I.P.

Note: Markin wants one and all to know that Harry Madden was a grifter not a grafter. Harry was no ten-percent man taking some small piece of some other guy’s action, and practically on bended knees praying for that cut. No Harry, like a true grifter, small or large, made his own deals, big or small, good or bad, and he was the guy who gave the cuts, if that was his pleasure. Got it.

On The 60th Anniversary Of Their Execution-From The Pen Of  Bob Feldman- "They Killed The Rosenbergs"

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

"They Killed The Rosenbergs"

They killed the Rosenbergs
They killed them on the electric chair
They killed the Rosenbergs
They killed them to make people scared.

They arrested the Rosenbergs
They broke into their home
They jailed the Rosenbergs
They ignored their sons who moaned.

They framed the Rosenbergs
They used false evidence
They tortured the Rosenbergs
They used a lying witness.

They smeared the Rosenbergs
They charged them with "conspiracy"
They sentenced the Rosenbergs
They sent them up to Sing Sing.

They murder the innocent
They execute the powerless
With barbaric hands they pulled their switch
For the Rosenbergs would not submit.


To listen to "They Killed The Rosenbergs" protest folk song, you can go to following music site link:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Biographical+Folk+Songs/They+Killed+the+Rosenbergs

Many years after the Rosenbergs were executed on June 19, 1953 by the U.S. government and no longer alive to deny that they were guilty of any crime, some U.S. academics and mainstream journalists claimed that de-classified KGB documents “prove” that the Rosenbergs were not framed. Yet, as I noted in Downtown (2/17/93), during the 1980s, former Village Voice writer Deborah Davis came into possession of a set of revealing U.S. Justice Department documents. The de-classified documents apparently indicated that, when he worked as a Press Attache’ in the U.S. embassy in Paris, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee “was a central figure” in “a State Department/CIA campaign against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg” which “was designed to persuade Europeans that the Rosenbergs were guilty of espionage and deserved to be put to death,” according to the second edition of Davis’s book, Katharine The Great: Katharine Graham and The Washington Post.

According to Davis, “the documents show” that in the early 1950s “Mr. Bradlee went to the Rosenberg prosecutors in New York under orders of `the head of the CIA in Paris,’ as he told an assistant prosecutor, and that from their material he composed his `Operations Memorandum’ on the case, which was the basis of all propaganda subsequently sent out to foreign journalists.”

In an April 1, 1987 letter to Deborah Davis, however, Bradlee (currently a vice-president of the Washington Post Company media conglomerate) wrote:

“I worked for the USIA as the Press Attache’ of the United States Embassy in the early 1950s. I never worked for the CIA. I never participated in a `CIA propaganda campaign’…”

Yet a December 13, 1952 U.S. Government Memorandum from Associate Prosecutor Maran to Asst. U.S. Atty. Myles Lane apparently stated:

“On December 13, 1952 a Mr. Benjamin Bradlee called and informed me that he was Press Attache’ with the American Embassy in Paris, that he had left Paris last night and arrived here this morning. He advised me that…he was sent here to look at the Rosenberg file…

“He advised me that it was an urgent matter…He further advised that he was sent here by Robert Thayer, who is the head of the C.I.A. in Paris…”

For more information on the Rosenberg Case, you can check out the web site of the Rosenberg Fund for Children at www.rfc.org/case.htm .